Doi Ani de Zile: Adventures in Moldova

Si acum, un om politic

2008-01-02T01:15:00.000+02:00

After much thought, I have decided to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in my home district in California. Please visit the campaign web site and get involved.

Si apoi, ce?

2007-08-15T08:02:00.001+03:00

What's next for me? I invite you all to read my new blog, The Trip: Rediscovering America by Car, as I document my long road trip across America.

La revedere

2007-08-14T07:59:00.000+03:00

Tonight, I'm closing out my blog. Not from Moldova, but from Lincoln, Nebraska.

A lot has happened since my last post: a four-day camp in my village put on by several volunteers, a handful of Moldovans and myself; a spectacular week at the Peace Corps' national English-language summer camp; finishing up my work in the school's computer lab; a week-long crash course for the functionaries in my village's primaria; a trip to Milestii Mici, a wine factory and underground cellar that has won a place in the Guiness Book of World Records for its 55 km of wine storage space; and a visit to Transnistria, the breakaway republic that claims the eastern portion of Moldova. I might return to the blog and fill in these stories when I have the time, but I want to talk about the most important part; saying goodbye.

The first big goodbye was to the cleaning ladies at my school. I invited them to a small masa at the school one night, and served them a simple fare of salami, bread and ketchup. Of course, I also included a lot of champagne and wine. This handful of women clean the halls and most of the school's classrooms, including my own, every day, and they are rarely appreciated, monetarily or otherwise. Each of them makes less than $40 a month, with which they have to support themselves and their families. I gave them a small present as we parted for the night, and exchanged kisses on the cheeks with each of them. One of them, Doichita, a large, boisterous and hilarious woman in her 40s, picked me up off the ground and kissed me on the lips.

I had decided to leave my village a full week before my flight to America, meaning that Saturday would be my last night in the village before leaving Sunday morning. During the day on Saturday, I visited and said goodbye to some of the teachers with whom I was close, and that night we had a big final masa at my house, which included my host family, my host dad's relatives in the village, a set of neighbors with whom I was close, and the school's principal and her family. All told, there were 18 of us at a table with barbecue pork, salads, and a load of other foods that I can't remember but ate a lot of.

The next morning, I ate my last meal with my host family, including Maria and Dumitru, my host parents; Diana, my host sister; Sergiu, my host brother; Olesea, Sergiu's wife; and Gabriel, their one-year-old son. Ever since he was born, I had spoken only English with Gabe. He understood some of what I was saying, but he had never said a word of English back. Then, at the last meal with the family, he pointed to the fruit pattern on the tablecloth and said, "apple". I pumped my fist in the air and declared my mission accomplished.

After breakfast, I finished packing and loaded my things into Sergiu's car; I was going to leave most of my bags at his house and stay there a couple nights during the week. Once the car was packed, the seven of us stood in front of the house and passed around a final glass of wine. I teared up just making toasts.

"I've seen you more in the last two years than I've seen my real parents in the last six," I told Maria and Dumitru. "I remember how I felt when I said goodbye to my family in America two years ago. It feels the same now here."

After two glasses of wine, it was time to really say goodbye. Sergiu drove out the gate, and we walked after him. I kissed Maria and Dumitru goodbye, and I'm not ashamed to say that all three of us were openly weeping. I got in the car, and soaked in every detail of what would be my final drive through the village for a long time.

I said lots of goodbyes to other Moldovans not from my village in the following week, but I don't think I need to document each one of them here. Suffice it to say that there were many people with whom I would have liked to spend more time, but my two years had run out, and it was time to move on.

My flight back to America was scheduled for 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, August 5, and I almost slept through it. I had been out drinking until 2 a.m. with some of the volunteers who had come in 2006 and still had another year of service, and I was sleeping alone in a hotel room. I had set my alarm for 5:15 so that I could wake up, get dressed and walk a mile to the Peace Corps office. There I would meet with Shawn, my friend who was flying home on the same day as me and was going with me to Frankfurt on the first leg of the trip. Our plan was to meet at the office at 6, take showers, and be in a cab to the airport by 6:30. I woke up at 6 when my phone rang. I didn't answer in time, but I saw that I had missed a call from the Peace Corps and realized I was running late. I got dressed, hustled downstairs, and hired a cab to take me to the office. I got there, took a shower, and we got in a cab at 7.

"Hey, 6:30, just like we planned," I said to Shawn.

The flight was uneventful; in fact, Shawn and I both fell asleep almost as soon as we were in the air. Our conversations before and after sleeping centered mostly on the phrase, "We did it."

Our flights to AmericaÑhim to New York, me to AtlantaÑleft from gates that were near one another, so Shawn and I were able to walk around together in the airport, although I had to hustle to make my connection. I took time, however, to notice a drinking fountain.

"Whoa, hold on there, Shawn," I said as we both stopped in our tracks. "I think we've got something here." He laughed as I bent down and used a drinking fountain for the first time in years.

After I finished, we continued walking. "You know, Pete," Shawn said. "When you said, 'I think we've got something here,' there was a girl in front of the water fountain, and she turned around and gave you the dirtiest look." I laughed; obviously, not everyone can share my joy in the simple things.

When we arrived at the final security checkpoint, a Delta representative hurried me through the line because my flight was leaving soon. I said a rushed goodbye to Shawn, and then walked quickly to my gate, where two other passengers and I were running late. One of them was a tall guy with an American flag on the back of his hat, who told the lady at the gate he was coming from Kuwait and responded to everyone with "Sir" or "Ma'am". He and I found out the same bad news at the same time; our flight had been overbooked, and Delta had to put us in first class. We walked down the jet-way with big smiles on our faces, and we briefly introduced ourselves; I was coming back from two years in the Peace Corps in Moldova, and he was coming back from his third eight-month stint in Iraq with the Army's Special Ops.

Minutes later, I was sitting in a seat that I would later find out cost everyone else around me Û5,000. Evidently, another passenger had noticed that something was wrong with the headrest on my chair, but when a mechanic came onboard, I told him he didn't need to delay the flight in order to fix it. "I've been living without running water for the last two years," I said. "I can deal with this."

Soon, I had a gin and tonic, a four-course meal complete with chocolate chip coookies, on-demand audio entertainment (the video portion was broken, which I'm sure I could have complained about and gotten a voucher or something, but I figured I had gotten a lot more than what I'd bargained for) and an electronically-controlled seat that reclined waay back. I thought about how quickly my idea of luxury had changed from a Chisinau restaurant where I spent $15 the night before to sitting in first-class on a trans-Atlantic flight.

When we landed, I started talking with the soldier a little more. "Boy, Uncle Sam sends us to some shit places," I said to him, "but they bring you back in style." He introduced himself as James, and we stuck together as we cleared customs (me without my bags, which I would later find out hadn't transferred in time in Frankfurt), then we headed to the airport T.G.I. Friday's for some beer and burgers.

On a side note, I hadn't noticed in Moldova that the beer bottles there are half a liter, as opposed to the 330 mL bottles in America. When I picked up my first Heineken at the bar in Atlanta, I thought it was some kind of special airport mini-beer.

James and I parted ways after our early dinner, and I made my way to my gate for my flight home to San Jose. I don't remember much about the flight, because I think I slept through most of it. I woke up for the descent, though, and for the final 20 minutes of the flight, I was slapping my thighs and literally bouncing up and down in my seat in anticipation to finally be home.

My parents met me just outside the gate, and we went to the baggage claim area, only to find out that my bags weren't there. No problem. We started to walk toward the car, which my parents told me was parked in a new area because of construction at the airport.

As we walked toward the new parking lot, I saw a taxi stand with about 10 cabs. Cabs are very rare in San Jose, and I expressed my surprise to my parents.

"There are cabs in San Jose? What happened while I was gone?" I joked. Then I saw a white stretch Hummer limo, the ultimate sign of American decadence. "See, that I expect to see here."

"Why?" my mom asked.

"Because it's so completely ridiculous," I said as we walked next to it and the chauffeur.

"This must be Peter," said the chauffeur.

"Yes it is," my mom said.

I have no idea what sound I made at that moment or what look I had on my face, but I'm sure it was pretty entertaining.

Willy, as the chauffeur introduced himself, snapped a Polaroid of me and my parents, and then opened the door for me. Inside were about 20 of my friends and some of their parents. One of my friends had set up the limo months earlier. I sat, sipped champagne and sang "Easy like Sunday Morning" with my family and friends, all the while in a complete state of disbelief as Willy took us all over to my house. People stayed at the house until nearly midnight, and I stayed up past 1 talking to my parents.

After two years in Moldova, I came home flying first class and riding in a limo. It was the most grandiose, shocking and ridiculous way to transition back to America, but how I got back didn't matter.

I was home.

Un alt sat: Partea a doua

2007-06-25T06:58:00.000+03:00

As I woke up on my second day in Rosietici, a small village in Floresti county, I had only two objectives: to see the village's second bridge, which is even less stable than the one I had crossed the day before; and to leave the village in the early afternoon so that I could be back home in Mereseni in the evening. Shawn, the volunteer I was visiting, was more than happy to help me with the first part of my day. No one, it seemed, was eager to help me with the second part.

