Jill Keegan, junior from Boston College, reflects on her experience of taking an internship with SOLIDARNA, a foundation that works to rebuild villages affected by the earthquake that took place in 2021. Jill connects academic lessons learned during the semester in Croatia with experience of visiting a farm destroyed by an earthquake.
My place in the back of the car was cramped and awkwardly located, diagonal relative to my supervisor and directly behind the CEO of the company, meaning that I had to hunch forward and do a sort of 45-degree-angle-upper-body twist in order to hear them. I nodded and smiled as they attempted to fill me in on the history of the region and asked follow-up questions occasionally, but mostly stared at the horizon and tried not to get sick from the sharp and winding gravel roads. The roads were so sharp and winding, in fact, that I was not entirely confident in the ability of the small red car to ascend to the top of the hills without breaking down. The CEO of Solidarna, the company at which I was interning for the semester, my direct supervisor, a volunteer, and I were climbing through the villages surrounding Petrinja, the small Croatian city hit most directly by the 6.4 Mw earthquake in December of 2020, and the word “village” seemed more and more incongruent with the surroundings the further we drove. The landscape of modest farmhouses succumbed by degrees to the pure wilderness of rocky fields and barren trees. It was stunningly beautiful, and all I wanted to do was get out of the close quarters of the vehicle and breathe in the fresh air. Still, when we finally did reach our destination, the farm of an older couple who had received a small wooden house sponsored by the organization, I barely had time to take in a breath before I felt the wind knock out of me again. It was impossible to soak in the peace of the surroundings without also confronting the utter devastation it held. The farmhouse was made of brick, and quaint, and also completely crumbled and caved into the field below. The barn was large, wooden, and populated by only a few animals, the rest having been killed by its initial collapse during the height of the earthquake. Even the valley below us was dotted with half-demolished houses and piles of rubble from disintegrated animal enclosures.
The older couple received our small group warmly, with a hug and a kiss for each one of us, and I did my best to glance inconspicuously at the faces of my supervisors to gauge how I should react. We all stared over the fields: my supervisors, high-profile social justice activists; the volunteer, a woman donating her free time to humanitarian causes; the older couple, residents of a two-room makeshift house in an earthquake-destroyed district; and me, the American student come overseas to study in a tailor-made academic program. I recalled the philosophy of double vision we had studied in class and on which I had just done homework and immediately felt ashamed. I felt the grass under my feet, heard the farm sheep bleat from mere feet away, and the immediacy of it all became all too much. Wait a second, I thought bitterly, Just give me a minute, you guys go ahead and figure out what to do when the government grant runs out. I’ll just be here, petting the sheep and thinking profound thoughts about what it might like to be you. It became apparent that I would not be allowed to merely observe when the woman, Rada, pressed a baby bottle into my hand and gestured at the goat staring plaintively up at me. The cows moo’d in the adjacent barn, my supervisor spoke rapid Croatian with the older man, Vlad, while petting the sheep dog, and I looked this little grey goat in the eyes and fed it its bottle. Rada laughed good-naturedly at my awkwardness and clapped me on the back.
We were given a tour of what remained of the small farm. You could see for a considerable distance down the narrow, weedy road alongside us before it disappeared into the brush, and occasionally I saw Vlad gaze down it. His lined face and kind eyes assumed a ruminative, indecipherable expression, a departure from his generally lighthearted demeanor. I knew Vlad had been diagnosed with cancer and that he had lived in their open-roofed shed for a week immediately following the earthquake before any relief efforts reached his remote corner of the county. I had great respect for him, but it occurred to me as I watched him how little I truly knew about him and what all of this meant to him. His was a hard life, that much was fact, but what could I know about the trials and triumphs of his day-to-day? My privilege felt glaringly obvious. It was clear that the couple was excited that I was from America, but even that sentiment–my cultural identity–carried new meaning. It was important to them that I, as a foreigner, understood their story, and it was important to me that I communicated both an openness and a sense of respect. To just be there, to exist in their space, to be a part in some small way of this community even as an observer - it was humbling. I became hyperaware of my own happenstance good fortune to be born into an environment where my material needs were assured, which was an uncomfortable feeling–but not an unwelcome one. Shame perhaps was not the right word, but rather humility. And absolutely, gratitude. I was impressed by the life they had built for themselves; the frivolities and the true joys of my own life became visible with a new kind of clarity as my mode of living was placed in parallel with theirs.
