That Settled it

I had known for a while that I needed to come to Chisinau, capital of Moldova, for a weekend of language training October 28th and 29th and that I needed to be in Chisinau Friday evening by 5:00. My original plan was to go there after lessons on Friday (I only teach two) but as the week progressed I began to think more and more of going early Friday morning, doing some work at the Peace Corps office, and relaxing a bit. My feelings were bolstered when my partner teacher told me that she could take my students if I was gone.

I wavered back and forth all day Thursday. The main problem is that there are two ways to get to Chisinau: I can go by bus that leaves the village every day at 6:00 or take two smaller busses and a trolleybus in Chisinau to get to my destination. Both have advantages and disadvantages. The bus is nice because I can just sit down and, two hours later, I’m at my destination. However, I need to get up at 5:00AM to ride it. The smaller busses allow my to sleep in and go after lessons, but it’s a big pain because I have to transfer in the regional center and then on the outskirts of Chisinau again.

Then Thursday I arrived home after working with a girl in the 10th grade. My host mom told me something about the pig, and I thought we were going to kill it. That got me excited, because it’s really interesting to watch. However, when I asked how we were going to kill it she told me that I was wrong and then made a snipping motion with her fingers. That requires no
transaction - castration time.

I won’t go into details but I will simply say that, as I was watching it, I figured that a trip to Chisinau would be a great gift to myself to get to Chisinau early.

So above are pictures. The top is of the two girls with whom I spent the "xpam" a few weeks ago - Alina on the left and Katya on the right. In the middle is a photo of our barrel of grapes from which the wine came. And on the bottom is the name of my village in Romanian and Russian.

Good luck with the Cyrillic.

I-Pod - Bringing People Together

I’ve written before here about the work I often to with my family on the weekends. First it was apples, picking them and bringing them, two buckets at a time, to crates in the cellar (three buckets equals one crate. We picked 195 crates. That’s a lot of trips). Then it was grapes, which is fun for about ten minutes until your hands get sticky and filthy and sore from tugging on some of these vines which are as tough steel. I thought grapes was the worst (and last) of the work that needed to be done.

Then corn happened.

My host mom on Sunday asked me, at lunch, if I could help them with work but was nondescript on the details. Of course I’m always glad to help, especially if I don’t know just what exactly it is we will be doing. All I knew is that we would be doing ‘corn.’ Turns out, what this entailed was my host sister-in-law, brother, mom, and I walking through our corn field stripping corn from the husk by hand, loading it into buckets, then into bags. My primary job - apart from picking - was hauling the bags of corn to the horsecart, tricky because, 1) These bags were eighty to one hundred pounds each and not the easiest things to handle, and 2) I had to walk as far as eighty yards through an uneven field of corn hauling these sacks. It was rather brutal - my hands were swollen for two hours after the work and sore for two days after because we picked at least 1500 pounds of corn, every ear by hand.

But then in the evening we say around at dinner and had a great time, eating and drinking самагон, which is homemade vodka - ours is flavored like strawberries and actually really good (more on самагон in a moment). My host sister-in-law beckoned me to eat, and I entered our kitchen humming Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony - Ode to Joy - that I had just been listening to on my I-Pod. My host mom asked me what I was singing and I told her "Beethoven’s Ninth," upon which she told me that she too likes it very much. So naturally I retrieved the I-Pod from my room and played for her what exactly I was listening to, which she loved. I turned off the player while we ate, but then at one point over dinner my host brother looked bored so I switched the language setting on the I-Pod from English to Russian and let him mess around a bit - before long he was playing songs and telling the whole table what exactly we were listening to. Then my host mom basically took it from him and asked me what classical music I had, so I went through all the Mozart and Beethoven that I have - she also has a great affinity for the Beatles, even listening to "Eleanor Rigby" and asking me what ‘people’ means. Just goes to show the great power of the I-Pod - it was a great evening for everyone, just sitting around after a day of hard work, listening to music and relaxing with Apple’s greatest invention.

