Sofer mi franceza

So another adventure in Moldovan logistics leaves me wilted and limp from the effects of too much sun and an adrenaline rush. Some times I wonder if I will survive my Peace Corps service intact.

This is my driver, Therry. Now he’s not my personal driver, but he has been the person – other than anonymous rutiera drivers – primarily responsible for transporting me from point A to point B in Moldova. He picked me up in Chișinău and brought me to Hîncești, he drove Ana and I to a work-related meeting in Chișinău last week, and yesterday she arranged for him to drive me and two other PCVs to Orhei Veche for the Gustar music Festival (more on that in a minute.) He is somehow connected to Ana and/or the organization where I work, but the details remain ambiguous and elusive.

Therry is French. He speaks only French, yet he’s lived in Moldova for more than two years. He doesn’t appear to have a job, yet he certainly isn’t without money or other resources. I asked him once (through Google translate) how he made money to live here and he actually made the sign for zipping his lips and walked away. That was the end of that conversation.

Therry is almost stereotypically, cartoonishly French, his gestures are so animated and exaggerated. He is forever kissing women’s hands, arms and cheeks – a mode of greeting viewed as informally, inappropriately intimate and not usually welcomed or tolerated by Moldovan woman from perfect strangers. But somehow he gets away with it. Probably because he’s French.

Therry drives in a manner commensurate with his personality – large, haphazard, and flamboyant. Lanes are not even suggestions, they’re meaningless markings left behind from some another rule-bound activity that couldn’t possible apply to him. One side of the road is as legitimate as the other in the race to reach his destination. Other drivers are obstacles placed in his trajectory that he must surmount and occlude. Potholes are launching pads for gaining air speed. At one point I checked the speedometer and he appeared to be doing 95. This, in a Renault four-speed van that was not manufactured in this century, equipped with just the shoulder-harness part of the seatbelts and door handles that only work from the outside. Now I understand why vehicle accidents represent the largest percentage of all Peace Corps’ in-service fatalities. And I’m not even in Africa.

Therry was supposed to pick me up at my house at 10:00am for the two-hour trip to Orhei Veche. By 10:30 when he hadn’t arrived, I texted Ana. (This, and all my subsequent communication with Therry throughout our tumultuous day, had to be conducted through a web of communication devices involving my partner Ana, who speaks French and Romanian; her friend Doina, who speaks Romanian and English; Irina, who was in the car with us, but only speaks Romanian; and me. It felt a bit like the United Nations.) Ana texted back to say that Therry was at the vets with his dogs and would be here at 11:00.

When 11:30 arrived with no sign of Therry I texted Laura, who was waiting for us at the PC Office, to call her work partner Doina to find out what was going on. Doina called Ana who said that Therry had come to my door, knocked and rang the bell repeatedly, but got no answer. (Apparently, he went to the wrong apartment.) Ana sent Therry back again to retrieve Lindsey and me. When he pulled up, there were already five people in the van, including him. He was motioning for us to get in, even though there was no room. I climbed in the luggage space in back of the seats and Lindsey got onto someone’s lap in the back. I immediately called Doina to tell her I didn’t know where we were going to put Laura. As we were talking, however, Therry pulled up to an apartment building and the three others in the back with Lindsey got out. (It turned out they were Irina’s kids who they decided to take with them when they couldn’t find us.)

By 12:30, 2 ½ hours after our scheduled departure time, we had picked up Laura and were on the road to the Gustar music festival at Orhei Vechi. Why anyone would allow music promoters to hold a festival at the site of a thousand-year-old archeological site astounds me, but this is what happens when governments are occupied with struggles that prioritize concerns more basic than the preservation of history and culture. (Paul, you were interested in hearing samples of the local music: click on the “Gustar” link above for a video showcasing many of the performers.)

We roared into the parking lot about 2:30pm. And I do mean roared. Therry barely slows down to park, so we hit the small boulder that you see in the left foreground in this picture at about 25 miles an hour. Hence, the flat tire. Puzzled at the hissing of air, Therry exits the vehicle sees the tire and shrugs: “Nu problemu.” (I think this is an amalgamation of Spanish, French, and Romanian.) We left him to deal with the ‘problemu’ and climbed a few steep grades in 95 degree heat to find the festival. We ran into a host of other foreigners, from various points in the globe, all of whom spoke English (it is the common tongue of the world, still.)

In case you didn’t click on the links above, here are some of the pictures I took of the monks’ cells carved out of the slope and the most amusing site at the festival: a train made from oil cans and drawn by a tractor:

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The festival was the just the juxtaposition of centuries I’ve come to expect from Moldova: horse drawn carts and hay wagons coupled with a state of the art sound system and cold beer on tap. A host of PCVs were there with tents and sleeping bags; they planned on making a weekend of it. Me? I guess 50 is NOT the new 18 when it comes to sleeping on the ground, peeing in the bushes, and negotiating crowds of party animals. I braved the ride back with Therry, whom we only found again after an hour of cross-texting and phoning between our multi-lingual navigation team. When we finally reunited (after another mile and half trudge in mind-bending heat – no wonder I’m losing weight by the hour) I climbed in the back, buckled my scrap of a seat belt, and closed my eyes. I didn’t open them again until Therry slammed us into the curb in front of my apartment. Man was I glad to be home.

