Un alt sat: Partea a doua

As I woke up on my second day in Rosietici, a small village in Floresti county, I had only two objectives: to see the village's second bridge, which is even less stable than the one I had crossed the day before; and to leave the village in the early afternoon so that I could be back home in Mereseni in the evening. Shawn, the volunteer I was visiting, was more than happy to help me with the first part of my day. No one, it seemed, was eager to help me with the second part.

Even the bus system conspired against my leaving. Normally, there are two buses out of Rosietici that leave on the paved road from the center of the village: one at 7:30 a.m. and the other at 10:15 a.m. If you miss these two buses and still want to leave the village, you have to walk 45 minutes to the highway and hitch a ride from there. Compare this to my village, which is on a major road and from which you can find a ride to the county seat or the capital city almost any time of day.

I slept until about 8 a.m., then prepared for the 10:15 bus. But when I woke up, Shawn's host family told me that there was no 10:15 bus that day because it was Sunday. Actually, I was glad to have a chance to repeat the 45-minute walk I had taken the day before, and I was happy to have the flexibility to leave the village any time I wanted during the day. Shawn and I agreed on a plan; first we would see the second bridge, and then in the early afternoon, we would walk to the highway.

Shawn and his family made it clear that I was welcome to stay a second night, especially because the 9th grade graduation ceremony was that night and I could be Shawn's guest. It sounded interesting, but I had no clothes for the occasion and I wanted to get home.

At 11, Shawn and I went for a walk through his village. We saw all three of the stores in the village, two of which had opened in the past month and had already taken large amounts of business away from the poorly stocked store which had previously enjoyed a monopoly. One night several months ago, the owner of one of the new stores was drunk and asked Shawn if he should add a second story to his building and put in a pool table. Shawn said it was a good idea, so the guy climbed up to the newly constructed roof and, in his inebriated state, tore it down to make way for the pool table. The next day, the guy realized that it was a bad idea, and he had to rebuild the store's roof.

We walked to the edge of the village and continued another 10 minutes through some fields until we got to a different bridge on the other side of the village from the bridge we had crossed the day before. This bridge was equal parts scary and hilarious; scary because of its construction, and hilarious because it's hard to imagine a place in the 21st century that depends on a bridge this poor as its connection to the outside world. The bridge was made from four 15-meter steel cables, two on the bottom to support the foot-planks and two up top to serve as handrails. On the bottom, two-by-fours spanned the cables every three or four meters, and those two-by-fours supported 20 cm-wide beams. Each section of the bridge had only one of these beams, creating what basically amounted to an unstable balance beam with handrails.

Shawn said that he had crossed the bridge plenty of times in the past two years, and that he wanted to see me try it on my own while he took pictures from the bank. I started walking across, more confident than I had been on the other bridge the day before because this time I could use my hands to balance. I had no major problems until I got halfway across and noticed that the next beam I needed to walk on was detached from the supporting two-by-four. Putting my weight on it would probably cause it to bend down a foot and cause me to slip backward. I turned around to look at Shawn.

"This board isn't even connected!" I shouted. "How the hell am I supposed to get any further?"

Shawn laughed. "Oh yeah. That just broke recently. Just walk on the cables." That made sense to me, so I spread my legs a meter wide, putting my left foot on one cable and my right foot on the other, and shuffled along for a few meters until I reached a stable plank.

I finished crossing, then got back on the bridge for a few posed pictures. After I crossed back over to the original side and we started walking back to Shawn's village, he told me that I was probably the third American to ever cross that bridge.

We got back to Shawn's house and I prepared to leave for the main road, but Stela, Shawn's host sister, insisted on us eating lunch before we left. In the middle of lunch, Shawn's brother called from America, so he left the table and Stela and I continued talking.

