A Simple Game of Cat and Mouse

I’ve written before how cool it is to have cats in my host family. There were four but one day last week I was sitting with one at dinner (he sat on my lap during every meal) and my host mom suddenly told me that I should enjoy the moment because the cat was getting shipped off to another home. Sure enough, we finished eating and my host brother stuffed the animal (and another) in a sack, off to a new home, leaving us with three cats, two kittens (down from four) and mom.

And lately, I’ve been lucky enough to witness one of the oldest games in the world - that of cat and mouse. We’ve started putting apples into crates in our cellar for the winter( more in a second), and as a result the mice are out too (they can’t get to the apples, but they still hang around trying. I guess that’s why they’re at the bottom of the food chain). And the cats are enjoying their presence too, as it means more food for them. And it means great entertainment for me.

On Monday of this week I saw it for the first time - I was just about to leave for school when I saw the mother cat, out of the corner of my eye, acting strange, swatting at something. Unsure what, I moved closer to get a better look and saw that she was playing with a mouse that she had dragged up from the cellar. The mouse was alive and the mom was having a great time playing, swatting it so it would run before pouncing on it, throwing it with its mouth, all the things I’ve heard about during my first twenty-three years but didn’t have a chance to see until now. It continued for about ten minutes until mom got either bored or hungry, upon which she decided to dig in. The young ones hunt a lot too, and they will play for a long time with the mouse. They almost always hunt alone, so if I get bored watching one play with a mouse and want to see the mouse get eaten, I simply find another cat and toss it in the direction of the hunter. This aggravates the hunter(who think’s is about to lose dinner) to the point that it will hiss and start eating away.

And as a result, I’ve also learned that a mouse, if bitten in it’s mid-section, will make a noise that is exactly a ‘squeaky toy’ that a dog plays with.

Notes
- In case you didn’t know, apple season is in full bloom, and because my family has about fifty trees it means that there is a lot of work to be done. Every day after school my host mom and I (and sometimes host-brother and sister) spend about two hours among the trees, with her climbing the ladder and picking the apples and me on the ground, carrying them in buckets to crates in the cellar. It’s fairly easy work, labor intensive but simple enough. I’m not exactly sure what we’ll do with all the apples: they may be for human consumption, but 1)There will be thousands, too many to eat, and 2) The cellar is cool but not too cold, so I doubt they will last the winter and not go rotten. My theory - they’ll get fed to the animals. It’s really nice to help, as often it’s just my host mom and I - she told me this week that she doesn’t know what she would do if I wasn’t there to help with the work.

In fact, last Sunday I spent six hours with my host family at the home of the father of my host mother working on apples. The three family members climbed the tree and put apples into buckets and I carried them to the crates - then, once six crates were full, my host brother and I put them on a wheel-barrow and, three at a time, rolled them about fifty yards down a hill. I was actually a little suckered into going. In the morning at breakfast my host mom asked me if I wanted to go with them but was vague on details. When I asked where we would be going, she simply said, "somewhere." We left at 12:30 and returned at 7:00 at night.

- I’m at the point in my time here when, if someone in my family says, "let’s go", I don’t even ask where we are going, why we are going, what we will be doing, or why we are going. I simply say ‘Ok’, grab my backpack and camera, a jacket if it’s cold, and go. No need for discussion.

- My biggest concern before I started teaching was classroom management and just how successful I would be with a room full of energetic farm kids and a loose grasp on the language. Luckily, it’s not too large of an issue for me due to two reasons, 1)Most importantly, the quality of the kids, and 2) The size of my classroom. The quality of the kids is great - for the most part, they work hard and listen. The 4th graders are even to the point that if one of their classmates starts to talk or act up, the others will tell him to be quiet. The 10th graders too - if one student starts to talk too much, I don’t need to say anything because one of the others will beat me to it. And my classroom can only fit twelve students, and there is no doubt that twelve students are much easier to manage that twenty or so.

- During training we were told that, under no circumstances, were we allowed to kick a student out of class, an order strickly from the Ministry of Education. However, last Thursday as I was leaving school I walked past one of our teachers standing on the front stairway just reaming out a student she had clearly kicked out of class. I didn’t understand much of what she said, other than the fact that she was calling him an idiot and telling him to go home. It’s was impressive. Even as the kid slowly walked away from school, she stood there and continued to holler away. Having played football for Donovan Larson, I saw some impressive chewing-outs, and believe me when I saw that - in any language - this one was one of the classics.
And you know what is ironic? The woman doing the yelling is our etiquette teacher.

