Ziua Limbii

Exactly one year ago, I decided to celebrate Moldova's Language Day by speaking only Moldovan (or Romanian, depending on what you want to call it). When volunteers called me or sent me text messages, I answered only in Moldovan. This was problematic when the two Russian speakers from our group tried to contact me, but I was convinced that it was their fault for not learning the official state language, enshrined in law on August 31, 1989.

This morning, the first word I said was "Привет". This was intentional. My opinion about Moldova's language issue has changed a lot in the past year, mostly because of my experiences and discussions, but also because I now better understand the politics of language in Moldova.

With the exception of the inter-war period of 1918-1940, Bessarabia (basically current Moldova without Transnistria) had been controlled by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union since 1812. By the time 1989 came, Russians had been a major ethnic and political influence in Bessarabia for 177 years.

Russians were also not the only non-Moldovan ethnicity in Bessarabia in the 19th century. According to Charles King in his illuminating book, The Moldovans, Bessarabia in 1897 was only 47.6 percent Moldovan, while Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, Bulgarians, Germans, Turks, Poles, Armenians, Turks and others comprised a plurality of the population. Moldovan was not the predominant language in cities, and the majority of newspapers were published in Russian because that's the language that readers wanted.

In 1918, Moldova's Sfatul Tarii hastily voted to unite with the rest of Romania. Minorities in this new combined nation were not well treated, especially the Jews who were slaughtered in the Holocaust. This was also the first time that Moldovans began to read and write their language in the Latin alphabet, echoing Romania's 19th-century change from the Cyrillic alphabet. Meanwhile in Transnistria, which had become a large part of the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet language reformers were trying to create Moldovan grammar texts and words that would differentiate the dialects of Romanian and Moldovan into two separate languages.

In 1941, the newly formed Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic, which encompassed the territory now known as the Republic of Moldova, was 68.8 percent Moldovan, 11.1 percent Ukrainian, 7.5 percent Bulgarian, 6.7 percent Russian and 4.9 percent Gagauz. Thus over 30 percent of the population would not necessarily be expected to speak the Moldovan language. Because nearly a third of the population new Russian better than Moldovan and because the MSSR was only one republic that needed to communicate with other Soviet states, Russian was declared the state language.

When discussing politics, this is the point where Romanian language nationalists tend to become upset. When you went to the store in the MSSR, you spoke in Russian. When you filed paperwork, it was in Russian. When you went to university, you studied in Russian. Two academics who studied French at Moldova's largest university have told me about times when they made an entire presentation in French and then were told to repeat it in Russian. Moldovan was not the esteemed language, and Russian speakers were often unwilling to stoop to what they called "the peasant language".

The most important thing about this time is that while ethnic Moldovans clung nearly unflinchingly to their language, other ethnicities began to use Russian. In 1989, 36.7 percent of ethnic Ukrainians in the MSSR spoke Russian as their native language, as opposed to 61.6 percent who kept Ukrainian, according to a Soviet census cited by King. Of those who continued to speak Ukrainian, 43.0 percent of them spoke fluent Russian, as opposed to only 12.8 percent who spoke fluent Moldovan.

Of ethnic Gagauz, who lived mostly in the south, 7.4 percent spoke Russian as their native language and 72.8 percent spoke it fluently; only 4.4 percent spoke fluent Moldovan. Over two-thirds of Jews in the MSSR spoke Russian as their first language.

Russian became not only the language of power, government work and commerce. It also became the language of Moldova's many ethnic minorities. These minorities were not accounted for by politicians in 1989.

After nearly a year of public debate, the MSSR Supreme Soviet on August 31, 1989 declared Moldovan as the official state language. This was mainly the work of nationalists and academics, and they immediately began talk of leaving the weakened USSR and re-uniting with Romania after nearly 50 years apart.

This talk was not only hasty, but it caused the ethnic minorities, nearly one-third of the MSSR's population, to worry. They were suddenly told that they spoke the wrong language, and many of them did not expect good treatment as minorities if unification with Romania were to happen. This led to the secession of Gagauzia and Transnistria.

In my opinion, ethnic Moldovans took the politics of language too far in the early '90s when they declared the national anthem to be "Limba Noastra," meaning "Our Language". This sent a message to Russian speakers that they were no longer included in the "we" of the Moldovan people?

Although the politics of language no longer creates large-scale demonstrations like in the late '80s and early '90s, there is still tension between Moldovan-speakers and Russian-speakers. On this blog I often write about times when I am frustrated with someone who only speaks Russian, and I've only lived here for a year. Because it is Language Day in Moldova, I want to list some observations about and suggestions for easing the language problem in this country.

• It is very easy for foreigners coming to Moldova to look at language in this country as a straightforward timeline: Russian was the dominant language in the Soviet era, both Russian and Moldovan are prevalent now, and some time in the future the entire country will speak Moldovan. But a significant minority in Moldova never considered Moldovan to be their language and entire ethnic groups, namely Ukrainians and Gagauz, have embraced Russian and see no need to learn Moldovan. This simplistic view is unrealistic.


• Moldova is a linguistically diverse country in which citizens need to know both Moldovan and Russian in order to get by. Native Russian speakers do not need to master Moldovan, nor do Moldovans need to master Russian. Moldovans don't need to have perfect Russian grammar, and Russians don't need to be able to describe their feelings or talk about abstract concepts in Moldovan. But every citizen should know how to buy food, get and give directions and otherwise be able to navigate life on a basic level in both languages. Moldovan-speaking restaurant workers who don't know the menu items in Russian are ignorant and ill-equipped for their job, just the same as a Russian-speaking shopkeeper who has to show a Moldovan-speaking customer the number 42 on a calculator because she doesn't know enough Moldovan to say how much his beer and water cost.


• Having the Moldovan national anthem only in the Moldovan language is offensive to Russian-speaking minorities. It should be recognized as a knee-jerk post-Soviet reaction against Russian language imperialism and retired as the national anthem. Moldova should look to the example of Canada, whose national anthem can be sung in either English or French.


• The Russian language should be recognized in some way in the Moldovan constitution. How, I don't know. But the fact that so many people speak it as their first language and the language isn't recognized in the constitution makes little sense.


• Currently, all signs in Moldova must be written in Moldovan. After they are written in Moldovan, writing the same message in Russian is optional. Looking again at Canada and Quebec, Moldova should make Russian signs mandatory in some situations, perhaps in raions and cities where at least 30 percent of the population prefers Russian over Moldovan.


• Settling some of these minority issues will help Moldova feel more cohesive and will remove a major objection that Transnistrian separatists currently have with the Chisinau government.

I don't have all the answers on this subject, but neither does anyone else. Language in the territory of modern Moldova has always been a major question and it has made it difficult to form a single national identity. August 31, 1989 was an important day for Moldova because it was one of the first times when the Supreme Soviet acted as a legislative body instead of simply rubber-stamping whatever Moscow said, according to King. It was also important because it gave the Moldovan majority a cultural win that it had been waiting for for decades. The cultural pendulum had been so far to the Russian side, but over the course of several months it swung to the Moldovan side. But it is important for Moldova to ask itself, "Did we go too far?" Moderate Moldovans need to examine the language question and push the pendulum back toward the center.

