#SOL18 Day 6: Long Distance Friend

My closest friend is the farthest away. 

We don’t text back and forth all day, but when we talk on the phone, it’s four hours. Guaranteed.

She knows me better than anyone. And even if it’s been three months since our last call, we can fall back in (and stay in) conversation indefinitely.

We met in Ukraine, as Peace Corps Volunteers. The tiny village where she taught English at an elementary school was two hours from the mid-size town where I taught English at a university.

You’ll ride a rickety bus a long way to spend time with someone who doesn’t find everything you say and do to be the strangest and/or funniest thing they’ve ever seen.

You need someone to celebrate with when you get mistaken for Polish at the bazaar for the first time--it means your Russian accent is getting better when a Ukrainian doesn’t immediately hear you speak and say, “Ah, Amerikanka.”

As you become more aware of the cultural indoctrination you’ve experienced as an American (in contrast to a culture built on a diametrically different foundation), you need that human touchstone to remind you that you are not, in fact, crazy. A little cultural calibration can be a lifesaver living overseas for 2+ years.

Because while the positive will outweigh the negative in the long run, every single day, something unexpected will knock you over and make you say, “What. Just. Happened?” (This is something you will miss later, back at home--surprising, but true.)

The fury you experience at the realization that there are no lines in Ukraine (seriously, no lines)--not at the post office to pay your phone bill in person every month, not as you’re trying to get on (or off) the bus, not as you’re trying to buy food in the bazaar--can only be safely unleashed in the presence of someone else who is as dumbfounded as you are by the lack of lines.

When you say something as culturally insensitive as, “If five year olds can learn to stand in line in an American kindergarten, surely adult Ukrainians can figure this out!” it’s important to have a trusted (and private) audience for that outburst who not only understands but will not judge you later. That American friend will recognize that you just spent the last 90 minutes trying to jockey your way to the front of a mob of pushing babushkas, insisting that they are old, and it doesn’t matter that you were there first.

(If I had not eventually learned to push, I would still be on a bus, circling the town center.)

We traveled the (Eastern European) world together, experiencing the way that crossing into Poland is like that part in The Wizard of Oz where it goes from black and white to color.

Our response was immediate (and identical) when approached by the cigarette smuggler at the border: No thank you; neither of us wish to transport a carton in our backpacks for you. We watched in amazement as a very large grandmother unstrapped (no joke) at least a dozen cartons of cigarettes from underneath her coat once the bus had cleared customs.

We learned that at the 30 minute mark (exactly) when using a Ukrainian phone, the line would cut out. Our joke, as we reconnected: The SBU (Ukrainian version of the KGB) needed to flip the tape.

My Peace Corps service is still the best and hardest thing I’ve ever done. And this shared experience connects us in a forever way.

Now that she is living in Beijing with her husband and children, many things have changed. Her life definitely has more WTF moments than mine does, but our friendship still helps me to calibrate myself. We may not see each other as often as we would like, but we schedule time for those lengthy phone calls.

Although. . . during our marathon phone calls these days, it takes way longer than 30 minutes for the connection to cut out.

(The Chinese must have gone digital.)