And the real work begins...

September rolled around and it already felt like fall.  Daily high temperatures rarely exceed the low sixties and overnight lows were dropping into the forties.  School started and while we did not attend any, all of the schools in our town put on elaborate opening festivities.  After living in the southern U.S. for so many years and after a year of chasing the sun, we were not looking forward to our first winter in a long time.

Both of us were settling into a routine.  Being us, we saw no reason to sit around in our offices when there was nothing to do.  Better to explore our town, try to use our language and talk about existing and potential projects.  So, after a couple of hours of face time in the office we usually met for lunch and went out and about.

There was plenty to do at the incubator, in our opinion, but we soon were faced with the realities of Moldova.  Shoddy work (for example, construction work) is shrugged at and paid for anyway.  Inventory management is science fiction.  For that matter, it does no good to make plans here because assuredly, at the last minute, something more important will come up.  Business and politics are not separate things here either…..but that’s all I’m going to say about it.

My partner, probably in frustration, introduced me to his 26 year old son Ivan.  Ivan had worked a few years in American and spoke an intermediate level of English.  The three of us spoke about several project ideas and we settled on three to proceed with.  In my opinion, two of these projects were great ideas.

First off, we focused on the rest and relaxation park.  Being relatively new to my site and Moldova I had yet to realize that this is one of the basic ideas that every Moldovan confronted with the freedom to imagine a business will envision.  Animal farms, spas, children’s playgrounds, hair salons, bars or small stores follow close behind.  (Wow, that’s almost a complete list).  Ivan and I planned to visit a few existing parks over the next month or so.

Next up, a plastic recycling project that we all agreed was a good idea.  We designed the project and started doing research.  It looked like all the pieces were in place for a great project.  Ivan and I both liked the project because not only would it address a community need, if it worked it would provide much needed clothing to rural children living in poverty.

Finally, we focused on our large, ambitious project.  Forgive me if I am a little vague here but my partners have asked that I don’t speak with anyone about this particular idea.  Not that it’s extremely original.  It’s nothing like that; it’s more like once somebody has an idea in Moldova, and it looks like it might work, several other people will decide to do the same thing.

Anyway, once again our research was providing positive results.  We attended an agricultural trade show (yes my partner is the local director of the national agricultural extension program known as ACSA) and located several firms that provided just what we needed.  We spoke to potential customers and also a few potential beneficiaries (this was also a complicated project) and obtained some high quality, positive information.  Next on the list was to send out a Request for Proposal.

Silly me; this is apparently a process that is unknown in Moldova, probably in Eastern Europe and possibly in Eurasia as a whole.  In order to move the project along swiftly, I wrote the RFP but since I could only handle the English speaking firms, and there were no Romanian speaking firms, I needed my partners to translate it into Russian for there were several Russian firms that only spoke that language.  Not one American firm was willing to consider a project as small as ours.

Did I mention that I spent most of the month learning about a whole new industry?  I had to do this in spite of Ivan having worked in this industry, in the U.S. for several months.  We even had a volunteer from AIDC/VOCA email us several times although he treated us like bumpkins.  I guess we are bumpkins come to think of it.  The project was moving forward quickly.

That’s enough about work.  Lilia returned from her seminar in Ukraine after the first week of the month and a few days later our host family had yet another barbeque.  Charcoal briquettes are not generally used in our town; maybe not in Moldova.  Wood, of any kind, is burned until there are sufficient embers to cook meat (in Uruguay they call this a parilla). 

I digress.  At this particular barbeque we were introduced to an interesting combination; raw onion and aged sheep cheese followed by a bite of bread and a quaff of red vin de casa (homemade wine).  Mmmm Mmmm Good!

On a Sunday in the middle of the month we went to the bus station to catch the autobus to Balți for our language tutoring session.  The bus was full and the driver wouldn’t let us on and we walked away to look for a rutiera.  Five minutes later, he stopped at the corner we were at and started letting people on.  My God I have never seen such a thing.

This is a small, 20 passenger bus and there must have been 50 people on it, most of them in some weird yoga position in order to accommodate the other passengers.  I couldn’t stand erect because of an overhead handrail, someone’s butt was pressed firmly into my stomach and I had a man’s arm in my face while his wife’s head was in my armpit.  I was worried about Marilyn who had somehow been pressed, back first, against the large windshield and prayed that we wouldn’t get into a collision.  There has got to be a better way!

Forty-five interminable minutes and 25 kilometers later we staggered off the bus, stiff and sore but glad the trip was over.  “Never again” we vowed.

Another Peace Corps Volunteer, our friend Arun, came to visit our town for a day.  He was able to catch a bus directly to the center of our town and we had a nice time showing him around and telling each other about our experiences over lunch. 

At the end of the day Arun had to travel back to his town, about 30 kilometers away.  The logistics for this were incredible.  First, he had to catch a taxi or a bus or in this case, a ride from my partner, to the national highway.  Then he had to flag down a passing rutiera for the 15 kilometer trip to the road to his town.  Finally, he had to hitchhike the final 8 kilometers into his town.  Hitchhiking is not generally free in Moldova, unless you know the driver.  People pick you up and expect money for gas.  That seems fair.