15 ani

The fireworks lit up the sky over the Arc of Triumph while the fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony played, delighting the thousands who had gathered in front of the Presidential Palace in the center of Chisinau. I was standing in the middle of the crowd, there with two students from this summer's English camp and a handful of their friends, all of whom had been wearing diapers when their country declared its independence from the Soviet Union on August 27, 1991. Today, as Moldova celebrated 15 years of independence, I was more excited about it than they were.

I started my day by coming into Chisinau and sending a text-message to my friend Lilia wishing her a happy Independence Day. She said that she had forgotten that Independence Day was today, but she was happy to be reminded.

At 5:30 p.m., I met up with Irina Nicorici, a university professor in Chisinau, Ryan Kennedy, a Fulbright scholar here, Ryan's wife, Allison, and a Frenchman named Camille who was working with a non-governmental organization here and had visited my village the day before.

I immediately noticed Irina's blue t-shirt with "Moldova" written across it and the national symbol covering a square foot of its front. Irina laughed and said that even just a year ago, she wouldn't have worn the shirt. "This year, talking with so many Americans, I've started to feel more and more Moldovan," she said, and with that sense of nationality came some pride in wearing a t-shirt that, paradoxically, she bought in Ukraine. I asked Irina how proud and excited she was for her country's anniversary. On a scale from one to 10, she told me she was at about five. After only 15 years, she said, there's no way for Independence Day to become as celebrated of a day here as the Fourth of July is in America after 230 years.

We walked to Chisinau's lakeside amphitheater, where the Ukrainian band Океан Ельзи (roughly transcribed from Ukrainian as Okean Elzy, or Elza's Ocean) was playing. The crowd was mostly teenagers and people in their early 20s, and a large amount of the people were wearing the black uniforms of youths who listen to hard rock and industrial music. In short, they were a lot like me and my friends when we were 16. Unfortunately, I spent most of my time at the amphitheater outside in a large crowd trying to file in through the one entrance. Crowd control and the concept of lines are not strong in Moldova.

Even outside the concert, it became clear to me that Romanian was not the event's preferred language. When I was asked at the security checkpoint to show what was in my pockets, it was in Russian first, although when I said that I didn't understand, the guard had no problem asking me in Romanian. When I attempted to not-so-subtly cut in the beer line, the girl behind me said something to me in Russian. When I responded, "Poftim?" she shrugged, since she had no way of explaining to me in Romanian that I was cutting. (I know that cutting in line is rude and awful, but sometimes you just want symbolic revenge after a 14 months of being cut in front of at every store.) I think my Russian is getting a little better; I can understand about 30 or 40 words now, although I don't have any of the grammatical knowledge that I would need in order to speak a complete sentence.

Because the concert was going later than I had anticipated, I had to leave Irina et al to go to the city's center at 8 p.m. There I met with three other Peace Corps volunteers, along with Nicoleta and Iulia, two girls from English camp who live in Chisinau, and a few of their friends. The main event for the night was to be Zdob si Zdub, Moldova's best band, playing on a stage in front of the Presidential Palace in the city's center at 9. We made our way into the crowd, which filled the streets of nearly the entire city block. The crowd here was very different from at the Океан Ельзи show, with much more Romanian spoken and with more brightly-colored clothing that fit with the warm August evening better than black. A traditional Moldovan folk ensemble was playing, and people in the crowd, including Nicoleta, Iulia and their friends, were dancing the hora.

I asked Nicoleta and Iulia the same question I had asked Irina about national pride. They basically shrugged off the question, but commented that it wasn't a very important celebration. Iulia said that because history is taught only twice a week in Moldovan schools, a lot of Moldovans aren't even sure what year their country became independent. I got the impression that for them, tonight was more of a Zdob si Zdub concert than an important birthday for their young country.

After the mayor of Chisinau addressed the crowd, the fireworks began. As I watched them, I thought about how I had arrived at this point. Here I am, 23 years old, already more than a year and a half out of college, living in a village without running water and with only one paved road in a country that I didn't even know existed 16 months ago, where I teach English and computers, speaking a second language for the majority of the day. That day, I had hitched a ride into the city on a bus that would have seemed highly disreputable to me if I were still living in America, and I had spent the day with a number of American, Moldovan and French acquaintances and friends, celebrating the independence of a nation younger than ourselves and fully realizing that Moldova still has many years remaining before it will truly be independent. At the exact moment of this fireworks show ("There goes the roads budget!" new volunteer Ren? exclaimed), I was standing with a group of Moldovan teenagers, speaking to them in English and eagerly awaiting a Moldovan band that we all loved. Suffice it to say, my life has changed more in the past year and a half than at any other time in my life.

The fireworks ended, and it was time for, as some of the Nicoleta and Iulia's friends called them, "Zdubii". The other volunteers wanted to move closer to the stage, so I was left with the girls and their friends. Even if scientists figure out cold fusion some day, nothing will ever match the energy of a teenage girl whose favorite band has just taken the stage. The jumping, the clapping, the screaming. And here I was with four teenage girls and four more stoic teenage boys.

"Buna seara, Chisinau!," called out Zdob si Zdub's lead singer, Roman.
"Buna seara, Roman!," screamed back the girls.

The band launched into over an hour of its most popular songs, including my favorites, "Nunta Extremala," "Everybody in the Casa Mare" and "DJ Vasile," and of course the Eurovision hit, "Bunica Bate Toba," (the girls knew all of the English lyrics to "Bunica Bate Toba," but I only knew the Romanian chorus). We barely looked at the stage, instead dancing in our own circle and jumping up and down during particularly rocking parts. By the end of the concert, the other volunteers had found us again and we all danced like madmen to my absolute favorite, "Buna Dimineata," which closed the show.

Nicoleta, Iulia and their friends left, and we volunteers met up with more volunteers, Moldovans and Camille, the Frenchman, for a few more beers, celebrating the independence of a country that we all, to some extent, now call our own.

The next day, when I returned home to Mereseni, I was still a little disappointed by Irina's, Nicoleta's and Iulia's low self-assessment of their patriotism. I was ready to chalk it up to the difference between an established country with its own national culture, like the U.S., and a young country that still has so many issues to deal with before it can feel truly unified and independent. Then I asked my host mom, Maria, and my host sister-in-law, Olesea, how proud they were of their country's independence.

"Somewhere between a seven or an eight," they both agreed. Maria began to talk about the opportunities that have opened to ethnic Moldovans in business and in government that had previously been dominated by ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. I asked Olesea why she was proud of Moldova.

"Because it's a young country," she said. "And every year, you see that it's getting a little bit better and better."

Viata peste hotare in musica moldovaneasca

Moldovan folk music is usually about love, dancing and drinking. But another major lyrical influence in current folk music is the Moldovan experience abroad. Because the subject of living and working abroad resonates with so many Moldovans, as well as Romanians, song lyrics are increasingly describing how much they miss home.

There is a popular song now in which the male singer says goodbye in Italian and proclaims that, "Our language is the richest and full of love.... I miss home."

