Cine este?

I should have seen it coming. Nevertheless, I was amazed Sunday night when, for the first time in my life, I mentioned the name Michael Jordan and received back a blank stare.

I was sitting on the bed in the living room/parents' bedroom of one of three potential host families in Mereseni, where I will spend the next two years starting in August. The host mother, Nina, is the geography teacher at the village's school. The school teaches grades 1-11, which totals 369 students in this village of 2,800 and falling. Most Moldovan schools are separated by grade levels, and the lyceum level typically teaches grades 10-12. However, because of Mereseni's small size, its students graduate from 11th grade and can finish taking 12th grade classes while starting at a university.

As I said, Nina is the sole geography teacher at the small school, and at the moment, she was looking back at me, saying that she didn't know who Michael Jordan was.

"The singer?" she said to me in Romanian. "No, no. That's Michael Jackson. I know who that is."

I turned to Victor, the host father who works as a supervisor in the fields nearby, for help. Yes, he knew who Michael Jackson was.

"But Michael Jordan is like Nike and McDonald's! He's everywhere!" I said, throwing my arms up in an effort to demonstrate his ubiquity.

"We don't really play basketball here," Nina said, as if that excused it. "At the school, some of the children play basketball. Volleyball is popular. Everyone plays football."

Marin, the 11-year-old son, was not in the room, so the only possible messiah for the conversation was nowhere to be found. I had to let it go. It's not as though this family, or other Moldovan families, are not exposed to American culture. The walls on the inside of their outhouse have posters of Jennifer Lopez, Ciara, the Backstreet Boys and a white rapper with whom I'm not familiar, decked out in Boston Celtics and Oakland Athletics gear. A popular music station here, 105.2 FM, throws together a mix of Romanian, Russian, English and American music, although seemingly with no understanding of which American pop songs of the past 30 years are good and which ones are awful. The most recent American import is Desperate Housewives, which premiered with the first two episodes with Romanian sub-titles on Saturday night on state television.

The town of Mereseni has also been exposed to American people for almost 10 years. One volunteer came as an English teacher in 1996. She left after four months, and I gather that it was because of a combination of her Californian idea of weather and the Moldovan idea of how to react to black people.

Way back then, she stayed with Maria and Dumitru, the host family with whom I stayed on Friday and Saturday nights. Since then, Maria and Dumitru, now aged 52 and 57, respectively, have hosted seven more Americans, including a current trainee. I have the feeling that I will be number nine. Maria and Dumitru have two grown sons who work as lawyers in Chisinau, and a daughter who is heading to the state university in September to study law. Diana, the daughter, was quite amused with Desperate Housewives and was still talking about it Sunday.

Dumitru's reputation preceded him, because trainees staying in Mereseni had told me for a week that he was the most fun and generous person in the village. I certainly saw no evidence to the contrary. He also sees the value in well-built hygienic facilities. Although they have no running water, there is the illusion of it. The sink outside has a reservoir above the faucet that well water can be poured into once every day or two. There is an outdoor sun-shower with a black basin placed three feet above the person's head. The sunlight heats the basin and the water inside, creating a hot shower in a town that has almost no cars. That shower, my first in four weeks, made me so profoundly happy that I couldn't get the smile off my face for a half hour.

Of course, after my previous outhouse flashlight difficulties, what really impressed me was their ceramic toilet in a well-lit outhouse. "Flushing" is accomplished by dipping a open-topped liter bottle into the pail of well water, pouring the water down the inside of the bowl, and repeating as necessary. I took pictures of the shower and toilet, so those will be on the pictures page.

Saturday, I toured the school with Svetlana, my counterpart, Maria, the assistant director of the school, and Diana. The school is much more colorful than the school where we have been learning language in Costesti, with light-blue walls, intricate murals and student artwork better than anything I could do displayed in the hallway leading to the cafeteria and gym. Outside is a large garden and a playground. The outhouse even has separating half-walls between the squatting spots, which I consider a luxury after Costesti.

My discussions with Svetlana and Maria, went well. I may have to work hard to get enough classes so that I can teach 18 hours a week, as the Peace Corps requires, but Svetlana and Maria know that it is important, so I'm sure everything will work out.
Svetlana is a 25-year-old woman who graduated from the state university in Chisinau in 2004 with a degree in journalism, and starting last year teaching every English class from second to 11th grade. Needless to say, she's thankful to have me lighten her load.

What makes Svetlana interesting is that although her paycheck is at the school, her heart is in journalism. Sveta is a person with whom I shared a career path just two years ago and who made the same change as I did a year ago, and yet while I consider teaching in Mereseni a tremendous opportunity, she seems to see it more as a base camp before she climbs toward something better. Inherent in this is a seeming lack of interest in bettering the school and the mental dismissal of entire grade levels that she sees as trouble-makers. When I suggested building up after-school sports programs or having monthly community pot luck dinners at the school, I was repeatedly rebutted with, "I don't think they'll really be interested."