Even the bus system conspired against my leaving. Normally, there are two buses out of Rosietici that leave on the paved road from the center of the village: one at 7:30 a.m. and the other at 10:15 a.m. If you miss these two buses and still want to leave the village, you have to walk 45 minutes to the highway and hitch a ride from there. Compare this to my village, which is on a major road and from which you can find a ride to the county seat or the capital city almost any time of day.

I slept until about 8 a.m., then prepared for the 10:15 bus. But when I woke up, Shawn's host family told me that there was no 10:15 bus that day because it was Sunday. Actually, I was glad to have a chance to repeat the 45-minute walk I had taken the day before, and I was happy to have the flexibility to leave the village any time I wanted during the day. Shawn and I agreed on a plan; first we would see the second bridge, and then in the early afternoon, we would walk to the highway.

Shawn and his family made it clear that I was welcome to stay a second night, especially because the 9th grade graduation ceremony was that night and I could be Shawn's guest. It sounded interesting, but I had no clothes for the occasion and I wanted to get home.

At 11, Shawn and I went for a walk through his village. We saw all three of the stores in the village, two of which had opened in the past month and had already taken large amounts of business away from the poorly stocked store which had previously enjoyed a monopoly. One night several months ago, the owner of one of the new stores was drunk and asked Shawn if he should add a second story to his building and put in a pool table. Shawn said it was a good idea, so the guy climbed up to the newly constructed roof and, in his inebriated state, tore it down to make way for the pool table. The next day, the guy realized that it was a bad idea, and he had to rebuild the store's roof.

We walked to the edge of the village and continued another 10 minutes through some fields until we got to a different bridge on the other side of the village from the bridge we had crossed the day before. This bridge was equal parts scary and hilarious; scary because of its construction, and hilarious because it's hard to imagine a place in the 21st century that depends on a bridge this poor as its connection to the outside world. The bridge was made from four 15-meter steel cables, two on the bottom to support the foot-planks and two up top to serve as handrails. On the bottom, two-by-fours spanned the cables every three or four meters, and those two-by-fours supported 20 cm-wide beams. Each section of the bridge had only one of these beams, creating what basically amounted to an unstable balance beam with handrails.

Shawn said that he had crossed the bridge plenty of times in the past two years, and that he wanted to see me try it on my own while he took pictures from the bank. I started walking across, more confident than I had been on the other bridge the day before because this time I could use my hands to balance. I had no major problems until I got halfway across and noticed that the next beam I needed to walk on was detached from the supporting two-by-four. Putting my weight on it would probably cause it to bend down a foot and cause me to slip backward. I turned around to look at Shawn.

"This board isn't even connected!" I shouted. "How the hell am I supposed to get any further?"

Shawn laughed. "Oh yeah. That just broke recently. Just walk on the cables." That made sense to me, so I spread my legs a meter wide, putting my left foot on one cable and my right foot on the other, and shuffled along for a few meters until I reached a stable plank.

I finished crossing, then got back on the bridge for a few posed pictures. After I crossed back over to the original side and we started walking back to Shawn's village, he told me that I was probably the third American to ever cross that bridge.

We got back to Shawn's house and I prepared to leave for the main road, but Stela, Shawn's host sister, insisted on us eating lunch before we left. In the middle of lunch, Shawn's brother called from America, so he left the table and Stela and I continued talking.

Stela is 28 and has her own tailoring business in Soroca, but has had to leave multiple times to work in Moscow in order to support herself and her mother. After finishing 11th grade, she went to a vocational school, where she learned all of the necessary skills to become a tailor. She then took correspondence courses at the state university in the same subject, but dropped out before her last year because the family didn't have the money to continue her education and she didn't think she was learning anything new that she hadn't already learned in vocational school. After that, as I understood, was the first time that she left for work in Moscow. It was odd seeing her photos from that time, especially because many of the pictures were with her neighbors who were Vietnamese immigrants. Even though I know Russia has the second-largest immigrant population in the world (only the U.S.'s is larger), I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea of Vietnamese immigrants speaking Russian and living in Moscow.

When Stela returned from Moscow, she started a tailoring and clothing rental business with a partner in the large town of Soroca. The first year, she told me, was good. They were able to make money and she enjoyed the work. The second year, however, the government began taxing her business at a higher rate and created a new law saying that businesses like hers had to also own arable land. Why did a tailoring business need to purchase farmland? Stela said she had no idea. She bought land, but soon the new taxes hurt her business too much, and she had to return to work in Moscow.

Only a stupid and corrupt government would make these kinds of regulations to hurt entrepreneurs, I told her. Stela agreed that it was completely non-sensical, but also told me how she copes.

Any time you don't understand how the government could function so poorly, how the system could have so little sense, she said, "just close your eyes, take a deep breath, and say to yourself, 'I'm in Moldova.' Then it'll all make sense, and you can move on."

Our conversation took place on a Sunday, and on Wednesday Stela would return to Moscow to work again as a shopkeeper. "She hates it there," Shawn told me, "but she does what she has to do."

After Stela and I had talked for a half-hour, Shawn got off the phone and we were ready to go. The weather, however, was now looking inhospitable. Clouds were starting to gather, and while I didn't mind walking a little bit in the rain, I didn't want to force Shawn out into the rain, especially because if it started to rain hard, he would have to walk back from the road to his village in the mud. I said goodbye to Stela, and Shawn and I started walking down the side of the gorge to the river. We stopped several times during the descent as the rain went through short spurts of intensity. Every time we stopped, we looked up the hill and saw Stela waving us back to the house. We crossed the same bridge that we had crossed the day before, but just after we had crossed it, it started raining more heavily. I stopped, looked at Shawn, and laughed.

"It's your call, man," Shawn said.

"Oh, screw it," I said. We turned around, crossed the river again and headed back to the village.

Un alt sat: Partea intii

2007-06-24T20:05:00.000+03:00

Sometimes I think that my life in my village of 2,500 people is small and dull, with few people and nothing to do. I recently found a place in Moldova that makes my village look like Manhattan.

Last week I visited my fellow Peace Corps volunteer Shawn's village of Rosietici, in Floresti county. Shawn and I have gotten along since the day we met, largely because of our sense of humor and because we've both spent considerable amounts of our lives in Boston; I was there for college, while Shawn was born and raised in Southie until he joined the Air Force at 18 and later went to college in Oklahoma. Despite our friendship, I had never visited his village. The opportunity presented itself while we were eating lunch in Chisinau and he invited me. I went, carrying with me only a toothbrush, a hairbrush and a stick of deodorant.

Just getting to Rosietici was a challenge. From Chisinau, we took a rutiera north toward Soroca. After two hours of travel, Shawn told the driver to stop and we got off. We stood on the side of the highway, from which a long road turned off and led to a village. The village at the end of that road was not Rosietici; in order to get to Rosietici, we started walking in the opposite direction, where there were no buildings in sight. Shawn had told me about the long walk to his village, but I was finally going to experience it.

We had been walking down the country road for about 10 minutes, during which time we had seen a single horse-drawn carriage and no cars, when Shawn pointed to the horizon and said, "You see the new church over there?"

I strained my eyes and could barely distinguish a building that rose slightly higher than the others. "Yeah, I see it."

"That's my village," he said.

"It doesn't look that far away," I said. "How long will it take to get there? Maybe another 15 minutes?"

"It looks close, doesn't it?" he said with a smile. "You'll see how long it really takes."

The church, Shawn told me, was the idea of a young man in the village. Several years ago, he had had a dream in which he went to a church located at that exact spot in the village. He took it as a sign from God to build the village's first church, and after years of fundraising and construction, he finally fulfilled his vision; the first ever service had been held a week earlier.

After a few more minutes on the road, Shawn turned to the side and started along a worn footpath through the middle of a field. I had just left the last paved road of my walk. We walked toward the distant image of the church, following the path and gulping water from our bottles under the blasting rays of the sun.

"One time I was walking home from the bus at night, and I lost the path," Shawn said. "I was lost for about a half-hour."

We continued to walk, now crossing some rocky terrain and a well-constructed bridge that would be suitable for cars to cross. I felt safe crossing this bridge, and didn't realize that I had always taken safety on bridges for granted. That would soon change.

We walked along pathways for another 10 minutes, until we came across another village built into the walls of a river gorge. Only several hundred people lived in the village, and many of them had dug their homes out of the steep hills, so in essence they were living in caves.

"Just think about it," Shawn said. "People started living here 400 years ago, and it's pretty much the same as it was back then. Sure, they have electricity and phones now, but not much else has changed."

We reached the river, where kids greeted "Mr. Shawn" while they swam near the bridge. The kids didn't attract my attention, however, as much as the bridge. It stretched about 20 meters across and stood only two meters over the water. It was constructed out of wooden planks about 30 cm wide, placed in sets of two or three planks lengthwise across the river so that you walked along the same pieces of wood for about four meters before moving to the next set of planks. The bridge was held together by metal cables, causing the bridge to dip and sway as you crossed it. There were also cables on the sides of the bridge, conceivably as handrails, but they were so low that I would have lost my balance stooping to grab one.

