Gripe Session

As much as I really like my life in Moldova, in my village, and my Peace Corps service in general, there are a few things that drive my nuts, especially in the last week. Here is a list:

- I have never, in my life, seen people (and an educational system in general) waste as much time as I have here. Case in point: On Tuesday of this week – the 27th – the 11th graders in my school were to write a test for Romanian. They were to start at 9:15 and take until 2:00, the end of the school day – yes, almost five hours for a three hour test. How is this possible? I wish I knew. It also created a problem for me because the 11th graders also have a test on Friday for English and I desperately needed to prepare them. However, according to the the schedule it would not be possible, because they would be busy writing the test during our planned lesson. This would be maddening enough if not for the fact that, for some reason, they didn't start writing the Romanian test until 11:00, just sitting around for two hours in the morning, again without appropriate reason, before going home at 2:00 as I watched in dis-belief as they walked out the doors. Had they actually decided to start on time, we could have maybe used one of the two chances I have to get them a little prepared. Insane.

- My host mom is great – I couldn't be happier with my selection for host families, as they are actually all great. But (like any mom), she does things that drive me nuts. The most interesting? If I'm watching TV people talk all the time, without a cafe of convern for me. This doesn't bother me really. But if my host mom is watching a soap opera on Russian TV, she has a tendency to start a conversation by asking a question and 'ssshhh' me when I start to respond. And while they are more than happy to talk when I watch something, I (and my host brother too) can't so much as think about talking without getting told to be quiet (this problem is not isolated to my family here – as anyone in my family in America knows, if my mom there is watching “Lost” or something of that sort, it's in the best everyone in the house to stay away for fear of causing even the slightest disturbance that will incur wrath).

- Last week saw the strongest wind I've ever seen in my life – 3 straight days of literally 40 miles per hour, so strong that it actually took part of the roof of our school. By the end of the 3rd day there was so much dust in the air that it was like a fog.

Well, as you could imagine the wind did a number of our satellite dish on the roof of the house, making the TV literally unwatchable as the signal couldn't be recieved. The reason was clear to my host brother and I, as we just looked at the satellite and saw it swaying back and forth in the wind and the answer was simply to wait. My host mom (who knows almost nothing about technology more complicated than a phone), however, was not happy with that answer and instead on Friday evening called the guy who installed the dish who, in turn, told her that someone needed to bring the receiver box to Chisinau so he could look at it. My host mom, knowing that I was going, volunteered me to meet that guy when I got off the bus at 8:00 in the morning so we could go to his shop together. That actually turned to out to be a painless effort, because while we had some trouble in meeting (resulting in my needing to call him on his cell phone), he was a really nice guy. No gripe here.

However, there were two annoying things. 1) One of the reasons for my trip was to get some pictures for my 11th graders, which I had promised them I would do for a while. So while I the aforementioned gentleman was working on the TV satellite receiver I went to the Kodak store in Chisinau to get these pictures, walking a half-mile through driving rain to the location only to find it closed, locked totally up at 9:00 in the morning (when it was supposed to have opened at 8:00). That was annoying. 2) At the Peace Corps office there were a ton of volunteers there, all of whom wanted me to sleep in Chisinau because we were going to go out and celebrate the birthday of a volunteer here. I would have loved nothing more than to stay, but because of the situation with the satellite dish that wasn't option, as my host mom would have been slightly peeved with me had I not come home on Friday eve. But of course, upon my return they quickly plugged in the box and we found that the situation was not only better but worse, much to our surprise.

That's it for the gripes. It felt good to get that out . . . .

Notes:
- On Friday of this week some friends of mine are coming to the village for the weekend, and it promises to be a good time. We have a dance at my school on Friday and believe me when I say that if we, all four of us, walk in together it will be like in a western film where the music stops, things break, and every neck in the gym will get whiplash from snapping their heads around.

