Jurnalista a scris minciune

I was interviewed several weeks ago for a Chisinau newspaper. I had given up on the article being published until I received e-mails and phone calls from two Peace Corps staff members Tuesday thanking me for the kind words I said about their country. Here is the article, which I translated into English. The Romanian can be found atВ http://www.jurnal.md/articol.php?id=3917&cat=&editie=425 .

"You know how to be happy even without money"

An interview with Peter Myers, an American volunteer with the Peace Corps.

by Irina Nechit, Jurnal de Chisinau. October 25, 2005

How old are you, Peter Myers?

I am 22 years old. I was born in Chicago, and my parents currently live in California.

How did you arrive in the Republic of Moldova?

I studied at the School of Journalism at Boston University, but after three years of studies I got the sense that journalism was not my vocation. A family friend asked me if I would like to work with the USA's Peace Corps and I accepted. [Translator's note: Yeah, it was just that easy.] When the Peace Corps asked me to go to Moldova as a volunteer, I asked, "Where is Moldova?" because I had never heard anything about the country until then. I searched on the Internet and saw that it existed!

Where did you learn Romanian?

At summer school in Costesti, Ialoveni, sponsored by Peace Corps Moldova. I arrived in Costesti in June 2005 and started to study Romanian with a very effective program. [Translator's note: I had to look up two words in this paragraph. Guess whether I used them in my interview.] After two months I had learned to communicate. I'm happy that I can speak with you in Romanian today. Right now, there are 150 American volunteers in Moldova. I will stay in Mereseni for two years, teaching children English.

Do you feel isolated from the civilized world?

Yes, but I feel that here, people live a more normal life, more natural than in technologically advanced countries. In the West and in America, life stresses you out; you are always tense. But in Moldovan towns, the rhythm of life is closer to nature and easier to tolerate. I don't feel isolated from the world, but to the contrary, I feel more connected to it.

[I feel an entire paragraph of explanation is necessary here. Her question was the same, but my answer was completely different. I said that while I am isolated from my friends and family, I am living a life that is more common in the world, and that is an experience that I'm grateful for. We in the West and in America are exceptions right now, and it is important for us to not assume that everyone else lives the way we do. Everything that is said about life being more natural and the Western world being stressful is all symptomatic of the same false Moldovan pride that has our English textbooks saying that Moldova is famous world-wide for its beautiful hills, wine, and delicious well water. I like Moldova, but it is important to separate fact from fiction.]

Do you like your accommodations in Moldova?

Yes! I live with the Vremea family, and I have my own room. We don't have hot water from the faucet, but I pour water by myself into a pot and heat it on the stove. [The way this conversation went down was so much funnier than how she wrote it. Plus, I rarely heat my own water; I would if I woke up before everyone else.] Houses in Mereseni are big, there's lots of room, and there's a lot of greenery. In California I lived in an apartment building, and I forgot the comfort of a house. [What?] I like that I'm awakened every morning by the birds. I like dogs in Mereseni; they are very different from American ones. [I said that Moldovans treat their dogs differently than Americans do, not that the dogs were different.]

Have you seen the difficulty that Moldovans have in surviving?

Yes, but you have a fundamental quality; you know how to be happy without money. Here people don't suffer too much if they don't have money. They are happy even if they're poor.

What feelings do you have about teaching as a career?

I like it! The children listen to me; I have very interesting conversations with them. I was at the harvest for a week and spoke with them only in English. The students told me in English how many buckets of grapes they had collected and I wrote the number in my notebook. You have very tasty grapes in Moldova. [We'll let the part about the kids listening to me slide for now. To say I have interesting conversations with them would be a major stretch, and to say that I spoke with them only in English at the harvest is a complete lie. The part about tasty grapes is another part of that Moldovan pride that I mentioned before, although it is much more true than Moldova being famous for its well water.]

Do you know what the word "homesick" means?

Definitely! [Wow, I must really love exclaiming things.] I miss my parents, my friends and America. It's good that I have Internet here; I can send messages home every once in a while. When I return to America, I will be a teacher. In Mereseni I discovered that I like teaching.

Much success!

So I would say that while the interview process was good, I would rank the writing somewhere around a Boston University journalism school sophomore in terms of fluidity and accuracy. I know that I represented my ideas clearly, and that the misstatements were the result of reporting, not a language barrier. I hope that I have the opportunity to do radio interviews, where it is harder to take my statements out of context. When I told my host family that I didn't say everything that was written, my host-brother, Sergiu, 27, said that he would call the journalist because a Moldovan should never lie. I told him that journalists lie, so it was okay. Overall, though, I'm happy with my first statements to the press, and if it helps some people feel better about their country, what's wrong with a little bit of white-lie reporting?