Also, the students at my school have taken an affinity for the I-Pod as well. Every day - every day - they ask me if they can listen to music. They usually ask in-between lessons, and I always tell them the same thing: "come here after lessons and can you can do all you want." They keep asking if they can listen during the day, but my hope is that with time they realize that I will not relent.

Notes
- The aforementioned самагон is rather popular here. It translates into English literally as "homemade vodka" - basically moonshine. I had it for the first time when I was in Russia for the summer a year ago, drinking with a friend of mine’s father from Siberia. I’ve actually seen it made a few times here, and it basically involves boiling bad wine, collecting the steam, cooling it in small tubes, and allowing it to drip into a bucket. It sounds much more complicated that it really is - it’s basically a distill. Sometimes the stuff is really good - like ours, which is strawberry flavored. And sometimes it tastes wretched, like it did a few weeks ago when I drank it with our gym teacher.

- More on that moment - every few weeks at my school they have a dance on Friday night that all the students 8th grade and over are welcomed to attend. I usually go because I like to listen to the music and watch the students dance. Usually I just sit in a chair and chat with kids, rejecting overtures to join them. They can’t believe that I don’t dance with them, but I think it would be very difficult to dance with students on Friday night and teach them how to conjugate verbs Monday morning. Nonetheless, I have a great time just hanging-out.

Well, two weeks ago I had been there about an hour, just watching, when the gym teacher at my school tapped me on the shoulder and told me that he wanted a word with me. He proceeded to lead me to his office near the gym where sat six or seven people drinking vodka, самагон, and eating a little. I ended up hanging out there for the next three hours, not leaving until 1:00 in the morning when the dance officially closed and we all had to go home. We also played basketball a little and he asked me if I wanted to play basketball with them during the winter. I can’t wait, actually, not only because I like to play but also because I’ve seen some of these people play and I, while not great, will be like Kevin Garnett here.

- In Minnesota and Moldova, my families talk about our days over dinner. In Minnesota my dad would complain about something like traffic - here my host mom complains that our ducks didn’t come home.

And speaking of poultry, one of my newer tasks around the house is to drive the turkeys from the garden. We have about fifteen of them who wonder through our yard/orchard every evening. But sometimes they make their way to the garden, where they are not supposed to be because they eat the seed planted and the vegetables that grow there. So if I’m in the yard my host mom will tell me to get the turkeys up near the house. It’s actually a great job, because I get to throw little clumps of dirt at the birds do move them along.

- There is a kid in my sixth grade, Andrei - a cute little kid who I think has used his cuteness to get far in school. He keeps saying things in a little cute voice that likely, in the past, got him far. However, he gets nowhere with me.

On October 23 - a Monday - I gave a test to his class. A few minutes into it he looked at me and asked (in his cutesy voice) if he could write in Russian and then translate. I told him he could, but I wasn’t sure if he would have enough time. Then he asked again - even cutesier - if he could just write in Russian. "What lesson is this?," I asked him. "What do you think?" He looked shocked at my rejection.

Also, every day - every day - kids ask me if they can go home instead of come to the lesson. I always say, "Of course you can go home. After the lesson." They are usually incredulous at my rejection of them.

- Next week we have a fall break in school. I’m headed to Chisinau for the first weekend (the next one) for two days of language training, where I’ll meet the other teachers in my group and actually be able to speak English in a normal way. I’ll return home for the week, then go back to Chisinau again the following weekend for two days of teacher training with the Peace Corps.

- Ukranian people have an interesting culinary habit - they love to eat fat. Just fat. Sometimes they’ll put it with garlic and bread (not too bad actually) but they often just munch on it straight, fresh slabs from the butcher. On Russian TV this week they had a report of a Fat Festival held in Ukraine in which a contest was held to see who could eat the most in a short amount of time. The winner ate 2 kilograms (about 4.5 pounds) of fat.

- Finally, I know I’ve written on his often, but I’ll write about the frequency of my washings again. First, I’ve just set a new record - 12 or13 days, not sure which (that’s how I know it was a long time). But secondly - and more importantly - there is a story that goes along with this that just goes to show how a persons outlook can change on something like this.

