So THIS is the Peace Corps

This is how it goes…Tuesday I find out that, in fact, my luggage and I will NOT be picked up at my current place of residence for transport by Peace Corps staff to my new site, which I have no clue how to get to and where I know not a soul (why in the world would I imagine that to be the case?) In fact, I will be handed a piece of paper with contact information, a job description, and a welcome letter – all in Romanian – and told “Drum buna!” (Safe travels!) and expected to find my own way.

I am learning what is meant by the admonition: “Moldovans are not the best at strategic planning.” Or any kind of planning, for that manner. Things like directions, schedules, meeting times, and destinations are all very loose and ambiguous concepts for them. Things will work out. Or they won’t. Que sera, sera (I wonder if they have a similar phrase?) I found out quite by accident that the directions that were given to me by my LTI were incorrect and would’ve landed me at the wrong bus station in Chisinau this morning.

My agenda for the next couple of days: Find the correct bus to transport me from Stauceni to the Gara de Sud in Chisinau. Tell the bus driver that I’m a dumb American who must be notified when I reach that destination. Once at the south bus station, locate the trolly bus labeled “Hîncești,” find a seat and sit back for 35-45 minutes until the bus stops. Disembark; look for someone who looks like she’s looking for me (my new Moldovan work partner.) Hope that she is there. Try to gather my rudimentary language skills together sufficiently to communicate my purpose for coming and enumerate the skills I will bring to her NGO’s endeavors (ha!) Go find the apartment I will be sharing with a strange Moldovan woman for the next two years. Work out cooking, bathing, laundering arrangements (again, all in another language.)

Go to my new office on Monday. Hope that I can find it. Meet a bunch of people who won’t understand me and whom I won’t understand. Smile a lot. Say “Dah,” (Yes) and nod like a bobble head for hours. Try to appear as if I understand what’s being said and expected of me. Go back to new apartment. Hope that I can find my way. Eat what’s cooked for me (hopefully something is cooked for me…) Collapse into exhausted sleep from the strain of trying to translate sense from the babble I’m swimming in.

Tuesday morning board the bus for Chisinau with my new work partner and travel to a conference that is supposed to teach us how to collaborate effectively, when we come from disparate cultures and I speak Romanian like a two-year old. Smile a lot. Nod like a bobble head for more hours. Spend the night in Chisinau at a hotel with communal showers (which I will be forced to utilize as it is 97 degrees here and I am running a constant river of sweat.) Wednesday morning. More training on how to work with Moldovan partners and ignore the abyss of cultural differences (like timeliness and clarity in directives) that yawns between us.

Go home to Nina. Yea! Strange that now it is her house that has become my haven…and that’s what gives me hope. Not too long from now I am sure that I will be feeling the same way about a place and a group of people who are strange to me now. Perhaps I will even come to love the abyss. A very wise PCV advised me to “Just let the culture wash over you…” Here’s to getting soaked.

Undercover angel

100_1686 — Sofie at the bar with Leslie and Jan

So it suddenly occurred to me that I may have been spending too much time in a huddle. Perhaps that’s what’s making me suddenly weak in the knees. I’m not really that social, after all. Oh yes, I enjoy my friends – hugely, mind you – but we tend to get together in delineated doses. For sporadic adventures that are time limited. We know when enough is enough and we all go home to our separate, largely tranquil domiciles (not those currently raising children, granted, but you all should have started earlier like me.)

I just recognized that I have been conducting my life amid a cacophony of other people’s noise – wending my way through their random thoughts, spontaneous opinions, toxic complaints, silly exuberance, and fill-in-the-blank musings. I’m not used to it. For the last eighteen months I’ve been largely alone or with one other being at most (Zoe and Mike alternating as my sidekick, depending on the hour of the day.) I haven’t had to make small talk or be accommodating or smile for no reason in particular in a long time. It’s tiring. On top of all the other challenges presenting themselves for attention at my doorstep.

For the last few days I’ve been bowing out. Going home instead of hanging out, skipping the mentor picnic today, bailing on the US Chambers of Commerce All American BBQ tomorrow. I just don’t feel like chumming up with more Americans. Time to meet Moldvenii. Become part of a new culture. Lose my all-too-American identity. I want the culture and the differentness to wash over and engulf me. I didn’t come here intending to bring the US with me.