The Moldovan Economy

Not sure of the source on this, but evidently it's English, with the use of the word "lorry" being the first indication. It came to me through our country director.

Migrants return to build Moldovan economy

By Stefan Wagstyl

Published: October 13 2005 03:00 | Last updated: October 13 2005 03:00

Three years ago Larisa and Pavel Cheptene were migrant workers from Moldova working in Italy. She picked strawberries, he drove a lorry.

Today, Mrs Cheptene runs the Mirage hair dressing salon in her home town of Straseni and Mr Cheptene is planning to open a cafe next door. The $50,000 (ВЈ41,500) they saved in Italy, with Mrs Cheptene working for one year and Mr Cheptene for three, went a long way to helping them to set up in business in Moldova, Europe's poorest country.

"For the moment the business is running well," says the 39-year-old Mrs Cheptene, who employs five people. "But sometimes you feel you want to drop everything and go away again."

The Cheptenes returned home in 2003 partly because their two daughters fell ill in Italy and partly because, after a decade of collapse and stagnation, the Moldovan economy was growing again and

creating opportunities for small businesses.

Gross domestic product has grown between 6.1 and 7.2 per cent each of the past four years, helped by investments from Moldovans and foreigners alike.

Among Moldovans, a key role is played by the trickle of migrant workers returning home, especially in the formation of enterprises in impoverished towns such as Straseni in central Moldova. These businesses are creating jobs allowing even the poorest to benefit from the country's growth.

Mrs Cheptene says: "Life has got better in the city in the past five years. The place looks different. New buildings. A supermarket. Roads are repaired."

It is a picture that is borne out by a World Bank study published yesterday that finds a marked decline in poverty in the ex-communist countries of eastern Europe and central Asia. Even though conditions remain difficult for many of the region's 470m people, the numbers surviving below the poverty level of $2.15 a day dropped from 102m to 61m in 1998-2003.

The bank argues that "the single most important factor behind the significant decline in poverty" is the high economic growth in the former Soviet Union, including Moldova, a largely rural country wedged between Romania and Ukraine.

However, it warns that the prospects for further rapid poverty reduction are "less propitious" because much of the gain of the past few years was due to a one-off recovery from the economic collapse that followed the end of the Soviet Union.

Further cuts in poverty depend on reducing unemployment, which remains high even in some of the region's more advanced states, such as Poland. The report recommends policies that can create jobs away from wealthy capitals - in poorer provincial cities, towns and villages.

In Moldova the need for job creation is particularly acute because so many of its 4.5m people work abroad - in central and western Europe or in Russia. The government estimates that 500,000-600,000 have left. This is about 10 per cent of the total population and 20-30 per cent of the working population. Mrs Cheptene says that in Straseni, 20km from the capital Chisinau, half the able-bodied work in foreign

countries, although not everybody is away all the time.

The Moldovan government, assisted by western aid organisations, is trying to encourage migrants to return home, partly to reduce the risk of exploitation many workers face in foreign countries and partly to bring back people who have skills and savings.

Olga Poalelungi, director-general of the government's migration department, admits that among her greatest challenges is winning migrants' trust in Moldova's stability and the effectiveness of public services. "People are scared, for example, to reveal how much money they have earned in foreign countries."

Mrs Cheptene agrees. "People don't come back because it's easier to work abroad and make money with no headaches. The bureaucracy holds everything back. It took us one year just to get the papers for the

extension we built to our apartment." But she does have hope for the future. "I have started now and I must carry on. In three years I want to employ 12-15 people and pay them better."

Ce cu pasarile?

"I was playing with the ducks, geese and chickens in my backyard Thursday, when all of a sudden three of them fell over dead! I couldn't believe it, but since this saved us from having to kill them the normal way, we cooked them up and feasted on them before the meat went bad. Now everyone in my family has a headache, upset stomach and a fever of about 101 degrees. Is this a problem?"

