Kuressaare, Estonia: A conversation with Elle (b. 1961)
Elle loves teaching others, leading tours of her hometown and along the island, and exploring the world.
She is a great lover of life. She tells me that her philosophy is to “enjoy every day and every moment, as much as we can — what is given to us here in this life on Earth.”
When I was a student, during my studies, there was a program called the “Students Building Arm.”¹ It’s not easy to translate into English. During summer holidays, students from different universities all over Estonia worked together on construction or were railway and airway hosts, hostesses. I did it too. The first summer I worked on the railway. It was on a train that goes between Tallinn and Moscow. I was a railway hostess for two months. That way, we earned pocket money and I practiced Russian. I got acquainted with a lot of Russian people. They are very kind and hospitable. Still, I am in touch with one family in Moscow. The man from this family worked at the university. He was a very smart man.
I wanted to be able to tell his family something about Saaremaa when they visited me. Then, in the newspaper, there was an advertisement: Become a guide for Saare County! I thought that it was meant for me, so I could know more and introduce Saaremaa to my friends. So now I am a member of the Saaremaa Guides’ Society. I enjoy it a lot. I guide in Russian, English, and Estonian.
I’m happy to be an islander. My friends say that when I studied at Tallinn, everyone wanted to be my friend because I was from Saaremaa. In the Soviet times, Saaremaa was a closed area. It was the border of the Soviet Union. After 1939, when Europe was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union, Estonia became a part of the Soviet Union. Saaremaa was a part of the Western border of the Soviet Union. A lot of military bases were built. The construction of them started in 1939.
When I studied in Tallinn, there were border guards on the island. Every time, I needed to show my passport to go home and leave. I was young, and I thought it was strange, but now I think that, yes, Estonia is a small country. You live on the island, you come home and you have to show your passport to affirm that you live on the island. Maybe this is one reason that there are older traditions and customs here, because life was not that developed in the Soviet times. Living on the islands was also its own sort of living behind an Iron Curtain.
Russian is not easy to learn at school. My dream was to study English or history. These were my favorite subjects at school. I am a country girl. Usually, when you come from the countryside, you are a bit shy and you don’t believe in yourself that much. In school I was good at sports and I participated in many competitions. But I liked English because of my first teacher, and I liked history because of my history teacher. But I was afraid of continuing my studies at Tartu University, because it was too far and as I said I wasn’t brave enough.
Then I went to Tallinn University. I went to study Estonian philology, so I could become an Estonian teacher. But it was a deeply Soviet time then. I was asked to change my mind and become a Russian teacher. This was because Saaremaa needed Russian teachers.
My friend, who was studying Russian, also asked me to do so. I hadn’t done any preparatory work for the university entrance exams but exams went well. So I studied my studies in the Russian philology department for five years. Now I’m happy about that because Russian is such a difficult language to learn. I graduated, but it was really not easy at the beginning.
Later, my dream was fulfilled. I was always hoping to learn more English. After 1991, when Estonia became an independent country, many Russian teachers were almost without jobs because Russian was no longer a compulsory subject. Students could choose. When I studied, it was taught as a second mother tongue. We had Russian lessons every day.
Later, they understood that not learning Russian was a mistake and later Russian became more popular again. In Tallinn and north-eastern part of Estonia it’s better, easier to get a job when you know both the languages Estonian and Russian . Still, Russia is our neighboring country. Who knows? Maybe you will have business with Ukraine, Belarus — and they all speak Russian. Yes, Russian is more popular again, but it’s not easy to learn probably because of the alphabet. Finnish, Russian, German, English, French became popular languages to learn .
My dream of becoming an English teacher was later fulfilled. In 2014, I graduated from Tartu University, along with my daughter. Now I can teach in the high school as well, and even at the university level if I like.
My teaching philosophy is to trust your heart. Try to understand the students, and create a friendly atmosphere. Respect the students. Be honest.
