One Third

Getting Home After the shock of being stuck in Belarus began to sink into my mind, I knew I would have to figure out a way to get myself home. I wallowed a bit in mild self-pity, looking through the tiny photo album I had with me of shots of home, family, friends, and pets. I was supposed to be seeing them at that very moment, not just staring wistfully at representations of them. It was tough. Max and Alecia’s family had a rickety rotary phone in their apartment that intermittently allowed you to call out of the country and even overseas. Max told me I should call my family so they would know I wasn’t coming home. I didn’t have any money to reimburse them for the call but they didn’t seem to mind and I was too desperate to think much about it. I excitedly called Pennsylvania and my dad picked up. His voice sounded thrilled to catch me on the other end. He exclaimed, “Oh, are you in Ireland now?” Our original flight plan included a few hours’ layover in Shannon. “No,” I countered grave...

Leaving Belarus After the dig and time languishing in Minsk while Walt took care of some “personal business,” the day finally came for us to leave Belarus. My time in Belarus had been tough. I was pooped from traveling, my indulgent year in Spain had taken its toll, and I missed my ex. The conditions were tolerable but not what I was used to. Our excavation team was comprised of Walt; me; two other female American college students; half a dozen Belarussian college students; a Belarussian archaeologist who used to sneak cigarettes beneath the pines behind the schoolhouse in which we slept; Oleg, another archaeologist; his young son, Gleb (which means “bread” in Russian); and various others. We all lived in the school, sleeping on the worn wooden floorboards. There was no running water so, yea, we retrieved our mildly radioactive water from the well, swam when it wasn’t too chilly in the cedar-tinted waters of the Pripyats river, and hurriedly “visited” the buggy outhouse behind the scho...

Intro to Belarus Here are some facts: Belarus is a former Soviet nation state to the east of Poland and to the west of Russia. During World War II, it was literally bulldozed through by the Germans and then the Russians and the Germans again. During all of this bloodletting, one out of every four Belarussians died. I went to Belarus in July 1996 after traveling around Western Europe with my ex for over a month. He and I parted in Rome. He was going to linger in the Eternal City a bit longer before heading state-side. I flew from Rome to Vienna, Austria, to Minsk, Belarus. Why would anyone trade a few more days at the lush Hotel Mascagni in Rome, gobbling up the Coliseum and the Vatican, feasts of pizza and insalata caprese and hearty red wine for Minsk, Belarus? That’s a sensible question. But just the sort of thing I would do and relish. I was, please keep in mind, just 20 years old. I was an aspiring anthropologist/Spanish major and had never done any anthropological/archaeological ...

9/11 into September 12th, 2001: The Williamsburg Bridge, Tiny's Giant Sandwich Shop, and Jogging in Gritty Air I left off recalling 9/11 with my ex and his companion hurrying to the buildings that morning, thinking they could help in a situation they never imagined would be so horrific. They were dusted in the destruction of the day and soon after, parted ways. My ex headed back to our apartment and met me there. As I said before, we had no preconceived disaster action plan or anything along those lines (Who did in those days? Who thought such a thing could possibly happen?) but we both instinctively got ourselves back to the apartment. We had a television but no cable and somehow were able to catch the signal from a local Spanish-language TV station that was showing the planes slamming into the buildings over and over again. Our apartment on Attorney Street must have been built as a tenement, cheaply, hastily constructed multi-story housing for last century’s herds of European im...