O Sa Avem Lectii La Poama

"Do students in America pick grapes like this in the fall, or do you harvest something else?" came the obvious question many times today.

"No," I responded to teachers and students. "We have Mexican immigrants who pick our grapes."

And with that, hopefully not letting on too many Moldovans to the fact that they are the European equivalents of America's south-of-the-border amigos, I started my first grape harvest.

Most rural Moldovan schools—that is to say, most Moldovan schools—take off time in the fall for harvesting. The crop can be apples, grapes, or others, depending on what the village's biggest product is. In Mereseni, it's grapes. While the lower grades stay in classes at the school, every student in the fifth grade or older works a six-hour day in the fields. Every student brings their own gardening shears and 10-liter bucket, as students fill truckloads of grapes every day. The pay is less than stellar, 1.40 lei per bucket, meaning that an average ninth-grader who picks 30 buckets a day will make about 45 lei, or just under $4. The hardest-working ninth-grader I had in my group was a girl who pulled in 52 buckets, giving her about $6.

We started the day at 8:30 a.m. in the hills and each class quickly went its own way. I brushed aside a teacher's comment that I should accompany the 11th-grade girls because they're pretty, just as I had the night before explained to an 11th-grade boy that I would dance with any 22-year-old he brought to the school dance, but that I would not slow-dance with any students. And so in the jumble of students going with theirВ diriginteВ (a sort of homeroom teacher or guidance counselor that stays with a class for all 11 years), I fell in with the ninth grade, section "a," with Doamna Larisa and 10 students whom I hadn't met before.

The system is not incredibly difficult. The supervisor from the company employing us tells us where to start, and we continue to divvy up the rows by class. Each student gets one side of a row, and teachers mark the row with chalk saying which class picked from that row. When students have full pails, they get their teacher's attention, call out their roll number (today, Sveta was one, Zinaida two, Maria three, etc.) and give their bucket to one of the 11th-grade boys in the truck bed in charge of turning the buckets. When the students call out to the teacher, the teacher puts a tally mark next to their name. I must say I was impressed with the tally system, which creates a base-10 system out of dots and lines; numbers one through four are expressed by dots on the corners of a square, five through eight are made by drawing edges of the square, and nine and ten finish the design with diagonals through the box. Each unit of ten buckets looks like a box with an X in it, making it easy to count quickly.

Because these two weeks (or more, possibly) take my students out of classes, I am slowly figuring out ways to turn these days into small English lessons. Late in the day, I began telling my ninth-graders how many buckets they had, and asking them what that number was in English. Some of them knew, although numbers bigger than 10 tend to be a problem for two-thirds of all students, regardless of age. Amazingly, one of my fifth-graders (this is the class that I had to teach personal pronouns and the conjugation of "to be") walked by, and when I began quizzing here, she knew all of her numbers; 25, 52, 33, all within two seconds of though. It was the happiest moment of my day, because it confirmed that my fifth-graders had actually learned something in the three years before I arrived. From now on, I will try to conduct the numbers part of the harvest only in English. Even when the demands of rural life take away my 18 hours a week, I have to work with the time that I do have with my students.

As I walked back down the hill at 2:45 with some students, I asked one of my fifth-graders in English how she liked her first day.

"I didn't like it," Vica replied in Romanian.

"Why not?" I continued in English (this is how many student conversations go for me, and remembering back to my years of studying language, I often responded to French or German questions in English).

"Pentru ca m-am mordarit," she said.В "Because I got dirty." Girls will be girls. Although to be fair to the gender as a whole, the older girls had no problem with the lack of cleanliness.

When I got home, I ate a huge lunch after seven hours without food, and took a nap.В Thursday I will be staying home to catch up on Peace Corps paperwork; if you think paperwork at a government job is bad, try working for two governments at the same time. But on Friday, I will be back in the fields, and the informal lessons will continue.

A Glimpse of My Life

My rutiera ride yesterday from Hincesti to Chisinau was pleasant and only lasted about 35 minutes. The small child sitting directly in front of me was silent for the entire ride. The duck behind me, however, was a little noisier. He started making noises after 10 minutes and sounded out five times over the course of the ride. I counted each time as I sat and grinned to myself.

