PST este gata

My work in Moldova has finally begun. After a week of wrapping up my life and saying goodyes in Costesti, I have sworn in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer and have moved to Mereseni. Tomorrow, Monday, I meet with the director of my school, head to Hincesti to clear my paperwork with the raion (county) police department, and head to the raion's seminar for English teachers. But before I go full-speed ahead with my Mereseni life, let me describe my final week of Pre-Service Training.

Sunday the 14th was the scheduled date of our field day for the children of Costesti, and I woke up to rain outside. So much for using the field. I called the school's gym teacher and asked if we could use the gym. He said that they were still getting the gym ready for the first day of school, so it was unavailable. (When you have to start making phone calls in a foreign language, you revert to being eight years old and planning out everything that you will say. My first phone call to a stranger here, and earlier call to the gym teacher, was accompanied upon completion by congratulations from fellow trainees.)

Unsure of what we would do without a field or a gym, some other trainees and I crowded into Tudor's car with two tubs of homemade chips and salsa for the occasion and drove to the school. In three hours, we set up a completely improvised carnival with five activity rooms and tug-of-war intermissions in the hallway. At 5 p.m., 100 kids were outside the school, and we started our party. After an hour and a half, we took the kids outside to the field--which, because it was made of a mixture of dirt and sand, was not muddy--and played a 70-person game of ultimate frisbee. It was absolute chaos, especially since the kids' total experience with the sport amounted to the four rules which we briefly explained to them in Romanian before the game began. But the kids had fun, and so did we.

The only major downside was that due to some miscommunication and carelessness among some other volunteers, my digital camera was left on a table in an unlocked room. A couple teenage boys saw an easy target, realized that they could sell it on the black market for more than the average monthly Moldovan salary, and stole it. It's an inconvenience for me to have to go through all sorts of insurance and legal paperwork to get a replacement. But the major bummer is that I no longer have the disgusting picture of the semi-poisonous spider bite on Krista's back.

Wednesday, my last day in Costesti, is better off forgotten. I came down with an awful case of food poisoning, probably from the under-cooked chicken I had eaten Tuesday night. My host family, however, said that everyone else had eaten the chicken and felt fine, so according to them, I simply ate too much.

Thursday, Tudor and Valodia drove me and my baggage to a hotel in Chisinau. Or rather, Tudor drove while Valodia got out to push the car when it stalled multiple times in bumper-to-bumper Chisinau traffic. Over the course of 10 weeks, I had never noticed that Tudor's 20-year-old car had an ignition switch that dangled eight inches below the steering column and was started not with a key, but with a screwdriver. My last memory of my PST days in Costesti will be Valodia pushing the car halfway across a busy intersection before the car started, then having to run through traffic to find us as we drove away at 25 miles per hour.

Friday's Swearing-In Ceremony was hard for me to see as a big deal. Is being one-thirteenth of the way through my time here really cause for celebration? But I was pleasantly surprised by the ceremony, and it was very frumos. (Frumos is the word for "beautiful". It is the first word I learned from my Costesti host family, and is used very, very often. There exists in Moldova a pervasive "Frumos Factor," as one volunteer has dubbed it, that I will describe in detail in some future entry.)

The real thrill of the ceremony for me was singing "Buna Seara, Mandro, Buna," with the three other male trainees in Costesti and five men from the town. The song is an old tune that boys would sing to their girlfriends before leaving for the army. I found some relevance to my life, especially in the fifth stanza:

Caci doi ani-e o viata lunga.
Dorul meu-o sa te-ajunga.
Mandro cand ne-om mai vedea eu nu stiu.

All of two years is a long life.
Your longing for me will suffice.
Darling, when we'll see each other again, I don't know.

The Costesti men wore traditional costumes and played the accordion and pan-pipes, while we trainees wore traditional hats and decorative scarf-towels with which the female trainees of Costesti adorned us. For such sad lyrics, the song is inexplicably upbeat, especially with an accordion and lines like, "Write me a postcard, chick." It was a definite crowd-pleaser, with the entire audience of 500 clapping along, and afterward I received a lot of praise at the reception.

The showstopper, though, was the song before ours, a love song from a poem by Mihai Eminescu. For Romanians and Moldovans, Eminescu is somewhere between Shakespeare Times Six and Shakespeare Times Nine. Most raion centers have an Eminescu Street, a school named after Eminescu, and his bust prominently displayed somewhere. I intend to begin reading his work around November, but trainees Samantha and Bob are way ahead of me in that regard. Samantha sang beautifully to Bob's piano accompaniment.

