Ninje tare tare

There's enough snow for everyone. This week the temperature got down to -23 C, which is -10 F. Here's my good ol' village of Zguriţa.

Traditional house in the village.

Main road out of my village. There is a town 20 km straight ahead.

My bus stop is at the bottom of this hill. I usually hitch hike, so this is the road I use to thumb for cars to stop when driving into town.
One of my favorite houses in the village.

This is my soba (fireplace) that keeps my apartment heated. When I moved into the building there was a statue of Lenin on top of the soba.

Reading Communism: A History by Richard Pipes and having Lenin's head looking across your living room is a very bittersweet thing.

Me and Justin thinking up grand plans to bring change to the world.

First Moldovan masa at my place with Justin and Kim, two awesome Volunteers who live in my district of Moldova.



This Friday I am leaving with four other Peace Corps Volunteers for a 12 day vacation to the Middle East. We'll be seeing Romania, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. Check back in a few weeks for lots of pics of camels, hummus, hookahs, Jews, pyramids, Muslims, and 75 degree weather. Peace.

Iarna a venit.

Winter has come and the snow is here to stay for a while. Here's a view from my balcony on the fourth floor.

The last time it snowed in South Carolina I watched a dog mark his territory on my snow man. Not cool.

How to enjoy a beer in Moldova

To enjoy a cold beer in a Moldovan village, you may need to take the following steps:


Buy six cubic meters of wood. Have a friend with a tractor and trailer help you transport it.

Hire someone in the village with a chainsaw, and hold the logs while he cuts them.

Find an ax, put on a pair of gloves, and split wood for several days.

Stack the split wood by the soba, which is used to heat the house.

Stack wood on the balcony.

Stack wood in the kitchen. In fact, stack wood anywhere and everywhere.

Learn the art of starting the fire.

When the house warms up, invite a Moldovan in to play the guitar.

Sit by the soba and take a personal day.

Fetiţa

A piece of a Romanian conversation I had last night at a birthday party:

Sergiu:"Vince, I didn't name my baby until a week after she was born."
Me: "Wait, I don't understand. What did you call her for that week?"
Sergiu: "Ehhh, you know, Little Girl."

Peşte pe strada

Today I didn't hitchhike, but instead I timed it just right and caught a rutiera (public mini bus) out of the village. I somehow lucked up and got the front seat. Most of the time there are no seats and I'm stuck standing; hence, why I like to hitchhike. As we were pulling away from the village, I saw a fish hanging in the road. No kidding, there was literally a fish hanging halfway across the road on a stick. Apparently, a lady had caught a good sized fish from our lake, stuck the fish on a long stick, and tied the base of the stick to the guard rails on our bridge. I hadn't seen excellent business marketing in Moldova until today. Every car or bus that drove across the bridge had no choice but to see the fish. Sure enough, our bus driver sees the fish and whips our rutiera full of people clear across two lanes to pull over to the lady. I could hear some folks start mumbling in the back of the bus. I guess he didn't like the price, because he dropped the gearstick into low gear and started speeding away. Immediately, three bunicas (grandmas) leaned over my shoulder to ask the driver the price. One bunica didn't hear what he said, so she hit me on the shoulder and said "cît costa mei?", which is village speak for "how much does it cost boy?"

A fost prea scump.

buna ziua

"Learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel."
-motto of The University of South Carolina

pigs, Park Place, and paddy wagons

Life is good in Moldova. Winter is coming fast. It snowed a little last week. As I'm writing this, I'm realizing that I haven't changed my long john pants in two weeks. When it's freezing outside, only one room of your house is heated by burning wood, you don't have running water, and you have to hand wash clothes, you seem to forget about how dirty your clothes are. For all honestly though, I don't think I smell.

As for language, one day my Romanian is unstoppable, and the next day I can't say much of anything. Living in a small village is leading me to speaking Romanian like I live in a small village. I started my Peace Corps service learning clean and proper Romanian, but my village of 2,000 people has quickly changed that. The more language I learn in the village, the more of a hick I sound like when I go into the cities of Moldova. It's a little like leaving South Carolina and visiting my buddies in the Northeast; however, to them I only have a strong accent. The villagers in Moldova use many different nouns, verbs, and phrases on top of having a different accent than the folks living in the cities of Moldova. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy speaking the village talk with people in the cities. Most of the city folks in Moldova grew up in villages, moved into the cities, and cleaned up their language. Most of the people I encounter seem to like it when I pull out the country talk....maybe it hits close to home.

