Summer!

It has been a long time since my last update!
I don’t remember where I left off. School finished at the end of May and from June onward I have been dividing my time between my village, friends’ villages, and Chisinau. Funding has still not come through for the summer camp, GLOW, so I’m unfortunately not sure how that will pan out. I did a few days of activities with my students at school after the year ended and also spent a few days in another volunteer’s village helping with her day camp for young students. I’ve also restarted my language lessons, this time working with Valentina. I really want to beef-up my Romanian this summer while I have free time and the motivation to study. I’ve found that writing essays in Romanian and then having Valentina edit them with me really helps. I learn faster by writing/reading than speaking now though I’m still working on my pronunciations. My goal is to score advanced on my next language exam (after this August) so PC will pay for me to take Russian lessons. I would really like to spend at least 9 months studying Russian while in Moldova and Valentina has told me she would help cu placere (with pleasure). I love spending time with Valentina and the language lessons benefit us both. Extra cash for her, and lots of needed language-help for me.
This past week an American friend with whom I studied abroad (Ireland) visited me in Moldova for a few days. She was a very lovely guest (easygoing, mature, and culturally sensitive) and so I enjoyed spending time with her--including the 4th (at a celebration thrown by the American Embassy in Chisinau). It was very interesting to hear Jessica’s impressions about Moldova because I’ve been here a long time and everything has become somewhat normal. She said that my village reminded her a bit of Paraguay—(I think she studied there)—but that the people are more neatly dressed. In my village you see an animal on every dusty unpaved street: horses, goats, cows, ducks, and chickens. She met my host mother, Valentina and Viorica, students from my school, my nurse partner at the hospital, and most of my volunteer friends within the PC community. I took her to a church service at our biserica (church) and that was interesting… Viorica was with us and said she would probably stay the full hour and a half, but I couldn’t handle the full time because of the intense heat inside of the church… plus the fact that the church doesn’t have chairs where you can sit. During a typical service (and these are just from my few/limited experiences attending/observing) the “preot” or priest of our Orthodox Church enters and exists through elaborately decorated French doors in the front of church shaking silver balls on a stick that release a smoky, nice smelling incense. He paces the inside of the church and attendants approach him to kiss his hands and give him folded sheets of paper enclosed with cash and names of family/loved ones. At the front of the church a group of women and young girls stand hidden in a corner singing and chanting verses and hymns in Romanian as the priest enters and exits through his French doors. Attendants light long, thin yellow candles and melt the ends of these candles so that their wax will stick to the holders in large, round gold bowls attached to gold stands. Each candle is purchased at the entrance of the church and these candles are lit for family members. The walls of the church are adorned with many gold heavy frames displaying gold pictures of Jesus and other Saints. Viorica told me that typically each framed gold picture costs about 100 Euro and the best ones are from Italy and Russia. The ceiling peaks into an onion-shaped dome that is painted with scenes from the New Testament. During the ceremony I attended with Jessica, only about 5 other elderly people were in the church. Half way through the service the priest (whom I’ve never heard break out of his chanting to say anything) approaches Jessica and starts talking to her. Jessica had her hands neatly clasped behind her back and he asked her if she understood and told her to not hold her hands that way…that it’s better if she holds her hands in front of her in the church. I turned and asked Viorica if that’s like some sort of rule and she said she had never heard that before. Viorica said she thinks he just wanted an excuse to see if she could talk because he was curious about the two of us. Viorica invited us over to her house afterward (we visit the cemetery as well and saw some of my young students climbing cherry trees, picking fruit) and generously served us dinner. Viorica has been such a great friend to me. She’s a very giving person and I’m excited about working with her next year. Anyway, so Jessica took one sip of the house wine and tried to set down her glass and Viorica starting yelling that if Jessica sets down a full glass on the table, then she (Jessica) will lose all of her money. She wouldn’t let her set her glass down and told her that Jessica couldn’t get drunk off of her wine because it “contains no sugar”. I’m not sure how the absence of added sugar would negate the presence of the alcohol in the wine, but Viorica was pretty convinced that no one could ever get drunk off of her wine. Jessica finished her first glass and Viorica grabbed the glass to refill it before Jessica could grab the glass from her. It was pretty funny, but I knew Viorica serious about the whole “don’t set down your wine glass until every drop is gone” deal. She said that the wine is good because it helps you sleep “very, very well”. The week before last I was also at Viorica’s (before Jessica’s arrival) and during a morning meal she and her guests were trying to serve me shots of alcohol saying it didn’t matter whether it’s 9am or 9pm… you can always drink. At a June school celebration for the 9th graders I was also yelled at for refusing to take shots of Cognac. When I said “Nu vreau, dar multumesc”/“I do not want (any), but thank you” I was told that I must not understand the word “want” in Romanian and that I apparently don’t know what I’m talking about. For some reason this summer I’ve received more pressure to drink alcohol in my village… I think I’ve gone to more celebrations so that’s probably the reason why. Anyway, that’s my little off-subject rant about alcohol and parties. I’m not offered alcohol every day here and I’m a woman (that helps when you don’t want to drink!) so the pressure could be worse.
