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The current conservative government of the party VMRO plans to build a new Orthodox church with public financing in the center of Skopje’s main square. Many Skopjans, both those I know and those in the media, are critical of this project. There are many reasons: it is waste of government money when there are already three churches very close to the area, it is a provocation of the Albanian community centered just on the other side of the square, it reflects an exclusionary attitude toward Macedonia’s Muslisms and other people of non-Orthodox faiths, and it emphasizes symbolism over good urban planning by interrupting a public plaza that has already been crowded in by many new buildings.

This last objection has been raised by students of the Faculty of Architecture at Sts. Cyril and Methodius University, who organized a protest on the main square against the new church yesterday. The students were strongly discouraged from wearing any party-affiliated articles or carrying signs that referenced the two largest political parties, conservative VMRO and liberal SDSM, so that the focus of the protest would remain on the building of the church itself. Several hundred gathered on the main square, called the Ploštad, and carried signs. One widely reported sign said, “Do not rape Skopje!” (Ne go siluvajte Skopje!).

Counterprotestors gathered in the square as well, numbering many times greater than the students. BalkanInsight reports that many of them were bussed in from towns outside Skopje such as Gostivar, and that these busses were parked near one of the buildings owned by the Macedonian Orthodox Church. They carried signs, religious flags, and crosses and chanted nationalist and pro-VMRO slogans. Utrinski Vesnik and the other reports I’m reading say that the smaller group of protestors were then brutally attacked. The religious counterprotestors rushed them, kicked them, and beat them. Some had head injuries. The protest was scattered under the attacks as the religious counterprotestors screamed “Traitors!”

There are no reports yet about whether the police were at the protest and if they were, whether they made any attempt to prevent the violence. Either they clearly failed, or they refused to stop the counterprotestors from beating the protestors.

It is strange to think that later in the day when I passed through the Ploštad multiple times, I had no idea any of this had happened.

The Skopje police have announced an investigation into the smaller group of student protestors and is holding their organizers responsible for “disturbing the peace and public order.” The Prime Minister, Nikola Gruevski of VMRO, did not condemn the attack on the protestors, nor did he express any sympathy or concern for those injured. Utrinski Vesnik reports this as his only comment:

For this side, which I suppose you reckon as politically motivated on our part, I can you assure you that it is not. I personally think that this is the work of Miroslav Grčev, who is directly against all projects of the curent government. He is a member of SDSM, he was mayor of the Centar ward at the time of SDSM, and he opposes every single project that the our government initiates. That is my opinion, but I am deeply convinced of it.

Премиерот Никола Груевски рече „за оваа страна, за која што претпоставувам сметате дека е од нас политички мотивирана можам да ви потврдам дека не е. Јас лично мислам дека се работи за проект на Мирослав Грчев, кој е директно против сите проекти на Владата. Тој е член на СДСМ, беше градоначалник на Центар во време на СДСМ и се спротивставува на секој проект кој што го прави Владата“

„Тоа е мое лично мислење не мора да е така, но јас сум длабоко убеден во тоа“, додаде Груевски, пренесе Македонското радио.

In all other respects he blamed the protestors for the violence.

This incident heavily reinforces an already thick wall of silence around the activities of the current government, through which no criticism may be permitted to penetrate. Any criticism of the state is at best basely politicized shilling for a corrupt opposition unfit to govern, at worst religious heresy and national treason.

Macedonia is not Russia, nor even Serbia. There remain vigorous voices of opposition in the press, the most recent round of elections were free and relatively fair according to international observers, and the country is still oriented towards integration with Western democratic institutions.

But with VMRO likely to win the upcoming presidency contest and with its dominance in the parliament, more room has been made for people who believe that Macedonia’s territory should extend to the Aegean and into Bulgaria, that the Macedonian Orthodox Church should have a special and close relationship to the government bankrolled by all the country’s taxpayers, that Macedonian is not a Slavic language but rather the direct descendent of the language spoken by Alexander the Great, and that the Rosetta Stone was actually written in Macedonian. These people are deluded, dangerous, and utterly opposed to secular democracy and the participation of Macedonians of all ethnicities in the country’s institutions.

The current government is giving them more power and influence, extending into many corners of Macedonian society. This includes the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, with which I am affiliated, and the Ministry of Culture, with which my fellow Fulbrighter Seth is working. Both are having their scientific work subverted and distorted by nationalism and politicization.

I am not a Macedonian. The violence that happened yesterday on the Ploštad does not directly affect me. But it does affect my colleagues and friends. They deserve better than this from their government.

