Update on my disappeared week

Apologies for having disappeared this past week! I feel badly because this is my main form of keeping in touch with most people, especially since I continue to not answer emails very well... And also because I have many impressions, but they will evaporate with time or get replaced by rapidly-collecting new impressions unless I quickly record them. So here is the record of my recent doings and impressions.

Last Monday, Nadya, my mother's childhood friend, arrived from Marseille, and since then I ended up spending more time at home (in Imanta, a Soviet-style neighborhood on the outskirts of Riga, built partially for Soviet military families, and located at exactly the farthest possible point from the TB center where I will be doing my research). And I have been slowly and disorganizedly, like with most of my academic work, finalizing the details of my research project and preparing various forms for the TB center's Ethics Committee. I made decisions about the issues I was struggling with the week before and I ended up completely rewriting and then retranslating the project summary from when I was planning to go to Russia, which of course took much longer than I expected. I'm not sure whether I can attach documents to my blog, but possibly I will attach the project summary in Russian and English sometime soon, in case someone is miraculously interested in all of the lengthy details. I have no idea of the status of my project's ethical approval, as I haven't heard from the TB center yet, but hopefully it will be approved and in late October I will start the interviews. Also! In addition to the project proposal and other forms in Russian and English, I had to submit translations of the questionnaire and informed consent (for participants of the study) in Latvian. Very luckily and happily for me the translations were done for free by Lyuba's Latvian neighbor, but they were hand-written and I needed to type them up. They were written pretty neatly, but, as it turned out, that wasn't enough when one is completely ignorant of the language. So it was a little bit like a game, where I had to figure out which letters were which and look up many of the words in the dictionary to make sure that I wasn't typing up gibberish. Surprisingly, I made few mistakes, and it was relatively amusing, but generally quite arduous, especially because at first I didn't know how to make Latvian accent marks and had to go back and add them all in later. Perhaps I am offering all of these details mostly for my the benefit of my dad, in defense of how long it took me to prepare everything to send to the TB center...

Also, I moved! It is still only temporary, for one month, and still in Imanta, in the building across from Nadya's apartment. So the windows face each other and we can even implement a secret light-code system : ) I really like my new apartment, more than I expected. I am living with Tanya, Nadya's sister's friend, who is very feminine, meek, and always speaks with an uncertainty, but seems quite strong and interesting, I am beginning to suspect. We have breakfast together and tea at night, and we talk and go for (a) walks. During the day I have been in Riga center, so I haven't yet cooked my planned borscht and we haven't eaten dinner (obed) together yet. But again, I feel that I have a family. Tanya works 12-hour shifts at a bank, monitoring the computers, and so every few nights she is at work, but otherwise she is home often.

Which can lead me to a little bit of a discussion on "Russians in Latvia". From what I can tell, financially the situation for adults (40's and 50's) and the elderly is difficult and quite similar to that in Moscow. People are reduced to working crappy, completely un-specialized jobs and still earn very little. The elderly receive even smaller pensions, which forces them to work or to be supported by their children. Vasilii Timofeivich (Nadya's father) worked as a guard after he lost his job at a military institute, and the woman I will live with permanently (I will get to that) works as a baby-sitter. Her friend gets paid by distributing advertisements, and Nadya's sister works under the table at a factory that produces cookies. All of them are educated and have other professions.

Also back to Tanya's apartment, it is in an unusual building (pod'ezd), in that most people in it are very friendly. They knock on each other's doors and have tea together, and have a collaborative building-cleaning system, where they take turns washing the stairs, and the entrance is really clean for a Soviet apartment building. People say hello and chat and know each other well. Also across the landing lives an elderly Latvian man, who returned from abroad after the fall of the Soviet Union, presumably from an English-speaking country, and I am planning to introduce myself to him, as he doesn't speak Russian and doesn't really have anyone to talk to in the building. (Imanta is a largely Russian neighborhood, as far as I understand.)

Last week Nadya's friend, Vera Sergeevna (who distributes advertisements, studies French, and some years ago had run in an election for the national? Riga? government), showed me her friend's apartment, which is much closer to Riga center, and I really loved it, so for the moment I plan to move there in a month, after my mom visits, and after Nadya leaves back to France (also Nadya's French husband, Gilbert, a classical harmonica musician and performer of child spectacles with music, balloon animals - I have been presented with a balloon flower, and marrionettes, arrived this weekend). Yulia Leonidovna, who works as a babysitter, lives there with her adult son, Artur. They are very funny and interesting, and the apartment is big and quirky. My (future) room has a pull-out couch (for your visits), and bookshelves full of history, philosophy, and religion books. The entrance between the kitchen and living room is hung with hundreds of traditional Russian wooden spoons, Artur apparently cooks oatmeal on weekdays and omelettes on weekends for all residents and houseguests, and Yulia Leonidovna and Vera Sergeevna plan to make me their card-playing (and alcohol-drinking?) companion!

And today I went to my first class of Latvian, which was extremely enjoyable. I haven't studied languages since high school, and I forgot how much I love it, especially making new sounds. Today the class had only me and a Dutch architect, and the somewhat traditionally-dressed and typically blonde, serious and seemingly knowledgeable and experienced teacher. Whether I will continue to take it will depend on pending extra funding from Fulbright, but at the moment it sounds like, happily, they will give it to me.

In general, I am quite happy and I like it here very much, though I still need to make a regime for myself (like the TB patients' regimens that I will be studying! this then will be my treatment towards intellectual health - familiarity with Latvian history, with oral history methodology, and with public health in Latvia) to read all of my library books before my mom arrives them and takes them back to Tufts, and to meet with doctors at the TB center.