- The satellite dish (now that it's working – my host brother and I repaired it by him going on the roof and moving it around until we found a signal, which I relayed my tapping on a window) is amazing for showing very odd sporting events. You can imagine my surprise when I turned on one of the Polish sport channels this week only to discover a replay of a 2006 NCAA Division II football semifinal game between Grand Valley State and Delta State, replayed in Polish. That was odd.

- I mentioned before about how we've started to play football with my kids a few times a week after school. It really is great fun, and it also allows me the chance to realize what it will be like to have kids one day and teach them sports, because there is little more frustrating that I've endured (including the complaints at the top) than throwing perfect pass after perfect pass to these kids, only to watch the ball slide through their grasps time and time and time again.
Thankfully, I received a lot of training in my summer as a T-ball coach when I was the only person staff patient enough to be a pitcher to the kids.

- Finally, highlight of the week (actually, two weeks ago, but who's counting?) - On Wednesday a doctor from the Peace Corps came to my house to look around and make things were fine here from a health standpoint (they are). Peace Corps pulled up in a white Toyota SUV, the likes of which have seldom been seen around here.

Well, the next day during my lesson with the 4th graders they asked me when my parents had arrived – I quickly asked them what they were talking about, as my parents aren't set to arrive here for another three months. They told me that they heard my parents had arrived (which one kid in the school no doubt just made up after seeing the SUV), and when I asked who told them that my parents arrived they all pointed to one girl near the window and said, “Nastya! Nastya told us your parents were here”, to which the girl responded, “It's not my fault! It's not my fault! Someone else told me!”.

Maybe you just have to have been there to appreciate it . . . .

Short But Sweet

On March 15th I called a friend of mine in the states to congratulate hims on his birthday, and he gave me one piece of advice – 'self-edit your blog.' I decided to take his advice and see what happens. It's actually a good week to try because not much new has happened.

1) On St. Patty's Day I went to my regional center of Calarasi and met with the two other volunteers there for a little celebration on our own. One of the volunteers (a TELF teacher) lives in a village in the region, while the other lives with a great family in the regional center and has plenty of space available for all of us. We ended up at a bar for 5.5 hours, until 3:30 in the morning, chatting away with the various people who came in. There was nothing more shocking to these people than meeting me, a Russian-speaking volunteer, because while most of them have seen many volunteers before, all of them in the past have spoken Romanian.
We were in one bar when one guy and I started talking about, of all things, grapes, which ended up in all six of us going to this guy's house at 3:30 in the morning to sample his wine. That was interesting.

And on an interesting note – the volunteer lives with a family that consists just of two daughters and a grandma, the mom and dad having moved to Paris twelve years ago and come home two or three times a year.

And in closing this section, hitch-hiking is one of the more common ways to get around in this
country for volunteers, as sometimes public transportation options are lacking at crucial times. I personally have never done it, but in coming home from the regional center on Sunday I was, in a way, reverse hitch-hiked. While I was standing in the bus-station waiting with the two volunteers (one of which was heading home in a matter of minutes), a man whom I've never seen before came up to me and asked if I was going to Hirjauca, my village. I responded with a yes, and he told me that he was going there too and offered to drive me (it was either that or wait anothet two and a half hours for my next public option). Worrying about getting screwed by a sly taxi-driver, my first question was how much I would have to pay him. When he told me it would be 15 lei ($1.16), I quickly departed from my friends and had an incident-free ride home.
2) My host grandpa has moved in with us, as of my arrival Sunday afternoon when I returned from our St. Patty's Day meeting. He's old and always speaks to me in the Ukrainian dialect that they always speak here and moves really slowly, but it's not too bad to have him around – we spend a lot of time watching sports together on TV. It's also a great help to my language, because while my Russian is coming along nicely, my accent is really strong and the grandpa doesn't understand me unless I focus hard on my words and try to minimized my accent.
3) In closing, I've started playing football with the kids at my school (I'm all time quarterback), and it's safe to say that it's about as much fun as a person should be allowed to have. I actually got the ball a few months ago from my parents but just now pumped it up, and the kids were chomping with the chance to play. So last Thursday I explained to my kids the rules and we went at it, 6th grade against 7th grade, for an hour.
The kids are constantly yelling at each other, especially if they drop the ball or if the person a kids is guarding scores – they also yell at me (not disrespectfully) about how they were open and about how I should have thrown to the ball to them.
And of course, I also love to give them a hard time when they drop the ball of something like that, and the kids really like it when I started joking with them about their performances. Like said, it's about as much fun as a person should be allowed to have.

