And I'm Done

For all intensive purposes, at the time of this posting my time as a TEFL teacher in Peace Corps Moldova is done. Yes, I won't leave this country until August 1st and won't arrive back in America until August 21st (I bought the tickets last weekend), and while we still have technically five more weeks of lessons, I'm counting myself as done. Allow me to explain.

Technically my vacation started yesterday at 11:15 in the morning when I left school – I'll write about my plans in a second – and after our vacation we have four short weeks of school. However, we have no lessons on Monday and Friday of the first week (Monday for Easter of the Dead, Friday for Victory Day), and the week after I'll have Thursday and Friday off for a Peace Corps conference. Then there's only two weeks but the last week doesn't count because grades are due a week before the final day of classes, making the final five days in school an exercise in creatively killing time. Therefore, we have only one real full week of lessons where we are supposed to pass along a semblance of education to our students.

How will I pass the time? For starters, I'm giving tests to four of my six classes, doing a review of all information given since our last vacation a long seven weeks ago. As for the rest of the year, my kids are getting one large assignment that will be due sometime during the last two weeks in May in which they will have to use all of the grammar we've learned this year: I tell them the grammar, the times it need to be used, and how many points they will receive for each usage. The topic is simple – they have to write about themselves. That's it. I've told them that they can give me only two rough drafts to check over and that I'll be more than happy to do so when requested. I'll only check their work twice because if I did it any other way I would get the question, “How do you say this?”, at least 100 times from everyone; to nip that I've had to make a few changes.

And those changes mark the beginning of the end of my two years in my school.

Notes:
- Outside of the classroom there is one problem that I've made my personal crusade during my second year. It's cellphones.

During my first year I didn't have any problem with cellphones because there was no real coverage in my village and as a result, it didn't make any sense for families and students to spend money on purchases that were obsolete for all intensive purposes. About this time last year, however, a new European company called Orange bought out one of the service providers here and made an effort to expand coverage – it wasn't long until they put up a tower in the village next to mine (I can tell you the exact date, May 2nd, when coverage finally arrived).

With this expansion of phones has come an equally large dislike of them by me. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for my kids, I've had to implement and enforce a 'no cellphone' in my classroom. The second one foot crosses my threshold I don't want to hear as much as a peep from any phone in the room, even through headphones. I tell them that what they want to do in the hallway is their own business but once they cross past the door they are in my territory and I can ask for what I want.

I finally totally obliterated the problem last month when on Tuesday I, already in a fired-up mood, took a phone that the kid had decided to play music through, in the middle of a lesson. I promptly deleted all the sounds. Ten minutes later another phone went off the girl holding just grinned. All her sounds were gone twenty seconds later.

Needless to say, it was the last time I've had a problem.

- I'm (and have been) looking forward to this next vacation with such excitement that I can't even begin do describe it. I'm heading down to a girl's village in the south on Saturday where I'll spend the Easter holiday on Sunday – it's the same village I've been to twice already and have always had a great time. Then on Tuesday there's a group of us heading to a town called Vadul lui Voda, located about ten miles from Chisinau and the place that is most popular within country for Moldovans to travel to and a great place to relax (the best way to describe it would be to compare it to Breezy Point in Brainerd. For anyone outside of Minnesota reading this, that will make no sense. But that's the best comparison I can come up with). We'll be there for a few days too.

That's it. That's the plan. A whole lot of nothing, which is exactly what I want.

- One thing I've become increasingly cognizant of during my almost two years here is the weather. It may seem like a thing that is totally obvious but until you live in an environment like this, where the quality of life of everyone greatly depends on what comes (and doesn't come) from the sky, it really changes your awareness.

If you'll remember, last year we suffered through the worst drought seen in this country in over sixty years. We had three days of rain from the middle of May through the first of August, causing the costs of food to skyrocket and, in some cases, wells to dry up. The ramifications of this were felt in everyday life and by every person here; the most basic example is that most people were forced into a situation in which they had to dump a lot of the animals they normally keep because, with a lack of corn that didn't grow, they had nothing with which to feed the livestock. It may seem like something not too significant but in an agrarian society like the one in which I live, it's a massive blow because those animals need to be replaced with money that is hard enough to come by as it is.

Thankfully, the weather this year has been a totally different story – it's the perfect spring. It rains usually two days a week, then there's enough time for the soil to dry out. Just when it starts to get a little too dry . . . the rain comes. It's the ideal combo. And it's the perfect opposite to what we went through last year.

- I'll end this by simply stating that one aspect of life that I've become totally accustomed in my village that will be hard to leave will be the absolute silence that is everywhere – it has to be experienced to be believed. Sometimes, if I sleep in in the morning, I just stay in bed until I hear a sound – any sound. It's almost always a few minutes.

And on my daily walks to and from school there are two sounds that are constant: the songs of birds and frogs. It's a combination I think I'll never encounter again, especially at the volume and frequency with which I bump into them here.

