Hello and Happy Spring!

Unlike last year, when we had warm days as early as March, spring is quite late this year.  A few weeks ago we had our first days with temperatures in the 50s (10-14° C), and even a day in the low 60s (17° C).  The ground was drying out, and people were going through the spring rituals of raking, sweeping, and burning.  The air was full of smoke as piles of damp grass and other refuse smoldered.  And in the countryside, whole fields were set afire to burn out the old growth and encourage the new.  The government has been trying to convince people to abandon this ritual, for safety and environmental reasons, but the practice is alive and well around Mazsalaca.  I was talking with a friend one day, and mentioned how I missed being able to smell spring: the damp earth, the first hints of sweetness from blossoming trees, the remnants of decaying leaves.  How it was such a shame to have to close the windows against the smoke when it would be so nice to open them and air out the house.  She said that for Latvians, the smell of burning _is_ the smell of spring.  It was a striking cross-cultural moment, a good reminder to not assume that people have the same feelings or preferences as I do, just because they look like me and our lifestyles have much in common.

Those springlike days seem like a dream right now, with about six inches of snow on the ground and temperatures back below freezing.  It's not unusual for this region to get some snow in April or even a light dusting in May, but this kind of return to winter is rare.  It started snowing last Friday, and snowed all through the Easter weekend.  On Easter Sunday, it was almost like a blizzard all day.  The streets were empty as I shuffled through the unshoveled snow to Agita's, where we spent an enjoyable evening watching The Sound of Music.  People were taken by surprise by the snow.  Agita had already put away the children's snow boots, and they had taken the snow tires off of their car.

For people who heat their house or apartment with a wood stove, the unseasonable cold weather isn't a problem.  But in apartment buildings with central heating (from wood-fired boilers), the heating season is supposed to be over, and regular heat and hot water have already been stopped. Since my building is on the same heating line as the school, we did have heat during the day last week, although the hot water schedule had returned to the Saturday and Wednesday routine of summer.  I was with Valentina in Valmiera Friday and Saturday, and we were cozy with wood heat.  When I returned to my apartment on Sunday, it was cool, but not cold.  There was a bit of heat coming through the pipes until early evening, then it stopped. By this morning the apartment was about 50 degrees (10° C), which isn't too bad, considering it got down in the 20s (about -4° C ) during the night outside.  We have heat again today, and warm (not hot) water, and with my electric oil heater I'm able to make my living room quite comfortable.   This is helped by the fact I can close the doors to keep in the heat.  When I first came to Latvia I thought it was strange that all the rooms in a house or apartment have doors, usually with some kind of opaque glass panel making up most of the door.  This is quite different from the American houses I have lived in, with wide openings between the various living areas of the house, and only bedrooms and bathrooms having doors, and sometimes the kitchen.  Although I can't quite get used to sleeping in a bedroom with a glass-paneled door, I'm accustomed to having doors on the other rooms now, and grateful for the coziness they provide.

During my visit with Valentina we watched several movies on TV.   One, called "East - West,"  provoked some long conversations about life in Latvia during Soviet times.  The movie is about a married couple, the husband Russian, the wife French.  They return to Russia from France, the husband heeding Stalin's call to come back and help the Motherland.  Unlike the hero's welcome they are promised, they are thrust into the harsh realities of life in the USSR.  This includes being given one room to live in, in a shared house where each family has its own table in the kitchen and one night a week in the bathroom to take baths and wash clothes.  The movie was in theaters last year, so it should be available on video now, and I recommend it.  From what Valentina says, it is a realistic portrayal of life during those times.  Many aspects, like the living conditions, continued in Latvia up until independence in 1990.  I'd like to share with you some of the things I learned from Valentina during our conversations, keeping in mind that this is not fact-checked history, but rather one person's experience and memories.

Valentina says that during Soviet times, life was characterized by limits. With housing, for example, a family's house could be no larger than 60 square meters.  People got around the size limit by building a house together: two sisters, a sister and brother, a father and son--whatever the combination, if two families shared the house, then it could be bigger.  And if a family wanted to build a house when they had already been assigned an apartment to live in, the parents would get a divorce so that they became two families rather than one.  There are a lot of unfinished houses around, in every Latvian town I have visited.  I asked Valentina about this.  She said that they were started before 1990, and that after that time no one had the money to buy materials.  Before independence, people would steal materials from work, or barter, to get bricks, windows, etc., to build a house, since there were limits on what you could buy, and often the stores didn't have anything anyway.  Although if you had something to bribe the store manager with, your chances of getting the materials were better.  Most people built their own houses, little by little, as they could get the materials.  With independence, everything became private property, and it was no longer just stealing from the State, and people had to stop.  So the empty, half-built structures stand, slowly succumbing to time and weather.

