Getting ready to dance.
My former host sister.
The building I now work at.
Random path I decided to start my hike on yesterday.
August 9, 2009
What do you get when you add eight weeks of stress, awkwardness, wine, sweat, sour cream, Romanian, and lots of fruit together?....A Peace Corps Volunteer. Yes, that’s right, no longer am I mere trainee. At 10:30 this morning, I took the official United States governmental oath to defend my country against all foreign and domestic threats and promised to uphold the Constitution to the best of my abilities, or something along those lines. If only I had a metal coat hanger, I would discombobulate it into a PC logo, and brand it on my right butt check. Just kidding, the medical officer here would freak out if she found out, so no worries.
This past week has been an absolute whirlwind. It seemed like the last week in classes I actually digressed in my language abilities, which sad to say, doesn’t call for one happy camper when you have to sit through hours of lecture everyday. At least I wasn’t in the sinking ship alone. A lot of my other comrades felt like they were in the same situation. But, it’s all over now and I can say that I am stronger because of it.
I’ll miss PST, well no, scratch that I’m lying; I’ll miss parts of PST. I’ll miss getting to see friends everyday, the beautiful village of Milestii Mici, the proximity to the capital, my host family and neighbors, and my professors. I’ll especially miss the random health advisories about the dangers of drinking water from one of my teachers. Anytime I would pour a glass of water this lady would tell me to wait a little bit, that I shouldn’t drink water now, it’s not good for my health. Albeit, “It’s to early in the morning”, “It’s too hot outside, you don’t want to sweat too much”, “You just ate cucumbers, wait a little while to drink water”, “My son plays outside in the sun, and if he drinks water when he comes inside he gets a headache”, and many, many more. I think Moldovans are just adverse to drinking water in general. For some reason I would even take heat from my host mother about this as well. “Neal, we’re about to drink champagne, its not good to drink water”, “Why do you want to drink water right now? It’s not good to drink water before bed” even though my five year old host sister sat there and drained, I kid you not, 3/4th of a quart of chefir- it’s similar to buttermilk, but chunky and they put salt in it, at 11 o’clock at night. I’m pretty sure this is a commonality in Moldova about water, because my new host mother even thinks I’m crazy for wanting to put water in the refrigerator, “You want cold water? Why? It will only make you sick”. Although it’s completely normal to try to get their American to drink wine at 7:45 in the morning before they move out. Nu e nimic, tot e bine, nu asa?
When I went on a site visit to my permanent site visit a month ago my host partner was out of town. Hmm, let me rewind a bit to explain what a host partner is first. Peace Corps wants all our projects here to be sustainable, because, our goal is to help develop human capital. To do this, we all (Health, English, ARBD, and COD) get host partners that are host country nations that work side by side with us in our respective NGO’s, schools, offices, etc. I think a lot a people have a misconception about developing countries…I am not here to come in a point out all the problems I see with their village and/or country, that would never be sustainable. My job is to work with my host partner, first and foremost learn from him/her and then we go about collaborating with the community about what their needs and wants are.
Getting back on track, I met my partner, and man is he a cool guy, very friendly and warm. He seems like a real shaker and a mover, because we got to discussing the projects he has underway, what they’ve done in the past, and why he requested to have a volunteer. From the sound of it, we have the potential to do great things in the way of agriculture projects and economic development.
The pictures I am posting are from our last day in our village. The ARBDs and the CODs get sworn in two weeks early and we had to put together presentations, learn songs and dances, and one person from each group had to give a goodbye/thank you speech to our host families. I worked on a presentation with my friend Vince about the problems Milestii Mici has with foxes. Many a night, my host family would chase a rogue fox, trying to steal one of our ducks, chickens, or rabbits, out of our yard. We actually put together a really nice presentation on all the different prevention methods that people use around the world, but somehow in the delivery of the speech we screwed it up and all the Moldovans thought we were talking about how the poor foxes are being discriminated. I was the one from ARBD to give the speech in Romanian thanking the host families for their hospitality and generosity. I volunteered for the position, because for some reason I love the thrill and nervousness I get when public speaking. I understand why it’s a fear for people to get in-front of a crowd and deliver a speech, but I’ve found that if you embrace that fear, it can be quite a rush. I know, I’m weird, but the challenge of preparing and presenting a speech in a foreign language was too much to pass up.