Stela is 28 and has her own tailoring business in Soroca, but has had to leave multiple times to work in Moscow in order to support herself and her mother. After finishing 11th grade, she went to a vocational school, where she learned all of the necessary skills to become a tailor. She then took correspondence courses at the state university in the same subject, but dropped out before her last year because the family didn't have the money to continue her education and she didn't think she was learning anything new that she hadn't already learned in vocational school. After that, as I understood, was the first time that she left for work in Moscow. It was odd seeing her photos from that time, especially because many of the pictures were with her neighbors who were Vietnamese immigrants. Even though I know Russia has the second-largest immigrant population in the world (only the U.S.'s is larger), I have trouble wrapping my head around the idea of Vietnamese immigrants speaking Russian and living in Moscow.

When Stela returned from Moscow, she started a tailoring and clothing rental business with a partner in the large town of Soroca. The first year, she told me, was good. They were able to make money and she enjoyed the work. The second year, however, the government began taxing her business at a higher rate and created a new law saying that businesses like hers had to also own arable land. Why did a tailoring business need to purchase farmland? Stela said she had no idea. She bought land, but soon the new taxes hurt her business too much, and she had to return to work in Moscow.

Only a stupid and corrupt government would make these kinds of regulations to hurt entrepreneurs, I told her. Stela agreed that it was completely non-sensical, but also told me how she copes.

Any time you don't understand how the government could function so poorly, how the system could have so little sense, she said, "just close your eyes, take a deep breath, and say to yourself, 'I'm in Moldova.' Then it'll all make sense, and you can move on."

Our conversation took place on a Sunday, and on Wednesday Stela would return to Moscow to work again as a shopkeeper. "She hates it there," Shawn told me, "but she does what she has to do."

After Stela and I had talked for a half-hour, Shawn got off the phone and we were ready to go. The weather, however, was now looking inhospitable. Clouds were starting to gather, and while I didn't mind walking a little bit in the rain, I didn't want to force Shawn out into the rain, especially because if it started to rain hard, he would have to walk back from the road to his village in the mud. I said goodbye to Stela, and Shawn and I started walking down the side of the gorge to the river. We stopped several times during the descent as the rain went through short spurts of intensity. Every time we stopped, we looked up the hill and saw Stela waving us back to the house. We crossed the same bridge that we had crossed the day before, but just after we had crossed it, it started raining more heavily. I stopped, looked at Shawn, and laughed.

"It's your call, man," Shawn said.

"Oh, screw it," I said. We turned around, crossed the river again and headed back to the village.

Un alt sat: Partea intii

Sometimes I think that my life in my village of 2,500 people is small and dull, with few people and nothing to do. I recently found a place in Moldova that makes my village look like Manhattan.

Last week I visited my fellow Peace Corps volunteer Shawn's village of Rosietici, in Floresti county. Shawn and I have gotten along since the day we met, largely because of our sense of humor and because we've both spent considerable amounts of our lives in Boston; I was there for college, while Shawn was born and raised in Southie until he joined the Air Force at 18 and later went to college in Oklahoma. Despite our friendship, I had never visited his village. The opportunity presented itself while we were eating lunch in Chisinau and he invited me. I went, carrying with me only a toothbrush, a hairbrush and a stick of deodorant.

Just getting to Rosietici was a challenge. From Chisinau, we took a rutiera north toward Soroca. After two hours of travel, Shawn told the driver to stop and we got off. We stood on the side of the highway, from which a long road turned off and led to a village. The village at the end of that road was not Rosietici; in order to get to Rosietici, we started walking in the opposite direction, where there were no buildings in sight. Shawn had told me about the long walk to his village, but I was finally going to experience it.

We had been walking down the country road for about 10 minutes, during which time we had seen a single horse-drawn carriage and no cars, when Shawn pointed to the horizon and said, "You see the new church over there?"

I strained my eyes and could barely distinguish a building that rose slightly higher than the others. "Yeah, I see it."

"That's my village," he said.

"It doesn't look that far away," I said. "How long will it take to get there? Maybe another 15 minutes?"

"It looks close, doesn't it?" he said with a smile. "You'll see how long it really takes."

