Hello — if you’ve stumbled on this page looking for my work, welcome. I’ve just switched my web hosting, which required a bottom-up reinstall of WordPress, and I’m slowly trying to get all of my work back up and visible. If there’s something you’re looking for that isn’t yet working, my apologies. Please email me at dathert@gmail.com, and I’d be happy to provide you with a portfolio.

Thanks!

A more substantive update will be forthcoming, but I wanted to direct the attention of anyone visiting this website to some new graphics that I’ve added. They were designed for a startup resume consulting business run by a friend of mine; I encourage you to visit her Twitter and inquire about her services if you’re looking for a new job. She’s calling her company Upstart Resumes, and I’ve added some graphic work that I did for her in my “Other Work” section. Check it out if you’re so inclined. More soon.

I am a strong advocate for Peace Corps. I’ve applied to about six hundred Peace Corps jobs since returning to the States. (Aaron Williams, call me!!) I’m in the middle of a lengthy pre-graduation push to convince my younger brother, a college junior, to consider applying. I’ve even got that nifty web banner, over there on the right.¹

On the face of it, this isn’t so abnormal. Lots of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers are strong advocates for Peace Corps. They consider their service to have meaning, their work to have value, and their commitment to have purpose. Many Peace Corps Volunteers enjoy their service so much that they sign up to serve again. What makes my commitment to Peace Corps interesting is the fact that, relatively speaking, my Peace Corps experience was…kind of horrible. I would estimate that I spent at least half of my 27 months partially or completely miserable. I had problems at work, problems at home, problems in my head, and problems in my limbs.² I found myself in situations where success seemed impossible because my coworkers weren’t capable of it, and situations where success seemed impossible because my coworkers were so capable that they didn’t need me. And yet here I am, telling you to click on that link.

When I was making the decision to continue my Peace Corps service in Romania, rather than returning to America, my parents asked me a pretty basic question: “…Why?” As all Peace Corps Volunteers know, when things are going wrong, the people paying international rates to call you once a week are going to bear the brunt of your dissatisfaction. “What’s new? Well, nothing. Nothing is new. Nothing is going right, and I broke my electric heater, and I haven’t eaten anything other than bread and cheese in six days, and I haven’t showered in eleven, and (expletive) you, that’s what’s new.” And, in Georgia, I had a lot of material for that weekly phone call. My first partner organization wasn’t ready for a volunteer; they didn’t know what they wanted to focus on, and the community wasn’t big enough to support more than the smallest of projects. I tried my best, made some youthful mistakes along the way, and finally changed organizations after ten months. After only a month in my new city, which I loved, the program was evacuated during the Russian invasion, and I spent 27 days in a hotel in rural Armenia where there was nothing to do but drink terrible vodka all day and limp around on a torn meniscus waiting for the next meal.³

So, as far as my parents were aware, Peace Corps was basically a government torture program designed to draw their precious little boy away from home and stomp repeatedly and mercilessly upon him until all signs of life were lost. They were only 57% incorrect, about this.⁴ So, naturally, they wished to know whether I was insane, inasmuch as I seemed to be signing up for Bagram in order to get out of Gitmo.

Going to Romania turned out to be the best decision I’ve ever made, but it was not itself without challenges. The organization I was placed with didn’t turn out to, technically, exist.⁵ My apartment was an hour from the organization I found to replace it, and my landlords turned out to be insane Pentecostals who would refuse to leave before spending hours pantomiming how my washing machine worked and telling me to turn down the heat. My organization was (and continues to be – see previous post) amazing, but clearly didn’t need me to be successful, and I spent a lot of time wondering what the point of it all was.

I’m not trying to portray myself as some sort of victim; I just got a lot of bad breaks along the way, and tried to deal with them the best I could. None of these are unusual problems for Volunteers. I’d go so far as to say that all volunteers face these issues to some degree during their service. It’s the nature of Peace Corps; you insert yourself in a completely unfamiliar situation, with unfamiliar people, whose needs you may be partially or completely unable to meet. Peace Corps has a lot of detractors for just these reasons – and yet, somehow, I’m not one of them.

A lot of people think that Peace Corps is a waste of time. Some of my Volunteer friends do. They believe that Volunteers are often placed in impossible positions, with organizations that don’t want them, or with organizations they don’t have the skills to assist. Some find it hubristic for the U.S. Government to send twentysomethings into some of the world’s most troubled regions, under the assumption that even twentysomethings with liberal arts degrees have a measure of American ingenuity and knowhow that people in poor countries lack. What use is an English major in a small African village that needs more rain and more roads? These people are not completely wrong.