Assimilating a new identity and taking on a new mission soon…

Drum roll, please…

So the Peace Corps really knows how to make you wait. First, the application process, which should’ve clued me in to their general modus operandi in getting news out to the eagerly awaiting recipient. Then, the placement process, wherein you sit in agonizing pain waiting to find out where in the world you are going to live for the next two years (Africa? Mongolia? Khazikstan? Peru?) Then, you get to your host country and have to wait a whole month for the final – biggest – question to be answered: what in the heck will I be doing anyways?

Yesterday, they made us wait all day before announcing our assignments. We had to sit through hours of language in the morning and then various lectures on how the decision process was made and how to accept the information that you will hear in a professional manner. (Basically, buck up and be a grown-up, this is the life you chose when you signed up for the Peace Corps and we never promised you a rose garden, ladies and gentlemen. In fact, we never promised you anything but “the hardest job you’ll ever love.”) They finally herded us all out to the front of the school to wait for another seemingly endless time while they “prepared” the announcements.

100_1667 — PCT Nicole in the lecture hall

Here is a video of the staging. Someone is chalking in a very approximate map of Moldova on the school playground and pasting the raion centers and site placements inside. The rest of us are milling about trying not to look as if we care where we are being sent (after all, we were all there for the CD’s lecture.) Despite that, most of us do care. A LOT. It’s somewhat akin to hanging out in the quad waiting to be asked to the prom. Only it doesn’t matter how pretty or popular or rich you are – it’s all been decided by the big people at headquarters strategic ally matching host agency needs with volunteer skills and age and education and host family availability.

They called people’s names one at a time and you received your welcome letter and job description from your host agency work partner and then went to stand on your spot in the map. Some poor souls were stranded way out in the perimeter with no one nearby (Patty.) Some of us were placed in the capital city of Chisinau (my friends Elsa and Romy – they were SO excited.) I will be working and living in Hîncești, a raoin center (sort of a county seat) of 20,000 people about 40 minutes from Chisinau by bus.

100_1682 — Where in the world is Yvette – ah, Hîncești!

Hîncești is just below the fold in the map above, to the southwest of Chișinau. My work partner is a younger woman who apparently worked for an bigger organization in the capital that now wants to start a smaller subsidiary in her own town of Hîncești. It is an organization that is working to integrate disabled children into regular classrooms and civil society. She is looking, basically, for a mentor during this process, someone with a knowledge of how to set up a non-profit or NGO and get it running effectively. How to get funding, grants, raise public awareness and create positive marketing for the cause. I certainly want to be of help and know that I have pertinent skills to offer. If only I get break through the language barrier. (It has been difficult enough learning how to speak socially – learning business language and culture will be another challenging hurdle.)

I will be living with another Nina who is a single woman with her own apartment (yea! indoor plumbing!!!) She apparently sells Avon for a living, though how one makes enough to live on selling Avon astounds me – she must be good. I have a feeling I might be wearing a lot more make up in the future…

So after all the drama and mental exhaustion of the day, a group of us went to the Beir Platz to celebrate. We all marked each other’s maps of Moldova with our new site locations. The M26s helped translate our welcome letters. I had a shot of tequila. It was divine.

100_1684 — Jesse (M26) Warren and the picture Patty will kill me for sharing

Let me THRIVE

Peace Corps unofficial motto — My Peace Corps Motto

In just about ten hours, I will learn where I am being assigned to serve out my two years in the Peace Corps. Up until August 2, all of us are classified as “trainees,” not yet sworn in as volunteers. Today we find out where we are going on August 3 as newly minted PCVs: who are work partners are – i.e. the agency or public administrative office that requested us – and in what village or city we will be serving. As you can imagine, we are all very anxious.

Even though we signed up for this particular adventure, training has served to derail a great deal of that fervent and headstrong belief that landed us here: that intense hardship and pervasive loneliness can ultimately be surmounted and survived, successfully, even brilliantly. Through the past month, we have bonded together as a tribe in that primal manner we humans typically do when faced with new and foreign circumstances. We laugh together, cry together, celebrate together, and lean on each other a great deal. The fact that we will be dispersed throughout the country in the next month to begin separate journeys is more than a little daunting. But then again none of us traveled all this way to live in an American commune….