The church, Shawn told me, was the idea of a young man in the village. Several years ago, he had had a dream in which he went to a church located at that exact spot in the village. He took it as a sign from God to build the village's first church, and after years of fundraising and construction, he finally fulfilled his vision; the first ever service had been held a week earlier.

After a few more minutes on the road, Shawn turned to the side and started along a worn footpath through the middle of a field. I had just left the last paved road of my walk. We walked toward the distant image of the church, following the path and gulping water from our bottles under the blasting rays of the sun.

"One time I was walking home from the bus at night, and I lost the path," Shawn said. "I was lost for about a half-hour."

We continued to walk, now crossing some rocky terrain and a well-constructed bridge that would be suitable for cars to cross. I felt safe crossing this bridge, and didn't realize that I had always taken safety on bridges for granted. That would soon change.

We walked along pathways for another 10 minutes, until we came across another village built into the walls of a river gorge. Only several hundred people lived in the village, and many of them had dug their homes out of the steep hills, so in essence they were living in caves.

"Just think about it," Shawn said. "People started living here 400 years ago, and it's pretty much the same as it was back then. Sure, they have electricity and phones now, but not much else has changed."

We reached the river, where kids greeted "Mr. Shawn" while they swam near the bridge. The kids didn't attract my attention, however, as much as the bridge. It stretched about 20 meters across and stood only two meters over the water. It was constructed out of wooden planks about 30 cm wide, placed in sets of two or three planks lengthwise across the river so that you walked along the same pieces of wood for about four meters before moving to the next set of planks. The bridge was held together by metal cables, causing the bridge to dip and sway as you crossed it. There were also cables on the sides of the bridge, conceivably as handrails, but they were so low that I would have lost my balance stooping to grab one.

Shawn led the way across the bridge with confidence, talking to the swimming kids as he walked. I followed more gingerly, laughing nervously and silently wishing that Shawn would slow down so that the bridge wouldn't shake so much. I got halfway over the river, looked down, and saw the water passing under the planks of the swaying bridge as dizziness set in. I stopped, regained my composure, and then continued across the bridge.

As I stepped onto the opposite bank, I laughed and said to Shawn, "I figured I'd do something like that at some point in my Peace Corps service."

"What's funny is that a lot of time, babas (old ladies) go across on their hands and knees so that they won't fall in," Shawn said.

"I thought I was going to fall in, but I got by."

"In the Air Force, we always used to say there are two kinds of people," Shawn said. "There are people who have puked, and there are people who haven't puked yet. It's the same with that bridge; there are people who have fallen in, and there are people who haven't fallen in yet." Shawn finished his military service without ever throwing up, but he still has over a month left to fall in the river.

After crossing the river, we went up the other side of the gorge and, after 45 minutes of walking, finally reached Shawn's village of 500 people. I thought I knew a lot of people in my village, but in a place one-fifth the size of Mereseni, Shawn really does know everyone, and he had stories about every person we passed.

We arrived at Shawn's house and I met his host mom, Emilia, a retired elementary school teacher, and his host sister, Stela, a 28-year-old tailor. Shawn bought some beer from the store and drew some wine from the barrel in the cellar, and we drank as we ate dinner with his host family and two neighbors, one of them also a girl in her 20s. I joked that Shawn, Stela, the neighbor and I should all go the village discoteca, but I pulled out of the plans when they told me that the disco was a 45-minute walk and two villages away.

The six of us stayed up late talking, and when the neighbors left, Shawn and I went to his room and talked more. If we were in my village, I would haven undoubtedly played a movie or something on my computer. Shawn is one of the few volunteers without a computer, though, so we just talked; nothing particularly profound, but living in a village makes you appreciate a long, un-rushed conversation between friends, especially with Shawn's picks of Irish music playing in the background. At about midnight, I went to the guest room and went to sleep, hours away from my own bed, yet feeling at home in a Moldovan village not so different from my own.

Reforma la bacalaureat?