Here are some other lyrics that I heard on the bus to Chisinau today:

"Nicaieri e mai frumoasa viata ca la tine acasa."

"Nowhere is life more beautiful than at your home."

"Zece ani am plecat, si m-am saturat."

"I've been gone for 10 years, and I've had enough."

Living abroad is currently, for better or worse, one of the most important aspects of the Moldovan experience. Moldovan music will continue to capture the yearning for home and, after years of not seeing your family and friends, the joy of returning home.

Tecnologie si Cules

Moldova is often described as a cross between old and new, where you can see new BMWs passing by horse-drawn carriages. I've discovered a fresh example of this truth:

I am currently writing up my own curriculum for teaching informatica class. In between lessons on the basics of Windows 95, I have allotted two weeks in the schedule for when students will be harvesting grapes.

As my friend Sean said, "Make some wine, write an algorithm."

Stiti limbajul PASCAL?

This summer, Mereseni's school lost its first grade teacher, the information technology teacher and the one English teacher who actually knew English. Turnover is inevitable at a school, and this wouldn't be a problem if there were young and qualified teachers ready to take the old teachers' places. But the problem in Mereseni and other villages like it is that there aren't young and qualified teachers ready to work.

The past week has given me some insight into the yearly scramble to find teachers for my village's school. It's possible the school went through the same process last year without my knowing, but seeing it this year has brought the chaos into perspective.

The first to leave was the first grade teacher, Vera Constantinovna, who left for Italy in July. Vera, in her mid-50s, went into so much debt financing her daughters' weddings that she had to leave the country and clean houses in Italy if she ever wanted to get back in black (the insistence among Moldovans to pay for huge weddings and baptisms that they can't afford is a topic for another time).

Vera's replacement was easily chosen; the new teacher will be a woman named Galina who had been teaching at the village's kindergarten. The students will already be comfortable with the woman who has taught them before, and she's qualified to teach first grade. As for who will teach at the kindergarten in Galina's place, I have no idea.

The next person to leave was my English-teaching counterpart, Svetlana. Sveta, as I wrote a year ago, graduated college with a degree and journalism and never wanted to teach, especially not in the village. Last week she took a job in Chisinau, presumably as a journalist?she didn't bother to tell me, her colleague, that she was leaving and for what kind of work she was leaving for. It's a good professional and social change for Sveta, and I'm happy that she'll be living where she wants to live and working where she wants to work. She did, however, leave me at the school with only Aliona, who is not trained in teaching English and doesn't have a very good grasp on the language.

After just several days of searching, Maria Dmitrivna, the school principal, found a replacement. My new counterpart, Maria, just graduated college with certification to teach Romanian and English. She is from Hincesti, the county seat, and will live with her grandmother in Mereseni during the school year.

Things got off to a good start today when I met Maria. In the first five minutes of talking, she smiled more than Sveta had in the entire year. She is enthusiastic about teaching, although she told me she's nervous. She came into my room multiple times today, which I don't think Sveta ever did. She expressed interest in how my classroom was arranged, my supplemental grammar books and my classroom's English library. In short, I think this will be a fruitful professional relationship, and it's a chance for me to leave a mark on the new generation of English teachers in this country.

The third teacher to leave is Sergiu, the information technology teacher. Last year, Sergiu came from Hincesti every Monday and taught all seven of the school's computer lessons. As I understand it, he got married over the summer and moved to northern Moldova.

So now Maria Dmitrivna is searching for a new IT teacher. There is a man in Sarata Mereseni, the neighboring ethnically Ukrainian and Russian village, who teaches IT at the school there. However, he's uncomfortable teaching in Romanian instead of Russian?when Maria Dmitrivna said this at the faculty meeting, I said, "If I can teach in Romanian, so can he." There is also one other woman who could possibly teach IT at the school, but she is unsure if she can come to the village one day every week. If neither of these specialists can teach at the school, though, my principal has one last teacher in reserve. Me.

That's right. My principal popped the question to me this morning, asking if I could take one day of the week and teach seven classes of IT. I believe that any right-thinking person, when asked if he could teach computer classes in his second language and expand his workweek from 20 hours to 27 at a job where he's already not being paid, would give a resounding No. When the right-thinking person heard that he would be expected to teach the 11th grade the PASCAL programming language, of which he has no knowledge, he would give a second, louder No. (My dad, who has worked in the software industry for over 30 years, sent me this instant message: "PASCAL??? This ceased to be of interest somewhere between 20-25 years ago!!!")

But I said yes, for one reason and one reason only. Because if these kids learn computers from me, they're actually going to know how to use a computer. The focus of computer education in Moldova is not computer usage, but instead basic-to-advanced computer science theory. Students graduate with a faint understanding of programming languages and the parts of a computer, but they don't know how to type, send e-mail, find a web page or use Microsoft Word, Powerpoint or Excel. The Moldovan Education Ministry gives these kids theoretical knowledge for which they have no use, but fails to provide them the basic skills they will need for a job in the 21st century.

If I end up teaching IT this year, I intend to make my own lesson plans, including lessons on typing, Microsoft Office and hopefully the internet (via possible Saturday field trips to Hincesti). As for the language barrier, I have already taken notes on some of the most important Windows terms as they are displayed in Russian ("Empty the Recycle Bin" translates to, "Очистить Корзину"). I am encouraged when I remember my first computer teacher back in first grade, Mr. DiSalvo. He was Italian and spoke with an accent, but he taught in English and we all learned. So Mr. D, if I teach (and the computers won't be a huge step up from what you taught me on in 1989), I'll always have you in mind.

"Cum doresti"

Corruption. It's everywhere, and every Moldovan knows it. But that doesn't mean that you should ever, ever, even subtly begin to imply to a person that what they're doing is corrupt. Especially when they work with buses.

I've had two experiences with transportation workers where my innocent questioning of a price has thrown people into fits. The first happened several months ago, when I wanted to buy a bus ticket from Chisinau back to my village of Mereseni. Normally, the ticket costs 10 lei. The woman in the booth told me it cost 12.

"Did the price go up?" I asked, pulling out an extra two lei.

"I'm just saying the prices!" she yelled at me through the plastic divider. She turned her computer's LCD screen so I could read it. "See! The prices changed! You think I'm pocketing this money?!"

"My God!" I responded. "Can't you see I'm already giving you the money? Here, take the money!" I bought my ticket and walked away. The woman continued, I'm sure, to have a rotten day.

The second time happened just this week. I had gotten taken a bus from Hincesti to Chisinau, a ticket that used to cost seven lei but had recently started costing nine. When we arrived in Chisinau, I gave the driver a 10 lei bill and waited for my change.

An awkward silence followed for five seconds.

"What are you still waiting for, boy?" the driver asked, already sounding agitated.

"Well, it costs nine lei from Hincesti," I said, "so I'm waiting for at least one leu."

"It's nine lei to the bus station," he said. "I took you to the center of the city. That's another leu. 10 lei."