Patty, the young woman that is filling in the “daughter” shoes for me during this time, voiced a profound thought for me the other day. She said that she has always just tended to keep her focus on the immediate and just “keeps doing that thing that I am now doing,” and that gets her through a lot. That’s actually exactly what I have done most of my life (sometimes that’s been good – getting me through graduate school and raising a wonderful child, sometimes, admittedly, not so good – keeping me working at a job I should have left way before I did.)

I expect that the next two years will be one of my greatest adventures in life. It will have its difficulties, of that I am sure. But I am also pretty sure it will present me with unimagined surprises and a profound sense of my own inner resources and resiliency. I will make new friends and immerse myself in a strange and ancient culture. I will speak a new language and surmount obstacles I would never face back in America. Most assuredly, I will survive. But what I really want – and expect – to do is THRIVE. I know all of you are behind me and that helps my mental fortitude a great deal, believe me. But in the end, it always comes down to the self alone. Of what mettle am I made?

This is where and when and how I find that out.

(This blog post scheduled for review and update: July 2014…)

Light my fire

It’s funny, today I felt like I had this breakthrough to another level, just when I was starting to feel a little depressed about my seeming lack of progress in language acquisition and enculturation. It started with Diana, my LTI, praising me effusively in our check in session. She said I reminded her of her own mother, who lives in the northern part of Moldova and she doesn’t get to see that often. I am enthusiastic and determined, just like her mother, she said. It’s good to have me in class, she said, because it makes her feel like she is an effective teacher and that she has a connection with her mother so far away. She actually grabbed my hand and squeezed it (and she’s not a demonstrative person.) She said that I am learning at a fast pace and I should be speaking Romanian comfortably before I realize it.

Which may have been just the spark I needed to light my confidence. I came home and started stringing random sentences together for Nina, even though I was hesitant about my grammar and pronunciation. I just kept running through the tenses and conjugation and gender/plural combinations until I found the right one. Soon enough, Nina and I were having little conversations. Sure they were episodic and halted mid-topic when she exceeded my vocabulary, but at least there was a back and forth going on that I could sustain for four or five sentences. IT FELT FANTASTIC. Really. Like I was a toddler uttering my first grammatically correct statement and my mom was making noises I could understand. And then a breeze started blowing and the sweaty film that has stuck to my skin like saran wrap for the last week was whisked away and the birds were singing and the leaves were rustling on the trees and I finally felt myself relax into my body and just be present. It was the very first moment that I stopped feeling like a complete stranger in a strange land and had the first breath of settling in.

Scratching the surface

Moldova State University — Entering the mathematics building State University Moldova

Our big project this week for Pre-service Training was paying a visit to an NGO in Chisinau called MilliniuM – the significance of the two “M”s representing “2000,” the year in which the organization was established, or registered, in Moldova. We interviewed its founding director and a Peace Corps volunteer who has been placed with the agency since last summer. Both the director and – of course – the PCV spoke English, so again we were relieved from having to draw on our mish mash of Roman-Engleza to communicate. (I’m still keenly aware of the future looming ahead, when I will be dropped off in a distant village on my own with no fellow Americans buffering the crushing linguistic tidal wave, keeping me afloat within their lifeboat of common conceptual experience.)

We spent an entire afternoon carefully crafting a series of multi-part, syntactically dense questions that I just had an inkling were not going to fit the situation we would find ourselves in. The interview we imagined ourselves conducting could’ve been written off on the expense account of any family foundation CEO or the Board Chair of a third generation non-profit sitting pretty on a diversified endowment. Instead, we found ourselves perched in a ring of hastily assembled mismatched chairs surrounding a pasteboard desk in the Soviet-era office of Vitalie Cirhana, a mathematics professor at Moldova State University. Conrad, (the PCV) was in shorts and flip flops; Vitalie was valiantly attempting to keep some air of authority amidst a battle with a motley crew of oblivious teen volunteers who invaded the office and commandeered all the computers in the midst of our session.