Shawn led the way across the bridge with confidence, talking to the swimming kids as he walked. I followed more gingerly, laughing nervously and silently wishing that Shawn would slow down so that the bridge wouldn't shake so much. I got halfway over the river, looked down, and saw the water passing under the planks of the swaying bridge as dizziness set in. I stopped, regained my composure, and then continued across the bridge.

As I stepped onto the opposite bank, I laughed and said to Shawn, "I figured I'd do something like that at some point in my Peace Corps service."

"What's funny is that a lot of time, babas (old ladies) go across on their hands and knees so that they won't fall in," Shawn said.

"I thought I was going to fall in, but I got by."

"In the Air Force, we always used to say there are two kinds of people," Shawn said. "There are people who have puked, and there are people who haven't puked yet. It's the same with that bridge; there are people who have fallen in, and there are people who haven't fallen in yet." Shawn finished his military service without ever throwing up, but he still has over a month left to fall in the river.

After crossing the river, we went up the other side of the gorge and, after 45 minutes of walking, finally reached Shawn's village of 500 people. I thought I knew a lot of people in my village, but in a place one-fifth the size of Mereseni, Shawn really does know everyone, and he had stories about every person we passed.

We arrived at Shawn's house and I met his host mom, Emilia, a retired elementary school teacher, and his host sister, Stela, a 28-year-old tailor. Shawn bought some beer from the store and drew some wine from the barrel in the cellar, and we drank as we ate dinner with his host family and two neighbors, one of them also a girl in her 20s. I joked that Shawn, Stela, the neighbor and I should all go the village discoteca, but I pulled out of the plans when they told me that the disco was a 45-minute walk and two villages away.

The six of us stayed up late talking, and when the neighbors left, Shawn and I went to his room and talked more. If we were in my village, I would haven undoubtedly played a movie or something on my computer. Shawn is one of the few volunteers without a computer, though, so we just talked; nothing particularly profound, but living in a village makes you appreciate a long, un-rushed conversation between friends, especially with Shawn's picks of Irish music playing in the background. At about midnight, I went to the guest room and went to sleep, hours away from my own bed, yet feeling at home in a Moldovan village not so different from my own.

Reforma la bacalaureat?

2007-06-09T21:47:00.000+03:00

The year-end baccalaureate exam required for graduation from 12th grade is best known for two things: being too hard and being a hotbed for cheating and bribes. So imagine my surprise on Thursday afternoon when I talked to Irina, a girl from my village who is finishing 12th grade at a school in the county seat, and she told me that the Romanian subject test she had taken earlier in the day was both accessible and very hard for people to copy on.

Cheating on tests, I discovered early in my service, is epidemic in Moldovan schools. I have done my best to crusade against it in my own classroom, but I've always known that English was probably the only class in which students didn't regularly copy off of each other. After talking to Irina, I was hopeful that the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports had finally addressed a major problem in its system, but I didn't want to get my hopes up. On Thursday evening and Friday morning, I talked to my school's 11th graders about the test. (Like in many Moldovan villages, my school only goes to 11th grade, and students who finish 11th grade can take a slightly different version of the baccalaureate and continue to a trade school or a university. Starting next school year, universities will require students to finish 12th grades, meaning that students from my village must go to the county seat for 10th through 12th grades.) The 11th graders told me the same things Irina had told me earlier; the test was easier than they had expected, but there was almost no way to copy.

The bac used to be administered at each school by the school's own teachers. Teachers, wanting their students to succeed, turned a blind eye toward the rampant cheating, and would often even help the students in the middle of the test. The government tried to institute reforms last year, but schools and teachers complained, and the system remained as-is.

This year, however, the baccalaureate is only given in county seats. My students took a six km ride to Hincesti, along with all the other students their age in the county. Students were separated into rooms according to alphabetical order, so classmates with the last names Mititelu and Moscovici were in the same room, but they were surrounded by kids they didn't know, and their classmates with last names Colesnic and Chirita were far, far away. Also the tests were given by two teachers whom the students didn't know, and they were supervised by two observers from the Ministry of Education. This took away two important motivations for cheating; students wanting to help, feeling pressured to help, or expecting help from their classmates, and teachers having a personal stake in the results of the students in the room.

It seems to me that the Moldovan educational system has just taken a huge step forward. My 11th grade students, who know my feelings on this even though I never taught them English and I never gave them an informatica test, gave me some interesting reactions:

Tanea: "I was writing my essay, and this boy near me said something, and I realized he had been copying off me. I didn't know what to do. I covered my paper."

Nadea: "It was nice to worry about just my own test, not someone else's."

Iurie, in response to me saying that the changes were good for the future of Moldova: "Yeah, but they're not too good for me."

Dana: "It's hard to copy on the Romanian test, anyway, because if they see the same essay on two different tests, they'll just mark it zero. We'll see what happens on the math test."

I like Dana's pragmatic answer. Like everything else in this country, we'll just have to wait and see if these reforms are real, and if they'll stick around next year, or even next week. Until then, I'm smiling with cautious optimism.

Vadul lui Voda

2007-06-05T21:28:00.000+03:00

When my plane landed in Moldova two years ago, the last things I expected to do in this country were playing frisbee and drinking beer on a sandy beach, followed by eating pork and beef barbecue at a private camping ground. But that's what seven other volunteers and I did last Sunday at the closest place Moldova has to Martha's Vineyard.

To celebrate the beginning of summer and the end of two years of English teaching, seven of the volunteers I came with (plus the Ukrainian fiancé of one of them) went to Vadul lui Voda, a resort town on the bank of the Nistru River. None of us had ever been there, and we couldn't find a working telephone number to make reservations anywhere, but that didn't stop us from going, based only on the three pieces of advice we had received from another volunteer: take a 130 or 131 rutiera, there's a place with blue cabins named after some kind of flower that costs 70 lei (less than $6) per person, and you don't need to make reservations anywhere. Two years ago I would have wanted more information, but these days that's enough for me to green-light an expedition.

First we stopped by the central market in Chisinau, where we bought several pounds of meat, barbecue skewers, plastic plates, fruits and vegetables. Then we hopped on the rutiera, which took us 20 km away from Chisinau in 40 minutes for the price of 8 lei (try going 20 km anywhere in America for 65 cents). Miraculously, given the meager amount of navigational information, we found the exact camping location that the volunteer had told us about, and we rented two sparsely-decorated cabins with a table and grill between them for 490 lei ($40). After settling in and marinating the meat, we headed to the beach.

The beach at Vadul lui Voda is a small feat of Soviet engineering; tons of sand were dumped decades ago in order to create a beach that's wider than the river it edges up to. On the other side—which, upon checking a map later, I discovered was not actually part of the Transnistrian separatist territory, despite being on the left bank—stood scores of trees in perfect rows, creating a backdrop to the river. The river itself was split in half by buoys; the near side was for swimming and the far side was speedboats and jet-skis. Also on the near side was a large boat that blasted music and announcements in Russian, from which I parsed that they were conducting river tours in x number of minutes and they had пиво, or beer.

We had our own beer, which we had bought from a stand near the beach for 30 lei ($2.50) per two-liter bottle, an exorbitant price by Moldovan standards. We sat on the beach and poured ourselves ice-cold beer, which attracted some sort of small bugs that loved to jump inside our cups. After 15 minutes, a lot of the volunteers went swimming, but I passed, since I had recently cut my foot and didn't want to risk infection. Instead, I sat on the beach, drank my beer, and reveled in seeing hundreds of very attractive Moldovan girls wearing flattering swimsuits made of less material in the back than what would be considered normal in America.

We threw around a Frisbee, and were joined by an eight-year-old boy who spoke no Romanian and would always dive for the disc, covering himself in sand. After a couple hours and a few liters of beer, the wind picked up, creating a small sandstorm and clearing the beach in a matter of minutes. We went back, barbecued, drank more, made a late-night trip back to the beach (I can proudly say that I have peed in the Nistru), and returned to the cabins to get some sleep.

The next morning, we ate more leftover barbecue and then headed back to Chisinau, unanimously agreeing that we wanted to come again sometime before we leave Moldova. There's not much time left, though; as of that Monday morning, I had only 59 days left of Peace Corps service.

Ultimul Sunet

2007-06-02T10:25:00.000+03:00

Thursday was the most emotional day of my life since I left America in June 2005. It was the last bell ceremony at school, the end of my second and final school year in Moldova. I had been asked several days beforehand to make a short speech, but I had no idea how I would react as I read it, and I didn't know how the rest of the day would go.

I woke up at my regular time and got to the school by 8:30 a.m. I went upstairs to the second floor, and as I turned the corner toward my toward my two classrooms, I saw Ecaterina Ivanovna, the Romanian teacher, and Nina Ivanovna, the geography teacher. A wave of emotions hit me, and I knew I needed to hurry to the solitude of my classroom; if I could barely handle seeing two teachers, that didn't bode well for my speech in front of 250 students, more than half of whom have been my students for a year or more.