First Steps in Hîncești

So I thought I would share some random notes on my first days living in Hîncești. This is a great place to be stationed, actually. I am close enough to Chișinău to make it accessible (it’s roughly a 60-75 minute bus ride to get to the PC Office, 26 lei roundtrip.) But I also have the advantages of being in a more rural atmosphere – hence the cow grazing in the field right up the street from my apartment building. And crossing the street with this on our right on our way back from language lessons:

Yet, we have at least three good pizza places, one of them overlooking the lake. There is a public pool that costs 90 lei to enter for the entire day; I hear tell it is as good as being at a resort (by Moldovan standards) as they play contemporary music, have lounge chairs and umbrellas, and serve beer and pizza for a small price. I think I’m going to go hunt it down today as the temperature is climbing back into the 90’s this week.

Speaking of the lake, these are the stairs I have to climb to get there – 172 of them to be exact. Note the large monument on top:

Once you make it to the top, here is the view:

And here is the backside of the monument. I haven’t quite figured out what the statues represent, though a fellow volunteer told me they were “Haiducii,” which is a Moldovan term for a sort of Robin Hood figure. These were groups of bandits that at one particularly savage point in their history were pillaging the landowners’ estates in order to pass on food and goods to the poor.

And then of course there is the lake itself. If you happened to miss my (rapturous) posting about the lake right behind my apartment building, here are a couple of pictures:

Hîncești, being a bigger town, is falling victim to that mindless, artless form of corporate sposored entertainment known (pretty much all over the world now, I guess) as the “autorile.” Ana made a big deal of this event, encouraging me to attend on Sunday, saying that it was “foarte frumos” and “interesant.” Well, you tell me. This is what the cars did for about an hour. No discernible rules, time strictures or game strategy. Just round and round and round and round. At a very high decible. In whichever direction you want. After about 15 minutes, I retreated home:

And then of course, there’s my life at home with my new Nina. (Remember I lived with another Nina in Stauceni. I’m beginning to think Nina’s are my destiny.) Things are beginning to evolve into a very comfortable situation. Nina (Stauceni) was much more mindful of my comings and goings and seemed to take more ownership of my health and well-being. This was really great when I first came to Moldovan, as it was rather like having a very solicitious and gracious inn-keeper making sure your meals were hot and satisfying and that she knew where you were at all times in case you got hit by a rutiera and didn’t make it home.

Nina (Hîncești) is much more like living with a room mate. I come and go as I please and am free to cook or not as the mood strikes me. If she makes food, she offers to share it with me and vice versa, but neither one of us is obligated. She was gone all last weekend – as she is normally, I gather, during planting and harvest seasons – working at her farm in Basarabeasca where she keeps her husband stashed (you can’t imagine how amusing I find this – she is the working woman with an apartment in the city while he is the country gent who stays tucked out of sight.) She has invited me to come, but I don’t know how down I am quite yet with the idea of working hard in the sun for two days with (most likely) no running water or toilets. I might be a city girl, after all.

Anyway, when she came back on Monday morning she was laden with tubs of meat from the pig and cow they had slaughtered, as well as boxes of tomatoes, onions, and potatos that are now stashed under the benches in the kitchen. Here are Nina and her friend making gevir from the pork meat. The white substance that they are wrapping the meat in is (I think) ropes of fat or stomach lining. I couldn’t quite translate the words. You will note me doing what I perenially do when trying to converse in Romanian – laughing a lot and saying “dah, dah, dah.”

I will not be working steadily until September 1, when the center where I am assigned – Pasarea Albasta – reopens after the summer break. But I did go in today to meet with the English Ambassador’s wife, who is a member of an organization called The International Women’s Foundation of Moldova. Kate is a simply lovely woman possessed of a British accent, of course, which is perhaps why it took me about 5 minutes to recognize that she was speaking English, not Romanian. Anyway, the IWF provided some funds for Pasarea Albastra to replace a broken washing machine so we went to the local electronics store to make the purchase. While the transaction was processed I got to spend some time speaking English with someone NOT connected to the Peace Corps, which was in itself delightful. If I had it to do all over (rhiannon are you reading this???) I would really consider a life in the diplomatic service. She and her husband were previously posted in Lithuania and they have been here in Moldova for three years now. Who knows where after that. What a great life. She has the benefits of a first world standard of living in a second world economy. Plus, she is making a difference and not just sitting on her butt and enjoying ex-the pat (priviledged) life. I really like her.

And I did start language lessons up again. I am working with the director of one of the high schools, along with Matt and Lindsey. It is rather interesting as the woman speaks only a bare minimum of English so it becomes quite the challenge to place our queries in context for her. One of the hardest things in learning a new language is understanding the idiomatic language – for example, when Americans say “go ahead,” Moldovans say “more farther” or when we say “stop!” or “enough” when someone pours us a drink, they say “arrived!” It is things like that which cause the most stumbling errors for me and it’s the main reason why one cannot rely solely on Google translate to get by.

After we complete our language lessons, I have a bar literally steps from my apartment where we are cultivating a nice relationship with the Romanian chelneriță. This represents one of our more earnest efforts at integration…Plus, there is a very nice view.

