MoldovAnn

In case you are wondering, the title means, roughly, There’s no making sense of Russia. It’s a line from a famous poem, that has now become a regular saying that perfectly sums up what I have thought about Russia, Russian culture, and the Russian language for 15 years. Why I just learned this phrase today, I don’t know, but There’s no making sense of Russia!

On another note, I continue to enjoy this bootcamp that we call Peace Corps Pre-Service Training. Somedays it just hits me like a wave that I’m really here, a Real Life Peace Corps Volunteer, and it’s just amazing. To think about something for so many years, and now to really finally be doing it. I just think to myself, Holy cow, I really did it! Of course, other days, I think to myself, Holy shit, what have I done? Like today, when the water is off again for no apparent reason. But that’s par for the course, I guess.

Things are still busy here. Saturday my host sister Alyona took Emily and me into Chisinau, the capital, for some shopping. I found a couple nice winter coats, and will go back tomorrow to buy one. How about a 3/4 length black cashmere coat for $65?! We had a good time, and I’m really liking Alyona a lot – she is Anya’s mother, Tamara Ivanovna’s 39-year old daughter. She was in London the last 3-4 months, and of course didn’t want to come back to Moldova but couldn’t get her visa extended and didn’t want to stay illegally. She’s an English teacher, but is being very good about speaking Russian with me, although I know she’s dying to work on her and Anya’s English. We mix the languages now, which gives me a break, too, as 24/7 was really wearing me out. I taught her some yoga last night, and we will probably do this together a few times a week now. It will be hard to move in 6 weeks as I’m getting very attached to these folks very quickly! They have all been so kind and gracious to me, and in fact we have all been very fortunate with our host
families.

Tomorrow we have an “independent field trip” to Chisinau scheduled, and we are supposed to get ourselves to a certain meeting place where a current volunteer will meet us and give us a tour of useful and interesting places in the city. Since Emily, Matt and I already had more access to the city than most other volunteers, we talked to our “guide” today and have some fun stuff planned in addition to the requisite informational tour.

Then on Wednesday we have our meeting with the Vice Mayor of Ialoveni. Each village of trainees has a set of community activities to complete as part of our training, and meeting with an important personage in the village/town is one of them. So, we set up the appointment with the Vice Mayor (mayor is travelling out of the country right now), and tomorrow we’ve got to figure out what the hell we’re going to ask him about. Understanding the answers is an entirely different set of problems!

We got our site options last week, which are the places that requested PC Volunteers this year and that were selected to receive a volunteer. There are three Russian sites, all in the southeast of Moldova, in the raion (district) of Taraclia. We’re supposed to be able to give our preferences, and Sylvia, the EOD program manager, will try to take preferences into account and then match volunteers with sites. Well, she made it pretty clear that she’s already decided for the three Russians, so we’ve been trying to guess all weekend who’s going where. All three sites sound like interesting work to me, so I fall back to my secondary criterion, which is indoor plumbing. Keep your fingers crossed for me! We find out our assignments a week from tomorrow, and then the following weekend we are supposed to somehow travel by ourselves to
our sites, meet our counterparts, check out possible host families, and get ourselves back to Chisinau 3 days later. This will be interesting, but the good news is that 2 weeks from today, I will know (a) in what town I will be living, (b) with whom I will working, and (c) with whom I will be living. It’s only taken a year to get that info, so what’s 2 more weeks now, eh?

I went with Alyona the other night to her friend’s house, who has an 8 year old daughter, Lyuba. She is absolutely adorable, chattered away to me for over an hour, showed me her aquarium, photo albums, performed a dance and sang a song from the school show, you name it. She speaks Russian and Romanian, and started learning English in school this year – 8 years old! She showed off her excellent school marks, and read to me from her English textbook. She also loaned me one of her Russian primers, which is actually about the perfect level for me right now. She was delightful. I walked home both happy and melancholy- missing all the wonderful kids back home so much. So, extra big kisses to those cuties at home! Moms and Dads, help them send me some emails, OK?