Cum eu fac dus

My host partner in the village (the person who applied to Peace Corps to host me as a volunteer) owns this building in the photo. She runs multiple organizations out of it, so I do some of my work out of here. It's got a neat history, because thirty years ago it was the central office for the Soviet military in this raion (county) of Moldova.The center of my village. My office is the building to the left, the mayor's office is up ahead, and there is a small park and a community well to the right.


I'm learning new words every day, however no one speaks clean romanian. In the village, we speak a mixture of romanian, russian, ukranian, and moldovan (moldovan is essentially romanian, but has developed into a different dialect over the years). From what I've heard, when I visit the country of Romania, where they speak clean romanian, they probably won't understand half of what I say.

Our garden behind our house. You name it, we've got it growing.
A view of my village from the top of a hill.

Another pic of my village. Rumor has it we have about 2,800 people living here.

Here's the front gates to our market, which comes once a week on Sundays. Most everyone goes to buy food, goods, etc that they'll need for the week. It's a pretty cool experience for me on Sundays, because everyone goes and comes to the market on horse drawn carts. It reminds me of what I imagine America to be a hundred years ago.
Where the magic happens.

Grapes hanging in my face when I walk out my front door.

One of my neighbors. Typical looking village house.
Another typical house.


My water source.
The walk to my well isn't far.

To the right, you'll see a soba used to burn wood to heat the water for bathing. The process is pretty simple: fetch a few buckets of water from the well, burn some wood in the soba to heat the water, scoop the warm water into the red bucket to the left, and bucket bathe in the tub.

We, like many traditonal Moldovan families, have two houses. "Casa mica" and "casa mare", which translates to big house and small house. This is a picture of casa mica in which the family lives, eats, and spends most of their time.
This is "casa mare", which is the guest house that I live in. It's bigger than the family's home, and contains the nice furniture, plates, glasses, etc. reserved for guests.


One of the rooms in "casa mare" where I live.

My room.

Inside casa mica, the family's home. The big blue thing is a soba which is used to heat the home during winter by burning wood or coal.


Another pic of living room/dining room/main room. To the right, you can see another soba used to heat the house for winter. This soba is built with a bedding area on top so people can sleep directly on the heat.Another pic of the main room of casa mica.


Eu sper ca toti sint bine. Pace. - I hope that everyone is good. Peace.