Un pedicur acasa

I don't know about other volunteers, or Moldovans themselves, but after a year of wearing uncomfortable Moldovan boots and sandals, along with large amounts of slipper-wearing outside, my feet had become very tough. I had a hardened layer of dead, yellowed and calloused skin covering my entire heel, white peeling skin on the underside of my big toe that was sometimes painful and a callous roughly a centimeter in diameter on the largest bunion on my right foot.

I casually mentioned my foot problems to a female volunteer, and she said that I should rub my foot with a pumice stone. Not having a pumice stone nor knowing the word for it in Romanian, I used what I already had at home: the file from my Leatherman tool.

After about 20 minutes of work, I had scraped off a lot of dead skin and had barely endured any pain. I rubbed two layers of lotion onto the soles of my feet and declared my work complete. This evidently isn't a long-lasting solution, since my heels have already started toughening again. But I'll keep filing away at my feet, mostly because of how strange it is to use a metal tool on my skin. There's something about it that says, "I would only do this in Peace Corps."

O nunta moldovaneasca

There are a few milestones in every Peace Corps Moldova volunteer's service: the first time walking home in the dark for more than 15 minutes without needing a flashlight, the first time getting giardia and the first time going to a Moldovan wedding.

I finally had my first Moldovan wedding experience last weekend. Not all volunteers like going to Moldovan weddings, and the naysayers usually complain because they don't know enough people at the wedding. While I didn't know the bride or the groom at this wedding, I knew about a quarter of the guests, two of the musicians and a handful of the young uninvited folks who were drinking outside the wedding.

I had a great time dancing with neighbors, students, host family members and a good-looking blonde from the next town over. I also got pulled into singing with the band; the only Moldovan song I know the lyrics to, however, is about a man leaving his lover for two years to join the army, and I refused to sing that at a wedding; instead, I accompanied them on the chorus for a happier and more romantic song, Pentru Tine.

I talked for about 20 minutes outside the wedding with a man in his 50s. When his wife and his sister came up and joined us, they asked me where I was staying in the village. When I told them my host family's last name, the sister cried out, "Miter! My love from 10th grade!" It turns out that my host father, quite the ladies' man before he settled down with Maria, had dated this woman for a short while. I went back into the school, where the wedding was, and pulled Dumitru outside. When he saw his former girlfriend of almost 40 years ago, he started telling one of his favorite stories, and one that I have probably heard 10 times now during my stay at his house.

Before he joined the army, Dumitru had a bicycle with a gasoline motor. Because he didn't want fathers to know that he was visiting their daughters, he would detach the muffler when he was a kilometer from the house and rev the engine. A girl, hearing what Dumitru claims was "as loud as a tractor," would know to sneak outside her gate a few minutes later. They would have as long of a date as they could manage outside the gate before the girl's father would start wondering where she had gone. When the father came outside, Dumitru would get on the bike as fast as possible and get away.

Not much later after reminiscing with Dumitru's old girlfriend, Dumitru and Maria left. Diana, my host sister, and I stayed so that we could give a small monetary wedding present. Everyone sat down again at the tables at 4 a.m. to make short speeches and to give money. I was dead tired, and I was "resting my eyes" at regular intervals. At 4:30 a.m., when the gift plate finally came to us, I roused myself from my involuntary nap and gave 15 Euros while Diana did the talking. Fifteen Euros isn't a bad amount to give to a couple whom I had never met before the wedding.

Within a minute of giving our gift, Diana and I left, gathered our things and walked home, no flashlight necessary. It was a night of fun, and I'm glad that I waited so long to experience a Moldovan wedding; it definitely lived up to the expectations.

Vin acru

Domnul Pascal, the head of the Mereseni vineyard, came to the school today to talk to the teachers about the upcoming grape harvest. A heavy-set man, he looked tired and defeated, and he spoke in a fashion that layed out the facts describing the wine industry's situation without trying to induce sympathy.

The facts are harsh. Russia has banned Moldovan wine imports since March, closing a large majority of Moldova's export wine market. Pascal said he saw no end in sight. Because of Russia's ban, many wine factories in our county of Hincesti have closed for the year; Mereseni's factory will be running only one assembly line. On top of the ban, the crop is small this year. I think that this is due to a combination of an unusually dry summer, the deep frost from last winter and the vineyard owners' lack of interest in putting resources into a crop that they won't be able to sell for a profit.