Of course, most of the official construction was of the ubiquitous Soviet apartment buildings, and most people in Latvia live in apartments. Valentina says that some people even still live in the shared style, where a family has just one room and shares the kitchen and bathroom, because they have nowhere else to go.  When she was growing up her family lived in Riga.  They lived in what had been a large, one-family home.  Her family (mother, father, Valentina, and her brother) lived in one room on the ground floor.  Another family lived in the other ground floor room.  And there was a family in each of the smaller upstairs rooms as well.  When Latvia was occupied, and private property confiscated, a homeowner's family was forced to move into one room of the house, and other people were brought in to live in the other rooms.

Other limits came into play at the food market.  The limits could vary from store to store, but in that store you were only allowed to buy a certain amount of something at one time, for example, 2.5 kilos (5.5 lb) of meat.  The meat truck used to come twice a week to the market where Valentina's grandmother shopped.  She would go get in line at 6 a.m., to wait for the store opening at 8 a.m.  Valentina says the grandmothers didn't mind, they spent the time gossiping and chatting; it was like a women's club.  For people with larger families, the limits could be quite a hardship.  Eventually, special stores were opened for families with more than a certain number of children.  These people could go once a week and buy as much as they had money for.  There were other rewards for having a large family:  women with five or more children were allowed to retire from their jobs earlier than other women.  A friend of Valentina's had a fifth child for just that reason.

Activities and lifestyles were limited too.  There were only certain songs you could sing at concerts, and certain kinds of jokes (about government figures, for instance) were forbidden.  Behavior was monitored by party members who reported things.  For example, on an excursion somewhere, people on the bus would know that one of the people was keeping track of who said what, and would report back to the party.  Valentina said that sometimes people would be taken away, always at night, after they had been reported on.  In the early days of the USSR, people who worked in collectives were paid with food staples, not money.  They didn't have papers that would allow them to live anywhere else.  If you lived in the country and worked on a farm or other kind of collective, you couldn't just decide to move to Riga and get a different job.  You stayed where you were.  Later people did start to get money for their work, but mobility was still limited.

Some things are not better since independence.  Prices have risen, and bread and bus fares are no longer cheap.  Higher education is not automatically paid for by the State.  The USSR was a huge country, and it was possible to travel to the Black Sea and other interesting places, without having to worry about borders, or language, or currency differences.  Today travel is expensive, and visa requirements make it complicated in some places.  Many older people say that life was better during Soviet times.   But there is a whole generation growing up now with no memory of life under occupation.  For these children, it's normal that the markets are full of a variety of products, like  bananas, lemons, six different kinds of potato chips, and nine different flavors of juice.  The major limits they face are those imposed by their economic circumstances and their own view of what is possible.  What a difference from the life they would have had just eleven years ago.

Although the view of snowy fields out the window makes it hard to believe, the school year is rapidly drawing to a close.  Next week I'll be heading to Tallinn, Estonia, for a week-long conference on ending Peace Corps service.  At the conference we will learn about the reports and other things required of us before we can leave our posts.  (Some people say it's more work to get out of the Peace Corps than to get in.)  We'll also get help with putting our experience into resume form, and strategies for dealing with reverse culture shock and returning to "regular" life.

Many of you have asked about my plans for life after Peace Corps.  Although school will be over at the end of May, my service doesn't officially end until July 19th. I'll have plenty of work to do during those summer weeks, finishing up projects with Agita, working at a summer camp, and giving away the teaching materials and household goods I have accumulated during the past two years.   Once my service is officially over, I'll be tying up loose ends and doing some traveling in Latvia and Russia before I return to the US, probably in late August.  Then I plan to spend a couple of months visiting people in various parts of the country, hopefully with an Amtrak pass of some kind, before I look for some kind of work to take me to the end of summer 2002, when I'll be preparing to move to Scotland for a year. I have been accepted in the masters program at the Centre for Human in Ecology in Edinburgh, and will be starting in October, 2002.  As far as the Centre is concerned, I could start in October, 2001.  But I think I need some time to reconnect with my family and friends and homeland, and process my experience in Latvia a bit, before I move to yet another foreign country.  I also need time to apply for financial aid and grants for my studies.  If you want to learn more about the Centre or the program I'll be in, you can visit their Website at http://www.che.ac.uk.

It's fun to think about the future, but there is still plenty of work to do here.  So with that in mind, I'll close for now and get busy correcting tests and preparing for tomorrow's lessons.  I wish you all a lovely spring.

Visu labu,

Sarah