I remember when I was 12 and my family moved to West Hills, we joked that we had moved into a witness protection program neighborhood. Even on the nicest days, on holidays, on weekends, everyone would stay in their houses/backyards, and aside from the occasional wave it just felt deserted. I lived in that house for 6 years before I moved away for college, and I don’t think I ever set foot in a neighbor’s house (and I can only remember a couple of the their names). In DC we had a small group of neighbors that we were friends with, but even though we lived there for two years and I saw the same people from our building on a daily basis, I never got to know most of them at all.

Fast forward to Macedonia, where на гости, or visits, are a normal part of everyday life. We’ve been given a crash course in the art of the на гости in Vatasha (come hungry, pace your eating, don’t fret if you completely lost track of the conversation) but our skills were really put to the test over the last three days during our first visit to Sveti Nikole, where we’ll live for the next two years*.

*For some people in our group, the scariest part of the site visit was meeting our new families, for others it was meeting their work counterpart, and for a few it was figuring out how exactly to get to their tiny village in the middle of nowhere. I felt parts of all of these things, but really what was in my head was “I’m supposed to live in the same place for two whole years!?! I haven’t lived in one place that long since college, and even then I at least moved rooms!”

Anyway, so back to the на гости. On Tuesday afternoon, the whole group of volunteers from Vatasha was invited to the local government office in Kavadartsi, the city up the road whose territory includes our village, to meet the Mayor. This was all arranged by Zoki, the President of Vatasha so to speak, who has also arranged to take all of us to Ohrid on Sunday and helped recruit the families who are currently hosting us. He’s a really awesome person. So the meeting started off the way these things usually do: the Mayor was running late on his trip back from Skopje, so we had coffee and tea and snacks while we waited and practiced our Macedonian with the staff. Before the meeting Kyle and I had taken a trip to the bus station to figure out how exactly to get to Sveti Nikole from here (the long story short is: you can’t, at least not easily) and were thinking about banding a bunch of us together to split a cab in that direction instead of taking the bus. We asked how much a cab might cost, and in truly hospitable Macedonian fashion… were offered a ride instead.

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