Dancing the waltz

I will admit that I spend more time on the Internet these days (and I didn’t know that was even possible) since the work site I have been assigned to won’t open until September 1 and it’s back to being a bloody inferno outside. Because I have so much time to surf, I fortuitously encounter different articles from divergent sources that somehow overlap or coincide, amplifying each other’s message and causing the information to echo through my brain for several days.

Here’s one example. On Monday morning I received my weekly newsletter from Brain Pickings, a website I highly recommend if you want to be served a veritable smorgasbord of interesting information dipping into such varied topics as art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, and anthropology. There was a piece culled from the third volume of Anais Nin’s diary, wherein she transcribed a letter written to her by Henry Miller. He is describing the synergy of altruism:

“For me it is no problem to depend on others. I am always curious to see how far people will go, how big a test one can put them to.

Certainly there are humiliations involved, but aren’t these humiliations due rather to our limitations? Isn’t it merely our pride which suffers? It’s only when we demand that we are hurt. I, who have been helped so much by others, I ought to know something of the duties of the receiver. It’s so much easier to be on the giving side. To receive is much harder — one actually has to be more delicate, if I may say so. One has to help people to be more generous. By receiving from others, by letting them help you, you really aid them to become bigger, more generous, more magnanimous. You do them a service.

And then finally, no one likes to do either one or the other alone. We all try to give and take, to the best of our powers. It’s only because giving is so much associated with material things that receiving looks bad. It would be a terrible calamity for the world if we eliminated the beggar. The beggar is just as important in the scheme of things as the giver. If begging were ever eliminated God help us if there should no longer be a need to appeal to some other human being, to make him give of his riches. Of what good abundance then? Must we not become strong in order to help, rich in order to give and so on? How will these fundamental aspects of life ever change?”

Miller manages to make so many points here pertinent to my situation in Moldova that I wonder if perhaps he’s been peeking over my shoulder some days from wherever his juicy spirit happens to be oozing right now.

Peace Corps Volunteers – in all countries where we serve, I would venture to say – are involved in a delicate dance with their host country nationals. We are giving to them, of our time, our expertise, our education, our energy. But they are reciprocating: they are opening their homes and work places, teaching us their language and customs, sharing their food and wine, welcoming us in to important life events and celebrations, such as weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Think about how difficult it might be to have a stranger show up at your door one day for a two year visit – one who does not know your language or cultural norms, much less recognize or respect your little idiosyncratic daily routines. You need to familiarize them with your town, where the market is, the bank, the pharmacy, who the neighbors are and which places maybe dangerous or unsafe after dark. You need to show them where they can buy a hair dryer and how to hand wash their clothes. Perhaps they don’t know how cook. Or make a bed. Maybe they are messy – even dirty, tracking mud throughout your home when they keep forgetting to remove their shoes at the door.

Then think about including this person into all your most emotional and memorable family events, taking them to your sister’s birthday party, your daughter’s graduation, your niece’s wedding, your father’s funeral, and having to watch out after them the whole time so they don’t do something culturally inappropriate like slap your aunt on the back or hug your brother when they are introduced or collapse on the ground in a heap if they’ve danced too hard or had one too many vodkas. One must possess a true wealth of spirit and a large portion of patience to continue giving of oneself through those (perhaps seemingly endless) two years.

I won’t go into detail, but I did hear one story from a volunteer who was disrobed, bathed and cleaned like a baby, put to bed in crisp sheets, and had the bathroom swabbed of her mess after a bout of giardia that had her spewing from both ends. (Did I mention there was no toilet – only a flimsy trash can – in said bathroom?) And this all took place within minutes of her meeting her host parents. And the father was just as solicitous and nurturing as the mother. So there is definitely give and take going on here.

And this odd waltz can take place precisely because of the manner in which Peace Corps operates: it is coordinated and supported aid that doesn’t involve giving money to the “needy” – it is all about extending a hand of service within an intimate context that allows both the giver and receiver to participate fully in the exchange and to take the lead at different times. And that hand can be extended by anyone – rich or poor, educated or ignorant, male or female, old or young, privileged or needy. We can all be generous in spirit, in caring, in listening, in sharing, in inclusion, in opening ourselves to each other.

So after having had this Miller piece slosh around in my head for a couple of hours, I happened upon the following story on the NPR website about a new study published in the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

Study Reveals The Geography of Charitable Giving

For those of you who can’t bear to leave my scintillating expository, I extract a few pertinent quotes here:

Ever wonder how charitable the people are who live in your state or community? It turns out that lower-income people tend to donate a much bigger share of their discretionary incomes than wealthier people do. And rich people are more generous when they live among those who aren’t so rich.

…. High-income people who live in economically diverse neighborhoods give more on average than high-income people who live in wealthier neighborhoods.

Paul Piff, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, says that’s consistent with what he’s found in years of research on income and giving.

“The more wealth you have, the more focused on your own self and your own needs you become, and the less attuned to the needs of other people you also become,” he says. “Simply reminding wealthy people of the diversity of needs that are out there is going to go a long way toward restoring the empathy or compassion deficit that we otherwise see,” he says.