At 9 a.m., the ceremony started in the shade of the school's front garden. I was busy keeping the 8th graders quiet, which was especially important because the microphone wasn't working and a single noisy student could drown out anyone speaking in front.

After several awards were handed out, Mrs. Lucia, the chemistry teacher, introduced me. During her introduction, several of the 8th graders around me kept saying, "Stay another year, Mr. Peter," and, "You can't go."

I walked to the front and pulled my speech out of my pocket, saying that I was too nervous to remember a speech (which you can read here in Romanian or English). I tried to improvise a thank you that I hadn't written at the beginning of the speech, but I choked up and had to turn my back to the crowd for a few seconds. I got through the speech well, although my voice stuck in my throat numerous times. When I finished, students blitzed me with dozens of flowers. In total, I received at least 40 flowers, enough to fill both a vase and a five-liter bucket when I got them home.

The ceremony continued with presentations from the first graders who finished their first year and from the 9th and 11th graders, both of which are leaving our school. After the ceremony, a few more students gave me flowers, including one of my 8th grade girls who broke down in tears when she started thanking me. Students then went to their homerooms to receive their grades, and I retreated to my English classroom. I opened the door and one of the windows, letting a nice breeze through the room, and I sat on my desk next to the window with my feet on the radiator pipes, looking out over the front garden and thinking about my two years of work. American hip-hop music was blasting in the garden, which may not have been the most conducive to thinking, but was somehow fitting.

A half-hour later, everyone in the school gathered again on the front lawn for Children's Day, which is technically June 1, but we celebrated it a day earlier. There were contests for chalk drawings on the cement in front of the school, poetry readings, essay-writing (for the elementary school kids), singing and dancing. The winners received prizes of candy and boxes of chocolates. After the concert, the boys played more music and the teachers and kids danced. A handful of kids asked me to pose for pictures with them.

Some of my 7th- and 8th-grade boys asked me to come to the pond with them, and I gladly joined them. When we got there, the boys all stripped down to their skivvies and ran in. I didn't swim, but took off my shirt, socks and shoes and sat on the grass near the pond. When boys wanted a break from swimming, they'd come out and talk with me for a while. After an hour, I walked back with a few of the boys, including one who didn't feel the need to wear anything more than a t-shirt and his boxer briefs as he walked back into the village. I went home, ate some lunch, and took a quick nap before returning for the school dance that evening.

After checking whether the boys organizing the dance needed any help, I went over to a nearby bar to grab a beer. I was accompanied to the store by one of my 5th grade students, who was going there to buy gum. Not wanting to buy a beer alone in front of one of my students, I was glad when I saw Vasile, one of the school's groundskeepers. I bought us each a beer and some peanuts and we talked for about 45 minutes. I then went back to the school, where the dance was starting to pick up momentum.

The boys had set up the speakers and sound system outside so that we could have the dance in front of the school. The weather was perfect for dancing, but the outdoor setting made my students and graduates think that it was acceptable to smoke at the dance. I had three ways of dealing with the kids, depending on their age; with the 11th graders and boys who had already graduated in years past, I told them to smoke on the road, not at the school. With my 8th graders who were smoking, I took the cigarettes out of their hands and stomped them out. (One of my 8th graders apologized and told me, in English, "Mr. Peter, I'm only smoking when I'm drunk." The fact that that was an acceptable rationale in his mind tells me there is a fundamental problem with attitudes toward alcohol and tobacco.)There was one other guy, about my age, who was not from the village and kept saying, "Show me the rule that I can't smoke at the school." I stood within two inches of his face, puffed out my chest, and harassed him in both Romanian and English for about three minutes until he put out his cigarette; if he wanted to be a jerk, I wasn't going to let my kids see me cave in to him, and I wasn't going to let him enjoy his smoke.

The dance was scheduled to end at 11:30 p.m., but we teachers were lenient and let the kids play music until midnight, on the one condition that it be Moldovan music so that we could dance the hora. When the dance finally ended, a handful of teachers stayed at the school and talked with Doichita, the security guard. Teachers repeatedly told me, "Don't forget us."

I finally got home at 12:45, happy to go to bed after a long day full of memories.

Ce am spus la Ultimul Sunet (in romana)

2007-06-01T10:44:00.001+03:00

This is the speech that I gave at the last bell ceremony at my school in Mereșeni on May 31, 2007. I'm sure my Romanian isn't perfect, but this is how I said it.

90 de ani în urmă, un scriitor american, Robert Frost, a scris o poezie care se numește "Drumul Neluat". Se începe așa:

Două drumuri s-au separat într-o pădure galbenă,
Și parîndu-mi rău că nu puteam să merg pe ambele
Și să fiu un călător, mult timp am stat.

Doi ani în urmă, eu am stat, gândându-mă la viitor, vădând două drumuri: un drum în America, cu o viață cunoscută și comodă, și un alt drum în Moldova, o țară străină în care nu aș știe limba, nu aș fi alături de familie și prieteni, și aș primi o zecime de salariu. Trebuia să aleg un singur drum. Ați putea să spuneți că eu am luat drumul neasfaltat.

21 de luni în urmă, am stat aici cu voi prima dată în fața școlii. Pentru voi, eu am fost un străin, și pentru mine, voi ați fost mai multe de 250 de fețe necunoscute. Dar incet, incet, am învățat numile tuturor elevilor mei. Voi repede v-ați deprins cu metoda mea de predare, și din cauza ospitalității voastre, după numai câteva luni m-am simțit ca acasă.

În al doilea an, am avut noroc să vă învăț și informatică. Mi-a plăcut să vă văd folosind calculatorul, înțelegînd un instrument care, pentru mulți din voi, a fost ceva nou în viață. Mi-a plăcut tot să vorbim la lecție în limba voastră că să știu mai bine personalitățile voastre. Sunt mulți copii și adolescenți minunați aici în școală, și sunt mulțumit că am putut să vă cunosc.

M-am uitat aseară la câteva poze din anul școlar trecut, și nu mi-a venit încredere cât de mult v-ați schimbat. În pozele mele, Denis Boincean este un baiățel mic și nedisciplinat, dar anul acesta s-a slăbit la față, s-a crescut, și a fost un lider adevărat la lecții de informatica, dar tot rămâne puțin șmecher. Ion Cătană din pozele mele este un elev pe care îl dedeam afară în aproape fiecare zi, dar anul acesta el întotdeaună facea tema pe acasă și leniștia clasa când era gălăgioasă. Când eu am sosit în sat, Tanea Cazanji și Doina Bufteac erau fete liniștite și pasive, dar s-au transformat în timpul de doi ani că să fie două din cele mai active eleve. Mă uit la elevii din clasa a 6a și îmi pare că toți s-au crescut cel puțin trei centimetri.

Acestea sunt numai câteva exemple de schimbările care am văzut în doi ani de zile. Fiecare din voi s-a crescut, s-a maturizat, a avut experiențe și bune și rele, și a învățat multe lucruri noi despre viață.

Când mă gândesc la toate lucrurile care eu am învățat de când am venit aici, mă gândesc la poezia aceea, a lui Robert Frost, despre două drumurile într-o pădure. Frost a terminat poezia cu cuvintele acestea:

Două drumuri s-au separat într-o pădure, și eu--
Eu l-am luat pe acela mai puțin călătorit,
Și asta a contat cel mai mult.

Eu nu am luat drumul mai ușor, dar mă bucur acum pentru că pe drumul acela am sosit în satul acesta și la școala aceasta, care adevărat a devinit a doua casă a mea. Dacă nu aș fi luat drumul mai greu, mai puțin călătorit, nu aș fi ajuns aici niciodată, și niciodată nu aș fi făcut cunoștință cu toți voi.

Peste aproape două luni, m-întorc în America. O să-mi fie dor de voi, și o să vă țin minte întotdeaună. Vreau să vă rog un singur lucru: să nu uitați cuvintele lui Robert Frost. Lumea este foarte mare, și voi o să aveți mai multe drumuri posibile în viață voastră decât parinții și bunicii voștri au acum. Sper că voi întotdeaună veți lua drumul mai puțin călătorit. Eu așa am făcut, și asta a contat cel mai mult.

Vă mulțumesc de nou că m-ați facut mereu că să mă simt acasă, și vă doresc mulți ani de învățămănt, sănătate, bucurie, și succes. Mulțumesc.

Ce am spus la Ultimul Sunet (in engleza)

2007-06-01T10:39:00.000+03:00

This is the speech that I gave at the last bell ceremony at my school in Mereșeni on May 31, 2007.

90 years ago, an American writer, Robert Frost, wrote a poem called "The Road Not Taken". It starts like this:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood...

Two years ago, I stood, thinking of the future, seeing two roads: one road in America, with a familiar and comfortable life, and another road in Moldova, a foreign country in which I wouldn't know the language, wouldn't be near my family and friends, and would receive a tenth of the salary. I had to choose a single road. You could say that I took the road unpaved.

21 months ago, I stood here with you for the first time in front of the school. For you, I was a foreigner, and for me, you were more than 250 new faces. But slowly, slowly, I learned all my students' names. You quickly adjusted to my teaching methods, and because of your hospitality, I felt at home after only a few months.