While I was only joking when I e-mailed that paragraph to Mary Stonehill, Peace Corps Moldova's registered nurse, I have gotten quite the wake-up call in the past two days with regards to avian flu. Suspected cases of bird flu have occurred in Turkey and Serbia, Bulgaria is on the alert, and the first confirmed instance of H5N1, the major strain, has occurred in Ceamurlia de Jos, Romania. Ceamurlia de Jos, pronounced "Chia-moor-lee'-ah day jhos," is in the south-eastern Romanian province of Tulcea, bordering the Black Sea (yes, I had to look this up). By my estimation, Ceamurlia de Jos is about 200 km away from the southern tip of Moldova and 300 km from my village of Mereseni, as the bird flies (pun intended). This equates to a deadly disease being about as far from me as New Haven, CT is from Boston and Santa Barbara, CA is from San Jose. However, unlike residents of New Haven, Boston, Santa Barbara and San Jose, my host family and everyone in my village has 40 or more ducks, geese, chickens and turkeys in their yards that we use for eggs and food.

Reading the numbers in Ceamurlia de Jos ("de Jos" means "lower," which usually means that there's also a Ceamurlia de Sus within 15 km, but my dictionary was not very helpful in telling me that "ceamur" is a historical word that translates to "cob" or "daub") invoked great sympathy for the people there. As many as 60,000 birds will need to be killed, and I can't imagine the impact on the people of that village's living situation. With all of the poultry destroyed and the possibility of transmittance to pigs, which are approaching the prime two months for slaughtering, many people in this village will be left with nothing except the fruits and vegetables that they have preserved in their cellars. I hope that the Romanian government is taking steps to compensate the victims with poultry when the area is safe again, or the promise of subsidized meat.

But as much sympathy as I have for those people, I hope even more strongly that my sympathy does not turn into empathy. I will be watching the news carefully tonight to see what Moldova is doing to prevent the spread of disease. I believe that poultry imports from Romania and Turkey were shut down late last week, but if the disease is spread through wild migratory birds, there seems to be little possible in the way of prevention. What I read is that poultry should be kept gated inside the yard and kept away from wild birds, which we already do at our house (although not everyone in the village does).

The Peace Corps Medical Office has vaccinated all volunteers in Moldova for flu, but that can only build our immunity to the most common strains from this year, not a new strain that might mutate this fall and easily pass from human to human. We also have Tamiflu available in the PCMO. More information will be coming in the November edition of our Peace Corps Moldova newsletter, The Grapevine, and an informational sheet was in my cubby in the PC office Saturday. As for now, though, I'm perfectly sanatosВ (healthy) and not overly worried. Transmission directly from birds to humans is extremely rare, but it is nevertheless a slight possibility, and the possible pandemic that so many people seem to worried about could start right here in Moldova. To everyone in America, enjoy the next year before you have to worry about this stuff, too.

Tot se duce in interior

It's that magical time of year in Moldova; the harvest has ended, the rain is starting to fall, the night temperatures drop as low as 40 degrees Fahrenheit, it's comfortable wearing four layers in the house because my host family has yet to buy wood for the furnaces, and yes, theВ apparatusesВ of daily living that were outside just last week have migrated indoors.

As many as three weeks ago, I was already putting on long underwear, sweatpants, a sweatshirt and a winter hat to use the phone outdoors. With the exception of one or two days in early October, it has only gotten colder. Thursday afternoon, my host brother, Sergiu, will move the phone inside for the winter. The only unfortunate side effect of this is that, as I explained to Maria, having the phone outside was a good way to make all my calls shorter and cheaper. Sometimes, warmth costs you in more ways than just the heating bill.

Saturday afternoon marked what was definitely be my last outdoor shower until springtime. Hot water that was heated on an outdoor stove just wasn't warm enough to compensate for the 55-degree air as I stood naked in front of the conveniently—yet awkwardly—placed small mirror in the shower. I watched my goose-bumps rise, my lower lip shake and my nipples harden (believe it or not, I'm stopping short in my description) as I patted myself down with water as quickly as possible and got back in the house with only a semi-thorough application of soap.

In the next few days, however, my family will finish building the indoor shower. It is in the casa mica, orВ "small house," which consists of one bedroom, a kitchen and the new bathroom and is used in winter by the family because it is easier to heat than the real house (I will stay in the big house, with my own heater for my room). The new shower room will have a wood-burning water heater, tile walls and a large reserve tank of water on the roof so that you can pour water in from the well any time you want, rather than just before taking a shower. The shower also has a drain, which, like our toilet and the hole in the back yard in which I dump used laundry water, seems to drain into the underground ether. I have no definite evidence of where the waste water flows to, but my house is uphill from the pond, and there's a reason why Peace Corps tells us not to swim or eat the Moldovan fish. The sink, which was until Wednesday outside on the patio, is now in the room leading into the shower room. It was a joy this morning to shave and not have the wind instantly whip my wet face.

