Time to at Least Tell You About My New Home in the South...

I am finally doing what I came here to do... teach!!!!! It has been a difficult time the past few weeks with packing up all of my things, meeting another family and trying to figure out their routines and habits, meeting my colleagues at the university, etc. I think part of my problem when I first got to Cahul was that I had too much time on my hands. I had almost two weeks before the term started when I couldn't start on my lesson plans because I had no idea what I was teaching, but I really didn't have much else to do either. (Those of you who know me well will know that the worst possible situation I can be in is one where I am bored!) Know I am in the full swing of teaching at the university here, I have some amazing students, and I am working really hard to plan well, to have interesting and relevent lessons/lectures, etc. I REALLY like the university here, and it is a novel and interesting idea to find myself standing in front of a group of students that really want to learn what I am teaching. This is going to make it very difficult to go back to teaching high school in America.... Jim, save me a spot at the university! I like it, I like it!
I am also lucky enough to have some amazing site mates. I have interesting things in common with both of them. Liza is working with the Pro Europa Center as a community developer. From what I understand so far she does translation and helps with grant writing. I only know a bit about the organization, but it looks like they are set up to encourage a more Western orientation for Moldova. (Looking toward Europe rather than Russia!) and they put together programs, social and business related, toward achieving that goal. I have briefly met some of the people in the organization and I am very impressed with what they have had to say. The "No Way!" connection I have with Liza is that she used to be an employee of good old Dillard's inc! She lived in Hillcrest and worked at corporate office with Dean about ten years ago. Sorry to say it wasn't her favorite job (go figure, Dean?) and she didn't live in Arkansas for a really long time, but kind of a weird thing. Michelle is my second site mate. She rocks!!!!! She introduced me to a great bar in town where the wine is in barrels and you order it by the pitcher. (People even come in with their own plastic bottles and have them filled there!) It is a dive by any standards, but a really fun one! There seem to be no women that go in there (we were the only ones and it was full!), but there are definitely some interesting characters there. On our first visit we met a man who proclaimed himself a Russian soldier that had just been in Iraq. After talking with us for a short time, he said that his job was to kill American soldiers in Iraq. (Keep in mind the language barriers we were facing. He spoke no Romanian, only Russian. We speak only Romanian and no Russian. Our conversation was a lot of hand gestures and a small amount of broken English on the soldier's part.) Needless to say we proudly proclaimed ourselves citizens of Canada and tried to encourage him to go back to his own table.
Thanks for keeping up with my adventures on the blog. I will try to figure out how to get pictures loaded some time soon and let you see some pictures of my new family and my new town. It is great down South!!!!!! Except for meetings and trainings, I don't have any need to leave here at all. We are all on what is called "lock down" right now, so we aren't allowed to travel anywhere in the first three months. It is designed to make us get involved in the community and to make us interact, but I know for people who live in very small towns it is very difficult. I am really lucky that I live in a small city with lots of shops, a few restaurants, etc. It makes life a lot easier!
For all of my wonderful friends starting the school year, I wish you the best of luck with your students and colleagues! For all of you folks with regular jobs, I wish you a swift end to summer in Arkansas, because I know how gross and hot it can be in September. Cooler weather is coming, along with the holidays. We are off lock down in the middle of November, so I plan to spend Christmas with my friends in Germany. (Andi, Susa.... Get ready!!! I am definitely going to be there to see you!) I am looking forward to indoor plumbing and lots of relaxing!!!!! Until then, I plan to work my butt off here and keep learning Romanian. Stay tuned for pictures....
Jennifer

Swearing In and Stuff

I decided to go ahead and do one more post before I left for the south. I wanted to include a few pictures from the Swearing In and a few from the festivities beforehand. We swore-in on the 16th, so of course, we had to have a celebration of the end of PST. Some of our guys in Moldova 20 decided 2 weeks ago that they wanted to have a mustache contest in the weeks leading up to swearing in. Needless to say, they were the butt of many jokes as their little 20 year old faces struggled valiantly to grow hair. At the celebration dinner they stood before the crowd, did a mustache "catwalk" and did some rather in-appropriate mustache stroking to get the voting crowd worked up. A good time was definitley had by all! A lot of the volunteers from groups that are currently serving in Moldova were there as well, so there were many stories, much wine, etc. It is a bit sad to think that some of the people I have been so close to over these weeks will now be pretty far away and I will only see them a couple of times over the next year!
Swearing In was a lot of fun as well. I sang the national anthem, gave a speech in Romanian and was sworn in by the ambassador himself. Our group is down to 28 from the original 34 that left from Philadelphia, but I think the ones who are staying are pretty committed to being here. It is such a wierd feeling when someone leaves. We are so tight that it definitely feels like there is a hole where they used to be. It is hard to imagine that we have only been together for 10 weeks!
I hope everyone is staying well, healthy and happy. Keep in touch!

