Moldoveni Peste Hotare

My 19-day vacation was in its final days. I had roller-bladed through London. I had watched soccer matches in pubs. I had walked through Covent Garden laughing to myself, remembering how great I had thought it was when I had been 15. In my mind, I kept returning to Moldova.

I missed Moldova. I was downloading Zdob si Zdub videos online. I was having mental meltdowns over the price of a pizza in London. I was even thinking of starting my own hostel in Chisinau when I completed my Peace Corps service. I missed the place that I now described as home.

I needed a taste of Moldova, and I got it in the form of me, three high school friends and nine Moldovans drinking beer and vodka, eating barbecue and salad and shooting fire extinguishers off the top of a seven-story construction site.

When I told my host brother, Sergiu, in May that I was going to London, he told me that I had to meet one of his best friends, Dumitru. Dumitru's family lives two doors down from my host family's house, and Sergiu and Dumitru were always at each others' houses through childhood. Dumitru, 26, began working in London a year ago as a security guard at a construction site. He, like the other foreigners working at the construction site and the vast majority of Moldovans abroad, is working as an illegal immigrant. Dumitru and I exchanged a hand-full of e-mails and agreed to meet during my stay in London.

At least 600,000 Moldovans work abroad, according to official statistics, and possibly double that number are actually working peste hotare, according to Aliona Avetisean of Winrock International. That means that nearly a quarter of Moldova's 4.4 million citizens work outside the country at any given time. Nearly every Moldovan has either worked abroad or has a family member who has worked abroad. Therefore, an essential part of my Moldovan Peace Corps experience was to see Moldovans working in another country.

I called Dumitru on Sunday, and he told us to come over right away so that he could properly host us. We arrived in an East London neighborhood in the early afternoon and were greeted by Dumitru.

"Which one of you is Peter?" he asked as he approached us outside the Underground stop. He was about 5'7" and broad-shouldered. His brown hair was just barely long enough to part, and although his hair was trimmed nicely, he sported a day's worth of unshaven beard. After I introduced myself and my friends Mike and Kyle, Dumitru announced his first priority; buying some beers at the local store. We gladly came along and carried the beers; Dumitru couldn't, since he had recently had a hernia operation.

"Don't tell anyone at home that I had surgery," he said. "Just tell them that I'm healthy and everything's fine."

We left the store and walked a couple blocks to the construction site. The neighborhood was not the most sparkling, and it is not in the scope of the average tourist's Kensington-Piccadilly-Notting Hill perception of London. On our way, we ran into one of Dumitru's Moldovan coworkers on the road. This surprised me, since I had assumed Dumitru would be the only Moldovan working at this job. We continued on to the work site, and I discovered how wrong my assumption had been.

After bumping our heads multiple times walking into the atrium center of the seven-story construction site, we were greeted by eight men and one young woman, all Romanian-speaking. Dumitru was definitely not alone. I introduced myself and my friends in Romanian. Then came the obvious question, from a man in his early twenties named Igor:

"Esti American sau Moldovan?"

I clarified that I was American, as were all of my friends, but that I knew Romanian because I'd been living in Dumitru's village for nearly a year. After the obligatory "Wow, you even have a good Moldovan accent" comments, we settled down to partying.

We sat and stood around the table, enjoying the usual Moldovan picnic foods of barbecued pork, salad, tomatoes and onions. There was no wine at the table, but there was plenty of beer and vodka. When we wanted to drink Strongbow cider, the Moldovan men wanted to make sure that it had high enough of an alcoholic content to suffice. 5.3 percent passed the test.

The men that we met were part of a 200-man work crew at the construction site. There are Moldovans, Romanians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Albanians and Brazilians working, just to name a few. No one works legally. While some younger men are like Dumitru and speak English well, the vast majority learn only the most basic English vocabulary. Everyone can parse the language well enough to know a hammer from a drill at work and a loaf of bread from a jug of milk at the store.

Dumitru and Igor's English was good enough to converse with my American friends, so I turned my attention to one of the men who didn't speak English, Sandu.

Sandu is 38 and was the only Romanian who was at the site that day. He is from Iasi, which is a beautiful city just across the Romanian-Moldovan border. Although a measuring tape would say he is only six feet tall, his presence is enhanced by a gut that poked out of his unzipped blue jacket throughout our entire visit; he leaves the impression that he towers over men just a couple inches shorter.

Sandu came to London a year ago with a fake Lithuanian passport. He is sacrificing time with his wife and children so that he can finish the last two rooms of their house and buy furniture. He told me that he makes five pounds per hour, which is more money than I made in my first four months out of college. He shares a four-bedroom apartment with five other men, and pays 160 pounds rent per month. He is able to send home hundreds of pounds for his wife and kids each month, which is much more than the $200 average monthly salary in Romania.