There is something about the Romanian language in general, and in particular with bus drivers' usage of it, that eschews all semblance of politeness or understanding within the first two seconds of a confrontational situation. The tone of a Moldovan bus driver explaining how he has concocted his price is impossible to translate into English. The emotions behind it are a mix of "I can't believe you don't know how much things cost and I have to explain it to you, you idiot," "How dare you come on my bus and tell me how much every other bus ride you've taken on this route has cost you," "I make the rules on this bus and f--- you if you don't like 'em," and "Why do you have to be the one guy who has a problem with my price? You're making my life so difficult just by existing." Now, re-read the driver's previous line with your newfound Moldovan driver voice. Not fun to hear, is it?

In the face of these attitudes, it is often best to simply step down. So I left the one leu on the bus and shrugged.

"Cum doresti," I said as I turned and walked off the bus. In English, this means, "Whatever you want." Because this translation is quite innocuous, the bus driver's final words surprised me:

"SDOIIJEWLKEFWJDSCMLKKJWEEOIFJLKSMJSLKSJFOIWIEURLLSDLKFJSDFKLJ!!!!!!!!" he barked. "SI SWOKJZCLKMJCLKJOWWJFOIJFLKSJSLKFFLK!!!!!!" he added for good measure. This is not a direct transcription, since angry drivers tend to swear in Russian, and although the majority of Russian words that I know are curses, I don't know nearly enough of them to understand all of the curses that a Moldovan driver can fit inside five seconds of yelling. I was already outside of the bus by then, so to show how little I cared about the whole situation and how much he was overreacting, I raised my hands high above my head and made an "I'm not listening" noise.

"Bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh bleh!" I called as I continued to walk away. Then, for good measure, I wanted to swear at him in Russian. Before I could think of the best word, though, I realized that I had already sworn at him seven times in a row; the standard American "I'm not listening" noise is best translated in Russian as "bitch".

So who won this argument? The driver who got an extra leu and screamed at the top of his lungs in order to maintain his authority on his bus, or the American who lost a leu, equivalent to eight American cents, unintentionally cursed loudly in the middle of a crowded street seven times and got to laugh afterward? I claim victory, because it was by far the best entertainment I'd ever had for just seven cents.

City Club

I didn't get drunk. I didn't start making out with random Moldovan girls. I didn't get in a fight with a Moldovan guy. I didn't see a guy get killed by the Russian mafia.

My first time in a Chisinau club, I just danced and enjoyed myself.

Thursday was the swearing-in ceremony for Peace Corps Moldova 18, a new group of 35 teachers who will specialize in either English or health education. For them, it was the end of their pre-service training and the start of two years in their separate villages, towns and cities. To celebrate, the group went out to party the night before, along with many volunteers who were already serving.

After dinner at the Nistru Bistro restaurant, which we had reserved well in advance, and drinks at The Dublin, an Irish pub, we made our way to City Club, a dance club near the state university. I paid just under three dollars for admission, which I continue to consider a lot of money. After being patted down, I entered the club.

The circular dance floor had a diameter of about 40 feet and was encircled by tables on a raised platform, a stage and a bar. On the near wall, a second floor was lofted 15 feet above, providing space for more tables and, in one place clearly visible from the dance floor, metal cage bars that anyone could grab onto and dance against.

On the far wall, levitating eight feet above where the bar met the stage, were two cages. As opposed to the near wall, where any amateur could grind the bars, these cages were only for the pros. The pro female dancers were dressed in short dresses that flirted with the male club-goers' eyes, always implying that the men might catch a glimpse of more than just upper thigh if they watched long enough. The one male dancer, however, was the best reason to watch the cages. Bare-chested, clad in tight pants and with his long hair pulled back in a pony tail, this guy danced non-stop with a simple four-step, his arms at waist-level and his hands seemingly locked in a casual thumbs-up position. I don't know any female volunteer who was attracted to this dancing man. Perhaps male dancers exist in Moldovan clubs to convince the male customers that they won't be the only ones dancing.

The men seemed to be convinced, as they were dancing without shame on the floor. The area was flooded; guys in tight shirts and those ridiculous dress shoes that curl up at the toe like those of Santa's little helpers, girls with bare midriffs, tight jeans or short skirts and the bodies to make it work. American clubs tend to have large amounts of both good-lucking and lackluster girls. It seems that only the first group shows up at Chisinau clubs.

Unlike a village disco, City Club was well equipped with colored lights of every kind. The strobe lights were in full effect, making me think twice before tapping any of the new female volunteers on the shoulder, for fear that the disorienting effects would result in me either groping them or clipping them on the chin.

The music in any club is usually bad. The music in a European club is awful. The music in a Moldovan club is horrendous. Luckily, I have become desensitized to it by school dances and my host sister's musical choices on the home radio. So when one particularly poor yet popular Romanian song played, I sang along with the banal lyrics:

"Softly she whispers a slow melody.
A moment ago she was dancing with me.
All I want is a kiss or two.
Oh baby, don't go. I'm in love with you."

Thankfully, last year's Crazy Frog sickness seems to have run its course. We were spared "Axel F" this time.

At 1 a.m., all dancers cleared the floor; it was time for the contest. We volunteers gathered around a table populated by U.S. marines and their female Moldovan friends for the evening. Although the emcee conducted the contest in Russian, it was simple enough to understand the premise when he brought three couples to the stage and used the words "Kama Sutra". The crowd went wild. Each couple had to act out a unique sexual position of their own design. They went through five rounds, offering the entire club 15 sneak peaks into their bedroom exploits. The loudest applause getters, for those of you interested in Moldovan sexual practices, were the 69, the Reverse Cowboy and some amalgamation of Doggy Style and the starting position for a wheelbarrow race. I have no idea whether the applause meter measured the Moldovans' familiarity with these positions or their taboo nature. I'm sure there's a master's thesis in this subject just waiting to be written by a Fulbright scholar.

After the contest, the deejay switched to more of a hip-hop bent, and I was disturbed by how well I knew the words to DMX's "Up in Here". At 2 a.m., we left for our hotel rooms.

Overall, I enjoyed my first Chisinau club experience. It's not something that I'll be doing every weekend, but the next time the group of volunteers I'm with decides to go to a club, I might not be such a sourpuss. Because in actuality, this was a better clubbing experience than either of the two times I went in America. Maybe those Lonely Planet books that say that Chisinau has wild nightlife aren't totally lying.

Prima zi de pregatire

School is back in session. At least for teachers.

Today was the first day for teachers to return to the school and begin preparations for the year. Students come on September 1, so a teacher's time is spent in these two weeks preparing visual aids and lesson plans for the new year.

At least that's how it's supposed to be. The reality is that many teachers at my school didn't even come today, and many of the ones who came sat around and talked. The two secretaries were caught up in a game of computer solitaire. (Pune opt pe noua!, for those of you learning Romanian, means "Put eight on top of nine.")

I brought a heavy suitcase full of books and magazines to the school and restocked the English library in my classroom. The library contains scores of magazines and books and is a great resource for my students.

