It has been an eventful couple of days in Moldova. My adventures this week started on Thursday with the food preparations leading up to Paste (pronounced pash-tay), or the Orthodox Easter. Thursday night we prepared the traditional Colzonac, a sweet bread a lot like the Jewish Challah. It takes an hour of kneading, so we worked in shifts on a huge vat of dough.

This is my first attempt at adding video, so see if it worked. If it did, you can see me in the "uniform" for the kitchen making the dough for the cozonac!

This is the finished product. Who said I couldn't bake?

On Friday all of the volunteers in my group (Officially the Molodva EE and Health 20s!) were invited to the home of our director, Jeff Kelley Clark. He is moving on to a job in Seattle and will be leaving us in another two weeks, so the evening marked the first in a long string of good-byes... It was a great evening with great people, great food and fun conversations. The guy in the back with the beard is our leader orchestrating things in the kitchen. Eric is in the middle with Jimmy in the forefront! Great people one and all!

Speaking of great people... Here are Brad and Matt on potato duty. They believed the line that only the greatest cooks can handle peeling 100's of potatoes.... Matt is truly one of the finest people I have met in a long time. He has saved my sanity this past year and provided a lot of comic relief in my Peace Corps life.

Some more of our fabulous volunteers.

Friday, after Jeff's shindig, Matt and I (and Emily, a volunteer who is now working in Chisinau!) took off to the airport at about midnight to go and pick up Andi, a friend of ours that finished his service last summer and is now working in Moscow. He came back for the holidays to see everyone and to spend some time with his host family. He is truly one of the funniest people I have ever met. He also randomly dispenses a huge amount of wisdom in his humorous diatribes. (How was my vocabulary usage on that one Andy?)

Finally, at about 4 am, Andy-the-mighty called it a night, so we finally got some sleep. Four hours of sleep later, I headed out of Chisinau for the 3 hour ride back to Cahul so that I could help out with the preparations for the holiday on Sunday. I made it just in time to help out with the Sarmale rolling (my specialty-stuffed grape leaves!).


So today (Sunday) was Orthodox Easter and, although I am winding down my time in Moldova, my first! (Last year I was in Turkey for the holidays!) This morning we were up at the crack of dawn (2:30 a.m. to be exact!) to head for the church. Every family brings a basket or bag with the traditional cozonac , some wine and water to be blessed, colored eggs, and some candles. Other things are in the basket to munch on after the wine is blessed and then shared with the people around. They spread it out on a little towel in front of them and this is all done in lines around the church. The people basically make concentric rings around the church to make room for everyone. It is unbelievably beautiful, with all of the candles burning and the people ....

Tante Elena (Unchi Nikolai's wife!) and her sister in front of their spread.

Sandu (in the front) Nicholai and our neighbors. The candles that are burning were lit in the church from a special flame and must stay burning until you get home. Carrying them through the streets without blowing out the flame is not as easy as you might think...

The ghostly figure in the middle is me! (Left is Nikolai and right is Angela.)

Basket with all of the goodies brought to the church.

It was a fun, beautiful and eventful three days for me. I hope that your holiday celebrations were a time for being together with friends and loved ones. See you in three months!

An education for the teacher...

This has been an interesting week for me. I know most of you have heard about the protests and the riots that went on in our capitol city last Tuesday. First let me say that I am far away the capitol and that we have had no problems down here in Cahul. Our staff at Peace Corps has done a great job of keeping us informed of what was happening and making sure that we were all in safety. They canceled all meetings for us in Chisinau and told us to stay put in our towns and villages while the situation was so unstable. Things right now are quiet and everyone seems to be cooling off.
I can't share much with you that you haven't seen on the news, but I will share with you something that makes me more sad and concerned than anything they played on UTube or the BBC. I am saddened by some of the misdirection of anger that I am seeing with my students. The events in Chisinau are sparking a lot of problems here between the Russian and Romanian speakers in our town. People here seem to be polarizing around language groups and (among my students anyway!) I am hearing some pretty predjudiced language. I decided Thursday and Friday to take some time out of my classes to give my students a chance to talk about the issues. I teach groups that are Romanian and groups that are Russian, and I wanted to give them the chance to talk about what was happening here. I know from my own life, that wild accusations about people are harder to make when you are sitting down at a table together. I wanted them to get past making generalizations about one another and remember that everyone has ideas and opinions that are based on their life experience, their families, and their own personal history. I think it was good for me to be a kind of "moderator" because this is not my country and not my fight. After a lot of rhetoric at the beginning, all of the students really wanted to talk about their own fears, their lack of faith in a future, and their lack of hope that they were ever going to be able to follow their dreams in Moldova. It didn't matter what language they spoke, their belief that they were never going to be able to make a good life in Moldova was universal. None of them want to stay here and try to make Moldova a better place because they have completely lost faith that that is possible.
Why does this make me sad? First, I am sad because they are so young and they have already lost faith in politics and government and, ultimitely, in their country. Second, because they are turning their anger over bad living conditions, lack of possibilities and an impossible economic situation turn into a kind of racism-Russian -vs-Romanian-instead of turning their anger into a passion to make Moldova a better place to live for everyone.
This past week has definitely been a lesson for the teacher. For my students, I think what they needed from me was someone who would just let them talk about their concerns out loud and who would make sure that everyone, regardless of their opinion or language, could be heard. Talking about their fears and concerns in English took the us-against-them factor out of the equation. For 80 minutes we were all speaking and listening in the SAME language. I hope it helped....