Two weeks ago I took a shower on a Saturday. The next Tuesday my host brother told me that we were going to the sister-in-laws to shower again. That’s three days between, about the longest I would ever consider going in America. Here, however, when he told me of the trip my initial thought was, "why? I just took a shower three days ago."

Really.

What Do You Mean, "Different"?

When asked what the differences between life in American and life in Moldova, one thing I always need to be conscious of is the fact that in America I live in a city of 2.5 million - here the amount of people who live in the twenty-five square mile around my house is maybe - maybe - two thousand people. So a lot of the differences I see are not necessarily "America and Moldova" differences than they are "Big Town and Small Town" differences.

For example, last Wednesday several students from my school came over and helped my host mom and brother with grapes, picking and loading them (more in this at two locations farther down). Because the father in my family tragically died in July, the students are more than willing to go out of their way to help with work that would have otherwise been done by the husband. Although I can’t say for certain, it seems like the type of thing that would take place in rural-America if a family there was in a similar situation.

Also, people always ask me how we work in America, if we work in America like we work in the village. When I say ‘no’ people usually are surprised a little, but then I remind them that people who live in Chisinau (capital of Moldova) don’t work like we work in the village and that people in what amounts to rural America definitely, without a doubt, work as hard as people in the village here.

Notes:
- Last Friday evening was one of the best and worse few hours that I’ve had, and it was the same event. First my host family - four people total - worked for five hours in the field picking and stacking 750 pounds of grapes to sell to a company that, once a year, comes to the village to buy extra grapes. I then helped only for an hour in the evening, carrying crates of grapes back and forth. That wasn’t too bad.

Then, about 9:00 at night after I had returned home and was sitting with my host sister-in-law my host brother came in and asked me if I wanted to do something with grapes - he was a little light on the details. All he told me was to bring a jacket because it was going to be cold - I of course ignored him, not knowing just what I was getting into but figuring that it would not be too bad and that a t-shirt would suffice. I thought that if I worked, I wouldn’t be cold (the temperature was hovering around 35 degrees).

Well, we went to an intersection in the village where there a huge refrigerated truck run by the aforementioned company ready to buy our grapes. First, after waiting there for 45 or so minutes (outside, in the aforementioned temperature), some guy in a huge truck drove my host brother and I to our grapes where my host mom was waiting - there we spent a half-hour loading the grapes onto the truck, only to return to the intersection and wait for them to load our grapes. It was a painfully slow process to endure, as we were third in line and had to wait two hours - first people had to load grapes onto a scale, then wait while they were weighed, then move the grapes from the scale to the truck, then onto the scale again. As a result, my family (the last of the evening to load their grapes) didn’t go home until 1:00 in the morning. The company paid only eleven cents per pound for the grapes, almost criminally low considering the amount of work that is required to harvest the grapes - my family was paid 300 dollars for 2800 pounds of grapes.

I spent the evening standing in the cold wearing just a t-shirt, cold but not too terribly uncomfortable. Of course, everyone thought I was totally insane, including my host mom who was convinced that I will die. Of course, I’m alive and well.

- On Saturday in the village next to mine was the храм, the day of the village (I say the village next to mine but I have no idea where one village ends and the other begins - nonetheless, people are very specific about the difference).

I was lucky enough to spent the days with two girls who I teach, one in tenth grade and the other in eleventh. On Friday after school we were working a little together and they invited me to come with them the following day to their homes to eat and just hang-out after our lesson (we work together on Saturday at school). It was a great day - we met at school at 12:30 for the lesson, went to the first girl’s home at 4:00, ate and drank and talked until 7:00, then went to the home of the other girl until 10:00, where we ate and drank more. The amount of food that is prepared for events such as this has to be seen to be believed - it is totally amazing. There were only three of us eating at both houses, just me and the girls (for some reason the parents didn’t join us), but there was enough food to comfortably feed six of seven people. It was insane to think about the amount of preparation that goes into such an event.

Then in the evening I went with the two girls to the largest central location in the village - the aforementioned intersection - where there was a large crowd of people gathered to celebrate the day. A lot of my students were there, and I spent the time just chatting and hanging out until 2:00 AM, one girls father finally gave me a ride home. It was the second day in a row that I was stuck in the center of the other village until the early parts of the morning - thankfully, the circumstances behind the second day were for more pleasant than the first. When I go to Chisinau next and have faster internet, I’ll post pictures of me and the two girls with whom I spent the day.