The two of us went to the roof together to look down on the rest of the neighborhood. In the far distance was the London Egg, one of the most sleekly designed buildings constructed in the city. Closer to us was a mosque.

"See the mosque over there?" Sandu asked me. "I don't like the Muslims here. They're dirty. All the Pakistanis just make problems."

"Maybe these ones do," I said, "but the Pakistanis I know are all good people. You know, other people probably say bad things about Romanians; that they're dirty and only cause problems."

"Maybe. But I don't like the Muslims."

After taking a few pictures from the roof, we went back downstairs and joined the group. Dumitru took the liberty of showing me a pornographic video on his mobile phone. Thank God for technology.

My attention turned now to Radu, a 20-year-old man from Ialoveni, the county neighboring mine. He fondly remembered the Peace Corps volunteer who had been in Ialoveni when he was in high school, and I told him that there was a new one now. Radu left for London after two years of university. He said that when he returns, he plans to finish school and start his own business with the money he will have earned. He disagreed with Sandu's numbers, saying that they made 10 pounds per hour.

Radu's said his time in England has been a mixed bag so far. On the positive side, he said he liked being around other young Moldovans, going to clubs every once in a while and inviting girls back to the construction site at night to have parties in the unfinished apartments. The biggest problem he had with London was that with so much immigration, it didn't seem very English.

"When you come to London, you think that you're going to see all English people. Then you come here," he said with some disappointment, "and you see all these other people."

"But what are you?" I asked. "Aren't you an immigrant?"

We talked for a few more minutes, and then decided to all go back to the roof. Mike, who didn't have a year of training in the fast-paced Moldovan drinking methods, laid down on the roof and began to doze off. After a few more minutes of talking, we woke him up and headed back downstairs. On our way down, though, Dumitru pointed out two fire extinguishers. Radu grabbed one of them, pointed it into the building's center atrium, and shot it.

"This is what we do for fun," Dumitru said.

I took my turn, and they took my picture. I had never shot a fire extinguisher before, and I have to say that it's even more fun than I imagined. Next time I do it, though, I'll be sure not to spray into the wind; extinguisher powder tastes awful.

After four hours of partying, it was time for us to go home. I guided my American friends through the traditional Moldovan goodbye routine.

"We have to go now."

"No, have another few drinks. There's no rush."

"No, we have to go now. Only the best. Good luck."

"One more drink."

"No, we've already had more than enough. Gotta go."

"Alright." Our hosts then took us to the exit. "Okay, just one more beer for the road."

"Sure, no problem." You can never refuse the last drink as you leave. On this particular day, Mike ruined the proceedings by vomiting. Ryan, Kyle and I, however, each drank a final beer with our hosts. Then we went on our way, all of my friends agreeing that Moldovans are "really cool".

This was just one construction site with a handful of Moldovans in a country where they are not in large numbers. According to Aliona Avetisean, the Winrock representative, Moldovans work mostly in Russia, followed in popularity by Portugal, Italy, Spain and Israel.

"The most popular reasons for Moldovans to go abroad is to earn more money than they can here," Avetisean wrote in an e-mail. "The average salary here is $100-150 per month and it is not enough for living, especially if you have to raise children. But the paradox is that they spend earned money on remodelling and buying new furniture and maybe some equipment, sometimes cars, instead of investing it into their own business. When they run out of money, [which] happens very quickly, they leave the country again. "

It's a much bigger situation than just these men in this construction site, and it is doing Moldova both good and harm on a large scale. But looking at it on a small scale, I'm glad that my friends got to meet Moldovans, and I'm glad that I got a taste of Moldova to cure my homesickness. I was only away from Moldova for 19 days. Can you imagine the situation for these illegal workers, staying away from their friends, family and everything they feel comfortable with for two years or more?

In that sense, we volunteers aren't too different from the people we've come to help.

Preturi la Londra

Many Moldovan salaries wouldn't last a day in London.

Consider the costs of a day of the English leg of my vacation.

1. I wake up in rented apartment. There are four beds for five people, meaning that I share a double bed with my friend Kyle. This costs $24 US per person in an apartment roughly half the size of the Chisinau apartment for six that I often rent. The Chisinau apartment costs about $6 per person.

2. I eat breakfast. Some cereal, milk, bread and Nutella. Although I never did the apartment's grocery shopping during our trip, I would estimate the cost of breakfast at $2 US.

3. I hand-wash my laundry in the sink. I am wary of spending money on a laundry machine that took nearly two hours to wash Kyle's laundry the day before. But if I were to use the washer and dryer in the apartment building, it would cost me $5.40.

4. I use public transportation for the first of several times during the day. One trip on the Underground costs ?3, or $5.40. Buying a day pass runs about $9.