Their performance endeared them to the press, as I watched later on the national news--our ceremony was the third-leading story, behind the massive flooding from the eight-hour storm the night before and the display of 30 new modernly equipped ambulances. Our Costesti performance was shown for a few seconds, but the five-minute segment featured 20 seconds of just Sam and Bob performing, along with interviews with each of them. Bob has been a slow learner of the language, but his sound bite was evidently good enough for the national news.

After the ceremony, the newly sworn-in volunteers went our separate ways, not to be together again until mid-October. This is when the true separation and loneliness begins, but it is also the beginning of our real work.

Wine, Beer and Vodka with Archaeologists, Soldiers and Watermelon Farmers

After just more than two months, I think I might be ready to start answering the question, What is a Moldovan? Is he a Soviet? Is he democratic? Is he Russian? Is he Romanian? The simple, yet painfully easy answer is, A Moldovan is none of these things and he is all of these things, because he is a Moldovan.

A week ago, on a Friday night, Levi, a fellow trainee, and I went to what Levi's host father, Mihai, calls "Costesti Vechi," or "Old Costesti." Levi, Mihai, Mihai's wife, one of their daughters and I went to the eastern border of the town, where at first we saw little more than some Moldovan soldiers digging three ditches in the middle of a field as a rotund man in a black-and-pastel colored short-sleeved shirt and a shirtless, bearded man who looked like Tommy Chong with a pot-belly watched over them.

It was difficult for Levi and I to catch much of the extensive history that was described to us, but basically the archaeologists-with help from the Moldovan army, because they don't have too many wars to fight at the moment-are digging up the remains of a Muslim city from the 14th century that was then conquered by Genghis Khan and the Golden Hoarde. They showed us coins, bones, and tools for creating ceramics. The archaeologists repeatedly stated, and were repeatedly echoed by Mihai, that these societies and empires that had been here were far more advanced at the time than Dark-Age Western Europe, and were a strong civilization before America was even discovered by the rest of the world. They had sewer pipes and baths long before their Western counterparts. Throughout their discussion was an underlying pride that their town had once been part of the most advanced civilization in the world, even if it is now a shrinking town with nearly a tenth of its population seeking work outside of the country.

After a trip to a more thoroughly excavated area of the old town, a ceramics factory where Levi and I could play catch with 600-year-old human shoulder bones without our hosts batting an eye, we went to drink some wine and eat some food at the soldiers' camp. We saw a few more ancient tools there, and I discovered that Baltica Beer is the best that this country has, imported or domestic.

Levi and I thought that our evening was over, since the sun had been down for 45 minutes and lightning was the only light on our path. We were sorely mistaken, as we walked down into a field that Mihai was leasing to watermelon farmers for the season. The seven of us ate three watermelons, had some wine and vodka, and took as good of pictures of we could in the light of the single kerosene lamp. We stayed there for a good hour and a half before finally driving home slightly after 11 p.m.

The next day, all of the Costesti trainees travelled north to Orheiul Vechi, or Old Orhei. I didn't place quotations around this like I did with "Costesti Vechi," because while "Costesti Vechi" is a name in the mind of Mihai, Orheiul Vechi is a national historical site, with remnants of Dacian civilizations that lived in this hill-and-river-encircled village for centuries before the birth of Christ. The village has been settled many times by different civilizations, as old as the Dacians and including the Muslims, Genghis Khan, the warlord Stefan Cel Mare ("Steven the Great"), who fought valiantly against the Turkish invasion and is immortalized on every piece of Moldovan paper currency, and 19th-century ethnic Romanian settlers. Levi and I saw many of the same clay pots, tools and coins that we saw the night before, but they were in glass cases, and playing catch with human bones was out of the question.

The many inhabitants of Orheiul Vechi brings us to the ever-present question for a foreigner in Moldova-What is a Moldovan? Well, it depends on who you want to listen to.