As Vlad and Ivan, our CEO, continued to talk and smoke outside, Rada ushered my supervisor and me into her home. Pictures of her grandchildren adorned her walls, and a small vase of flowers sat on the single table in the common living space. She bustled about and soon presented me with a chocolate bar. I was surprised and remembered the section in the book we had read, Chasing a Croatian Girl, in which the narrator explains how you have to refuse an offer several times prior to accepting. But this was a moment of intercultural communication: I immediately accepted the offer. The gift was a symbol, and a powerful one, of her compassion and of her desire to connect. Her gesture of kindness was moving; here she stood, giving me a chocolate bar, inside the small house set in her small, largely destroyed farm. My thanks felt inadequate. There was so much I wanted to communicate, but even if I spoke Croatian, I don’t think I would have been able to express it. I just smiled as widely as I could and gave her a hug. As we all took seats around the table, Rada began to speak to me via the translation of my supervisor. Her voice began to shake as emotion overcame her, and yet she spoke clearly and emphatically and looked me in the eyes. I wish we could just demolish what’s left of our house. Every day I wake up and I have to see what we have lost and think about everything that could have been. How can I do that? But you are here helping us, and I still wake up every day and look at my house. So there’s something good, still. It was all I could do to stay composed. She looked at me with such kindness that I felt utterly seen by her, and I wished more than anything I was able to offer that same sense of understanding to her. I knew my nods, however emphatic, were insufficient, but to do anything more felt contrived, even brashly presumptive. The weight of her burdens was palpable in the air between us–in the obvious scarcity of her damaged farm, but also in the simple dignity of her well-kept home and in the way Vlad’s hand frequently alighted on her shoulder. So there’s something good, still. These small observations offered glimpses into her life, but these were fleeting, not decisive and unambiguous windows into Rada as an individual. Still, it was in this very inability of mine to thread a narrative, to offer a meaningful and articulate show of compassion, that I realized the beauty of my own limited perspective. I had a limited store of comparable experiences upon which to draw to relate to Vlad and Rada; it was futile to even try to relate on a practical level. All that was left was emotion–empathy and respect for their incredible resilience–and the intimacy of the moment became achingly clear. Double vision, I began to see, was concrete. It was in the moment, in the interaction, and it was not predicated upon a hope for complete understanding. Cross-cultural communication would cease to be cross-cultural if the playing field were level or the medium were perfect.
There was no need for me to isolate myself, Descartes-style, and return to the group to summarize my conclusions. Frankly, I tried. I looked out pensively over the fields and tried my hardest to have a profound coming-of-age movie moment that would indelibly mark my passage into adulthood. It felt cheap, and it was. I was a tiny cog in the machine of SOLIDARNA, more ornamental than anything, and I knew I had to focus on just experiencing each moment of this trip in order to gain any real larger perspective, somewhat ironically. The relief program wasn’t about me, not in the slightest, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t a part of it. I was removed from Rada and Vlad’s context, certainly, but this was a very personal encounter; I felt almost as if I could have lived at that farm, really been in charge of feeding the goats, even as the ridiculousness of that statement remained obvious. As we said goodbye to Rada and Vlad and returned to the car, I grappled with my desire to apply our class discussions to this very real scenario. The speechlessness I had just demonstrated in my encounter on the farm reflected how I now saw the purpose of studying complex philosophical theories: not merely to acquire the ability to regurgitate said complex philosophical theory, but rather to integrate it into your perspective. I didn’t need to debate “double vision” with Rada to engage in it; in fact, a debate on the subject at that moment would likely have precluded the forging of any real connection between us. As I confronted this impenetrable boundary between myself and the other, I was reminded of our very-human drive for connection, belonging, and compassion–the fact that this journey is asymptotic does not make it any less necessary. I am so glad I was able to meet Rada and Vlad; I was so moved that I was unable to consciously project my own thoughts and opinions, thus making the gaps in my perspective all the more glaring. I saw, in real time, that I was not the center of the universe, free to gather experiences like souvenirs and input them into my personality as I saw fit. This was a reality I thought I understood. I did not. As I consider what this semester has meant to me both within and apart from my internship, I am most reminded of the moments of speechlessness like the one I had upon meeting Rada. I’m reminded of being challenged in class and needing a moment to reflect, of hearing a casually-phrased observation from one of our instructors and being touched unexpectedly by its profundity, of taking in a sweeping view of a natural wonder and being touched to my core by the immensity of the world. This all sounds very grandiose, but believe me, these moments were anything but. I have stuttered over my words in class discussions, needed to read passages three times to glean any comprehensible meaning, and been lightly made fun of by my friends as I shed a few unbecoming tears into the canyons of Plitvice Lakes (definitely the most embarrassing example of the three). Maybe it’s a paradox, but somehow the moments when the philosophy we have studied makes the most sense to me are when I am not actively unpacking it at all. Perhaps that is the purpose of the program: not to be a one-and-done semester-long vacation, but an opportunity to develop a mindset that will last much longer. It’s discomfiting, and difficult–my trip to Sisak-Moslavina County exhausted my emotional resources for about a week–but incredibly rewarding. I barely noticed my carsickness on the journey back down the twisting mountain roads from Petrinja to SOLIDARNA’s headquarters, and now when I think of the trip I am reminded of how lucky I was to occupy that cramped back seat at all. I hope the gratitude this experience endowed me with will retain its strength, but I don’t know if that’s realistic. Already, I find myself taking for granted small parts of life in Zagreb–like the cafe culture or the open-air market–that filled me with wonder when I first encountered them. It’s an arduous task to consistently engage in double vision when tunnel vision seems so much more natural–and so much easier. Recognizing the need to see outside of your own petty wants and concerns is a constant task, and I’m sure I will fumble meaningful encounters more than I get them right throughout my life. Still, the gift of even being aware that there is something beyond me in a real, tangible way is one I will certainly take with me long after I fly back over the Atlantic.