Hitch-hiking is prevalent around my village, as well in the rest of Moldova, so I usually hitch a ride to and from the nearest town when I need to go in to the open market to shop. Somehow, me and about 9 other Moldovans ended up hitching a ride from the police......in the back of the Paddy Wagon. As the 10 of us sat in a circle in the back facing each other, everyone seemed to be smiling. I think it was because we weren't handcuffed. Someone should have had a guitar.


Here's a few kids that live on my street. I had to present my village at a conference with Peace Corps, so I put the kids to work and had them draw maps and pictures of our village. If I would have known that they were giving me bunny ears in the pic, I would have slammed a kid.

Hardly none of them knew where America was on the map, and only one or two knew where Moldova was. They all knew where Russia was.

Kickin' it with some PC volunteers in my raion (district). We had an Arabic knock-off version of Monopoly that has taken into account years of inflation (big bill was 50,000). Martin, the guy to the left, is convinced that the utilities are a good buy. He had a lucky game with them, but I'm still convinced to stay away from the utilities.

We had two more weeks of training with Peace Corps, so I went back and stayed with my first host family in Milestii Mici. It's been a few months since I last saw them, and my Romanian has developed a good bit, so they were happy that I could actually speak now. As you can see in the picture, they sent me home with a bottle of homemade wine in my hand.

The Placinta's at Milestii Mici. My host mom and dad went and bought a pig the first day I got there, so for the first few days we toasted our shots of wine by saying "pentru porcul sa creasca mare" or "for the pig to grow big".

After doing a little work in the village of Cotova, we rode in the back of Vloidea's big blue truck through the village to go to a bar for a coffee and beer.

Three American volunteers, three Moldovan villagers, and a spontaneous meal and drinks on top of chairs in the middle of the living room.

Funky looking Soviet tractor that refuses to stop working.

Small flour mill close to my house in my village.

Typical village houses



I'm going into Balti to stay with another volunteer this weekend. He has a toilet, running water, and a bathtub. Holler if you hear me.

Eu sint ocupat in Milestii Mici, dar poftim.

I've written in the past about Transnistria, the region of Moldova that operates as an independent country but it not recognized by the rest of the world. Here is a short documentary that BBC filmed about Moldova and Transnistria. The first clip on YouTube is about 8 minutes, but hopefully it will interest you enough to continue on with the other 3 sections (4 separate sections on YouTube).

p.s. he doesn't pronounce the capital, Chişinua, correctly

Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmrLbTHBV3s

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHZLV8aEtWQ&NR=1

Part 3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6Esw48a4zk&feature=channel

Part 4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEXs6YxUUfQ&feature=channel

Lucrul e tare tare greu

I am traveling back to my first village, Milestii Mici, for two weeks more of Peace Corps training. One of those days we will have a gallery/presentation walk-though in which every volunteer has a station to present their respective village and organization and what we've learned over the first two months living at our permanent sites. I will only be presenting information on my primary projects which are focused on small business and agriculture. I don't have many ideas yet for secondary projects that I can do with the kids, mayor, or school, but hopefully they will come in time. Here's the information that I will present about my community:

What are the problems of Zguriţa, and what are the interests of my organizations?

When asked about the weaknesses of Zguriţa, the consensus of most of the people is that our biggest problems relate to our young people leaving to find work. Like other villages in Moldova, it is normal for the kids to grow up with grandparents, relatives, or friends while their parents work abroad. There are very few people in the village of Zguriţa between the ages of 18-35. The lack of work in the village naturally leads to other problems like human trafficking, poverty, and children becoming orphaned.

By cooperating with my two organizations, ACSA and ONG Fortuna, it is our hope to directly combat the problems of human trafficking, poverty, and orphaned children by creating new economic opportunities through small business development in our village. For every new job created, another opportunity may become available for a family to stay together in Zguriţa.

I was invited to these two organizations in Zguriţa to collaborate with three people: XXXXXXXX, XXXXXXXXX, and XXXXXXXXX. All three of my partners have worked with the Peace Corps in the past and I feel that they are very capable to continue working on new projects, especially in the area of agriculture and small business development. They seem to be some of the most respected people in the village, so they will also be great resources for any other secondary projects I decide to work on with the school director, kids, or Primaria.

What are our ideas for projects?