I’ve been enjoying spending time with my host mother! I first met her at the end of June and she’s been spending most of her time at the house doing construction in the larger house. Yesterday she knocked down a wall to make a room larger and today I believe she is painting. She hired Moldovan men to work and they’ve been very busy. Before my host mom came home I received warnings from Viorica and Valentina (mostly from Viorica!) telling me that my host mom is “severe”, and an extreme perfectionist. I’ve so far found her to be pretty normal in that a lot of the ways she talks and acts toward me are more western. She’s very relaxed with me about money issues (no constant discussions or complaints about finances or how much I’m paying her), she’s very liberal in allowing me to use electricity as I wish so that I feel comfortable, she seems really clean (tells me to wash my hands and she purposefully doesn’t use communal silverware or share food). She also cooks yummy Italian food and shares generously with me. I don’t want to imply that every single Moldovan does the opposite of these things, these are just a few things I have observed about her that strike me as very different from my past experiences living with individuals in rural parts of Moldova. As she and one of her close Moldovan-Italian friends told me this past week, Italian culture is extremely different from Moldovan culture. It’s interesting because many things that I like and miss about Western culture, they dislike. (These are only the opinions of 3 individuals: 1 American and 2 Moldavians, but it’s still interesting to hear…) For example, they explained to me that good customer service in Italy is strange and often unpleasant to them. They don’t want someone smiling and asking them about their day when they enter a store. They said it is fake and if someone did that in Moldova (unless they were foreign like me—because let’s face it I often have a goofy, American smile on my face) people would think they were “sick in the head”. I miss people being polite to me when I shop in Moldova. When I eat out in Chisinau the waiters often forget to bring my meal or roll their eyes at me when I ask for a napkin. The American (apparently like Italian) customer service might be a bit phony, but it’s what I’m used to and I like someone smiling at me even if their work day sucked. It’s your job to be polite, right? I guess depending on your culture. Another interesting cultural difference is our use of the word “friend”. In Moldova there is a very thick line between who you would label as your friend who would be your acquaintance, colleague, neighbor, etc. People often clarify to me their relationship with someone else. “So-and-so is not my friend, they’re just my colleague”. This relationship could also be stated in the presence of the other individual, no hard feelings involved. After an hour or honestly maybe even 10 minutes of chummy conversation with another American we might introduce ourselves to others as “new friends”. If someone in the US were to tell someone else in front of me that I wasn’t their friend, but only their acquaintance, I might feel a little burned. However, if I were to call myself the “friend” of a Moldovan in my village that I’m friendly with, but not in close contact with, I would be thought of as fake. There are a lot of other interesting things we talked about, so ask me for more if we meet up next month. I also hope to sit down with one of my American friends here to write down our best stories before August. You start to forget things and some of the stories are too priceless to forget…
What else interesting has happened….
Oh, so the water in our village started working again… and then stopped again… and then started again… and now is off again. Last night my host mom helped me hang my “Sun shower” (a solar-heated bag of water with an attached shower nasal) on the post that our clothes-line-rope wraps around. So, I locked the front gate, hung some towels on my clothes line to form a curtain, and took my first outside shower. It was actually pretty nice; I just know I can’t continue bathing outside after September ends, so we’ll see what happens with the water situation. I handled no water last winter at my house so I can clearly do it again.
The new volunteers came to Moldova!--About 50-60 people. I can’t believe I forgot to add that… that has been exciting having new faces, new people to talk with. My group of volunteers also had our 1 year party camping out at a beach on the Nistru River which was really fun. We all went swimming (against the rules… oops), but no one became seriously sick later so it was a good time.
Apricots are currently ripe and delicious! I also have raspberries and apples. Sour cherries are still in season, too, but the best sweet cherries ended last month. I love the fresh foods. I cook with garlic and onion from the garden and only drink (boiled, of course!) fresh milk. Like an hour-after-it-was-milked fresh. I feel spoiled and know that fruit, vegetables, eggs, and milk will never taste the same after Moldova.