Andy's Moldovan Vacation

I write having spent one of the most interesting 10 day stretches I've had in my time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Moldova.

It all started on Thursday the 29th of February – about 1:30 in the afternoon while I was doing some work in my classroom I noticed that all the second graders were in my classroom, running around and eating a little. I kept joking around with them, asking them where my food and candy were. Well, about 2:00 they all were standing around the door to their classroom and they asked me to come in, where I saw all of their mothers (8 women in all) sitting around with their teacher, food and wine everywhere with one open chair and a glass of cognac placed in front of it. I ended up sitting around with them for four hours, eating and drinking wine while listening to them all speak the Ukrainian dialect (a one point one woman was telling a story and another turned to her and told her that she needed to speak Russian so “our guest”could understand, to which the woman telling story responded, after a moment of thought, “I want to speak our language”).

On Friday the 2nd of March we celebrated International Womens Day at our school (It's a holiday that they celebrate like mad in this part of the world but is non-existent in America). The day is actually celebrated on the 8th of March but because we have a vacation on that day, we did things a week early at my school and most schools in Moldova in general. Being not only a holiday but that last day of school before vacation, they actually canceled that last two lessons of the day, the fifth and sixth lessons, ironic for me because I have only the fifth and sixth lessons of the day and meaning that I was totally free. We ended up sitting around eating and drinking wine until 5:00 in the afternoon, dancing the 'hora' and having an overall great time.

On Saturday morning I woke up at 5:00, got on a bus at 6:15, and arrived in Chisinau at 8:15, my trip made necessary by a seminar for all the TEFL volunteers in my group and our partner teachers, with the theme being “Environmental Education in Moldova.” We were in meetings for nine and a half hours on Sunday, followed up by trip to the disco until 3:30 in the morning. We wanted to go to the disco near our hotel that had “Hip-Hop Sundays”, but upon arrival we found the place totally closed. All ready to go, we quickly flagged down three taxi's and within 10 minutes were at another disco in the area, where we celebrated until the early morning. We left from the disco about 3:00 AM, and with a 7:30AM wake up call waiting for us, we decided to test the theory that it's better to sleep 3 hours than to sleep 4 – we arrived at the hotel at 3:30 and four of us sat in one room for 45 minutes, just talking about life.

We had more meetings the following day, Monday, although I was only there for the first half because I thought my wallet with credit cards and ID's was stolen so I had to go to the bank to cancel my cards and get new ones. Our meetings on the environment ended on Monday evening but we had language classes on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, followed up by another language exam. In the afternoon I took a little bus to the village were I lived in the summer, Ivancea, to see my family for the first time since the middle of August. It was a great time there, chatting away with everyone and talking about my life here. It was also really interesting for them because my language skills have grown amazingly since that time. One thing I was most looking forward to was talking to my host brother there, who left for Moscow about two weeks after I left. Turns out, he didn't make one dime in Russia – he got caught in a scam. He was supposed to earn 800 dollars a month (he was there for six weeks), but at the end of his time he went to get paid and they told him that he had a lot of 'hidden' charges, meaning that in the end he made out with enough to buy a ticket home. And of course, because he's Moldovan, his chances with the police were absolutely non-existent.