Another new circumstance is complicating this year's harvest. Normally, students in village schools work for a few weeks to help with the harvest. The youngest students, in fifth grade, are some of the hardest workers and use the money they earn to buy clothes for winter and other necessities. Earlier this year, however, the Moldovan Parliament passed a law requiring students to be at least 14 years old in order to work in the fields, while also requiring 11th graders to stay in class. This creates a labor strain on the vineyards, since they depend on the student labor to quickly collect the grapes.

The facts are lined up this year against Pascal and others who depend on the wine industry, and they are partially hurt by the industry's current inefficiency. Right now, nearly every village has its own crop and its own wine factory. This system was fine when there was a large market for wine, but it is unsustainable now when it becomes harder and harder every year to make a profit. I think that the wine industry will bottom out soon and transition into agribusiness funded by wealthy Moldovans or foreign companies. These corporations could finance technological improvements such as tractors (not used much since the end of Soviet times) and irrigation, which would help the crop output. This seemingly inevitable transition, however, is still years down the line. In the meantime, at least some of my students are off to the harvest for another year.

Chiloti

No matter what language you speak, some things are funny to any middle school student.

In both my fifth grade class and 7a class this week, students used the word "underwear" in a sentence. The seventh grader used it as an example of a compound noun. The fifth grader used it when he thought he was using the word for clothes in general.

I asked both students, "Do you know what 'underwear' means?"

"No."

"Chiloti," I said.

The seventh graders laughed for 15 seconds. The fifth graders laughed for nearly a full minute.

It's good to be back in the classroom.

Calculator stricat

Because of computer problems, I won't be able to update my site very often in the coming weeks. Hopefully, everything will be resolved quickly. In the meantime, I'll be saving up material to write about on the weekends, when I can access the internet from Chisinau. Stay tuned.

Suntem nemti si suntem mandrii!

My first national allegiance will always be to America, but for years I have also felt a cultural connection with my German heritage. I also have English, French, Polish and even Dalmatian blood, but I feel much closer to the family names Myers, Tiffenbach and Kress than I do any others.

When I arrived in Mereseni a year ago, people told me that they had heard my last name before, since there was a family in the village called Maier. The first Maier had settled in Mereseni around the time of the first World War, and his German blood had mixed in with Moldovan blood through a few generations of descendents.

A week and a half ago, I was in the hall when three fifth graders came up to me and asked what days we had class. I asked them their names. The first one to respond said that she was Victoria Maier.

"Maier? So you're German?" I asked in Romanian, smiling.

"Nuuuuuuu!" she replied, continuing in Romanian. "I'm not German."

"Yes you are," I said. "Your last name is Maier. I have the same last name, Myers, and I'm German."

She and her friends giggled and I noticed how much blonder Victoria's hair was than any Moldovan's I'd ever seen.

"Ask your mom tonight," I said. "She'll tell you that you're German."

The girls went off down the hall, laughing. The next day, I had class with the fifth grade. At the end of class, Victoria approached me.

"Did you ask your mom last night?" I asked. Victoria flashed a huge smile.

"Mr. Peter," she said. "I'm German!" She giggled and ran out of the room.

Cultura moldovaneasca, si buna, si rea

I have noticed two major cultural presences in Moldova this month, and sadly, the bad one is more popular.

The bad one is Cleopatra Stratan, the three-year-old daughter of pop singer Pavel Stratan. Her song, which has the exact same backing track has her father's song, plays on Moldovan radio all day. This wouldn't be a problem if my host family didn't constantly play Moldovan pop radio. Whenever the song comes on, I have to leave the room and listen to something completely opposite, like Atari Teenage Riot. Cleopatra is headlining her own concert Sunday, with her father as the "special guest". Now there is definitely a time and a place for cute little kids singing, namely public television before 11 a.m. But for a three-year-old girl to be this popular is beyond my understanding.

My perception of Moldovan culture has been revived, however, by The Matrix dubbed in Moldovan. No, not Romanian. No, not Russian. Dubbed in Moldovan, a mix of Romanian and Russian words and phrases with the most vulgar words from both languages mixed in at every other line. The makers of the Moldovan Matrix dubbed all the lines in corny voices and replaced parts of the movie's original soundtrack with Russian dance music. They also changed a healthy amount of the plot; The Matrix is how Moldovans picture themselves in 2003, a time when Moldova occupied half the territory of Europe, and machines enslaved Moldovans because they realized that a drunk Moldovan was an excellent source of energy. Moldovans trapped in the Matrix have never tasted real wine. Some of my favorite lines from the movie:

When Morpheus talks to Neo for the first time on the cell phone and warns him about agents approaching: "Just give them a bribe and they'll let you go."