My major effort this year is to improve the number of visual aides in my classroom, in order to make the classroom both more colorful and more informative. I also have set up a spot on my wall for Students of the Month, where I post pictures of the student in each class who impressed me most over the course of the month. Positive reinforcement usually works better than some Moldovan methods I've seen, which include screaming at the kids to shut up and pulling a boy out of his desk by his hair. Like I said, positive reinforcement is important.

I'm excited to be back at work, mostly because summer was getting boring. A man can only make so many trips to Chisinau before he realizes that he's not really being productive. My Romanian has also suffered from not being in a work environment. I noticed that while talking to my colleagues for the first time in months, I was making a lot of mistakes and forgetting words that I had known for six months. Luckily, my level of Romanian will go back up after a week or two at the school.

As I returned home from the school this afternoon, an old lady who lives on my route talked to me from her yard. She asked me where I had been in vacation, and then began talking about her daughter, who was currently living abroad. The woman, standing barefoot in her yard with her arthritic toes curled on top of each other, began to cry.

"I miss her so much," she said. "And you're so dear to me when you walk by every day."

Our connection today isn't the impact of an American in a foreign country. It's just a young person doing the simple act of greeting the elderly as he walks by. And regardless of nationality or culture, those little things can leave a bigger mark than my "real work" at the school. With less than a year left in Moldova, I hope that I have success at the school, but also that I can keep doing the little things that matter to women like her.

Moldova dintr-un alt punct de vedere

Thanks to Ed for sending a link to his recent tour through Romania and Moldova. Although published recently, it talks about his travel back in May. He was in Tiraspol on Victory Day, and has this to say:

For me, the most worrying aspect of life in Transdnistria is that whilst there are not a huge number of young people here, the ones who I have spoken to for a while seem to dislike the regime but defend it because it is their regime. I can understand the many old people wishing to turn up to celebrate their victory over the Nazis, but also I must say I was slightly confused, almost shocked, by the enthusiasm shown by the youth. They are so proud to be Russian, why is this? Maybe as a result of the way they feel that they are threatened maybe? Or maybe they do just think that Russia is a great place. A couple of kids in their teens stood on duty by the eternal flame, for me this looked like some sort of Hitler Youth movement, and I?d read before about the indoctrination that this government sponsored group delivers to children, promoting a raving sense of nationalism, anti-Semitism and the ability to fire a gun. Maybe Transdnistria does have some sort of future. This is the most scary aspect of stay in Transdnistria which will now come to a close as I walk back towards the bus station.

Be sure to read everything he writes about Moldova. He seems to have gotten a very bad impression of Moldovan men, and I certainly won't deny that the type of men he met exist in large quantities in this country. There are many others, though, who don't go after every non Romanian-speaking rube they come across.

O problema mare a fiecarui primar

I stopped by the primaria, or town hall, last week to talk with the mayor. I'm helping my village try to get a new volunteer this fall with a different speciality, and even though a second volunteer is a long shot, my meeting with the mayor gave me a chance to talk with him for about 45 minutes.

Petru Rosculet is a physically imposing hulk of a village mayor, standing just under six feet tall but with a thick body, broad shoulders and huge hands that bring his weight to around 230 pounds. His face is rounded and his eyes appear slightly slanted, so he looks more Mongolian than Moldovan. He has moved up through the village over the decades, beginning as a teacher at the school, then becoming the school's principal. Then, near the end of the '90s, he was appointed as vice-mayor. In 2003, the previous mayor passed on the title to Petru, and he was then elected by the villages of Mereseni and Sarata Mereseni later in the same year. His term goes until 2007.

Last year, Petru's wife, the school principal at the time, left to work in Italy. Not only does he have two villages to run (Sarata Mereseni is a small Russian-speaking village that shares a mayor, school system and other facilities with Mereseni), but he has to do it with his wife temporarily in another country. Petru drums up enthusiasm when he sees one of his constituents or is in a meeting, but in the in-between moments, he seems much more tired and worn-out than a man in his 50s should be.

Petru has overseen the creation of the new parent-teacher association in Mereseni that will fund and is slowly bringing natural gas pipelines into the village to improve heating and cooking possibilities in homes and at the school. But compared to what he had promised in 2003, he has failed; running water has not been restored to the village, the roads haven't improved, and there are no new streetlights to improve safety at night.

The problem, Petru told me last week, is the tax system that the federal government enacted in 2003. Before 2003, the village collected taxes and gave the county and federal government what was due to them; the mayor's office kept a lot of the tax money and could use it to the mayor's discretion. But since 2003, the federal government has taken all of the village's tax money and then distributed it back down to counties and villages.

This system clearly hurts Moldovan villages, since mayors now have to request back the money that was collected from their villages. Money in Chisinau is much more likely to go to issues that Chisinau politicians find pressing, and properly funding village schools and water distribution systems are not first and foremost in the mind of politicians who send their children to private city schools and can turn on a faucet in their house and instantly get water.

"I've talked to the prime-minister, [Vasile] Tarlev, a few times," Petru said. "And I asked him, 'Why isn't there enough money going to the villages? Don't we pay taxes? Aren't we Moldovan citizens just as much as someone living in Chisinau?'"

Moldovan mayors like Petru are trying desperately to get funds into their villages just in order to pay for heating the schools and pay the salaries of public workers, let alone improve the village. Thankfully, progress might be on the horizon with the 2007 federal budget. Petru told me that two possible improvements in tax law might come:

First, the tax collection system would go back to the pre-2003 method, where villages pass to the county and federal governments only what is due to them and keep local finances inside the village. This should give mayors much more control over how funds are used.

Second, the federal government will take over the burden of paying teachers. This will alleviate some financial stress on village budgets and will hopefully result in teachers being paid in a more timely manner.

Lucia Candu at Public Policy Watch has this optimistic news (full post here):

Finally, the legislation is soon to be improved, and the major shortcomings will be eliminated. The Parliament has already adopted the draft new law on local public finances in the first reading. I have read the new piece of legislation, and, in my opinion, it contains important provisions that can lead to an increased financial autonomy of local governments.

Until then, progress in villages, where nearly half of Moldovans live, will be slow. And mayors like Petru Rosculet will have to keep trying to make something out of nothing.

Cea mai importanta intalnire a anului

As readers of this blog and followers of Moldovan news know, Russia outlawed the importing of Moldovan and Georgian wine in April this year. With grape-picking season approaching, many wineries are getting ready to scale down or completely close their operations for the year. Now, there's some hope that they won't have to.

Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin went to Moscow Tuesday and met with President Vladimir Putin to discuss, among other things, wine and agri-food exports to Russia, gas imports to Moldova and the Transnistrian conflict.

Voronin sounded positive after the meeting, saying, "The meeting had an extremely friendly and favourable character, and its outcomes make us optimistic about the settlement of considered problems. The meeting is a serious step taken to thaw our countries strategic relations."

Hopefully, the wine and gas issues can be resolved before the fall. Otherwise, Moldovans won't have the wine industry's income and won't be able to afford to heat their houses with gas that is too expensive.

Read the full moldova.org article here.

Cat de putin fac un dus intr-un an

When I left America in June 2005, I had a 129 ml (14.5 fl oz) bottle of Suave Humectant shampoo. It was about three-quarters full.

