Un alt sat: Partea a doua

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

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.

Cultura moldovaneasca, si buna, si rea

I have noticed two major cultural presences in Moldova this month, and sadly, the bad one is more popular.

The bad one is Cleopatra Stratan, the three-year-old daughter of pop singer Pavel Stratan. Her song, which has the exact same backing track has her father's song, plays on Moldovan radio all day. This wouldn't be a problem if my host family didn't constantly play Moldovan pop radio. Whenever the song comes on, I have to leave the room and listen to something completely opposite, like Atari Teenage Riot. Cleopatra is headlining her own concert Sunday, with her father as the "special guest". Now there is definitely a time and a place for cute little kids singing, namely public television before 11 a.m. But for a three-year-old girl to be this popular is beyond my understanding.

My perception of Moldovan culture has been revived, however, by The Matrix dubbed in Moldovan. No, not Romanian. No, not Russian. Dubbed in Moldovan, a mix of Romanian and Russian words and phrases with the most vulgar words from both languages mixed in at every other line. The makers of the Moldovan Matrix dubbed all the lines in corny voices and replaced parts of the movie's original soundtrack with Russian dance music. They also changed a healthy amount of the plot; The Matrix is how Moldovans picture themselves in 2003, a time when Moldova occupied half the territory of Europe, and machines enslaved Moldovans because they realized that a drunk Moldovan was an excellent source of energy. Moldovans trapped in the Matrix have never tasted real wine. Some of my favorite lines from the movie:

When Morpheus talks to Neo for the first time on the cell phone and warns him about agents approaching: "Just give them a bribe and they'll let you go."

When Morpheus talks to Neo in the dojo simulation: "Hit me in the balls, but not too hard."

When Dozer says (in English), "We've got a lot of work to do," Neo and Morpheus have this conversation:
Neo: What language is he speaking?
Morpheus: I don't know.
Neo: Why doesn't he learn Romanian?
Morpheus: He's weak in the head. He doesn't even know how to read.

It's not high-class humor, but it's simple and fun. Watching it has also expanded my vocabulary of curse words in both Romanian and Russian. Now that's the kind of Moldovan culture I like.