The NPR article concluded that it is important people see need first hand by integrating into heterogeneous neighborhoods that are economically diverse. And I would amplify that thought by saying this is true not merely because those who see need will tend to be more generous, but because it is imperative that we allow the osmosis, the synergy, the waltz of generosity to be fully and deeply expressed by both the giver and the receiver. And that can only happen when we are not isolated from each other, when we become part of the fabric of each other’s lives, when our homes and neighborhoods and customs and idiosyncratic behaviors are no longer “foreign” to each other. I love Peace Corps for illustrating the truth of this, each and every day, all over the world, amongst thousands of dancing partners.

There are merits to playing both roles, to attaining the flexibility and humility to both lead and be led. We Americans must realize that the money and material goods some of hold in relative abundance are not the only sources of wealth that exist in this the world. And that, perhaps, a much greater gift is presented sometimes by standing in the role of receiver.

I know most of you out there are not going to run out and join the Peace Corps. But realize that you can give by receiving, too. By stopping to talk to that person asking you for money on the corner, allowing him to tell you his story. By accepting the dinner invitation from the couple that bores you to tears and just keeping your heart and mind open for a few hours. Perhaps through attending the dance rehearsal of your next door neighbor’s granddaughter and clapping vigorously and enthusiastically. Or going to the ethnic festival in your community center and participating in the dances, eating the food, and intermingling with people from diverse backgrounds.

Try putting yourself in places you normally avoid, meeting people that unnerve you just a bit, stepping outside of your comfort zone and risking humiliation by joining in the waltz maybe once or twice a week, all in the spirit of dancing. Go ahead: I challenge you. I’m doing it.

(And I’d love to hear any comments on what it felt like …)

Floored

There is no other way to put it. I wandered down the road just above my apartment building and found this:

I don’t know what else to say. (Of course, I always have more to say.) I wrote in my journal:

What did I do to deserve this? I finally, finally found the place where I can be completely at home here. The language, the culture, the buildings, the corruption, the sadness, the confusion, the disparity, the discomfort – none of that intrudes here. Though I did have a half hour conversation with two seemingly homeless, mentally ill folks who sat down on the bench next to me and shot me questions in Ruski-romanian . They really wanted to know when we could hook up again…

I appreciated the opportunity to converse really slowly and repetitively with people who were happy to play along. I am blessed.

As I was soaking up the last of the afternoon rays I got a text from my site mates, Matt and Lindsey. I made my way to the bar next door to my apartment and spent a relaxing couple of hours with them, comparing notes on how lucky we are to live in Hîncești. Patty was walking by and heard my laugh (mom, are you listening?) and then we were four. Patty just moved to site today, having completed her 10 week English Education Training. Took her oath this morning. Now the whole M27 group are officially Peace Corps Volunteers!

I don’t know what these adorable little girls were doing in the bar, but they certainly provided a whimsical touch:

I felt a bit like her, finally having put on my tutu and ready to dance for the world. I have some good friends, a great host sister, an energetic work partner, and a bustling village in which to live for the next two years. The Peace Corps is proving to be everything I wished it would be…I am so blessed!

Prima Zi

This last Sunday I arose with some little trepidation (I’ll admit it) and put the last stray items into my luggage in readiness to move to my final destination. It has been a long journey that brought me to this point, all the way from my sallying cry in the dark so many years ago. It was not registering completely that this trip in Terry’s van would probably be my last ride in a personal vehicle with all my luggage in tow while I’m in Moldova. (When you leave the country at the end of your service, for some reason you have to find your own way back to the Peace Corps offices and the airport. Hence, most people leave most of their things here, only taking back the REALLY important stuff….)

When they arrived – Ana, my work partner, and Eduard, her husband, and Terry, the driver – we had to haul my luggage out from the apartment all the way around the building to the front to the car, because of course I couldn’t manage to open the gate into the parking lot. (This was the beginning of the end of my ‘healed’ knee.) On the way to Hîncești we stopped at a store called Metro, which I heard about but didn’t quite believe existed. I was wrong. Costco has married WalMart and moved to Moldova. Here is a huge warehouse store with everything from dish soap, to washing machines, to socks, to watermelon and cheese. All under one tin roof. For a nation of bus riders. That’s right. You know how much you buy when you visit a warehouse store….well imagine transporting all of that home on a jam-packed rutiera. I don’t get how this works. But Moldovans are diligent and proficient at getting done what needs to get done, with very little technology most times. It makes me yet again realize how much consumption we take for granted in the USA. Ana and I have hesitant conversations, comparing the price of laundry detergent. We find a bag for 20 lei cheaper and send her husband to put back the more expensive versions we had just picked up. Terry careens madly through the store, flirting with every woman he sees. (More on Terry at later time – he really deserves his own post.) I am feeling vaguely comfortable with Moldovans, not an American in site. We stuff all our purchases in the van with all my bags and climg aboard for the wild toad ride to Hîncesti. Terry pilots the van somewhat like a flying carpet. We seem to be zipping a couple of inches over the actual road. Is this better than a rutiera? I think.