In the second year, I was lucky enough to also teach you informatica. I enjoyed seeing you using computers and understanding a tool that, for many of you, was something new in life. I also liked that we spoke your language in class, so that I could better know your personalities. There are a lot of wonderful kids and teenagers here at this school, and I'm thankful that I could know you.

Last night I looked at some pictures from the last school year, and I couldn't believe how much you have all changed. In my pictures, Denis Boincean is a little boy without any discipline, but this year his face is thinner, he's taller and he has been a true leader in computer class; but he's still a little bit of a punk. The Ion Cătană in my pictures is a student whom I used to kick out of my class nearly every day, but this year he always did his homework and quieted down the class when it was too noisy. When I arrived in the village, Tanea Cazanji and Doina Bufteac were quiet and passive girls, but they've transformed over the course of two years to be two of the most active students in class. I look at the 6th graders, and I think all of them have grown at least three centimeters.

These are just a few examples of the changes I've seen in two years. Each of you has grown, has matured, has had experiences both good and bad, and has learned many new things about life.

When I think of all the things I've learned since I came here, I think of that poem by Robert Frost about the two roads in a forest. Frost ended his poem with these words:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I didn't take the easier road, but I'm glad now because the road I took lead me to this village and this school, which has truly become a second home for me. If I had not taken the more difficult road, the road less traveled by, I would never have come here, and I would never have met all of you.

In about two months, I'm returning to America. I will miss you, and I will always remember you. I want to ask you to do one single thing: Don't forget the words of Robert Frost. The world is huge, and you will have many more roads open to you than your parents and grandparents had. I hope that you always take the road less traveled. I did, and it has made all the difference.

Thank you again that you always made me feel at home, and I wish you many years of education, health, happiness and success. Thank you.

Daca nu te inteleg pe tine, nici tu nu ma vei intelege pe mine

2007-05-30T20:12:00.000+03:00

Wednesday, a handful of men from the neighborhood, including my host dad, worked to deepen the well near our house. This well serves the entire neighborhood, but had recently dried up. In the evening, with the men done with work for the day, they came to our house for a very late lunch. I joined them, and was both amused and slightly bothered by a man in his 60s, Dima, who kept trying to speak to me in Russian.

"He doesn't know Russian," my host dad and the other men told him repeatedly.

"He understands чут чут," Dima said, using the Russian word for "a little".

The fifth time he tried speaking entire sentences to me in Russian, I stopped him. "I've been living here for two years, learning Romanian," I said. "Let's speak in Romanian. If you keep speaking in Russian, I'm going to start speaking in English, and we're not going to understand each other at all."

Everyone at the table laughed, and Dima switched to Romanian for a few minutes. Then he started speaking to me again in Russian. I switched to English.

"OK, you decided," I said in my native language. "You want to keep speaking Russian? I'm going to speak English. No more Romanian. No more Russian. I'm speaking English now."

The entire table cracked up. Minutes later, Dima apologized. I think he thought I had said something awful about him in English. Or maybe he hadn't thought twice about his language choice, and was instead apologizing for the wine he had spilled on the table. Either way, it gave me a little bit of entertainment for the evening.

Nu mai scriu nici o singura nota

2007-05-30T00:22:00.000+03:00

Monday, 2:30 p.m. I walk into my school's vice-principal's office, hand her the 5th grade class register, and with a smile and over-dramatic timing, declare, "Never again in my life will I write another grade in this country."

It's been over a year since I've written about The Catalog, the pale blue grade book for each class that must contain a detailed listing of every lesson taught in every subject and every grade given to every student. The Catalog, which was mysteriously renamed The Register this year in a change that only I seem to have noticed, must be written in with a particular pen and must be constantly updated with handwritten entries. Failure to constantly update The Catalog, I have discovered, is the fastest way to alienate your coworkers and get everyone at the school ticked off at you.

But it doesn't matter any more. On Monday, I finished writing all of my grades—I needed to write them for about 140 students in two subjects in eight classes for a total of 12 sections to complete. That included pulling some of my failing informatica students out of their classes to complete an assignment so that they'd have a passing grade. There were also several students who were in The Catalog that I didn't even know, but their homeroom teachers begged me to give them a passing grade. I protested for a minute or two with both of the teachers who asked me, but I caved in. After all, what do I care if a kid with a tough situation at home gets a 4 or a 5 in my class?

I could complain more about The Catalog. I could praise the American system, in which teachers provide progress reports to the school, students and parents every six weeks and don't need to detail every lesson that they teach and every grade they give. But what's the point? Instead, I can stay positive, because never again will I have to write another grade in those stupid blue books.

Deschiderea sezonului sportiv

2007-05-30T00:15:00.000+03:00

Even though the 250 lb man who had finished his fourth and final wrestling match was more tired than I, I was dead tired after just watching a day full of soccer, cycling, wrestling and, thanks to me, some frisbee on the side.

Sunday was the opening of the sports season in Mereseni, a day full of different competitions on the village's soccer field. I couldn't go last year, but this year I came with two Canadian tourists, Ziggy and John, and my frisbee.

Ziggy, John and I came from Chisinau in the morning, and I gave them a short walking tour of the village. Ziggy had been to many villages in east Asia, and John was born and raised in a small town in Newfoundland, but this was their first experience in an Eastern European village. They got a good sample right away, as an old lady and her middle-aged daughter called us across the road to serve us wine and candy. It is a Moldovan tradition for a family to mourn the anniversary of a loved one's death by serving wine to anyone they see in the village. I understood the situation and began a conversation with the women and a man who later joined us. My visitors had no idea what was going on, and after seeing me drink my glass of wine in one gulp, assumed that they were about to drink grape juice; needless to say, they were surprised when they tasted something stronger.

After quick stops at the cemetery, culture house, pasture, my house and the school, the three of us went to the field with my frisbee in hand. We were there early for the festivities, but there were a couple dozen kids hanging around the field, so we started a game of ultimate frisbee. I had taught my English students how to play the week earlier, so they knew not only how to play, but also how to say, "Here!" "Nice defense!" and "The score is 3-1," in English, among other phrases. Knowing that the soccer game wasn't scheduled to start until 2 p.m. and that that meant it wouldn't actually start until 2:45, the three of us left the frisbee with my students and went back to the house to have some lunch.

After lunch, we returned to the field to watch the soccer game, which had just started. There was a lightly contested match between Mereseni and Sarata Mereseni, the small Russian and Ukrainian village that shares a mayor with Mereseni. But the real match was between the adults in the village and the boys in the village under 18 years old. It was well played, and I'm not sure what the final score was because we were drawn away multiple times to throw the frisbee in a circle of kids.

The 90-degree weather had us constantly going to the nearby store to purchase, at various times, water, lime soda, ice cream and beer. With the heat not showing any sign of stopping, the soccer game ended, and there was a brief cycling race among the kids. Then the crowd of hundreds gathered around some gymnastics mats that had been laid together on the grass. It was time for wrestling.

Moldovan wrestling, "trinta," is a simple form of wrestling based solely on takedowns. The purpose is to put your opponent on his back as a direct result of the takedown; if he lands on his stomach, the ref blows his whistle and both wrestlers return to standing positions without any points being awarded. The two most common ways to achieve this are with a fancy but easy to escape head-and-arm throw or by gaining position on your opponent's side and sweeping his leg. Throws are made easier because both competitors wear a belt. In my opinion, it's a lesser form of wrestling than the folk-style and freestyle wrestling that is prevalent in U.S. high schools and colleges because there are so few possible successful moves, but nevertheless it's exciting.

The competition was divided into three age divisions, the first of which featured boys up to 14 years old fighting to win a rooster. At this age level, the wrestling was simplistic and focused mostly on head-and-arms. The winner, Mihai Brinzeanu, was clearly more experienced and used a larger variety of moves to take down his opponents.

The second division was for boys up to 18 years old, who wrestled for a lamb. There were more close matches, and many of the boys were using strategies they had adapted from the judo training that they receive in Hincesti. Denis Mititelu, a tall, slender and muscular kid, used excellent positioning and fast hands to win, and he put the sheep on his shoulders and paraded it around the mats.

Then it was time for the adults, who wrestled for a ram. I had thought of entering in the competition, but was happy that none of my students had mentioned it to me. Then, as men were signing up the competition, some acquaintances of mine in their 20s asked me if I was going to wrestle. I demurred a couple times, but then said, "Okay, I'll try." I told the mayor to sign me up, but he refused to put me on the list. Then I told him to sign up Bill Clinton. He still refused. I'm not sure what his reasons were, but I'm sure he wasn't afraid of me winning it all. After five minutes, the other men and I stopped asking him.

All in all, 26 men from the village entered the tournament. Most of the matches were pretty good, with much better defense than the boys' matches. Several pairs of shorts were ripped during fights, which added a lot of amusement for the crowd and a little bit of skin for the girls. In the end, a boy remained to fight a man: Denis Mititelu, the boy who had won the lamb, was matched against Victor Cucereanu, a 250 lb man in his mid-30s who, although shorter and with blond hair, had a similar muscular build to Zangief from Street Fighter II.

