weakness + wilderness

Dear friend,

I was in Bucharest again this past weekend, though instead of dropping someone off at the airport I was picking someone up. Two someones, in fact: American interns that have come to spend the next several months working with Fara Limite. One of my roles here is that of the intern coordinator, and it’s a role I truly enjoy. It’s refreshing getting some new faces in our community, and I enjoy introducing people to Romania, the Jiu Valley, and Fara Limite. I remember my first summer in this place as an intern myself, and it’s fun to get a glimpse of it again through the lens of the new interns’ eyes, recalling what it was like to see everything for the first time, to experience everything so intensely.

I took the Thursday night train from Petrosani to Bucharest, trying to pack as much sleep into the 6 hour ride as I could, but waking often to the jostling of the train as it rattled through the dark countryside. I was on one of the top bunks of a small 6-person sleeper car, every single stacked bed occupied with some sleeping traveler. If I had tried to sit up straight I would have smacked my head on the ceiling. A little after 5 am, a half-hour before we were set to arrive, I maneuvered myself down the ladder of questionable stability and slid open the curtained door to the corridor with its wide windows full of dawn light. I stood there as we approached the city, watching the deep orange orb of the sun slowly show itself from behind a horizon of gray buildings and summery trees. 

There’s something I like about the anonymity, the vulnerability of the night train. All of these strangers sharing their sleeping hours, waking far away from where they laid their heads down. 

I wandered Bucharest in the early morning hours, saying my morning prayers on a park bench, then getting coffee at the first cafe that opened. I visited a few shops that are just nothing like what we have available to us in the Jiu Valley, including a darling French bookstore. I got grilled olives from a Turkish grocery store, a baguette from a French bakery, and fresh peaches from a little outdoor market stall, and then I walked back to the train station so that I could get to the airport to greet the interns when they arrived.

This I was able to do, but things seemed to start unraveling after that. The train we were supposed to be on that afternoon ran out of seats, something that I had never experienced and never even thought of considering, so we had to come up with plan B: a hostel for tonight and the morning train for tomorrow. Then, the next morning, dead-set determined to be there on time, I got us all the way to the train station with an Uber before realizing that I had no idea where my wallet was—the wallet with all of my cash, my cards, my passport, my residence card, and our train tickets—and realized that most likely it was back at the hostel by the front entrance where we had been hurriedly putting on our shoes to run out to the car. The Uber driver, who had some stake in me finding my wallet since I was supposed to pay him cash, sped me back through the morning streets of Bucharest with a sense of resigned hopelessness, assuring me that if I left it at the entrance of a hostel it had likely already been stolen. I tried to ignore him and just silently prayed that he was wrong.

He was. I found it exactly where I thought I had left it, and since I had insisted that morning on leaving the hostel a full hour before our train was scheduled to leave, by some miracle I made it back to the train station to meet up with my interns with time to spare. Thank God that they are easy-going, though I worried I was not instilling a lot of confidence in them. It had already been a bit of a rough week—I had been in charge of driving a van full of girls to a poetry camp every morning at the children’s library one town over, and though I had learned to drive stick a few years back, I did not have much experience, and though I was feeling good and confident when I practiced with the empty van the few days before, I quickly learned that it’s a different beast altogether to drive that thing with seven passengers and a whole lot of nerves. The first few days I stalled several times in terrible places, and just couldn’t get the thing going again. (Part of this was due to mounting anxiety as all of my passengers and everyone on the road became more and more exasperated with me, and part of it was due to the fact that I didn’t account for how much heavier that vehicle was when it was full and just needed to give the thing more gas.) By the end of the week I had figured it out for the most part, and the girls praised me on my good driving and for conquering my fears (bless them) and we had a really lovely time at the poetry camp but I have to admit I shed many tears over the whole ordeal. I hate feeling incompetent, but I guess that sometimes in life we just have to accept and lean into our weaknesses and fears and embarrassments until we get through to the other side. It is a humbling but important lesson, I suppose. One that was really driven home with these fumbling mistakes during my first hours with this year’s interns, because it’s not enough to learn it once apparently :)

I got the interns to their Jiu Valley homes eventually, and let out a deep sigh of relief. After church on Sunday I took them up to the mountains, to the shepherd’s hut at Scorota, because I wanted to introduce them to our wilderness, and I also just needed to get outside and breathe and collect wild thyme and pine tips and see the sunlight on the trees and remember that I don’t have to be good at everything. 

And so we hiked up through the gorge and then onto the mountain, we bought several kilos of fresh sheep’s cheese from the shepherds’ hut, we picked the purple blooms of the wild thyme that were bursting in clusters on the mountain side (these I will dry for tea) and we collected the lime green new-growth tips from the pine trees (these I will mix with honey or sugar to make a syrup). And then we descended in the cool of the coming evening, and then I got into the driver’s seat of the van and drove us all home. 

May your week be blessed, and may your weaknesses be blessed!

Xenia