The Serenity Prayer Applied
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
change, the courage to change the things I can, and the
wisdom to know the difference.
T
he month before I joined the Peace Corps, I received two
journals and a bookmark with the Serenity Prayer on it.
While I was growing up, this prayer was one of my mother’s favorites—I remember reading it on the bathroom wall, above the
stove in the kitchen, and on my mother’s dresser, never thinking
much of it. It wasn’t until I found myself in a small village on a
broken down bus in the middle of winter that I realized how applicable to my daily life it was.
Serenity: On the eve of the Orthodox Christmas, I boarded a bus
full of passengers going to visit their relatives for the joyous occasion. The bus ride was supposed to take around three and half
hours from Skopje to Demir Hisar, my Macedonian hometown.
When we made our usual stop at a village halfway between
Gostivar and Kicevo everybody got off to buy burek and chips.
We re-boarded after the requisite 15 minutes, but the bus didn’t
continue, and didn’t continue, and still didn’t continue. Everybody remained sitting quietly, minus the driver and a couple of
men who began taking apart the floor paneling in the back of
the bus and trying to repair the problem. I was so confused. It
was Christmas Eve! Why wasn’t anybody complaining or asking
questions? I sat there silently for a while until a woman noticed
that the book I was reading was in English, asked where I was
from, and confirmed that I was a foreigner. It was at that time
that the prayer came back to me. Grant me serenity. There was
nothing I nor the other passengers could do, nothing we could
change. This was, after all, the only daily bus from Skopje to
Demir Hisar. There was no other option but to sit serenely on the
bus for the next five and half hours and wait.
Courage: I was asked to do my first presentation at the American Corner after I’d accidentally mentioned to Natasha, an employee at the Bitola branch, that I was a Women’s Studies minor.
To her, this meant that I was obviously more than qualified to
give a presentation during their celebration of Women’s Month.
I said I’d be happy to, and set out to decide on a topic. I subtitled
the speech “The Objectification of Women in the Media” thanks
to plenty of data that I’d gathered right here in Macedonia as well
as internationally. I talked to audiences about the images that we,
in America, might define as pornography on windows of buses,
national billboard campaigns, public places with disturbing posters, and of course, Fashion TV. We talked about how this sort
of portrayal had infiltrated Macedonian society and whether it
was something they wanted representing their culture. And if it
wasn’t a part of their culture that people are proud of, what was it
they could do about it? Could they ask the bus driver to remove
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the posters? Should they inform their children that these advertisements and posters aren’t appropriate? Would they write letters to bus companies requesting the removal of offensive posters? Did they have the power to ask public officials to remove
such posters from public spaces? My lectures challenged the
audience not to just sit on the bus silently averting their eyes, but
to go out and be the ones who make the change. For me, change
requires the courage to bring this subject up with anybody that I
have an opportunity to do so with, whether it is at a camp, to an
elected official, or to an elementary school child. I can help others help themselves by getting people to think critically and take
action on their own.
Wisdom: Thanks to my less-than-proficient language skills, I
have been able to step back in many situations and take a moment
to look below the surface. With a greater proficiency in Macedonian, I think I would have posed questions out of frustration that
could have come across as offensive. It was during one of these
moments that I realized that the Macedonian catchphrase ima
vreme (there is time) is much more than just that: it is a lifestyle.
The concept of time here is not something I can change—it runs
deep in Macedonians’ blood—nor would I want to change it now
that I’ve begun to understand it. Having time for family, time for
friends, for colleagues, and for complete strangers are all things
that keep Macedonians healthy-minded, hospitable people. With
many Macedonians working hard on their farms and others looking for work, people take comfort in the consistency of time. No
matter how hard their lives might be, there is always time. Had I
blurted out insensitively what came first to my mind, I may have
missed underlying causes or circumstances that my language
skills made me fail to understand. Now certainly schools and
NGOs would work more proficiently if meetings always started
on time. Realizing deadlines in advance and meeting those deadlines would surely increase the amount of projects and funds that
organizations are eligible for. Knowing the difference between
what requires serenity and what requires courage is essential, but
I must also not loose sight of my goal to make positive changes
whenever possible and appropriate. Now if only I can find the
wisdom to do this from within the context of ima vreme, the possibilities would be boundless.
I like to think that every day I serve as a Volunteer here in Macedonia, I understand these three virtues just a little bit more.
by Tara Trepanier