And yet, there is a whole spectrum of possible outcomes when a Volunteer moves into his or her village (or town, or city, or whatever). At one end of that spectrum is total success – the Volunteer learns the language, works well with his partners, and brings a measure of success to his community, in whatever form that may take. At the other end is total failure – the Volunteer cannot integrate, cannot make progress, and cannot succeed. Most Volunteers fall somewhere in between, obviously. The reason I support Peace Corps, and the reason I feel that nearly everyone would benefit from working as a Peace Corps Volunteer, is that I know from my own experience that both ends of this spectrum end positively.

There were moments when I wanted to quit – quit that day or that night, leave, and return to America. I can vividly recall the days when I had one foot out the door, only to be talked back inside by my friends. And there were moments when I walked home after a day filled with such success that I couldn’t help but pump my fist at the air, passersby be damned. I’m a better person for both. I know what it is to fail – to fail miserably, to fail in such a helpless way that you question your ability to succeed at anything, let alone the task at hand. And I also know what it is to bring an idea to someone who desperately needs it. I know what it is to throw myself into the complete unknown – before my invitation to serve there, I didn’t even know Georgia was a country – and emerge only partially scathed. I know what it is to commit myself to something foreign – a language, a culture, an ethos – and look back at America from a new perspective.

Peace Corps Volunteers might not bring the success they desire to the community they serve. Misfires happen – but not for a lack of trying. At its core, Peace Corps’ mission is just that: to try. Peace Corps Volunteers make the effort that others don’t. They serve the communities that large-scale humanitarian efforts often ignore. They live among people that Americans cannot see. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they seem no more selfless than a study abroad program with a curriculum of, “Look! Others!” But even if they fail, they’ve served a purpose, because they made that effort. They’ve shown a community that they’re willing to make that effort, and they’ve shown themselves that they’re willing to make that effort. They’ve shown that America, some small part of it, is willing to make that effort. That effort can change a community; there are three students from my village in Georgia who are studying in America right now, because of the efforts of the Peace Corps Volunteers who taught English there before me. Those Volunteers were often frustrated by their service, too. But their students are in America. They made that effort.

So, I tell my brother, and others who ask: click that link. Make that effort. Jumping off the cliff is worth it, even if the chasm ends up sucking big time. Plus, I tell them, the health care is pretty good, and we’re in a recession. And Peace Corps Volunteers always win on Jeopardy.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to ask for money. My Romanian partner organization, Fundația pentru Asistență Socială și Tineret (FAST, or the Foundation for Social Assistance and Youth), is a terrific organization, one well worth your attention and contributions. That’s not something one can often say about Peace Corps partner organizations, as any former Volunteer will know. Usually, they need your help for a reason. But FAST didn’t really need my help, and does amazing work in their community for Roma families and children. They’re currently building a vocational workshop at a local Roma school to help children learn physical skills, like carpentry, that will help them get jobs in the future, and they also provide extracurricular education for Roma elementary students, who for many reasons tend to fall instantly behind in school and often drop out by fifth grade. They have a devoted group of donors and supporters, mostly in Britain, who visit FAST regularly to volunteer and deliver money and materials, and nobody ever volunteers at FAST without wishing to return.¹ I’d urge you to check out their website if you’re in the market for a cause to support or an alternative kind of vacation.

This winter, FAST is hoping to address a vital but often forgotten issue in Roma communities² – water. Roma communities often lack any water supply; the community FAST works with must walk hundreds of meters to find an open water supply, or use water from a river. In the winter, obviously, this limits considerably their ability to find water easily enough to provide for their families. FAST is trying to raise money to pay for the extension of the adjacent town’s water supply into the Roma village. I’ll post their letter about the project below. It’s a great charity, and a great cause, and I hope you’ll spread the word. Donations to FAST can be made quickly and easily through their website.

“Dearest friends, on the 14th of October we had the first snow this season in Sacele and Brasov, which means that winter is already knocking at the door and Christmas holidays are getting near. Unfortunatelly, Christmas and winter are not happy news for many of the very poor people and children living in Tarlungeni. For them it means having to endure cold, hunger and lack of very basic needs such as electricity and drinking water. Most of you know that the only source of water for some of the families and children we’ve been supporting this year is the nearby river. In winter the temperatures drop sometimes to -20 degrees so water is becoming even less available.

