For the past 5 months I've been in the habit of falling asleep around 9:30 every night. In my first family's house in Pepeni I think it was because I felt nervous leaving the overhead light on for an extended period of time (battles over how much electricity you pay to use are no fun). In Ludmila's house I first slept in their living room before moving into my casa mica. I would read until maybe 9pm, radio BBC news, and then fall asleep. Now I'm pushing midnight and I think a 9-5am sleep schedule might be better. Or at least, more Moldovan. I found out that my 14 year old host brother, Sergiu, is having problems with his gallbladder, not his appendix. He will be in the hospital for at least a week. I know that's hard for my family. Grandma was in the Chisinau hospital for a couple of weeks recently because she has serious heart problems and mom also has health problems. I think it's possible that many of these health problems are made worse or instigated by so much strenous, physical labor. Sergiu chopped most of our family's wood for winter with an axe. He had to stop for a day or two because he began having serious chest pains...so then my mother finished the work. After grandma got back from the hospital she was back outside that day helping with the wood, the garden, and our animals. We have many chickens and roosters, two goats, and a rabbit. After returning from picking up my laptop yesterday, grandma helped me start the fire in my soba to heat up the house. My soba is covered in what appear to be bathroom tiles and is the length of my bed, though most sobas look similar to this. You light a fire in a pit/furnice beneath the wall to heat the wall and your room long after the fire has died. I have stove units above my fire so I can cook food on the units while my fire is burning which is nice if I don't want to use my gas stove. Anyway, grandma or mom usually help me start my fire in the evenings and I add more wood if necessary. While grandma helped me with my soba yesterday she told me that the doctor at the hospital (she had an appointment while she was visiting Sergiu) had prescribed her a formula to drink for heart medication. She went to the pharmacy (farmacia) in our village and found out that she can't afford it. She was really upset and cried. She worked as a nurse for 40-50 years and her retirement salary is about 500lei per month. Or ~$50. She then asked me how much my dad makes for his retirement and I said I didn't know. Which is mostly the truth. She asked me if it was more than $50 per month and I said yes. I'm often asked (very often, even by people I don't even know) how much money my parents make. I can never respond because nearly all salaries in the US are greater. The cost of living in the US is higher (in regard to housing, electricity, other bills and services) so it's not fair to always compare, which is what those who ask me to give salary amounts would like to do. Minimum wage will always be higher than many salaries in Moldova though may still be considered poverty in the US.

I spent this morning working with Viorica at the school on lesson plans. We also came up with an exercise routine for the first grade students who wish to participate in "gymnastica" next week. I normally like working with Viorica, minus our major differences we usually get along, but today for some reason was difficult. We've had 3 PC volunteers in Pepeni (including myself). The last volunteer was Nina (English teacher), and before her, Margot (health teacher). Margot left a text book with Viorica and I borrowed it the other week. I really thought I returned it to her, but I can't remember for sure. It's not in my house so maybe I left it with my other partner, Valentina. I have an identic copy of the same book, but Viorica is very angry at me for not finding the copy from Margot. Hopefully she won't stay mad forever, because it's hard to deal with her being angry at me when we need to work together. What normally makes Viorica a good partner is her enthusiasm to learn and teach about health. She loves being one of our two school nurses and also working in the classroom with me. It's funny because as difficult as she can be to work with sometimes, I feel like if I didn't have her as a partner I would feel less useful at my job. She started off the year not really interacting with the kids, standing in front of the classroom to lecture them. Now she walks around the classroom to talk to the students and sit down at the desks with them if I am speaking. She also is more interested in planning activities and learning games that involve the kids more. It's nice to see her growing as a teacher and becoming more comfortable with being on level with the students.My frustrations with her are often on par with my admiration for her development. We have very different ideas for how students should be disciplined or even praised. She hasn't come to fully accept that hitting kids is not a proper way to control behavior. She hasn't hit a kid in front of me within the past couple of weeks, but she will still grab a child's hair or pull ears. She also likes to criticise kids when they don't give the right answer, or embarrass them. We had a unit about stress and she asked one boy for an example of stress in his life. He said he didn't have one, so she laughed and told him that she bet he felt stressed when his mother left him. During that same lesson she asked a kid who was misbehaving to come to the front of the class, pretended to hit him, and then asked the child if that made him feel stressed. Not our finest lesson.
After each lesson I try to encourage a feedback session where we talk about what we liked most about the lesson and ways we could improve. So many teachers in my school use agression to try to make kids listen or behave. My little sister, Alina, has said this makes school hard for the children. The kids, I think, internalize everything because I've seen a lot of physical violence between them. In the middle of class one day I had to pull apart two 5th grade boys who were punching each other. Another day one of my 5th graders punched another boy in the face and he received no punishment. Meanwhile my partner, in front of the class, criticised the kid who was punched as being too "passive" and unable to stand up for himself. I don't yell at the kids, I don't tell a child that they are rotten ("obraznic" or "rau"), and I don't show favoritism for children who are cleaner, smarter, wealthier. She thinks that my ideas are often silly or too American, but I'm glad I can expose her to another way of thinking.
I hope to do a lesson about diversity with Viorica next semester. I spent a day at her house this past week working on a lesson while her son was watching an American film--dubbed in Russian--on tv. The main actors in the film were black and Viorica asked me "do you have black people in North Carolina?" I said yes, and she asked if I was serious. I told her I was serious and that I have many friends and have had many friends who are black or of different colors. I'm not sure if she believed me, she then asked me "are they [black people] bad?" The word for bad in Romanian can also mean evil or stupid. I told her no and that all people, whatever their exterior are the same. She agreed, "you're right, Melissa, we're all made by God", but I'm not sure if she has ever really thought much about this. She, like other Moldovans have, then asked me how I feel now that "America has a black president". I told her that he is an intelligent man, whatever his color, and that it is healthy for the US to move in a direction where beliefs about people based on color are broken down. Conversations with Viorica can be exhausting to me. Hopefully some of the things we talk about will be meaningful to her.

It's freezing in my house now... I hope to start a fire soon. I have lots of cleaning and other work to do. The seminar on alcohol will be Wednesday, and I hope my nurse partner, Efimia, will be reliable in helping me organize our materials. We've made appointments to meet before where I have showed up and she is not there and didn't bother to call and let me know. I've written most of the alcohol lesson myself which has been a tad frustrating, but I also have to take into consideration that Efimia is not being paid extra to work with me. Valentina and Viorica are given money through (I believe) the Moldovan government for their work with PC.

I hope my internet access continues to be relatively stable. My life in Moldova is often a lesson on anger management, so I also need to be patient if my internet does not work. There are larger problems to deal with. Plus, any internet in Moldova is better than no internet:). Many of you have said you would be interested in talking on Skype. I would LOVE that. Let me know what times you are free to chat and I will be waiting.