Finally, Some Good

At the end of my last entry I wrote about the glasses give-away that was to occur last weekend. It turned out to be one of the best, most fulfilling projects I've been apart of in my two years here.

As I mentioned, I have a good friend here whose cousin's wife works as a optometrist and who really likes doing mission work and who decided to come here to do free eye inspections as well as a give-away of glasses to those who needed it. Everything started on Sunday morning: my friend had put up signs throughout the village advertising the program while also noting that special attention would be paid to the kids who showed up. So on Sunday morning we walked into the building where we were going to work and set up shop: we had on registration by the door, in one room we had a place for the vision test and for eye drops, and in another room was the place where the doctor did the test of the actual eye as well as testing different lens strengths in order to appropriate the right glasses.

We were expecting a handful of people, maybe a few trickling in every few hours. We were wrong. Right away at 9:00 there was a throng of people waiting for us, a throng that never really diminished. My job at first was to sit in with the eye doctor and translate her instructions as well as questions and answers (all pretty easy work, as it was various combinations of the same words). However, after a lot of commotion outside in regards to who came and when, with different people trying to go right to the front. After about two hours my friend who was doing registration and told me how I had to switch places because, as he told me, “you know Russian and you can be rude with it, you don't know anyone here, and because you don't live here you can say what you want without having to worry.”

So I got to work door duty, which turned out to be one of the most frustrating and yet fun things I've done all year. (It should be noted that Moldovans in general aren't fan of lines or standing in them. It's actually not common at all to be standing in a store and have someone go right in front of you and start talking to the clerk. It happens often, actually). When I took over my friend told me who the first four people waiting in line were so I let them in order but after that it was chaos (there is a more accurate word in Russian, bordak, that sadly doesn't translate). I had to basically go on feel. It was always fun for me when a person tried to jump to the front of the line because I got very short with them, told them where to go, and gave them a mini tongue-lashing in the process.

The worst of it happened right before we broke for lunch. We decided to do a queue system so we could maintain some sense of order after we got back: I wrote down numbers on pieces of paper and gave them out to those waiting. The first ten or so were clear enough but after that it got a little murky. After a little while I said “who's next?” and all four people in front of me said, “Me.” I looked at them and said, “Listen. I have four people here in front of me. Only one of you can be next. You know the truth. There's only one truth and when I ask for it I get four voices from four people. I don't know anything – you yourselves know. So please, tell me, who is first?” They looked for a second at me, then each-other, then back at me before they all responded, “Me. I was the first one here.” It was amazing (I promptly moved them all to the back of the line. It would be a lie to say the power wasn't fun to wield).

Things got a lot better after lunch, when the queue system went into full effect and those who came in time to get help received it. There wasn't a whole lot of fighting but people had a hard time figuring out the system and what exactly it meant – they didn't comprehend that they could go home and come back and keep their place in line. For example, one woman came in after lunch while we were on number two and ended being in at number twenty-seven. She promptly stood in front of my desk – and DIDN'T MOVE A STEP – for the next four hours. I told her that she could go home and come back in, at the very least, two more hours but she refused. It was surreal in a way.

There were a lot of really nice aspects of the work, apart from just obvious. One woman came in, seventy-eight years old and physically strong and sturdy (although her face had the wrinkles of a person who has spent twelve hours a day, eight months a year, outside). As part of my work in registering them I had to get general information and things like that and when I asked her about her eyes she responded, “I'm seventy-eight years old. I see far. I see close. I have a few problems with reading so I want glasses for that.”

There was one man who came in, seventy-four, and my first questions to everyone was about their general vision and how they read. When I asked him how he reads he responded, “I finished forth grade. I can read.” “No,” I responded, “Can you read without problems?” “I have a forth grade education but I read well. No problems.” I chuckled a bit to myself and said, “I know you can read. But how about the letters on the page? Are they clear? Can you read them?” It was only now that he knew what I meant. It was a very enduring exchange (meant fully complimentary to the gentleman I helped).

Also, there are a lot of residents of the village who speak the same Ukrainian dialect that is spoken in my own village and a lot of people started to think they could talk about me, around me, without an issue (thinking I wouldn't understand). I took it for a while for me fill them in on the fact that I knew what they were saying – it wasn't until a woman came in and responded to all of my questions in Ukrainian with me writing the answers that people really got surprised. When I finished I told her that she was lucky I live in a village where I can understand all that she said – the room then got quiet and it was the last of the dialect that I heard.

It also led to one of the most rewarding moment's I've had as a volunteer here. While I was doing registration I went in back to where the doctor was examining eyes and there was a woman I had sent back there in tears, seventy-one years old and clutching her first ever pair of glasses. I asked her what was wrong and she said, “I'm seventy-one years old – I don't have much longer to live on this earth but I want to be able to see while I still can. Thanks to everyone here, I can.”

Think about it – you're in your seventies and finally you get your first pair of glasses and see clearly for the first time in as long as you can remember. It's heart-warming to imagine and was even more heart-warming to see.