(Not) Making Sense of it All

There are many aspects of being an American here in Moldova, many parts of life, that can make a born and bred Western like myself crazy. And I'm not talking about amenities like running water and a toilet inside. I'm talking about day-to-day goings on that simply make no sense and that, if added together, can drive someone like me nuts.

The most obvious examples of this happen in Chisinau, where being in the capital of a European nation makes some people and establishments feel like they are more important than they really are. For example, a few months ago I went to meet with a girl in Chisinau who had spent last summer in America and who wanted to talk about her experiences there. She told me to meet at a certain hotel in the center, a lower-class place in any other European nation but one here that is just middle-class (it costs twenty-five dollars a night), and a hotel that we Peace Corps volunteers are very familiar with because we hold a fair amount of conferences there. Upon walking through the door I started to scan the lobby for the girl but before I got too far I (dressed in normal every-day clothes) immediately had the guard at the door ask me in Russian for what reason I had come and what I wanted there. I told him I was just looking for a person but that is really beside the point – the point is that, at this little hotel in this little capital, I was grilled by this odd guard (I should have just looked at him oddly and answered something in English). Compare this reaction to the one we had at the Hilton Hotel in Cairo, where my two friends and I walked in also dressed like normal tourists and which where a room costs 125 dollars a night - were greeted with nothing but smiles and welcomes when our only goal was to access the ATM there.

Or even in my village we have two stores side-by-side (THE only two stores), both of which work the exact same hours; even their breaks are the same. Am I crazy or does this not make a whole lot of sense – shouldn't they tier their breaks so at least one is always open? And to make matters worse, both choose to close at the one time of day that would likely be the highest in traffic, right at two o'clock in the afternoon when school gets out and a mass of one hundred hungry and thirsty kids goes by the two places that can placate them.

These two previous observations are just tips of the iceberg, just little examples of goings on that can really start to bother someone like me. But recently, the government raised the price of basic transport as high as fifty-percent, all in one hike. From the moment I first got to my village in June 2006 to the week before last the cost to get to Chisinau, one way, was 25 lei (about 2 dollars). Then, all of a sudden, last week they raised the price to 34 lei, which on one hand is only 75 cents but on the other hand is 1)Quite the percentage raise, and 2) Means that the passenger pays an extra 18 lei for a round trip, around 75 percent of the original total cost and enough to discourage many people on a strict budget to even think about such a trip (and this is just an example from my village – similar hikes occurred everywhere here). Now, while I realize that the cost of gas has gone up a lot in the last twenty months and that such a rate hike was likely totally necessary, but in most places in the world it would have been a gradual, incremental hike done month-by-month or something along those lines. Here? All at once. Just another line on the list . . .

Notes:
- Last Saturday some of my friends and I, in an effort to add a little culture to our usual weekends, decided to spent 2.50$ and attend the theater in Chisinau for a two-hour performance. The bad news is that it was all in Romanian, leaving me in a state of dis-comprehension that was tough to get out of. The good news is that my time here has given my mind the ability to fill vast amounts of free time with nothingness. Teacher meetings, four-hour bus rides that go only 100 miles, hours of conferences that repeat information for the hundredth time – compared to such events, the play was a feast for the senses, far more entertaining that my usual mind-occupancy tasks such as counting the amount of times in my life I've flown or the amount of US capitals I've been to or naming all the coaches of every NFL team as well as many coordinators as I could. This was

- I've written before about the life-cycle of animals here and how they come and go so frequently that it doesn't really make any sense to get too emotionally attached to them. Farm animals are the ones who naturally go the the quickest – I've even refrained from naming our pig because while I talk to her if she's out eating I also know her days are numbered (in regards to her, I've maintained so emotionally dis-attached that I would be her executioner in a heartbeat if given the chance – it would be one of the highlights of my service too).

However, this cycle applies to 'pets' as well. I wrote back in September how my favorite cat was ran over by a car, the one named by my parents last June. A new cat had since taken his place as the one I preferred, but when I woke up this last Wednesday I walked past the barn and saw her dead as a doorknob, eyes wide open but splayed out on her side, body intact and not moving. She was fine the night before and in the morning, dead. No one really has any idea what happened either. I'm 33% sad, 33% indifferent (it was just a cat), and 33% of me is laughing at the oddness of the situation. And if any of this sounds cold – as I'm sure it maybe does – you just have to realize that this rapidity of life and death is something that all of us here just get used to.

- Last week my friend and I had a plan we had been working about for a few weeks; we were going to do a surprise visit to her village, to just show up out of the blue. The only catch was that we wanted to call her host-family and get their permission first, thinking it would be merely a formality and that we would be welcomed with open arms. So I called the house one day when I knew our friend would be at school and when the host-mom answered I told her that it was likely a little strange but that I didn't want the American, that I wanted to talk to the mom herself and explained the situation, again waiting for the expected welcoming words of invitation. So you can imagine my shock when after my suggestion she responded with a, “well . . . this Saturday will be difficult. It'll be better another time.” I was stunned with disbelief and the only thing I could mutter was, “OK . . . . well then, we won't come on Saturday.” I went from being 100 percent happy to 100 percent incredulous in a few seconds.

