Nu se poate!

I was walking back from the English-language movie theater in Chisinau with three female volunteers when we saw a Moldovan couple in their early 20s arguing on the sidewalk. The man had a hold of the woman's arm and was not letting her pull away.

"Oh my God, is he going to hit her?" asked Jill, one of the volunteers.

We waited to see. We watched the argument from 10 yards away, hoping that the couple would notice four people watching them and calm themselves down. The couple didn't notice. A group of 10 Moldovans standing further aways also seemed to pay no mind. After 30 seconds of yelling, the guy slapped the girl.

It was a weak slap, but hitting is hitting. I ran over, positioned myself between them and politely asked them in Romanian, "Do you need anything?"

Standing in front of the man, I finally realized what I had gotten me into. I'm 5'10" and this man was easily eight inches taller than me. Good thing I had entered politely.

Jill sprinted into the situation more stridently.

"Nu se poate! Nu se poate!" she said, waving her finger wildly in the air and signaling to the man that what he did was not allowed.

Another man slightly shorter than me joined the scene as well. He didn't seem to know the two people involved.

"This is nothing," he said. "This is between a man and a woman."

I stood my ground against the giant and said the only thing that came to my mind, "So what? So what?"

"Are you Italian?" the shorter man asked.

"No, I'm American," I replied. But that doesn't matter. The guy and girl started to talk angrily over my head, and I told the girl to go home like she should.

"So, what?" the tall belligerent said. "You think you're big because you're American?"

"No," I said. I had tapped into national pride issues, and I wanted to stop any American-Moldovan tension before I got sucker-punched. "It doesn't matter if I'm an American. But we know how to be with our women."

While I was trying to choose my words delicately in a foreign language to avoid a savage beat-down, Jill, my 5'2" blonde peace-making partner, was teaching a no-holds-barred lesson.

"You're better off without him!" she told the Moldovan girl. The girl, as Jill told me later, "just stared back" at her. She also began a side debate with the shorter man when he said that it wasn't her problem. "Any time I see a girl hit on the street, that's my problem," she said.

We could have stood there for another 40 minutes, Jill pontificating on traditional gender roles and me trying to maintain a facial expression that would neither inflame the situation nor show any sign of backing down. Luckily for Jill's tongue and my face, the Moldovan girl had hailed a rutiera and was now telling her attacker to get in with her.

I agreed with her and said, "Da, du-te acasa." "Yeah, go home."

At the exact moment I said it, I realized it was not what I had wanted to say to an aggressive Moldovan, probably drunk, who was eight inches taller than me and had just slapped a girl. I kept my eyes on him and watched for where the punch would come from.

"Du-te tu acasa!" he said. And then he got on the rutiera and left, thankfully not hearing me call him a derivative of the f word as he stepped in.

After our adrenaline lowered, we four volunteers began to talk. Why did the tall Moldovan think it was acceptable to slap the girl he was with? Why did the girl stay with him for the rest of the evening? Why did 10 Moldovans standing 50 feet away not do anything about the situation? Why did the one Moldovan who joined in the argument only come to tell us not to worry about it?

In my senior year of high school, a young man and woman began arguing in the hallway during class time. The students inside did nothing. The situation escalated, and one boy went outside without the help of his classmates and told the man to stop before the situation got out of hand. The couple outside were actors brought in by the teacher, and a class discussion followed.

On the streets of Chisinau, no Moldovan came to a the aide of an abused girl. In the hallways of Los Gatos High School, only one American boy helped. Neither situation is acceptable.