Roaming

Nothing big has happened to me in the last week with which I can use to introduce the rest of the entry – it's been a pretty slow last week. But I figure I should fill people in on what I've been up to: if I waited for quality material and stories, I wouldn't be able to post anything for quite a while.

- We got our new group of English and Health Education volunteers. They were a little frazzled coming in because they had no layover in Frankfurt due to a delay in their flight out of JFK – they had only a few minutes on the ground in Germany before getting on their connecting flight. I actually didn't have a chance to talk with them the first day because they got in a little late and

I was tired from my 5:30 AM wake-up call. The tradition here is for a lot of volunteers to meet the rookies at a bar near their hotel in the center of the city but rather than go there I went to a different place where they were showing Euro Cup soccer on massive TV screens.

My mentality with the new group is simple: while I wish them all the best and will be more than happy to answer any of their questions when they are received. But because I'll be in America by the time they get out of training I'll never have a chance to get to know any of them. And it's still amazing to me that I was in their position a mere twenty-four months ago.

- On Thursday I had a very fun and depressing evening, all at the same time. I went to the south of Moldova to a girl's going-away party which was very fun because it was celebratory, with a lot of food and wine and dancing. Everyone was in a good mood. It was depressing too because it was organized by the other teachers and it was 100 percent better than the going-away that will not be held for me in my village. (I forgot to write last time: how many words of thanks for my two years of service did I get on the last day of school? Zero. No recognition for all that I did here).

- On Tuesday I did something I hadn't yet done in this country – went fishing. One of my students who finished ninth grade actually invited me during the last week of school to go with him at some point this summer and after missing on a few days, we finally decided settled on last Tuesday.

When he first told me about it I was excited but with one trepidation: I had to meet him near our school at 5:30 in the morning. I thought he was joking when he first told me but my alarm going off at 5:15 in the morning convinced me that he was, indeed, very serious. He actually showed up twenty minutes late which really bothered me as I waited but my feelings of irk were dissolved when I saw him sprinting to our meeting place so that he could make up for lost time.

We went to our local lake with our arsenal – worms, bread, cornbread, and our fishing poles (I felt like Huck Finn – the poles were just eight-foot long sticks with eight feet of fishing line tied to the end with wooden bobbers and hooks). We sat by the lake for five hours and caught only four small fish, although one monster took our bait and was so big that he split the line in half.

- I was exhausted by waking up at 5:15 because 1)It was 5:15 in the morning, and 2) Because I had slept ten hours the previous two nights combined (although if should be noted that when I'm not in my village I go out of my way to not sleep at all, knowing that sleep is one of the tools I use to kill time when at home). The night before the one preceding sleeping I was in a village celebrating 'xram', the day of the city (or village), with eight other volunteers. I've written about these days many times before: basically, people eat and drink in the early evening then all congregate in the center for a huge dance.

At this particular dinner something amazing happened, something that hadn't occurred in almost two years: I ate some much I couldn't sleep anymore. It was a combination of Russian salad, sausage, cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, chicken, fresh onion, rabbit (very tender), mushrooms, and rice wrapped in grape leaves. I think I ate half a rabbit just by myself. There was also plenty of wine and cognac to go around too.

At around 11:00 in the evening we went to the center where there were literally hundreds of people gathered around, all of them doing nothing but the national dance called the hora in which people lock arms around each-other, form a big circle, and proceed to circle around and around around for the duration of the song, doing some sort of cross-over step with their legs. It's simple and people here love it. I can't express this enough: they love it. At any even where five or more people are dancing, there'll be a hora. And because we were there with all the Moldovans, we fell right into lock step until 2:30 in the morning, when we decided to finally head home.

- The previous two nights I went to a town about two hours north of Chisinau called Singerei to hang with a friend of mine there, another volunteer who happens to have an XBox that drew my attention. I got there at 7:00 on Friday, played until 2:00 in the morning, woke up at 9:00 on Saturday and played until 7:00 at night, breaking for nothing more than the bathroom, a shower, and a three minute run to the local store. It might seem like a big waste of time to the casual reader but I not only would disagree, I would say that I can't wait to get back and do it again, likely next weekend.

In the evening we decided to go out and ended up at a great disco, one of the best that has to be in any regional center in this country. We ended up there and at another place until 5:15 in the morning and I have to say, there's nothing stranger than going to bed and walking past people who have already woken up to start their work day. It's something I did only once or twice in all my time in America but something I've done about a half dozen times both here and in Russia and I'm still not used to it.

- This weekend I'm actually going to do something productive. The cousin of a friend of mine is coming in from America and the cousin's wife works as an optometrist; they're bringing in 200 pairs of glasses and giving them out to villagers in my friends village. But it's a village in which about forty percent of the village doesn't speak any Romanian so I need to go and help translate. It promises to be a really good time, one that will not only benefit me but others as well. I'm already looking forward to it.

