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.