Vorba la Masa

Friday night, my host brother, Sergiu, and his wife, Olesea, visited the house with their infant son, Gabriel. We and the rest of the family stayed at the table until about 11:30 at night, eating and drinking.

The Romanian radio station was playing Afro-Cuban Latin jazz, and I my mind began to wander.

"I'm thinking about how I thought my life in the Peace Corps would be," I told my host family. "I knew that I would be sitting at a table, eating and drinking wine, and listening to Latin music. I just thought that it would be in Latin America." I told them the story of my application interview for the Peace Corps.

It was summer 2004 when I went into the Peace Corps' Boston office for my application interview. Within minutes of entering the downtown government building, I was greeted by Suzanne, the woman in charge of my application. We talked for about 15 minutes about the Peace Corps experience in general, and then she asked me what regions of the world I would prefer to work in.

"Well, I'd really like to go to Latin America," I said. "I really like the culture and the people, and it seems like a great place."

"Okay," Suzanne said. "How well do you know Spanish?"

"Well, I've taken one semester of it in college, and by the time I graduate in December, I'll have taken a second semester."

"The issue is that we already have lots of Spanish speakers applying to Latin America," she said. "Because of that, we can choose people who already know Spanish and not spend as much time training them. But where else would you like to go?"

"Hmm..." I said, having not expected this problem. "I think Africa would be really interesting. My neighbor's from Senegal, and he's played some music for me from there. I think it'd be great."

"How's your French?"

"Well, I studied it for three years in high school, and I'm sure that if I took a class, it would come back to me," I said.

"Once again," she said, "we have a lot of people who already speak French, so it's a similar situation as with Spanish. Where else would you like to go?"

"Okay," I said, sensing that my options were quickly dwindling. "I guess you can just send me anywhere you want. It doesn't matter much."

"And that," I told my host family, "is how I ended up in Moldova."

I told my family a few more stories which I'm sure they must have heard already, but they showed the same courtesy and enjoyment the second or third time that we all give Dumitru, my host father, when he tells the same story for the third time; after all, if they're good stories, why not repeat them? The topic then changed to the renovations that Sergiu and Olesea are doing on their house, which they bought about five months ago. Sergiu mentioned how hard it was to find money for everything they wanted to do in the house.

"Slowly, slowly," his mother, Maria, said. "Do you think our house was built right away when we got married? It takes years."

"Yeah," I said. "In America, we say, 'Rome wasn't built in a day.'"

"Ah, but here," Sergiu said, "we say Moscow."

I burst into laughter for a full 10 seconds, pausing only to say, "That's perfect."

"But both Rome and Moscow are still being constructed," Dumitru noted.

"And neither of them," I said about the capitals of the two countries that employ the most Moldovans, "would be built without Moldovans."

Another big laugh from everyone in the room. The discussion was just how I had imagined years ago that my Peace Corps experience would be. The only differences were the language and the continent. And while I'll never know what my experience would have been like in Latin America or Africa, I'm incredibly happy with how it's gone in Moldova.