For the first few minutes, neither fighter had a clear advantage. The boy was more active and aggressive, but the man was immovable and was directing movement around the mat with his hand on the back of the boy's neck. Middle-aged men exclaimed to their friends, "Uite la patanul acela." "Look at that kid." After five minutes, the timekeeper yelled, "Time!" but instead of going to a contrived overtime, several men in the crowd said, "Let them wrestle." The match continued.

Minutes passed. Denis continued his assault, sometimes getting a leg and knocking his opponent over, but Victor always able to recover to his belly. Victor, although flagging from the heat and a lack of conditioning, continued to show flashes of power, reminding the crowd and his opponent that he was twice as old and nearly twice as large as the juvenile challenger. Whereas Denis rarely came close to putting Victor on his back with his takedowns, Victor used his weight and power to his advantage, and Denis barely escaped several times by bellying out.

As the sun beat down and hundreds of villagers looked on, the man and the boy continued their battle. After one burst of activity, Victor grabbed a water bottle out of the crowd and doused his face. After another, Denis sprung up from the mat and stood ready to fight. Victor stumbled up and smiled at him in disbelief. The crowd laughed; momentum was on the boy's side.

A minute later, Denis took Victor down to his stomach again. Denis stood up quickly. Victor rose up wearily, looked at the referee and waved his hands in front of him; no more.

The crowd erupted. The boy jumped up and down, pumping his fist in the air before collapsing in the center of the mat. His friend came to give him a high five and a bottle of water. After 30 seconds, Denis stood up, grabbed the rope that was wrapped around his new ram's horns, and led it on a short trip around the mat before passing it to his father. Later, as according to tradition, he would butcher the ram and hold a feast for the winning soccer team.

After the final match, the crowd lingered around the field. The evening air had cooled slightly, and everyone continued to socialize and revel in the uncharacteristically summer-like day. The day's events, especially the final, had electrified us all, and no one was eager to go home.

Ziua mea, un seminar si o frizerita

2007-05-21T22:45:00.001+03:00

On May 12th, I celebrated my 24th birthday. Unlike last year, I didn't want to do a big feast in my village with my teachers and my host family, nor did I want to gather a bunch of volunteers to invade a Chisinau restaurant like I did a week after my birthday last year. Instead, I spent my birthday weekend in Cahul, a major southern city, with a handful of other volunteers and over a dozen English-speaking students from the local university.

Sam Parkes, a volunteer in Cahul University's English department, is helping her colleagues and students start the first university alumni association in Moldova, and she had asked me to conduct a seminar about how to create an alumni magazine. So on Friday afternoon, I flagged down the Cahul bus that passes through my village and started the trip.

At first, I had to stand on the bus. This is normal if you pick up a bus in a village; you just wait until other people get off at their villages, and then you can have a seat. An aisle seat freed up once we got to the next village, and I sat down next to an attractive girl in her early 20s.

The girl was playing with her cell phone, and I had a book to read, so I didn't rush a conversation. After all, female volunteers often complain to me about men hitting on them on public transport, so I didn't want to be "that guy" for some girl who was just trying to visit her parents over the weekend. Plus we would be sitting next to one another for another two hours, so I could take my time. Instead, I took a few nonchalant glances out the window, supposedly looking past her but making full use of my peripheral vision.

After about an hour of sitting next to one another, the girl started dozing off. Comfort is hard to come by while sleeping on a bus, and her head was bouncing with every bump in the road. Several times, her head would rest on my shoulder for a few seconds, but then she would raise it back up in semi-conscious self-consciousness. The third time it happened, I said, "If it's more comfortable, you can use my shoulder."

"Thanks," she said, and put her head back without hesitation and slept for another half-hour. Warm fuzzy feelings filled my heart, and I knew we had gotten off to a good start.

When she woke up just outside the Cahul city limits, we chatted about Moldova and America. She told me she was a hairdresser in Chisinau who was originally from Cahul, and she was coming home for the weekend to visit her family. The bus stopped in the center, and even though I could have gotten to Sam's house faster by staying on the bus until the last stop, I got off and walked with her a little more.

As we parted ways a few minutes later, we got each other's names; Oxana for her, Petru for me. She said she'd like to talk to me more this weekend, so I gave her my phone number and told her to call me. I had two reasons for giving my number instead of taking hers. First, as I said earlier, I didn't want to be seen as a creep trying to pick her up on the bus. Second, Moldovan women in general are much more passive than American women, so asking her to call me was a test.

I continued walking to Sam's house, where I finished planning the seminar and she baked some cupcakes and cookies for the next day. Sam shared my excitement about the possibility of Oxana calling, and we were both thrilled when a missed call showed up on my phone. I called the number back, ready to invite her to my birthday dinner the next night. Instead, I got Dumitru Minzarari, a Moldovan whose English-language article I have been proofreading. Dumitru's a great guy and all, but I would have much rather gotten a call from a cute girl in her early 20s than a male Columbia-educated former Moldovan military officer. Sam and I continued to hope for a call from Oxana, but didn't receive one that night. No problem; that night I slept in a double bed for the first time since I was home for Christmas, so I was content enough.

The next day, the seminar went well. The students and professors that I met were all really good English speakers, and I repeatedly praised them during the six-hour seminar for the fact that they were working to improve the situation at their university and in their country.

Four more volunteers came to Cahul during the day, and in the evening we went out for my birthday dinner, a relaxed affair at a Moldovan restaurant, eating mamaliga and barbecue and washing it down with a beer or two. When we returned to Sam's house, we continued with a little more beer; Scott, Sam's boyfriend and my cohort in running the basketball league, got tipsy enough with me to start talking about classic cable advertisements. Scott would randomly shout, "Look! It's Eagle Man!" and we sang, "588-2300, Empire!" together in both English and Romanian. I soloed a New England classic, singing, "1-800-54-GIANT," for Giant Glass. Oxana still didn't call, which at that point in the evening was probably a good thing.

The next day, I took the bus back up north with Meg, another English teacher from my group. The trip included several highlights. One was a frumpy middle-aged woman standing in the aisle who would reach inside her skirt and then rest her guilty hand dangerously close to Meg's head. Another highlight was when a woman got on the bus with her two-year-old grandson, who was gripping her leg and crying as she tried to make her way down the aisle; a man loudly called out, "Do you see what happens when you have a child that you don't want?" The final highlight was when a woman started complaining to the driver from her seat that he was stopping too often to pick up passengers. Rather than respond, the driver simply turned up the music in the bus, which caused the woman to start screaming and the rest of us to start laughing.

I much preferred the casual approach to my birthday this year, and so far I've had a good time being 24. My only regret is giving Oxana my number instead of getting hers. It's been more than a week, and she hasn't called. Sure, I can say that I was testing her and that she failed the test. But honestly, if a cute girl puts her head on your shoulder, that's no time to test her. It's the last mistake I'll ever make as a 23 year old.

Pravda?

2007-04-02T23:13:00.000+03:00

I don't have time to even start picking this article apart.

How about just a couple questions:

Would the good Doctor Akleh care to provide a single source for his article?

Who the hell is Dr. Elias Akleh? I Googled to find out, and you can see the other things he's written.

Why does he "use" so many "quotation marks" in his writing?

Why would a news service like Moldova.org print this along with other straight news articles? It should be clearly labeled as an opinion article.

Nothing like a little bit of anti-American disinformation to help me go to sleep a little easier tonight.

Inseamna ca lectiile de informatica sunt un succes

2007-03-27T00:27:00.000+03:00

One of the homework questions for my seventh grade computer students about Microsoft Word was, "What is the purpose of headers and footers? What information can these things contain?" One girl responded perfectly to the first part, and then got creative in the second part of her response:

"These objects can contain: important information, scholastic information, information for teachers, information for students and lastly, secret information that only the principal should know."

The answer is too entertaining to be marked wrong.

Dor de anii trecuti

2007-03-26T22:06:00.000+03:00

After class today, I noticed nearly a dozen men, of whom I know several and who are major figures in the village, standing around on the first floor of the school. I said hello and then continued upstairs. On the way to the computer lab, I saw Raisa, one of the cleaning ladies. I struck up a conversation:

"Why are practically all the men in Mereseni at the school right now?" I said, exaggerating.

"It's a Communist party meeting," Raisa said. "They want the Communists in power."

This was the first time I had heard of a local Communist party in the village, but it didn't surprise me. Before I could respond, Raisa summed up the political thinking of many Moldovan villagers, rooted in nostalgia for the times when food was cheap and salaries came on time:

"I would be in favor of the Communists," she said, "if I thought that they could make things the way they were back then."

Rusia sub conducerea lui Putin

2007-03-21T22:37:00.000+02:00

This is an interesting article about Russia under Putin, published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute. As a volunteer in a former Soviet country, it's easy for me to be pessimistic about Russia's influence in the region and to want to smash my head against a wall when I see Russia's version of political maneuvering. This article challenged some of my assumptions about the country, although I still have a long list of things that I don't like about it. It's a good read for everyone.

