Coolest oldest lady EVER

Statka (sp?), the Slovak Granny of the Bury family is pretty much the cutiest, most awesome lady to ever exist. She also might be the tiniest. The following are her reenacting reigning horses from her youth, and her own interpretation of Whitney Houston's "I will always love you". Look at her beautiful hands.

Shots from my Slovak Christmas

I Do What I Want: A Liberal Interpretation of God on Christmas

Instead of snowfall this Christmas, Central Slovakia was blanketed in torrential downpours of rain. At 6:00 in the morning my slumber was disturbed by the aggressive trill of raindrops on the sunroof above my bed, and through out the day the rain continued to fall in varying degrees of severity. By the time the 7:00 p.m. news rolled around a good part of the region was under water. The news showed clips of bridges being submerged or hammered by runaway driftwood and disgruntled home owners or stressed-out public officials bemoaning the inconvenience of the natural disaster. But it also showed a Brittan buried by blizzards in arctic-like conditions.

My first though was: the world is ending. I’m rocking a T-shirt and light sweatshirt in the dead of winter in Central Europe, begging for snow but instead getting monsoons, while England is hammered with snow. It’s all backwards, the end is night.

But after mulling over it a while, I decided that this complete reversal of anything even remotely representing the norm is the perfect, most EPIC demonstration of Christmas. This year I’ve been into Advent, really trying to contemplate what Christmas means instead of just switching on to autopilot—you know, there was that donkey, manger, and little impromptu party in a barn in the middle of the night.

Christmas is God becoming a human—the Divine voluntarily becoming a measly mortal –and not some powerful dictator on the spot, but a little vulnerable baby. And yet from the moment of His birth EVERYTHING in the universe was turned upside down. Every rule or norm people who were trying to be good had previously followed was inverted (all that business about ‘the last being first’), All things external became very internal—basically God came, and he brought the thunda.

After hearing a story a hundred times it sort of looses it’s effect (if you let it…), it’s hard to keep the abstract real and alive. If your house or local freeway is suddenly submerged in water or surrounded by swirling, boiling eddies though, your attention is arrested and the message suddenly feels very real and concrete.

On the 26th I woke up to find the sun shining in a blue sky (for the first time in literally over a week), puffy cumulous nimbus clouds lazily drifting over the surrounding hilltops, and a pleasant chill hanging in the air. While there wasn’t any rainbow the peaceful feeling and finally calm atmosphere did have that covenant feeling of God saying, “Don’t trip, I’m not gonna’ flood you to death.” This birthday party with its sublime hydro techniques is over, order is restored. The world is not ending today, but it sure aint’ the same…

Merry Christmas!

Enter to Learn, Leave to Serve

After being steeped in a Lasallian environment for eight years, being raised on the platform “I owe you three things in life, an education, a religion, and love,” and just amassing my own experiences over the years, I’m pretty hell-bent on the importance of education. Since for most of the free world school is mandatory at least through adolescence and pretty status quo after that (college / university) we have completely forgotten good ol’ LaSalle’s sentiment that “education is the means for participation in society.” We begrudgingly sit in classrooms Monday through Friday, store away ‘useless’ or seemingly superfluous information until is forgotten as we trudge towards that finish line of graduation. Next we look for that nicely labeled job or title we can hold, that product we must have been after in the first place.

By now the ruts we follow are so deeply entrenched that we forget there are other possible paths or tracks—pre-existent or yet to be trailblazed. We forget why we educate ourselves in the first place—that participation in society is actually a privilege, not a duty, and that it is accompanied by responsibilities. So far I’ve spoken in broad generalizations, but it is because over the last few years I have seen first hand trans-continental examples of not only rampant laziness in the classroom, but also a disgusting sense of entitlement and even repulsion towards learning.

This year I have been given an incredible opportunity. My unique (and incredibly flexible) role at EGT and even the Hotel Academy in Brezno has given me exposure to many students from all levels in gymnasium (Slovak high school). Since I have not had any of my own classes I see students either once a week, once in a blue moon, or in the company of a co-teacher and often under his/her plans. This has its benefits and drawbacks—one of the benefits is that as I said I have been able to interact with many more students. My classroom persona has been incredibly performative because I am usually trying to arouse these kids out of their coma of boredom and disenchantment. I bring shock value. Many of them think I am insane. But many of them like it, and ask when I’ll come to class again.

