Corn and Grapes

The forest

Someone sleeps in this little hut in the vineyard to make sure no one steals the grapes.

Beautiful vineyard view

The week’s adventure continues. On Wednesday I helped pick grapes again. Driving out to a little village of 600 people, my friend Ion told me we were going to take the back way, because the main road to get into the village is really bad, and at times almost impassable. Needless to say, the back way was straight up a mountain, on a horrible dirt road filled with potholes and other tire-blowing surprises. When the rain starts, Ion said, the good road turns into a mudslide and people are forced to take the main road into the village, adding an extra two hours onto the trip. Driving on the roads in Louisiana, which as many of you know can be night and day once you cross the border to another state, seem like a dream compared to here. It’s funny because whenever I take the microbus to Chisinau I usually put my earphones in and take a nap, and every time we pass through a town called Orhei I am startled awake by my head getting smashed against the ceiling because of the potholes in the road. How I look at it though is that if they had good roads here, it just wouldn’t be as fun.

Once we reached the top of the mountain the views were fantastic. The countryside here is beautiful. Looking out at the horizon you can see small clusters of houses and trees that make up different villages, vast open grazing lands for the livestock, acres and acres of farm land accented by freshly tilled earth, rows of grapes, or stacks of corn husks made into tee-pees. We made it early in the morning and first had to harvest a couple acres of corn, by hand. Talk about some bad breaking work, you go through the rows of corn, cut the stalk near the ground with a scythe (if you recall from a previous blog post I was having trouble remembering the word for the slasher tool the Grim Reeper uses), and once that is complete you must remove the husk, and then make giant tee-pees with the stalks, which will be picked up by a horse cart to store for winter which feeds the cows. After we finished the corn we took a break and had a picnic of rabbit, tomatoes, bread, and wine in the shade of an apple tree. I don’t think I’m programmed the same way as the Moldovans, because the old grandpa I was working with seemed to be energized by the wine, but all I wanted to do was take a booze-and-fatigued induced nap in the shade. It probably didn’t help matters that I had killed my water three hours earlier and was pushing the dehydration threshold. My logic at that point was to graze freely on the grapes, and hopefully the fructose and water in the fruit would keep me going.

Harvesting grapes and making wine probably is a lot stickier than you would imagine. You start at the end of a row, and use your knife to cut the bushels off the vine. Every time I would start to get in a groove, and felt like I was really making some headway I would slice my hand open with my knife. Once the baskets were full, we would haul them to the van and pile them in the back on top of a large tarp laid down so as not to get the van dirty since at the bottom a nice layer of juice had formed. Bees swarm to the grapes and I’m really surprised only one of us got stung, because driving down the road we were like a mobile beehive. Of course while driving to the village at the end of the day to drop the grapes off to start the wine making process, the van broke down. I’m no mechanic, and my Romanian is pretty rusty, especially when it comes to technical car parts, but I think the problem was the transmission. I was pretty curious to see how we were going to get out of this pickle, but after banging around the engine with a hammer for ten minutes, we were merrily bumping down the road again.

After my friend Ion and I unloaded the grapes, we had to weigh them, and I believe it came to a little over a ton. We thought we were going to bring the harvest back to Telenesti to sell to a man that owns a bar, so we loaded the grapes back into the van. Well, no dice. The guy didn't want the grapes, so once again, we had to scoop out all the grapes (it was getting really sticky by this point), and carry them a couple hundred yards to the back of the house where a giant barrel was waiting for us to deposit the load. I had been going strong for twelve hours at this point, and was releived when the babusca sat us down at the table to eat borsht, eggs, and a tomato salad.

Cool autumn nights during Harvest

Remember what I have mentioned about unpredictability? This Friday everything seemed to be “normal”. I walked around the village, shot the breeze with a couple people, had a meeting with the director of the school, went to tutoring, and had a nice dinner. After 8 o’clock I’m pretty much in the clear for unexpected adventures, and I like to talk with my host family, read a book, or pop in a movie; I live in a village and the discotech here isn’t really my thing (big room, no bar, big groups of 14 year olds). Anyways, it was about 10 pm, I had just finished going over my day’s language lesson and was looking forward to finishing Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan. I heard the doorbell ring and could tell right away from the voices that it was my neighbor, Igor the bus driver. I first met him at the funeral party I went to on my site visit to Telenesti. He is a jovial sort of man that loves to ramble away in Russian forgetting that I only know Romanian. He is a classic repeater. Some people here will be talking to you, then when they can see that they’ve lost you, or a word has stumped you, they will try a different approach to the conversation, and hope that you know a synonym of the word they are trying to get across. This seems to be the most practical method, at least for me. However, there are others, the repeaters, that will repeat the word over, and over, and over, hoping that somehow after ten times of hearing the word, the meaning will suddenly make sense to you. The best part is that people won’t simply repeat the word, but they get louder each time. This seems to be a classic universal mistake, and at first it’s frustrating because you want to tell them that you aren’t deaf or stupid, you just haven’t learned the word yet in the four months you’ve been in the country. If I feel the situation at hand is informal enough, I will shout back at them “NU INTELEG ACEEA CUVENT”- I DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT WORD. Works like a charm, and you can see the wheels turning trying to come up with a new way to explain what they are talking about instead of writing you off as the linguistically challenged foreigner. Anyways, old Igor the bus driver, came over to tell me, against my host mothers wishes, that I was to go night fishing with him and his buddy Viscile. I had to get up early the next morning to help a family harvest grapes, but Igor the bus driver wouldn’t have it any other way, we were going fishing.