I had barely set my bags down and hadn’t even unzipped a suitcase before Nina, my new host sister (I have to call her that as she is my own age – it feels too weird to call her my “host mom”) tells me that we are going to a masa in the small village of Boghaceni in celebration of a four month old baby boy born to a couple for whom she is the “Nona.”

Culture break: A Nona is sort of like a godparent for married couples. It is a non-relative whom a couple asks to serve as a guide and mentor for them during their married life. It can be a couple or a single man or woman. Generally, the person or couple is quite a bit older with some life experience under their belt. They will help the new couple make big decisions, teach them about parenting, offer advice and comfort during difficult times, etc. I find this especially perceptive in NOT having it be a relative, as many times married couples can encounter difficulties with parents and in-laws that require some sound guidance to help them through so they don’t make a mess of things.

So we cross the street in front of our apartment building and begin waiting for a ride to this village. Now ruteiras come by every ten-fifteen minutes or so, but most folks are impatient and try to flag down passing cars that are going the same way. Of course, Peace Corps advises volunteers against this practice, but everyone does it anyway. It is a good way to meet Moldovans and practice your language, I guess, but I haven’t tried it on my own. Now that I’m with Nina, I guess I’m ready to hitch hike (I actually don’t have a choice. She’s madly flagging down every car that whizzes by.) A couple of cars stop but they’re either going a different way or they can only fit one person. We end up in a rutiera just as it starts to rain.

And then it’s pouring. (Luckily at this point I had not learned of the horrible accident that just claimed the lives of ten people in a 17-seat rutiera that was carrying fifty persons. It’s brakes failed on a curve and the mayor of a town and his wife were among the fatalities.) I am not looking forward to the walk from the rutiera to this masa, as I left in such a hurry I didn’t grab an umbrella and hadn’t changed out of my sandals. After about an hour, I hear Nina yell for the driver to stop. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. I am confused. After we disembark, a young man comes up to greet us. His car is parked right there where the bus stopped. Oh thank the lord, I don’t have to walk. We get in his car and proceed down a dirt road that is quickly melting into mud. He is driving fast, trying to beat the disintegration of traction. A couple of times I find myself wondering if walking would’ve been better, but the road turns out to be miles long. The house that we’re going to comes into view ahead – it’s way up on a hill to the right of us and as we slowly drive by it is apparent that the car is not going to make it up the slippery slope of mud flowing down that is probably a road in dryer times. We exit the vehicle and ponder the slope. Nina is in high heels, I am in sandals. The young man grins, grabs my arm, and says: Sos! (UP!) Here we go.

Well, this is the second stage of total knee failure. I am slipping and sliding and clutching at the branches of bushes to my left with my free arm. Up ahead of me, Nina is slogging on galliantly alone with her umbrella held high and her wedgies sinking inches deep into the mud. Up and up and up. We finally attain the summit and walk for another few minutes through flat muddy soup and stop in front of a locked gate. The young man – his name is Sergio, I’ve learned during our little ambling duet – pulls out his cell phone and calls his parents, the people we’re visiting. Are they not here? Are they still miles away in a rutiera? If they’re home and they know we’re coming, why is the gate locked? We wait. And we wait. And we wait. Recall that it’s raining. Pretty hard. Me without umbrella. In sandals. In mud. After about 10 minutes, we hear the hearty hey ho of a man approaching the gate. He is laughing and chattering away in Romanian as he unlocks the gate. I learn soon enough why it took him so long. We have another half mile climb up yet another muddly slope to the house above.

We pass through orchards full of pear trees and grapes hanging off the vine. There are more tomatoes (roșii) and watermelon (harbuz) than we saw at Metro. Another orchard with plum trees, the fruit being the actual size of the prunes that they will become later upon drying in the sun (pruna.) Some corn that looks sere, droopy and tattered from the (former) lack of rain. Finally we pass what smells like the outhouse. Good, we must be getting close, I think.

Why am I here again, when I could be back at Nina’s place, dry and unpacking? Oh yes – the all important „integration” (I didn’t mess up on the quotation marks, btw, that’s how they do it in Romanian.) Not soon enough, we arrive at the front door where three older woman, all wearing kerchiefs and aprons, one with missing teeth and a wandering eye, one small, anxious boy, and one lithe young woman holding a forty pound baby (no kidding) stand waiting to welcome us. We remove our shoes and enter into safe harbor. Thank the lord, we’ve made it, I think. Now I just have to get down again. I guess I’ll worry about that later.

There is a mass of food – a masa – spread out on the table before us. We are given some bread and wine and salt, the traditional Moldovan welcoming gesture and invited to sit. Nina gives the married couple (Sergio turns out to be the husband) some money and a gift for the baby. We begin to eat. For the next two hours it continues to rain outside while we repast indoors. Wine, food, talk. More wine, more food, more talk. Many toasts to America and my health. The people comment on how well I speak Romanian. The old man says Barak Obama’s name several times, as it is the only English words he knows. Nina pulls out her Avon catalogues and goes into a protracted sales pitch which, suprisingly, holds both the men and the women rapt. Even the little boy is held captive. Perfume samples are passed out to all. She’s good. After about an hour, I note that Sergio is trying to refuse more wine as he reminds them he has to drive us back to the bus stop. Thank the lord, I think. He’s only successful about half the time in not having his glass filled. Oh well, I think.