I’ve been teaching Roma kids English at an NGO called Sumnal in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Skopje called Topana. It’s amazing how drastically the city changes as you move from one neighborhood to the next. Commie kitsch to Balkan favela by just crossing the street, and Turkish old town just down the road. I want to take some pictures the next time I’m there during the day.

The kids are sweet, well-behaved, and surprisingly tolerant of my broken Macedonian. Their English level is limited to a few set greetings and basic nouns like names for body parts or everyday objects–they don’t even really know how to conjugate the verb ‘to be’ yet, so most of my teaching is in Macedonian. I’m not trained as a teacher, much less as a teacher of a foreign language, much less as a teacher of a foreign language to young children. But I am free and I’m trying hard to learn better teaching methods through trial and error. My focus has been to try to make sure all the kids get to participate and have a little one-to-one attention, which sometimes involves stepping away from the front of the table and coming up to some of the quiter ones. Often the younger girls are very shy, but know a bit more English than the charasmatic kids who sit near the front and yell out the answers. I want the quiet ones to know that I’m paying attention to them too.

So far covered have been introducing yourself, basic possessive pronouns, and body parts. I probably should have backed up and drilled the conjugation of ‘to be’ and the subject pronouns, because the kids had trouble with distinguishing I/you, my/your. I’ll work on that in the future. In any case, to help with pronunciation I write both the English spelling and the approximate way it’s said in Cyrillic, because otherwise the kids rapidly forget how to read the English spelling. They don’t really know how Latin letters are pronounced in English beyond the literal letter names. I’m somewhat worried about giving them approximate Cyrillic transcriptions of the pronunciations, though, because I’m afraid they’ll be confused when they hear me pronounce something ‘teeth’ but see me write the closest Macedonian equivalent: ‘teet’.

I have a bit of a guide in A, who let me co-teach a class at her elementary school where I take my Albanian lessons, so I’ve been trying to model what I’m doing on her. But she has a textbook to work from and a class of kids who seem to have grasped the basic phonics rules of English. The kids at Sumnal are bright, but several of them have literacy problems. I made a major stumble when I asked kids to go up to the board to write the words and pronunciations they were guessing as I pointed to various body parts. One girl got a word right, but blushed and turned away when I asked her to go up to the board to write the word. Another kid jumped in to say, “Teacher, I’ll do it! She can’t write!” I hadn’t meant to expose the kid to embarrassment.  I need to be more careful about it in the future.

The kids seemed reasonably entertained by my teaching. I don’t know if they’re really learning anything yet. I don’t know how effective a teacher I can be playing it by ear and with limited knowledge of their background and challenges. But I prefer trying to help, even in a small way. And there is a lot I would like to learn from the children at Sumnal.

One thing is that they taught me the Macedonian words for some bodyparts that I didn’t know. I can name the individual fingers now, for example! Some are transparent, like ‘mal prst,’ which means ‘little finger.’ The group consensus is that ‘pinkie,’ the English equivalent, is a very silly word.

But moreover, I’m fascinated by the way the children switch back and forth between Macedonian and Romani. Sometimes it seems as if they start the sentence in one language and switch to another half way through. Never to me–I’m an outsider and even more modernized Roma communities like those of Macedonia draw sharp and strictly-policed distinctions between Rom and Non-Rom, but among each other the mix the two languages easily. This is called ‘code switching’ and it’s quite common among speakers of a minority language fluent in the majority standard in countries all over the world, but I’ve never seen it in action before, and never between a not-yet-standardized, primarily-spoken language and a literary language. Major strides have been made in the codification of Romani for official and written purposes, for example translations of works of literature; or the Macedonian census project, but the impoverishment of the Roma community combined with some of the unique challenges of standardizing Romani (many mutually unintelligible dialects stretched all across Europe, high levels of borrowed vocabulary that may differ considerable from nation to nation, some communities’ resistance to the idea of Romani being an ‘official’ language) have made progress slow. Macedonia is probably the farthest along in the project of cultivating a healthy and just relationship between the bureaucratic state and the Roma, being the only country in Europe where Romani is actually a municipal-level administrative language, but that’s not saying much. The Roma remain incredibly marginalized wherever you go in Europe.