- My host mom - and people in general - think I’m totally crazy for the way in which I dress in the cold weather. What they don’t realize is that I’ve seen colder weather than any of them have other seen, that when I was young and school was cancelled from the cold my brothers and I would go play outside in temperatures approaching 40 degrees negative.

- I’ll end by saying that, much like I’m sure it is in the Midwest, it’s officially gotten cold here in the village. I’ve already written about the cold night I spent stuck in a t-shirt, but more than that, the temperature dips down to about 32 degrees every day. This week we’ve finally ‘turned on’ our heat. Our heating source for the house consists of a large (eight feet by six feet) brick oven in which we burn wood. It’s tough to describe exactly (much like many things here, it simply needs to be seen to believe), but pipes leave emit from the oven through every room in the house, actually keeping things warm. The temperature gets to about 60 degrees in the house, much warmer than the temperature at which I kept my house in college.

Born Free . . . At Least The Next Best Thing

At my house here in the middle of Moldova my family has a few pigs, one big (at least 200 pounds) and the other young, a few months old. Usually they are both kept in separate cages, the big one on the ground and the younger one in a cage a few feet off the ground - the two cages are fifteen or so meters apart.

Well, last week the little one first managed to knock off the latch that kept his door shut (it was just a piece of wood held in place by a nail), but it took him a day or so until he figured that he could just jump down a few feet and roam free. On Monday morning I was home alone getting ready for school and he had escaped - he was drinking rainwater out of a bowl. When I got home my host brother was standing in the doorway grinning and pointing at something. It was the pig.

It spent the next few days freely roaming through the yard and garden, eating everything in site and having the best few days of his short life. And as a result of his freedom I’ve learned a few things important things: 1)Anyone who says pigs are smart has either never seen a pig up close for more than a few seconds, or they are a vegetarian. 2) Pigs are really, really happy when they are eating. And they eat anything

Notes
- It was an interesting Wednesday, October 4th and Thursday, October 5th for me here in the middle of Moldova.

First, on Wednesday I went to our regional center Calarasi where a lot of teachers from our region gathered and received various certificates for success. Our school received something for being the best in the region for preparing the school for the start of the year. Ten or teachers from our school went, and overall it was interesting - the first half when they gave away the recognition. It was all in Romanian but still, enjoyable.

Then, it all went down hill when a ‘concert’ of sorts started. I use the term ‘concert’ because a concert involves music, and I wouldn’t call when transpired ‘music.’ It was basically an hour and a half of a guy singing these terrible songs (the only accompaniments were an accordion and synthesizer, bother blared at ear-splitting levels). And I couldn’t understand the music but it really sounded like he sang one song at least three or four times. It was, without a doubt, the worst hour I’ve had in a really, really long time.

Then Thursday, October 5th was a bit of a national holiday in Moldova - the "Day of Teachers." Every school in the nation celebrated it, and mine was no different. We only had three lessons in the morning, after which everyone - teachers and students - gathered in the courtyard in front of school for a little ceremony that lasted an hour or so in which students from grades one through eight all presented little skits or shows - very interesting.

Afterwards all the teachers gathered in the school cafeteria for a huge feast (including six liters of vodka) to celebrate the day, and it was a great event (more on this in a second). The director gave a big speech at one point and gave me a book of essays written by a teacher - "Up the Down Staircase", by a woman named Bel Kaufman. Naturally, it’s a Russian translation. Then, as we ate, every few minutes someone would stand up and say a few words of thanks. After a half hour my director invited me to say something so I gave a little toast in Russian, basically thanking the other teachers for doing the work they do and telling them that "today is your day. I’m not a teacher, I’m a volunteer." They loved it. Our local priest was there and when I sat down he asked how long I’ve studied Russian for - when they told him only four months, he seemed to be impressed.