Recently I got the official invite to return next year as a full-time teacher, and I need to have an answer by the end of January.

I’m not the best teacher—I don’t know all about proper pedagogical methodology or the most effective lesson planning (I’ve made a few mistakes like “gah! I should have been making them do paraphrases all along!” or “Why did I let them pick their own essay topics for their first essay EVER! I should have given them theses options-duh!” But, I think one of my mottos of the year is: “Good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgment.”). In February an English/literature teacher is going on maternity leave so I will be rescheduled yet again, but this time I will gain some of my own classes. I’m incredibly excited, and I think it will be good. I have enough knowledge to impart on these students for where they’re at right now, and more than anything I have energy and intensity—something their education thus far has been pretty bereft of—and I don’t think they hand out credentials for that.

I don’t even want to be a ‘teacher’ yet. I’ve long said that I want to teach “when I’m 50 and in my turquoise phase.” But, as that good ol’ Lasallian motto says, “enter to learn, leave to serve.” I’m sure I could come back to the states and find a valid, exciting new place to “serve” or work, and it would be a heck of a lot closer to my family and friends. Yet there is a clear and present place and position for me to serve here in my unique way. This year I have merely staked out the property and cleared some bramble. I haven’t really had the time to be able to make something fruitful grow. And growing things is a process. I’m afraid of storming in here, messing things up (the status quo), then just running away and leaving the students I was starting to get through to utterly confused.

In the classes I have been seeing regularly (like my 3rd year lit class once a week) I am definitely seeing growth and some light bulbs going off. Just historically and institutionally the Slovak perception of education is heavily based on memorization, plot summary, and what I consider to be a whole bunch of worthless bullshit. The students know it, and so most have absolutely no expectations of taking anything worthwhile away from school. If I can get just one class, or a couple classes fired up, I will feel like I am making a difference. I know you can’t win them all, but I’d consider just a few inspired Slovaks a high success rate.

A huge part of me really wants to be back in Colorado next year. I’ve spent too many winters away, missing my family and any sort of regular ski season (I’ve had to get my ski days in in quick, greedy snatches when I descended on Colorado for mere weeks or weekends). It seems to be snowing everywhere I am not (it JUST started snowing here!). Plus, for years I have put off seeing friends because of commitments—constantly saying next year, next year. I told a few of you before I left, “If you get married (or have a baby) while I’m gone I’ll kill you.” Just give me a year, I said, and then you can do what you need to do. But that year is quickly ticking away, and I’m seriously considering renewing it. I’m torn between my desires to be close to friends, family, and geography that I love, and a strong internal tug to stay put—even if it prolongs my absence from the lives of those I love.

I could throw more Lasallian mumbo-jumbo at you like, “one thing [leads] to another,” But I think I’ll just leave you with the wise words of Cat Stevens: “I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul. Where I’ll end up, well I think only God really knows.”

A few more shots from Zabijacka

Zabijacka! Or, Pig Slaughter

Saturday morning at 5:30 I waited outside my apartment building, and was gradually joined by a few of my fellow American teachers, until the school van (on loan) pulled up and a man we had never met before gestured for the four of us to get in. We were on our way to a neighboring village to purchase and pick up a pig for a zabijacka.

Zabit means to kill in Slovak, and the zabijacka is essentially a pig slaughter. The tradition used to be ubiquitous in Slovakia, families would work together to take apart the pig they had jointly raised and would make sausage, smoked meat, etc to live off of during the winter. In recent times zabijacka is becoming rarer and mostly only happens in small towns and villages. The first time I encountered this procedure was in 2007 in Brehy, my grandpa’s village. By the time I arrived on the scene the process was well underway, the pig had already been cleaned and cleaved, and was hanging from a pulley system while internal organs simmered in a large vat nearby. I went, I saw, and I left about ten minutes later, not really sure what was going on or how much work the process entailed.