When I started, it wasn’t easy to say sorry, I don’t know the answer. Today it’s so normal. You just can’t know everything. But there are sources like Google and encyclopedias that help us.
Creating a friendly atmosphere, so students feel that you do not favor one student over another. They are all different, and everyone has their own problems — especially at our school. Maybe at every school, not everybody comes from a family where there is happiness. A lot of students have broken hearts.
I try to motivate students and raise their belief in themselves. They are not sure about their strengths — maybe more aware about their weaknesses. Quite often, it comes from homes where they are told they are not doing so well. So maybe this is the mission for teachers as well. You can never say to someone who wants to become a chef or a teacher or a doctor that you are not good at these things. It’s never good to do so.
As an adult, I’m also tired of all of the negative news we hear now. I try to impress upon students my honest opinion. Covid-19 has influenced our lifestyles. I know that we need to be careful, and follow the rules. In Estonia, there are rules: the 2+2 rule, wearing masks in grocery stores, washing hands, and keeping distance from one another. Staying home — if you can stay home, then stay home. I also explain that all of this will come to an end.
A lot of Estonians participated in the mobilization into the Soviet and Nazi armies. We didn’t want to join. A lot of men escaped into the forest, and were known as the Forest Brothers. They left the homeland. Many Estonians live in Australia, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Germany and I’m sure that in many other countries. Nobody wanted to participate in the war.
In many families, it was the case that one brother could kill his own brother. One brother was mobilized in 1941 and the other was mobilized into the Nazi army a year later. So, they were fighting against each other but did not want to. It could happen to any family, depending on the age of the men.
I always love to say when I am guiding that the Baltic States are like three little sisters next to the Baltic Sea, and Estonia is the smallest one. Our history is quite similar. Maybe the biggest difference is that Estonia and Latvia never were kingdoms but Lithuania used to be a kingdom.
It’s a bit unbelievable. We really got our independence through the Singing Revolution. In Latvia and Lithuania, things didn’t go so well, but here we didn’t lose anybody.
In 1989, August 23rd, there was a peaceful political demonstration in the Baltic states. It is called a Baltic Chain, a human chain from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. My daughters were really small then, so I didn’t participate in the Baltic Chain. I remember there were buses from Saaremaa that went there. We could go, but my daughters were really small. I remember.
When Saaremaa was part of the Soviet border, we needed special permission to leave or go. So people wanted to be friends with people from Hiiumaa or Saaremaa, because it was a closed area. Nobody could visit these places, because you needed special permission to come here. For relatives who lived in Tallinn or the mainland, you could get a special “visa” for a longer period of time. But for friends or others who you knew, you could get this document for two weeks. It was from the office of the parish, or something like that. Back then the institutions were called differently.
Back then you always needed your passport with you. We didn’t have ID cards, so we needed to use passports. It was a part of my life then, but now I think that Estonia is such a small country. I went to study in Tallinn, and to come home I needed to get permission and show my passport as if I were visiting a foreign country. It’s a part of history now.
The world is more open now. When Estonia was a member of the Soviet Union, a socialist republic, we lived behind the Iron Curtain. It wasn’t possible to travel much. We could travel inside the Soviet Union, and we could visit beautiful places. There is so much natural beauty in diffèrent parts of the world, everywhere.
When I studied at university, I could go to the German Democratic Republic. It happened in 1981. We had the Communist Party for younger people, called the Komsomol. Before becoming a member of the Communist Party you could be in the Komsomol, and before that you were a Pioneer.
Because I was a member of the Komsomol, I had a chance to go to the Democratic Republic of Germany². Back then, Berlin was the capital. It was part of a one-month program for the Student Building Arm, where for three weeks we worked on railway construction. Then, for one week we could travel around Germany: to Potsdam, Berlin, and Dresden. We saw different places.