- If you are at all interested in Moldova, there is a book that you have to read written by a British guy named Tony Hawks how played tennis against every member of the Moldovan National Soccer Team. It’s cleverly titled, 'Playing the Moldovans in Tennis' and it is amazingly funny and true at the same time. My host family thought I was crazy because I was reading it and laughing often and loudly, to the point that they asked me what was so funny. If you can get your hands on this book through any means, do yourself a favor.

- During training, one thing was made clear to all future teachers, that the quality of director in our schools could make or break our experience. I’m lucky in that my director is of the highest sort. About once a week or so I work on the internet in our computer lab, and it’s just him and I - after I finish he usually asks me questions about how things are at home and school, and I can tell that he is truly concerned about my well being in the village.

- The frequency of my showering is . . . . low. I’m down to about once a week, which isn’t as bad as it seems for two reasons: First, it’s autumn and the weather is cooling down, so I don’t sweat as much, and Second, in talking with other volunteers I realize this is about typical.

- My language skills are progressing slowly but surely, but my largest problem is word order. In Russian it’s not important at all - the structure of a sentence is presented through the grammar, which is tricky. For example, in English take the sentence "be it will today cold rain will and ." I’d imagine that you understood the sentence but it likely took more than one reading to do so. That’s where I am. In fact, often someone will say something to me and I understand every word but I need to hear again so I can pick-up the grammar. But when I ask for something to be repeated, the speaker often thinks I didn’t understand the words and they just say the same thing again with different words.

Actually, I told this to two girls that I tutor and they told me that, even for them, word order is a problem. That made me feel a little bit better.

- My parents sent me an advertisement from Rainbow foods to use as tool in the classroom, and on Thursday night my host mom was asking me how much things cost in America and rather go product by product I simply showed her the ad, much to her shock. A loaf of fresh bread here is about 30 cents as opposed to three or so dollars in the States.

- On Tuesday of this week my host mom, after dinner, showed me pictures taken of the man who would have been my host father. It was absolutely heart-breaking. There was a picture of the whole family on New Years Day this year, a picture of perfect health, smiling away. There was one of him on May Day (a big deal here), and it was clear he was sick, as he was bundled and hunched over. It’s hard to believe that only 10 weeks (almost to the day) he was dead. I think about the man all the time - I can only imagine how much the family must think about him.

- Finally, I’ll end with my favorite story from this last week. Last Wednesday I taught the sixth grade and they were very difficult - it was actually my biggest problem with discipline that I’ve had up to now. So I gave them homework and checked it at our next lesson, which was on Friday.

One student, when asked where is work was, told me, "I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know how."
"Why didn’t you know how?" I asked. "The last lesson, did you play or listen? You played right? Right.? Yes or no?"
"Yes", he responded timidly.
"Well of course you didn’t know what to do."
He was, for the first time in a month, speechless.

Getting Old Fast

The students at my school - especially the younger ones - have developed an annoying little habit. They just sit and watch me as I work.

I won’t lie - at first it was a little cute, a little enduring, but now it’s just really annoying. In between classes many days I will look up and see a half-dozen faces just staring at me, intrigued by the presence of this new American who they have in their midst. Once in a while one of them will say ‘hello’ in Russian, upon which the others immediately break out in laughter. They even sometimes will push each other into the room, shut the door, and start to laugh, like they are pushing someone into a lions den and then fleeing before the carnage happens.

Also, I teach only half of the sixth graders - my partner teacher takes the other half - and those whom she teaches have become rather enamored with me and my presence in school. One day I stepped outside to send a text message on my phone and within one minute I had seven sixth-graders surrounding me, just watching me write on my phone and quietly saying things like "it’s a Motorola." Then they asked me if I was free of if I had a lesson, and when I told them that I was free they followed me into my room, sat silently and watched me work for a few minutes, then started asking me questions. It wasn’t bad at first but now they want to do it all the time . . .
However, it stopped early this week when all the kids were watching me do nothing and another teacher came up to them, grabbed one of them by the arm, and started to loudly say, "What are you looking at? What is so interesting there?" That stopped the staring, to sat the least.

