Flat Broke
The contents of this website are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. government or the Peace Corps, of which I am a proud volunteer.

I was thinking about what to write in my blog entry when I remembered I'm flat @$$ broke this month. Seriously. I shudder to think of it.

What happened was when I got back from vacation last month - I had just enough in my account to pay my rent. But I don't have to pay my rent on any fixed schedule, just whenever I see my landlord. So the last week in April I decided to take some of my rent money out of the bank and buy groceries. I didn't even spend it all. Just a little bit more than half.

Then at the end of April I either got paid for April or got my "allowance" for May - however you like to look at it, but since my landlord came by to drop off a brand-spanking new stove and oven last week I thought I should pay him the rent for April and May out of the same chunk of money which was automatically deposited in my account at the end of April. At the same time I withdrew 400 lei to pay the bills for April.

Recently my internet/cable company has decided to start charging people every other month for two months at a time. Which means I probably didn't pay a cable/internet bill in March - but what happened to the money? Who knows? Or more accurately I probably spent it on coffees and deserts when I was on vacation.

So after rent and bills I was already left with 71 lei for the month of May - and May hadn't started yet. That's about $29.58. And food is roughly the same price here as it is in the USA (so when I a jar of spaghetti sauce is roughly $3 in the USA - it's roughly 7 lei here.) Luckily I already bought enough groceries to (hopefully) last me the month.

That and I got 25 lei out of my change jar, and I had about 8 lei left over after I paid the bills.

However, I have two problems.

1) I went out for pizza today - because when a friend comes to town and you actually have someone visiting that you can sit at a table and speak English with, someone who is regularly denied pizza as much as I am denied opportunities to leave my apartment without spending money - you get 10 lei out of your change jar and go out to lunch with them.

2) I'm leaving on Thursday to go to a Peace Corps conference. Well, I'm leaving Thursday to visit a friend and going to the conference Monday through Thursday - but as I'll be gone for six days I need to show up to the person watching my cat with a week's supply of cat food and cat litter and I'm pretty sure to make it through the week I'm going to need to buy toilet paper, matches and yeast.

I'd like some milk for my tea too, but that's just silly when I'm leaving Thursday. A liter of milk will spoil and I can't afford it.

But I do need bus fair because tomorrow morning I have big meeting in another town at the time I'm usually opening my eyes and trying to decide if I can reasonably hit snooze for another half hour - and it's probably going to be about 10 lei round trip not to mention it would be good form to pay for the friend-who's-going-with-me-because-she-speaks-Romanian-better-than-I-do-although-English-isn't-her-first-language-either.

So I'm in a bit of a bind.

Also, I eat only fruits and vegetables. Or rather, because I'm a vegetarian I like to think I eat only fruits and vegetables but I actually eat mostly Schwepp's bitter lemon, banana peanut butter and honey sandwiches, potatoes, cheese, eggs and olives. But if you buy a month's supply of fruits and vegetables, specifically if you buy them at the end of last month - they go bad quickly. Which is why right now I have half a pizza in the fridge along with a big bowl of Greek salad, four carrots, and all the necessary ingredients to make another pizza - but all of which should be eaten before the end of the week.

Thankfully I have the unnatural luck of having a freezer so I can make another pizza and freeze it because I'm going to need to eat something later in the month. Too bad I can't do all my eating these first two weeks when I have access to good fresh food and then just not eat the rest of the month.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make. No matter how low funds are I always have to remind myself that my needs will be met. Even when I've been really broke, I've never been totally broke. I mean, yeah, I've eaten nothing but rice and popcorn for a week. But I've always had a Safety Net - in college I would say I'm just going to eat this bag of apples and nothing else, but then I could go out to dinner and put it on my credit card. Here I have the option of using my American bank account (which I have only done three times and once was so I could buy medicine for my sore throat and which only has money in it because I found a wealthy pirate named Magwhich to be my patron). Or there was that time I was contacted by a collection agency because my health insurance never paid a bill I thought they had paid and I split the bill three ways with my parents.

Anyway, I attribute my ability to get by - to find a way to meet my needs - to live on a corner of a dollar more to privilege than to my own intelligence. In Moorhead I got to ride the bus for free - lucky me. Here, well I get reimbursed by Peace Corps for that medicine, eventually, so that will help me make it through the month.

So I'm not complaining. It's nice to know when you're broke that you're not really going to go under. It's an amusing challenge to see how far you can make it. Am I going eat plain baked potatoes with nothing but salt at the end of the month? Maybe. But I know I won't starve.

So if you're reading this take a moment to appreciate all the times you've had a Safety Net and then maybe go to The Hunger Site or something. Do something for someone who doesn't have a safety net. I know I will be doing that - after I make it through the week.