This one is really funny, though definitely PG-13
So you want to join the Peace Corps?
The group of volunteers who arrived last year showed this you tube video to all of us yesterday. Hilarious and so very very true…
First impressions
This past weekend I cleared the final, obscuring hurdle in this protracted journey from my past and familiar life into a great unknown. Starting in February of 2011, I have spent months wondering about the location, people, and organizations that would fill my life and delineate my experience for the twenty-seven months of my Peace Corps service. The journey to Hîncește on Saturday lifted the final veil.
Let me say first that actually making the journey all on my own was a HUGE success for me (you have to celebrate the little stuff, folks!) I took the familiar route into Chisinau, but then had to navigate my way through the piața – the vast outdoor vendor mart where one can obtain anything from chicken feet to pirated DVDs to Chanel knockoffs – and find a rutiera serving a route which I had never taken to get me another six or seven kilometers to the Gara de Sud where I would board a trolley bus to Hîncește. I was able to communicate in Romanian enough to ask someone for directions and to be notified when we reached the station. The trolley bus was parked right in front of the station when I arrived – lucky me.
I arrived in Hîncește and hour and half early, so I decided to try to find the organization that is sponsoring me – Pasarea Albastra – on my own. Mysteriously, I headed in exactly the right direction, even though it was uphill and around a long and sweeping corner, to find myself standing in front of the closed up building – come on, it is Sunday, Yvette – within ten minutes. I then had to call the woman, Ana Vioara, who speaks no English and will be my work partner to explain who and where I was. Within five minutes she joined me on the sidewalk.
She then took me inside and showed me around. It’s a bright and cheerful place, newly built or refurbished (couldn’t quite make out which) and opened for use last December. It certainly rivals any day care center in the US that I’ve visited. She made me tea and brought out a plate of cookies, however, we soon realized that my limited language capabilities were putting a serious damper on the party. While Moldovans are generally much more comfortable with prolonged silences that most Americans, I think Ana was a bit nervous and wanting to make a good impression so it pained me greatly not to be able to converse with her. Periodically she would roll forth a rushing river of sentences from which I could only wishfully pluck a scarce smattering of familiar nouns and strangely conjugated verbs (damn those reflexive pronouns!) All I could truthfully respond was “Îmi pare rau, nu ințeleg.” (Sorry, I don’t understand.) We hadn’t even finished our tea before she suggested we move on to Nina’s house so she could introduce me to my new mama gazda. Really, I think she was looking for reinforcements in her effort to hold up one end of a dialogue.
A surprising characteristic of Moldovan architecture is that one cannot judge the building by its cover. So many of them here are crumbling artifacts of the Soviet era, hulking cement block monsters moldering in weedy lots, framed in scraggly trees and festooned with ribbons of clothesline. It was exactly one of these that Ana led me to, wending her way up the eroded asphalt that served as parking lot, driveway, sidewalk and playground around the back of the building. There, the harsh outlines were softened by a pleasant little hillock of trees and bushes nestled up against the building. Nina has added an “office” to her apartment (in Moldova most people own, rather than rent or lease, their living quarters) so there is an actual separate entrance used by visiting clients giving entry into an extra space attached to her bedroom. And the interior was a refreshing and pleasant contrast to the dismal exterior, markedly upgraded and very modern.
Moldovans seem to take greater pride than most Americans of similar – or even better – economic circumstances in furnishing and decorating their living spaces. All the furniture I’ve run across here is sturdy and finely-upholstered in good fabric; bathrooms and kitchens are tiled in ceramic or stone with substantial bathtubs that one could actually stretch out in; cabinets are crafted with heavy wood, solid hinges and decorative blown glass; the floors are of inlaid wood, individually fitted and highly polished; carpet pile is heavy, soft and brilliantly hued. It is far more tasteful and better made than the plaster board, spray-painted, hastily assembled Target/Ikea breed of furnishings that is slowly encroaching homes across America. And it definitely counters the depressing vistas of their cityscapes.
Nina’s apartment is much smaller than the house in which I am currently residing in Stauceni. And there is no garden – boo hoo. I get the feeling that she is quite consumed with making money, building her client base, and scouting out potential new pyramiding opportunities. Although she was somewhat shy around me, she did manage to haul out the Avon catalogue to peruse with me page by page and posed not-so-subtle questions regarding my Peace Corps income and potential revenue from the husband back in the States. I think she sees me not only as a potential consumer of products, but as a conduit to a whole new gathering of female resources. I could tell she was more than a little disappointed at the obvious absence of cosmetics applied upon my person. This will be a much different relationship, I think, than the one I enjoy with my current mama gazda. We shall see.