When it’s finally time to go, Sergio runs out ahead of time and returns with a nice pair of galoshes for both Nina and I. Thank you god, I think. Though there may be no tread on the bottom of these, at least my toes will stay clean and the cuts on my feet will not be infected with typhoid. We wash our own shoes in a bucket of rain water kindly provided by the clouds overhead. And then we ski down the hill. That is the best term for our meandering sliding progress. The old man is holding Nina’s arm and Sergio has mine. I am clutching him in the hopes of avoiding an embarassing face plant. This is the penultimate stage of knee damage. (I still have to walk to work tomorrow carrying 20 pounds of books and computer on my back. That did it in completely…)

The ride back to the highway is a testament to German autobuiders (I think we’re in an old Audi.) The car weaves wildly on torrents of mud from one side of the road to the other. Sergio hunches with great concentration over the wheel, smearing his left hand against the inside of the windshield every minute or so to clear the condensation. One windshield wiper is working valiantly. A car passes us on the left. Seriously? I think. Nina pats my knee and smiles winningly. I wonder if she’s going to pull out the Avon catalogue.

When we get to the road, Sergio stops at the bus shelter and leads us inside. Then he runs back out to the highway. What a gentleman, I think, waiting to signal the passing rutiera for us. Within seconds he has flagged down a late model Taurus (compete with leather seats and Dolby sound) and he gestures us to climb in with the three burly, bald Russian occupants. Great. Everything the Peace Corps warned me about. Gangsters, I think. Note the gold chains and silence. Completely unconcerned, Nina pulls out her phone and checks her voice mails. The entire way no one talks. The driver dials a number but gets no answer. Apparently the human trafficer connection has taken the day off, I think. When we arrive at our apartment, Nina tries to give the driver 20 lei. He refuses gruffly. Well how about that, I think.

Later that night, I put brand new sheets on my bed. I unpack all my bags for the first time since I loaded them up in Fullerton so many eons ago. I find things I forgot I brought. I Skype with Rhiannon and Nicole back in the States. I take a shower and get into my jammies. It’s still raining outside. Nina is already sacked out, fast asleep. The winds whistles and a steady patter of rain drops is like a metronome tick-tocking right outside my window. A smile spreads slowly cross my face.

My first day in Hîncești, I think. This might turn out to be a bit of the adventure I’d hoped it would be…

The Big City

Time has sped by the last 10 days…with PST over and all my M27 friends departed to site, I thought I was going to have an easy, quiet time in the TDY apartment in Chișinău while I received daily treatment for my knee. Not so. It was probably the most busy (and entertained) that I have been since arriving in Moldova.

Let’s begin with the diva knee. So, I am sent to this NICE apartment right next door to the Peace Corps office with all my bags (suddenly I have even more stuff than I came to Moldova with) after the swearing in ceremony. There are three bedrooms there, all empty, and a great big kitchen with a microwave, even. So I’m excited. I trot off to the market and buy some groceries and cook my very first meal since leaving home. Then I spend some time reading and I take a bath and I make up a bed and settle in and soon am fast asleep. RRIIIIINNGGGGG….ring…it’s the telephone. 9:30pm the PC doctor is calling, not to check up on me but to announce the impending arrival of another volunteer. (I guess she didn’t want me to freak out when the front door opened.)

Well, this volunteer’s arrival marked the start of the week of the revolving door. In seven days there were eight other people in and out of the apartment for various reasons. They all stayed for at least a day or two and somewhere in there I heard every single one of their stories, all of which fleshed out for me a more complete picture of Peace Corps Moldova. It’s complicated. Just like most other things in life, I guess. It made me appreciate how unique each person’s service ends up being: even though we‘re all in the same country, we are not having the experience. Which means that it is impossible to judge anyone else’s outcome or decisions – whether they ET (early terminate) or extend for an extra year or do their proscribed two years and flee back home. There are a million different reasons for walking many different roads here. I suppose that’s true of all the PCVs around the world. But here is a video of my new friends Maria and Katie playing on the teeter totter outside our apartment:

This is the one of the main reasons PCVs say that they love their experience. We know how to make fun happen with whatever comes along…

My other new friend Maria – in traditional Moldveneasca costume!

Back to the knee: every day I would walk over to PC offices and my own driver would whisk me off to a state-of-the-art medical center (called MedPark – looks exactly like Kaiser in the US) where a lovely aide would spend half an hour giving me various treatments involving magnets, electricity , and sonar. Another volunteer was getting the same treatments, so we had a chance to chat everyday for an hour or two as we rode there and back and underwent our treatments. She related a lot of useful info about her year’s worth of time here and she was very funny and entertaining. My knee felt better and better every day. Life was lovely. (Then I screwed up my knee again my first day at site – more on that experience later…)

I was also invited by a group of the M26s for an evening at an American couple’s house in the outer limits of Chisinau. He works as an IT specialist for the American Embassy and his wife loves to cook but has no one to eat it all. So every Thursday they host a buffet meal in a varying theme for any American ex-pat who wants to attend. The best part of all was their pets – a BIG Sharr Mountain Shepard (never heard of it before that night) and a cat that both craved attention. And all of us animal-starved people were ready to slather it on. I felt like I had received a mental health intervention just petting and cooing at them. Man, I miss my dog.

