Friday, November 6, 2009

Polako

Living in a region of the world where the motto seems to be always “polako polako” (slowly slowly) one finds that deadlines are not met, household items are not fixed, and meetings rarely begin or end at their appointed time.  During my frist few months in Serbia I attempted, nearly successfully, to step into this slow moving... we are talking molassas in January... river of time and float.  But even I have my limits, there is a point when one... yeah one meaning me, but “one” just sounds better doesn’t it?... goes from saying “okay polako polako” to “wait am I just being lied too?!”  Oh yes, see things may move slowly here in the Balkans, but they may also just never come at all.  Like anywhere in the world there are good people, bad people, honest people, liars, and the ever unreliable humanbeings.  For me unreliable is the most frustrating, because unreliable people are not bad people, maybe they don’t even intend to lie, but they do lie and lie and lie.  At first the lie is for their convienence because they intend to accomplish the promised thing, but at their own, not your, pace; but then they lie to save face, and then they lie because being honest seems a nearly impossible thing to do.  I am not a fan of unreliable people.  We have all failed someone at some point in our lives, we have all lied, but continual, regular, repeated behavior this is the diference between being temporarily unreliable and being an unreliable person.

In case you have not yet picked up on my oh so subtle narration style; I am currently dealing with an unreliable person.  In Belgrade I worked with a few unreliable people, I lived with one, and while they annoyed me I learned to work around them... for the most part.  But my current Sarajevo unreliable person is my landlord, and after two months of what I now feel was blatant lying I realize that I have to move.  My landlords are not bad people, they are simply unreliable.  

In one’s own culture where one knows the approved cultural cues, approved social and cultural behavior... the behavior spectrum, one feels more confident making decisions (read judgements) and more quickly able to make said decisions about the people with whom one interacts.  But here, in a new place, a new culture, I find myself tiptoeing around what I see as my own ignorance.  Maybe I feel slighted, injured, lied too, but am I being culturally insensitive, am I being too demanding?  An aquaintance of mine in Sarajevo once said to me “I hate when people blame everything on cutural differences... sometimes the person you are dealing with seems like a bitch because she is a bitch.”

I hate moving.

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