Just when we were getting the hang of things in our town,
starting to meet people we can communicate with and finding a few things to
start working on, way too soon we have to pack up, cancel everything for two
weeks and return to our training village for two more weeks of training.
On the plus side we will get to see everybody that we
initially trained with and hear about their experiences and new homes. We will also get some additional language
training, and some more Peace Corps administrative and technical training.
On the down side, we had found a wonderful private tutor who
is working with us specifically on the language we need and we will be missing
several sessions with her. We have to
stop all work and every discussion about projects and explain that we have to
pick it up again in two weeks. Worse, we
have to pack for two weeks right at the time of year when it could be 80 one
day and 45 the next so packing is crazy.
Finally, we have to face two more weeks of endless training sessions,
some valuable - some, not so much.
Sound like we’re not enjoying training? Guess you could say that, in our minds, the
down side is winning this battle. But,
off we go, on our two hour rutiera ride to Chisinau then a quick change to the
local bus and 20 minutes later we are back in our training village. Arriving at the house was very much like
going “home” since it was our first home here in Moldova and we lived in it
longer than we have been at our new site.
Seeing Iulia was great but there was definitely an air of
melancholy about her, she commented that things were very difficult without
Sasha. The next day Iulia tried to talk
to us a bit as she left for work and told us that there was someone sleeping in
the house – we did not quite understand everything she said but since our area
was accessed from a separate outside door we did not think it would be a
problem if someone was staying with her so we just settled in, went about our
business and thought no more of it.
As it turns out the man sleeping in the house was her son,
Vitaly who lives in Russia, he had come back to Moldova to visit his mother and
to handle some legal paperwork. He is
the spitting image of his father Sasha; we were absolutely amazed when we saw
him! He speaks almost no Romanian and we
have no Russian but he makes a valiant effort and we do our best with charades
and whatever else we can do to communicate.
When we were here in June and July the house was very quiet,
we were able to study and we saw quite a bit of Lilia and her children. This time, Sasha is catching up with all the
friends he has not seen for many years, there are people we don’t know over at
the house all the time, particularly when Iulia is at work. Thankfully with the door shut we can block
most of the noise, but the trick is, getting in and through the garden into the
house before anyone sees us, if we get seen it means stopping to try to chat
and of course to have a few drinks.
Studying goes right out the window if you start drinking with Moldovans
right after class.
We did have the pleasure of seeing Lilia, Daniela, Iuliana
and Bogdan again and spent a couple of delightful evenings visiting with Iulia
and the family. Our language was
definitely better, but we still struggled mightily. Daniela still had to do quite a bit of
translating.
The language lessons were challenging in ways we had not
anticipated. Since we were working with
a tutor, we were in a completely different place in our learning than the
classes were geared for. Mike and I were
in different classes and the content was not consistent between the
classes. It was not that we were ahead
or behind, we were just studying different things. All in all, Mike felt that his language
lessons were not very valuable where I felt that I did get value from mine.
Most of the other “training sessions” were handled by
volunteers who came to Moldova a year before we did and had some experiences to
share. While some of it was interesting
we found that some of the younger volunteers who spoke to us appeared to be
less involved in their own communities than we were already in ours. They spoke of the difficulty in gaining the
respect of their Moldovan counterparts and about many of the challenges they
faced.
In these sessions we were struck by the realization that we
were having a very different experience for one very simple reason. Age, we are older than the average volunteer. The culture in Moldova ascribes a certain
amount of respect to people simply on the basis that you have lived life for a
while. It is interesting to note that in
Moldova “youth” programs are open to anyone age 18-29 and many are open for
people up to age 35. The age grid in
Moldova goes something like this:
Under 19 – child
20 to 30-35 – youth
35 to 50 – adult
50 to 65 – experienced, respected older person
65 and on up – very respected elder (as in, why aren’t you
dead yet?)
In the time we were in our training village the weather went
from late summer to decidedly fall.
There is no heat in the room we were in (the camera mare) so we found
that we were heading for bed early whenever possible just to stay warm. The outhouse is a long ways away when it is
5C outside! We poured buckets of water
heated on the stove into the barrel atop the summer shower every other day or
so. Multiple layers of clothes, sweaters
and jackets were piled on as October began and training wound up.
Many of the volunteers planned to spend the weekend after
training in Chisinau as the first weekend in October is the National Wine Festival. While we love wine and were very interested
in the Festival, we found ourselves really wanting to be back at our site. We figured that the festival would happen
again next year so there would be another chance to attend.
Reversing our trip we found ourselves back home and as we
walked from the bus station to our home we found a whole lot of activity in our
main square and surprise, surprise, we have our own wine festival brewing up
for Sunday! We were so glad we did not
stay in Chisinau.
Back at the house we found Andrei preparing the first soba
of the year to warm one of our rooms. A
soba, for those of you who don’t know, is a special fireplace designed to heat
a wall of a room. I don’t think it was
an hour before our Peace Corps carbon monoxide monitor was shrieking. Andrei came running up the stairs wanting to
know what all the commotion was about.
We aired out the room and reset the monitor and it didn’t go off again
that night. We simply assumed that the
chimneys needed to air themselves out a little.
We turned our attention to unpacking the rest of our luggage
to get to the coats and boots that had not been out of the bags since our
arrival. Looking forward to the festival
we also found ourselves anxious to get to work, with no more interruptions in
sight, and even more anxious about the onset of winter, we have not experienced
a real winter since moving to California in 1988.
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