Apasati pe Control pentru a impusca

2007-03-20T22:05:00.000+02:00

Every Friday evening for the past month, I've time-travelled back to 9th grade. Back then, my friends and I would meet at my house, where my dad had installed a 16-port 10/100 Base-T ethernet hub and had wired nearly every room in the house with network ports. We would set ourselves up in different rooms and play Quake, Quake II and Myth: The Fallen Lords for hours and hours. The hallways were filled with the sounds of shotgun blasts, grenade explosions and shouts of, "How ya like dem apples!?"

Now, I'm reliving those online playing days in my school's computer lab. In February, several students asked me to open the computer room for games in the evening. It sounded like something I would enjoy doing and something that could easily raise money for improving the school's computer equipment in a few basic ways. After getting approval from the school principal, I began running game nights every Friday from 4 to 6 p.m.

Every week since then, over a dozen boys have come to play games on these aging but still fun computers. They pay two lei per hour, and with eight computers available, we are able to raise 32 lei (about $2.50) per week. When I started in February, I only had Doom II, Sim City, Civilization II, Quake II and Monster Truck Madness on the computers. We also had no network on which to play the games, because the power adaptor for the ethernet hub had been either lost or stolen.

Two weeks ago, two major things happened; we raised enough money to buy a power adaptor for the hub, and I received a shipment from my dad full of memory chips and some of the best games from the mid- and late-90s, including Warcraft II, Quake and Starcraft. I installed the memory, upgrading each computer from 16 or 32 MB of RAM to 192, their maximum capacity. A memory upgrade like this would have cost thousands of dollars when the computers were new in 1997, but it cost a total of about $40 for all eight computers when my dad bought the chips on eBay earlier this year. I then installed the new games, plugged in the ethernet hub, and let the games begin.

My first test drive of network gaming (the nerds who read this can get nostalgic; it was over an IPX network) was playing Quake with three 8th-grade girls who had been typing up their English papers after class and another 6th-grade girl who didn't have anything to do after school. My old instincts came back, and I soundly defeated a handful of newbie girls. It was not the most challenging match-up I've ever had. I also ran some tests with Starcraft and Monster Truck Madness before the big Friday night showdown.

By Friday night, word had spread that we had a functioning network in the lab. Turnout was higher than usual, and all the boys wanted to play on the network. I watched them scramble around for two hours, and then announced that I would keep the lab open for extra time only if I got to play Quake with them.

I joined their game, the rules of which said that the first player to 10 kills was the winner. I beat three of my 7th-grade students in four straight games, although I was nearly beaten once by Ion, a boy who had very good mastery of the controls for a first-time player. After an extra half-hour of games, I closed the room and sent the boys home.

This is the kind of small project that works in Moldova, for two reasons:

First, it's not dependent on creating new capital. The computers were already there, and with less than $100 of financial help from myself and my father (I also bought CD-ROM drives and new batteries for each computer in December), we have greatly added to the value of the school's computer lab without needing to write big grants. Now that some basic items have been installed, game nights at the lab can generate over $2 a week, which can pay for the school's internet fees or other technology-related expenses, such as filling up the printer cartridge.

Second, the idea of a game night was proposed by Moldovans, and I can pass it on to Moldovans very easily so that they can run it when I'm gone. It's these small successes, the successes that are sustainable, that I think I'm going to be happiest about when I leave in five months. That, and I'll be happier after the virtual therapy of shooting my students with a rocket launcher.

Ce facem cu elevii buni?

2007-03-14T22:53:00.000+02:00

The widely accepted theory in American schools is that students who act out are doing it largely for the attention that they think notoriety will bring them. That's why in American schools, students with failing grades or poor behavior are dealt with on a personal level and are rarely rewarded with attention in front of the entire class. On the other hand, students in America who behave well and receive good grades are praised and encouraged by everything from stickers in elementary school to citizenship awards in middle school to trophies in high school. This system isn't perfect, but it is relatively successful based on one principal: students must understand that misbehaving will isolate them from their peers, but demonstrating excellent behavior and doing well academically will earn them praise in front of their classmates.

Contrast that with what is practiced at my school and, based on conversations I've had, most others in Moldova. At every Monday's school assembly, the class that served as hall monitors for the previous week presents its behavior summary in front of the entire school. The student representative, in either 8th, 9th or 11th grade, names a handful of students who misbehaved in the hall during the week. Those students are forced to step forward and, so the theory goes, face the judgment and condemnation of their teachers and peers.

If we were still in the politically charged atmosphere of Soviet Union, being branded as a problem child in school would taint a student's entire life. A student would be so ashamed of not being a good Pioneer that he would quickly conform to the system. The problem is that the Soviet Union ended over 15 years ago. At my school, the same handful of boys are pulled to the front of the assembly every week, and they're often smiling. The teachers yell at them for misbehaving, and the boys either deny that they did anything wrong or come back with a quip that makes the entire student body laugh. One of the more vociferous teachers will then attempt to belittle the misbehaving student, but the comment usually comes across as a flustered raising of the white flag, and all of the students laugh even more. I have seen this over and over, and I have concluded that this system is fundamentally broken. The misbehaving boys are being rewarded with attention, and they don't seem to mind that it's negative.

Sometimes my school gets it right. A month ago, the principal picked several students out of the assembly to show how students should dress for school, with a collared shirt and ironed pants or a skirt. The students up front felt that they were being rewarded for doing something right (even if it was for something as materialistic as wearing the proper clothes), and the next day, the majority of students came to school better dressed than they had the previous day.

In my own classroom, I've tried to emphasize rewards over punishments. My attempt in September and October to give students detention didn't work because I didn't have time to enforce it after school (instead, I keep the computer lab open for kids to work in, which I think is far more useful than detention in the long run). So since my punishments lack teeth, I've relied on rewards to coax students away from the Dark Side.

Every month, I give an award for the student of the month in each of my six English classes, choosing students who impressed me during the previous month through a combination of grades, effort, attendance or the respect that they showed their classmates. I take their pictures and post them on the wall, and they can choose a prize from the prize table, which offers everything from Fruit Roll-Ups to Swiss Miss hot chocolate to lanyard bracelets to their own personalized mix CD of English-language music (by far the most popular choice). I always say what the student did to impress me, and then I ask three other students to tell me what the student of the month did to earn the award.

In my seventh and eighth grade classes, the good students take their award in stride. The medium-level students who don't normally receive awards but are singled out for their effort that month stand up and pick their prize with a proud smile. My fifth and sixth graders, on the other hand, get excited when the month is coming to an end, and I can usually milk a week of good behavior out of those classes at the end of the month by saying, "I still haven't picked the student of the month for this month. Anyone can still win, and I'm watching extra carefully trying to decide who it will be." Almost universally, a medium-level student who wins student of the month has an even stronger month after winning.

I've also had success with my "Race to 50," a system of incentives that gives classes points for perfect homework participation, perfect attendance and respect. Classes can also lose points if three or more students are late for class or don't do their homework, or if the class doesn't quiet down when I start counting to three. When a class reaches 50 points, they win a party during class time, complete with card games, English-language music, soda, cookies and candy. (The fifth and sixth grades had their first parties today, at 8:30 and 9:15 a.m. I almost never use caffeine, so drinking soda and eating candy for an hour and a half in the morning nearly killed me.) Classes like to compare themselves to one another to see which are the best-behaved, and they love the party. They also force the boys who normally would cut class to come, just so they can get the extra point for perfect attendance, and they get indignant toward students who don't come to class on time or don't do their homework.

The American system is not perfect, and I will never defend it as being perfect. I've never heard of a gun being fired in a Moldovan school, and there have only been one or two serious fights at my school in the past year and a half, compared to America, where both of these things are frighteningly common. But the Moldovan system needs to emphasize the good qualities in its exemplary students instead of making a circus atmosphere every Monday and showering attention on a handful of punks.

Last week, my school's ninth-grade homeroom teacher announced to the faculty that she would be holding a parent-teacher meeting later that week. "So if you have any problems that you need to tell the parents about, come to the meeting," she said.

"Well, can we come and say anything good?" I said with a smile.

No one deemed my question worthy of a response.

Un "chinez"

2007-02-28T22:48:00.000+02:00

As a white guy who wears boots, pants, a coat and a hat that all conform to the Moldovan norm, I get none of the strange looks that some other Peace Corps volunteers get when they walk around. That's why I was shocked, but not surprised, by what happened when Scott, a Peace Corps volunteer who was born in America to Korean immigrant parents, visited my school last week.

Because my students had been studying journalism, I had invited Scott to be interviewed by some of my top eighth-grade students for a profile they were writing for our one-issue English newspaper. I only had two classes that day, so I met him at the school in the late morning. I knew that for just about every student at the school, Scott would be the first Asian they had ever seen; still, I wasn't prepared for their reaction.

The bell rang, and the students flooded into the hall for their 10-minute break. My sixth-grade students came into the classroom to drop off their backpacks, and they stopped dead in their tracks when they saw Scott standing next to my desk. Girls stood 10 feet away and giggled. Boys stood in the doorway and stared. I described the scene to Scott as he had his back turned.