100_1592 — Hallway leading to Vitalie’s office

This is one of the beautiful realities – at least in my opinion – of the Peace Corps. Your placement will inevitably be ad hoc and entirely of your own making and nothing like anything you might have done before in the States. Conrad is an attorney who used to be the in-house counsel for a condominium association in Florida (though if you saw him, I swear you’d think he was a musician/hipster straight out of Echo Park. He doesn’t look a day over 25 and I’m sure he rides a fixed gear bike with no brakes into work.) Conrad openly admitted he knew nothing about running an NGO and that it had taken him the better part of a year to figure out what MilleniuM’s mission and goals actually were and how Vitalie envisioned it continuing to be viable and effective into the future. This gives me great hope for the comparative value I can bring to my future placement site, but also causes me to wonder if my executive level experience will really be of any practical use in this environment. I foresee myself coaching some well-intentioned mayor who holds down a full-time job in the city and farms his outlying plot on the weekends how to create a balance sheet for the village’s expenses.

One of the stark realities of this place that I was faced with today is the general dilapidation of the infrastructure here. Because I was overwhelmed and fascinated by the newness of my environment, I wasn’t making any evaluative judgments about it. Now that I’ve been here for a couple of weeks, the crumbling buildings, worn sidewalks, eroding pavements, and boarded up windows are becoming more prevalent in my consciousness. You can see that everything must once have looked quite grand – there are elaborately carved stone edifices and elegantly designed buildings that have not seen any maintenance in a couple of decades. Beautifully landscaped central parks are overgrown with weeds and tangled bushes; it is obvious that no one has mown the grass or trimmed the trees in recent memory. Though litter and refuse are not prevalent, there is no sense of overall care and husbandry of the environment. It almost feels like some sort of spontaneous recovery after a nuclear accident – a makeshift metropolis patched together from the relics of a once proud civilization. You can see the potential hovering like a kaleidoscopic watercolor painting just below the gritty surface sketch. If only. I mean, this is the first place I’ve been in the world – including Guatemala for effin sake – that does not have a Starbucks. Nowhere. In the whole country. (Is my shock quotient coming through?) Did you know there was a country in the world without a Starbucks??? What the bleep?

100_1594 — That’s Rodica – one of our LTI’s – in the corner of the picture, waiting to flag down a rutiera

There is vast potential here – that is what is so exciting. A representative from the US Embassy came yesterday to speak to us about the socio-political environment in Moldova. Though most of the younger PCT’s couldn’t really stay focused, I was fascinated by the information. They have been through so much and come so far in just two decades. I mean, here we find a former Soviet state grinding the gears of representative democracy into motion. Even though the going is episodic and halting, it is moving. And I get to participate – at least at the sidelines – for a couple of incredible years. I do feel lucky and really excited to be here at just this moment in time.

On a more somber note: we had our first casualty this week. A member of the 50+ group decided that the experience is not a good fit and he returned to the States today. We all liked him a great deal – he was a fun-loving, gregarious chap. Not the person I would’ve picked to throw in the towel. But another great aspect of Peace Corps is their absolute commitment to our well-being; if we decide that we want to go home, they book our plane ticket ASAP, no questions or criticisms. And I do admire the courage needed to admit that this isn’t the place one wants to be, after all the excitement and hoopla and bravado that most of us have displayed in coming here. Sometimes the reality just doesn’t match up to the ideal and that’s life. The statistic is actually close to 30% of every incoming group who don’t make it for the whole two years, for whatever reason. So we have about 22-23 more people who will head home sooner rather than later.

I am pretty determined at this point not to be one of them.

Allow me a little tantrum…

So it’s the middle of our second week, six left to go. We have settled in to our daily routines and are wearing pathways between our homes, the school, and the bar. We know who gets to school early and who is perennially late. Our language instructors are possessively proud of us and sang a lovely song for Leslie and Jan’s anniversary today at the break. The bar staff is so inured to our presence that they conducted a water fight over our heads this afternoon. We forgave them (and even felt a bit jolly that they’re not treating us like aliens anymore.) Today it was at least 98 degrees in the shade. They say, “Capi frijți!” My brain is fried.

It hit me softly in the stomach today that just one month ago I was sitting on a balcony at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel sipping a $19 martini and slurping up a plate of exquisitely prepared mussels with my daughter and grandmother, worlds away from my mental and economic circumstances at the moment. (How quickly life can change with jet propelled air travel.) I went to the market today and stood in front of the shelf of instant coffee, debating whether I really wanted to spend 40 lei on a jar. I decided that was too much; it wasn’t until I was halfway home that I realized 40 lei works out to about $4.50. I wasn’t wont to buy instant coffee at home, but I imagine it runs a bit more than that in the States. And it certainly cost a lot less than my over-priced martini.

