Monday, October 22, 2012

From Chatterbox to Wall Flower


Spending this past year in Romania with the Peace Corps has helped me learn a lot about myself. I’ve learned to be more independent but it has also taught me to ask for help when I need it. What I didn’t expect Peace Corps to teach me was kind of an understanding for people back home. Lets use my brother as an example.

For those of you that haven’t spent 30 seconds with me, let me tell you, I’m pretty outgoing and social. I love to talk and to meet people and socialize. I have had a view of my brother as being a sort of opposite to this. He rarely had friends over to the house, he almost never “partied”, spoke very little to me or my parents (who I speak with almost daily) and spent almost all his time in his room on the internet playing games. I’m not saying any of these traits are bad per se, possibly a little unhealthy, but so would partying too much. More than anything his behavior sort of baffled me and sometimes hurt my feelings a little. This of course was before I joined Peace Corps.

For the last 18 months I have lived with two host families and neither of them have spoken English. They have welcomed me into their home been overwhelmingly kind and patient with me as I struggle to communicate and integrate. As incredible as these families have been toward me it hasn’t been without frustration and adjustments on both sides. Constantly being around people speaking a foreign language is exhausting, even when you’ve been speaking it for 18 months. Being at a dinner party where, the conversation is moving too quickly to follow, so you can’t really jump in and no one is asking you a direct question, can grow quite tedious. No one’s trying to exclude me or make me feel uncomfortable but there is a language barrier there and I haven’t quite broken it. So after about 20 minutes or so of smiling politely and zoning out I excuse myself from the table. Sometimes, later my host mother will knock on my door and make sure I’m not upset about something and I try to explain that I’m tired and it’s difficult for me to understand the conversations. But I don’t think she really understands, she’s never left Romania (much as she’d like to) and has little experience with foreign that aren’t me. Its times like these I think of my brother.

Here I am, spending all my time in my room “alone” and it must baffle my host mother to no end (and culturally “alone time” isn't necessarily valued the same here). I don’t generally feel alone or even lonely in my room. I’m almost constantly communicating with someone, be it an email to Peace Corps, a chat message from a friend or a skype session with my parents. Because I spend all day being somewhat socially awkward with my colleagues and students it just feels good to go home and communicate effectively with someone, anyone. Then I start to wonder if this is how my brother feels sometimes and maybe that’s part of drives him into his room and keeps him from responding to my skype messages.

I guess what I’ve come to understand is that yearning for communication and understanding from someone else and how people express that need differently. It’s strange to go from someone who will chat everyone up at party to the person sitting in the corner quietly. I gain a new sympathy for people that regularly feel awkward and uncomfortable in social situations in their own culture. Though who knows how well I’ll fit in anywhere after being gone for over 2 years.