Working within the Framework of the Other's Values

People make decisions about us all the time. Are we good or bad? Do they like us? They use their own value systems, not ours, to make these decisions. During the Cold War, most official documents required by Americans in the Soviet Union were difficult to obtain, so it was no surprise that three weeks after I had arrived as an exchange scholar at the University of Moscow, the American Embassy was no closer to getting the paperwork to enroll my daughter, Lizzie, in school than they had been when we arrived.

"Don't worry," I told the embassy officer. "Soviet officials are used to working with embassy personnel, but I doubt that they've seen a mad American mother."

I home and asked a friend who had moved from Krasnodar to Moscow what she had done to enroll her child, and I followed the same procedure. I dressed Lizzie in a pretty pink dress since she did not yet have a school uniform and tied Russian-style ribbons in her hair, which I braided in Russian fashion. Then, off we went to meet the director of the school that I wanted Lizzie to attend.

The director of the school was very taken with Lizzie and with the fact that after only two weeks in Moscow, she was answering questions fully, accurately, and in literate Russian (something, as a foreign language teacher, I made sure of before going to the school). She was also impressed with Lizzie's level of education. (Of course, it helped that Lizzie had skipped two grades at home.) She accepted Lizzie and told me to get the napravlenie (enrollment permission) for her school at the Main School Directorate, located on a small alley off the Old Arbat.

Off I went, Lizzie in her pink dress and pink ribbons in tow. Lizzie quickly garnered the sympathy of the elderly lady in charge of transfers. Unusually gentle for a bureaucrat, she sympathized, "It's wrong to hold a child out of school for two weeks."

I concurred and mentioned that Lizzie cried at night because she could not attend school. Well, that comment, made to someone from a culture that puts children first and foremost, immediately brought forth a document. We were in fine shape until the bureaucrat had to fill in the name of the transfer city: Washington. She had thought we were transferring from another city in the Soviet Union and had no choice but to send us away to the International Division. However, she did send along a partially filled-in document, which made it easier for the International Division bureaucrat to make the decision to enroll Lizzie.

Technically, no one had to enroll her because she had not yet received permission for enrollment from the Ministry of Education. In those days, the ministry could dally forever so the mad American mother had to come up with a plan. I did. That plan was to use Russian values (love for children and appreciation for education) to get what Lizzie needed. Before leaving earlier in the day for the Main School Directorate, I had given myself 24 hours to get her enrolled, but I managed to do it in even less.

The International Division bureaucrat wavered. On the one hand, she had the paperwork from the International Division, but on the other hand, she had nothing from the ministry. I jumped in and pleasantly explained that I realized I might seem impatient but that was because of an American upbringing that I could not walk away from, even in a foreign land. "In America," I said, "we value education, and we love children."

"So do we," insisted the International Division bureaucrat. With that, she sat down and signed the napravlenie.

As she handed the document to me, she muttered, mostly to herself, "I wonder if we will ever get the permission slip for the files from the ministry." To this day, I have no idea if she ever did. However, Lizzie spent delightful months in school in Moscow, thanks to a bureaucrat who was willing to bend the rules during the height of the Cold War. I don't know if that kind lady ever felt any kind of reward for her remarkable deed, but I do know that, thanks to her, Lizzie, her friends, and school did as the one American child and the many Russian children learned a lot about each other and each other's countries from each other in a way that no political system can foster -- or undermine.

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Excerpted and adapted from a story I published in a collection of vignettes, copyright 2003.