In other news, Dumitru's brother comes in on a train next Wednesday night from Vladivostock, on the Pacific coast of Russia. He has not seen his brothers and sisters in Moldova for 20 years, and until this summer, hadn't talked to them for 15 years.В  He has never seen Diana, his 18-year-old niece. This is an amazing story, and one that I feel may not be incredibly uncommon across the former Soviet Union. I plan to make a documentary about the visit (which will be several weeks long) and make it my next Pete In Moldova Productions video. In the meantime, I'm sure I'll be posting little bits of the story on this blog.

Vrei sa pleci dar nu ma iei

Without anything major to elaborate on at the moment, I will instead try to create a collage for you of my life in the past two weeks:

Language Weekend, two days of Romanian classes in Chisinau with fellow trainees from my summer group, was a great reunion after more than a month apart. No psychedelic substance can equal the trip of speaking fluent Romanian for hours with a group of five other Americans and the Moldovan woman who, just four months ago, was leading you in a circle with a playground ball teaching you how to count to ten and conjugate the verb "to be".

A Lebanese restaurant in Chisinau called Class is probably the best eating experience I've ever had, rivaled only by Double D's in Los Gatos after our Senior Talent Show. Complete with belly dancers, Lebanese music, customers dancing with napkins in hand (it's the custom), nine bottles of wine and three hookahs split among six guys at our table (don't know what the six girls went through), spectacular food and more Muslims than Bush could shake an M-16 at. In essence, it was what I thought every day in the Peace Corps would be like, before I found out I was going to Moldova. The only downside: what would have cost me probably $60 in America cost me only $12 in Moldova, yet I can't remember ever feeling so guilty about spending money on food. Consider that our per diem for the 30 hours was less than $10 and that my personal monthly restaurant budget is $8, and you can start to understand what I mean.

While listening to my iPod in a free period today, I finally understand the chorus from O-Zone's Dragostea Din Tei. "Vrei sa pleci dar nu ma iei," meaning, "You want to go, but you're not taking me." I guess that explains the airplane in the video, but why the jet engines on the plane turn into booming speakers when someone hits the eject button on a Mac keyboard halfway through the video, nothing can ever explain.

Wednesday was the first day of school after two weeks of grape harvesting, and the kids were rather unruly to start off. By Friday, they had mellowed out a bit, and I had productive classes again.

Wednesday was also Teachers' Day. To celebrate, the 11th-graders organized a dance and a masaВ for the teachers. Dancing with all of my colleagues, all but four of them aged 40 or more, was much more fun than I thought, and I worked on my ridiculous move-around-in-a-circle traditional dance moves. When teachers asked me what the traditional American dance was, I made a quick reference to line-dancing, but said that it was more of a Southern thing. I said that by and large, the dancing that goes on in American discos is raunchy and vulgar. I illustrated this by putting my hands up over my head and saying, "I didn't do anything, Mr. Policeman!"

Teachers dancing with students is accepted an encouraged here, along with the whole kiss-on-the-cheek thing that's everywhere here. Who would have thought that this would be the thing that would take me the most getting used to?

I believe the 11th-graders are also trying to fix me up with my counterpart, since we are the only two single teachers at the school. They invited each of us to the school dance tonight. I believe logic and earlier posts can explain why I am not interested in romancing my counterpart, but Mereseni 11th-graders have neither logic nor access to my blog.

Toilet paper is softer than copier paper, but sometimes necessity dictates. When I look down the hole at the school's outhouse, I see I'm not the only one who's had to compromise. I still don't understand why it's so bright at the bottom of the outhouse pit; if there's light, doesn't that mean there's a large hole somewhere that lets in light and, by extension, animals and small children?