Even here, where discrimination against the Roma is said to be less severe than in other states, I have heard some toe-curling things said about them in a very casual, matter-of-fact way. But, it would be unfair to say that and not also mention that I have heard Macedonians and Albanians express progressive and supportive attitudes toward the community. I remember my landlady once telling me a story about a Macedonian woman who eloped with a Rom man, which set the hairs on the back of my neck standing as I waited for her to reach a nasty conclusion. But as I concentrated on what she was saying and pieced together the grammar and the words, I realized she was speaking of something she considered to be a story with a happy end. The families of the couple were persuaded to meet and negotiate a marriage ceremony, and the newlyweds made planned compromises to make a mixed-culture marriage that would soothe the worries of both sides of relatives. One frivolous sounding, but apparently important example was that the Macedonian woman learned some of the Rom dances and could perform them at the marriage.

There must be something important to this. My professor, who is not Rom but has very good relationships with the Roma community, is famous for knowing Rom dances as well. A Macedonian professor related to me that she first met him when she was walking to a linguistics conference early in the morning and saw him dancing with a group of Rom men. She took him to be just one of the group and thus was astonished when she sat down in a conference room later that afternoon to find him sitting up front as the main presenter. He had room for doing both things in his day.

I hope I’ll be able to cultivate the same relationships and good will, so that some day I’ll be able to dance with the Roma as well as study their language.

Last night I gave the second half of a presentation on culture shock at the American Corner in Skopje, an information center, library, and all around awesome symbol of my country. The people there put huge amounts of effort into offering presentations, workshops, and materials to help people get jobs in the US, study in the US, or just learn more about the culture and language. I think it’s excellent soft diplomacy.

Anyway, the presentation was split between me and a Macedonian, Igor, who had studied in the US. He gave a general overview of culture shock, and then I related some of my particular experiences of it here in Macedonia. What was interesting is that some of the symptoms Igor cited where things I hadn’t even realized I’d been doing. In the discussion afterwards, some of the Macedonians who had lived abroad pointed out more things that resonated with my own experience. They also pointed out that it’s hard to understand just how pervasive and involuntary culture shock can be if you haven’t lived abroad yourself. I’m just going to run with that and list off some of things I’ve done or felt here that are probably part of culture shock.

• Excessive anger about minor inconveniences: I have more than once been inappropriately ornery at my roommate about fairly small things. Friends and family have also had to hear me rant with nearly sputtering rage about such matters as “they make you pay for ketchup!” or “cars park on the sidewalk!”
• Sudden intense feelings of loyalty to your own culture: I look forward to every Sunday when I go with the other Americans to one of the local expat bars and watch football. Here’s the thing: I hate football. I never watch it back in the States. For that matter, I don’t watch any sports back in the States. Here though, it somehow makes me feel more essentially American and less homesick. My roommate has pointed out that, even when I’m talking about distant American government functionaries or matters wholly unrelated to myself, I’ll say “we” instead of “they,” stressing a shared membership that he finds puzzling. It’s probably part of this symptom.
• Overeating or loss of appetite: Both, actually. Some days I forget to eat. Literally, I just forget about it. And then other times I’ll be ravenously and insatiably hungry the whole day.
• A need for excessive sleep: I’ve been fighting this one recently, because it started to get a bit ridiculous. No one needs ten hours of sleep daily.
• Feeling sick much of the time: I’ve already ended up in the hospital once, and that turned out to be a legitimate infection I needed treatment for, but I’d just ignored this one too because I’d had so many other random maladies that couldn’t be traced to anything specific before it. For example, one day I was feeling totally fine, if rather stressed out, the entire day. I came home, ate the exact same things I normally eat for dinner, got on the computer to do some work, and inexplicably started to feel queasy. That queasiness turned into an upset stomach so severe that I stayed up till five a.m. vomiting every twenty minutes. Then, magically, the upset stomach disappeared. I had no fever, no other complaints, I was suddenly the peak of health again (though still stresed). It was literally one day perfect, that night more violently ill than I’ve been in years, the next morning perfect. I suspect it was actually just a physical reaction to the culture shock stress, though I could be wrong.
• Exaggerated cleanliness: I actually don’t mind this so much, as I tend to like neat spaces, but am not very good at keeping things organized or clean under normal circumstances. Here though, I clean almost obsessively. It makes me feel like I’m taking back control over my personal space, after spending the whole day being off balance and constantly on my guard interacting in a foreign culture. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that this sudden change in my cleanliness could be a product of culture shock.

These are just the things that I was surprised to hear associated with culture shock. The rest you’ve already probably read previously on this blog, if you’re a regular reader. The upside to all these downsides of being abroad is, when you have a good day, you have a really excellent day, as yesterday’s post testifies. It’s kind of like a high. Everything is new, everything is an adventure, and there’s no time to be bored.

