On A Related Point

A few weeks ago I wrote about my own personal language here in Moldova, but a far more interesting topic is the issue of language as it applies to the nation as a whole, particularly the issues people have between the speakers of Russian and Moldovan and how this nations runs as a bilingual society (I tell people here all the time that if I knew more Spanish than the words for 'beer', 'book', 'girl', 'on fire', and 'no more', I would go back to America and get a Fulbright scholarship to compare multilingualism in a place like this and in a place like New York, Southern California, something like that). I live it what is, for all intensive purposes, a fully functioning bi-lingual nation.

Officially here the language is Moldovan, basically Romanian (the difference between the languages is like the differences between American and British English). However, as I was told within two hours of arriving in Moldova, being a Russian speaker is a huge advantage because everyone knows Russian – whether a person wants to or likes to speak the language is a different issue (more in a second), but at least every person over the age of 25 or so is fully able to communicate, with most people under 25 having a solid grasp of the language because 1)It's taught from the first grade in most schools, and 2) As odd as it sounds, a lot of the television channels are in Russian and most of the DVD's traded around are in Russian too, so children from a young age are are bombarded with the language and their comprehension is solid.

The history of the Moldovan language here is a long one – I may be off on some of the facts but basically, under the Soviet Union Russian was the only language, officially, and all the Moldovan was not only forced to the background but the alphabet of the language was also changed from the traditional Latin alphabet to the Cyrillic, Russian alphabet, an especially touchy issue (this also means that a person over a certain age could get by just fine just knowing Russian but would have huge issues just knowing Moldovan). At the end of the Soviet Union, when Moldova was about to declare it's independence, the first thing that the people of Moldova reclaimed was their language – as an example of how strong passions were, look no further than the Moldovan national anthem, “Limba Noastra,” which in Romanian means “Our Language.”

With this surge of nationalism for their own culture by the Moldovans comes a backlash against all those who were responsible for the original oppression – in this case, the Russians (who, in turn, have returned the tension to the native Moldovan speakers). There are numerous examples of tensions between the people, usually with Russian speakers showing high disdain for their Moldovan counterparts (my favorite examples – a teacher from Peace Corps once was told by a Russian speaker that “Moldovan is a language for the animals” and our former Training Coordinator once, while asking in Moldovan for a person to move so she could get off a bus, was told in Russian, “why don't you speak a normal human language”). I myself have also found my self in the presence of a surprised Russian speaker who thinks it only natural that my friends have a firm grasp of Moldovan after having studied only eight months (with Moldovan being considered a 'simple' language) but are more than surprised to learn that not only do I speak Russian but double surprised that I too have a firm grasp of the language after an equally small amount of time.

However, despite this fact the Moldovan speakers are not to be let off the hook totally, as there is a huge dislike for Russian speakers who are not fluent in Moldovan, who do a lot of mistakes. For example, if I'm with friends in a bar or in the market or something and a friend of mine makes a mistake, it's usually actually appreciated because it's known that the person making the mistake is an American and, frankly, not too many people go out of their way to try and master a language like Moldovan. However, if a native Russian speaker is in the same situation and makes the same mistake, said person can be laughed at because they've lived in this nation all their lives and are unable to speak the native language. In fact, this point to me is especially interesting – all the kids in my school who are in the Moldovan classes - 100 % of them - are fully functional in Russian, while I would say that the number of kids in the Russian classes who are equally functional in Moldovan is in the low teens.

And while it should be noted that much of the disdain shown for Russian speakers is justified, it should also be noted that most of this tension is mainly amongst the older set, amongst those old enough to remember the treatment of the Moldovan language under the Soviet Union. Amongst the youth of Moldova, the problem is minimal.