On my last day in Chișinău my lovely friends Elsa and Carl, who are stationed in the city, took Darnell and I out for a day long excursion through the parks and museums and fashionable districts. We had a lot of fun and I got to see a side of Chișinău that I hadn’t seen before. There are stores – like Abercrombie and Salamander – that one would see in the US. There are multi-storied, densely packed buildings that house a warren of vendors selling an eclectic variety of products: one floor will be shoes, one floor fabric, another bed linens and bath accessories, one all toys, etc. It’s like having a whole mall, but packed into one building. Very efficient. There are lovely parks with giant chessboards where people stand around watching a game like it’s a tennis match or something. There seem to be hundreds of couples getting married. They speed by in cars decorated with masking tape and colored plastic bags and honk horns and scream madly to passersby. More pictures of Chișinău:

One of hundreds of wedding limos driving through Chisinau on Saturday

Romulus and Remus in front of the Museum of Archeology

Moldova, Meet Circe: cultural question no. 2

Well, today I did it. I bought a fan. For the merest outlay of 160 lei (just under $13) I now sit blissful before it while it blows upon me with all of its third button, top speed, non-rotating, full blast force. I am not sweating. There is no sticky film upon my skin. Hair, no longer weighed down by leaden droplets of perspiration, wafts pleasantly about my head. I need not hold at bay the physical exhaustion that comes of plying one’s limbs through a thick batter of humid, heavy air. My tee-shirt is dry, not glued to my back, stomach, and chest with an amalgam of water, salt, and the body lotion I habitually (stupidly) apply after showering. And unlike the only other fan I have met in Moldova – in the school room where five of us studied Romanian all day – I don’t have to share it. It is my personal fan, all mine, blowing solely upon me.

One would imagine – erroneously, of course, but then I would venture to say that one’s imagination has not had the opportunity to visit Moldova – that Moldovans would be eager consumers of those cheap-ass wire mesh rotating fans that grace every college dorm room, strip mall retail establishment, Chinese food take-out, double-wide trailer living room, and even some outdoor campsites (in Texas) across America. After all, their inexpensive and great at performing the function they’re specifically designed for – COOLING PEOPLE OFF IN HOT WEATHER, PEOPLE!!!

One might imagine that there would be lines of stalls in the piața selling fans – small fans for your table, hand held, battery-powered fans for the microbus, monster fans for the kitchen, ceiling fans for the bedroom, perhaps even weather-proof fans for the garden. Canny vendors would set up shop at the rutiera stop, capitalizing on the freshly boiled meat continuously exiting those stewpot infernos. Fans would beckon forth from the ubiquitous corner alimentare: Come within, get cool (and buy some bere while you’re here!)

But no. No fans. There are a few for sale – maybe four or five vendors in the entire piața offer them, the piața being a swap meet, trading post derivative which surely boasts several hundred thousand types of product, at the very least. The vendors that do sell them have only one or two on hand. They don’t sell very many to Moldovans, you see.

Perhaps they only think to stock them when the newest batch of Peace Corps Volunteers wanders through mid-summer, wilting and pitiful, mopping their faces with baby wipes and bleating out “Ventilator, vreau sa cumpar ventilator, va rog!” The sweet gentleman who sold mine to me was careful to demonstrate all of her features, depressing each of her three buttons, pulling up the lever that set her head a wagging, turning the one that tilted her head up and down. He wasn’t quite sure I had ever encountered one of these odd contraptions which manufactured its own breeze. It wasn’t a popular item in his inventory, I guess. And why not, you might logically cry? Why don’t they sell a million ventilators when Moldovan summers simulate the conditions inside a wool sweater worn over a wet suit wrapped in a down parka baked in a pizza oven somewhere in Death Valley in the middle of August?

Because of The Current, they will answer.

The Current. That mysterious force that inhabits any flow of air, most particularly as it passes over and around the human form. The Current. Responsible for aching backs, stiff joints, raspy lungs, sore throats, throbbing heads, and achy eardrums. The Current. A viral laden beast that permeates one’s orifices with its sly wisps, seeding the body with illness, debilitating one’s muscles and sapping one’s strength. (Perhaps it was The Current that made ill my knee.)

Once, in July, my LTI walked into class with saggy bags weighing down her eyes, her arms drooping listlessly, her feet dragging invisible anchors behind her. “What’s wrong?” I queried. “You look so tired.” She told me that she and her husband had been up all night with their 18-month old baby, who was so sweaty and miserable and tormented by heat that she spent the entire night thrashing and sobbing. They had opened all the windows and doors, removed their clothing, and laid down on the floor with her seeking some relief. “Don’t you have a fan?” I asked, dumbly. Well, yes, she said, somewhat puzzled, but you could never expose a baby that young to The Current, you know. She then dragged herself from the room, oblivous to my stupification.