Friends, we invite you to join our Christmas project this year: Let’s bring fresh drinking water to the children in Tarlungeni! What a Christmas gift that would be, probably one you’ve never given before! Will you join us in this new and challenging venture, please?

Although it sounds simple, it is not an easy nor a cheap operation. We will have to bring the main water supply close to the homes where these children live and for this we will need to work with a professional water company. I have already discussed the situation with a few local companies and the job can be done relatively quickly if we have the funding. The good news is that if we move FAST, these children can have the water available by Christmas this year!

The best price we have been given is: £32 per 1 metre of water pipe! (This means Eur36 or $52 or 150 Romanian Lei)

The price includes all the materials, labour and connection fees to the main water supply of the village. Our aim is to extend the water supply with 300 metres, thus bringing drinking water closer to over 200 children and their families and making it possible for more to connect in the future. Each family will still have to connect to the main water pipe individually, which will be a simple and cheap proceedure once the main system is installed and running.

Would you like to buy a few metres of water for these children? Even one metre can make a difference! We have already received a donation which covers for the first 10 metres: a great start!

If you think you can help, please do send me an email or use the Paypal account on Donate to FAST page on our website and I am sure that together we can bring water to all these families for Christmas!

Thank you, dear friends, and I am looking forward to hearing from you in good time and please remember that Christmas is a time of giving and a time of receiving and I am sure that as we give out selflessly, we will receive much more in return! Thank you.

For the FAST charity, Daniel Hristea”

“America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.” – Pat Buchanan

I’m going to start by explaining what I meant by my statement that I felt more “complicated” about America upon my return than I did upon leaving. Plenty has been said about Americans’ tendency to feel exceptional; the Puritan “city on a hill” has become a self-perpetuating myth that America always has been and always shall be the greatest nation on earth. Liberals invoke this myth as much as conservatives do – the phrase, “In no other country is my story even possible,” was part of Barack Obama’s stump speech, drilled into voters’ heads over and over and over as a way to make them feel as if a vote for Obama was a vote for the righteousness of the American spirit.¹ And it’s easy to be solipsistic. This country is enormous, its influence is even more enormous, and it’s hard to escape its grasp.

But once you do, the spell is broken. For me, it happened in two stages. When I was living in Georgia, in a town I will forever describe with only partial exaggeration as a village on a mountain, America was as intangible as Honalee, a mythical place out in the mist whose name carried weight but whose actions meant nothing. I was a curiosity, a magic dragon who was endlessly interesting to the locals but was clearly of no consequence. I tried to do my work and was occassionally humored – though endlessly told, “That’s not how it works here,” – and that was that. Georgians care about America a lot, but it’s their own myth that they cling to – the myth that America is their protector, and will shield them from harm against Russian aggression.² They receive tangible macroeconomic benefits from America, investments and large-scale humanitarian work and such, but those things don’t filter out into the rural communities. Only the myth. My village watched news about the American election, but mostly out of curiosity.³

The second stage of alienation from the American Mythos happened when I moved to Romania. In Romania, and, judging from personal interactions, in most of Europe, they just don’t really care about America. At all. You get no points for revealing that you are from America. You are received with puzzlement when you try to describe the current social battles going on in the US.⁴ Some of your friends will share your excitement about Obama’s election on the day after it occurs, but others will forget that it has happened and react with tepid congratulations at best. Who gives a crap, about America?

This is understandable and predictable, but living it gives you a certain new perspective. Who does give a crap about America, and why should they? What is so special about America? Other countries treat their citizens better. Other countries treat foreign citizens better. Other countries treat the global environment better. Not all of them, some better than others, and some far worse than others, but America remains exceptional at nearly nothing except noxious displays of greed and self-importance. To mention only one of the examples I have noticed since being back: America is the only country on earth that thinks its leader is too important to do leader-ly things. The President of the United States, to Americans⁵, is basically the President of Earth. It is beneath him to go to Copenhagen on behalf of Chicago’s Olympic bid. Let the president of Brazil and the prime minister of Japan and the King of Spain, for crying out loud, do this dirty filthy “asking for things” business. The President of the United States is above it! He is also above attending meetings at the United Nations, and talking to other countries if we don’t like them, because an honor like talking to the Leader of the Free World is something that should be reserved for special occasions, and not just any peon-y Leader of A Different Country.

