A Student Excerpt

I'm going to begin regular installments of student writing that strikes me as either exceptionally good, exceptionally bad, or exceptionally from the mouth of a middle-schooler. The first such excerpt is from Cristina, an eighth grader:

My brother name Alex. He is a students and he are 10 years old. Alex like sport because sport helps you to taste a sweet feeling of victory and teaches you to lose with dignity.

More to come.

Cum spalam haine la noi

For 165 days in Moldova, I have refrained from discussing the subject of laundry. Needless to say, I have washed clothes in the mean time, but I have not found it fascinating enough to discuss in a long written form. But now, since I am more than 20 percent finished with my Peace Corps service (time flies when you're learning a language and warding off homesickness), I feel that I can write a rather comprehensive piece on laundry in Moldova.

In Costesti, I washed all of my clothes by hand. This took a couple hours, and always left me with the impression that I wasn't doing it right. Surely the act of merely putting clothes in soapy water, pulling them out, rubbing them in your hands, then rinsing them could not sufficiently clean them. Of course, this is exactly what a machine does, but we don't see it working, and so we assume that washing clothes is a much more complicated and sophisticated process. The Costesti process had me working for an hour and a half to wash the equivalent of one of my loads, and it was an hour and a half of continuous and sweaty work. In the process of doing laundry, I usually sweated through the white undershirt I was wearing, which I could not wash at that moment because the washing water was dark by that time.

When I finished washing in Costesti, I would take the clothes outside and hang them on the line. Mila, my host mother, was very picky about hanging clothes on the line, because by putting her clotheslines in the front of the house, she had exposed her laundry skills to the eyes of the entire neighborhood. There were very specific rules on how to hang long-sleeved shirts, short-sleeved shirts, t-shirts and undershirts, pants, shorts, socks and underwear, in order for everything to look frumos, or "beautiful". Mila cared most that all of the items on the line faced the same way. If I placed two shirts facing in opposite directions, Mila would come to me within 15 minutes, telling that she had to re-arrange things.

But I have now lived in Mereseni longer than I lived in Costesti, so I can focus on my current system. The good news here is that we have a washing machine. But wait. Don't get too excited.В Washing machines function differently when you don't have running water in your village.

The first difference, obviously, is the delivery of water to the machine. In Mereseni, we heat five or six gallons of water on the wood- or coal-burning stove, then pour the water into the machine. We also heat another gallon or two of water and place it in a large, shallow bowl. This is for rinsing, because the machine has no source for clean rinsing water. As such, the machine agitates the soap and rubs it into the clothes, and then I have to try to rinse all the soap out of the clothes, usually with a sense of failure. I then place the clothes on the line, where they dry over the course of a couple days.

Clothes out of an American dryer are warm, soft and smell like rose petals. Clothes off the Moldovan clothesline are stiff with soap, sun-bleached and covered in lint and other remnants that never really got cleaned off of them. As I discovered Sunday, clothes off the line in freezing weather and light snow present an even larger problem. I currently have socks, underwear, sweatpants and a sweatshirt hung up on various rods and draped over several chairs in my room as they thaw. You know it's cold when you take your sweatshirt off the line and the drawstrings stand straight up.

From doing laundry, I have learned a few important lessons:

1. В  В Don't bring white clothes to the second or third world. They will never be truly clean, and you will become frustrated with your poor washing skills. Undershirts are the exception to this rule, while underwear is the double-underlined stress point to the rule.

2. В  В Wash light clothes first, because the water gets darker and darker as you keep washing. It eventually looks both chalky and muddy at the same time.

3. В  В Do your laundry several days before you need clothes, to account for drying time. To be honest, though, who knows if you wear the same underwear again?

4. В  В Don't plan on any of your clothes' vibrant colors remaining for more than three wash cycles. Even the yellow stripe on my favorite socks (they were warm and matched the Ottawa Senators colors) became gray. Is nothing sacred?

5. В  В A new washing machine with a functioning dryer costs about 2000 lei, and thanks to a certain string of Americans who have been living in my house of the past five and a half months, my host family will be buying one in the next few weeks. That means I will still have to hand-rinse, but time on the clothes line should be cut down drastically.

That's all from here. Time to prepare a lot of things for Thanksgiving break, including a new video.

Ce faci in timpul liber?

Two things in this irrelevant post:

1. The Bears have a better record than the Pats, Eagles, Packers, Vikings, Lions, Giants, Raiders and 49ers. YES!

2. People ask me what I do with my free time. I wish the answer weren't this: click for photo

Avem nevoie de ambulanta?