Notes:
- Last Tuesday the librarian at our school came into my classroom and asked me if I would be able to work one-on-one and tutor her daughter who is in 11th grade. "She knows nothing," said the mom, and she also told me that she would gladly pay me for my time. The bad news was, I can’t help her daughter for money - its strict Peace Corps policy. The good news is that I’m more than glad to help her free of charge. We’ve had our first two lessons, just covering the basics - verb conjugation, present tense of the verb ‘to be’, and pluralization. Not only is it good for the daughter but for me as well, because while in class I speak only English, with her I speak mostly Russian and it’s a great chance for me to practice.

I also realized a huge reason why it is so difficult to study English if Russian is your first language - the ten most common words in English are: ‘the’, ‘of’ , ‘and’, ‘a’, ‘to’, ‘in’, ‘is’, ‘you’, ‘that’, and ‘it’. Russian doesn’t have ‘of’, ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘is’, or ‘it.’

- The director of my school is only in the school building a few times a week, three days at most. I thought it was really odd until my host mom told me something - turns out, he only has one lung

- I spent last weekend in Chisinau at a conference for teachers of English that was held on Saturday from 10:00 to 5:00 with a break for lunch. There were a few hundred English teachers gathered at the largest university in Chisinau, and it was a good success. I didn’t present anything, just went to get new information on how to teach. And I was lucky too - my plan was to get on the bus at 6:00 AM that leaves my village and attend the conference, knowing that I would have to leave it early so I could catch the last bus to my village. However, on the bus the director of TEFL teachers for Peace Corps called me and told me that if I wanted I could stay in a hotel for the night that Peace Corps would pay for. So I did, spending Saturday night with two current volunteers who have been here for a year and talking about life, here in America. It was a great night.

- If I do something at home that my host mom doesn’t like, she’ll refer to me as "Mr. Andrew." I know I’m in trouble when I hear those words. For example, last weekend it was my goal to return to home on a bus at10:00, meaning I would leave Chisinau at 8:30 in the morning - I called my host mom to tell her such. However, I had to do too much work in the morning and didn’t leave until 1:30 on a bus - but I forgot to tell my host-mom of the change in details. When I got home I was alone but she quickly arrived and when she saw me preceded to say, "Mr. Andrew . . . ." - she was bugged that I didn’t either A)come home early, or B) call to tell otherwise.

- My partner-teacher’s son has asthma and this past week he was in the hospital and she was with him, meaning that I had to teach all the students. My biggest concern was classroom management with the class size doubled -

- Friday night at my school was a talent show to see which student would become, "Miss Autumn." There were five girls in the competition, each of which put on different shows to show how they deserved the title (everything in good fun). I was asked to be a part of the jury, which made the experience all that much more interesting.

- Finally, I will end with one of the funniest things I’ve heard in a while. At my fourth grade class on Thursday the students were talking before the lesson started and one of them commented on the other’s dictionary. "Is that new?" asked the first? "Yeah", said the second, and in a bragging manner she added, "it’s has 50,000 words.""Wow!," responded the first in a shocking manner. It was the highlight of my day.

One Down, Thirty Three To Go

The first week of school is officially under my belt. Overall, things are fine. My partner teacher (the other English teacher) told me for weeks just how poor the quality of the students are but I have been pleasantly surprised by their quality. Most - especially the younger kids - seem very eager to learn and work hard. I teach 18 lessons a week, between five and three in a day, which isn’t too bad. It’s do-able, at least. Plus, if I start to complain I need only think of my partner-teacher, who teaches 28 lessons a week, or else my host mom, who teaches an equally large number.

One thing that I really like about my school - and that really speaks volumes about my director - is that they are using my presence to greatly expand their English program; let me explain. Before I arrived my partner teacher taught thirty one hours a week, a huge amount. But upon my arrival she’s not suddenly teaching only thirteen hours - instead, the school is using me to expand its program. Usually students start learning English in the second grade, but because of limited chances they weren’t starting until the third grade, and even then they were meeting only once a week until fifth grade, when they met twice a week.

But now we have a full English program, one that actually exceeds most standards because I work with my students three hours a week while normally, they meet for only two hours. Lucky us.

Notes
- I actually spent last weekend in Chisinau, spending the night on Saturday. I went on Saturday morning with the intention of 1) Working on the internet a little, 2) Seeing the doctor, 3)Shopping for school supplies, and 4)Meeting with a girl I met a few weeks ago so she could practice her English. Well, I arrived in Chisinau at 8:15 with the knowledge that the latest I could stay would be 3:00, because then I needed to leave on a bus for my regional center - the last bus from the regional center to the village leaves at 4:30.