When we first arrived, the Peace Corps gave us an envelope with 730 lei for our “walking around” expenses. This works out to just over $60. Since our board is provided, we use the money to pay the 6-8 lei roundtrip ticket price on the rutiera (which we take a couple of times a week), load minutes onto our phones, purchase internet time from our host families, and – of course – finance our trips to the bar. Let me tell you, I’m adopting a whole new awareness of money. There are no credit or debit cards to fall back on; Moldova is almost entirely a cash economy. You can’t even get a mortgage for a house. So I must be cognizant of the total sum of money I have available to me on a daily basis, a concept I haven’t had to entertain for at least a decade. I’m anxiously anticipating the advent of my next allowance, which will be deposited, unfortunately, directly into a bank account that will require the use of an ATM card to retrieve. I may be poor for awhile.

These are the sorts of incremental, incidental changes that end up altering my existential experience of being at home in the world. It’s like being slammed back into childhood, suddenly and with no reprieve. I can’t talk right. I can’t communicate my needs or desires or worries or doubts to the person I’m living with. I can’t order complicated food at a restaurant (we have managed to buy a pizza.) I’m somewhat terrified each time I get on the rutiera that I won’t recognize my stop and I’ll end up wandering the back alleys of Chisinau’s less desirable quarters stammering to wary strangers in a patched together dialect of verb infinitives and singular nouns. When I go into a store, all the labels are in Russian. Unless I recognize the packaging I have no clue what I’m buying. And I have no idea if the prices are steep or fair. I bought a credit card from Orange, the mobile phone company, to load minutes on my phone. I couldn’t read any of the directions and fumbled my way through the process relying on luck and tactical guesswork (i.e., randomly punching buttons on my iPhone menu.) The date is twisted here – the day listed prior to the month, the cold water is on the side the hot water should be and time is told military style. I am literally exhausted at the end of the day from translating the world around me and struggling through inane tasks that I could perform with my eyes closed standing on one foot while texting and cooking dinner back home. It’s all we long for at this point – to one day be multi-tasking, competent, self-assured grown-ups again.

Waahhh….

Not Much Time…

I’ve discovered over the past few days that my internet access at Nina’s home is intermittent and largely unpredictable. Mostly, it seems to work best at 6:00am, a time when I am not feeling so inspired to blog. So when I saw the bars appear in the lower left hand corner of the screen while I was conjugating my “to be’ verbs, I grabbed my computer and moved over to the corner of the room where the signal is the strongest. I am madly trying to get photos uploaded before the signal disappears again…

So here is the classroom where I spend the majority of my mornings. It’s actually quite pleasant (when it’s not a 100 degrees inside; Moldovans do not use air conditioning.) There is a year round kindergarten in session downstairs so our studies are set to the lilting sounds of children laughing and playing. Speaking of conjugating verbs. Oh MY GOD. Language lessons took a sudden jet-propelled thrust into DIFFICULT today: who in the world decided that substantive definite and substantive indefinite nouns should be modified differently? According to whether they are male, female, singular, or plural? Can’t we just toss a “the” or “these” in front of them and be done with it??? And then conjugate the verbs and adjectives, too, accordingly? I have lists two sheets long for conjugating just the male form of the verb “to be.” This is crazy hard to keep straight in my head.

100_1567 — Public well in neighborhood. Fill your cup. Noroc!

Today, for a bit more fun, I partnered up with Warren and Patty and we walked through our assigned quadrant of Stauceni to conduct our first experiment in “community mapping.” This is a tool we each will use at our assigned site for getting to know our community, its layout, socioeconomic and industrial composition, demographics, gender divisions and roles, etc. We literally walked the streets using my iPad (ok – we’re so American) GPS mapping tool to find our way down to the winery, bus stations, altamenteri, lyceum, premir (mayoral) residence, where we then stood around taking pictures and writing down notes and generally looking like completely here from space tourists. It was fun.

