The scene at the last youth council meeting

Irinia: "We have an invitation to attend a discrimination seminar in Chisinau."

Cristina: "What's discrimination?"

Melissa: "Discrimination is when you deny someone something because of who they are. In America, we pride ourselves on being diverse and respecting one another. But that wasn't always the case. In an ugly part of our history, we didn't let black people have things that white people used. Now look, we have a black president!"

Marcela: "Oh, ok. Like sometimes that still happens to gypsies."

Melissa: "Yes, but let's call them Roma, not gypsies."

Thirty minutes goes by...

Colea: "Marcela, you are only 14 years-old. You cannot be a trainer at the leadership course because you are too young and no one will listen to you. I will not listen to you."

Marcela: "I may be young, but I am the only graduate of the leadership course on the whole district council! And, besides, I've already taught these topics at other trainings."

Melissa: "Colea, are you discriminating against Marcela because of her age?"

All: "Yea! You can't do that!"

Romanian: Two countries, one language?

Shortly after the arrival of 2011, I took a three-day trip to Transylvania with three Peace Corps Moldova colleagues. This is a shot I snapped from inside the infamous Bran Castle. Heard of Dracula, anyone?

The border crossings between Moldova and Romania are frequented by Peace Corps Volunteers with relative ease, since most (but not all!) study the Romanian language during our Pre-Service Training. I say we are taught Romanian during training, specifically, because once we leave training, some volunteers find it necessary (or more desirous) to deviate their studies from clean-cut Romanian to "Moldovaneste." Discussing language can lead to a rather political argument, but we'll leave that for someone else to un-pack.

Put one way, it's village speak. Put another way, it is a dialect that makes it easy for Romanians at universities and tourist spots to pick out the Moldovans. Moldovaneste tends to include Russian nouns, 'b' sounds dropped for the grunting 'g' sound, and words for fruits and vegetables that you will not find in a Romanian nor Russian dictionary.

My host family and neighbors will sometimes ask me to speak Moldovaneste for sport, entertainment for the crew painting a fence, or as a sort of 'party trick' that gets new acquaintances laughing. But for the most part, I work and live in a place that is perfect for the Romanian I was taught and continue to study every.single.day.

Thus, traveling in Romania is appealing because it's a foreign culture that I neither live in, nor rely on English for during my visit. This trip was the longest consecutive stretch of time I've stayed in Romania, and as the days went by, so too did my confidence as a "Romanian" speaker.

Menus with foods I didn't recognize. Signs I couldn't fully understand. Words necessary for our ski trip that honestly, I've never had to encounter in Moldova (and being the over-confident one that I am, I didn't bring a dictionary).

Okay, I concede to being a bit over-the-top....and almost everyone we encountered was fascinated by our group of American, Romanian speaking volunteers, from Moldova. Once, we found a cabby that spoke our language. The minute we mention Moldova, he abandons 'b' sounds for 'g' sounds and proceeds to tell us everything he knows about Moldova (a whole other story!).

I probably could have added 40 words to my Romanian repertoire, if only I'd had a Romanian dictionary on that trip. But then again, would those new words have been any use to me on this side of the border? Therein lies the Romanian question.

Ten months in Moldova, I think this is love

This week, I had many conversations with our country director (see photo), my program managers, peers, and family about how excited I am to be in Moldova right now. The thing is, I thought I loved my service last fall, but it turns out that is only because I didn't know to what extent I would enjoy being in Moldova at this point. If the rate of enjoyment continues to rise at this exponential rate, by fall I'll surely be the most happily-annoying person you have ever met.

The thing is, Peace Corps has three goals (listed on the right side of the page). So even if I haven't taught a class on program planning this week, or given a computer lesson, or whatever, it is still acceptable that I visited the homes of two neighbors, played hours of frisbee with twelve year-old boys, and cooked several new dishes for my host family. Of late, I haven't even seen my Romanian tutor much, but spending time with Moldovans outside my normal circuit is a great way to pick up new vocabulary. I feel truly blessed to me in here in such a role, a country that a year ago I couldn't locate on the map, with a people that I have come to understand, appreciate, and even love. I hope this blog conveys that message clearly.

Spring and summer also mean the return of day trips to "the forest" for relaxing and socializing. Today, some of the youth and I took the first trip of the season. One where a much-bigger-than-necessary fire was built to bake potatoes, frisbees were thrown with as much enthusiasm as the sunflower seed ammunition in the heat of battle, and I proceeded to lose many a hand at Moldovan/Russian card games. Fantastic day.

I'll leave the reader now with a recording of today's wildlife sightings. Make no mistake, these are no bird calls...only the most gargantuan amphibians one has ever seen (scratch that, heard).

Winter, winter go away! Come again another day!

So when you get an email from a dear friend that says "I can't wait to read your new blog posts"...you know it's time to write some. Honestly, the last couple of weeks haven't been overly exciting. But I am just praying the above freezing temps are here to stay, along with the sun we've been blessed with recently. I have decided that human beings, do in fact use photosynthesis to take energy from the sun. When I get the chance to see the sun these days, I have no qualms with skipping the morning coffee and going outside to walk myself (because in Romanian, taking a walk just doesn't make sense).