Well, by the time I was done on the internet and with the doctor it was 11:30, and I had plans to meet the girl at 12:30 - adding a twenty minute walk to our meeting site and I had no time to shop. But before I left the doctor she told me that if I wanted I could stay in something called TDY (more in a second) in case I had an allergic reaction to the anti-biotic I received for the tick bite. I figured that I wouldn’t react but realized it was a chance to have a free, authorized night spent in Chisinau. So I took her up on the offer while she called my host family to tell them of my situation. I met the girl, hung out with her for about four hours, took a bus back to Peace Corps office (and saw the US Embassy on the way - now I know exactly where it is), and just sat around for a while.

TDY is an acronym for something - I’m not exactly sure what. But it’s an apartment that the Peace Corps owns about forty meters from the PC office, and it’s a place where people can stay when they are sick and need observation. It’s a three-bedroom apartment with a kitchen, two bathrooms, and a large living room - like the Hilton for someone like me who lives with a well for water and a pitcher for a shower. With me there were two girls who have been in Moldova two years and are leaving soon, and although I was exhausted (having woken up at 5:00 to catch the bus into the city) and my plan was to go to bed about 9:30, I started talking to these girls at 9:15 and three hours later, I went to bed. It was a great conversation though, one that allowed me to ask a lot of questions to two PC veterans.

And the next day I finished shopping and got on a bus, arriving home at 3:30
- We all - volunteers - have nightmare stories of trying to buy things in a shop or in the market and having the attendant not able to understand us and, rather that try, just move on to the next customer. On Sunday I had the totally opposite experience. I was at one of the two major stores in Chisinau buying supplies for my classroom, and the woman could not have been more helpful. I thought she would be when she greeted me and asked me a question in Romanian and when I said "Excuse me?" in Russian she switched (you’d be shocked at how often that doesn’t happen). I was struggling in navigating through a lot of tricky terms (I can ask for paper, but asking for a ‘ream of paper’ is a different story - same with tape as opposed to ‘clear packing tape’ and ‘masking tape’) but she was very understanding, even telling me at one point "What do you need? I want to help you." She did herself a favor too because every time in the next two years that I need supplies - which should be fairly often - I’m making a beeline for her stand.

- Newsweek magazine supplies volunteers with free - current - magazines to use in our classrooms, and whenever I go to Chisinau I get mine and read it on the bus for the ride home. My favorite part of the trip is when someone sits next to me and realizes I’m reading something in English - they usually spend the whole trip trying to subtly stare at me and the magazine, wondering who exactly they sat next to. And I usually listen to music to add to the intrigue, but last week I was without the Ipod and the guy next to me, after fifteen minutes, couldn’t contain his curiosity and asked me where I was from. His reaction when I told him was interesting . . . .

- Two things at my school are very different from most schools in America. The first is our bell schedule. In theory, school starts at 8:30, every class is forty-five minutes long, there is a ten minute break in-between classes, and the final bell rings at 2:00. In reality, school starts about 8:35, classes are between forty and fifty minutes long, and the break is between eight and twenty minutes. It can be maddening, actually - there is nothing worse than thinking there is five minutes left in class and having the bell ring before you have a chance to wrap up, and equally frustrating is finishing up a class right on time - forty five minutes - and then you are forced to scramble to fill time until the bell rings.

Also, in America I could count on every teacher, at least three days a week, to stay for a while after school to, to chat or help students or simply prepare lessons for the next day. Here, the bell rings at 1:50 and by 2:00, everyone is gone. I try to hang around until 2:15, and I’m almost always one of the last three teachers left in school. Also, a teacher doesn’t need to be at school until they teach - if I don’t teach first or second hour, I don’t need to arrive until 10:00, and as soon as my last lesson for the day is over I can go home.

- Another aspect of schools here that is really different from schools in America - the class schedule. There is no set schedule at the start of the year; instead, everyday around 12:00 the class schedule for the next day is posted in a hallway- neither students nor teachers know what they will learn or teach until they see the schedule. It’s not too bad, with one exception. Everything is written in Russian. And I don’t mean Russian in the printed script - I can read that without problems. The schedule is posted in a cursive script that looks something like Sanscrit. If I don’t know the context I can read maybe twenty percent - with context that number goes up tSo seventy or so percent. Also, they usually post the schedule and for English classes just write "Engl" in the cursive - not too bad.

