When we arrived, we were all exhausted. It was not just the journey itself, a trip that included a five-plus hour wait on the tarmac at Dulles while we waited for some part or other to be flown from Atlanta and installed on the plane, replacing the broken whatever that was keeping us grounded. It was not the nauseating bus ride from Warsaw to Radom, where our training was to be held, a ride that included much swaying as memory serves as well as a lot of heat and an already-upset stomach for me. Framing all of this was the simple adventure the group of Americans (were there sixty-some of us, or was it eighty-something?) were embarking upon. A new country with a new language and new culture (new to us, anyway), a new job, a new everything.
We arrived at the training center to find a crowd of Poles — our host families, with whom we would be spending the next twelve weeks — milling about the crumbling parking area, walking around the building, just generally waiting. Kids from the surrounding apartment blocks were circling the main training building on roller blades, something that somehow surprised me and stuck with me as the most memorable element of our arrival. Somehow or other we were portioned off to the various families, and I set off in a Polish Fiat 126p — a Maluch, meaning “a small little thing” — with a mustachioed man and what I thought was his son. I never saw the man again, never figured out who he was. The young man I thought was his son was Piotr, the son of the woman who was putting me up for twelve weeks during training. My host brother and host mother — host family — though the relationship between my “brother” and me at times was so strained that even outsiders noticed the tension.
Of all things about that arrival, though, I most clearly remember those children on roller blades, circling the building, screaming and laughing in a language that was then unintelligible to me but now is an every day reality. Twenty years ago, though, it was gibberish. Poland, a mystery. The future, an adventure.
We were all so naive then. Well, I was so naive then. Naive about my motives. Naive about the impact I would have. Naive about my own ability. Naive about the future. No, not naive, perhaps. Just unable to guess at the turn of events that, twenty years later, would lead me to go on a walk with my Polish (now Polish-American) wife up the street with my son, who just learned to ride a bike really well (“Daddy, I’m really getting the hang of this!”) and my daughter on her new roller skates. Not roller blades, but roller skates — the variety I used myself as a kid, the type I would have expected to find kids wearing in Poland in 1996 instead of roller blades.
Twenty years ago. June 3, 1996 — the day I arrived in Poland for the first time. The day it arrived in my heart and soul, never to leave.