Danseaza si fuge? Domnul Peter este bravo!

One of the things I knew when I chose the small village of Mereseni for two years was that I was going to be a popular teacher where every student would know me after two years. Just by teaching half of the fifth-through-eighth graders, I am teaching about a fifth of the school. But quickly, I have seen opportunities to be active with more students.

One of my two seventh-grade classes has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic to invite me to every extracurricular event. The first occurred last Friday, when they asked me in the middle of class if I was going to the disco that night. As I knew well from my days in Costesti, the disco at a town's casa de culturaВ is full of older high-schoolers and younger 20-somethings getting drunk, so I knew that I could not go and still have a reputation as a teacher. But my seventh-graders told me that the disco was not at the casa de cultura, but was instead a booze-free dance club in the cafeteria of the school every Friday. Hearing this, I said I would try to make it.

The dance started at 8 p.m., and after Desperate HousewivesВ ended on Romanian TV (English with Romanian subtitles) at 9, I made the 10-minute walk to the school. It would normally be a five-minute walk, but walking on dirt roads in the dark significantly increases increases your travel time. (I will absolutely rock at Night Banana when the 2007 season kicks in.) After talking with Doamna Elena, the physical education teacher who runs the weekly disco, I walked into the cafeteria. For a moment, I felt like Brad Pitt walking into a middle-school dance, because every one of my students' hands went to the sky amid shouts of joy. Not exactly knowing what to do, I sat down for 30 seconds before my students told me to dance in a circle with them. I obliged.

For the first 45 minutes, I couldn't stop laughing. All of the characteristics of my old middle-school dances were present, such as bad dancing, several of the girls towering over the boys and slow dances that clear the floor in two seconds while the boys and girls sit in separate areas, where the boys work up the courage for three minutes and then dance with a girl for the final 30 seconds. Memories of 4'11" Peter asking 5'7" Nicole Marek to dance in eighth grade came flooding back more vibrantly than ever before.

What happens in Moldova more than I remember happening in America is the natural separation of boys and girls circles for the middle-schoolers. Ninth, tenth and eleventh-graders at the dance had no problems with co-ed dancing, but the younger girls, probably sick of the boys after the first 30 minutes, went off to dance by themselves. In America, this would be a crippling blow for the boys. Here, the boys dance in their own circle and have a hell of a time anyway. It was only in the all-boys circle that the serious efforts at break-dancing were undertaken. Well, maybe "serious" isn't the word I want to use. One sixth-grader who is not my student managed to stomp up, down and sideways furiously in the middle of the circle and call it dancing.

I was impressed, however with the dancing of Ilie, a seventh-grader of mine who always speaks English in class, with the emphasis being on "always". Although I have yet to find a seat for him in the class where he will not be hyper-active, I like him. It helps that he wears a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt, even if he thought that the team was from New York. Friday night, though, he took off the sweatshirt to reveal a wife-beater undershirt and proceeded to show off his dance moves. In summary, not bad for a white boy.

I mostly stuck to dancing with my students, mostly because they're my students, and also because the energetic dancing of middle-school boys is replaced by a slow back-and-forth rocking by the time those boys are in 10th grade, making it decidedly un-fun.В 

The other time that I stayed away from the older students was this Wednesday, when I knew they would outclass me in the weekly running competition. So instead, I ran in Tuesday's race with the middle-schoolers. The boys ran four laps around the village's soccer field, and the girls ran two laps. I came in at a solid middle of the pack among middle-school boys, but to be optimistic, I ran a lot better this week than I did when I was their age.

The disco and the race provided me with the first smack-my-head moment in Mereseni. Doamna Elena, the P.E. teacher and someone who I can definitely get along with in planning extracurriculars for the next two years, collected a small entrance fee of several lei from every student that came to the disco. She then asked me if I could possibly find a way to get some soccer balls, basketballs and volleyballs from America. I said that it was possible, but that I was here to set up systems so that the school could buy balls when I was gone. I then asked her what she used the money for that she collected from the students.