Twenty minutes later, sitting in the soft mud next to a large pond used to water the local cows, sheep, and goats, we had poles in hand and lines in the water. It’s been quite sometime since I’ve been fresh water fishing, and I was trying to explain that the kind of fishing I do back home is pretty far from what we were doing. Finally after freezing my tail off for about an hour and a half with nothing to show for it except a stomach full of fresh goat cheese and wine, we decided to pack it in. I’m pretty sure there aren’t even fish in the pond, but all in all I really enjoyed the camaraderie of sitting on the bank, listening to stories about Soviet times, and taking in the dark landscape only barely visible from the sliver of the moon peaking through the clouds and the orange glow of Igor the bus driver’s cigarette.

The next morning at 6:45 I was roused out of bed, again by Igor the bus driver. To make up for our fruitless labors the night before he came bearing gift of fish sandwiches. Nothing like waking up to the day with a cup of coffee, and rich, oily canned fish paste spread over a slice of bread. Surprisingly enough, that was the second time in ten days to have fish paste sandwiches for breakfast, and I am really starting to enjoy them.

After a couple hours working my magic with sheers on grape vines, the family I was helping decided to call it a day. I forgot to bring my camera, but I’m sure there will be more photo ops to see me in action, don’t worry. After saying goodbye and promising I would come back to help make wine, I walked to the main road near their farm, and instead of hitching back to my village, I found myself getting on a bus to Chisinau going the opposite direction. My host family would be gone all weekend, and I really didn’t feel like sitting at home by myself. An hour and a half later, after a nice cat nap induced by the warmth of 50 people in roughly the size of a cardboard box with no open windows, I made it into the capital. I picked the right weekend to go in because 3/4ths of PC Moldova was in town for the weekend. I spend the weekend bumping around the big city, grabbing snacks in the piata, enjoying the weather on the terrace of a local bar, and jamming out to a great cover band that our Safety and Security Officer for PC plays the harmonica in. Sunday morning, I was able to lethargically lounge around PC headquaters watching ESPN, trying to find the energy to make it to the auto Gara de Nord (North Bus Station) and head back home. Next weekend I’ll be back in the capital for two days of language lessons, and soon it will be Wine Fest in October kicked off with a 10K road race that I’m looking forward to. In the mean time, I’ve got a case of the Monday’s and I really need to get up and go to work. Multi ani si success aceasta saptamâna, paka paka.

Living Rural: 101 Days

At an old Jewish cemetery helping to clean it up.

Selling produce in the Sunday morning market.

I’m having a hard time starting this blog post. It’s not that I haven’t been doing anything, quite on the contrary, I have been very busy, yet mildly productive. Actually, I’m not really sure what “productive” means right now. America is a society based upon results, of action, and much of what inspired me to come to the Peace Corps is from hearing about previous success stories (go check out Peace Corps website and you’ll see what I mean, I’m pretty sure I decided that I wanted to join whenever I read the entire site on my iPhone driving back from a fishing trip). What they didn’t tell me is that productivity can be very strange; I know now that by simply being in my village and showing the people that I am dedicated to living here by learning their language, making friends, going to work, and living like they do is productive, but whenever your used to “doing” something, and able to see tangible outputs, it makes me stir crazy to get a project going. I’ve actually got a couple projects floating around in the old steal trap that I want to get started with, but I still have a good amount of prep work before I can start getting my hands dirty. A friend of mine in the village bought a really nice sewing machine, and he and his wife want to start a sewing business. It’s ironic because I had just heard what another PCV did earlier in another site where he and his partner helped setup a sewing business, geared more for tailoring. The guy in my village wants to make embroideries and sell them in a local/regional market. We also collaborated on the possibilities of getting more sewing machines, and renting them out Internet café style per hour. The idea is in very early stages, but there is promise. I told him that my mother owns her own needlepoint shop, and the guy almost fell out of his chair thinking that I was God’s personal gift to him. In the grand scheme of things that doesn’t mean squat, but I don’t want to deflate the wind out of my own sails and am really eager to work with this couple.