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic. Or maybe this is exactly why I'm in going to Mereseni.

Mereseni Bound

No time for a long post, but I wanted to let everyone know that I am headed to the town of Mereseni for the next two years. All of our assignments were announced today at 5 p.m., and I'm pumped. It was my first choice, and is close to the town of Hancesti and relatively close to several volunteers and Chisinau. It's pronounced Mai-rai-shain', and has a grand total of under 3,000 people. No internet access, but there are two cafenea/bars. One is good. One is bad. I'm leaving Friday to meet my Moldovan counterpart and three possible host families. I return to Costesti on Monday and decide by Tuesday morning which family I will live with for the first six months of my assignment.

In other news, Evan likes his flashlight. Vladimir told everyone at the dinner table last night the true location of where I "lost" the flashlight. I had to leave the kitchen for a minute, I was laughing so hard. I guess the secret's out.

I think I heard something on the news about the U.S. shooting down an asteroid with a rocket. But everything I've heard about it was in Romanian, so I can't be sure. Can anyone tell me more about this?

I'll try to have some Mereseni observations and some photos put together by the time I update on Tuesday. Until then, la revedere.

The Fourth (or Second) of July

When is the Fourth of July not the Fourth of July? When the U.S. Embassy in Moldova invites you to celebrate in Chisinau on the Second. All of us trainees (minus a couple for medical reasons) and many other Americans, including Peace Corps Volunteers, a small amount of military personnel, embassy workers and their families, and missionaries, made it to Chisinau's Botanical Gardens for a day-long barbecue.

The Botanical Gardens are absolutely beautiful, although the stench of the bathrooms can strike from up to 30 feet away. The gardens house a small zoo with goats, a donkey, peacocks (the sound of which reminded me of the evening hours back home in California), deer and two ostriches. Ostriches are big and mean, and I agree with Jess A. that they are the closest thing the modern world has to a velociraptor.

The embassy did a minimal but solid job, providing an open field, barbecue pits, a pleasant mix of American music and a few security guards thrown in, too. It was a loose framework that allowed me to eat a hamburger, drink a few beers, smoke half a cigar, and play wiffle-ball, ultimate frisbee and baseball.

Throwing a baseball has transformed itself into an almost Zen-like centering exercise for me while in this country. Among the trainees, we have three right-handed gloves and one lefty. I bring my glove any place where more than the nine Costesti trainees will be. It's something familiar and American, and something that combines the right amounts of concentration on the task at hand and socializing with the person you're throwing with. At the Fourth of July party, for example, I noticed and gestured toward a stranger with a baseball glove. Without speaking for the first ten minutes, we never got closer to one another than 60 feet. We communicated with the simplest of baseball hand signals: pointing in the sky for a pop-up, tapping ourselves apologetically on the chest after an errant throw and a nod and a smile after a particularly nice catch. Other than that, complete silence. It could have gone on for hours, but I was thirsty for a beer, so I hustled over for a conference, introduced myself, found out that my throwing partner was a missionary living in Chisinau, and then excused myself for a drink.

After a second beer and a few innings pitched of wiffle-ball, I found myself talking with a member of the North Carolina National Guard. He was a sturdy and confident man, aged somewhere in his early-to-mid 30s. He had had several assignments in Moldova, and had recently finished the first month of his current assignment. The U.S. has an interest in having friendly relations with the Moldovan military, and this soldier was doing his part.

"So are y'all doing training exercises with them?" I said, simultaneously throwing in a Southern tinge to my voice and shooting the majority of my military jargon in the first load.

"Well, training's a bit of a dirty word with us," the soldier said. "We call if familiarization. We show them how we do it, and then say, 'Now you have to forget this.'"

For his part, this soldier's exchange was not purely military. He was joined by a slightly-younger lady named Rodica, who was only the first of several military menРҐs Moldovan girlfriends I met throughout the day. I believe that the nine-year-old American-looking boy named Mihai with whom I played wiffle-ball was the product of such a match, and he seemed like a good kid, so I can find no objection to this portion of the cultural exchange.

Speaking of the culture, I did something this weekend that I donРҐt believe I ever would have done in America. I was rather drunk on Saturday night and had been walked home by fellow trainees Evan and Krista. Evan let me borrow his flashlight, and I headed directly to the outhouse in the back. As I stood over the hole and did what I needed to do, I cradled the flashlight between my turned neck and right shoulder. As I was preparing to turn and leave, the outhouse got dark, the load on my shoulder felt lighter, and my eye was drawn to a faint light coming from below the outhouse floor. It took me several seconds to realize that Evan's flashlight was gone and it wasn't coming back. The next morning, I went to the outhouse with latex gloves in my pocket, but I couldn't make visual contact with the flashlight, so I decided it was better not to try. My host family knows that I need to buy Evan a new flashlight in Chisinau on Wednesday, but when they asked me where I lost it, I simply replied, "Nu stiu. Sunt idiot." I don't know. I'm an idiot.