Saint John's Day | Sf. Ion

The last of the winter holidays, at least according to my host mother, is Saint John's day. Usually on these holidays that are named after a specific person, you only celebrate it if there is someone in your family that shares that namesake. For instance, on Sf. Maria day, everyone brings flowers to my host mother because that is her name too. But Sf. Ion is a bit different and as I walked in the snow showers with Maria to the cemetery on Wednesday morning we talked about the reason we celebrate Sf. Ion. She told me the story of John baptizing Jesus in the water, as if I was hearing it for the very first time. In many ways I was, because religious vocabulary is not something I hear that often in Romanian. It's difficult to tell what is going on in this first picture, but all those people are standing around a long table covered in the customary offerings (bread, candles, candy, wine). The priest is the young man with the beard in the center. Pretty much the only men with facial hair in Moldova are the men of the Church.

Since we arrived a little late, we stayed back from the big table and cleared Domnul Costel's (Maria's husband) grave of the snow and lit candles. When the second table was being prepared, Maria went to offer our bread and wine. As you can see, it was snowing pretty good that day, Maria said it deterred people from coming out to the cemetery. But to me, seeing a hundred people in a snowy cemetery on a Wednesday morning is pretty impressive. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, these Eastern Orthodox traditions are admirable. They convey so much respect for the elderly and the dead.

I have a friend that questions whether or not it is right that even people who lived life pretty inhumanly deserve to be venerated in death. It's an interesting question to ponder, but I don't care to comment on my opinion here. Though, I did have an interesting conversation with a Moldovan girl recently who criticized the Church for being extraneous. "I believe in God," she said, "but I don't need the priest to tell me how to convey my faith." I should have asked her if she just came of the Mayflower.

Anyway, later that day Maria and I went to a neighbor's house for dinner. We can't go empty handed and Maria had been asking me to make an apple crisp, so it was the perfect opportunity. My instincts were correct when I heard that the purpose of the meal was to get to know the two daughters who want to study English with me. They worked on English with another PCV over the summer. I have to be gone next week, so I told them the next week I would go back with my recently inherited scrabble board.

But in anycase, I am happy to get to know another family in my neighborhood. The wife works at a public office in town, making sure employers follow employment laws and the like. The husband is the boss of the local market where I buy (recently) oranges and pomegranates. The two daughters are 17 and 11 years old. Teenagers are teenagers all over the world, but the 11 year old still has an innocence that I adore. Quite the artist too. She crochets, cross stitches, draws, and made a collage out of pencil shavings. Reminds me of when I used to love to get those craft kits for Christmas, like the kind from Toys*R*Us.

Maria originally said she didn't want to stay long, but not until the nine o'clock hour did we finally start to say our good byes. The conversation was great, lots of hard questions that can't be answered definitively. Mostly about language, politics, and corruption. But even about how Maria's employer (she is an accountant at the bread factory) is struggling with competition--a focal point of the capitalism that Moldovans admire about America, but are still learning how to endure. I like these conversations a lot. Sometimes, if the conversation is not interesting, my mind wanders, and since it's not my native language, it's a lot harder to rejoin the conversation. I usually have to wait until the subject changes. I have a language exam coming up next month, so it's time to get my study on!