Anyway, when I was in Ivancea a friend of mine called and invited me to his place in his regional center of Teleneti for a few days, an invitation I was more than happy to accept. So I went there on Thursday afternoon, meeting my friends (another was also invited) in a town of Orhei at the bus station so we could travel along together. We arrived in Teleneti and had a relaxing time, first getting a tour of the 'city' that took about ten minutes (I use quotations because it's the smallest regional center and feels very much like a big village). My friend had just moved homes so we were joining him in his first night there – his lack of furniture meant that we slept on the floor using our jackets and sweatshirts for blankets and t-shirts stuffed into other t-shirts as pillows. It actually was relatively painless for me once I figured out what to do, how to sleep.

On Friday two girls – volunteers who live in the region where my friend live - came in to spend the day, and we killed time just walking through the piazza, eating together. We also met with a Moldovan guy who has a chance to work in America – he gave us the list of potential jobs and we offered our commentary (my personal favorite – working as a valet at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut, a job I myself would love to have). In the afternoon another friend of ours came in, making four in all, and we killed the time by again walking around before the girls left, leaving the four of us guys to spend the night at a bar, meeting some Moldovan's, students of my friend, and just relaxing in general.

Saturday – another slow day spent walking around the place. We had all decided to go home on this day so we could rest on Sunday before the start of classes on Monday, and I was in the situation of trying to find a ride home. My village is only about 30, 35 miles to the south of the town I was in, but because of the lack of public transportation between regional centers (which are directly north and south of each other), my options by means of buses were: 1)Go in basically a 120 mile circle, taking 3 hours, 3 buses, and a mile walk through Chisinau for the purpose of going only 30 miles to the south, or 2) Take a bus 45 miles to the north only to return 70 miles to the south to my regional center, where I could have a caught a bus home another 15 miles to the north. Clearly, neither option was ideal. However, my host brother told me that if I was willing to pay for gas he was more than happy to come and get me. Naturally, I chose that option, which while saving time also gave me a glimpse of just how bad roads can be here, as it took us 45 minutes to, at one point, go about 25 miles because of the condition of the roads.
I returned home and promptly slept 12 hours straight. Not only the most relaxing of vacations, but one that I certainly enjoyed . . . .

Notes:
- I returned home to probably the most exciting development that's happened to me in a long time – my family, in my absence, purchased a satellite dish. Our channel options have gone from 4 (only two of which worked more than 8 hours a day) to somewhere around 200, including ESPN Classic, VH1, the BBC, and Al-Jazeera International, and the Real Madrid Channel (which I spent about 4 hours watching on Sunday alone). As I told my Dad on the phone Sunday night, despite the growth in options I quickly realized that only 15 channels are actually watchable.

Actually, satellite dishes here are a sweet deal, as my family spent about 180 dollars – a one time fee – to have permanent access to all the channels.

- On Wednesday I had my second exam of my Peace Corps service, with the first coming after my training during the summer. If you'll remember, I was horribly shocked and frustrated with the results of my first exam. This time, to say the least, things went far smoother. The format of the test is basically to talk and talk and talk and there are two things that will increase a score:1) To talk in generalities as much as possible, and 2) To compare things with each other as much as possible – it doesn't hurt to show a master of the language by playing with words, making, jokes, and the like. My tester and I ended up talking for 10 minutes over the time limit, with me drawing the question (designed to test our language skills), “You have just discovered that your money and documents are missing. Go to the police station, explain the situation, and find out how they can help you.” I was able to answer it without problems.

- If you want to know what is perhaps the biggest problem facing Moldova today is, go to here. It's one of the most important challenges we face as Peace Corps volunteers.

- We have another vacation here in four weeks, Easter Break, and it looks like I'm headed to Kiev with some friends for three or four days – only 16 hours and 15 dollars away on a train. Actually, for all intensive purposes there is only 8 more weeks of school, as we have only 6 weeks after this break but from what everyone says, school basically shuts down for the last two weeks of school.