Vesenoe Nastroenie - 4/22/07

I am now nearing the last two months of my time here in Samara, and I feel as though I have entered a new (and, I hope, final) phase. I finally sense some momentum behind my various projects. In fact I am now incredibly busy, trying to keep up with all the translations and various documents I need for all the things I am doing. I have found a renewed excitement for my research and am going to try and give it one last push to get some real, hard and useful data in my last 9 weeks. I'm now creating a panel of questions to be used for qualitative interviews, and am in the process of arranging interviews with up to three different groups (frequent support group participants, people living with HIV/AIDS engaged with the healthcare system, but not with any NGO programs, and people living with HIV/AIDS not engaged with the healthcare system, but in contact with NGO outreach workers). If I could conduct enough interviews to make a valid comparison, I think it would make a pretty interesting study. And if I can talk to a few doctors in the process, I will be quite delighted.

I'm also almost finished with preparing the third training, which I will be doing for the organization I'm now working with in Togliatti. This week, I created a Russian-language website to act as a mini-resource center for case management. It has all my training materials on it and some links to decent articles on relevant topics in Russian. I'm hoping I will be able to write a Russian language article about case management by the end my time here, in which I will mention this website.

Last weekend I took a fun little trip to Saratov, the next big city down on the Volga. It is a quaint little town, nestled between some small hills and the Mighty Volga. I went with my three German friends to visit their colleague there, who works for the Goethe Institute. It was quite fun, and, needless to say, I learned a good bit of German. At the top of one of the hills behind the city sits Park Pobedy [Victory Park] the city's obligatory ode the Soviet Union's defeat of Germany during World War II (or the Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to it). In addition to the gigantic memorial shown below, there was a permanent exhibit of all the military technology of the Soviet Union, from the first tanks used in WWII to the helicopters and planes used to invade Afghanistan. There were missile launching trucks and gigantic bombs. It was easy to forget that the purpose of all this million dollar stuff was to turn human flesh into unusable mush. I'm glad I'm going to become a doctor not a soldier.From below this monument, you can look out upon some amazing views of the city and the Mighty River Volga (including her longest bridge which links Saratov to nearby Engels).Many couples were getting married on the particular Saturday we were at this vista point, and they almost had to wait their turn to take pictures in front of the city scape and release doves into the immense, cloudy sky.All in all, it was a nice little trip, and I ended up killing two birds (not doves) with one stone, as I managed to arrange for myself a meeting with a PSI representative there who was very excited about using me for their case managers there. In fact, I will probably be returning in early June for a two day seminar of my design for all the case managers they work with in the city of Saratov.

Spring is here and I have been enjoying the changes it has brought with it. Certainly all Samara's young people are out and about gulyat'-ing [literally meaning to walk, but colloquially meaning to hang out], and I must admit to having a bit of a veseniy nastroenie [literally, spring mood, usually a reference to the seasonal desire for companionship]. More importantly, I have been watching some of the most wonderful sunsets over the Volga.


This evening, I went to gulyat' with a friend of mine and her sister and brother. They were running late in meeting me on Pushkin Square, so I sat, looking out over the hill descending down to the bank of the Volga, and watched the horizon flare up in front of me. Breathing in the crisp spring air, clean and shivering from the day's brief, chilly showers, I could feel the immensity of the sky under which I sat; I watched as its churning layers of gigantic, sweetly flavored clouds dwarfed the icey grey waters of the river below them; the reds and oranges and violets stretching from me to infinity made the dark brown forests on the opposite bank seem to hide themselves shyly, to quietly bow in reverence. It was a wonderful moment. I tried to stretch it out and savor it, to notice each moment pass, each breath try its best then disappear.

I'm a sucker for things like drama and catharsis. I have always sought out moments of transformative importance. I cannot say if these ten minutes I spent this evening will succeed toward that end, if this sunset will serve as a symbol of some transition to a new life, one with purpose and discipline and payoff. Perhaps it was nothing more than a nice sunset, that very same phenomenon that is going on constantly as the earth's shadow sweeps across it's surface, seen by millions, unnoticed by most.

Who knows? I liked it, anyway.