The language situation in my host family is a little interesting. My host brother, for example, understands about 80% of Moldovan but I've only heard him speak it twice, both times on the phone and both times to the same person. If he's in the market selling apples in Chisinau, there's no doubt that he's fully able to help a person and speaks Moldovan well enough to do so, but he simply won't do it for fear of making a mistake and being a point of amusement (see the above note on Moldovan speakers not having much patience for Russian speakers and their mistakes). My host mom, on the other hand, told me (we had a big conversation about language here on Friday evening) that she understand about 50% of Moldovan language, that unlike a lot of native Russian speakers she has the utmost respect for the Moldovan language and the people who speak it, likes Moldovan culture in general – she simply never had the chance to learn the language and as a result, can't speak it (a point of embarrassment for her, actually). She told me that often she's in a place – in a store in Chisinau, for example – and the person helping her simply refuses to speak Russian despite the ability to do so, which drives her crazy. Also, she's found herself in situations where someone will ask her a question in Romanian, she'll fully understand the question and respond in Russian, upon which the asker of the question will turn to another and make some smart comment about how she really didn't understand the question.
And in closing, her inability to speak Moldovan has another huge downfall – we have our mayoral elections in the village coming up in a few months and there's nothing more she would like than to become mayor .However, her ability to speak the language immediately removes the option for her, as it's one of the few requirements of any would-be mayor.

Notes:
- The weather here has taken another turn for the worse – it's officially cold. During the day the temperature hasn't been over 30 degrees in a week or so, and at night it gets to as low as 10 degrees below zero. In my room at night it gets really cold, down to the low 40's – thank God for the four inches of blanket I lay under. However, all signs point to the weather turning warm within a few days, the snow melting, and the mud coming with it . . . .

- Last week brought one of the most . . . interesting experiences I've had so far here. On Wednesday my host mom told me that she wanted to get on the Internet because she needed to find something that had to do with Biology. So Wednesday evening we spent an hour and a half working together, pumping words into Russian search engines and seeing what came up. The low . . . er, highlight for me was typing words into the engine one letter at a time, toggling between a overlay of the Russian keyboard, finding a letter, then toggling back to the Internet site to enter the letter – this is how sentences were built. Can't describe how fun that was. And it can be frustrating to communicate with a person who knows something about computers if both people speak the same language fluently – just imagine how tough it can be when one person knows absolutely nothing about computers and their communication is limited by language.

On the bright side (really), we did manage to find out exactly what she wanted without either of us hurting the other. That's a plus.

- We have our first vacation of second semester coming up next week (after eight weeks of lessons), and I'm off to Chisinau at 6:00 AM Saturday morning. I have two days of lessons for teachers (in which my whole group will be together for the first time in 6 months, all 35 of us), two days of lessons for Russian, then on Wednesday I'm off to the village where I lived in the summer – they called me two weeks ago out of the blue and invited me back, so I'm off. Should be a good time, especially because my language skills have grown immensely since I last saw them in August. My host brother from the time went to Moscow to work a week after I left and has since returned – he said the work was very, very tough. I can't wait to see them all again . . . I think I'll return also with my friends from the summer who I studied with, all one group returning together. Promises to be a great time.

- Highlight of the week – on Saturday, simply walking between villages after a tutoring session in the village next-door. It was one of the classic winter days, about 10 degrees without cloud in the sky, the sun shining, a little wind, the air cold, fresh, and clean with a new six inches or so of snow covering everything. “Brown-Eyed Girl” was playing on the Ipod – the top 15 minutes of my week.

Help!

If you are at all interested in helping my basketball team/league here, please go here to make a tax-free contribution. It would be greatly appreciated by all . . .

I'll tell you up front, in advance, that the status of my own personal team is up in the air because of the status of my gym floor, but that hopefully won't deter anyone from giving.

Thanks in advance.

A Sickness of Epidemic Proportions?

At my school last week there was a severe lack of . . . students. On Tuesday, for example, I had only 3 of my usual 9 11th graders, with similarly low numbers arriving for other classes. On Wednesday during the day we had a meeting with our director in which he told us that there was the potential for a flu epidemic sweeping through our school (25 percent of the students had stayed home) and that they had invited a doctor to assess various children and, if it turned out that they had the flu, we would have had to close school on Thursday and Friday and make up for lessons on Saturday and Sunday, an option no one was really interested.

So it was much to my joy when, in a second meeting that day after school, the doctor gave his opinion and announced that flu was not the cause of sickness and that instead it was just a wicked strand of a cold (of course, potentially hurting his credibility a bit is the fact that he also went on to list one of the causes for the cold as being that children drink cold water at school . . . ). But nonetheless, it was music to our ears.