In the Soviet times, there were no jobless people. Everybody had a job. At least something. There were no worries about that. Now we have quite a lot of jobless and homeless people. This was not an expression that existed during the Soviet times. Maybe there were homeless people as well, but now they are shown on TV. When I go to Tallinn now, I see homeless people.
In the Soviet Union, our shops didn’t offer a big choice of products. We had the same products, and the same prices everywhere. We didn’t have any private shops. Take, for example, jeans. We couldn’t even buy jeans from shops. Some businessmen brought them from Finland, but they were extremely expensive. I remember I bought jeans for my brother and for myself from Germany in 1981. I wore them for however long I could, even after they had holes in them.
In the 1990s, times were really difficult and there was almost nothing in the shops. We had ration tickets to buy sugar and other products. It was a business for people. Maybe you wanted something else, then people changed or sold them.
There was not enough sugar in the 1990s, so we started growing beetroot. We would boil the syrup and use it to make desserts and pastries. We could also sell it. We worked a lot back then. I can’t imagine myself working that much anymore. I worked at school, then took care of the children, then the farming and agriculture. We also had animals: sheep, chickens, and cows for selling. Now we might only have chickens, to get eggs. But there’s no more energy for selling animals or making hay.
When I was young, I didn’t have to worry about my future. But we couldn’t discover the world or go abroad: to visit the countries we really wanted to visit. Nowadays young people have more freedom to go everywhere. At the same time, it’s not that easy when you think about the financial side.
But it’s always good to be free. Freedom is really, really important. It’s much better to learn from our own mistakes. Our first President, Konstantin Pats, visited Saaremaa in 1939. My mother remembers that people loved him. But now Estonia is divided into two parts: one part for him and the other against. The people against him say that he sold Estonia to the Soviet Union.
There was a very good interview with one historian who explained that maybe Pats had already realized that Europe was divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. He was also deported to Siberia, and came back in the 1950s. A lot of people visited him, even though he was so ill. The Soviets saw that he was so popular among Estonians that they took him back to Siberia at the end of the 1950s. It was a really sad story. But his last words before leaving Estonia were that it’s not important what happens to me, but it’s really important what happens to the Estonian people. It would be essential for us to keep our existence. But I think that maybe he was right: he knew that Europe was divided.
Nowadays, I think Estonia is known as an e-country. It’s good to do something well and get appreciation for it. But there are mistakes we have to learn from.
I really love my home island. I feel that one of the missions of my life is to introduce Saaremaa to people who are interested in completely different places. My hobby is guiding. I am happy to teach tour guides, or learn together with future guides. I took courses at the end of the 1990s — not to become a tour guide, but to learn more about my home place.
The people who have come and visited, I believe they were satisfied. One visitor was the son of a millionaire. He was young compared to the others. He wasn’t interested in anything; he had seen the whole world and said that churches are the same everywhere, museums are the same everywhere, and everything was so boring. I felt a bit sorry for him. He was a young man. Maybe he didn’t have to try, and everything was given to him. I wanted to say something when we said goodbye. I told him that maybe he would like to be my son for a while, and work in the countryside. We could pick wild strawberries in the forest, and make jam together. In the autumn we could pick apples; my grandparents’ farm had apple trees. In the winter we could make firewood. I invited him to practice these skills and live with us. I told him that life is for living, and for discovering the world.
I feel that maybe my mission is to share the beauty of Saaremaa, my home island, to people who want to discover the places here. Our natural places are wild and untouched. Walking in the bog is something special. Seeing the sunrise is something special.
There are so many places worth visiting. Life sometimes seems too short to discover the whole world, but I try to discover the world as much as possible.
Footnotes
¹ In Soviet Estonia, there were voluntary work programs for young students. This was a source of cheap labor within the Soviet economy, officially marketed as “work education.”
² The formal name for East Germany, which remained under influence of the Soviet bloc until 1990.
This is part of a conversation series centered around the country of Estonia. Click here to read the introduction.
