Halloween comes to an end...finally!

A week after our first Halloween "celebration" of the season, we ended it with another on our weekly visit to the children's center. Here, you can see the kids racing to "mummify" the youth volunteers. This game is much harder here than in the states because the toilet paper is of a different quality, and doesn't exactly come on a "roll" like we are accustomed too.

In any case, it was much fun. The center and schools are closed this next week due to H1N1, but the director of the center and are are planning to take the time to create our plan for building the new playground this spring. Stay tuned....there may be a way for you all to help!

I hope you are all well and starting to enjoy the holiday season!

End of training dinner

To the left, is a scene from our end of training dinner. The toasts. Respectively, you have the American Amabassador, the Director of Peace Corps Moldova, myself, and my colleague. Can you pick out the two WSU COUGARS? The Ambassador was born and raised in Pullman, Washington! We talked for several minutes about the Cougar family, football, and his recent trip to Cannon Beach, Oregon. Go Cougs!

These are just a few more of my peeps. Jen (p.s. we bought tickets to Prague this morning!), me, and Janel (I don't hold it against her that she may or may not become a Husky after this).





And these are the Ann Arbor hopefuls. Craig also goes by the name "Sheldon." Poftim.

My Marylin

This lady is a trooper! I want to be her in 50 years.

Back in the training village for fall...

The Five Month Challenge

We are coming up on the five month anniversary of my arrival in Moldova, which has been marked by one of the more emotional moments of my experience thus far. I prepared for this day by visiting the local market and scoping out the selection, carefully considering my options with regard to prices, colors, and flavors.

In the end, I chose to purchase a product without much sparkle or shine. It’s packaged in a simple red box which promises to meet my needs. Anti-cavity protection. That’s right folks. I have consumed the last of my CREST anti-cavity, regular paste, 20 ounce tube of toothpaste.

We will be apart from one another for a minimum of 20 more months. The replacement being a “fabricat in Romania” variety of something known as “Colgate.” So far we are getting along well…but no paste will every truly fill the bristles of my brush quite like my fallen CREST.

Back to School

The month of October flew by, in part, because the latter half of it was spent back in my training village with my colleagues. The days were packed in with great technical sessions and language classes with our favorite teacher, and the evenings spent getting reacquainted with one another and our host families (I learned so much about them know that I can actually understand them!).

This is the first time that “pre-service training” has been broken into two parts for PCVs in my program. But it proved incredibly effective. After spending three months at site, we have a greater understanding about what our communities and partner organizations need. As our program manager said, this allowed us to ask more direct questions and be most effective in this training time. For this blog’s avid readers (haha!) this pertains to that “behind the scenes” work I plan to do to make my organization more sustainable. Once again, I am going back to site with a long to-do list and a set of recharged batteries. So much to do, and less than two years to do it!

While we were back at training two rather “distractiv” or “fun” events went down. The first being my first birthday abroad. My fellow PCVs, host family, and teachers really made it special. One for the books!
The second event, was our village’s annual celebration to commemorate its founding. We partook in some homemade wine, laughed A LOT, and danced the hora with children until midnight. It was a blast. Moldovan music is definitely starting to grow on me!

My first REAL Peace Corps Project!

This is my first REAL drop in the bucket towards helping my partner organization become more self-sustaining in the long run—the heart of my work here in Moldova. Unlike the many events I’ve helped the youth with, this was an event the youth had never been exposed to before, and I helped them orchestrate it. Needless to say, I finally feel like I’ve contributed something!

The situation is something like this. The youth want to do lots of great projects (like building a playground and helping surrounding communities build youth centers), but they do not have any sources of income. In a planning discussion with some of the youth leaders, we decided to take advantage of the large amount of people who would be coming in for our town’s wine day and sell something. Raising the money ourselves is far more sustainable than grant writing, plus the money is easier to appreciate when you have to work for it!

So what did they want to sell? It went something like this: “Melissa, do you know how to make those cookies from America with chocolate?” And off we went…

A week before our chocolate chip cookie sale, I taught seven girls how to bake the cookies. Then each boy from the youth center purchased and donated an ingredient to the girls. Each girl was responsible for baking a batch of cookies at home the day before the event. The result of our bake sale, the first-ever for the youth, raised a quarter of a teacher’s monthly salary in just over two hours! Everyone went home happy.

In addition to the monetary gain, here are a few other successes of the event. The youth did a new kind of fundraising, and interacted with people from the whole raion in doing so. They had the opportunity to tell people who they are and what they want to do with the money that will help the community. They educated people about the concept of donating to good causes, and saw that the youth were working for their money. So many people were new to this idea!

We discovered two significant cookie selling strategies at this event. First, the youth had to be energetic. When they danced the hora with customers, and made themselves noticeable, more people came over to see what was going on at our booth.

This gal, Vica, would earn a free trip to summer camp for cookie sales if she only had that little green uniform. She was dancing all over the place to attract customers, taking platefuls around to all the exhibitioners, and had a sales-pitch that only a kid selling newspapers on a soap box could compete with! Way to go Vica!

And, about 40 minutes into our cookie sale, and through a series of discussions unknown to me, I ended up on stage with 500 pairs of eyes staring at me while I explained who I was, why I helped the youth prepare these cookies, and the great plans for the money that we will raise (for the next two days people stopped me on the street to ask how long I’ve studied Romanian. Compliment or criticism???). By the time I made my way back to the booth, I couldn’t actually get through the crowd. We made close to 100 lei in the ten minutes immediately following my little announcement. Overall, the event was a huge learning experience for the youth.

The best way to wrap this up is to quote my partner’s reaction. Mind you, this is a translation. But the last word of the quote is the same in English, just that the “u” is pronounced with something more like an “oo” sound and the “er” is more like the word “air. Try it, it will be more meaningful.

“Melissa, this was a good idea. I was a pessimist this morning, but that was super!”