Then later my director wanted to drink with me and asked me to say something: I said "Na Rok," which is Romanian for ‘Cheers!’. He loved it - we were talking quietly but he quickly announced to everyone that "Andy just said ‘Na Rok.’" They couldn’t believe it.

- On public transportation here there are countless opportunities to see things you’ve never seen before and things which you would never expect to see on a bus. People often carry odd things ranging from a refrigerator to a lot of wire, which was so much that the man carrying it had to buy an extra ticket. And one time a month ago a couple got off the bus I was on and, unbeknownst to me, they had a goat with them.

- I just set a record for "time spent between showers." I went from a Saturday to a Wednesday. And I don’t mean the next Wednesday, I mean a whole week and then a Wednesday. Eleven days. And I was prepared to push it even farther . . .

- Last Saturday was one of the best days I’ve had in a while. First in the morning a Moldovan who lived with my family in Minneapolis for three weeks in September drove out to visit me with his children (he lives in Chisinau). His name is Alexander, and we had a great talk about the lives that we experienced (or are experiencing) - mine in his nation, him in mine. And his children loved the house. When the saw the aforementioned smaller big walking around they let out a loud "wow", and later I introduced them to the big, 300 pounder, which they really loved. He also brought me the sports section from five issues of the Minneapolis-Star-Tribune, which was so great to have.

But alas, Alexander had to work so he was here only an hour - but in the afternoon I spent five hours picking grapes with my host family at the home of my host grandpa. First my host mom asked me it I would go help, and I told her that of course I would go. So she said we would go in ten minutes, but the verb she used in Russian translates to "go by ground transport" (another verb for going on foot). It’s not a big deal to hear it, as it usually means we’re going by car. But when I walked outside I saw my host brother sitting on the seat of a horse-drawn cart, reins in hand, and my host mom in the back. Yes, we rode a horse-drawn cart the mile or so to the grandpa’s. It was a great experience.

And once we arrived there was a big crowd there, six or seven people, and we just tore through the grapes, picking about 1200 pounds in four hours. Picking grapes is actually not the most enjoyable experience in the world, as your hands get filthy and sticky from dirt and the juice from the grapes. But it was really interesting. Then, after work, we all sat around, ate a big meal, drank vodka and wine, and just relaxed.

- The Teachers Day celebration we had at our school, apart from the previously mentioned festivities, was great for other reasons. For me, as I stood there watching the performances by the students, I was amazed by just how comfortable I’ve become here. The last time we had a celebration like that was the first day of school, and at that time I just stood there wondering just what I had gotten myself into, not really knowing anyone or anything. It was a marked difference the second time - I chatted with students before hand, actually knew what was going on, and even chatted with the teachers there.

My situation with the other teachers is also interesting. Because I’m the first volunteer that this village has had, it has naturally taken them a while to get used to me, and slowly but surely I sense getting adjusted to my presence. It’s a good feeling to have.

- I will end by telling a story that describes just how different my life here is from what it was like in America:

Last Friday my host family all went to a concert in the regional capital about fifteen miles away leaving me home alone for a few hours after school, and because it was raining I didn’t do much. About 7:00 or so someone outside was yelling for my host mom and when I went outside to tell them that she wasn’t home the woman yelling saw me, quickly said something, and walked away - of all she said I only understood the words "cow" and "here." Then it hit me - our two cows go out to eat in some field everyday and in the evening, they are led back home - they simply needed to be let in through a gate. So I looked to my right and saw our two cows (mom and a young one) slowly walking away from the gate that needs to be opened.

So I grabbed a thin stick with which I could smack them if they wandered too far (like my host family uses) and followed after them - they walked about fifty yards to a corn field and started eating there, and to get them out I needed to walk through this thick mud in just my sandals, mud that was high enough to engulf my footwear totally. It took a while but I finally managed to drive the cattle back to our gate and into the barn.

I distantly remember thinking, as I trudged through the mud up to my ankles, that there was I, 23 years old with a 110,000 dollar high school and college education flowing through my brain, a degree from a great Liberals Arts university, and I was in the middle of a cornfield in the middle of Moldova chasing some cows and getting stuck in the mud.

And I couldn’t have been happier.

Born Free . . . At Least The Next Best Thing