Walking from my house down the hill and into my village in Moldova, I would frequently pass a baba or two on the street. Some babas would be hunched over their handleless brooms or scolding a filthy child. Others would be coming back from Chisinau, lugging along the typical baba accessory: boxy, blue-and-red plaid, plastic bags filled with eggs or cheese or milk. I always smiled and said good morning to the babas. Some of them just grunted at me. A few said good morning back. Most would stare.
The babas would stare even if they’d seen me a hundred times before. They’d stare whether I was dressed in a shirt and tie, shirtless and in gym shorts going to buy beer at the corner store, walking by myself, walking with Americans, or walking with Moldovans. They were like tanks tracking a target: they would literally stop whatever they were doing and follow me until I was out of sight, rotating their heads like turrets to trace my passing.
The more seasoned volunteers warned my group when we arrived to expect stares and unrequited smiles, not because we were unwelcome, but because smiling at passersby in a village is not normal. We were not normal. We were space aliens.
Being a space alien is surprisingly liberating and easy to settle in to, as long as you accept that you will never fit in, and that people are okay with that. A regular person has to fuss over the tiniest things, like worrying about whether you’ve got spinach in your teeth or whether your pants are pleated in a weird way. When you get stared at no matter what you do or no matter how long you’ve been in a place, it’s not long before you realize that you can waltz into town with your underwear on your head and folks will likely write it off as just something space aliens do. And as the natives who get to know you learn to appreciate how similar you really are deep down, weirdnesses become endearing and what’s normal becomes irrelevant.
After having been a space alien and having come home to my own people, I have a newfound confidence in how normal I am. Last week I walked around the corner to the grocery store. An older man was coming in my direction down the sidewalk, and he stopped as I was passing and stared at me, just like a baba. A few years ago, I would have averted my eyes and spent the next 20 minutes trying to figure out what’s wrong with me, why he was staring. Now, I can be certain that this guy was the weird one, and I stared right back at him.
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