That’s definitely worth it.

One of my main headaches when I first got here was the way people in Skopje talked.

I don’t speak Macedonian at anything higher than an intermediate level. Nonetheless, in my first few days in Skopje it was like I was hearing a different language. I might as well not have studied Macedonian (and it sort of sounded like Serbian would’ve done me more good).

These days that isn’t as much of a problem. The way people talk in everyday life, rather than in formal or academic discourse, still puzzles me and reduces my comprehension level, but I can function. I’m even starting to pick up on some of the differences! As a linguist, this of course amuses and delights me far more than reasonable for any other person, but I’ll present what I’ve found so far.

Pronunciation: All colloquial language forms go in for reduction of some kind. The problem is learning exactly what kind of reduction, when it occurs, and what’s being reduced. Some of the vowel quality distinctions in Skopje seem to be flattened. The e sound raises rather close to the i sound. Still distinguishable, but harder to tell apart in rapid speech and harder still if you’re processing this as a foreign sound system. The sound v drops between vowels all the time, especially in common words. So pravime “we’re making” becomes praime or even prajme. Final vowels are also devoiced, which is a phonetic process by which a vowel sounds like it’s being whispered. I’m used to devoiced vowels from my previous experience with them in Japanese, but the circumstances and the rules for vowel devoicing are much more specific in Japanese. In Macedonian, it seems to be just final vowels. The end result is that you can barely hear the vowel at all. The sound v and word final vowels are both important to verb conjugation, sadly to say for my comprehension abilities, but at least I know the reductions are going on.

Words: Lots of very basic words are replaced. The preposition vo “in,” for example, is replaced with u (which is the same in Serbian). Povekje “more” becomes poviše, which because of the v-dropping rule becomes poiše. Navistina “really” or “are you serious?” becomes stvarno. Mostly the borrowings are from Serbian, although I’ve heard a bit of Maklish as well, like searchne “to search” or googlene “to google.”

Grammar: Not too much that I can detect so far, though there are a some fixed accusatives borrowed from Serbian, especially in obscenities like pičku mater. I’m also hearing some non-standard clitic usage, specifically a lack of clitics where the standard expects them. But that’s going to require further research (happily enough, this is exactly my research topic, so I can count it as work!)

My friend Jeremy wrote about a really good metaphor for native-English speakers learning another language. Because of the dominance of English internationally and the pre-eminence of English in almost every domain imaginable, native-English speakers are the ultra-rich executives of the language world. We have an enormous amount of communicative power because of both our ease with the language as native speakers and because of its spread across the world as a default means of international communication. In learning another language, we’re giving up that power. Our tools and abilities in a non-English langauge may be extremely limited in comparison, especially if we’re learning it after that magic window between birth and twelve years of age as most Americans do. That sort of power loss can be highly frustrating. But the work has rewards too, in terms of a new breadth of communicative ability and a sense of accomplishment that you gain.

So while I’m still the linguistic equivalent of a temp worker in Macedonian, there’s hope for a promotion ahead.

A very brief list of things that strike me as odd here in Macedonia:

• Rat-tail haircuts: Children have them. Teenagers have them. Distinguished professors have them. The rat-tail never died here in Macedonia. In fact, it’s flourished and undergone variation. There are loose, traditional rat-tails, rubberband-tied rat-tails, braided rat-tails, rat-tails sprouting from higher off the head almost like top-knots, long luxuriant rat-tails, and that’s only what I can remember off the top of my head. I can assure you that it is a singularly surreal experience to be listening to an erudite and somewhat stuffy lecture from a typically professorial man adjusting his glasses, shuffling his papers, staring off into space as if deep in thought, and occasionally brushing his sizeable rat-tail.
• Three-quarter length pants: They’re not shorts. They’re not pants. They’re not capris, thank gods. What they are are like normal, maybe somewhat tight European style pants that just… stop. Before they ever quite make it. Why? Is fabric unusually expensive here? Is excessive ankle warmth a serious problem?
• Belly thumping: I think this is considered somewhat crass, but it’s definitely an everyday sight on the street. Macedonian men will pull up their shirts just to expose their bellies and then walk around like that. Usually they’re rather prominent guts, since you need some protrusion to hold the shirt up like that for any period of time I think. Some bizarre compromise short of just taking their shirts off. Then, occasionally, they’ll thump their bellies with satisfaction.

I’m pulling from different social levels and customs here. Don’t get the wrong impression: I’m sure any average European could put together a similar list of everyday things seen on the street in the US. But those are the things that have had me puzzled in any case.