"For the races," she said. "They're prizes for the first, second and third place finishers. It gives them a reason to run."

I held my tongue because I wasn't sure how well I could elaborate my views in Romanian on the fly, but I will certainly raise the following questions with her in the next week or two:В 

<li>Why do half of the kids in the school run afterschool, while most of the rest of the school watches from the side? They can't all want money, because the majority of them don't have a chance. I would argue that they run for fun, whether or not there's a prize involved.</li>

<li>Do the students who try a little harder for a prize really want money, or do they just want some sort of prize? Would a prize as simple as a pencil be just as rewarding?</li>

<li>Which would the students want the money used for more, prizes for the 18 fastest runners in the school, or balls that the entire school can use?</li>

It's these small bits of thinking that I think I am here to bring to Mereseni. These little tinkerings are the ones that can have the biggest contribution. If after three months, the school can buy its own new basketball and volleyball for the winter, then I will consider it a success.В 

In the meantime, I'm putting together a mix CD of American and British hip-hop and techno music for next week's disco. Even if students don't know the lyrics, I really don't feel comfortable dancing with them all to the current selection of DMX's "Up In Here".

Ce Fel De Botez?

When I last wrote, I was coming to grips with having students in my English class who are not very talented—or anywhere close to grade-level—in English. That initial shock and worry washed away instantly with one trip to Chisinau and one hell of a baptism.

Saturday was the baptism of Claudio, my 33-year-old brother's two-month-old son. Igor, my host brother, lives in Chisinau, and so the evening's festivities allowed me to come into Chisinau for the day. If you're wondering what festivities can be attached to a baptism other than a lightly social coffee hour with a few presents, then you obviously haven't attended a baptism in Moldova. But more on that later.

Chisinau is a sort of mini-vacation and a breath of sanity in the life of a Moldovan volunteer. Here there are stores (gasp!), restaurants (double-gasp!) and even a small English-language movie theater (asthma-induced panic attack!). You can buy an imported beer (Baltica is a nice brand if you can find it in the States, and a Baltica 9 can wreck you with just 12 oz.), go into a mall and laugh at how you can't afford any of the clothes there, and buy literature from the one English-language book store.

Yes, I did all of these things Saturday, although I had a milder Baltica 5 instead of a 9. I arrived at Peace Corps headquarters at 11 a.m. and watched some of CNN's coverage of Hurricane Katrina. It seems that my realization in the past week of how bad the situation was came slower than the president's, if that's possible. This is a dark September for Americans, and being far away from it does not necessarily soften the gloom.

As is always the case with CNN, I could only watch so much in one sitting, so fellow volunteer Krista and I left to run some errands and enjoy ourselves. I was able to buy some books: Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch and About a Boy, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Total cost for the books was less than $40, which seemed cheap in America but equates to almost 500 lei, or a month-and-a-half's rent money. I have immersed myself in reading in Moldova to levels that are only rivaled by childhood summers when I had no friends. I read seven books this summer, and I just started J.R.R. Tolkien's Return of the King Sunday after reading The Two Towers in a week.

Krista reads even more than I do, and over the summer I had teased her for reading the novelization of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie flick. She got the last laugh, however, since Mr. and Mrs. Smith was playing at the English-language movie theater on Saturday, and we each paid 15 lei ($1.20) for a matinee show in an upstairs room about the size of a luxurious home theater with a decent sound system. The movie was standard popcorn fare, and Krista said that she liked the novelization's ending better.

After running a few more errands—I was so excited to find Gillette after-shave and deodorant that I paid $8 for them—I put on some nice clothes and waited for my host family to pick me up outside the Peace Corps office. We arrived at the church for the final 10 minutes of the baptism, but according to the Moldovan traditions, the after-party is the important part; we were there early.