When Morpheus talks to Neo in the dojo simulation: "Hit me in the balls, but not too hard."

When Dozer says (in English), "We've got a lot of work to do," Neo and Morpheus have this conversation:
Neo: What language is he speaking?
Morpheus: I don't know.
Neo: Why doesn't he learn Romanian?
Morpheus: He's weak in the head. He doesn't even know how to read.

It's not high-class humor, but it's simple and fun. Watching it has also expanded my vocabulary of curse words in both Romanian and Russian. Now that's the kind of Moldovan culture I like.

Ce, Ion? Vrei detention? Ti-e distractiv?

Moldovans, in general, are always running late. If you tell a group of Moldovans to meet you at 7 p.m., you can call them at 7:15 and they probably haven't left home yet. The first guests at a 7:30 wedding will come at 8:15. School events that are slated to start at 6 p.m. usually start at about 7 or 8. One punctual Moldovan friend of mine often gets to work at 8:55 a.m. to start the day at 9, only to work alone in the office until someone else comes at 9:45.

This is part of Moldova's culture to the point that "to be late" is its own verb in Romanian. When planning weddings or social events, Moldovans automatically factor in the delay and there are no problems. But there's one place where tardiness corrodes the work environment and the respect structure, and one place where tardiness cannot be tolerated. School.

At every class in a Moldovan school, at least one student always comes late, and it is usually more. In a 45-minute lesson, I usually lose at least the first three minutes because kids come late. Students come to class as late as they want and there is no discipline structure in Moldovan schools to punish tardiness or reward punctuality. In fact, you're often lucky if your students are only late; they often don't even bother coming to class, and they aren't disciplined for that, either.

Teachers often complain to one another about students who are consistently late or don't attend school, but schools don't structure a system that expects punctuality and attendance. Unlike in America, students who cut class (or translated from Romanian, "run from the lesson,") don't receive calls home to their parents, nor do they risk failing a course or serving detention if they are consistently late or absent.

Not a single Moldovan will say that student tardiness and class-cutting are good things. Students coming to class whenever they want without reprimand damages a teacher's credibility as an authority figure and encourages laziness and irresponsibility later in life. However, the problem does not receive much attention.

Last year, my school announced a system in which multiple tardies or absences would be punishable by a fine paid at the mayor's office. I think I was the only teacher who wrote out tardy slips, and when I gave them to students' homeroom teachers, the teachers didn't carry the process out any further. At one teachers' meeting, I told the teachers that the system was "a shark without teeth".

I refused to teach a second year under this system, so I introduced one of America's greatest institutions: detention.

This year, students who are late to my class must serve a five-minute detention at the end of the day, unless they have a note from a teacher who kept them after class in their previous subject. In addition, students who miss class and do not have a written excuse from a parent receive 45 minutes of detention. Students can also receive detention for bad behavior in class. In my English lessons, I also have class rewards and punishments for attendance, tardiness, mutual respect and homework participation.

On Thursday, I gave detention to eight students for tardiness and one student for misbehavior. I only taught 50 kids that day. All of them served except one, who had to leave school early, and he will serve it when he returns to school. On Friday, my first day teaching computer class, I gave detention to over 15 of my 120 students for tardiness. Because most of the students only had five classes and I could only run detention during seventh period, only five of the students served today, but the rest will serve Monday.

So far, my authority to give detention has only been contested once, and that was by an 11th grader who complained that he was only late because he had been talking to the school principal. After class, he walked away from me as I tried to talk to him.

"Vitale, if you don't come back right now, you won't touch a computer all next week," I called after him in Romanian. He came back, and I told him that if the principal wrote an excuse for him, he wouldn't have detention. I also told him that I didn't care whether he liked my rules or not, because those were the rules. I'm sure I wasn't his favorite teacher for the day, but I'm not bringing the concept of detention to this school to win popularity points with the students. Also, I have plenty of popularity points to spare.