5. I go to a pub to watch a World Cup match. I buy a pint of beer to start the game and another at the half. Lunchtime rolls around, so I buy a burger and fries. $16.

6. In the evening, I head with my friends to a pub before dinner. I don't have money to spend, so I make a deal with my friend Ryan that if he buys me drinks for the rest of the night, I'll officially give him ownership of the bass guitar that he borrowed from me five years ago and never returned. He buys me two pints, and because the bass is hard to factor, we'll just say that the drinks totaled $9.

7. We go to a nice-looking pizzeria. My friends glance at the menu and walk in. I stay outside gawking.
"Hey guys," I say. "Have you looked at these prices?"
"What's wrong?" says an American ex-pat acquaintance of ours. "Is he complaining about the prices?"
"Hell yeah I'm complaining at the prices," I grumble. "I make 250 bucks a month."
I'm dragged in anyway, and choose the least expensive item on the menu, a margarita pizza. Ryan covers it for me, in an unspoken corollary to our bass-for-beer agreement. The pizza costs $9.90.

8. We return to the apartment and I use the internet on my friend Mike's laptop. We each paid ?3 for the week so that our apartment would have high-speed internet access. That means 50 p per day, and 90 cents.

Let's add it up:
apartment $24.00
breakfast $2.00
laundry $5.40
public transit $9.00
lunch $16.00
pre-dinner drinks $9.00
dinner $9.90
internet $0.90
grand total: $76.20

Seventy-six dollars and twenty cents. One day. The average Moldovan salary is $100 per month.

Oh brave new world that would be so damn expensive!

Muzeul Comunismului

Today I visited the Museum of Communism in Prague. First off, it's hard to see many traces of communism in Prague. The architecture is beautiful, far different from Romania, Moldova and Hungary's drab rows of buildings. There is a vibrant city center and English is spoken in many places.

The city has put the communist past behind it very well, and in the past few years, the Museum of Communism has been developed. Ironically, it is located (and advertized as) "above the McDonalds." This led to an interesting exchange when I asked a young woman working in a restaurant for directions:

"Excuse me, which way is the Museum of Communism?"
"What?"
"The Museum of Communism. Where is it?"
"What?"
"Where's the McDonald's?"
"Oh, turn right and it's straight ahead."

Funded by an American businessman, the text-heavy museum is filled with socialist mementos, trinkets and propaganda posters. For me, the objects in the exhibit were old-hat, but they were new and foreign for my traveling companions, four high school friends. I enjoyed reading about Czechoslovakia's specific communist history, which I haven't studied before, especially the events of 1968 and the Velvet Revolution. The museum was lacking in depth, which is endemic of any museum that has to cram itself in between a McDonald's and a casino. I bought one of the museum's self-published books for further reading.

What was surprisingly lacking in this museum was any happy remembrance of communist times. It seems impossible that every Czech and Slovak looks back at the communist era with sour memories. I wonder how much its American founder influenced things; sometimes it reinforced western stereotypes about communism that Moldovans have told me are incorrect. However, I do sense that the Czech Republic and Slovakia have moved on rapidly since 1989, unlike Moldova. Why have they moved on while Moldova has stayed behind? Well, I'm vacation, so I don't have time to fill in the blanks.

In baie

The shower of a hostel in Bucharest can be a valuable foreign language lesson. As I took my shower yesterday, I saw: shampoo bottles in German, French, Romanian, Spanish and English; hair gel, facial soap and after-shave in Russian and my shaving cream, which is in some Nordic language that I can't distinguish from other Nordic languages.

So raise a glass to multi-lingual bathrooms.

Urasc Bucuresti

There is absolutely nothing interesting or spectacular about Bucharest. Compared to other cities in Romania, it's too big, too dirty, too confusing to get around in, and too devoid of any interesting architecture. I'm glad to be moving on to Prague tomorrow.

The one nice thing about Bucharest has been seeing Aaron Silberstein, a high school friend of mine who is giving a series of math lectures this month at a Romanian university. It's great seeing him, and I've met some interesting Romanians through him.

Other than that, I hate Bucharest and I don't plan on ever coming back.

Buna Dimineata

I was in Falesti two months ago when three volunteers showed a video shot in Moldova, centering on a common problem in a Moldovan village; What do you do when you have a lot of wine with you and you can't find anyone to drink with?

Thanks Priya for putting a link online. Now everyone who reads this blog can get the best possible visual representation of the village:

Serios? Acesta este Corpul Pacii?

After washing my face with running water in the morning, attending a class where children viewed a video for their English lesson and watching a school drama club rehearse an English-language play about the psychology of a shooting spree at an American high school, I have one question:

This is the Peace Corps?