We drove with five other cars to a small but luxurious restaurant that Igor and his wife, Natalia, had rented for the occasion. As I entered the restaurant, three large strings of banquet tables were arranged in the shape of pi, able to sit about 70 in total. The walls were painted a shade of peach, and had various small window-like inlets where objects of art were placed. To the left were the doors to the two indoor bathrooms. A few feet past those doors was a small bar/stationing area and the door to the kitchen. To the right was set the musicians for the evening; a 55-year-old man with a KORG synthesizer, a microphone and a machine that had all of the drum beats and rhythms necessary for the evening's music; a similarly-aged violinist with pick-ups on his bridge to plug the sound into the amplifier mix; a slightly older man playing a hammer dulcimer that was barely audible all night; and a 35-year-old woman who was able to belt out traditional and popular songs from Moldova, Romania, Ukraine, Russia and America without an accent and with good vocal quality.

But of more immediate attention as I entered was the round table, 4 feet in diameter, with a pitcher of wine and eight glasses placed on a tray. One by one, people presented flowers to Igor and Natalia and drank a token amount of wine to toast to the baby's health. I gave three flowers (very important to have an odd number, although it hasn't been explained to me yet why) and drank some wine, although I evidently have not gotten used to the custom of greeting women whom I've met once before with a kiss, and the discomfort was obvious.

I had noticed that many of the women were holding prayer candles and small bouquets of flowers. While it seemed like a bad idea as they all gave Natalia candles, I assumed that the flowers had enough moisture in them to resist fire. Even if they didn't, what harm could one or two burning flowers do? I didn't realize the other fire hazard until it was too late. As Natalia leaned in to kiss a friend, the friend's candle ignited the hair hanging in front of Natalia's right shoulder—I had forgotten about hair spray. Igor beat the fire out quickly, and another woman was designated the candle-holder so that history would not repeat.

After a few photographs (more about the ever-present Moldovan desire to have professional videos and photos made for every important event in some other post), everyone came through the line-up again and gave gifts of clothes, stuffed animals and toys. I, being a teacher, gave several Romanian-language children's books that I bought from a street vendor. Claudio, the baby, was then placed on top of the three-feet-high pile of gifts and hoisted by all of the women as the band played MulИ›i Ani TreascДѓ, or Live Many Years. After removing Claudio from the pile, the men took the gifts into a side room and everyone sat down to eat.

The ordinary Moldova dinner table is a feast by many standards. For a special occasion, families will put many tables together and have a huge masДѓ, which literally means "table" or "feast". But for huge events such as this, nothing beats a professionally catered masДѓ, with wine, champagne, cognac, vodka for the masses and water and orange soda for the light-hearted. All of the food is put out on communal plates on the table, and people serve themselves by putting anything they want at that moment onto the six-inch-diameter plate in front of them (the plate is seemingly always six inches wide, regardless of where you are). With foods that can be stabbed rather than scooped, however, people are more likely to stick their forks in and eat directly off the communal plates. I believe there was a week when I first got here when this bothered me. Now I just notice which pieces of bread my host father touches when his hands are particularly dirty and continue about my meal.

A faint recollection of the foods served:
bread, cheeses and cold cuts;
cucumbers, tomatoes and other vegetables;
fruits ranging from oranges to kiwis;
pastries filled with crab meat;
tomatoes cut in half and topped with cheese;
various salads with egg, corn and other tasty bits;
chicken that had been sat upright with a cartoonish human head in place of the real head, which was a lot cuter than it may read;
sardines and other fish;
the infamous chicken jelly dish that I have still avoided tasting;
lightly battered and fried chicken with mushroom stuffing;
meat kabobs;
sarmale, which are sweet peppers stuffed with or cabbage leaves wrapped around rice and seasonings;
a desert pastry similar to raspberry crepes with whipped cream piled on top;
cake.

That's 14 dishes, and I'm sure that I'm forgetting one or two that didn't make a strong impression on me or weren't close to my seat. Don't worry if this seems like too much food, because we stretched it out from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., being sure to mix in many drinks and a lot of dancing. I lost count of my drinks early on, but I'm sure I clocked in about 10, and it doesn't help that Moldovans don't believe in sipping. This is definitely a Down Your Drink culture, whether it's a shot of wine, champagne, vodka, cognac, a cherry liquor called viИ™inatДѓ or any other homemade liquor loosely called rachiu. Beer isn't taken in one gulp, but it's not given its proper sipping time either.