However, I use quotation marks around the title because I have a really strong feeling that all of the sickness in the students was as serious as they would want us to believe. On Friday at school I had the 11th graders again, the whole class together (usually I have half and my partner teacher takes half), and only eight of the 19 were in school. Later on that night, however, I went to the disco with some of my kids, partly as an experiment and partly because I was really bored at home, and I found that there were six kids who were not healthy enough to go to school but were healthy enough for the disco. It was a shocking but not surprising (if that makes sense), to say the least.

My first instinct is to blame the kids, of course – I really want to just blame them for not showing up. Then I have to remind my self that these are, after all, 17 and 18 year old children, and that if they don't want to come to school it should be the job of the parents to send their kids to school. So then I want to shift blame to the parents. But then I realize that, for at least of the two kids how were too sick for school, their family situations are not exactly what would be descried as 'normal,' as the mother of one works in Turkey and the other lives with just his grandma in the next village. Really, there is no one to blame.

Notes:
- Last Sunday was the “Olympiad” in the regional center for English and a handful of other subjects. I knew about this Olympiad a week or so ago and choose what student from the 110th and 11th grades to go – I thought that was the end of my responsibility. However, on Saturday evening at about 5:30 my host mom told me that the vice-director of my school had called and told me that I needed to go to the regional center with the kids, that the director of Foreign Languages for schools in the region requested that I go along, meaning that my normal schedule of sleeping for 10 hours a night on the weekend (me being tired combined with the amazingly fresh air and lack of noise besides chickens outside makes it all possible) was broken violently by a 6:53 wake-up call.

Well, as it turns out, the reason why we (me as well as the other TEFL volunteer in the region and a non-TEFL volunteer who lives in the regional center) were wanted was to correct the essays when the students were done. The questions were on topics like, “What is the role of education in the future,” and the answers were often stunning in their quality (like, senior level in college-quality work, only the answers here had fewer mistakes). It was a great opportunity for me, not only to spend the day speaking English but to also see just how far my kids have to go and how good the may be able to become one day. And it was hilarious for the non-TEFL volunteer to listen to the two teachers talk and how we kept talking our 'kids' when talking about our students.

And, for the record, my kids both finished dead last in their respective groups, results that I'm sure to not take personally.

- I received a question on the entry a little bit ago about the role of corruption in Moldova, using Russia as an example. I can say with confidence that the situation here is not as bad as in Russia, where according to all reports, corruption in so prominent that it's now the rule, a sort of modern feudal system (according to Newsweek). That's not to say, however, that the situation here is great.

For example, my partner-teacher told me a story about just how prevalent it can be. Every year, in every school, students have to take exams at the end of the 11th grade (or 12th, if the school goes that far), the results of which not only insure that a child can graduate from school but the results are also forwarded onto potential universities or colleges. Well, last year she said there were four kids who didn't work at all for eleven years of school, who could care less about learning English. As a result, they received a '4' on the exam, a failing grade, and they had to travel to Chisinau to re-take the test with at a school. There they simply paid the director of the school they were at 700 lei (a little over 50 dollars) for a score of '7'. Problem solved.

There are also massive problems with corruption in, of all fields, medicine, with there being a need to pay doctors for the 'real' care (if not, you might receive a pill for a problem like a broken-leg). There are two reasons for this, the first being that the salaries of doctors are so low (about 180 dollars a month) that they are much more likely to accepting a bribe than they otherwise would be if their salary was normal. The second problem is that the system simply sets itself up for the possibility of corruption, as most of the time it's encouraged to pay the doctor him/herself – in cash – for services rendered. There is a system in which a person can pay a desk – in which the money goes to the hospital itself – but that is largely ignored, the ignorance of which drains precious money from the hospital coffers, meaning that the salaries of doctors can't be raised, and because they can't be raised they have to take bribes. It's cyclical, a downward spiral.

Of course, there are frequent attempts to alleviate the problem. I can go on for 4 pages about something called the Millennium Challenge Account program started by George Bush II (Google it if you have the time or curiosity), but while Moldova has largely met some of the criteria, the one thing keeping them from receiving all the potential funds is corruption, leading to several attempts to fight it. The US Ambassador to Moldova, over Thanksgiving weekend, told us how in his opinion a key to solving the problem was simply taking away the need by raising the socio-economic status of those who might be tempted, and two weeks later I saw him on Moldovan State TV Russian news presenting new cars to a large group of new police officers.