I also have a couple Ag specific projects that I’ve been thinking about. I’m more drawn to projects in the agriculture sector here. Call me crazy, but there is something romantic in working the land, helping to refine a practice that has been around for thousands of years, and literally is, our life source. There’s a lot of need for improving greenhouses here, and other volunteers have really sparked my interest in solar battery powered greenhouses where the sun heats up barrels of water and regulates the temperature in the winter time, making it much more cost efficient than burning fuel in a heat source. I’m not sure how enthused farmers would be about portable greenhouses, but I think it’s a pretty cool concept. Essentially, you can plant, for example lettuce, earlier than most crops because they are more resilient to cold weather; once these have started to grow, you get your tractor and pull your greenhouse (usually on rails or something similar) to another plot where you are starting the next type of crop, and so forth until all the crops don’t need a greenhouse anymore. The next project is a dreamer, and is simply an idea, but if someone would build a produce refrigeration unit in my raoin, the farmers could store their produce longer and market them in the winter. As for now, there isn’t any option for locally grown produce in the winter, and the fresh produce they can get is expensive. I might just want to see this project go through because the thought of canned watermelon (no joke, I’ll tell you how it tastes in a couple months) really turns my stomach. And last, but definitely not the least, I would like to introduce sweet potatoes to Moldovans. It’s one of those “If you build it, they will come” type of deals, because the Moldovans go crazy over their potatoes. I had potatoes at all three meals today. They can be baked, boiled, smashed, diced, roasted, or toasted and they will eat them. Not only does the nutritional content of sweet potatoes blow the hell out of regular potatoes, but they taste better too (please refer to my disclaimer on the right-hand side of my blog about my opinions). I’m pretty certain that if they will accept the fact that the inside of the potato is orange, they will love them, and I will be given my own holiday in Moldova, and statues of Lenin, as you see blow, will be taken down and replaced by me. A guy can dream…

Sunday morning market in Cortova, that really is a statue of Lenin in the background.

This past weekend I went up to visit another volunteer that lives near the border of Ukraine. He had a project that involved cleaning up an old Jewish cemetery that he needed help with. It was a great weekend, and it was really nice to be able to see my fellow PCVs in action. Talk about some impressive language abilities, these guys have been in site for 18 months and were rattling off Romanian and Moldovaneasca (blend of Romanian and Russian) like it was nothing. Needless to say, I’m quite jealous. I had an epiphany while there when we were walking to the morning market trying to buy some snacks for later in the day, and somehow ended up in someone’s car, where we were then shown the corn meal factory, ended up in the fields supervising a boy learn how to prune raspberry plants, and then were deposited at a table where we ate bread, cheese, and pig fat washed down with homemade wine. I love the unpredictability of my days here. Time is quite an irrelevant concept, and if you go with the flow, it is truly amazing where you will end up at the end of the day. I actually experienced that quite literally last Monday when my partner told me we were going to a masa (like a party) at this family’s house in another village. After we ate, my partner and I said our goodbyes, and we were preparing to leave when he told me that I would be staying with that family for the next two days. No extra clothes, toothbrush, phone charger, or whatever other convenience I usually would bring on a similar outing. I spent the next two days wandering around the farm, learning how to milk a cow, harvest grapes, and watching the grass grow, and the best part of it, I loved every second of it. Since then I’ve been daydreaming of the day I can move out of my host family’s apartment, rent out a little cottage with a nice fruit and vegetable garden, and even have some chickens, ducks, and rabbits. Before I get distracted and go into detail, I will end it there because I feel like I’ve hit you with a lot of agriculture related material today. Although before I do go, I must say that the news that’s coming out of America is quite repulsive. It’s either someone screaming at the president in Congress, a popstar dying or being defamed, or a bloody mess with healthcare reform, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be hanging up to towel on my news sites and simply “be” for awhile, so hopefully by the time I get back the economy will be in full swing, healthcare will be affordable for all, and the south is no longer in racist-shock that there is a black president. Have fun sorting out that mess, I'm sticking to language lessons.

Language lessons

Muddy fields and horse carts

This is a monument in my village for a famous Moldovan poet.

Noroc my faithful readership. From my daily news readings it sounds like things are really heating up over there in the States. I would like to thank the person that signed me up for the daily conservative newsletters; the only thing better would be a Rush Limbaugh podcast or reruns of Bill O’Reily. Sadly enough, I don’t get much of a chance to read the newsletters before my cursor finds its way to the Delete button. Now if I could only figure out how to block obnoxious forwarded emails from friends and acquaintances. Who in their right mind likes receiving those? Even more, who in their right mind likes sending those? I won’t divulge further into this caveat, for your sake, but just stop and think next time before you hit the Forward button on those pointless emails.