Then we went to the bar for a beer. We all spend quite a bit of time at the bar, trying to cop an internet fix (free Wi-Fi) and sip our cheap ass beer as slowly as we can in order to hang out for hours without appearing to be loitering. I tried buying a Perrier today because I thought it would look bad to get a beer for lunch, but it cost me 40 lei and a beer is only 15. Robyn bought a pot of tea and it was 25 lei. It’s like they’re forcing us poor volunteers to consume alcohol…

Tomorrow, we’re off to Chisinau again in the spa bus to “team build” with the other volunteers in a park. The weather shows thunderstorms, so this might be interesting as Moldovans don’t stop their activities just because of a little rain. ( I’ve seen blog pictures of picnics being conducted under hand held umbrellas.)

A Day in the Life

After a steamy, humid night where I awake every two hours or so to mop my drenched face and neck, I rise in the morning to brush my teeth, arrange my hair, and take the (very steep) stairs down to the kitchen. There, Nina has already prepared my breakfast, which has included such varied items as a garden salad, a bowl of cherries and bread, or oatmeal. I feel a bit like a princess, as she serves me and insists I start eating while she bustles about the kitchen. Usually she joins me after a couple of minutes, but sometimes she’s already eaten and she just keeps me company during my repast. Which felt a bit awkward the first couple of times, but I’m starting to get used to it. The thing is, Moldovans don’t see the need or understand the desire for “being alone.” Their word for loneliness and alone are the same; people just hang out together, even if they don’t talk or engage in the same activity. There is quite a lot of culture training around this issue for us volunteers and how to effectively integrate into our host families without having to sacrifice our “weird” American desire for privacy.

I then make the short walk to school by myself, attempting to be careful not to look or smile at people passing. This is another “weird” American trait; Moldovans do not seek to engage passersby with generic pleasantries; greetings and smiles are strictly reserved for friends. In fact, a single woman smiling to a man on the street is considered to have made an inappropriate invitation. This has been extremely difficult for me to remember and I probably already have a reputation in this town. Oh well. I won’t be staying here long. I usually get to school a half hour early and hang out with the other PCTs who are there. This group of people – my language training class – is supposedly the one that all PCV’s become closest to during their service, as we end up spending the most time together. There are a couple of them that I feel closer to at this point: Patty is 26 (Rhiannon’s age) and I am around her mother’s age, so we have been drawn to each other for obvious reasons. She is very introspective and concerned with her relationship with her host family, which has had its ups and downs. We talk a lot about fitting in versus being one’s self. Georgiana is gregarious and the accessorizing queen; she comes from a family of lawyers and is very analytical, yet relaxed and funny.

Our language class consists of endless repetitions and phony dialogues, which can get tedious but does, admittedly, expose us to the sounds and rhythm of the language. It has only been four days, but I am just beginning to get a feel for the words as separate entities when they are strung together seamlessly in a sentence. I must say it is a beautiful language – the common description is that hearing Romanian is like listening to an Italian speaking Russian. Even when the Moldovans speak English, they retain a lilting cadence to their verbiage that is quite captivating. The hardest thing is trying to make sounds that our American ear can’t even hear. They will repeat the singular and plural form of a word, for example, that sound exactly the same to all of us Americans. We have them repeat it over and over again, but to our dismay we cannot distinguish between the two. Perhaps we have just not formed the necessary neural pathways? Anyway, it remains a mystery we can’t seem to resolve. We just say it the same way in both cases and they accept our efforts.

I then walk home for lunch which, again, is all laid out for me on the kitchen table and typically consists of cucumbers, parsley, dill, butter lettuce, tomatoes, a thin piece of chicken, cherries, raspberries, and perhaps some placinta for dessert. Nina keeps up a running monologue which I cannot respond to, but, again, helps train my ear to the structure and sound of Romanian. After checking my email and Facebook messages (I am an Internet addict, I now realize), I walk back to school; up a VERY steep hill. I am getting some exercise. Yesterday and today, in the afternoon, we had a class with all of the Community Organizational Development Volunteers (there are 20 of us total.) They take the rutierai over from a neighboring village, which we will do next week and I AM NOT looking forward to; it’s already in the 90’s and it climbs into the triple digits, easily, aboard that sweat box. Anyway. We went over our Participatory Analysis for Community Analysis (PACA) which is basically a set of tools for how to do development within the Peace Corps environment.