Our headmistress is very good about making sure we partake in any and all “Slovak” festivities, whether it be bike rides to gulas or pressing cabbage into sauerkraut. When she told us about this zabijacka (the pig is for her family, though friends were leading and mostly performing the operation) she suggested we bypass most of the gore, swing by sometime in the afternoon to see a sausage or two made, then join her for yet another special cabbage soup feast.

This time though I wanted to see the process from the very beginning. First of all, anything that involves an “alpine start” (though 5:30 is hardly “alpine”) or getting up before the sun to accomplish something just FEELS like an adventure. More importantly, I wanted to see the pig when it was still alive, and watch the transformation from the walking, animated creature I am familiar with to the inanimate, cellophane-wrapped slabs of meat I am also familiar with. I wanted to fill in those gray areas of the production process about which I am mostly clueless, and of course I wanted to participate in an inherently Slovak tradition that would probably be placed on an “endangered traditions list,” if such a list existed.

The three men—our driver Jano, his companion Camil, and the farmer—handled catching and killing the pig. In the predawn hours the panicked animal let out its final death-squeal, and immediately after being shot in the head (there wasn’t a gun—I thought it was a giant bolt but there was some kind of charge…) fell to the ground and begun to convulse and thrash around while the three men kneeled on it to gash its throat (allowing blood to drain out) and attempt to keep it down. A postmortem weighing marked the pig at around 150 kilos- which is a lot of pounds. The pig was then heaved into the trunk of the school van, and we made our way to the headmistress’s yard for the first stage of dismantling.

As I said before, in the few minutes between when the pigs mortal wound was inflicted and the time it was in fact lifeless and motionless, it did plenty of thrashing around in the muck and mud mixed with blood, water, and even its own excrement. When we arrived at processing plant number one (Helena’s yard) in the still gray light of dawn Vlado, Helena’s husband, had already prepared an outdoor fire to heat water for cleaning, some pallets which served as the OR table, an array of tools, and a token bottle of slivovica with a shot glass—it might be early, but such celebratory work requires at lest a shot or two. With large tin cups of warm water we rinsed as much dirt and debris off as possible, then the two Slovak men (Jano and Camil) begun shaving off the hair with metal horn-like tools. Heidi (another American) and I became like dental hygienists, or probably more appropriately assistants in the OR—following our respective “boss” around with a steady, but slow stream of hot water. After removing the hair and rinsing it as much as possible we blowtorched the pig to burn off any remaining hair, and also sterilize the body. I got to wield a torch myself, and I must admit I felt pretty accomplished.

After the outside of the pig was effectively cleaned we had to handle the inside. With freshly sharpened knives Jano made expert incisions with the ease and familiarity of someone who’s done the job a thousand times. Now, even though I was an English major in college I took an anatomy class in high school, and I retained much of the information. The body—human or otherwise—is in an incredible mechanism, and, for lack of better words, blows my mind! Heidi is pre-med and currently teaching biology, therefore she also had body parts on the brain; so as Jano sliced, grabbed, and moved innards around we oohed and aahed and did our best to identify anatomy—that was the heart (notice the increase flow in blood…), those are the lungs, and is that the pancreas, or stomach? We even brushed up on the functions each organ performed. The liver was absolutely beautiful—its rich red-brown color glistened as Jano pulled it out and tossed it into a bowl, lobes splayed out like the fins of a stingray. The morning was cold but heat radiated out of the recently deceased body, where core temperature had not yet had time to plummet. As I held an ax for Jano and Camil to pound on with a hammer and split bone in the skull and spine that clearly did not want to be split, I just couldn’t stop thinking about how well-built the body is, how much trauma is really necessary to inflict serious damage on it.

In Helena and Vlado’s yard the pig was completely dismantled. It was fully decapitated, the unwanted eyeballs, eardrums, and toenails were flicked into the grass and the intestines were buried in a hole Vlado dug in the far corner of the yard. The more precious liver, heart, kidneys, and other internal organs (even parts of the face) were separated into bowls. The rest of the carcass was cut into sections: shoulders, haunches, and two massive ribcages. After just a few hours and the first stop of the morning the original state of the pig had been completely altered, and a good portion of it did not continue on to the next stage. While it took four or even five people to lift the whole animal into the van and transport it to the pallets (talk about “dead weight!”), one man was capable of carrying the pared-down sections back to the van in which we traveled to our processing plant number two.