It is now August 2006. There's still a decent amount left in the bottle.

Shampoo goes slowly when you take only one or two showers a week. It's just another way that the cost of living is much cheaper in the village than in the city. My city-dwelling English campers were shocked and disgusted that I took showers so rarely. Those darn Moldovan city slickers and their showers.

100 si 10,000

This post commemorates two personal milestones in my Peace Corps service. It is both my 100th post on this blog and I have just finished reading my 10,000th page of Peace Corps service. I thought I'd share a list of what I've been reading and what my general thoughts were on each book. I hope this assures any bookworm Peace Corps applicants that yes, you will have plenty of time to read in the Peace Corps. Each book is given one, two or three stars. Why no fourth star? Because my notation system just doesn't work like that.

Summer 2005

• Bissinger, Buzz. 3 Nights in August. 272 pg. This book followed Tony LaRussa of the St. Louis Cardinals for three days and explains game situations in the same way that Moneyball explained a general manager's thought processes. 3 stars.
  
• Hornby, Nick. High Fidelity. 245 pg. This was the first Nick Hornby book I had ever read, and I followed it up with two others in the fall. I don't know if it's good or bad that I couldn't get Jack Black out of my head while reading it. 3 stars.
  
• Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hitman. 230 pg. This was about a former Peace Corps volunteer who then used his position as an economic advisor to sabotage governments. His mea culpa was weak not only because his purported activities were borderline evil, but also because he claimed to know of a large conspiracy without ever actually attributing sources of his "knowledge". 2 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley in Search of America. 277 pg. I hadn't read this book since early in high school, and since I have discovered New England and several countries outside of America in the time since I had last read it, the book gave me a new appreciation for America and its people. 3 stars.
  
• Palahniuk, Chuck. Diary. 261 pg. Since Fight Club, Palahniuk's writing has been a downward spiral from novels with social relevance to graphic mystery page-turners for a male audience. This book finished Palahniuk for me. 2 stars.
  
• Thoreau, Henry. Walden. 296 pg. This was the first book I read in Mereseni, the smallest and closest-to-nature place I had ever lived in. It reminded me of New England, but at the same time had me thinking with longing of the Mereseni pond when it would freeze over that winter. 3 stars.
  
• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Two Towers. 398 pg. There's nothing to say that hasn't already been said about the trilogy. I just remember my host sister, 18 at the time, looking at me like I was crazy as I described these books to her at the lunch table one day. 3 stars.
  

September 2005

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. 490 pg. Ditto for what was said above about The Two Towers. 3 stars.
  
• Wodehouse, P.G. How Right You Are, Jeeves. 206 pg. The first Wodehouse I had read since it was required reading in freshman year of college. The adventures of Bertie and Jeeves are hilarious, and this wouldn't be the last I read of them. 3 stars.
  
• Hornby, Nick. Fever Pitch. 239 pg. Nothing like the movie. There's no real narrative structure to this book about soccer, like there was in the Fallon-Berrymore-Red Sox feature film. That wouldn't work in a film, but in a book, it's enjoyable. I liked his admittance that the so-called typical male obsession of sports actually fades in and out depending on the man, the time in his life and the quality of the game. 3 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. 169 pg. I don't know who writes better about America than John Steinbeck. I had to come to Moldova to realize that Steinbeck was my favorite English-language writer. 3 stars.
  
• Hornby, Nick. About a Boy. 307 pg. I know that Kurt Cobain isn't the focus of the book, but I kept focusing on the fact that I was just a few years too young to really grasp the significance of his death when it happened. This book helped give me some perspective. 3 stars.
  

October 2005

• Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 281 pg. Many Moldovans told me that they had already read Huck Finn in Russian or Romanian, but what those translations don't give are the beautifully transcribed accents in the book. Nor is it easy for a non-American to begin to comprehend the black-white relations that this book addresses. 3 stars.
  

November 2005

• Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. 277 pg. If this book had caught me six or seven years ago, it would have been a huge influence. But having attended Boston University and seen some traces of the culture that Holden lives in, I didn't need this book to tell me it was, in the narrator's words, "bullshit". 3 stars.
  

December 2005

• Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. 463 pg. Yet another book that I enjoyed, but would have probably enjoyed more if I had read it in high school, when I was reading Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five. No matter how much Tom Brokaw romances "The Greatest Generation," there will always be Catch-22 to turn the memory of World War II on its ear. 3 stars.
  
• Hawks, Tony. Playing the Moldovans at Tennis. 249 pg. When you live in a country of only 4 million people and you've been trying so hard to understand the culture for the past six months, it's good to read a book about a guy who has never been in a rutiera, speaks awful Romanian and can't get over the fact that people in this country don't smile. It was just what I needed before I left on vacation. 3 stars.
  
• Strauss, Neil. The Game. 437 pg. I asked my parents for this book for Christmas because it included a chapter on Transnistria. Little did I know that this book on pick-up artists would be one of the most enjoyable reads I'll have in my entire two years here. This book has been read by myself and eight other volunteers, and the skills that it teaches may have helped one volunteer snag his current fianc®e. 3 stars.
  

January 2006

• Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. 118 pg. This was the third time I've read this book in my life, and only this time did the idea of wanting to settle down resonate with me. I also thought of the way so many people in this country are trying so hard to get to that next level; they have just one dream, and they may never achieve it. 3 stars.
  
• Seinfeld, Jerry. Sein Language. 180 pg. A quick and mindless comedy read. No harm done. 2 stars.
  
• Petras, Kathryn and Ross Petras. Here Speeching American. 223 pg. A hilarious collection of English errors seen all over the world. I had gotten so used to the common Moldovan errors in English, it was nice to read how other countries mangle the language. 3 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. Tortilla Flat. 151 pg. The lives of a bunch of low-down no-goods in a village written out like morality plays and with speech patterns belonging to the Arthurian legends impressed me as stories and as a style. 3 stars.
  
• Wodehouse, P.G. Very Good, Jeeves. 264 pg. January was a big month for reading, and especially a big month for reading comedy. 3 stars.
  
• Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. 380 pg. This is my mother's favorite book, and as I read it I thought about my Costesti host father, Tudor. He has so much love and respect for the land, but he is raising his children in a new generation which doesn't see agriculture as a major part of its future. I think of the day when his son will sell their vineyards to a corporation. 3 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. The Pearl. 97 pg. Like much of the Steinbeck on this list, I had already read The Pearl once before. Knowing more about Latin America's past and the oppression of native and mestizo populations made this a much more interesting read for me than it had been in high school. 3 stars.
  

February 2006

• Simmons, Bill. Now I Can Die in Peace. 353 pg. This is a collection of online columns that Simmons compiled into a book while the Red Sox were on their way to their 2004 World Series win. As a Sox fon, I really had no choice but to like this book. As a writer, the concept of compiling online writing and making a book out of it struck me as an interesting possibility. 3 stars.
  
• Wodehouse, P.G. Uncle Fred in the Springtime. 250 pg. Without Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, this comedy about the characters at Blandings just wasn't as funny as other Wodehouse material. 2 stars.
  