- I'll end with a few pictures. The one on top is of me at the wedding with my host-brother and his new bride, taken at about 5:30 in the morning. The second one is of the rather motley crew (said fully complimentary) I met at my host-grandpa's house on the last day of school. Grandpa is on the left, his best friend since childhood next to him, his neighbor next, and finally the woman who comes to take care of him on the far right.

Freedom

I realized something this last week: these next free seven weeks will be the last time until I retire in a few decades that I will have this much time off – seven weeks with no responsibilities, no duties, and the ability to form my own schedule in regards to work (my lessons with my kids in my village), doing as much or as little as I want and doing it when I want.

So far, my first ten days of vacation have been great. I've not really done much of anything. In my village, I sleep, eat, run, read, and . . . . That's about it. I've also developed a sort of reverse tolerance to life here; I can stand it for seventy-two, maybe eighty-four consecutive hours before I have to get out again, before I just can't take it anymore. I regularly forget what day of the week it is. When I'm not in my village I'm either in Chisinau or in a friends village and my plans change from day to day. On Monday of this week I was in the village of a girl who lives in the south of Moldova and I called my host-mom, telling her where I was and then saying how I had no idea when I would return home – maybe in a day, maybe two days, maybe in another week – and that no news from me means that everything was OK (I ended up returning home the next day due to a lack of clean clothes).

A good example of all this happened last week. My original plan was to leave last Wednesday to go to xram – the day of the city – in the village of one girl who lives about thirty-five miles from the Ukrainian border but the day before her mom de-invited me. Then I wanted to go to my regional center and hang-out with the girl who lives there on Thursday but she had too much work so I waited until Friday. From there I didn't really have a plan but got an invitation to go the south to another girl's village with some other volunteers. Again, my plan was to get there on Saturday and roll out on Sunday morning on the bus at 6:00 AM.

But all five of us went out to a bar/disco in the village on Saturday night (one of my top ten nights out ever in this country) and didn't go to sleep until 3:30, quickly erasing any thoughts I had of getting up two hours later. Which turned out to be a great decision because the next day we didn't really do anything. We woke up, ate pancakes cooked with Bisquick mix, then laid out on the sun all day doing almost nothing (more on this at the end). Two other volunteers showed in the afternoon, bringing the total up to seven of us (or five percent of Peace Corps Moldova), and they just continued in the laziness. It was great. The day ended with dinner, house wine, and Euro Cup 2008 soccer.

My plans for the next week? I got home Monday afternoon, I'll be here on Tuesday, leaving Wednesday morning, and not coming back until next Sunday. I'll be in Chisinau, in the North, in the South. Everywhere but home.

Notes:
- On Wednesday the 11th we're getting our new group of volunteers, which is always a great day. It'll be a little odd because I'm not going to get a chance to really get to know any of them, but it's great because they all look at us second-year volunteers like we are wise sages.

- I wrote that I was in a village on Saturday and Sunday but the word 'village' is a bit of a misnomer because it's basically a town of 6700 (or about five times larger than my village). They have things like flowers in the median, no-passing painted lines on the road, a large museum, gas and water. It felt like I had gone about 500 miles to the west. The host family is awesome, perfectly happy to have guests over. It's actually a Bulgarian village, the language heard everywhere there, but they all speak Russian too so I had no problems. It was a lot of fun, walking into a bar and having the girl point to everyone and tell the bartender, “They're my friends – they all speak Romanian,” to which I could answer, “Except me.”

- I've got a new pet-project here in my village: I'm teaching computers to the mom of my best student. It's a little odd because she has no clue about computers, not even knowing how to turn one off and on. I show her and explain to her how to do tasks like the opening and closing of folders, how to click on things and what not, but it's tough because she has no idea what she is opening and closing and I'm not really sure what to do. Even a basic program like Word causes a lot of difficulties because she has no idea how to use any of them.

But nonetheless, I really like my time there. The mom is really nice and always kind to me and it's good for the daughter because she has a chance to practice her English. They always feed me too, with the mom not letting me leave unless I've eaten an acceptable amount and the dad not letting me leave unless I've drank an acceptable amount of their home-made whiskey.

- I'll end by explaining what happened on Saturday that interrupted our afternoon of nothingness. We were lying in the driveway in the sun and on towels with music playing when the host-dad and brother drove in a tractor that was pulling a lot of hay that when set on the asphalt ended up being about 25 feet by 10 feet and 5 feet tall. There was another guy there from Iowa who actually grew up on a farm and we were quick to ask if they needed any help.

So they gave us two pitchforks and we joined them in their task of transferring it to the barn where it could be dryly stored for the winter. There were four of us total working, two Americans and the brother and dad. The brother and Americans manipulated the hay from the big pile into smaller, more manageable piles, then pushed those piles fifty feet (through a doorway) to near the barn, where host dad shoveled them into the barn itself. It was hard work, really labor intensive, and it had been over a year since I had done work like that. It was fun too because three of the girls there sat and watched while chatting with the host-grandma, making jokes.

It was great though. Half-way through we all took a break, drank some wine and ate a little. It was clear that as happy as we were to help they were equally happy to receive it.