Let Me Give You a Little Bit of a Scenario Of What My Life Is All About

Yes, the title is a Matt Foley quote, so you’re an astute reader and it sounds familiar, now you know why. I just discovered all these great skits on my computer last weekend, a nice revelation to have. The greats are all here in Moldova: Matt Foley, Blue Oyster Cult, two Harry Caray’s, Bathroom Monkey, Schmidt’s Gay, Philip the Hyper-Hypo . . .

But the title has it merits - I figured I’d give you a rundown of what exactly me (and the other volunteers) do in a week.

Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday consist of language training in the morning, 8:30 to either 1:00 (M,W,F) or 11:00 (Saturdays). Afternoons on those days are basically free, but we have a lot of work to do in areas other than language, like preparing maps of our villages, practicing our new language with our families, or preparing either individual or long-term lesson plans for the teacher training that we undergo once a week.
Tuesdays and Thursdays are ‘Hub Days," when we all meet in Orhei, long days that usually see me leave the house around 7:00 in the morning and returning around 5:30 in the evening. Tuesday mornings consist of a speaker (this week was our Country Director and a Foreign Service Officer) on issues "Moldovan," and about 11:15 we break up into two groups, those of us who are TEFL teachers and those of use who are Health Education (HE) teachers. We are in these groups until 5:00 in the evening, with an hour break at some point for lunch (which we usually spend half of walking the local farmers market, practicing the language amongst the vendors). These lessons are actually very beneficial for someone like myself, with little teaching experience. We do a lot of talking about lessons, what to teach and how to teach it, and how to incorporate the national curriculum into our everyday work, and we learn certain hurdles of teaching in Moldova that you don’t find in America (every year in the fall schools can close because kids need to go into the fields and pick apples, giving teachers one less week with which to teach the material). We also do work involving "community integration," which doesn’t sound like much at the beginning but which is very important to our long-term success as volunteers (especially once we get to our permanent sites). These sessions are also nice because they are facilitated by current volunteers who have a year under their belts, which instantly makes them easier to be engaged with.

Thursdays mornings are all about health: we get needed shots (like Typhoid and Rabies) and get a three hour presentation on a cheery topic like "Diarrhea: Food and Water Preparation"(last week) and "Alcohol and Substance Abuse" (this week). After a lunch break, we break up again and go back to more teacher training until 5:00 in the evening.

Saturday afternoons are usually free of anything, and Sundays are almost always totally free. Most host families don’t to much on Sunday, unless you are like mine (more on that later).

That’s the overall schedule for now, although it changes more once the weeks advance and our training winds to a close. Then, the focus will start to shift to our language assessments that I will have on August 14 - a successful test will be the best birthday gift I can imagine.

Getting to Orhei is always interesting, as we all board a "rutiera," the public bus. There is a joke here that couldn’t be any truer: "How many people can fit on a rutiera? One more." Sometimes I get lucky, the bus is not jammed full of people and I can actually move a little. But most days are not like that. And to make matters worse, there is a health myth here that any type of wind causes all types of health ailments: thus, no matter how hot the rustika gets, the windows stay sealed shut. It’s not too bad yet, but we all hear that it can - literally - like a sauna inside them if the weather is right (wrong?).

Tuesday morning was fun on the rutiera. The girl in my Russian-speaking group was forced to stand on the rear entrance stairs in the bus because it was so crowded. At one point the bus stopped, the door opened (which it does sometimes for no apparent reason, as no one either gets on or off the thing), and a man started loudly talking (not exactly yelling) at our girl on the stairs. After a second, our teacher turned to the girl and said "Elizabeth, they want to get off the bus," which immediately drew a collective sigh of "aaaaaahhhhhhh" from six or so people in the back, all of whom realized at the same moment why the strange girl didn’t respond to them. It was as if several light bulbs went off at the same time. Very entertaining.

A note on my family. I wrote earlier how I have a host brother who speaks English - well, turns out he’s home just on weekends, as he studies in Chisinau in the week in a school that trains police. So Monday through Friday it’s just my host parents and I. However, my host father does little more than work and sleep, which sounds bad until you realize that he sleeps so often because he works amazingly hard. He’s a farmer, which puts him in the field around 4:00 every morning. He usually doesn’t return home until 7 or 8:00 at night. On weekends he sleeps in, all the way until 6:00 in the morning. He works on the fields on some Sundays until the early afternoon, and on Saturdays he does work around the house. Believe me, he needs to sleep as much as he does.

One quick story: on Wednesday of this week the entire group of trainees (still 37 - no one has quit yet) got together in the forest outside the city Orhei for "team-building" exercises. The exercises themselves were ok, basically the stuff you do with eight-year olds at summer camp. But throughout the day the clouds kept moving in, thicker and thicker, and the thunder with it; after a few hours, just as we were about to eat dinner, the rain came. And it came hard, the type where you can hear it before you can see it, like a wave coming from the sky. There were about fifty-five of us in the forest (including staff), and we quickly moved all the food into cars that proceeded to a restaurant. We all started walking through the downpour (and literally, it was like someone had turned on a shower) to the restaurant, and along the way a bus or van would come and pick up a herd of people. There were about ten of us, though, who hiked the whole way through the rain, fifteen minutes through streets and parks, along field and a lake. It was simultaneously torturous and tremendous, picturesque in a way, this group of people who were strangers seventeen days ago now strolling through a storm in an old town thirty miles north of the capital of Moldova. At one point we were walking up a hill and the water was pouring down the street so fast that it almost looked like a flash flood. - we felt like salmon jumping up a stream. Amazing. The Peace Corps is all about experiences, and this was certainly an experience I will never forget.

And I think I finally know where exactly I will spend my full two years of Peace Corps service: in a small town of 2878 called Hirjauca in the region Calarasi which is about fifty miles north-west of Chisinau and should be found some maps (Calarasi, not Hirjauca). While nothing is official until next week, it shouldn’t be a problem to get this sight because there are only three Russian speaking trainees and only three places for us to go - we’re all set on our places. I was hoping for a place close to the breakaway region of Transnestria, but alas, there were no options there, so I got the closest one to Chisinau. In two weeks I will go there to take a visit and to scout out potential host-families, of which I will visit three and decided with whom I want to spend at least the next six months (the minimum, via Peace Corps policy) and more likely, the next two years. I’m excited to go . . . .

And I will end by just saying this: I love the other thirty-six volunteers. They’re all amazing, all easy to talk with, all kind people: Simply put, I couldn’t be happier with the people I serve with. We’re like a family.