So on Monday I looked at the schedule and saw only two classes with the aforementioned four letters scribbled down. I thought it was odd but scanned multiple times and came to the same conclusion - I even talked with my partner teacher and she told me that I would only be teaching twice the next day. On Tuesday I taught 10th grade first and thought I had a period off before the 11th grade, but after they all left students started to file in who looked far to small to be in 11th grade. And at the same time two teachers came in and asked me if I wanted to go eat something. I told them that I wanted to but that I had students in my room and did not know why, so they directed me to the schedule where, under the 8th grade, the word "English" had been written out totally. I couldn’t believe it - I told the teachers that I couldn’t go with them because I had to prepare a lesson.

And then I have times like the one on Thursday where I was supposed to teach the fourth graders for the last lesson of the day. However, I stood outside my classroom and watched as about half of them walked past me without entering - I assumed that they were going to the bathroom or something. But when the bell rang and ten minutes later our my room was empty, I asked my partner teacher and she told me that probably the students weren’t told and assumed that they had nothing. So they went home.

- Still no update on the tutor front for Russian. I asked the partner teacher if she knew anyone who spoke a little English who could teach me, and said there was no-one. I have only two rules in finding a tutor - I don’t want it to be someone I, 1)Work with, or 2)Live with. However, it looks like that leaves me with no options in the village. I may end up going with a teacher of Russian at the school, but even that won’t be for a while because everyone has a lot of work to do around the house and this is the busiest time of year for that.

- On Friday after dinner (we eat dinner at 9:00 or so) a man showed up at our house out of the blue - turns out he’s some friend of the family. My host mom asked if he wanted something to eat and he said, "No, maybe something to drink." After a little bit of wine he told me about a trip he is taking this weekend, from Moldova to Bucharest to Budapest to Vienna and back, and he was quick to invite me along, telling me we would be back by Monday after lunch. It actually took me a while to figure out what he was talking about - I thought he was inviting me but I wasn’t sure, and it wasn’t until he asked me if I needed a visa or not until I totally understood him.

- My classroom in school is right next to the first graders, and a few times last week I was the classic moment where a mother will knock on the door holding the hand of a five-year old, the mother will talk with the teacher for a moment and then turn to leave, upon which the little one will burst into tears and cling to any sort of mom’s clothing that they can get.

- Finally, two aspects of life here that I really love:
1) If I want to eat an apple, I walk into the yard, and (after searching for worms) pick one off the tree, clean it, and eat it.
2) One night last week I couldn’t find my flashlight and I had to navigate through a proverbial maze to get to the outhouse at night. I used my cell phone for a while but soon realized I didn’t need it. The reason? A full moon. It shone bright enough that no additional light was needed.

Pictures, At Last

The top picture is of the three of us who learned Russian, Aaron (from Maine) and Elizabeth (from Kansas). Second is an example of the type of scenery in which I live every day - it's stunning. And finally there is a picture of my host sister-in-law Anya and my host brother, Sasha. For more detail, just click on the photo and it should expand.

And don't forget, a new entry was made below this too . . .

Reality Hits

As I’ve written before, the family that I live with now had their father pass away from prostate cancer about a month before I moved in - the man died on July 21. In fact, I visited with the family on July 8th, and then it seemed like the man was not going to be around much longer. Overall, the family seems to be in good spirits most of the time - sometimes they seem despondent and sad, but of course that’s to be expected.

One day I came home getting my haircut (courtesy of my host sister-in-law, who runs her own salon) and my host mother and her mother were in the midst of preparing a massive feast outside on our fire-oven. I asked her what she was making and she told me, and when I asked her why so much she told me, and among her Russian I understood it was something about her husband and she kept repeating a again and again - when I looked it up in the dictionary it translated as "funeral respite." Turns out, in Orthodox tradition families have a large memorial meal 40 days after someone has died, done to commemorate their life.

So the next day I woke up, went to a teachers meeting at school (more on these in a second), and when I returned home there were about twenty people in our courtyard and a table set up full of food. It was a very somber event, with not much talking - at one point my host mom teared-up and went into the house, returning later with red eyes. Also, the father of the father who died - my host siblings grandfather - was there too. I’ve met him once before: he’s very old and not of the soundest mind (when they told him I was from America, he wasn’t really sure what they were talking about). Well, at the end of the meal he had tears his eyes thinking about his son - you’d have to be a corpse to not be affected by that.