Goodbyes and New Beginnings

I know, I have been a bit tardy with the updates! The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of activity, saying goodbye, packing up, etc. Let me start with the best part of all of PST... Practice School. I was fortunate to be in the capital city at the continuing education university with some absolutely amazing students. They were from universities all over the city (state, medical, etc.) and were so much fun to be with. We talked about all kinds of great topics- including politics, problems in Moldova, problems in the US, etc. We ended the class with a community project at a small orphanage in the city. My student chose the project, found an orphanage to work with, put together a list of activities, and came to spend the morning with the kids playing games, hanging out, and leaving them with lots of gifts. Amazing, huh? I had so much fun with them! If they are even half as wonderful down in Cahul this will be a great two years. I am just afraid that they have spoiled me for all teaching in the US. I was definitely a great experience!!!!! (I have included some pictures of them with this posting.)

Next thing up is heading for Cahul. I have been way-laid by a bit of a medical snafu. (That is my code for saying I am a clumzy twit!) Last week we had our final party with the families in Peresecina and we had a great evening saying goodbye, playing goofy games, etc. After the party we went to the home of one of the guys in the group and hung out for a while. At about midnight I decided it was time to head home and one of my colleagues insisted on walking me (despite my very stubborn protests!). I learned a valuable lesson about the lighting situation in Moldovan villages that night--It is non-existant! There are absolutely no streetlights at all (not even on the main roads!) and the sidewalks are rough, full of holes and debris, or non-existant. Needless to say, I tripped, went face first into the concrete, and busted my chin open. I didn't think it was that big a deal (lots of blood, but it was on my face, so that is to be expected!), but when I saw it in the mirror the next morning (and it was still bleeding!) I realized it was probably going to need stitches. The best news in all of this is that Peace Corps medical is amazing! Within two hours of calling them I was in Chisinau with a plastic surgeon getting ready to neatly stitch up my chin. I will have a small scar and a great story to tell later! Unfortunately, it means I have to stay in Chisinau a couple of extra days before going to Cahul so that they can take the stitches out. Until then, I have a big white gauze bandage and some stitches on my chin to remember the evening by.
Yesterday we were officially sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers. I didn't get to dance (who knew you needed talent?), but I was one of the four volunteers to give speeches and I sang the national anthem. It was a very solemn occasion with the ambassador to Moldova and media, host families new and old, etc. It was fun for our group to be together one last time before scattering to the four corners of Moldova.
I will be heading to Cahul at the beginning of the week to start getting ready for the beginning of the school year. I will update the blog as soon as I get settled in and figure out about internet access and the like. Thanks for keeping up with my adventures! More soon....

Teaching (and other!) Realities in Moldova

I feel like I am really beginning to get the hang of the way things work (or in some cases, from my American perspective) don't work. I am having the most amazing time at the university teaching this practice school class. You wouldn't believe the way the students are so anxious to learn! It has been a 100 plus degrees for almost all of practice school. The students are adults with jobs and lives and they are not getting any credit for the school, yet they continue to come. They are interested, interesting, and unbelievably intelligent. They bring gifts, they bring me water (so that I don't pass out in class, and they even clap at the end of class sometimes! This is a very different experience from any I have ever had before. I am liking it!
I am also learning to do the national dance of Moldova (the hora!) for our swearing-in ceremony. I will get to wear the costume and everything!!!!!! Be sure that I will post pictures of the entire event on an upcoming blog. It should be a hoot! It is a hell of a lot of work as we practice three days a week for 3 hours a night. Most days are 12 hour work days while we are in practice school. It sounds like a lot, but that is really all that I am doing. I don't have to worry about bills, food, cleaning my house, and all of those other things that occupy life at home. I definitely sleep well at night, so I must be doing something right.
I am learning some fascinating things about the culture and the problems here. Yesterday we had a fascinating discussion about Chernobyl and the connection with Moldova. Chernobyl was located in Ukraine (a country that borders Moldova!). Many people from here were sent to help in the clean up efforts without being told anything about the dangers of radiation! That combined with proximity has meant a startling incidence of cancer in very young people and children. We are so lucky in the US! I feel like I take so much about our water, soil, etc. for granted. Here it is very important to know where food comes from, how it has been stored, etc. These are not things I give much thought to at all in the US.
Well, that's about it for now. I am going to try and post one more time before I head down to Cahul, but it may be a while after that before I get up and running in my new place. I wish all of you great starts to the new school year, more good than bad in life, and the company of people you love!!!!!!

Sunday in Moldova....