Without getting into excruciating detail, let me just say the Peace Corps is an agency that has actually learned something in its fifty years of operation. They have very smart strategies for integrating volunteers into a community without us coming off as overbearing experts who have all the answers, first, by selecting the right people from the start . It is SO refreshing to be working with a group of really smart individuals; I don’t think I truly appreciated the rigorous selection process of the Peace Corps before now. Everyone I’m working with is very savvy – not just book smart, but “people smart;” they seem to know how to collaborate, listen, work within a team environment, and build on each other’s strengths. I don’t feel the need to step in and be “the leader” because everyone is a leader, yet no one is so self aggrandizing that they need to grab the spotlight. It is a joy to study and learn alongside them. Lessons move quickly and everyone “gets it” right off the bat; there is no having to go back and repeat or explain to a slower contingent.

Today, after class, we went to a neighborhood bar. It’s sort of an open, covered patio where they play “house music” and stout mugs of beer are just about a buck ten. (Good you didn’t come, huh? You know who you are…) Tipping is not an ordinary practice but we do leave 2-5% just because we’re such a loud and rowdy bunch. And we want to encourage a positive impression of the “Corpul Pescii Voluntare” in the village. It’s amazing that one can have an evening out at the bar for less than $5 American and then come home to a warm meal of fresh vegetable soup, complete with raw garlic right out of the ground. And not have to do any dishes. Life doesn’t get much better.

Moldova – at Last!!!

Since Monday, I have spent over nineteen hours folded into the cramped seat of an airplane, shuttle or bus and more than sixteen hours hanging out (mostly on the floor) in various airports. I’ve had less than five hours sleep in the past thirty-six and only two of those were consecutive. Yet at this moment – 4:30am on Friday morning, June 8 – I am the most energized and clear headed I’ve been in many months. I made it: I’m finally in Moldova!

Last night we debarked the two shuttles that brought us from the airport at 11:30pm to a cheering mob of current Peace Corps Volunteers: our program mentors, training and safety coordinators, the country director, and various other Moldovan Peace Corps staff. It was just like the Lakers returning to Los Angeles after a stupendous playoff sweep; we were every bit the victorious team lifted up by adulatory fans. After the grueling travel itinerary of the past couple of days, I could easily have burst into sobs of exhausted elation (I didn’t, thank god – not wanting to be labeled the emotive freakazoid the very first hour of my arrival, but a couple of other trainees said they felt exactly the same way.)

After a celebratory greeting, a very brief safety summary and assurances that we would cover – ad nauseum – all of our raging questions today, we were sent to bed with the admonishment to snatch what sleep we might before beginning our 8-10 weeks (depending on one’s assigned program area) of training this morning. There will be no rest for the weary, it seems. Assimilation begins in four hours.

Apparently, I have ended up in one of – if not the –safest countries the Peace Corps operates in. There is very little danger – apparently roving packs of (maybe rabid) dogs, easily dissuaded with sticks and stones – pose the largest threat. Not counting our incoming group of 67 trainees, there are currently 102 Peace Corps Volunteers serving in Moldova. It being a relatively small country, no one is posted more than five hours from Chisinau and Peace Corps headquarters, or more than an hour or so from a fellow volunteer. Everyone sees each other a lot; no worries about being isolated or lonely. According to everything we’ve heard so far, it is a verdant, beautiful environment populated with welcoming, friendly people. And, much to my surprise and delight, just about a third of our trainee group is older than me. I am the youngest of the “seniors,” so I do get to feel (comparatively) young again!

Today’s agenda includes another safety briefing, a health briefing, administrative paperwork and immunizations, distribution of cell phones and other equipment and our first language class. At 6:00 this evening we travel by ‘maxi-van’ with our training groups (6-8 people) to our respective training sites in the surrounding suburbs of Chisinau, where each of us will meet our individual host families with whom we will reside for the next 8-10 weeks. Tomorrow, more training. Sunday, thank the lord, a day of rest.

I can’t convey how astounding it feels to finally be here, to have this long-awaited goal finally materialize into a place and people and activities to fill up my brain and my day. I feel absolutely at home in this experience and couldn’t be more confident in my ability to navigate the road ahead. Wow. Gee whiz. I’ve actually seen one of my longest-held dreams come true. Amazing!!!

Stay tuned – wonderful things to come…

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