Seed Packets
My partner has a seed business where she grows onions and carrots, harvests the seeds, and then exports sacks full of seeds to Russia. She employs about 20 workers to help her though the entire process. She wants to write a grant for a seed packaging machine. With a seed packaging machine, it is predicted that the bottom line profit for the business would nearly double. The “middle man” would be cut out and she could now sell small packets of seeds to retailers instead of selling large wholesale bags. If we could win a grant of this sort, it would be possible to immediately create at least 5 new jobs to operate the machine and to increase the monthly salaries of the current 20 employees.

Dried Fruit
A good bit of apples are grown in my village, but all of the farmers are individually selling their apples to a juice factory. They are getting very little money for each kilogram of apples sold to the factory. One idea to improve this situation would be for the farmers to sell their apples to a central buyer in the village who would then make dried fruit. Dried fruit, I’ve been told by farmers, brings exponentially more profit per kilogram than selling the apples to the juice factory. My partners have proposed an idea to write a grant for a machine that would cut the apples, dry the apples, and then package them for sale. Thus, a new business would be created where a farmer or association of farmers would buy most of the apples of my village, process and package the dried fruit, and export the packages to retailers. The idea would be to create a new business or association in the village, increase the profits of the current apple growers, and to attract new farmers to grow apples in their fields.

Drip Irrigation
One of the biggest resources we have in our village is our lake. It’s very large but underutilized. Our harvest this year wasn’t as great as last year because of the lack of rain, but pumping water from the lake to irrigate the fields would be a great way to help increase the output of crops. To realize this project, we would need to research drip irrigation and write a grant for the pump and pipes needed to transport the water to the fields surrounding the lake. In theory, this project could work in collaboration with the seed and dried fruit projects above, because a higher output of seeds and apples could potentially lead to more profits and more jobs.

Other
We have a vocational school for grades 10-12. The boys study the mechanics and operation of tractors and the girls study how to sew and tailor clothes. In the past, this vocational school has served as a haven for smugglers to attract young girls to leave abroad once they graduated. The last volunteer in my village collaborated with Moldova TIP and Winrock to do trafficking awareness and business skills seminars for the students and he successfully helped several girls find jobs locally who were about to go abroad. Being that new students come on a rotating basis every year to the school, it is one of our top priorities to continue this work with Moldova TIP, Winrock, and La Strada.

Hramul Cotavei

Fall is here, but winter is coming quick. We finally started burning wood in our sobas to heat the house, so I am going to sleep like a powdered baby tonight.

Harvest is mostly done. Here are corn stalks stacked to dry out.

Road through my village with a big stack of corn stalks to the left.

A World War II statue in my village with Cyrillic writing.

Another pic of the statue of Lenin from my neighboring village of Cotova. There are lots of Soviet and Communist statues still standing all over Moldova.

Yesterday was "Hramul Cotovei" (Cotova's hram). Every village has a "hram" once a year as a day to celebrate the village. Another PC volunteer lives in my neighboring village, so I went with him to celebrate his village's hram. Basically, each family prepares tons of food and all the relatives and friends come into the village to stay for a few days. We pretty much hopped from house to house to visit everyone, which required us to eat and drink at every house we stopped at. Here's a few pics and videos from my first hram:

Table full of food. Every house has a full table.

Me, Justin, Vlodie, and Vlodie's daughter.

Grapes that were offered to us when we first walked in the door.
Cool looking old truck outside of Vlodie's house.

Chickens, geese, and the mighty dog that protects them from being eaten by foxes.

Most of the corn that is grown is stored for winter to feed the animals.



One room full of food and drinks, another full of people dancing the hora.



Everyone singing at the table. We sounded really good, but the microphone on my camera didn't do us any justice.

One of the songs we sang through every month of the year. When they call your month you stand up, everyone wishes you many years in life, and then they sing for you to sit back down for the next month.

Winter, kids, and The Haircut

Winter is coming. It's getting cold here, and everyone is preparing to hibernate. I'm all Long-John's from here on out. We haven't started burning wood in our sobas (ovens for heating the home) yet, but I'm counting down the days. I got up this morning, took the traditional trip to the outhouse, and realized that winter was coming to Moldova when my pants hit my ankles. Let's just say the cold outhouse is not a place to hang out, read the paper, drink coffee, and enjoy sitting on the throne.

The most common mode of transportation in my village is a căruţă.

I've been told the carts with wheels will be replaced with sleds for the snow in winter.

