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?