"It's okay," he said. "I'm used to it. It happens everywhere I go. I don't mind when kids do it, because they've never seen anyone like me. It just bothers me when adults act the same way." On the plus side, none of the students pulled their eyes back to slits, which is an inexplicably rude and offensive gesture that seems to be obligatory whenever a Moldovan describes an Asian.

At the beginning of class with my sixth grade, I allowed my students to ask Scott questions. They stuck to cookie-cutter questions, such as, "How old are you?" and "Who is your best friend?" After answering a handful of them, Scott sat in the back of the class and observed.

After that lesson, I had a free period. I took Scott next door to see the computer lab, where we discussed computer games from the late '90s, a subject in which Scott is well-versed—some Asian stereotypes have truth behind them.

Next was my 8b class, which asked Scott questions for about 15 minutes. The questions were wide-ranging, from "Do you smoke?" and "Do you like the Chicago Bears?" to "What are your parents' names?" and "What is Shao Lin?" Questions about Shao Lin and whether Scott spoke Chinese were based on stereotypes, but Scott was happy to deflect them, and in some ways affirm them, since he speaks some Korean and did a small amount of martial arts as a child. The kids came away learning something new about a kind of person they had only seen before in action movies.

Then came my 8a class, specifically the group of girls who were ready to interview Scott. They talked to him for the full 45 minutes of class time, and then continued the discussion for a few more minutes. Their questions were generic enough to ask any American working in Moldova, since I had told them only that they would be interviewing a Peace Corps volunteer. During the interview, I threw in a couple questions about what it was like looking different in Moldova, and I think Scott's answers made a small effect on the girls. It surprised them, for example, that Scott was stopped by Moldovan police 13 times in 2006, including once when he was hauled off and interrogated (thankfully, he's now on a three-month streak free of harassment).

I saw Scott off, feeling that I had exposed my students to something new, and hoping that meeting someone with Asian heritage who didn't know karate or how to speak Chinese had challenged some of their assumptions.

The next day, one of my sixth-grade girls bounded into my classroom and asked, "Mr. Peter, is the Chinese man going to be here today, too?"

"Did he say he was Chinese?" I asked. "No, he said he was American."

The girl merely shrugged and laughed. "I don't know. He looked Chinese."

Perhaps my expectations were too high.

Folclor

2007-02-21T19:02:00.000+02:00

I often have dreams in which I have to go onstage, not knowing the plot of a play or the words of any of its songs. In my dreams, I'm never that worried about not knowing what I'm doing; I just go up and do my best.

During today's school play about Moldovan traditions, my dream of unpreparedness became real, and I totally winged it.

The play, as I had gathered from attending only one rehearsal, centered on a husband and wife, played by two 9th-grade students, as they hosted a party for dozens of friends, who sat in a circle, knitted, told jokes and sang songs, "just like in the old days". My part was to sit on a stool close to the hosts, have a short, unscripted dialogue with the wife, and then lead that dialogue into a song that I would sing solo with accordion and flute accompaniment. Later, I would dance the hora with everyone else in the final number.

The song was the least of my worries. I had sung "Buna Seara, Mandro, Buna" many times before, even in the exact same assembly hall that I would sing it in today. But other than the three minutes in which I would sing my song, what else was I going to do on stage? I asked my school's principal, Mrs. Maria, who was also the stage director for the play, this exact question less than one hour before the performance. It didn't seem to bother her that in the 20 minutes between my entrance at the beginning of the play and the time when I sang my song, I had nothing to do and didn't know any of the words to any of the songs the kids were singing. If it didn't bother her, it didn't bother me.

In the fourth minute of the play, I made my entrance, Mrs. Maria feeding me my line two seconds before I needed to say it: "Will you welcome me, too?" I sat down next to the hosts, certain that even though I was sitting on a low stool, I was still blocking the audience's line of sight to several of the 7th, 8th, and 9th-grade girls who were sitting on a table behind me.

Each of the 25 girls in the circle—compared with four boys—was holding some sort of knitting work or another item that you can find in a Moldovan home economics classroom. The kids traded scripted jokes, stories, riddles and tongue-twisters, and joined together several times to sing songs. Even though all of my theatrical experience was in school, choir and church productions and ended before I entered high school, I knew what I was supposed to do in this situation: realize that anyone could be looking at me at any given time, always turn toward whoever was speaking, and mouth fake words to any song that the kids sang so that it wasn't obvious that I didn't know the words. I did that much well.

Then it came time for my big scene. Diana, the 9th-grade host, stood and asked me several questions:

"Mr. Peter [even though everything else was in Romanian, she still said, 'Mr. Peter'], in the time that you've lived here, what traditions have you liked?"

"I've enjoyed all the food in Moldova, and I like how you sing and dance."

"Have you learned any of our traditions?"

"Well, I've learned how to dance in the Moldovan style, and also how to sing Moldovan songs."

"Could you sing us one this evening?

"No problem."

I stood up, the accordion started, and I began to sing.

It was not my best performance of the song, because I have three very memorable performances of it under my belt: once at the Peace Corps Swearing-In ceremony with the other guys from my summer training village in my first three months of living in Moldova; another at last year's school alumni dinner, where we were all a little liquored up; and last summer, when I was vacationing in Romania with my sister and a friend and surprised them one night by performing it with the musicians at a restaurant in Brasov.

It wasn't my best performance, but it was the one during which I thought the most. In the song, the singer says goodbye to his love as they see each other for the last time before he joins the army for two years. When I learned the song at the beginning of my two years of service, the lyrics hit me personally, as I had just left America and for two years would be away from the people and country that I love. But as I faced an audience full of students, over 150 of which I teach at least one subject and sang the words, "I leave you with goodwill, because I'm leaving you today," I nearly choked up as I realized that the tables had turned. Mereseni was no longer my two-year assignment; it was the home that I would be leaving in less than six months. I settled myself, sang the final two verses, and received applause as I returned to my seat on stage.

The kids continued the play with other songs, me mouthing the words the whole time. After my solo, however, Mrs. Maria seemed to have noticed that I didn't have anything to do. She told one of my 7th graders who was sitting behind me to give me her ball of yarn. For the rest of the performance, I held the yarn that Vica was knitting with, slowly un-spooling it so she would have enough to work with; whenever I didn't feed her the yarn fast enough, she would tug on the yarn to get my attention, and I would continue giving her material to work with.

Then the final dance came. The older students left the stage to dance in front of it, leaving the younger students to dance in their own circle on stage. Since I am much closer in height to my 7th, 8th and 9th graders, I assumed I would dance with them. Mrs. Maria had a different idea; she and I would stay on the stage and be partners in a circle with the younger students. As we organized ourselves into pairs, Nadia, one of my 5th graders, came up to Mrs. Maria and said that she didn't have a partner.

"Then you'll just dance alone," Mrs. Maria said.

"Or I can dance with her," I said, resigning my principal to be a wallflower.

"Okay, good," Mrs. Maria said. I joined hands with Nadia on my right side and another student on my left, and the music started.

Nadia and I danced well together, even though her head barely came up to the same level as my chest. She also kept coughing a very wet cough every 10 seconds or so, and I made a mental note to wash my hands extra-thoroughly before I ate lunch.

The performance ended, and I had done it; I had participated in a Moldovan village school play, by no means a goal which I had set out for myself two years ago. It was not a crowning achievement of my time here, but it was fun. Most importantly, I realized today, more than I ever had realized before, that in a short amount of time, I'm going to miss this place.

Ajutor!

2007-02-13T20:13:00.000+02:00

We still need thousands of dollars to help fund the Moldovan Village Basketball league.

You can help here.

Razboiul Rece nu s-a terminat

2007-02-11T13:23:00.000+02:00

The Cold War never ended. Just ask Vladimir Putin.

Putin has a couple valid points, especially regarding the illegitimacy of the Iraq war. To counter, though, here's John McCain, quoted in the New York Times:

“Will Russia’s autocratic turn become more pronounced, its foreign policy more opposed to the principles of the Western democracies and its energy policy used as a tool of intimidation?” he asked. “Moscow must understand that it cannot enjoy a genuine partnership with the West so long as its actions, at home and abroad, conflict fundamentally with the core values of the Euro-Atlantic democracies.”

But what really bothered me about the article, especially considering the quality of the Times, is this paragraph:

The United Nations is weighing a proposal that would put Kosovo on the path to independence from Serbia, which Russia opposes because it fears that such a move could upset its own turbulent relations with ethnic groups in the Caucasus. Russia has crushed one separatist-minded people within its own borders, in Chechnya, but supports two breakaway regions in Georgia: Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

Excuse me, but Russia supports a third breakaway region, and it's in Moldova. Why does the Transnistria problem continue to get absolutely no acknowledgement in the Western media?

Emigratie

2007-02-07T23:40:00.000+02:00

This article from Edward Lucas describes the emigration situation well in all of Eastern Europe, not just in Moldova.

Notice that of all the Eastern European countries, Moldova creates the highest amount of its GDP through remittances; in total, over a quarter of the country's GDP is based on workers sending money from abroad.

Also, with Romania's entrance into the EU, Moldova faces another problem; Moldovans requesting Romanian citizenship, mostly in order to give them even easier access to the West's job markets.