My biggest fans, and closest friends in the village, are definitely the kids. I have 8 or so kids that live on my road in the village who want to hang out every day. They range from ages 7-11. They all live with their grandmothers, because their parents have had to leave abroad (mostly Russia) to find work. Their parents send them money back for basic living expenses, but some haven't seen their parents since they were old enough to remember. One good thing about being in the Peace Corps is all the time I've spent goofing around and playing with the kids is time I've spent "working". The technical work that I'll be doing (maybe things like writing grants, greenhouses, community development, etc.) is only 1/3 of the Peace Corps' mission, while the other 2/3 is building friendships with Moldovans to facilitate cross cultural exchange; so yes, hanging out with Moldovans in my village is my job and I doubt I'll ever find another job quite like it.

When I was in the capital I went in for another haircut at the salon. I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but for an intermediate romanian speaker in Moldova, it's a big deal. It's a big deal because the hairstyles for the guys over here are different than the ones in States, and I'm sure the hair stylists naturally want to cut my hair like the local style. To my Moldovan friends reading this, I am not saying I don't like the hairstyles of the guys here. In fact, I am sure I will have a Moldovan hairstyle before long. However, just understand that it takes more than four months of living in Moldova to build up the courage for such a transformation of my afro. I have to take my glasses off to get a haircut, and being that I have really bad eye sight, I can't see what my haircut looks like until the grand finale. When she's finally done cutting my hair and asks do I want to put on my glasses to see my hair, the first thought that runs through my head is "I don't know, do I?"

This weekend is Moldova's national Wine Festival in Chisinau, the capital. I'll be hanging out with most, if not all, of the PC volunteers in Moldova drinking wine from all around the country and coming up with obscure and meaningless english, romanian, and russian toasts.

Cheers, Hai noroc, sănătate, Будьте здоровы, fii sănătos, numai bine, mulţi ani mulţi bani, sus pahari jos chiloţi

Timp de patru luni

I've looked back and realized that all of my blog posts express how I love living in Moldova. To be fair to the grand ol' USA, here's some things I miss from back home, aside from the obvious like spending time with my family and friends:

- thick, soft, and long mattresses
- running water
- toilets
- indian food, italian food, seafood, mexican food, and all kinds of food that I took for granted, especially fish
- people smiling, waving, and throwing the bird or peace sign
- being around a university campus
- microbrewed beer, specifically ales (nothing but lagers in Moldova)
- playing golf and tennis
- hiking in the mountains (hopefully next year I'll hike the Carpathians in Transylvania, Romania)
- voicing my opinion about anything without a language barrier
- being sarcastic or telling or a joke without a language barrier
- stand up comedians
- live bands
- smooth, paved roads
- tailgating for college football
- roadtrips
- and last, but certainly not least, the Atlantic Ocean

piaţa Cotovei

Most small villages have a market once a week. Larger villages or towns may a have a market every day, but my village and my neighboring village of Cotova only go on Sundays. Here's some pics of my neighboring village's market, which is about 4 km from me.

Buy what you need for a week, because they'll pack up until next Sunday.

Classic Russian car with a watermelon on the roof. These little cars are probably half of the cars you see on the road. I'm buying one when I get back to the States. A green one.

Cotova's market is set up in the village center, near the mayor's office.

Another pic of the market in the center. Notice the statue of Lenin still standing in the background. The Lenin statue is interesting, because ironically (or not) it stands in front of an abandoned Soviet building.

Doing business like it's their job, because it is their job.

The horses pull the carts to the center, and then the owners tie the horses in a nearby field to graze for the day.

Dăti-mi mai ieftin, vă rog - Give it to me cheaper, please.

One thing that was difficult to learn in Moldova was buying everything in grams/kilograms. In America, everything is either pre-packaged or in pounds (produce). In Moldova, everything is weighed, so you have to tell them how many grams/kilograms of something you want. For example, the first time I went to buy some rice I looked for the typical 5 pound bag we would have in America. Of course they didn't have it, but instead the lady asked me how many kilograms I wanted. First, I had no idea how many "kilograms" I wanted. Secondly, my Romanian was horrible back then, so for all I knew she could have been asking me how much my first born child was going to weigh.

This isn't the market, but it's the back patio at my work partner's house. Not sure exactly what happens next. I've got a feeling I'll be eating a lot of pumpkin placinta (placinta is a national dish that is similiar to a pie/pastry filled with apples, potatoes, cabbage, pumpkin, etc)