Last Saturday morning, I hopped into a rutiera from Cahul en route to Chisinau, expecting an uneventful 45-minute ride to the capital. The van was full, so I sat on a stool in the aisle. When we were 15 minutes away from the capital, I heard an un-human sound behind me and assumed it to be something normal, like a pig or a chicken. Then I heard shouting behind me.

"Opreste, opreste!" a man yelled behind me, calling for the driver to stop the van.

"Vania!" a 25-year-old girl screamed in front of me as she looked past me. I turned around and saw Vania, a young man who was presumably the girl's boyfriend, having a seizure three feet away from me.

First, I'll get the serious aspects of this medical emergency out of the way, so you can stop worrying. We pulled over, called an ambulance on my cell phone and kept him from going into shock while we waited. As far as I know, the guy turned out fine.

Now we can amuse ourselves with the way Moldovans with very little understanding of medicine tried to help this man in his time of need.

The first reaction anyone had was to slap the guy in the face several times. This was done by a man in his 50s who had been sitting behind me. How slapping an epileptic helps is beyond me. (I gather that he was an epileptic because his girlfriend, although very distraught, quickly told everyone that the biggest danger was him swallowing his tongue. She obviously knew his condition.)

When slapping had no apparent effect, several of the other men carried Vania out of the rutiera and laid him in the grass on the side of the road. This was smart, although they may not have known it, because it left him with nothing to hit his head on. From that point on, though, hindsight doesn't look kindly on some of their actions. The driver's first instinct when confronted with the seizure victim was to pour bottled water on his face and chest. This qualifies as a rapid temperature change and is not the best thing to do when you're trying to keep a victim warm in 45-degree weather. The driver can be excused, however, because he didn't do perhaps the least helpful and/or most dangerous action. Another man, I believe the one who had slapped Vania in the rutiera, pried open Vania's mouth and initiated three or four chest compressions. Vania was breathing and had a pulse, thus there was no need for this, and broken ribs would ahve been a possibility if the man had continued.

After the man was satisfied that Vania had a pulse, others put a purse under his head as a cushion and placed his girlfriend's coat over him. These were smart things to do. Two people then began to rub his arms in a motion that implied they were trying to return blood flow to his extremities, which they had no reason to suspect had stopped other than his clammy skin. The girlfriend was massaging the intersecting area among the eye sockets and the top of the nose. These measures weren't helping, but they weren't hurting, either, so I kept my Red Cross-trained mouth shut.

Somewhere early in the process, I asked if someone should call an ambulance. I was either not heard the first time or ignored. When I asked a second time, I was told by the girlfriend, still hysterical, that no one knew the number. I searched the Voxtel Numere UtileВ section of my phone and found Ambulanta. I started the phone dialing and gave it to the driver and told him to talk to them, not trusting my Romanian in this situation. I found a knocked-over cement mile marker (or was it a kilometer marker?) on the side of the road and gave him the number.

When the driver finished the call, he gave me back the phone and all the men began to wonder what to do next. Not wanting to do nothing, they agreed that they were wasting time waiting for the ambulance here, and that they would do better by driving toward Chisinau to try to intercept it. Since I had no idea how long the medical response time would be in a second-world country, I had no problem with this, especially when the driver used my phone again to call the paramedics and tell them we were driving toward them.

In the three minutes while we were driving in the rutiera, Vania and his girlfriend sat in the front of the passenger section, while I stood behind them, having lost my stool somewhere in the rush. The girlfriend and a random woman sitting next to them were each massaging an arm. The common wisdom on the rutieraВ was that it was too hot for Vania, so the driver rolled down the windows. This is not a strange idea in America, but in a country and a region of the world in which people fear The Current, a.k.a. fresh air that is certain to carry diseases, opening the windows was a huge risk and, I would say, a total betrayal of centuries of Moldovan common sense medical practices. Nevertheless, they did it, and in this particular situation, it might have actually been the wrong idea, since it's better to keep the patient warm to keep him from going into shock.

My worries about shock were warranted; as I stood over Vania, looking down every few seconds to check on him, I noticed his eyes closing. I turned to his girlfriend and spoke with as much medical authority as I could without knowing the words for "seizure" or "shock":

"El nu poate sa doarma," literally meaning, "He can't sleep," but not really using a correct formulation in Romanian. Better would have been, "El nu trebuie sa doarma," meaning, "He mustn't sleep." But my language teachers would be proud of my mastery of the conjunctive in the third person.

