I've been in Macedonia for the past week volunteering on a hazelnut farm, and have written about this on Medium. Maybe I will make a few pennies from my blog readers!
March 11, 2019
March 01, 2019
Makedonija
Lily, in her 60s, speaks loudly and often in an endearing, rapid-fire mix of Macedonian and English. Although she learned English in school decades ago, she still has a shaky vocabulary of about 100 words, and she uses all of the words in her arsenal to try to get her point across.
"Your cousin married in Australia." (She actually means her husband's cousin, mixing "his" with "your" and giving me newfound appreciation for possessive pronouns.) "Makedonija in Australia crazy." She puts a finger to her head and turns it back and forth in the universal sign for crazy. She then launches into an explanation of why she thinks so in Macedonian, peppering her phrases with a few English words like "sister," "no," and often again, "no," louder. Every once in a while I could also catch a word that I understood in Russian. Gift. Night.
She holds up a hand with four fingers. "Five," she says in English. "Chetiri."
"You razberi? Understand?" She looks at me expectantly for an affirmative.
I can only shake my head and laugh. She shrugs and shakes her head.
It is in exchanges like this that Lily tries to talk to me about Albanians, her knee problem, God, and of course, her disastrous trip to Australia to attend this wedding. I still have not been able to piece together what made this trip so terrible, but I'm sure that Lily will keep on trying to tell me. If I had lived with a host family like her's when I was in Moscow, I'm fairly certain I'd be fluent in Russian by now.
I am in southern Macedonia for the next couple weeks, volunteering on an organic hazelnut farm in exchange for room and board. I am WWOOFing. But unlike the typical WWOOFers -- hippies, hipsters, young people in search of a cheap way to travel -- I am in it for the market research, in order to start a business. Perhaps I am an anti-WWOOFer in that sense.
At the moment, I am housed with Lily and her husband, the parents of the hazelnut farm owner. The house is adjacent to one of the hazelnut orchards, and I will be spending the next couple weeks out in the fields removing excess branches from the trees so they don't suck away energy from the main nut-growing part. Fittingly, this work is called "suckering."
The village where they live has a population of about 1,000, and there is one bus an hour to the main town of Struga (population 14,000). Lily took me to the village grocery store yesterday, and greeted most of the people in the store by name. She introduced me as a friend of her son's. "I no tell to you and you and you," she points to imaginary people around us, "Teresa coming." I understood the gist that the village was too gossipy and people would ask too many questions.
The next couple weeks will be alternating fascinating and possibly mind-mumblingly boring. But I'm definitely enjoying these random experiences with older Macedonians. And this view of the Jablanica mountain range.
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