- If you want to watch something new about Moldova and have thirty minutes to kill, go to YouTube and search “BBC Places that don't exist Moldova” and you'll find a three part series, each ten minutes, about a guy from the BBC who goes to the breakaway region of Transnestria. It's really interesting to watch and you'll also get some images of the capital city here. For example, the park where they have the ceremony that the woman crashes in right in the center – I see it all the time and all of us here use it as a common meeting place.

- I spent last weekend in the village of a friend in the north of Moldova, about 120 miles (or four hours) from Chisinau, going up there with another girl in my group for a trip that was six weeks in the making. Before we went, however, we decided to play a little joke on our host. We sent him two frantic text messages telling him how the bus was full and the driver wouldn't let us stand up because of a police crackdown; we then told him how we were going to the cheapest hotel in Chisinau and would roll in the next day (he told me that the first bus leaves at 8:00 AM – I said that was too early just to rub it in). He naturally panicked and the girl I was with couldn't keep it together on the phone so I, being the colder blooded of the two of us, had to take over. It was classic – we kept him on a string for a long, long while. It was so great that even when we got to his village it was clear that he was still seething. It was one of the top five jokes I've ever perpetuated in my life, and despite the fact that my buddy hated it, I would do it all again. In a second.

Differences

At the end of this entry you'll find a series of pictures that I've been meaning to post, mainly because it's been a slow week and I don't have much to write. Just a few little observations . . .
- I can't begin to describe the differences between my life here in Moldova and my life in America – I could write 3000 words on just this topic alone. But the difference that strikes me I think most odd (apart from the outhouse and lack of running water) is my daily proximity to animals. Not just cats and dogs but to fowl and livestock as well.

I've written before how, every time I go to the outhouse, I walk past a pig, two cows, a horse, and any number of ducks/chickens/turkeys that happen to be on the little path. Sometimes I get home and there are literally a dozen turkeys sitting on the stoop to the house. When I walk to school I again walk through a heard of various birds and, now that it's spring, a few horses and cows. The oddity of this whole situation didn't fully hit me until a week ago when, walking home, I passed a group of chickens that refused to get out of my way. Being higher on the evolutionary scale I thought I should assume right-of-way and when the offending chicken refused to budge, I just clapped my hands a bit and yelled out, startling the offending bird and freeing up my path. I then realized, the moment after I had passed, just how odd my world has become, how I can count on one hand the amount of times in America that I had seen a real live chicken before coming here but how now I have gotten to the point where 1)Seeing animals like this doesn't even phase me and 2) Yelling at them to get out of the way doesn't phase me either. It's an odd state of mind to live in.

This point came to full fruition a few days ago when I was finishing my run and wanted to end at the stadium around the track located near school but I had to avert my path because there instead was a woman with three goats (another animal I never really saw close up in America: I can report that they are very creepy looking up close) walking them and they were in the way. How many times could/will I be able to say that?

- As I wrote about last in my last entry, I was lucky enough last Saturday to have two friends come visit me. They came in on our bus and the first thing we did was head to visit my host-grandpa, of whom I have written about almost ad-nausea. We got off the bus and walked right there, with them being especially surprised because he lives in the boondocks of the next village - “This is Peace Corps,” said a friend of mine. We dropped in – I warned him the day before of our coming – and he was pumped to greet us. He naturally offered us wine and when the first batch was gone he sent my friend and I to the cellar to fetch more from one of the barrels there. There's no tap present; instead you need to take a little tube, place it in the opening on the top of the barrel, and siphon it out with the mouth. Usually it's a simple process that takes a few seconds but for some reason we were unable to do so. Grandpa sat at the top of the stairs yelling at us in Romanian – something hilarious, I was told – and he was insistent that we get wine, so we just knocked away the supporters keeping the barrel upright, rolled the thing until wine started to pour out, filled up the pitcher, and returned everything to it's proper place. It was one of those odd, surreal moments that had to be really seen to be believed. It was the type of story too that Moldovans find amazing – my host-mom almost lost it when we retold her later on.

- I'll end with a description of the pictures that accompany this entry: I figured it's been a while since I posted any I got some good ones.

The first picture is of my friend and I hoisting glasses of with with host-grandpa in the background. Under that is a picture of where he lives, with the outhouse in the foreground and the house itself a little ways right behind it. The third picture is of me and my host-mom (finally – I think it's the first of her that I've posted). I'm ready to go to the new bar. And finally, there's a picture I took last September and am pretty sure that I haven't yet posted – it's taken from across the lake that I usually walk/run around and in the distance you can see the village I live in. It's one of the best pictures I think I've ever taken and it's one of the images I'll use in the future whenever asked to describe my village.