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.