I decided to dedicate some time today for getting the hang of this blogging thing, so be sure to scroll down to the end of my page and take a look at the pictures I have managed to add! Sometimes all it takes is a little time to get to know your computer. Other times it takes a sledgehammer and a bottle of wine!
Well, here it is week seven in Moldova and I have learned many important lessons in this time. I will start with the superficial lessons. First, when the Peace Corps officials tell you to be careful about the water, not to eat the home-made cheeses, etc.-LISTEN! They know what they are talking about. I have always been able to eat the craziest stuff and live to tell about it. (Suni, remember the Chicken Feet at that nasty Dim Sum place in Chinatown?) I have discovered that being sick is not fun when you are in a foreign country, so the lesson I am taking from this is to be more careful about what I eat and listen to the Peace Corps. They know of what they speak!
Lesson #2: This lesson involves temperature. I didn't go to Africa because I was afraid the heat would kill me. Enter the 115 degree temperatures in Moldova. (Andi, I am sorry about what I said about global warming! I believe, I believe!!!!!!) It has been over 110 degrees for a week now. I thought it would not be a big deal. After all, I am from Arkansas. Summer sweltering is a part of life. I am afraid that there is a difference between running out to your hot car and giving it 5 minutes for the air to kick in and trying to sleep when the low temperature is about 95 degrees. I am tired of sweating and having my brains fry out of my head on the walk home from language class!!!!! Please, if you believe in God in any of her forms, ask her for a bit of divine intervention. I was so busy obsessing about the winters it never occurred to me to do a bit of a rain dance and light a candle for cooler temperatures!
Enough with the whining about conditions. (This is what I went into the Peace Corps for, wasn't it? The adventure of living in another country?) Let me tell you about some of the truly beautiful things about living in Moldova. The people are amazing!!!!!! I have never met a kinder, more hospitable group of people in my life. Everywhere I go, people are interested in talking to me, finding out where I come from, practicing their English, letting me practice my broken Romanian, etc. I don't know if there is enough room to begin to tell you about my wonderful host family. They take such good care of me and have made me feel so comfortable and welcome in their home it is unbelievable. I am one lucky lady!
Right now I am in Practice School. That means that I head to Chisinau every morning (Peace Corps is wonderful. They send a driver to pick us up every day and take us into the city to the University there!) I teach two classes a day with students from assorted universities all over Chisinau. They are amazing students! They range in age from 18 to 61 and are all wonderful students of English. We can talk about all kinds of topics, from the deep to the shallow and they hang in there for it all. One of the students brings me cold water every morning because it is so damn hot! The most amazing thing is that the students keep coming. It is unbearable hot (no air conditioning anywhere!), it is their summer vacation, and they still come. As I said, I am one lucky lady! Practice School lasts until one in the afternoon, then we head back to Peresecina for language class (with two of the most wonderful, patient and kind instructors in the world!), then starting next week I will have to go to Orhei every evening for dance and voice lessons. It seems I have gotten myself into another fine mess. I have agreed to learn to dance the Hora (the national dance of Moldova!) and sing the national anthem for the swearing in next month. Not so worried about the singing, but I am terrified about the dancing! You have to follow directions and touch someone to dance it. Not my strong suits on the dance floor! I have decided, in the spirit of adventure, to give it a whirl (HUGE pun intended!), but won't get my feelings hurt if they politely tell me I should concentrate on the singing....
Right now the days are pretty long, so I haven't had a lot of time to myself, but everyone (i.e. the other volunteers who have already been here for a year!) say that PST is the most difficult time in Peace Corps. I am feeling a little lonely for my family and friends, but that is to be expected. I think the two years will go by faster than I ever expected. It is already hard to believe I have been here for six weeks already!
I miss all of my friends in the states and hope that everything is going well. After Christmas I will start looking for an apartment, so keep me in mind when you make your summer plans for travel. I hope that you will take me up on my offer to show the beauty of Moldova. I will have a piece of Futon ready with your name on it! Stay well.....
Jennifer

Even the mighty fall.....