Diva Knee
In that way that a niggling irritant will steadily blow itself into obnoxious proportions in seeking the spotlight, I have had to bow down before the increasing tantrums of my left knee and allow it take center stage. Through weeks of humping back and forth to school along rocky roads slogging sixteen pounds of paraphernalia, coupled with boogie boarding the aisles of careening rutieras, compounded by an ambitious hike up the crumbling, Soviet-era, one hundred and seventy three steps (I counted) linking my home and a picturesque lake in my new village, I’ve managed to create quite a diva out of this joint. It sends shooting pains up my thigh at night, rumbling into a dull throb in the morning that climbs to a screeching glissando of pain after ten or twelve hours of the above listed activities. I finally went to see the PC doctor, who set the wheels in motion that will all but ground me for the remainder of Pre-Service Training. I did not see this coming.
What I did know was that I would be walking. And walking, and walking, and walking, everywhere while in the Peace Corps. So I began walking, almost from the moment I began filling out the application. The furthest I ever went in a day was 10.12 miles; I routinely went four to five without breaking a sweat. I was hiking rough trails in the Fullerton and Tustin hills at least four times a week. (Okay, I will confess to slacking off slightly towards the end when it got up into the upper 80’s in Fullerton, which is quite balmy weather for me now.) Not one knee problem through it all. I did not see this coming.
My second week here I tripped on the tiled stairway inside the PC offices and went down smack on my knees. (One of the stairs is slightly higher than all the others causing one to miscalculate in clearing it going up and land heavily when going down; everyone knows this and many people have taken their own spills. The HR professional in me wants to run screaming through the halls at the liability potential. Oops. That’s right, I’m in Moldova. No one cares.) According to the PC doctor, this “triggered” an underlying problem with cartilage wear and compressing space in the joint. What’s this: a pre-existing condition that I did not note on my medical application? Mostly because I didn’t know about it, Doctor. (I guess the Peace Corps needs to take precautions against the middle-aged uninsured who sign up for two years of service in a sweltering country without pay with the sole aim of getting their blown out joints fixed for free?) The pre-existing clause causes an issue in gaining authorization for any kind of expensive intervention, like arthroscopic surgery, for example. What is authorized is three weeks of house arrest, a strong anti-inflammatory, a hulking knee brace that mysteriously increases my overall body temperature by at least five degrees, and a combination of physical therapy and ultrasound to excitedly anticipate in the coming weeks. I couldn’t be more thrilled.
The thing about my situation that sucks the most is that I’m stuck in the middle. All the older folks (60 and up) have already HAD their knees done, so they are all springy and sly with surgically-conferred youth. And of course the kids still have their knees, which they torture quite regularly with the blithe disregard of youth,straining and popping them in strenous soccer matches only to appear dewy fresh and mysteriously healed the next day. Me? I am just beginning the long, slow decline into better acquaintance with orthopedic surgeons, MRI’s and Latin terminology, which I’ve quite creatively managed to accelerate in my forever ambitious manner.
Oh well. Perhaps it is my devious little daemon taking action, zealously guarding my thirsty need for time. Time to read, time to write, time to sit and gaze dreamily into space; time that isn’t filled with the recitation of new nouns and verbs and propositions or downloading safety information, rape prevention tactics and other obviously, DC-formulated policies and procedures or listening to PCVs and administrative coordinators and program managers prepare us up down and sideways for any anticipated occurrence which could rattle our now somewhat tenuous hold on the idealistic convictions that landed us here.
PST is lasting too long and the diva knee is asserting her potent will. Other than mornings spent in language class (which I am insisting on attending for my own sake) I have now gained about ten hours per week back for ME. Perhaps my joints are not so bad, after all.
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
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…
Sunday in Orhei
I’ve been so busy (and anxious) this week waiting for site announcements and preparing for our language check-in today, that I have not posted any pictures from my recent excursion to Orhei with Warren and Georgia. They both attend the Catholic Church (Biserica Catolica) in Stauceni on Sundays and have made good friends with the young Fijian priest who is serving there. In fact, our COD group will be conducting a youth activity with some kids from the church at the end of July (more on that later.)
