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
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