The political situation in Moldova is fascinating and I’ve settled into a nice routine of printing out the latest political news here and translating them into English. The struggle between the Communists and the Democrats to elect a president still continues, even after three subsequent elections.

Last week was a great week. It was the first week where I really started to feel comfortable with the notion that this village is my home for the next 20-someodd months. I’m not doing much at work besides showing up, translating articles and books, reading, and doing my song-and-dance whenever people wander in and want to talk with me. There are reoccurring questions that I get without fail: “How do you like Moldova?; “What is better, America or Moldova?”; “What do you think of our women?”; “Do you live near New York or California?”; and “What do you think about Obama?”. I don’t care one way or another what your political leanings are, it’s nice to travel when other countries like your president and you aren’t ostracized for having an American passport.

I’ve made friends with a family in my village with four kids whom all speak very good English. They learned English from a PCV nine years ago that spent three years in my village. It’s fascinating listening to them talk about the PCV and how much he has helped change their lives. Not only did he teach them a valuable skill that helped get them a better education in Romania, but he also showed them a new perspective of the world. PCVs in over 100 countries are teaching people the value of having an open mind. I didn’t want to start an English club before coming to my village because I don’t know the first thing about teaching a foreign language. But I’ve changed my mind, and have found five kids that are very eager to work with me, and if the only thing I do here for the next two years is teach them English, I know this impact will go far beyond the scope of my time here. People are looking for a way out of poverty in Moldova, and their best chances to do this is to get a good education. The future truly lies in the hands of the youth, and if they can get a good education and put it into practice here in Moldova, the country will have a much brighter future. It is humbling to know that I can be a part of this, even on the grassroots level, and there is no greater feeling than that of helping people and making a difference. It is a privilege to call this my job, and I know that these experiences will mold me for the rest of my life.

Apart from starting an English club, I helped with a leadership conference for high schoolers this past Saturday. Thirty students attended and listened to speakers (a mayor, auditor, journalist, economist, teacher, and a police officer) talk about their jobs and qualifications. After that, the kids learned how to assemble a CV and a resume, and then they had two sessions on Pro-activity and Leadership. I guided a group of students on the Delegation style of leadership. The kids’ conception of delegation was that the boss simply hands out work and tells people what to do. We did different skits and situations to show them that an effective leader is one that utilizes the assets of his/her employees. I wanted to show them that you don’t have to be the smartest person, or the most talented, to be an effective leader. All the students seemed to have a good time, and I learned just as much as they did, and I look forward to putting on more informational sessions similar to this one.

This is a group of students that I was leading on Leadership styles...in Romanian.

This is a group shot of the professionals we had come speak for the kids at the conference.

Last week I was able to get a tutor for Romanian, no thanks to my partner or my host family. I was getting tired, annoyed is a better word, of “bride shopping” as my partner put it. I threw him a curve ball the other day just to see what his reaction would be, and I told him that I wanted to get a guy to tutor me because we would have more in common. That was when he stopped “helping” me find a tutor; probably for the best because my patience was starting to wear thin. Along with a tutor, I was also able to find a workout partner. I was getting really worried what kind of physical activity I would be able to do during the winter because the snow, mud, ice, and weather are supposed to make it difficult to run through the fields. I met a police officer that said I could work out with him at the police gym since there’s no other gym in my village. A couple free weights and a bar, and I’m a happy camper. In the mean time, I’ve made more Moldovan friends, and we play basketball a couple times a week. Which ever previous volunteer that was here that played basketball in college, thank you for very much for making me look like a horrible basketball player. The guys matched me against a 6’7 giant that is an incredible player, thinking that all Americans are really good at the sport (because of that other volunteer). The guy ran me into the ground the first day, but I’ve been able to hold my weight for the most part since then. It’s just fun getting out with the locals and playing.

This is a wedding driving through my village. They decorate the cars and honk all the way down the street.

I haven’t attended any more funerals, thank God, but I did get invited to a wedding in a couple weeks. From what I’ve heard, weddings here are sundown to sunup celebrations, full of dancing, food, and many, many rounds of toasting the firewater. I’m a little nervous because there is no telling how this is going to turn out. The two other big celebrations I’ve been to landed me in the hospital and naked in a polluted river (separate occasions with no connection to each other). So we shall see… Tune in next week for more stories and soliloquies, until then Geaux Tigers and happy Labor Day!

This little house is a Crochet and stitching shop in my village.

One of the many horse carts, called a caruta.

A couple kiosks near my work, I love the one called "Lactate" on the left.

In the background is my apartment building, and the foreground is an abandoned Orthodox Church and someone's horse grazing on the side of the road.

My buddy Dave in Balti reading what this monument says in Russian. Apparently it is a monument for Chernobyl.