August 13, 2009
I could have sworn I posted the earlier entry until I got an email today saying that I haven’t updated my blog in awhile. My bad. I don’t want to say I’ve been too busy to post, because that would be a lie. I’ve just not gotten around to it lately is more of an acceptable excuse. I attribute this to the fact that the initial culture shock is wearing off, good sign. However I do have some good updates of what has been going on.
I’ve been at my new site now for a good part of a week, and I’ve only gone to work for a day and a half. Monday was the first day at the office. Most of the day I spent reading a book and working on Romanian, and throughout the day people would wander in, talk with my host partner, and then ask me if I knew the volunteer that was here last year, named Danny or Donny, which they pronounce Joy, don’t ask. That was news to me, I had been told the last volunteer at my site had been an English teacher back in the ‘90s. Now, if my Romanian servers correct, this cat Donny couldn’t handle the Moldovan nectar and would apparently start sippin’ grandpa’s cough syrup before he even made it to lunch, and was kicked out of the PC. What blows my mind is that you have got to be hitting the bottle pretty f-ing hard if Moldovans start thinking you have a drinking problem. Because while I was getting told this story, and warned not to drink very much, my host partner was serving us beer, at work, at 11:30 in the morning. Not only that, but the next day my firm conducted a seminar about apiculture. After the seminar ended, me and six Moldovan farmers went to one of their houses and proceeded to eat probably five chickens, three loafs of bread, a school of fish, half a cow, two watermelons, and drained it all down with about 5 bottles of wine. Needless to say, everyone took the afternoon off. I took a nice four-hour power nap and still had to go to bed at 10 that night.
For the past two days my host partner has been in Chisinau and I haven’t had to work. Yesterday I read a book and a half, watched a movie, took a three-hour walk through the town and surrounding areas, caught a nap, knocked out some studying, and then had dinner. After dinner my host mother showed me food in the fridge, told me it was my breakfast, and told me to lock the door behind her. Okkkaayy, goodnight? I was just about to settle into my book around 10pm when I get a call on my cell phone from my host mother. “Nehlo, vini aklfaklfaskfjdsakafkjasbfasf”, I didn’t understand one word she said. “Bine, la revedere!”- Ok, goodbye! was my response. Thinking that did the trick, I was disrupted 15 minutes later by the doorbell ringing. I threw on some workout shorts and a shirt, and was greeted by the fattest, sweatiest man (shirtless, wearing tiny shorts that disappeared under his bulging stomach) I think I’ve ever encountered in my life. He said something about my host mom, said that his car was downstairs, so I figured what the hell, let’s see where this goes.
Thirty minutes later, after driving through the dark, past any sign of civilization, we pulled off the road to a lone house and was greeted by strangers I’ve never met before. Thoroughly confused, I introduced myself, came inside, and was relieved to see my host mother and sister at the table. It was a terribly strange evening, the father of the family left when I got there and was headed to Moscow, and for the rest of the night the family and I kicked it in one of the bedrooms eating fruit and listening to Moldovan pop music. Around 11:30 they asked if I was tired and then showed me a bed. All right, the night was already weird enough, but since I didn’t have a choice, or the vocabulary, I went along with it. I got up at 7 knowing that my host mom had to be at work by 8, but was sent back to bed. So I got up again at 9:30, ate a breakfast of bread, hot dogs, and congealed chicken feet, and was told that my host mom and sister left an hour before. Not knowing what they had in store for me, I was doing a fine job at asking a bunch of worthless questions and doing my best to understand what they were telling me. This story is really starting to ramble, and the stool I’m sitting on sucks, so I’m going to skip ahead a couple hours. I was asked to look over a loan application, I told them I couldn’t read it, and once I was deemed useless the older brother and myself set off back to my town.
There isn’t a bus that far out, so we had to hitchhike. An old man, with a young woman and her two kids picked us up after ten minutes on the side of the road. Did that old man know how to feed some speed to his ride. At one point, we were doing 70 mph down a dirt road, and doing a great job scaring the shit out of the American in the car. We started swerving all over the road, and then came to a fairly abrupt halt, great, flat tire in the middle of nowhere. We get out to see what happened, and I made it out of the car just in time to see one of the back tires rolling down the hill. It was quite a sight to see this old man sprinting down a hill, leaving his, I presume, daughter and grandkids in his beat up Russian clunker of a car, with three wheels. The guy I was with simply turned, and said “Ha diem” Let’s go.
Just think, Neal, the adventure is just starting Bob
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