Well, all I can say at this moment is The Current is a seductive little Circe, her silky arms slipping mistily about me, whispering dreams of air-conditioned lobbies leading to refrigerated rooms stocked with cool tubs of ice where winter maidens brush frost crystals from their hair. We have all the curtains pulled, she and I. The room is a cool cave, hovering just outside a glacier. Her whirring blades mesmerize me, spinning my head and swirling the memory of weeks of blazing heat until they evaporate into nothingness. The Current carries me into thinness and lilting steps and clarified air and breezy sighs.

The Current is my friend and my little Circe is her medium. To hell with my knee.

Back in the kitchen again…

100_1723 — Borscht verde, otherwise known as fresh from the garden veggie soup

So here I sit in sick bay while all the rest of my compatriots travel on to their new sites and volunteer service, taking their first steps into their new lives. I have been watching FB all day, tracing their footsteps through their new villages, comparing the size of their bedrooms with my own, lusting after the masa (feasts) wherein their new host families celebrate their coming by spreading a multitude of wonderful dishes across the table. Hey wait a minute, I think. I have a kitchen…and some veggies from Nina’s garden…and some odds and ends in the cupboards left by former inhabitants of this den. I can cook something…

One of the less positive effects of Pre-Service Training and living with a host family is that it slammed the trainee back into the experience of childhood again. We relied on the Peace Corps staff or our host mother or our Language Training Instructors or even the M26’s and M25’s to script our lives for us. Almost every waking moment was defined by language lessons, tech training, homework, studying, self-directed activities or field trips or traveling back and forth to hub site or cluster site.

When I knew I would be here, on my own, at TDY for a week or so, I actually felt a bit of trepidation. No Nina to prepare my healthy meals? How will I eat? On Friday, I ventured into Everest, a pseudo-supermarket (everything is almost, in Moldova,) like a 10 year old given the responsibility of cooking some dinner for her siblings while mom worked late. All the labels are in Russian, so one must have a pretty good sense of what the picture on the packet might be in order to feel confident in making a purchase decision. The produce section was sad and empty (most everyone grows their own or buys in the piața.) There was an entire shelf of white rice (no brown) and pasta (all semolina,) supplemented by hrisca and lentils. They do like their carbs here. I ended up with a carton of mushrooms (haven’t had those since I left the States,) some Activa yogurt (same label as the States,) a miniature loaf of black bread and some carbonated water. Yea for me.

Today, after seeing all those masa spreads, I remembered the bag of veggies that Nina pressed on me as I was leaving Friday morning. Well damn, I don’t want another yogurt and I polished off the jar of peanut butter someone left in the cupboard (sweet!) for breakfast. It was strange at first, peeling the onions, mincing the garlic, chopping the dovlece (like a squash, only seedless…even sweeter!) Like maybe I wasn’t old enough to be handling sharp knives. I felt Nina hovering over my left shoulder, clucking disapprovingly. While she made some good, healthy soups, they tended to taste very much the same. She had a limited repertoire of herbs – parsley and dill – and used only salt and pepper to flavor. And, in characteristic Moldovan style, one did things the same each and every time. She cooks the way her mother taught her, the way her mother taught her before that. Nothing changes. Tradition holds.

Now that I was on my own, I went through the cupboards and pulled out mysterious packets of Russian-labeled spices and had at it with impulsive America style. Then I threw in some habanero sauce I brought from home – this was verboten in Nina’s house as it was way too hot for any Moldovan who tried it (mild by our standards, mild!) With a small handful of egg noodles to thicken it up, I had myself an aromatic concoction burbling on the burner in no time.

Let me tell you, the succulence of vine-ripened tomatoes and the sharpness of fresh plucked garlic make for amazing soups – I surprised myself! I had two bowls. But it wasn’t just my body being nourished: I felt like I had slipped right back into my age-old soul, wielding that knife on the chopping board. I’m back in the kitchen again, self-sufficient, creative, and all grown up again! Thank you, dear Hestia! And let me keep enjoying while the vegetables are ripening…

I am a Peace Corps Volunteer

IMG_0161[1] — Holding my Oath of Office – I am a Peace Corps Volunteer!

Today, in a suitably serious and solemn ceremony, I and 37 members of my colleagues in the M27 Moldova group were sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers. (The rest of our group, Health and English Education Trainees, have 7 more days of “practice teaching” sessions remaining in their training.)

I confess that, as we repeated the same oath that – in various permutations – thousands of other Americans serving in the military, diplomatic service, political office and other agencies of government have taken, I did tear up. Being an American is a insoluble paradox for me. I left the country partly because I am so tired of its politics, its materialism, its narcissistic patriotism, its inability to transcend its own mythos. Yet it is America that brought me here, that sustains my work and the Peace Corps mission throughout the world, that continues to believe in “promoting peace and friendship” abroad through the voluntary service of over 200,000 of its citizens to date. As the Ambassador to Moldova William H. Moser said in addressing our group, we are the most effective ambassadors of the American people in 137 countries around the world.

In searching for a YouTube video of my new site, Hîncești, I came across the following video. Made, of course, by a Peace Corps volunteer. Because I challenge you to search YouTube for a video made of ANY country in the last five years and not come up with one made by a PCV. This is what we do. We bring laughter, creativity, camraderie, esprit de corps, hope, friendship, diplomacy, and good will wherever we have been. And we share it with the world.

Today, I am proud to be American.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xyk2qJjPQwE&feature=related

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