The priest is having to fill in for the father in Orhei who is off on vacation. So we all three, along with Georgia’s host mom Olga, drove into Orhei last Sunday for services. It was quite beautiful listening to the mass in Romanian. I could just sit back and enjoy the musicality of it without analyzing the message. We passed the sunflower field on the way and pulled over to take pictures.
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.
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.
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.
Let me THRIVE
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…)
Cîinea Cîntea (The Dogs Sing)
I don’t know what songs they might sing for Christmas around here, but there is no such thing as a silent night in Stauceni. First of all, let me say that there isn’t much night to speak of anyway: it doesn’t get dark-dark until after 10pm and the sky is light enough to read by at 4:15am (I know, because I’ve done it.) Because I don’t sleep very well unless it’s really dark (I can’t even stand a light on in the next room,) I’d really like to sleep through the relatively short period of night that occurs here in Moldova during the summertime.
Not so, I’m afraid, because each night the dogs must sing their opera.
I have not mentioned the dogs here yet, mostly because their living conditions really sadden me. Though it isn’t as bad as other countries I’ve visited, there is still a profound difference in the way they are treated compared to dogs in the US. Basically, there are a multitude of strays everywhere that forage the trash, streets, and fields for food and then there are those kept chained up in people’s yards and fed disparately according to their owners’ temperaments. There are a few that seem to be kept as pets, i.e., allowed to roam their owners’ yards freely (NEVER inside the house) but amongst us volunteers only two out of nine of our families have one like that. Almost every house in the village, though, has a dog chained up near the front door. Ostensibly, they are supposed to serve as sentries. But when they bark at every person that passes by, I’m not sure how effective they could be, as one becomes inured quickly to their warnings during the day time.
Note “during the daytime.” Now let’s talk about night time:
Every night I’ve been in Moldova, I am invariably woken up sometime between 2:00 and 3:00am by the dogs (sometimes it’s the roosters, too, but I’ll leave that for another day.) Sometimes it’s just one dog, sometimes it’s two or three, at times it seems to be all the dogs in Stauceni. They bark in tandem, they bark duets, they crescendo, they solo, they bark a call and bark in response. I lie awake until dawn at times waiting for them to shut the fuck up – or for some irritated owner to yell at their own dog, at the very least. No. No one else seems to mind. Or perhaps they sleep through it, I don’t know. I know most of us volunteers don’t. We’ll meet up in class bleary eyed and nod at each other knowingly: “The dogs again…did you hear them…oh I heard them…damn dogs….I hate dogs.”
Except I don’t. I really love dogs and am missing my own more than I expected. (I spent a lot of time with her the past six months or so when she was my only company most days.) So last night as I lay there again listening to the chorus and trying not to let evil thoughts of slaughter creep into mind, suddenly an awareness sifted softly into my sleepy brain: they are singing to each other, I thought. These dogs that spend their whole lives chained up in yards, never allowed to roam, cavort, or run, always circling the same four foot enclosure, never able to sniff or greet or play with their own kind, they are lonely. In the silence of the night they call out to each other, sing for each other, tell stories amongst themselves about the meager contents of their days. Perhaps the strays join in and relate the vagaries of their existence – the difficulty of finding food, the discomfort of the hot sun and cold rain and blustering wind when there is no shelter to be found. Their songs are permeated with frustration and yearning and sadness and grief. At least that’s what I was hearing at 3:30am in the never-silent night.
This is the first time I’ve seen Nina pet Pirate. It made me so happy. Though he has been chained up in a corner of the yard during my stay, she does feed him regularly and well. (I give him meat from my lunch sometimes, when Nina isn’t home.) But this is not always the case for some dogs. Other volunteers have related stories of dogs chained up at houses under construction where they sometimes have no water and appear to be starving, like the owners are trying to make them fierce and dangerous. (And who is stupid enough to come near a chained up, starving German Sheppard??? Really, I just don’t see the point.)
On a happier note, Nina and her male suitor (she refuses to even CONSIDER his persistent proposals) sing often for me. This is one thing that’s very different about Moldovans. After our meal is finished, very often we’ll sit in silence (finally – silence!) for minutes at a time, just looking around, listening to the birds sing, the wind blow, the children play out in the street. Occasionally, with no apparent prompt, Nina or Ilea will begin humming or foot tapping, and then begin a duet melodious and sweet. Sometimes they sing to each other, sometimes they sing to me. Sometimes they just sing. The songs are often melancholy and bittersweet. Even though they’re in Russian or Romanian, I can always tell by the tone what emotion the song is conveying.
Just like with the dogs…
From Now On I Live Mad 