I'm pretty sure that today's fifth grade lesson on the possessive case was supposed to be review, but when all of my students told me that "the girl's hair" meant that there were many girls, I knew I was in for a long lesson. By the end of the 45 minutes, I had them shouting and repeating "Apostrophe S, Apostrophe S, Apostrophe S." They were pretty into it. After class, I took a black marker and wrote it on some of the straggler's hands. I told them in Romanian, "When your mother asks you why you have this written on your hand, tell her that it's because it's easier in English than in Romanian."В 

To demonstrate my point, Poftim the Possessive Case in Romanian:

masculine possessor, feminine object: the boy's cat: pisica baiatului (pisica=cat, baiat=boy)

masculine possessor, proper name, feminine object: Tom's cat: pisica lui Tom

feminine possessor, feminine object: the girl's cat: pisica fetei (note that this uses the plural form of fata, even though there's only one girl)

feminine possessor, proper name, feminine object: Oxana's cat: pisica Oxanei (this is only possible because every Moldovan girl's name ends with -a)

masculine possessor, neuter object: the boy's pen: pixul baiatului

masculine possessor, proper name, neuter object: Tom's pen: pixul lui Tom

feminine possessor, neuter object, the girl's pen: pixul fatei

feminine possessor, proper name, neuter object: Oxana's pen: pisica Oxanei (for foreign names that don't end in -a, use the masculine form, "lui Tom")

masculine possessor, masculine object: the boy's uncle: unchiul baiatului

masculine possessor, proper name, masculine object: Tom's uncle: unchiul lui Tom

feminine possessor, masculine object: the girl's uncle: unchiul fetei

feminine possessor, proper name, masculine object: Oxana's uncle: unchiul Oxanei

masculine plural possessor, feminine plural object: the boys' cats: pisicele baiatilor (this neglects several key accents that are not available online)

feminine plural possessor, feminine plural object: the girls' cats: pisicele fetelor

masculine plural possessor, neuter plural object: the boys' pens: pixurile baiatilor

feminine plural possessor, neuter plural object: the girls' pens: pixurile fetelor

masculine plural possessor, masculine plural object: the boys' brothers: fratii baiatilor

feminine plural possessor, masculine plural object: the girls' brothers: fratii fetelor

Compare those variants to this rule: If there's no s at the end of the possessor, write 's. If there's already an s, just writeВ '. For names like Dennis and Jesus, do whatever you want.

As Jess A. said in our language class two months ago, "I like 's better."

In non-grammatical news, I am helping with the house winemaking. Today Dumitru and I took all the bags of grapes that the women of the house had picked all day and poured them into a masher that emptied them into a huge cask. There, the sun's heat (caldura soarelui)В will make the stems, leaves, seeds and skins rise to the top, allowing us to scoop those things out and leave only pure wine. At first, Dumitru was very worried about me getting dirty; obviously he doesn't know what kind of American decides to join the Peace Corps. I told him after a few minutes that "O viata murdara este o viata mai interesanta", or "A messy life is a more interesting life." He laughed and agreed, and our discussion turned to essential wine-making vocabulary.

A journalist from Chisinau came to our school Thursday to interview some teachers, and I was included in the interview. When she found out that I had come from America, she asked me a lot of questions about how I was adjusting; all in Romanian, of course. When asked if I felt isolated from the world living in a country like Moldova, I responded that if anything, I feel more connected to the world because this is how the majority of the world lives. Western Europe and America are exceptions to the norm. When asked if it was difficult for me to live without hot water and all the other nice things that I had in America, I responded, "No, of course I have hot water here. I have a shower when I want and hot water in the morning." After a second-long pause, realization came over my face and I said, "Oh, you mean from the faucet? No, we don't have that. I forgot that I had that in America."

Diana came home from her first week of college talking about how big Chisinau was and how nervous she was. Sometimes it's easy to forget that when kids go from Mereseni to Chisinau for university, it's the equivalent of a poor Montana farm kid moving to New York City.

In American sports news, I'm glad to see that the NHL has started again, even if it was with a Sharks loss. Also, as my Soviet history lessons in America and here have taught me, when it comes Whites vs. Reds, the Reds always win. Hopefully the respective Sox colors are well versed in Soviet history. Hell, Red Sox ticket prices already practically constitute a war economy.

Lastly, there's nothing like walking to school and seeing an old lady yelling at her chickens. It happens more often than you'd think.

Vreau numai muzica mea!

7:20 a.m.; drowsily listening to Sigur Ros's ambient "BA BA TI KI DI
DO" EP on my computer; used the outdoor bathroom this morning long
enough to know that it's too cold for me to want to wash my face
outside; my bedroom door hangs open.

But soft! what sound from the living room breaks? It is Hit FM, and
Shakira is the tsunami that drowns out the soothing and eccentric
Icelandic vibes; goodbye morning; time to wash my face; oh God,
they're playing that late-80s hit, "Pump up the Jams"; I need to kill
the radio; there is no stopping American pop music, and it bombards
you even at 7:20 in the morning.