It's not just the concept of detention that is lacking in these school systems; it's basic accountability. No teachers seem to want to teach accountability, especially in my school, and I think that is partly because the faculty comprises 16 female teachers and 4 male ones; among the male teachers, I am the only one who both teaches every day and is under 60 years old. Male students lack a positive young male role model at my school, and those whose fathers are working in Russia, Portugal and Italy completely lack male role models, just like fatherless children in America. Also, the vast majority of young men who stay in my village after finishing school don't attend university and simply get drunk and go to the disco. They are not good role models from which to learn accountability. Girls, while less likely to cause major discipline problems at my school, are just as likely to come late to class or not do their homework.

To put it simply, students of both genders need a young, strict, male teacher who won't put up with their bullshit. I'm happy to fill the void.

O scrisoare de o adolescenta

I want to share parts of an e-mail from Olga, a 16-year-old student at the prestigious (and Pan Romanian-leaning) Prometeu Lyceum in Chisinau. After we met at Moldova's Independence Day celebration, she read my blog and had some things to say (I have made some slight grammatical corrections to her writing for better readability):

Why should I be proud for some kind of decision made 15 years ago? I don't feel free after this decision, as the only place where I am not afraid to say what I feel and think is my school, which fights hard for our independence and still teaches us Romanian (the correct form of the language, not "Moldavian," a word that I can hardly pronounce).

I saw you talked about Limba Noastra too, and the problem we are confronting with the Russian speakers. If you were in Chisinau on the 31st of August you would have been very disappointed just as all of us were. President Voronin came from his journey from Greece specially for the 27th important holiday, but he decided to visit the Czech Republic on the 31st, a holiday with no sense for him but much more important for me and many others. In the center of the city there were no concerts. Nothing. Just some awful folk music with no sense at the lakeside amphitheater.

I am tired of leaving the shops just for the reason that the shop assistant can't give me the thing I need because she says she does not understand Romanian and I say I don't understand Russian (though I know it perfectly). My grandmother is told to speak like a human being (as if Romanian is not a good language) if she asks something in Romanian.

We all still bear the consequences of the USSR system. I give myself as an example. All the 2005-2006 year of study I was fighting and getting good marks because my parents promised to send me to France for the wedding of my aunt.

That was the dream of my life, everything I ever wanted. I got great marks at my exams; I studied extra French and got the greatest marks from my group. When I got tickets and went for my passport all I saw was "visa refused". Why? You can't ask. But from their short sentences I understood: you are from an ex-sovietic country and we risk the fact that you may like the civilization from there so as to never come back here. So everything was ruined, all my dreams, all my hopes.

And when you wrote about the fireworks and the sentence with all the budget money that they are spending for 20 minutes of pleasure, I spread it. All of my friends laughed, but I was talking seriously because they could spend the money on something more useful like to give a better salary to my parents, both very good doctors that save lives, work hard and some persons don't even say thank you after a hard operation.

It's hard, really and if somehow I will escape from here I will just come back to see my relatives and that’s all. Nothing more attracts me here.

Once again, bravo for your reports. I liked them a lot.

I don't agree with everything she has written, but Olga is not the only Moldovan teenager who feels this way about her country. I fear that Moldova is losing an entire generation of some of its best and brightest young minds, who see the opportunities of the outside world and conclude that their home country has nothing to offer them.

Deschideti usa!

On Tuesday, I was the first teacher at the school and the last one out. My 7:40 class guaranteed that I was first, and a locked door guaranteed that I was the last.

I set my alarm Tuesday morning for 5:30 a.m., since part of my morning routine is standing up and pressing the snooze button on my phone for at least 45 minutes. I shaved, got dressed, ate and left the house at 7:20. Not all of my sixth-grade students knew about the "zero hour" class, since the schedule had been posted after most of them had left the day before. I had called as many of them at home as I could, but since three of the students don't have phones, several others didn't answer Monday night and one girl is still in Moscow with her family waiting to get a plane ticket home, I wasn't expecting great attendance. When I started class at 7:40, I had three students, and more trickled in over the course of 45 minutes.

When my sixth-period class ended, I stayed through seventh period so that I could write out lesson plans for the next day. I have more desk space and fewer distractions at school than at home, so this year I plan to work as much as I can in my classroom. Seventh period ended and I continued working for another half hour until 3:30.

At 3:30, I packed up and looked out my window to see Maria, the head custodian, leaving the school with her son. I finished packing, locked my classroom and went downstairs to leave the building.

The school door was closed. I hadn't seen this door closed at all week. I was worried. Two weeks ago, my school principal had joked that I worked so quietly in my room at the end of the second-floor hallway that they might accidentally lock me in one day.