As for dancing, I must say that it's nice to dance in a country where everyone's white and there aren't any really good dancers. The most complicated dance involves holding hands in a circle and can be picked up in the course of one song. But more often than not, the dancing is free-form and awful, which is great for me. After more than a decade of shame, I can dance simply for hours and throw in something ridiculous now and then; no one will say anything, because they're all bad, too. The Boris the Dancing Bear combination of shimmying and close-fisted disco hand motions is quite common, especially in the case of Dumitru, my 57-year-old host father who stands at about 5'5" and often looks like a pudgy and smiling elf. My host cousin, Ion, who met me for the first time that night, was quite adamant that I dance and that I was in the center circle as often as possible. I was happy to do what he said, until he told me I should dance with his wife. If that's a cultural thing, I haven't heard of it before.

At about 12 a.m., no one had left, and it was time for the cumnatrii, or the child's sponsors, to fulfill another part of their ceremonial duties. For every sponsor, Sergiu (Igor's brother) and Micha (Natalia's brother) walked down the aisle between the two tables, carrying ceremonial bread and a new set of cook-wear for Igor and Natalia. Each sponsor kissed the bread, gave a short speech and presented a gift anywhere between 1000 lei ($80) and 200 Euros. This ceremonial part got a little tiring after five sponsors, mostly because they talked too quietly for everyone to hear. But afterward, there was more drinking, dancing and eating. Most people left at 1:30 a.m., and I stayed with the family at the restaurant until about 2, when we got into Sergiu's car and drove back to sleep a few hours in MereИ™eni.

Was all of this ceremony really necessary? Certainly not. Will Claudio have even the faintest memory of his baptism? Of course not. But was it a great reason to get a lot of family and friends together at a nice restaurant and party hard in a ceremony full of frumos things? You bet it was, and it was a great time.

More Work Than I Thought

After one ceremonial first day of school and the first day of actual lessons, I can officially say that I have a lot of work to do here. These kids are sweet, smart and excited, but they sure as hell can't speak English.

We'll start with the good part, which was Thursday, September 1, the nationwide first day of school every year. At 9 a.m. students, parents and teachers waited in the school's front courtyard as I walked out with the school's adjunct director, the mayor and the Hincesti raion's director of English curriculum. (The director of the school, who is also the mayor's wife, was not present because she unexpectedly left last week to work in Italy for an undetermined length of time. I'll need to write on illegal emigration some other time, but suffice it to say for now that Moldova is the European equivalent of Guatemala, and if you have a chance to work somewhere else for more money, you pay an exorbitant amount of money to be driven across the borders in secrecy.)

The ceremony began with a tape of the Moldovan national anthem, Limba Noastra, playing on a small, yet loud boom-box. Then the oldest class, the 11th-graders, parading to the front of the remarkably well-organized crowd of 300 and leading in the newest class, the first-graders. There are between 15 and 30 children per grade in the school, so there were approximately 40 students coming in. Doamna Maria, our adjunct director, gave a short presentation, followed by the mayor, also named Petru. At one point in his improvised speech, which was peppered with many calls for health and many years and success, he mentioned that he liked having an American come to Mereseni with the same name. The raional director of the English curriculum, whose name I will fill in at a later date so that it doesn't look like I've met this woman three times and still don't know her name, gave another short speech and then presented me.

My time to shine, as I picked up my small Peace Corps-issued notebook where I had scribbled out a page-long speech the night before. The English version of the speech (which I wrote in Romanian with only two or three corrections from my host sister and dictionary consultations only to check the spellings of words that I already know and use all the time) can be found below. When I finished, I received large amounts of applause and calls of "Bravo!" as well as excessive amounts of flowers.
It seemed that at every small transition in the ceremony, a different student was giving me flowers of some sort, and when I finally managed to bring them home, I had enough to fill three vases; one for the living room, one for the kitchen and one for my nightstand. Moldovan students love giving flowers and gifts to their teachers. In Practice School in Costesti, I received a six-inch tall sculpture of two doves one week and a picture frame with a teddy bear riding in a baby carriage. Where they find these things, I don't know, but I like getting them anyway.