March-April 2006

• Friedman, Thomas. The World is Flat. 469 pg. I avoided this book like the plague for the first year after it was published, thinking that I knew enough of Friedman's thoughts on globalization just from his New York Times columns. I was wrong. It gave me perspectives on where Moldova can possibly go in the decades to come, with an emphasis on information technology and services. 3 stars.
  

May 2006

• Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. 67 pg. This book will make me think a little when I call something bullshit, but I can't credit it for being a life-changing piece of literature. I guess I just wanted something more humorous. 2 stars.
  
• Wodehouse, P.G. Jeeves and the Tie that Binds. 205 pg. Thank God for Jeeves and Bertie, and thanks to whatever volunteer put so many Wodehouse books in the Peace Corps library. 3 stars.
  
• McCourt, Frank. Teacher Man. 258 pg. This is by no means a perfect book, but it is important for anyone who wants to teach high school, especially in a public school. And since that's exactly what I want to do, it's a good thing I read it. 3 stars.
  

June 2006

• Shakespeare, William. Othello. 128 pg. I was supposed to have already read this play in college, but I was probably busy playing Super Monkey Ball on my roommate's Gamecube. Shakespeare really mastered the art of one character deceiving another in this play, and I can't think of any other work by any other author with so much nervous dramatic irony. 3 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 619 pg. With about 100 pages left in the book, I finally realized that the book had no possibility of ending well. I'm told by one source that Romanian literature doesn't transcribe accents like Twain and Steinbeck do; if that's true, than I consider the language to be a little bit poorer than what it could be. My favorite memory of this book was text-messaging another volunteer and using the initialization "G.O.R." Only a day later did I realize that the final word is Wrath.
  
• Borek, David, Tomas Carba and Alexandr Kocab. Legacy. 107 pg. This book, available at the Museum of Communism in Prague, was a nice piece of supplemental reading to tie in with a visit to the museum. I would have liked a book with more depth, though. 2 stars.
  

July 2006

• Thompson, Hunter S. Better than Sex. 246 pg. This book about the 1992 presidential election doesn't hold a candle to Thompson's work in the '70s, mostly because, as my friend Dennis pointed out, he was no longer really in the game. He was just watching TV and reacting to it. 2 stars.
  
• Keret, Etgar. The Nimrod Flip Out. 167 pg. I just couldn't get into this collection of short stories translated from Hebrew. Maybe I need to be with a character for more than 10 pages before I really know what's going on. So my poor review of this isn't so much about Keret's writing, but rather the form factor that it was published in. 1 star.
  
• Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Breakfast of Champions. 295 pg. Four words: Wide Open Beavers Inside! I hadn't read any Vonnegut for a long time, and I love his style. His usage of little hook phrases such as "Listen" or "And so on" combined with my recent Thompson reading to influence my writing style for the time being. 3 stars.
  

August 2006

• Sachs, Jeffrey. The End of Poverty. 368 pg. This book is a must-read. Two things stood out to me: First, Moldova is in the lower half of countries in the world, but is at least stable and is on the development ladder. Many countries, especially in Africa, are nowhere near the bottom rung of the development ladder. Second, there needs to be a major policy change among developed countries, especially in the U.S., about poverty reduction in the developing world. U.S. aid is far too little, and for just 0.7 percent of our GDP, we would nearly eliminate extreme poverty in the next 20 years. 3 stars.
  

Un razboi distractiv

Standing in a five-foot ditch, hiding behind some grass growing at the top of the hole. My semi-automatic in my hands. Searching for the enemy creeping around this deserted half-constructed office building. Every few minutes, a round of gunfire in the distance. The enemy is invisible.

There! A glimpse of camouflage sticking out against the cement background, 30 yards away. Crouch. Hide. A friendly or the enemy? Can't tell. Just looked back at me. Must have seen me. Grip the gun tighter. Be ready.

There! Yellow on his arm. The Enemy. Kill him. Three shots off before he can even react. Don't stop shooting. His hands go up. He's dead.

My first paintball kill of the day.

Yes, paintball exists in Moldova. I was invited to play it last Sunday with some Moldovan alumni from American Councils, a U.S. government program that sponsors foreigners on exchange trips of various lengths to the States. Their programs include business development and the FLEX program, which allows foreign students to spend a year in an American high school. Sunday one alumna, Marina, organized a trip for a dozen alumni (and a stray American) to play paintball at Attiss, a site on the outskirts of Chisinau.

Even though Moldova's attitude toward safety is nowhere near that of America's, I was still surprised when we arrived at Attiss and saw what looked like an Afghan terrorist training center. The staging area was on the second floor of an office building that had only been half-constructed and was already on its way backward toward dilapidation. No interior walls had yet been built, creating a single room out of the 40 foot by 100 foot space. There were two large piles of rubble at different corners of the building. Just 15 feet away from the spectators and new arrivals were fully armed men shooting target practice against a wall, nothing standing between the firing guns and the unprotected masses except the men's discretion.

We put on paintball gear that the company provided: a camouflage jumpsuit, a fabric flack jacket to cover our chest, stomach and back, an athletic cup, a cloth hat, cloth gloves and a plastic face shield. Lilia, my date from the previous night's wedding who had invited me paintballing, wanted to play. The worker she approached about equipment gave her what I perceived to be as a "This isn't for little girls like you" speech in Russian, then had her hold a piece of cardboard at arm's length from her body. He shot the cardboard from 10 feet away, and the paintball went clear through the cardboard without breaking. Despite my continued encouragement, that was enough to make Lilia sit out for the day.

The men working there gave us some directions in Russian (it was the language of choice for the day, but a guy named Vlad translated for me), telling us that the most important rule was to always wear your mask when you went into the playing area. The objective of the game is to grab the flag from the other team and bring it to your own flag. The flags in our game would be cardboard boxes. After the explanation, they gave us our guns.

At an American paintball range, you must insert a plastic plug into your gun barrel whenever you are not in the playing area. There were no such plugs for us, but each gun had a safety. But as various Moldovans waved their guns around a little too carelessly with their fingers on the triggers, I would have preferred something plugging up the barrel, assuring me that a paintball wasn't going to explode my eyeball out of the socket at any moment. No such assurance came.

We then split into teams, and I was impressed with my Russian when they pointed at me and said, "Красный," and I knew that I was on the red team. This meant I was part of the Red Army. In Moldova. How apropos.

We went downstairs and outside onto the playing field. We toured the field and the buildings it encompassed and prepared ourselves for urban warfare. The lecture we had received about putting on our masks as soon as we went downstairs was not very seriously enforced; one of the employees told me that I could take it off until the game started.

Because of my lack of Russian, I was left out of the mission planning. I was told to stay with Vlad, wherever he went, and that the two of us would be on defense for the first game.

The first game went well, although after we had already secured a perimeter around our flag that included an easy-to-defend building, Vlad told me that we should collapse in toward the flag. Five minutes later, when I wanted to investigate a sound I had heard, I was ambushed by a yellow player who was standing in the exact hallway that I had been protecting earlier. Follow orders, get killed. Ain't that how it always is.

