Wax?

Wax. After a good year in Moldova, that particular word had never came up and now I was searching frantically through my dictionary to come up with what exactly wax is in Romanian. I spent a few days as a translator for a Dutch bee keeping expert who was in my village for a week to help out some local beekeepers improve their operations. My bee based vocabulary at that point consisted of beekeeping, honey, and bees. Not exactly enough to smoothly translate without the help of my dictionary who also came up blank on words such as drones, though thankfully the Moldovan farmers knew that word in English. The way we absorb language, primarily our own, is a mystery to me. The thousands of subsets of vocabulary themes we have stuck in our head, the ease with which we can learn new words as if by osmosis runs into stark contrast with the difficulty of adapting to a second language as an adult. I have to keep a little notebook where I write a category or theme, and then translate all the words I can think of in English pertaining to that category to Romanian. Then, I have to study them over and over through visual and verbal repetition until they vaguely float around in my head so that I maybe able to recall them, though not always, if the situation arises.

This experience also made me reflect upon the challenges I have faced in Moldova as a volunteer and the amount of control I have over my environment/experience. I often relate being in Moldova to running with a 20 pound vest on. Going back to America will be like taking that vest off and running the same amount. Why? Well, I have the sense that everything will seem so much easier because we have such an intimate knowledge of our cultural environment that a lot of the variability, and challenge that comes along with that, is eliminated. Like with our native language, little things and challenges that come our way can be worked through with a type of creativity that can only be harnessed due to an intimate knowledge of our surroundings and the ability to make assumptions on how things will work. With language, we have such an innate sense of grammatical structures and vast vocabulary that we can effortlessly switch nouns to verbs or adjectives, relate unknown objects to known objects, use functions like metaphors and analogies to creatively overcome communication barriers, and fully express ourselves. Here, I like that kind of freedom. The little things that will come up in life, say like learning you will be translating for the first time in your life the night before, become a worrisome ordeal. However, this is all part of being a Peace Corps volunteer, and the sense of adventure and accomplishment when you somehow work your way through these situations is one of the more rewarding aspects of this job. I did things, namely translating, I never thought I would do, and learned things, like beekeeping, that I never thought I would learn.

When we signed up, we implicitly accepted 27 months of discomfort, not so much through physical necessities which is what is often invoked, but through the mental challenges that we would be asked to endure by living in another culture and language. These are often much more difficult because they strip you of your personality and comfort with your surrounding conditions. They create an environment of much greater risk, chaos, and variability that can make one feel as if they have lost a lot of control. However, we all end up benefiting in unforseen ways and overcoming challenges which would never have manifested if we hadn’t left our comfort zone. With this in mind, I hope that those beekeepers who got the chance to discuss with this Dutch expert obtained as much as I did through this experience.