First, there are the extremists on both the Romanian and Russian sides. On the Russian side, there are many immigrants to Moldova, not even necessarily from Russia, but from other Soviet Republics, who kept the Russian language because it was universal throughout the Union. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, these people were the main forces, particularly in the southern Gagauzia and the eastern Transnistria regions, that rejected the push of Moldovan nationalists. After nationalists changed the official state language to Romanian in 1989 and declared its independence in 1991, these Russian speakers, who are perceived by Romanian speakers as arrogant oppressors who cannot accept Moldova's nationalist push, moved Moldova into a 1994 civil war that resulted in a Russian military presence in Transnistria that remains to this day. Peace Corps doesn't send volunteers to Transistria, but it does to Gagauzia, which does not have the recent history of violence. Russian speakers are much more common in the large cities of Chisinau, Balti ("Bults"), Comrat (in Gagauzia), Cahul, and Tiraspol (in Transnistria). Russian is side-by-side with Romanian in nearly every store, and is often more prevalent on food packaging, regardless of where you are in the country. Russian is still a necessary language for every Moldovan, even if there is a feeling of resentment when they are forced to speak it by a shopkeeper who refuses to do business with Romanian-speakers.

On the opposite side are the ardent Romanian supporters, of which my language and cross-cultural facilitator, Galina, is the only one I have met. These people seem to be intellectuals and students, and come out of the woodwork when the government leans in a direction that they view as drawing closer to the Soviet past. There were massive student protests in Chisinau in 2002 when the Communist government began to initiate pro-Russian and pro-Soviet reforms. In this group, there seems to be a sense that they were lied to for so many years by their government, and that a return to their original ethnically Romanian traditions is the only logical path. Included in this is a returned devotion to religion, which was largely banned during the Soviet era, and a desire to be considered Romanian. With this desire to be considered Romanian comes a great amount of pride and refusal to be submissive again.

The Russians "say we are pigs," Galina said several weeks ago. "We are not pigs. We are people."

The majority of Moldovans, however, consider themselves neither Romanian or Russian. They are simply Moldovan, which for them means that they have a culture unique unto themselves. Their dialect of Romanian is mixed with Russian words, and so you are just as likely to be called maladeti ("mal-u-daetz"), the Russian word, as you are to be called bravo, the Romanian word. My host-aunt's husband, Slavic, was showing me around the garage and pointed to a hubcap, saying, "I don't know the word in Romanian, but in Russian, it's calpac." There are many such instances. When I asked Tudor's brother, Victor, how to say a particular vulgar English word in Romanian, he said, "I don't know. All of our vulgar words are in Russian." These are not isolated incidents. It has led to the population embracing the concept of moldovaneste, or a separate Moldovan language. This was originally the label placed by the Soviets when they imposed the Cyrillic alphabet on the Romanian language in Moldova, but its acceptance is wide-spread now.

This Moldovan identity shapes the people's view of the past. Any Moldovan over the age of 30 will fondly remember when national identity across the Union was the most important aspect of every citizen's life, and when a loaf of bread cost less than a penny, as opposed to the some 20 cents it costs today. They look at the gas prices of over 75 cents per liter-just slightly more than in America in a country where the average salary is a twentieth of America's average salary-and wonder why it was such a good idea for the ruling Communist Party to lean toward the West and away from Russia, when every loyal C.I.S. member pays much less at the pump. They are prone to saying things such as what Tudor's brother said at his birthday a month and a half ago: "Democracy is good. But too much democracy can be dangerous."

The average Moldovan feels much less kinship with Romania than the die-hard ethnic Romanians. When I discussed World War II with Tudor and mentioned the brief period in which Romania "liberated" Moldova, Tudor was quick to stop me.

"Romania occupied us. Russia occupied us. We were never liberated," he said. "Only now are we free."

Tatiana, an English teacher from Susleni, said that actual Romanians tend to condescend toward Moldovans just as much as the Russians do. Tatiana and Cesara, my resource teacher from Glodeni, had a wonderful exchange with me after Cesara had found a junked poster of Lenin and I had asked if I could keep it. We discussed Soviet times for about an hour, and it was interesting to hear some of the propagandist spins on history.

"I know that Lenin did some bad things," Cesara said. "I've heard some things about them, but I can't think of anything specific right now." She turned her attention toward Tatiana.

"But as I was telling Peter, Lenin is no Hitler. No one will look back at Hitler as a good man. But people will remember Lenin with love," Cesara said.

"Did you know," Tatiana said, turning to me, "that when there was a great famine over the country, people tried to bring the best food to Lenin. And he turned it away, saying, 'No. Give this to the hungry people who need it most.'" Tatiana's face glowed as she said this. Cesara was quick to jump in before I ran the risk of being impolite.

"Or maybe that's just a story," Cesara said. "We were told so much over the years, that it's hard to tell what's true and what's not."

Regardless, the Russian and Soviet occupation of this country has changed the people of this country. You can see it in their attitudes toward their neighbors, in their politics, in their church-going habits, and even what they call their own language. They are their own people, and they are proud of it.

