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.