Sound like we were all a little confused?  Correct.  Part of being a new Peace Corps Volunteer is to figure it out.  We were just getting started in our service but we felt like we’d made a good start and were excited about our work, our town, our language tutors and the people we’d met.  We thought we were doing a good job integrating into our community and were getting some traction on our projects.  Did I mention that it was getting colder?

Suddenly, it all came to an end.  Drop everything and return to Ciorescu for another two weeks of training.  Whoopee!  

Integration into a new community and a new life.

August 9^th - Less than two weeks on site and we have to return to Chișinău to complete our residency paperwork at the immigration office.  The 2 hour trip means that we will lose an entire day, frustrating because we are scheduled to return to Chișinău on the 15th for the Peace Corps Moldova 20 year celebration and volunteer swearing-in ceremony.  We discovered that if we miss the 2 o’clock bus to our town from Chișinău we are in for a 40 minute walk into our town from where other rutieras drop us off.

August 11^th – Our host family took us to the city (population approximately 140,000) of Balți on Sunday afternoon where we wandered around the large open air market area eventually stopping for a refreshing beverage.  On the way home Lilia pointed out a street corner where there were 30 or 40 people gathered and told us that it was where we could catch a maxi-taxi back to our town.  We wondered why anyone would choose to ride with 7 or 8 people crammed into a taxi.  Boy was our education just beginning!

August 12th & 13th – Frustrating couple of days at the office for both of us.  Although my partner had driven us out to a farm and an orchard and introduced us to the farmers, we could barely understand what they were saying we were becoming rather bored at our respective offices.

August 14th & 15th – Traveled by rutiera to Ciorescu to see our host mother from PST (training) before the ceremony on the following day.  We brought a chicken as a gift for here but when we arrived she was asleep so we sat outside chatting for awhile.  Iulia woke later and immediately prepared a lunch of battered and fried fish and salad made fresh from the garden.  Later that evening the entire family came over and we found that Iulia had cooked the damned chicken for our dinner!

The next day we took a combination of autobus, trolleybus and rutiera to the ceremony and back to the bus station or autogara.  We were so proud of ourselves that we had navigated the confusing Chișinău public transportation system successfully for the first time. 

Back in our town we found that our partners hadn’t missed us and there was very little for us to do except to wander about and explore the place where we would be living for two years.  We were excited for the weekend because on Sunday we would travel on our own to Balți for a session with our new and highly recommended Romanian grammar tutor.  We were also informed that for the next two weeks Lilia (and I’m not sure but maybe Andrei) would be observing “post” for the next two weeks.  We were not looking forward to the vegan diet this would mean for us.

We were lucky on Sunday to catch a passing rutiera going to Balți.  Later we learned that it is uncommon for rutieras to pass through our town, especially on Sunday morning.  On the trip home however, we couldn’t find an autobus scheduled to leave for our town in less than 3 hours so we wandered over to the street corner that Lilia had pointed out to us the previous week and amazingly enough there were a couple of maxi-taxis waiting for a few more passengers before leaving for our town.  The trip was quick and cheap.  What a convenient alternative!  We were starting to believe we were figuring things out.

The rest of the month passed with increasing frustrations in the office for both of us.  We both hated that our lack of language skills kept us from communicating with our partners and that there was very little for us to do except study the language.  We did get to know our town a little better and had found where the 4 small cafes were located along with the important small shops where we could purchase what we needed.  We felt fortunate that we could find most of what we needed in our town.

In Moldova, August 27 is Independence Day and the 31^st is “Language Day”.  This year there would be a four day weekend starting on the 24^th and Saturday was spent cleaning the house.  It is only August but we could feel fall coming.  On Sunday we traveled to Orhei Vechi to see the second day of the “Gustar” music festival (think Country Thunder on a small scale).

On Monday the 27^th, a holiday, it was pouring rain as we caught an autobus to Balți to see our tutor Nadejda.  We discovered that the autobus was very crowded, took 20 minutes longer to make the trip because it seemed to stop every few hundred yards and cost more that the rutieras charge.  It was determined that from now on we would catch rutieras.  It turns out that wasn’t exactly a good plan.

Independence Day began with the dedication of a new monument commemorating those who died at Chernobyl, in the war with Transnistra, and in Afghanistan from our town and we attended the two hour ceremony with Andrei and Lilia. 

We spend the rest of the day enjoying the nice but rapidly cooling weather.  Lilia left in the evening to attend a seminar in Ukraine for a week and Andrei was only going to be home sporadically while she was gone so we had some extended time to ourselves for the first time since we had arrived in Moldova. 

The rest of the month was spent trying to communicate with our partners and harder still, to get something, anything, accomplished.  The final day of the month was another typical Moldovan holiday with bands playing and many speeches.  Later, after helping Andrei clean the house a little we went to one of the local cafes to sit outside and enjoy the nice weather.

We had been at our site for one month.  We had explored out town.  We had been introduced to several people including the raion council president and vice presidents and the mayor.  We had discovered a few things about the public transportation system, been frustrated with the inability to communicate or accomplish anything but we felt that we were slowly integrating into our small community.  Although we were being patient we found ourselves wondering about the usefulness of our lives as volunteers in our community.