"Dar i-e somn," the girlfriend replied. "But he's tired."

"Nu, el nu poate sa doarma," I said, repeating my grammatical mistake but with an even more serious face. "Daca el doarme, este o conditie foarte rau," I said, forgetting to agree "bad" with the feminine word for "condition," yet nevertheless getting my point across that, "If he sleeps, it's a very bad condition." I must have delivered my garbled lines well, because the girlfriend snapped to it quickly and started rubbing him face and arms more fervently and telling him to wake up.

Not long afterward, we intercepted the ambulance, and the men from the rutieraВ helped Vania, who was not in shock but noticeably shaken, sweaty and pale, get in. His girlfriend got in behind him, and we piled back into our rutieraВ for the last few minutes of the drive to Chisinau. Thanks to having two fewer passengers, I even got to sit in a real seat. I got out at South Station, paid my 10 lei, and went on my way.

The Wonder of "You"

Very rarely do I complain about the Romanian language. I seldom have reason; it is, outside of French and Spanish, probably the language closest to English out of all possible Peace Corps countries. The ability to use much of my grammar and vocabulary from years of French and Spanish and adapt them to Romanian has helped me immensely with my ability to communicate. For instance, take the English and French word, "adaptation," and replace the -ion with -ie, and you have the Romanian word, "adaptatie," which means the same thing (due to limitations with the Internet, I am leaving out an important change to the second "t," which adds the equivalent of the French cedilleВ to it, but this change becomes automatic after a month or two of Romanian).

One of the things that has been difficult for me to grasp, however, has been the difference among the various formal and informal forms of "you". If one has spoken only English in one's life, it is easy to take for granted only one form of "you". But in Romanian, there are four forms of "you": tu, dumneata, voi and dumneavoastra.

The simplest and most casual is tu. This is used among friends of all ages, and young people, even when the young people are just meeting. It signifies a very close and casual relationship. Parents use it with their children, but children might or might not use it to address their parents. My 25-year-old English-teaching counterpart, Domnisoara Svetlana, and I are the only two teachers with whom students would ever even think of usingВ tu, and although it doesn't necessarily bother us, other students will usually quickly correct the student who used tu, and the student who used it might blush. Only twice have I told a student to not use tuВ with me, mostly because on each occasion, the student was being a punk. I used tuВ with my Costesti host parents (ages 40 and 34) without problems, and I might have surprised my Mereseni host parents, who are 15 years older, by using tu so quickly. But their adult sons use it, so it's not a real problem.

The next-easiest word to understand is voi. This is used to address more than one person, usually informally. This, like vosotrosВ in Spanish and vousВ in French, is equivalent to the Southern y'all. As tempting as it is to teach my students y'all, I have refrained.

Now, the ever-present dumneavoastra. Literally, it means "your lordship," which in my mind originally gave connotations that one would only use it with a work superior, the elderly, police officers and the president—although I'd probably use tu with Bush, just to piss him off. Basically, anyone with whom we would use "sir" or "ma'am," we should use dumneavoastra.

Well, my original understanding was way off. Now I know to basically address anyone over the age of 30 as dumneavoastra, and to not expect it back. You should use dumneavoastra with shop clerks, waiters and your work colleagues. I use it with all but four teachers at the school, and the only time I didn't use it with a waiter was with a 16-year-old kid whom I was telling to cancel my order because everyone else at the table had finished eating and my lasagna had yet to arrive.

As if the rules of dumneavoastraВ and tuВ weren't complicated enough, out of freaking nowhere comes the obscure and almost completely unusable dumneata, which is in the middle between dumneavoastraВ and tu. This is going completely overboard with degrees of formality, and I refuse to discuss it or understand it.

It is strange to be expressly told your status with a person based on the personal pronoun they use, and I personally don't like it. In high school in America, I was friends with a girl for years and often talked to her parents, not knowing whether to call them by their first names or their last names. When they moved to England, I even visited them there. To my knowledge, I never called them by either their first names or their last names, and yet I was able to have many conversations with them without having that part of our relationship established. I just used "you". If this scenario were carried out in Romanian, however, I wouldn't be able to conjugate a verb without knowing whether to use the formal or informal.

The strangest transition for me was when I began to speak on the phone with my Peace Corps boss in Romanian. Until September, I had spoken with Nina only in English. When she called one day and we spoke in Romanian, I was forced in the first two minutes of the conversation to decide how to address her. I used tu. She still talks to me, and I didn't suddenly age 200 years and decompose in a corner, leaving only my swastika pin and a beautiful screaming blonde, so I guess I chose wisely.

