In September 1992, exactly 30 years ago , a young woman named Miss Christine Minett arrived at the dark bus station in Nitra, Czechoslovakia. She spoke no Slovak. There was a single pay phone under a dim light, with which she hopefully dialed the number scrawled on a piece of paper. She got a person on the other end who spoke no English and who hung up on her soon after the call started. She didn’t know a single person in Nitra, had little money or knowledge of what to do and it was getting cold, so she called the number back again. Thankfully, when the man entered, he spoke some unintelligible words that seemed to signify “wait”… and then the next voice Christine heard was of Mary, a person she had never met, who was to greet her and get her started on her teaching assignment. Miss Minett had flown from England, and then took a bus along winding country roads through flat countryside to Nitra to teach English for the first time, at the agricultural university .
A few weeks earlier, upon being given the opportunity to teach English somewhere in Eastern Europe as part of an EU program to promote the English language, she was given the choice to go to several places, none of which she knew anything about. (Remember that it was before smart phones and the Internet.) At random, she chose Nitra. It was a fateful choice, as she met her first husband there, which led her to move to the US, which led to her getting divorced, which led to us meeting and getting married.
Chris had never really taught before, but she had a post graduate degree in education, with a focus on English as a Second Language (ESL). The term of her assignment was a year.
Mary arrived a few minutes later and got Chris set up in a hotel for the night, and then, the following day, in a dorm building for students and visiting teachers. Both the hotel and the dorm building are still there 30 years later, pretty much unchanged.
It was a quiet existence but she was busy teaching herself how to teach while teaching teachers and students English. She shared an office with a woman named Jarmilla, who introduced Chris to Slovak customs while Chris patiently taught her English.
It was a time of great change in Czechoslovakia. Only three years previous, in 1989, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia relinquished its power and allowed the single-party state to collapse, allowing Czechoslovakia to become a democratic country. And then three years after that, during the time that Chris went back to England for Christmas, Czechoslovakia split into two countries – Slovakia and the Czech Republic – making her currency worthless when she arrived back!
Nitra is a scant hour’s drive from Bratislava, and so we took an afternoon to go visit, wanting to see it again (Chris) and for the first time (me). We located the university using Google Maps, and took a highway to get there. Chris said the building she taught in looked like a spaceship.
We found the University and parked nearby. Chris navigated mostly familiar, streets, remembering restaurants that were no longer there, and the post office where she could make an international call. We had Doris, so I hung out with her and Chris went in the building where she taught, looking to see how it had changed and if there was anyone she knew who was still there. She was gone a while. Inside, she had found the English department, and found the directory that included someone named Jarmilla, but with a different last name. Since it was the English department, she could ask people questions! 🙂 Chris told people about her history there, and someone summoned Jarmilla, luckily in-between classes. Jarmilla came down the stairs, looked at Chris and asked “Do I know you?”. Chris answered that she should! She was her officemate 30 years ago – and it was all smiles. Jarmilla was still teaching English, was now married with children and they spent a few moments remembering the past. Great memories! Jarmilla thanked Chris for being so patient with her. And for Chris it was amazing that Jarmilla had been in those same rooms, those same halls, that same building, all the while teaching English….while she had been traveling the globe and going all sorts of directions.
Jarmilla told Chris that she was so skinny that she could barely recognize her! Most of the other people Chris knew and worked with have retired, including Mary.
But, now Jarmilla and Chris are connected and several emails have passed between them. Who knows, maybe the next meeting will be with Mary?
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