Next in the ceremony was the first-graders performing several songs with the musical accompaniment of an upright piano that was wheeled out to the front of the school. As with any group of six year olds trying to put together a melody, they sounded cacophonous and cute, and even if I knew every word in the Romanian language I wouldn't have been able to understand them.

After them, the 11th graders sang several songs, presented the first graders with notebooks, pencils and a two-foot-long symbolic key to the school and then addressed each grade level with two or three specific sentences. Not many of these 16 and 17 year olds had a very commanding presence or loud voice, and so the crowd began to get restless. Even the mayor was talking in a not-too-quiet whisper, and even my much-practiced movie theater turn-around "shut up" glare had no effect. I guess when you don't go to movie theaters, you don't learn how to react to the turn-around "shut up" glare.

When the 11th graders were finished, two 11th grade boys hoisted a boy and a girl from the first grade onto their shoulders and walked around in a large circle as the boy and girl rang the ceremonial first bell of school, bringing the only heartfelt applause of the day. The students who had paraded in to begin the ceremony now filed into the school to applause that couldn't last for the necessary 45 seconds while retaining authenticity. But there it was. The school year had begun, and the next day would begin lessons.

And oh, what lessons they were. On Friday, I had the fifth grade, the seventh grade and half of the sixth grade. Even then, I only had a half of each group, as the other half goes with Domnisoara Sveta, my counterpart. It was the same lesson for every class: the students came one-by-one to the front of the class and answered a few general questions about themselves, including their name, age and favorite hobby. Then we would read over the classroom rules, in English and Romanian. Then we would take a pressure-free test reviewing the previous year's curriculum in which every student who didn't copy would receive a 10, the highest mark possible. A reasonable expectation for students who have studied the language since they started in second grade, I thought.

Wrong.

I had been warned by other volunteers after Mereseni's first week of practice school that the students were far behind the level of the textbooks, but after teaching wealthier students in Costesti, I had no idea what I was in for. In my "more advanced" half of the classes, there were many students for whom I needed to directly translate the question into Romanian, get their answer in Romanian, and then have them repeat the English answer in two-word segments. I had seventh graders not knowing how to say that they were 13 years old. But on the plus side, they all knew how to say their name in a complete sentence. I have no idea how I will teach the students who I couldn't get to say one word of English, and who didn't write a word on the test after 15 minutes. But I really don't have a choice, and so I need to start getting creative very quickly. I needed to call a fellow volunteer, Jess A., before I even got done with the five-minute walk home, and complain to her. She was having some of the same frustrations, as many of her 10th graders in Ialoveni didn't know the personal pronouns.

As a side note, talking on a cell phone while standing on a dirt road next to a pile of rocks and broken cinder blocks behind my school and in front of the under-construction church while wearing a long-sleeved shirt, pants and a tie made me feel like a stock-broker who had been sucked into a black hole and transported into another dimension, which in fact isn't too far from the facts.

The bottom line for today, and the one that I repeated many times to my host family when I got home: Eu am mult lucru sДѓ fac. I've got a lot of work to do.

My Speech on the First Day of School (Translated into English)

Hello students, parents and teachers. My name is "Domnul Peter," or "Mr. Peter" when we are in class. I came from America, and whether you believe it or not, I have waited three years to be here with you today.

Today, 33 volunteers and I are starting lessons in Moldova for the first time. We are here for two years because we want to know more about the world and we want you to learn more about America. But what is most important is that we want to help in any way that we can. I am in Mereseni for you. I have ideas right now about how I can help here, but I don't know what you want, and that is more important. When you have ideas, tell me! I cannot move mountains, but together we can work to make something special for this school and this village.

I think I am very lucky to be in Mereseni, a beautiful village where I can make acquaintances with everyone. I hope, too, that soon, your village will become our village, and your school will become our school. I am very pleased to meet everyone, and I thank you.