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."