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TITLE: To Russia with a Passion By Lynda Olson 08/28/06 |
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Olivia watched her classmates wipe the tears from their eyes and sat back in her chair with a feeling of satisfaction in a job well done. Her college writing class had been assigned to write a paper describing a place, and she had written about the train station on the day that she and 9 other students from (Chaminade) High School left Russia. How had she made her peers and professor cry with the description of the departure from a place she had gone on a trip? Surely they had all taken trips that had ended! It was clear to Olivia that her peers felt the same shaking emotions she had on the day she left her 10 Russian friends, this fact giving her the assurance that she had used the right words. Those hours of re-living her experience onto paper had paid off.
The emotions she now shared with her classmates had not only inspired her writing but also her goals. She was now an English Education major at _______ College, also studying Russian and teaching English as a second language.
"I'm going back," she told them.
That was all they needed to hear. She didn't need to explain. They didn't ask when or how or why. Those things don't matter when you have experienced love as deep as the bond described in her rough draft. However, Olivia had answers to those questions. She intended to return as an English teacher, working in the Russian orphanages.
One girl asked, "What ever happened to you and (Greisha)?"
Did she really need to answer this question? Her irritation stemmed more from the situation in question than the question itself. The answer was clear. She was here, and he wasn't. He was in Russia, and she wasn't.
She answered the girl anyway. "We wrote for a while then lost touch. You know how long distance relationships go," she said with a half-hearted chuckle.
The truth be told, it was (Greisha) who had stopped writing to her without warning or provocation. She wondered about him, worried about him and wished for a letter from him, for a word from anyone who knew how he was! The mail in Russia was not reliable like the U.S. mail; you couldn't trust them to come through in sunny weather let alone any kind of bad weather. It was entirely possible that someone had read her letter and decided it wasn't worthy of reaching him or vice versa. She hoped that was all that had happened.
She decided there was no need to think further about it and briefly focused on the task at hand, college writing. The English classroom in which she sat looked surprisingly similar to the out-dated classroom/multi-purpose room in Vyatka Humanitarian Gymnasium where they also ate meals, held dances, gave crafting lessons and held almost any other school activities imaginable. Her fellow English majors sat at the large wooden desks connected in an un-finished square shape, mirroring the desks in Kirov around which she had gathered with her Russian friends and American classmates. As she looked at them holding copies of her rough draft, their faces became the faces of Greisha and his friends, taking her back to their last meeting in this room of all trades, their last day together. Then, she quickly began to think about the first time she had seen these wonderful friends.
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