But there is one thing that Americans are demonstrably better at than most nations, and that is inclusion. Our history of inclusion is torturous, slow, and usually contested, but it happens eventually. President Obama wasn’t wrong when he said that this is the only country on earth where his story is possible. A Roma will never be President of Romania. An ethnic Armenian will never be President of Georgia. The European nations that rank above us on nearly every social wellness index are the nations that are most homogenous.⁶ Only America continues to beckon people of all colors and backgrounds – if only in fits and starts, at this point – and mix them into something American. Responding to Pat Buchanan’s column quoted above, Andrew Sullivan says,

“…this axiom, while useful as a myth, has a problem. It is untrue. And this “country” that white Americans are allegedly losing is not, in fact, a country. It is merely a self-serving and solipsistic illusion of a country that some white Americans feel they are losing. From its very beginning, after all, America was a profoundly black country as well. This took a while for an Englishman to grasp upon arriving here, because it’s so easy to carry with you all the subconscious cultural baggage you grew up with. England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon. It makes some sense to refer to England’s roots and ethnic identity as white, its language as English, its inheritance as a deep mixture of Northern European peoples – the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Celts. And superficially, English-speaking white Americans might seem in the same cultural boat as white English people, dealing with a relatively new multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society…It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me – and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are.” [italics his]

So you can imagine how complicated it feels, to spend two years in places that have a lot of things going for them that America doesn’t, but that clearly don’t treat the Other among them in civilized ways⁷, only to return to the States and find that people like Pat Buchanan⁸ are fundamentally misunderstanding and misrepresenting the One Thing that gives America its purchase in the world. This isn’t a country of “traditional Americans” who are losing that tradition to the Other. We don’t have much tradition to begin with! If you want tradition, there are dozens of countries with more of it, who might give you some! Maybe a castle, or a historical king, or something! If you want to really be exceptional in the world, then you have to embrace the other, because nobody else does. Instead, America is in what could be described as the throes of an all-out culture war, in which a shrieking minority is shrieking because minorities will soon be the majority, and what happened to the city on a hill in which all the citizens were white?

Except it never was a city on a hill, and it won’t be until people in this country shut up. Anyway, my feelings about America are complicated.

Starting (or re-starting) a blog is a difficult thing to do. You must convince (or re-convince) people that you not only have something to say, but that you have a lot of things to say. Day after day, month after month. Then you have to actually say them, day after day, month after month. I have not done a very good job of blogging consistently in my previous efforts. Prodigiously, yes; consistently, no. There are several reasons for this; one, I tended to blog about the absurdities I experienced while working as a volunteer in a tiny village on a mountain, and eventually all of the absurd things stopped seeming quite so absurd. Two, I tended to blog out of boredom. When I was bored, which was often, I would compose Iliad-length posts about nothing at all, but fail to then follow up on these posts once I became distracted by something else. Three, the most interesting and bloggable events, like Peace Corps’ evacuation from Georgia during the South Ossetian War, are depressing and require mental fortitude that I don’t possess to process and retell. So I haven’t blogged much in over a year.

But, I’m back. I’m sure I’ll be talking to nobody for a while, but that’s how these things go. Those of you who know who I am: welcome back. Those of you who don’t: I’m a former Hollywood bottom-rung who dropped the glamour life of fetching beverages and getting yelled at to join the Peace Corps in 2007, serving in a small village in the Republic of Georgia, which is a tiny country that nobody ever heard of until Russia invaded the shit out of it in August 2008. So, fun story: I was in Georgia when it was invaded, and my group of Peace Corps Volunteers evacuated the country, taking up residence in a hotel in rural Armenia, from where I left to continue my Peace Corps service in Romania. It was much less interesting and much more productive, which is how these things tend to go.

I finished my service three months ago, did some traveling, and returned to the States, only to find my relationship with my native land to be slightly more complicated than it was when I left. And that is what this blog will be about: leaving, and coming back, and the adventures inherent in doing both. I’m thinking about writing a book, and I’m looking for a job, and I need to regain my writing-in-English touch, so I hope to blog on a daily basis. Mostly, I’ll be talking about politics and telling Peace Corps stories – at least, that’s the idea. Within two weeks I might be talking about international bond markets and Victorian literature. Blogging, friends! It is ever an adventure. Please join me. Or, give me a job! Or both!

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