Now I tested the door. My principal had been right. I was locked in.

I called out, "Alo?" hoping someone would respond. No luck. I was the only one around.

If this had happened in my first year, I would have panicked, especially since the door to the secretary's phone was locked. Luckily, I knew where the school's second, unlocked phone was. I called my house, where my host mom answered.

"Maria, it's Peter. I'm locked inside the school," I said with a laugh. "Could you please call someone to come open the school?"

Maria called the secretary, who then called one of the cleaning ladies who lives near the school. I only had to wait about five minutes before the cleaning lady came, took the key out of its hiding place outside the school and opened the door for me. In that time, I helped a fifth-grade girl who had come to the school to find out her schedule for the next day of lessons.

I left the school at 3:45 after spending over eight hours at school. As I walked part of the way home with the cleaning lady, I joked with her, "Maybe this is God telling me that I'm working too hard."

Primul sunet, a doua ora

What a difference a year makes.

A year ago, I was nervous about the first day of school, I didn't know any of the students or the majority of the teachers, I stood at the front of the school assembly and I read my first ever speech in Romanian to a crowd of a few hundred students, parents and teachers.

This year, the school was mine. Not only did I come in today as an English teacher with one year of experience, but also as the computer teacher. In fact, because my English classroom is next to the computer lab, I practically have my own wing of the school on the second floor. Today I told kids where to stand and talked to the students whom I hadn't seen in months. And unlike last year, I organized an event on the first day of school.

Today I hosted two alumni from the FLEX program, a U.S. government-sponsored program that brings students from all over the former Soviet Union to America to study in an American high school for one year. Exchange students are sent all over the country, live with host families for a year and are given allowances to cover all of their expenses in America.

I wanted the two alumni, recently returned Olga Cojocaru from nearby Hincesti and blogger and current Harvard doctoral student Alexandru Culiuc from Chisinau, to speak to the students about their experiences in America. My hope was that the program would interest students and I could take some of them to apply for testing in the fall.

The audience of 8th, 9th and 11th graders (we don't have a 10th grade this year) listened, although some more attentively than others, as Alex (in the FLEX program for the 1993-4 school year) and Olga (2005-6) talked about the application process, their schools, their host families and more. I was able to relate to both of their experiences, since Alex studied in Cohasset, Mass. and Olga lived in San Jose, Calif., which are both places I have lived near in my life. When I told Olga that I was from Los Gatos, she said she had spent a lot of time there during her year in America, and we laughed about the difference between my suburban town full of million-dollar houses and my current village of Mereseni, full of people who don't earn $1,000 the entire year.

Although only a handful of students at my school are conversant enough in English to pass the first level of the FLEX test, more than half of the students took informational flyers with them as they left, and some of the more active students from my classes stayed and talked with Alex and Olga.

After the assembly, Olga went back home, but Alex and his girlfriend Vanessa, a Chinese-American dual citizen who is completing her masters at Harvard this year, stayed for a masa with the school's teachers. Early in the meal, my vice-principal asked me in Romanian where my guests were from. Alex responded in Romanian that he was from Chisinau, which surprised the Moldovans at the table who had assumed he was a foreigner.

Alex, Vanessa and I then went back to the house so that they could see Moldovan village life. Alex is a true city slicker, being the third generation in his family to live in Chisinau. Most Moldovans who live in Chisinau visit their grandparents in the village, but Alex's grandparents also live in Chisinau, so he had never been to a village before. It was strange to be an American showing a Moldovan my chickens, my cellar full of wine and preserved foods, the rows of grapes in my garden and the view from my back yard of the valley and Mereseni's other hills.

After a second lunch and a discussion with my host mother, Alex, Vanessa and I discussed their plan for a non-governmental organization that aims to improve the quality of higher education in Moldova, especially in regards to research and critical thinking. I only have my undergraduate degree, so some of the academic things they talked about were over my head, but I'm looking forward to helping them any way that I can and, more importantly, creating a link between them and more Peace Corps volunteers.

At about 3 p.m., it was time for Alex and Vanessa to leave. I walked them to the main road and gave them a crash course in hitchhiking. As I walked back home, I thought about how happy I was to have finally met Alex, with whom I had corresponded online for over seven months but had never met face-to-face until today. It's ironic that in 2005, we were separated only by Boston's Charles River, but we didn't meet until 2006, when the Atlantic Ocean and most of Europe stood between us.

What a difference a year makes.