Thursday, April 26, 2007

Rusglish 4/27/07

Quite possibly the coolest email I've ever gotten:

Hi Dan,

It is nice to feel your fervour !
Make it in Russian, pls, as the seminar will be in local dialect.
--
All the best,
Michael

Sunday, April 22, 2007

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.

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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.