Mila, my host mother, put it simply the other night.

"Look at my identification card," she said. "It says I'm a Moldovan. It doesn't say Romanian anywhere. I don't know any Romanians. I'm a Moldovan."

Back to the Blog

Well, I've gone for about a month with an update. Who would have thought that a separation from the Internet would happen so quickly? I think that I've been in a state lately where I've been busy and I've valued human voices and conversation over the unrequited projection of blogging. But I'm over that, and I can get back to these entries that people seem to want more of.

Everyone from my father to my godfather has wanted to know more about the actual life of a Peace Corps Trainee (as I am called for another few days before my Swearing-In Ceremony on August 19). Description of my everyday life has never held much interest for me, for the obvious reason that it's my everyday life and there's nothing special about it to me. But since you all seem to want it so badly, incepem.

Practice School, the practical training ground for TEFL volunteers that consists of three weeks of teaching two hours a day, has come and gone. I had a wonderful resource teacher, Cesara, to help me figure out different interesting ways to deliver each and every one of my 28 lessons. Finally being able to teach was a reminder of my purpose here, and gave me an intense desire to get to Mereseni and start with my real students.

The Moldovan Ministry of Education is an interesting creature. If any American teacher fears what a federal bureaucracy-controlled education might look like, they can look to Moldova to affirm their worst fears. The federal government provides beautifully-bound grade books for teachers to record grades into, and every student's grade and the subject of every lesson that they have ever learned is kept on federal record for 50 years after the student's graduation from lyceum. In America the idea is budding that if the students at a school fails, the school has failed. In Moldova, this concept is in full bloom; if a student receives a failing grade-five or lower out of 10-for the semester, the teacher who failed the student is responsible for helping the student re-pass the test at the end of the summer. Even if the student fails again, or doesn't even show up for summer sessions, he or she is often passed on to the next class, anyway. Students rarely fail, though, both because teachers don't want to be perceived as failures and because there is often a bribe involved.

Cheating and copying is deeply ingrained in the culture here, and is tolerated by teachers. When young Pavel, a seventh-grader in my Practice School class, was blatantly copying from the boys around him on my test, he was unfazed when I told him to stop. Krista, a fellow volunteer, had to physically hold the head of a fifth-grade girl in place so that she would stop turning to look at her neighbor's test. All of us realized after that first test that cheating is something that needs to be addressed before it happens in our classrooms, and it is also something that we will not be able to stop in other teachers' classes. Cheating is the worst on the day of the Baccalaureate. When I spoke with a volunteer, Melissa, who has been here for a year, she told me that her school's director (principal) instructed every teacher other than her to walk out of the school when Melissa came in. Then the teachers came in a back entrance so that Melissa wouldn't see them, and they helped the students with the Baccalaureate.

I won't speak much about the life of a trainee, other than to say that it is full of fun and frustrations. Overall, there are a couple areas where trainees and the Peace Corps Moldova staff are extremely polarized. We Americans are, of course, adults, and have gotten used to making our choices without supervision for our adult lives, which for the youngest of us has been four years; the Moldovan staff is understandably worried about our safety in a new country, but tends to treat us like oversized children and ignores the fact that most of us have lived in much more dangerous places in the United States than any place that this small agricultural country has to offer. Maybe we're naive, but from my biased viewpoint, we could do with more freedom. I was even restricted from visiting the Mereseni volunteers overnight when, according to the rules, I should have been able to go (since discovering this, I have told the Pre-Service Training director that she owes me a favor now).

The other major difference between the American trainees and the Moldovan staff regards the idea of feedback. Mind you, the word feedback doesn't exist in the Romanian or Russian languages. The staff here often says that they are open to feedback, but we trainees have found that when we bring our issues to the table as we would in America, the Moldovan staff is offended that we have written negative comments about them on paper. And because the feedback forms are not anonymous, the staff wants to know why you said what you did, and tell you how difficult their jobs are. It seems to me that it is a relic of the Soviet system in which dissidents were confronted by numerous peers and told that their disagreements were without grounds and that they should respect everyone else for trying their hardest. It's a psychological block between the trainees and the staff, and it's something on which I'm sure the Moldovan staff has a different viewpoint. Nevertheless, it is frustrating and it is part of the otherwise positive Peace Corps experience.

So Dad and George, this is about what you asked for. But now I am done writing for the night and I haven't even delved into my planned entry on The Moldovan Struggle For Identity. Well, maybe I'll start that entry next.