Monday, April 02, 2007

Coming Round the Bend/Anxiety - 4/2/07

The moon hung low and full tonight over the aging concrete buildings along the Volga River embankment. Her full, white eye was engaged in a silent staring contest with Mercury, floating low above the opposite bank. Both shone unblinking silver light into the spring night air. The dim glowing cityscape hugged the river's curve north around the Zhiguli Mountains, lying low and invisible below the scant stars and deep purple night. I spent an hour this evening walking along the naberezhnoi [embankment], unloading to my parents over the phone about how dissatisfied I am with what I have to account for the last seven months here. It was a beautiful night, but I couldn't enjoy it. I was too weighed down by the feeling that I'm wasting a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Now that I officially have only three months left, I feel acutely the need to try to somehow make this fellowhip worth its salt. I have had some relative successes of late at being productive. A little over a week ago, I finally gave my second training, the one I had been preparing about burnout. It seemed to go pretty well, despite the fact that I stumbled over my Russian during the powerpoint presentation. The two case managers asked the woman I work with at PSI to ask me about giving the training to the staff psychologists at the family center where they work. The coordinator of the case management program also gave the thumbs up on me doing three more trainings in my remaining time here. Earlier that week, I had also been told that another CM program funded by PSI in nearby Togliatti had been asking about me and that I should do the first training there. (Why this had only gotten back to me just now is one of those Russian questions that's better left without an answer.)

Last week, I volunteered for a language camp that reminded me of both the satisfaction and the tiredness of having a full-time job. I ended up falling in love with the kids who ranged from a five year old, who could shyly sing a song in french about a family of tortoises, to a pair of cynical fifteen year-olds, with whom I analyzed lyrics to a popular song by Fall Out Boy. The star of the week for me was a hyperactive seven year old who looooved it when I held her upside down in the air and tickled her stomach and such. By the end of the week, she had mastered the sentences, "I want to go upside down, please," "I want to jump, please," and "I want to sit on your shoulders, please." She could even add "again" appropriately to them.

Now that I am back to answering only to myself for my time, I am quite a bit anxious. I must struggle to bring to fruition all of the promising semi-offers of a week ago. I am also now trying to prepare the bases for two publishable articles, one in a Western journal of medical anthropology, and one in a Russian language journal on health promotion. I am particularly anxious, because this is by no means the first time in this grant period that I have had a bunch of ideas and a handful of promising leads toward meaningful engagement in the community; almost none of them have come to fruition in the past, both out of my own lack of initiative and that of others.

After an hour on the phone with my folks, my brother finally managed to cheer me up. "Look on the bright side," he said. "You're alive. You have five senses. Breathe deeply." As he said this, I looked up at the rows of colored lights above one of the fancy new buildings hanging over the Volga and saw them glimmer. I watched dust blow across the little square in which I was pacing. I looked out across the wordless, ponderous river, and saw the faintest strip of violet along the horizon, hanging over the dark forest on the right bank. Slick, silvery chunks of ice slowly floated quietly by in the night. And I was brought back to a nice moment, to a momentary feeling of belonging.

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