About an hour after the feast (and I do mean feast - the five of us in the family spent 3 days finishing off the uneaten food), after all the cleaning had been done, I was in my room working on Long Term lesson plans when my host mom came in and asked me if I wanted to go somewhere with them, but she said that if I didn’t want to go that was ok - I wasn’t sure what she was asking about but I assumed, so I looked up "cemetery" in the dictionary and sure enough, that’s what it was. By the time I had looked it up they were gone, although I didn’t really want to go anyways; it seemed like far too personal a thing to go to. However, in hindsight I wish I had gone.

Notes:
- I’ve officially met about 75% of the staff at my school - my colleagues. There’s around 22 teachers and only four of us are men: I’m the only one who comes in at under fifty-five years of age. And meetings are great entertainment to watch. Our director (a man) will make a statement and after a pause about five women will instantly start yelling to/at each-other and to the director, who just sits back and lets things subside. It usually takes a minute or two for things to calm down, then he moves on to the next point. I usually don’t understand much of what is going on in these meetings but I can guess the theme, and it’s always great fun.

However, there has been one sad thing, one that needs some clarification to be fully understood.
In Moldova there are different types of ‘schools’: there’s a Gymnasium (2nd - 9th grades), a School (2nd - 11th) and a Lyceum (9th -12th grade). Usually their prestige lies in the order that I just listed, with Lyceum being the highest. Now my school is simply that, a School, and when I first met my director there was talk of us possibly becoming a Lyceum in the future. Now, however, it looks like we’ll become a Gymnasium, which is not only a downgrade but it means that after ninth grade, students will have to travel to either Chisinau or Calarasi, the regional center, for classes, meaning not only an inconvenience but also a likely added expense and a loss of jobs for some teachers. We learned of this information first at a teachers meeting, and the second the topic was brought up the mood in the room changed to very serious. And when I got home my host mother asked me what we did, and when I told her that the school was likely to become a Gymnasium, she also instantly became serious. The following day we had a parents meeting (more on this) and the parents were all surprised and upset too. I figured that they would be, but it wasn’t until my host mother stood up and said her opinion that I fully understood why - our school is a Russian one. They are scarce in the region: the regional center has only one, so spacing might be limited and students will have to travel forty-five miles - one way - to attend class.

For some perspective, when I was in 6th grade my Catholic school closed, and naturally it was a huge issue for parents who fought like mad to save it. However, I could only imagine just how upset people would get if the nearest Catholic school was not two miles away but instead, fifteen - or forty-five - miles away. The intensity of the ire would be upped just a little, don’t you think? Well, that’s exactly what is happening here.

- At the aforementioned parents meeting my school director introduced me to a round of applause and told everyone that I would be in Moldova for two years. Then the parents asked me if I could stay longer if I wanted, and when I told them ‘yes’ and asked why they wanted to know, they asked me what would happen if I were to get married.
I wrote last time how often I get this question. This story just goes to prove how prevalent it is.

- I got a question about why I distill water here. The reason is simple - I value my health and want to do as little as possible to jeopardize it. All the water is drawn from a well, and although the Moldovans can drink it without problems, Americans are virtually guaranteed to have major problems. It’s the same thing when Americans head to Latin America - while those there can eat the meat all day and never have an issue, an American usually can’t touch it without Montezuma’s Revenge hitting hard.

In fact, even with proper handling of food and water people get sick. A little thing called Giardia (Google it) is highly prevalent here and I want to do everything possible to not make it’s acquaintance, although Peace Corps has told us from the first day that it’s just a matter of time until it hits - statistically, it’s a guarantee. But don’t worry - if (when) it hits, I’ll exclude it from blog entry.

A quick story on how quickly a person can get sick: a volunteer from the group before ours had it in his mind that he was going to acclimate to the water, even talking about it during training in Philadelphia. His plan was to drink just a little a day - the equivalent of a shot - and he was convinced that over time he would be able to consume it regularly because his body would adjust. Everyone told him it was a really bad idea but he was convinced it would work.

Giardia hit him on his second day in country.

