The Transylvania Joem: A Young Peace Corps Volunteer in Romania

From Friday the 10th until Sunday the 19th, I was on a spring break trip in the Ukraine with five other volunteers. It was, hands down, the best trip of my life. Our camaraderie was deep, and little ever actually went wrong. We stopped periodically to stare into each other’s eyes and giggle “we are so blessed,” before the adventure would continue.

However, the trip was a 205 hour marathon of social interaction (about 80 of which were spent in some form of cheap transportation). There was little alone time, and most of the madness took place in crammed, public places.

Hence, the day after I returned, I desperately needed two things: quiet time for introspection, and some post-traveling physical activity. So I went for what is directly translated as “a drop of movement/motion,” and hiked to the top of Roșie, which is the steep quarter mountain behind my town.

I went the highest I’ve ever gone today–all the way to the wooded top. Near the summit, I found a perfect place to sit and stare over the Jiu Valley. It has a soft patch of grass under a short and twisted tree that’s ready to sprout leaves and give shade in the hot summer days ahead. There are strange piles of rocks in this place that may or may not be makeshift graves. I will imagine from now on that they are.

But this place isn’t the highest point on Roșie– so I pushed a bit farther. Just beyond that place I smelled the sweet waft of haystacks warming in the sun. I heard birds singing in the wind singing in the trees. There was a fullness to all my senses that I haven’t felt in months. It was brought by expanding the separation between nature and the town life nestled lower along the river bank.

I climbed higher through a meadow with bright yellow and violet wild flowers in no discernible pattern–just happy to be blooming and to find any touch of sun that would come. I passed through a weather-beaten gate rust-bolted into a willow tree. The world here becomes a narrow pass, with two sharply rising hills covered in leafless trees. I kept to the meadow in the middle. The hills on either side were a deep orange–still buried three inches deep by leaves from last fall–still too cold this high up for leaves to begin to bud.

Here, I came to the high point saddle between hills. Moving onward were more short mountains, with scattered shepherds huts (not yet inhabited at this point in the season). The clouds were cold and a dull blue farther along the way.

I climbed back down to the shepherd cemetery. Now was time for rest and introspection, but any heavy thought or concern seemed far away and irrelevant. I felt such a vast closeness to my life here as I was able to glance out and take my entire wonderful little town in with one wide, swooped glance.

The Ukraine trip taught me this: that the Earth is a place of grace and that it deserves all of the faith you can possibly place into it.
We six Americans came and bounced through that foreign country with a command of less than five phrases. We were slap happy, and hugging each other almost too much, and excited by everything. We were loud and innocent and free–yet we felt (almost always) relentlessly blessed by our good fortune because the trip was testament that this world is good. So many things could have gone wrong, and instead a parade of mostly smiling strangers reached out to us, beyond a language barrier, and helped us find our way for nothing but to let a little bit of the goodness inside of them shine.

And now, after 11 months in Romania, I sit in a fairytale grave yard on a quarter mountain and am convinced that love is something universal, and am confident in my ability to always do my best, and am content to know that this is all that really matters.