Today’s task was to “find your namesake and write them a letter”. Well, this one was bonkers as I Googled my name in hopes to find the namesake and experienced no luck so I decided to celebrate me instead. Came up with weird information. Turns out I lived in two churches. This was a first as I don’t believe in god much less live in his house… Found my old profile at Alaska SeaGrant as I worked there for 4 years: https://seagrant.uaf.edu/staff/piatanova.html
Then I searched in Russian and lo and behold I found her! And she is on Facebook! Further search on FB complicated the matter as there were 5 of them. Darn. What do I do? Send a letter to all of them or just pick one? Of course, the message has to be in Russian as I doubt they speak English which is at this point my first language. Writing in Russian would be an undertaking as even when I speak to my sister I found I don’t remember many words anymore and we play a guessing game and I have an accent. So I am an in-betweener (not completely Russian anymore and not completely American either language-wise. Have an accent for both). I closed my eyes and clicked on whatever link. It came up as Tatiana Piatanova who was working at the Children’s Center in St. Petersburg. Noble profession… I friended her (waiting to be friended back). And here is the letter I wrote (translated from Russian):
“Hello, dear namesake. I found you at last! I’ve been searching for you and finally, the search led me to you. Do you know about me? Are you related to me? Because our last name is rare. Would you like to be my friend? I would very much like that. Maybe we can discuss our uncles? I have one left and he is a sportsman and overall is OK. He lives in Moscow and in spite of being old still plays tennis and is buff. We should all be so lucky. But that tells me that I potentially can live till 90. DNA and all. Tell me about your work. Do you adopt many children to the US as many Russian orphanages do? I want to know everything! Sincerely Tatiana Piatanova.” Her profile was from 2017 and I highly doubt she will check her abandoned account but one just never knows: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100021003636346
That pretty much concluded the task. I don’t know what else I can do. It is out of my hands and hanging some there in the digital domain.