This isn't the Peace Corps in Moldova, certainly. I am in Mangalia, a city of 50,000 in southwestern Romania on the Black Sea coast. I am staying in the apartment of two volunteers in the Teaching English as a Foreign Language project. They share an apartment. They have running water, just like even the majority of villagers now have in Romania. They had never seen someone drink wine as a shot until I did it last night. They speak English with many of their older students outside of class time. They trained in Brasov, the place where I just went for vacation. They get put up in nice hotels for conferences. They have DSL internet access in their apartment. At one of their schools, there's a computer for every teacher. About this time in June, tourists begin to flood the city because of its beautiful beaches.

I repeat. This is the Peace Corps?

I am visiting Jesse, a girl I went to college with at Boston University, and her sitemate, Kelly. They are TEFL volunteers and teach at two different schools in this major seaport and resort town. The differences between their work and mine are hard to overstate. They have a lot of restaurants and a beautiful beach; I have a few small grocery shops and a lot of cows. The young Romanians in their city attend university; the young Moldovans who stay in my village after the age of 19 work around the farm and drink wine.

I could go on.

The problem with their Peace Corps experience is that it doesn't feel like the Peace Corps. Instead of being in villages where one person can make a huge difference, Romanian Peace Corps volunteers are put in cities where they blend into the background. Kelly, one of the volunteers I am visiting, said that she is surrounded by good English teachers at her school. Both Jesse and Kelly said they often have to convince themselves that they are needed. Compare that to Moldova, where we volunteers can't walk five feet without seeing a project that desperately needs fixing.

Romania will probably be accepted into the European Union in 2007, so is there really a need for Peace Corps there? The growing consensus is no, and Jesse and Kelly think Peace Corps Romania would end in the next two years.

But that's big picture. On the small picture, I have enjoyed my time with Jesse's high school students. Jesse formed a drama club at her school and they are performing a play about school violence in America. The students all speak very well, have memorized their lines, and are able to act better in English than many American high school students. Nearly all of them can carry a conversation, and one girl has almost no discernable accent.

I also spent some time at Jesse and Kelly's schools. At Kelly's school, I watched her teach the first and second grades, and I played "Mr. Wolf" in a game that she used to teach numbers and how to tell time. While she taught the fourth grade, I went into her director's office and drank some liquor with him and some of the other male teachers. I told me that he'd like to do a partnership between my school and his, in which a delegation of students and teachers from my school would come to Mangalia and engage in contests and cultural exchanges with his students and teachers. It could be an amazing opportunity if my director agrees and we can work out the details.

The day after visiting Kelly's school, I taught Jesse's 10th grade class. I asked them some questions about Romania and they asked me some questions about California and Moldova. One boy asked me what it was like living in a communist country. It surprised me because I see the Moldovan government striving to move westward, but these Romanian students seemed to just see Moldova as backward. I'm always amazed when I talk to students who were born in the late 1980s or early 1990s and they have no understanding of communism. It's something their parents discuss, but in their minds, it has no direct effect on them.

I loved my time in Mangalia. It's a beautiful city with smart students and an impressive amount of businesses. But are those the signs of a city in need of Peace Corps volunteers?

O viata cu dulceata!

Congratulations to Shie and Leigh Benedaret, the first Peace Corps volunteers to marry each other in Moldova. Good luck in your life together and I wish you the best.

And remember, Shie, that I will figure out a way to steal Leigh at the nunta in Mereseni.

Primul an s-a terminat

Exactly one year ago today, a group of strangers met in a basement conference room in the Sheraton Hotel in Philadelphia. Since then, Peace Corps Moldova 16 has lost a few people and gained a few Uzbek PC refugees, but we're still together. Peace Corps volunteers are reputed to be a bunch of pot-smoking liberals in their mid-20s who refuse to get real jobs. I've found that although everyone in the group has at least one of those characteristics, only a couple fit the full profile, and I like them, too.

After a first year of constantly asking myself what I was doing far away from home, I'm glad to say that I'm happy to be in Moldova. As I travel during my vacation and talk about my life, the Peace Corps and Moldova, I realize that there is no other way to create the memories and experiences I'm having.

Here's to my first successful year, and here's to another one for myself and for all of PCM 16.

La anul si multi ani!

Prima zi in Brasov

I took a bus all night to Brasov, Romania from Thursday night until just before sunrise Friday morning. It was great to walk through Brasov and also go to the same hostel where I stayed in December. All of the staff remembered me as "the guy with the crazy Moldovan accent". The best thing, of course, is seeing my sister again after nearly a year. It's amazing how family can pick up right where they left of a year ago.

For my sister and her friend, Dave, Brasov is a step down from Vienna and the other cities they've visited this month. For me, Brasov is a huge and elegant city compared to Chisinau and especially Mereseni. Amazing how much a year will change your mindset.

Time's running out at this internet cafe (filled with boys in their late teens and early 20s playing Counter Strike and talking to cute girls on Skype all night), so I'm off.