When it comes to "you," users of the English language are like hobbits. When I read the linguistic appendices of TheВ Lord of the RingsВ in September (yes, I have that much spare time), I discovered that in the Common Speech from which the trilogy is supposedly "translated," there are formal and informal forms of "you" that are impossible to accurately express in English. Hobbits, being the carefree and naive bunch they are, only use the informal form, and are probably never educated about the formal. In The Lord of the Rings, this created situations when hobbits rode up to kings and immediately addressed them using the informal forms. A king who was not so worried about destroying the Dark Lord might have put those hobbits in the stocks, but these kings were a linguistically understanding lot, and laughed about it.

Try as I might to explain to Moldovans that we Americans, and especially we Californians, are very informal, no Moldovan who hasn't studied English has been as forgiving as those kings. And so I tell them, "Poftim. Luati pronumele dumneavoastra," which means, "Here you go. Take your pronoun," using, of course, the dumneavoastraВ form.

Haidem sa sarbatorim ca ar fi anul 1999!

After several weeks of depression and homesickness, I got the remedy
I needed; a week-long vacation, one day of school on the following
Monday and then a huge party to celebrate Mereseni Day (it sounds so
much cooler in Romanian, "ziua satului" or "hramul satului").
Mereseni Day takes on an even large significance in my host family,
because it is the Feast of Saint Dumitru, whose name is shared by my
host father, who turned 56 just a week earlier. Because of these
abundant coincidences, my host family celebrates Dumitru's birthday
on the same day as Mereseni Day, making an already big party into an
even bigger one.

It was three years ago to the day that Dumitru surprised the entire
family by returning home from 15 months of working in Portugal, as
they were all gathered at the house celebrating his birthday without
him. This year was made especially joyful by the presence of Costia,
Dumitru's brother who is visiting from Vladivostoc this month after
19 years without stepping foot in Moldova and 16 years without
speaking to Dumitru or their sisters. Dumitru had never seen Diana,
my host sister, until he met her at the train station last month. At
that point, he called her Maria and had to be corrected.

But before I could focus on Dumitru's birthday, I wanted to see what
went on for the entire village on Mereseni Day. The centerpiece was
at the stadium (a.k.a. dilapidated soccer field), where a large truck
was converted into a stage with live music. In front of the stage,
hundreds of people danced in the dark, mostly of the circular hora
fashion of which I have written in previous posts. I took my first
pictures with my new insurance-company-reimbursed digital camera, and
so in the Mereseni section of my WebShots album, you can see plenty
of my students dancing around me as I squatted in the center of a
circle.

At the stadium, I also danced with my buddy the gym teacher, Doamna
Elena, and met her husband, Oleg. Taking the full range of dancing
partners, I also danced with one of my fifth grade students, Irina,
who could only be listed at 4 feet tall while wearing skates. She
tried at first to mimic adult dancing and reached to place her hand
on my shoulder. It was a stretch, to say the least, until a lady next
to us laughed and told her to put her hand on my elbow. It was an
easier hold, and after I instructed her on which way we needed to
turn as we danced, she did pretty well.

In Moldova, each village's day is a very large event, much larger
than any of the national independence days. It's not hard to see why;
Mereseni is first noted in historical documents 384 years ago, before
most of North America's Atlantic Coast was colonized. Hincesti, the
county seat, is 505 years old, and proudly displays that fact on a
hillside as you enter by car from Chisinau. Trace back 505 years in
America, and a guy named Columbus still thought he had landed in
India.So compare the history of these villages and towns, centuries
old, with the actual country of Moldova, which is younger than nearly
every high school student, and you have an idea of why village days
are more important than national holidays. When my sixth grade
students were happy, and maybe slightly shocked, to discover that
their village was older than the U.S.

After some time at the stadium, I returned back to the house to eat
what I calculate to have been my third dinner of the evening. I
managed to stay sober—that "I have to mold young minds tomorrow
morning" line, although not exactly what I say in Romanian, works
every time—but danced with Maria, Dumitru, his brother, his sisters
and their husbands, along with one nephew and his wife. All the
dancing took place in a small hallway measuring eight feet wide by 11
feet long, although the hallway, like my dance partner, would require
skates to measure that large. That's why the pictures I have are from
me standing on a chair in the corner, and that's also why they're not
outstanding pictures.

I'm going to allow the new digital pictures online to speak for
themselves now, and head off to sleep as quickly as possible. Got to
mold young minds tomorrow, doncha know.