And there are commercials on TV fairly consistently warning of the dangers of corruption, my favorite of which shows a students paying 1000 lei for a grade from a professor, then showing the professor on an operating table with the same student hovering over him with a scalpel, leading to a look of shock on the face of the bribe-taker as the gas is applied – then a message comes on in Russian saying something like 'don't let this happen to you.'

- I've written about the odd medical beliefs of many Moldovan's, and last week my host mom told me three different . . . interesting ideals regarding health:1) That I shouldn't lay on a cold floor because I'll hurt my kidneys, 2)That I shouldn't eat sun-flower seeds whole because I'll get appendicitis, and 3) That a person shouldn't eat when they are sick because the food feeds the sickness.

- We eat all the parts of the animals here, from the intestines of chickens and pigs to the feet of turkeys (as a result, I can say with confidence that the neck of a bird is very tender). Two weeks ago I saw something that was very surprising, however, as I watched my host mom eat the comb of a chicken head that had been boiled for a while.

At first I was shocked and thought it was amazingly odd and a little gross until I re-read one of my Newsweek's in which it was written that “El Bulli” in Spain, largely considered one of the top three restaurants in the world, a place where they get 30,000 requests a year for 5,000 tables and which takes reservations as much as six months in advance, one of their signature disks is lamb brain cooked with the head chef's signature 'liquification' technique. If given the choice between the two (boiled chicken-comb or liquified lamb brain), I think I'd choose the Moldovan delicatessen (my host mom's words).

- Two highlights from the last week (which, if they are existent, I like to end on):
1) On Saturday night on Russian 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire' there was a question about which city is across the Bay Bridge from Oakland, with the answers being San Francisco, Chicago, Richmond, or Pittsburgh. I knew the answer right away (of course) and I told my family who was watching, which they responded to with questions of “you think so?.” “No”, I said, “I know so.” The guy walked away with the money, but first he said we would have guessed “Richmond.” When I told me family that he was “5000 kilometers from the answer,” they thought it was absolutely hilarious.

2) I wrote last time about my birthday party at a 4th graders house with her cousin in 2nd grade occupying a lot of my attention while all the men argued about politics in the Ukrainian dialect. Well, the second graders at school have a had a habit of a while of just hanging out in front of my door watching me work in-between lessons (as 7 year-olds are prone to do), terrified to go in.

On Monday of this week, however, they were all hanging around when the girl I met (her name is Zhena, short for Alexandra) confidently strolled through the center of them up to me with a little smirk on her face while the eyes of her classmates opened wide. That led to them all quickly following her inside and the start of the routine when, after every lesson, about 5 second graders drop into my room while we talk about their day's, how their lessons went and what not (I should say that only three talk while two little girls just smile, stare, and giggle incessantly when I talk to them). It's officially the best part of my day, every day up to now . . .

Slow But Sure

In my group of three of the TEFL teachers who speak Russian, I'm the only one who no real experience studying another language, apart from three years spent in a Latin classroom in high-school. Therefore, it's a little difficult for me to judge my language development, as I have no previous experience with which to compare this one. In fact, over the summer there were plenty of times where I would be amazingly frustrated with my progress while the other two in the group (who are proficient in 5 languages between them) would be totally comfortable with out progress, knowing that it just takes time. My problem is that I've never really studied anything as extensive as a language before – everything I learned in college, including the semester of Calculus-based Physics, could be figured out with no more than an hour of hard focus.

Russian, however, is a step-up, to say the least.

Now, the vocabulary in any language is tough and just required work to manage – there is no doubt about that, and I can't actually complain about the alphabet, which just takes some time go get used to (although Russian does have a bad habit of having huge words with 6, 7, 8 syllables. My favorite example is the verb 'to earn.' In English, we say the plural form, 'you earn', two syllables. In Russian, it's вы зарабатываете – believe me when I say it's 8 syllables). Russian grammar, however, is a far cry from most sane grammar systems. I could give you literally dozens of examples on how tricky the grammar can be, but instead you'll read just one – in Russian there are 4 words for the word 'for' in English: для, meaning 'for the purpose of,' на, meaning 'with the plan of' (which I understand when said but have no idea how to use) за meaning, 'for obtaining,' and за for the rest of meanings (yes it's the same word twice, but the first form takes the Instrumental Case, the second takes the Accusative Case – there are six cases in all). As a result, you can have the statements, 'this is a book for the lesson', 'I'm going to the well for water,' and 'I was at school for six hours' and have three different forms of words in Russian (plus the aforementioned form I don't know how to use).