With the prep work out of the way it was time to get down to business. We arrived at Jano’s house where Camil’s wife, Katka, already had a wood burning stove ready to start making kapustnica (cabage soup), and a pot full of onions clarifying in lard for the liver stew we ate at lunch. A large wooden table had already been cleared off with knives and various tools set out and ready for action. She even had drinks poured (tonic water, fernet, and a slice of lemon). Freezing, yet reluctant to admit it to our Slovak supervisors for fear of looking weak, this warm basement workroom came as a pleasant surprise, only enhanced by Katka’s offer of “Kava? (Coffee?).” “Prosim! (Please!)” we excitedly replied. We worked hard all day, but every once and a while we would pause to have a drink and cheers each other, or eat a stew prepared from the delicacy of the fresh liver, mere hours after it had been removed from a live body. I’m not the most partial to liver, but knowing what a delicacy it is forced Heidi and I to stomach some, along with copious amounts of bread. Our fellow American Mark was gracious enough to take one for the team and handle a few pieces we just weren’t capable of ingesting.

This team (Jano, Katka, and Camil) has been performing Zabiackas together for years, and they are a well oiled machine. Each person knows his or her job and knows it well. Nobody missed a beat, though Jano seemed to be the boss and sort of got on everyone’s case a little from time to time. Katka could do the whole thing blindfolded, and like a true Slovak woman she managed to perform her duties as well as entertain by preparing drinks and our lunch of liver stew and bread. It was almost impossible to distinguish her tasks between pertaining to the pig and zabijacka, or making sure her fellow workers were well fed, hydrated, and comfortable.

As the day progressed I too found some kind of rhythm. I did my best to make myself sparse when it was clear I was not needed, and the white butcher shirt I was wearing once again made me feel like an assistant in an OR—except instead of “scalpel” one of my leaders might say “Vit-any, noz (“knife”). Also, the leading ‘surgeons’ did not seem overwhelmingly concerned with the contamination possibilities of handling raw meat—Jano would reach for his cell phone after simply wiping his hands on his shirt, and there was way more licking of fingers or even eating bits of raw lard going on than this well-trained American with a raw meat phobia was comfortable with. At one point Camil was digging around in the vat of 40 kilos of ground meat, rooting for garlic cloves and popping them into his mouth. I just had to remind myself that this wasn’t their first rodeo, and they were probably far more aware of the repercussions of their actions than I was. I got plenty of practice speaking Slovak, and expanded my vocabulary a little. Once again Heidi and I ogled the specimens of striated muscle, veins and arteries, fascia, and all other marvels of the body. We also both happened to develop a strong urge to go running over the hour or so we spent separating the subcutaneous layers of fat from the skin and cubing it so it could be melted down into lard.


As I mentioned before, the process took all day and other than brief breaks to eat, drink, or sit (“union breaks!” as my mother calls such time-outs while working in the yard) we continually partitioned the pig into smaller and more differentiated pieces or categories— meat to be made into klobasa (sausage), fat to be boiled down into lard, or prized tenderloins to be left unprocessed and simply cooked. Many of the bones and some pieces of meat were chucked into the giant pot that sat simmering on the stove all day which I decided to call “bone soup” instead of “stone soup” like children’s book—I felt like the same general philosophy of throwing anything and everything in applied, except we were working with animal parts, not a panoply of vegetables. Almost every part of the pig was used somehow—even if it was just given to the cats and dogs as an extra treat, like the spinal cord or miscellaneous pieces of tissue.

At no point did I feel mortified or grossed out by what we were doing (well, other than sanitation wise), and now whenever I see a nicely portioned filet of meat I will know just how much back-work was necessary to get to that one little morsel (comparatively speaking). That evening we congregated with the other four Americans at Helena’s house to eat some of the “Bone soup,” and enjoy the fruits—or rather meats—of our labor.

"part of your world" slide show link

As promised... Check it out, it makes the song even MORE awesome. This is a link to the school website, so don't be bashfull--look around a little.

http://www.egtis.edu.sk/indexEng.html