You know, I have always said that I have a cast iron constitution.... These things always come back to haunt me!!!!!! I have had my first case of 3rd World ebola and am now able to talk about it in humorous terms. I came down with a whopping case of Giardia at the beginning of the week that about killed me! From what I understand, Giardia is a bacteria that produces anaerobically in your stomach and intestines. That basically means that you get the screaming stomach pain, the horrible diahrrea, and horrible throw-ups. All of this is made more difficult by the whole outhouse experience, I must say. All I can tell you, my friends, is that you haven't lived until you have tried to position two opposite ends of your body over the same whole in the floor. THIS is what I came into the Peace Corps for.... Adventure, raw adventure.
Despite my brush with ebola, I have had a great couple of weeks. Tomorrow we start Practice School at the University here in Chisinau and I am really excited to get started on the giving portion of the program. So far I have just been absorbing information and trying desperately to learn Romanian, so I haven't felt much like I was really doing what I came here for. Now is my chance to show my stuff and do a little teaching. I am ready and thrilled!
You might remember that I was headed out to Cahul last week to visit my new host family and the university in Cahul. That was great. I got there on the weekend of a big international folk festival called Nufurul Alb. There were folk dance teams and folk singers from all over the (Eastern) world. It was pretty amazing. My new host family was in charge of showing the team from Romania around, so I got to go back to where they were staying and see them dance and listen to them sing til 3 in the morning. It was stunning to see! My new family seems fabulous. They are cool with me being in the kitchen and promise to teach me all about canning summer vegetables and harvesting the grapes in the fall. My university colleagues are all about mid to late 20's and gorgeous! Jeremy, tell Tidwell and the crew they really need to come visit. Man, can I fix them up! Pottery ladies, I am still looking for pottery opportunities. I can learn how to create baskets from corn, carve wood and paint eggs, but so far, no kilns in sight!
The next few weeks I will be finishing up in northern Moldova, then I will head south and get ready for the University there. More later.....

Hello to all my friends in the states! I know it has been a while, but internet access hasn't been as easy as I thought. (I can get on the internet a couple of times each week, but the pages are all in Russian for everything, so navigating and knowing what buttons to push has not been easy!) At any rate, I want to update you on what has been going on since I left, so here goes...
We started this adventure in Philadelphia, what seems like a lifetime ago. We went through two days of intense (but strangely non-specific!) orientation, getting-to-know-you activities, etc., then the next thing I knew we were on a bus headed to JFK for our flight! We spent about 24 hours en route, then we arrived in Chisinau to begin our official training.
Our first few days in Chisinau were packed with warnings about safety and security, not drinking the water, etc. We were all pretty jet-lagged, overwhelmed etc., so a lot of the information went in one ear and out the other, but they are repeating things during our PST (pre service training!) so I don't feel like I missed out on too much. Chisinau is a big city, but it is different than other large cities I have been to in Europe. First, it is a bit more run-down, but it is also lacking in a lot of the historic buildings you see in most European capitols. My theory on this is that Western Europe spent billions reconstructing what had been destroyed in WWII. I get the impression that it wasn't the biggest priority under Communist rule, so what was rebuilt was done in a more communist-era style.
After three closely-supervised days in Chisinau in a hotel, we were sent out to our families in villages about 25-35 kilometers away from Chisinau. I am in a village called Peresecina, the largest of the PST villages. It is an interesting place. The past seems on a collision course with the modern here. Most families have a number of cell phones, TV's, etc. but no indoor bathroom. The streets off of the main road are mostly not paved and are rutted and full of potholes. Horses and carts hug the left lane of the main street here while BMVs and the occasional Mercedes fly past at break-neck speeds.
I am living with an amazing family. My "host mother" is Luda. She is a nurse and about the hardest working woman I have ever met. She has two drop-dead gorgeous daughters that live at the house. Olga is 25 and a doctor; Zina is 20 and an accountant. Neither of them are married, but Zina will marry in the spring, so I am looking forward to my first Moldovan wedding!!!!! Now to the important stuff... The food and the wine is amazing. It is an interesting mixture of Italy and Eastern Europe. We eat stuffed cabbage, polenta, borscht, and all kinds of meats and cheeses. Cucumbers and tomatoes are to be had at every meal. My host mother is a fabulous cook, so I am all kinds of great food. There is a mysterious and seemingly unlimited supply of wine (brought to the table in little pitchers!) in the basement, so nothing ever gets too bad! I have a big room with a bed, table and chairs and a bit of space in a wardrobe for my things. The only down side is.... the toilet. It is a stroll past the chicken coop, a squeeze past the pigs, and ... an outhouse! I have to admit that it was the hardest thing to get used to, but I am also proud to say that I am getting used to the whole process. I don't want to say that I love it, but it definitely does not overshadow the fact that I am living with a kind and wonderful family that I adore!!!!!
My days are basically spent learning Romanian, attending sessions on how to be a great foreign language teacher, and learning about what it is going to take to be a great volunteer. This week we learned where we will be going in Moldova for our permanent teaching sites, so I am happy to say that I will be in Cahul at the university there. This weekend I go to visit the university, meet some of my colleagues, and stay with a couple of potential host families to see which one I like best. Wish me luck!!!!
I hope that I will be able to do better keeping up with the blog once I get to Cahul. They have an English lab at the university, so keeping up with e-mails and things should be easier. I have uploaded a few pictures of some of the adventures, so take a look if you have time! I miss you all and hope that everyone is doing well and staying safe and busy. Pottery ladies, I hope you are making beautiful things and having a blast!