On one hand, it's amazingly frustrating, yet on the other hand it's very interesting for me to, slowly but surely, make feel myself slowly getting more and used to the language, feel my mind getting programmed to the grammar, to the gender of words and all that fun stuff.

The best analogy I can think of in learning the language is that it's like building a house, with the grammar being the tools and the vocabulary being the materials – you can have all the materials you need but what you have is far from a house. Instead, you need to appropriate tools to put all the materials together in a way that works. It's a slow process, building the house – picking up various tools and materials here and there, some important and some less important but all service the same purpose.

Of course, with all the development there are still plenty of moments when I say something and I see the eyes of the person whom I'm speaking search around for a while, trying to pick up the meaning of what I said before they finally figure it out. And about once a week I'll talk to some kid who's not one of my students (and therefore not used to how I talk) and after I say something they turn to one of my kids ( whose used to hearing my often) and ask what the heck I'm talking about, although that usually happens when I'm telling them to get out of my classroom or something like that (I have to admit and say that my classroom management Russian is pretty good). The other problem I have is that I hate when I do simple mistakes – it drives me nuts, especially when I make a mistake on grammar I learned in June or August. Most volunteers who have been here for a year or longer say that you simply get used to making mistakes. I hope so . . .

As for the ulitmate test, I remember in linguistics in my junior year of college that our professor told us that when a person starts to dream – consistently – in another langauge, it means that such person has had a breakthrough of sorts. Well, I actually dream in Russian on a rather consistent basis – if I dream about a person in my host family or in a person in my dreams speak Russian, that person invariably speaks Russian in my dreams, with me responding in kind. I think this alone means that I've reached a certain base-line comfort with my language.

Notes:
I had a great time at 'class reunion Saturday' in Moldova last Saturday night. People packed our school theater to the brim and we all watched a show put on by our 11th graders, featuring lots of singing, shows, contests between. They also added a nice touch of inviting various parents up in front of everyone and asking them questions like, “what is your wives favorite color?” and what not. A good time all around . I also spent some time in the room of our gym-teacher with some other teacher's, their families, and various other people drinking vodka, cognac, and wine before I finally retired home at 3:00 in the morning.

In the room with all the teachers was a man who works as a taxi driver in Chisinau and who was convinced that he could understand English, that it was an easy English – he then challenged me to ask questions and he would answer them. I was more than happy to oblige him and of course, he understood nothing that I said to him.

It was also interesting because my partner teacher was there and every time we talked to each-other, the whole room went totally silence. They all went on to talk about how beautiful of a language English is, a thought that as a native speaker never occurred to me. But I'll accept the compliment on behalf of all native English speakers everywhere.

- Because Russian State TV is one of three channels we get with regularity here, we are exposed to a high does of President Putin. Now, no matter what a person's thoughts on his leadership style and where he's taking Russia, there is no doubt that he can be highly charming with the press. Last week he held his annual press-conference in which he sits in a huge auditorium with several hundred reporters and accepts their questions on all topics – he answered 606 questions in three and a half hours and was very charming in the process, greeting reporters from Al-Jazzera, China, and Azerbaijan with words of 'hello' in their own language. It was quite the spectacle.

- In November I went to a birthday party of one of my students in the 10th grade and had a great time, and yesterday I went to the birthday party of one of my 4th graders and had a great time also. I knew it was her birthday and went out of my way to wish her a Happy Birthday during the day at school, and about 4:00 in the evening after classes she called my house and invited me to come to her for dinner to celebrate.

It turned out to be a great time. There were her parents (her mom is a teacher in the school) and various other parents, coupled with a great friend of hers, a girl in the second grade. After about a half-hour of dinner the men all started going at it talking about politics (and the Russian curse words were flying), so I ended up talking with the 2nd grade girl for about 20 minutes. Really, I can think of no better way to spend time . . .