The sun came just in time because last week was a tough one. Winter started to get the best of me, but now that I can see the proverbial light in my tunnel's end, all is on the mend. Though, I admit, vacation planning is probably responsible for 60 percent of my improvement this week. I'm going to meet Mom and Dad in Greece! Eu vreau sa ma bronzez. I want a tan!

The rough times do have a way of bringing people together though. I have made some pretty good friends here in Peace Corps Moldova. I especially appreciate the ones who, like me, get down only because they feel like they aren't doing enough, not that they don't have anything to do. We have to be self-starters in the COD program. On a daily basis, I am accountable only to myself.

Since my work at the youth center has been a little slow, I've actually spent a good deal of time on my language this week. I met with a Peace Corps tutor in Balti last weekend to study vocabulary for human trafficking. Then about 10 of us participated in a two-day refresher course that Peace Corps offered, this week. Just past the six month mark.

I feel a trace of guilt because I sometimes think that my secondary project (with the anti-human trafficking organization) is more interesting than my primary project. In some ways, I feel more productive there too. I've always loved constitutional law, but I've come to think of human rights issues as constitutional law applied to all people in all spaces. And when I mean all people, I don't mean Locke's people. I mean ALL people.

So there's a quick update. Stay tuned. A speech I was supposed to give last October recently got rescheduled for next weekend. Timely, I know. So maybe that will make for an interesting post. I kind of hope someone records it so I can count the mistakes.

Oh, and if you are one of the new invitees to Peace Corps Moldova, congrats! Felicitari! See you soon in the 'Dova!

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!

Moldova and Me

I am on "The Dating Game" and I just chose bachelor number two. For the sake of the story, let’s assume bachelors number one and three were graduate school and an entry level government job, respectively. But Bachelor number two found a way to be both intellectually stimulating and adventurous. Let the courtship commence!

You see, coming to Moldova, I understood about as much as one can about one strange man among three behind a semi-translucent screen. I knew how old it is (at least the modern system of governing), what languages it speaks, and what religion follows. But that’s not exactly enough to buy a bridal magazine over.

The past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to do that thing that most Type A personalities do after the first few dates—define the relationship. This has literally consumes every spare second. Moldova and I have been together for five months now, but the last few mornings have felt like blind dates all over again. What do I have to offer Moldova? Ce noi putem sa facem impreauna? What can we do together?

Work with my primary partnership has slowed down considerably, though we did have our first English club session. The youth have been clamoring for this. I am not a teacher, but I’m doing my best. The rest of my time has been divided among some more centralized Peace Corps projects among volunteers, and working at the children’s center.

Talk about blind dates! The director of the children’s center and I thought we were going to see some playground equipment the other day. To get to the manufacturer, a small furniture factory, we rode a bus to a village neither of us had ever been to before, crossed some really big railroad tracks, walked through a vodka factory, stopped to look at some ostrich and deer—no joke, just some ostrich and deer hanging out in a vodka factory attached to a furniture factory in Eastern Europe—and finally arrived at the correct office to find out that the man we wanted to speak with wasn’t there. At least that’s how I think the story should be interpreted, it all happened in Russian. But is that not how most relationships go? Some days it just seems you and your partner don’t speak the same language?

Aşa e viaţa! This is the life!

My first facilitation in Romanian!

This weekend I facilitated my first solo activity (though, I am quite grateful for the presence of another English speaker who was able to help her colleagues understand my special brand of Romanian). It was fun to be back on this side of things after having spent the summer as a participant in many training exercises.

The activity is called “community mapping,” and it helps different groups identify different resources in communities. For instance, the group was able to identify a lot of institutions in their community, but soon realized they have actually worked with a few. We conduct these kinds of activities to help facilitate “asset based development” rather than relying on outside funding and resources. Onward!

learning our prepositions in relation to this chair...

Limba Romania este dificil!

Yes, learning Romanian is difficult, but it is proving to be really fun. We received roughly 10 hours of instruction before being dropped off with our host families (YIKES!), and now we have about four formal hours of instruction every morning. Not only do we have these three lovely Moldovenca teachers (seen here with America’s finest confections), but almost everyone we meet challenges us to learn something new. A neighbor, bus driver, PCV, etc. Acquiring the language is the most important skill we can acquire at this point!

Particularly fabulous of help is my host niece. This little seven-year-old taught me my numbers, colors, animals, gives me the funniest look whenever I say “nu intleg” (don’t understand), and is currently helping me learn the names of the body parts via my introduction of the Hokey Pokey. Hi-stinkin-larious! All of the neighborhood kids laugh at us. What a sight to see! Especially since my colleagues and I are already the talk of the town. If anyone has anymore suggestions for easy to learn American songs…shoot them my way, please!

So far in class we’ve learned the verb tenses and basic pronouns, dozens of adjectives, numbers (which includes being able to tell ages and time), family titles, greetings, and formal dialogues. Everyday builds on the previous, and it’s hard, but we are thriving and I can already have brief conversations with my host Mother at dinner (far fewer awkward silences!).

Almost all of my class studies Romanian, but a few were selected to learn Russian since much of the northern part of the country is mostly Russian speaking (See Moldovan your favorite Moldovan history book Re: actions of Soviet Union). We see them a couple times a week at our hub site for technical training.