- I’ve taken to the habit of walking in the woods near my house some nights a week, which is great exercise (it’s a twenty minute walk almost straight up-hill) and very relaxing. The only problem is that the people here don’t go into the forest too often, leaving spiders plenty of time to build up webs across the paths. And as anyone who spends time outdoors knows, they love to build the nests at approximately face level - there nothing worse than walking along quietly and suddenly getting a face-full of spider web. Ticks are also highly prevalent, as I discovered when I was going to bed one night after a stroll and found one firmly entrenched in me. In fact, now I’m in at the Peace Corps office now getting my preventative antibiotics.

- Throughout the summer all trainees were told, numerous times by numerous people, that on the first day of school we would not need to teach any lessons, that there would just be a large ceremony with a lot of pomp and circumstance and that we need only sit back and relax, to not prepare any lessons.

However, two days before the start of classes I was at school and I asked the other English teacher what the schedule would be for the first day, basically just curious what time the events would start - she directed me to a board that teachers were huddled around which told me that the meeting was only forty-five minutes and that I would be teaching four classes that day. That’s right, four classes. Thankfully noone near me understood English curse words because quite a few flew from my mouth at that moment. The shock was overwhelming, and I think I was visibly flustered because the other English asked me if everything was okay.

Well, two days later was the start of school, and I’ve there is one Golden Rule for teaching in Moldova, it’s simply that ‘Schedules Are Made To Be Broken." We were supposed to have a school wide meeting at 8:30, followed by 45 minutes session that would have amounted to homeroom in America (during which I would have free time), and then four classes to follow.
In reality, I woke up early with the intention of getting to class by 8:00 to get ready. Well, because of delays in breakfast I didn’t leave until 8:30, and my host mother (a teacher at the school) was still getting ready and didn’t seem too worried. I arrived at school and the other English teacher met me and told me that she wasn’t sure when the meeting would be held but would tell me. About 9:15 I heard a bell ring and saw students scramble somewhere, so I just followed and sure enough, the meeting was outside in-front of the school. It lasted about an hour, and it was just a welcoming of students and teachers (myself included - my director gave me a Russian novel), and the new students fresh out of kindergarten were featured. There were about fifteen of them all dressed in their best clothes, and first they sang a song featuring lines like ‘goodbye kindergarten, we’re in school now’, then a microphone was passed along and they recited a poem, which was great because they had no concept that if they yelled into the microphone the sound would be amplified tremendously. Some of them sounded like Ted Nugent shouting to a stadium.

Then homeroom commenced, followed by classes. After the first class the other English teacher told me that there was likely to be only two more classes on the day. Not bad. Then after the second class she came up to me and said that classes were over. Time to go home. All that worry for nothing.

- My host mother asked me one day which classes I would be teaching, and when I told her that I would be teaching six classes she told me, very honestly, that it would be very difficult. "Yes", I said, "especially the first month." She agreed whole-heartedly.

- I’ve learned courtesy of my brother Moldova has now adopted the policy of Ukraine and declared that starting Januray 2007, Americans no longer need a visa to visit here. So if anyone was thinking of visiting but didn’t want to pay the extra 150 or so dollars on top of the airfare, well now . . . you have one less reason.

- There’s really only one thing that I really miss about America so far - sports. No joke. I’m so desperate for sports information that if I’m on the internet at all I cut and paste documents from ESPN.com to a Word document so I can read them later. And when I talk to my dad we usually spend at least a half hour discussion sports. I’ve said from the start that college football season would be like torture - yes, I know that things start today and it’s a killer.

- I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but people here drink wine like a really big shot, usually about three or four ounces - there’s no sipping allowed, especially for men. And people often all drink from the same glass that’s passed around - at the feast to commiserate the deceases father, fifteen or so people poured through three liters of wine and all drank from two cups.

- I’ll end by saying this: a lot of volunteers say that most difficult part of service is the culture shock of returning to America. I’ve only been here a few months and have two years to go, but I can already guarantee that culture shock will be huge.

In America, if I want to go somewhere I just got in a car and drive. Here, I either need to get up at 5:00 in the morning to catch one of three busses a day that leave the village or else hitchhike. In America, if I want to use a bathroom I walk ten feet. Here I walk thirty yards and on the way navigate through chickens (one of whom will fluff her feathers and charge if I get too close), two pigs, two horses, and a cow. In America if I want something to drink I go to the tap. Here if I don’t have any water I need to go the well, get some, then wait three hours while for a machine to distill about a 1.5. liters.

And that’s just a start.