In between games, the locker room talk about who had shot whom was all in Russian, so I felt a little left out. A Russian-speaking Peace Corps volunteer can walk up to any Moldovan, even if the Moldovan is speaking Romanian at the time, and know that he can converse with them in Russian. A Romanian-speaking Peace Corps volunteer like me can never be sure that someone speaking Russian will know Romanian, and my experience has been that they often don't. Thus, I decided that any attempts at locker room talk would be poorly received, so I just drank water and, as we left, proclaimed in English, "Come on, Red Army. Let's go out there and defend the Soviet Motherland." The ones who understood it laughed.

For the second game I stuck with Vlad again, but this time we went on offense. At one point, while standing in a ditch on the side, I killed a guy. Shooting someone instead of being shot was a good mood-improver.

The second game ended, and I decided that if I wanted to get back to my village that evening, I wouldn't be able to play a third game. So I changed my clothes, with the exception of my t-shirt, which was soaked through and for which I had brought no replacement. I had some more ammunition, so I got Lilia to take a few shots. She wouldn't make a good marine.

While talking before we left, I found out Vlad and his wife, Cezara (who has her own organizational development consulting site), had lived in Santa Cruz, CA for two years, only 30 minutes away from where I grew up. They had even met a high school friend of mine because she was dating a Bulgarian guy they know. Small world.

I returned home that evening, my shirt still sweating, after a weekend full of love at a wedding and violence from paintball. From the wedding, I have a videotape. From the paintball match, I have a welt on my upper thigh that, as of Thursday, has not yet gone away. I'll treasure both of my mementos.

A-M-A-R: Amar!

"Chiar si noi am fost la nunta. Am ciocnit pahare pentru tineri. Am dansat cu ei in hora, ca incepe viata lor. Nunta, mare bucurie."
- Zdob si Zdub, "Nunta Extremala"

It was June 6, 2005. The first day of Peace Corps staging in Philadelphia for Moldova Group 16. At the end of our day's sessions, one of the Peace Corps staff members told us that he met his wife in Peace Corps.

"Today," he said, "some of you met your future husband or wife for the first time."

Those two were Leigh Carroll and Shie Benedaret. Throughout pre-service training in Mereseni last summer, they sat together in language classes, went on walks together through the village and visited each other's houses. Saturday, they married at the school in Mereseni in front of over 100 people, including their family and friends from America, Peace Corps volunteers, Peace Corps staff and Moldovans from Mereseni, Orhei and Cimislia.

Because Leigh's old host family is my current one, I was a constant helper in and observer of the furious preparation for the entire week before the wedding. It was full of buying drinks (25 bottles each of champagne and cognac, 150 liters combined of water and soda and 100 liters of wine), meat (25 kilograms total, or nearly a third of a pound of meat for each guest) and all sorts of other ingredients (a major excursion where seven of us spent hours at Chisinau's central market and filled up my host brother's station wagon). After that, Leigh and Shie's host mothers and over a dozen female relatives and family friends spent three days and two nights putting together a wedding feast. We set up 15 tables and put lights outside the school so people could dance in the night air. I've exhausted myself just by typing this paragraph.

Thursday, two days before the wedding, Shie and Leigh's families and friends from America came to Mereseni and we barbecued in the forest. Leigh looks almost exactly like her mother, and after meeting Shie's mom, step-father, two brothers and friend, it's obvious how he became such an energetic, outspoken and caring person.

On Friday, Shie and Leigh's families came to the school, joining all the Moldovans who were already working to prepare for the wedding. Shie's brothers were starting to warm to the idea of Moldovan drinking, and gleefully participated in a practice round with all of us.

Saturday was the big day. My host brother and father hung lights outside the school and near the outhouse with the help of our neighbor. The women put the finishing touches on the food. I fastened down the tableclothes (the whole time joking about how thankless my job was) and shuttled the drinks from the house to the school. The musicians came at 5 p.m. and began setting up.

I served as the wedding videographer, filming the pre-wedding rituals, such as the bride's brother sticking a knife across the door and demanding payment from the groom before allowing the wedding to go on (Shie had to pay $28). They also drank out of a well for good luck, although that good luck could be cancelled by giardasis on their honeymoon.

The guests began arriving at 6:30, which for Moldovans at a 7 p.m. wedding means that they were about three hours early. As each guest came, they were greeted by Shie; Leigh; Gabe, the best man; Bethany, the maid of honor; and shots of wine. Each guest came to the table, congratulated the bride and groom and drank a shot of wine.

At 7:15 everyone gathered outside, where Samantha, a volunteer, gave some beautiful remarks in both English and Romanian. She was interrupted at times by the master of ceremonies, a fat Moldovan man with a full head of thinning hair who spoke almost as loudly as his orange shirt; any time he felt that Samantha had made a good point, he would have his band play the chords of the traditional wedding/birthday/baptism/anything song, Multi Ani Traiasca.

Then Leigh and Shie read their vows to each other; Leigh had to pause a few times to keep from tearing up uncontrollably, while Shie put away his notes 10 seconds into his speech and winged it until there wasn't a dry eye in the crowd, including the Moldovans who didn't understand their English speeches.

Then it was time for the feast, the dancing and the drinking. The band was spectacular, playing a mix of Moldovan and American music on a keyboard, accordion and violin. I got to take a few breaks from filming and talk and dance with my date to the wedding. Dancing the hora outside the school with scores of Moldovans and Americans ranks at the top of a prestigiously high list of fun times I've had dancing in this country; everyone knew the steps, everyone was happy to get out and dance, and everyone was simply overjoyed to see Leigh and Shie married.

The only unsuccessful part of the night was we bachelors' attempts to steal the bride. Moldovan tradition says that I and the other bachelors should have abducted Leigh and then charged Shie for her release. A handful of male volunteers tried to think of the most ingenious ways to steal her, but Shie foiled all of our attempts. My date, Lilia, tried to take Leigh outside to talk to her so that we could nab her, but Shie told her that the two could talk about whatever they wanted in front of him. Shie's very drunk step-brother, Eol, tried to dance with Leigh, but Shie would have none of it and had some unkind words to say about the whole situation. Shie and Leigh even accompanied each other to the bathroom so that no one could steal her. They had all their bases covered. Maybe I shouldn't have been telling them for two months that we would find a way to steal her, because Shie definitely rose to my challenge.

With the exception of the bachelors' failure in our most important job of the night, the wedding was perfect. The band closed up at 1:45 a.m., which is early for a Moldovan wedding but guaranteed that we had tons of energy until the very end. I stayed around the school and had a few more shots of wine with friends and family in order to polish off any pitchers that still needed to be emptied.

This wedding was special, not just because it was the first wedding between two Americans in Moldova, according to the U.S. Embassy. It was special because it was between two of the greatest people I've ever had the honor to call my friends. It was special because even the casual observer could see the love not only between the bride and groom, but between the pair and their guests and between the Americans who love so much about Moldovan culture and people and the Moldovans who reciprocate that love. That's what made this wedding special, and I may never be at a wedding this wonderful ever again.

La multi ani, sanatate, o casa de piatra, multi copii (peste cativa ani) si amar!