Dear friends,
I am writing to you from the Elefteriades library at Anatolia, an environment that is so familiar and western that it could almost be the first floor of Burling library at Grinnell. I am using Microsoft Word. Neatly arranged books, metal shelves, students bent over open textbooks, teachers grading papers, and librarians updating the catalogue surround me. Outside my window, the rain is transforming our campus into a green park-more like Iowa than the Mediterranean.
And yet, the librarians are speaking Greek with the students, not English. The titles of the books are in the Greek alphabet rather than the Latin, and I know that if I walk through the campus gate, cross the street, and hop on a bus, I will be surrounded by sensations that are thousands of miles away from Iowa-fresh fish, sweat on the bus, burned sugar emanating from the pastry shops, and cigarette smoke everywhere. It's strange, feeling both at home and abroad all the time. While I am often reminded of home, other factors never let me forget that I am a foreigner here.
Still, I like that foreigner status. I always feel a bit exotic, especially with my blonde hair and Scandinavian features. Wherever I go, be it the central market or the city bus, people ask me about myself: where are you from? How did you learn Greek? Where do you live? Do you like Greece? What do you think of George W. Bush? (Although Greeks harbour little affection for our government, most don't hold the US's policies against American individuals.) Being the object of friendly interest, I find I talk to many more strangers here than I did in the US. For example: as I was waiting for the bus the other day, I asked an elderly man next to me (in halting Greek) whether he thought the next bus would arrive soon. He assured me that it would and then, smiling, began asking me the usual battery of questions. We continued talking as we sat together on the bus, and he told me about his son (a priest), his wife, and his 30 years of work in Germany. Before I got off, he had given me his address and invited me to lunch at his home.
This openness and hospitality is not unusual. That same week, as I was stopping by a Byzantine church, I started talking with the church's caretaker. She was an older lady who had grown up in Rhodes and only come to Thessaloniki, which is perhaps why she was so kind to a fellow newcomer like me. When she heard that my parents would be visiting soon, she invited all of us to coffee with her and her daughter.
It is partly this openness that makes Thessaloniki, and indeed all of Greece, feel much safer than the US. I think an American city of comparable size and population density (about a million people) would struggle with robbery, rape, muggings, and drug dealing, but with the exception of some drug-dealing down by the railroad tracks, Thessaloniki has one of the lowest crime rates in Europe. Though I have often walked by myself at night, I never felt that my safety was threatened. Traffic, however, is another matter. Thessaloniki has grown so quickly recently that the infrastructure has been unable to keep up with the ever-increasing herds of automobiles, which bear down on pedestrians with force and frequency. Crosswalks exist in the city, but nobody stops for them. More than once, I've seen an old lady almost mowed down by a passing car or bus.
After navigating the traffic of downtown and the packed buses, the dormitory can feel almost peaceful. Almost. But the weather is improving now, and with it, the spirits and energy of the dorm students. I wake up to their shouts and music in the mornings, and I often still hear them talking as I go to bed at night. This internship has turned out to more dorm-oriented internship than I had expected when I applied, especially since, in addition to being my workplace, it is also my bedroom, kitchen, and living room. I often find myself thinking about how to manage issues there.
Most recently, I have been brooding about how to maintain order in the dorm without making it feel like a prison. One night as I was putting the girls' hall to bed, I found a group of the older students in one room together, deep in conversation. They were discussing how much the dorm had changed under the new director, how much stricter it had become, how they felt like they were compelled, through the strict schedule and discipline, to be more like automatons than children. Though Mr. Antoniou regularly tells the students that he wants the dorm to feel like a home, and the people there to be like family, the girls reported that it felt less family-like, and more prison-like, than it ever had before. They also feel distant from the advisors, as if we were only here to patrol them and make sure their rooms are clean, rather than supporting them.
As an advisor, I am caught between the students and the director. This makes it difficult to determine when to adhere strictly to our dorm rules and when to bend them: Do we let the older kids leave campus with friends, even though most are not allowed to leave during the week? And may I let them help each other on their homework assignments in the library, even though any talking is technically forbidden? If the 3rd Lord of the Rings movie is on TV, should I let them watch it even though it continues past their bedtimes? On one hand, it seems inhuman not to make occasional exceptions for the kids. On the other, making too many exceptions can make it hard to keep any order at all.
My time here is passing quickly, so I try to explore more of Greece whenever I have a spare weekend. On March 4-5 I went to Florina, a town in the North, to help administer the Michigan Exams for proficiency in English. While this task is not specifically part of the intern position, they often hire us to read the tests and interview candidates. Florina is just an hour from both the Macedonian and Albanian borders, and it has a different, more Balkan feel from the rest of Greece. Residents have lighter eyes and hair, the weather is several degrees C colder than it is in Thessaloniki, and the food seems meatier and fattier. More beans, more sausage. And when we turned on the radio, we were just as likely to hear Albanian as we were Greek.
After I finished with my testing duties, I headed even further North, to the mountainous Prespes lakes region. My ride had to return early to Thessaloniki, so he let me off about 20km from my destination. From there, so I thumbed rides with fishermen and tourists until I arrived at the edge of the biggest Prespes lake. By way of a floating boardwalk, I walked to a tiny, barely-inhabited island. The only people I saw there were a couple of sullen, inbred-looking residents who ran the only convenience store on the island. The rest of the buildings were stone shacks and, as I soon discovered, Byzantine ruins. With the aid of a muddy path and a few decrepit signs, I found my way to the remains of a 12th century church. I was the only one there. The age of the place, and its isolation, gave me the eerie feeling that I had stepped out of my own century.
But now, back to my century and back to work! Take care,
Laura
