my midwestern roots

I am an American. This is a fact about my life that has always been apparent. It has been so much more apparent in the past months of my life, but what being an American really means did not really hit me until the past few weeks. In these past few weeks, everything I thought I knew about survival, life, love, has been challenged in a plethora of confusing and unexpected ways.

I haven't taken many pictures recently, so here is a picture of me in the canyon by the river, which is basically where I live now.

So let me give you a bit of a window into what kinds of challenges I am talking about. The other day, I got a call. My friends were coming to meet me on my sunset watching perch, and we were all going to go on a xhiro. Cool, let's go.

We started walking down the street, and soon came upon a large group of young men, just loitering around the top of the town's main staircase. I heard someone call Niku's name, and I heard some combination of his name and mine, "the Americane". I didn't like it. My head snapped in the direction of these men in the sort of defiant challenge that I proudly claim and instinctively changed course so I could move into the safety of Niku's wake. Whew. I made it. However, it became abundantly clear that something was wrong as we trudged down the stairs. I thought Niku was annoyed too, and didn't pay much attention as he continued a heated discussion with his cousin. I continued to walk along my merry way, ignoring the Shqip conversation happening next to me because I was tired, and Shqip is hard. It wasn't long, however, before I caught a few words and animated actions, and realized that they were talking about me. They were talking about my reaction to those men, and Niku's cousin was trying to reason with Niku on my behalf, saying that my culture is different.

Here's this, in case anyone was wondering what I do on the weekends.

What is happening? So we got back to Niku's house and sat silently for what felt like far too long. Then, me, being unable to let things go. Me, being unable to sit around quietly while others are angry with me. Me, needing to talk always. I forced the issue, because I didn't understand. I quickly learned that I shouldn't have looked at the group of men. Apparently, just looking at men gives them the idea that I am interested, which opens the door to harassment that Niku feels the need to address so that my life can continue in safety. Basically, my habits are creating a lot of work, a lot of awkward conversations, for him, unbeknownst to me. So I'm sitting here listening to this ridiculousness and thinking about what was going through my mind in that moment. Why did I feel the need to look? It took me a long time to realize why because my immediate thought was, I don't know, it's habit, I'm always looking. Why though?

The thing is, I am always looking. I am always aware of the details of the world around me. The longer I thought about it, the more I realized that it's self-defense. It's my idea, my American culture, my upbringing of safety, that makes me do this.

One day, a man stopped me on the road and asked me if I was Italian. When I said no, he asked if I spoke English. When I said yes, he screamed expletives at me, told me he would stab me in the road, and came charging at me. I was terrified. I called Niku, and I told him what had happened. I told him every single detail of the man, of the people around at the time, of the cars that had recently passed by. How did I know all of that? It became abundantly clear to me the other day as I was trying to sort through my feelings at the top of the stairs.

This is Poppy. He is almost as sad as I am that Niku has skipped town to live his best life in the mountains for a few weeks.

So then, I had a jolt of my own reality here in Albania. I was literally put on a plane with a bunch of people I did not know, handed off to a woman I had never met and could not talk to, taken to an unfamiliar home, to a family I had never met, in a town, within a country, that I had never been to, and left there to just figure it out. Ten weeks later, I did the same thing all over again, except this time, I didn't have 4 other Americans doing the same thing just a block away. I'm an American, perhaps more than that though, I'm a midwesterner, which, as I'm now realizing, makes me unique in one very crucial way, and that is that I have an incredible ability, or perhaps weakness, to trust. In the Peace Corps, sometimes you just have to have blind trust. It's just required. So I adjusted to, or I guess I was quicker on the uptake of being comfortable with the people and place a little easier than others. However, I'm not entirely sure that was a good thing.

When I showed up in Çorovodë, all of the sudden, I was completely alone. I had no one. No one I knew I could trust. No one I could depend on. No one I could call. For me, as it always has, the trust came quickly. The people I met for 5 minutes were closer to me than anyone else, so they had my trust, whether or not they deserved it, because I had no choice, no other options. Over the last few months, I have operated according to my roots. I greet everyone in the street because, in my mind, it's polite. I stop and chat when prompted because I love people and want to make friends. I smile because I am happy.

Then there are the things I do for not so happy reasons, but for the fact that I am an American nonetheless. I make eye contact and greet people who give me a gut-churning feeling because I want them to know that I know their face, that I know they are there, and that I am not afraid. My eyes are constantly flitting around, my brain taking detailed notes of the people around me, where they are, who they are, what they look like. Notes of the cars, how many times they have turned around to pass me again, the speed at which they are doing so, their license plate numbers. Notes of the people I know, where they are, and how clear my path is to get to them if I find myself needing someone I trust.

So I found out that I have low iron levels or something, and my doctor recommended red wine. I got to Niku's house the other day, and his mom brings out a giant bottle of wine, and goes, "Niku's worried about you and told me to give you wine??" Hilarious.

Though I never really felt in danger in America, I can trace each of these quirks of mine back to my experience being a young, short, weak, girl, trying to survive in the reality of my environment. Because the reality was and is so often that we must do what we can in order to prevent, in order to stay safe, or, in my case as a young, short, weak, girl, in order to make it easier for the police to catch those who have done us wrong.

The thing is, here, many of these things I do unconsciously for self-preservation, send a message that may actually be compromising my safety. A fact which I did not realize until that evening, talking with Niku about my reaction to the men on the stairs. My greeting, my observant eyes doing mental note taking, sends a signal to these men that I am interested, and that they have the green light to do what they please with me. A fact to which I was completely oblivious, but thinking back over my time here, makes so much sense. I was egging people on when I thought I was making my boundaries crystal clear, and I can very specifically recall instances where my actions caused a reaction I was not expecting. It occurred to me how much those I trust have had to do for me in order to right some of my oblivious blunders, how many awkward conversations have had to be had on my behalf. All of the sudden, the moment of wondering where Niku had disappeared to, just days after being me threatened in the street, only to walk outside to be greeted by the man who had formerly been incensed by my mere presence, a man who has never given me trouble again. It all of the sudden makes sense the sudden drop off of the incessant text messages from a local landlord after I mentioned to my favorite local family that I felt uncomfortable.

Views.

Though there are bits of this culture that frustrate me, often my reflection about what makes me the way that I am frustrates me even more. I am frustrated that a simple hello or where my eyes choose to wander could get me into trouble, but I am also frustrated at why my eyes feel the need to wander. These last few weeks have been especially hard to be an American, and I feel like a lot of these realizations of my culture and my embedded thinking have come crashing down on my mind all at once. It is hard to recognize that I am a product of a lot of really hard truths of my reality back home. It is hard to be in a place where the "why" of my everyday actions is suddenly questioned, forced into reflection, then turned into this incredibly sad realization of the world as I know it. It's also hard to watch my country in pain, to watch the people grieve, but to be so far removed from it, from others to grieve alongside. It's like an echo of pain, the kind of helplessness you feel watching a sad or scary movie, knowing you can't help or stop the pain. It's the kind of pain that's lonely and isolating, because in this place, I alone get the news notifications from back home, and I alone both understand and am completely bewildered by what is happening. So here I am, attempting to figure this all out, and catching blows from all sides, including the news from 5,000 miles away. It makes me question what's right, what's better, what's really freedom of the mind, body, and soul. Just when I feel I have my feet on a solid understanding, I reluctantly shift to the why of those understandings, and everything is a mess again.