The year-end baccalaureate exam required for graduation from 12th grade is best known for two things: being too hard and being a hotbed for cheating and bribes. So imagine my surprise on Thursday afternoon when I talked to Irina, a girl from my village who is finishing 12th grade at a school in the county seat, and she told me that the Romanian subject test she had taken earlier in the day was both accessible and very hard for people to copy on.

Cheating on tests, I discovered early in my service, is epidemic in Moldovan schools. I have done my best to crusade against it in my own classroom, but I've always known that English was probably the only class in which students didn't regularly copy off of each other. After talking to Irina, I was hopeful that the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports had finally addressed a major problem in its system, but I didn't want to get my hopes up. On Thursday evening and Friday morning, I talked to my school's 11th graders about the test. (Like in many Moldovan villages, my school only goes to 11th grade, and students who finish 11th grade can take a slightly different version of the baccalaureate and continue to a trade school or a university. Starting next school year, universities will require students to finish 12th grades, meaning that students from my village must go to the county seat for 10th through 12th grades.) The 11th graders told me the same things Irina had told me earlier; the test was easier than they had expected, but there was almost no way to copy.

The bac used to be administered at each school by the school's own teachers. Teachers, wanting their students to succeed, turned a blind eye toward the rampant cheating, and would often even help the students in the middle of the test. The government tried to institute reforms last year, but schools and teachers complained, and the system remained as-is.

This year, however, the baccalaureate is only given in county seats. My students took a six km ride to Hincesti, along with all the other students their age in the county. Students were separated into rooms according to alphabetical order, so classmates with the last names Mititelu and Moscovici were in the same room, but they were surrounded by kids they didn't know, and their classmates with last names Colesnic and Chirita were far, far away. Also the tests were given by two teachers whom the students didn't know, and they were supervised by two observers from the Ministry of Education. This took away two important motivations for cheating; students wanting to help, feeling pressured to help, or expecting help from their classmates, and teachers having a personal stake in the results of the students in the room.

It seems to me that the Moldovan educational system has just taken a huge step forward. My 11th grade students, who know my feelings on this even though I never taught them English and I never gave them an informatica test, gave me some interesting reactions:

Tanea: "I was writing my essay, and this boy near me said something, and I realized he had been copying off me. I didn't know what to do. I covered my paper."

Nadea: "It was nice to worry about just my own test, not someone else's."

Iurie, in response to me saying that the changes were good for the future of Moldova: "Yeah, but they're not too good for me."

Dana: "It's hard to copy on the Romanian test, anyway, because if they see the same essay on two different tests, they'll just mark it zero. We'll see what happens on the math test."

I like Dana's pragmatic answer. Like everything else in this country, we'll just have to wait and see if these reforms are real, and if they'll stick around next year, or even next week. Until then, I'm smiling with cautious optimism.

Vadul lui Voda

When my plane landed in Moldova two years ago, the last things I expected to do in this country were playing frisbee and drinking beer on a sandy beach, followed by eating pork and beef barbecue at a private camping ground. But that's what seven other volunteers and I did last Sunday at the closest place Moldova has to Martha's Vineyard.

To celebrate the beginning of summer and the end of two years of English teaching, seven of the volunteers I came with (plus the Ukrainian fiancé of one of them) went to Vadul lui Voda, a resort town on the bank of the Nistru River. None of us had ever been there, and we couldn't find a working telephone number to make reservations anywhere, but that didn't stop us from going, based only on the three pieces of advice we had received from another volunteer: take a 130 or 131 rutiera, there's a place with blue cabins named after some kind of flower that costs 70 lei (less than $6) per person, and you don't need to make reservations anywhere. Two years ago I would have wanted more information, but these days that's enough for me to green-light an expedition.

First we stopped by the central market in Chisinau, where we bought several pounds of meat, barbecue skewers, plastic plates, fruits and vegetables. Then we hopped on the rutiera, which took us 20 km away from Chisinau in 40 minutes for the price of 8 lei (try going 20 km anywhere in America for 65 cents). Miraculously, given the meager amount of navigational information, we found the exact camping location that the volunteer had told us about, and we rented two sparsely-decorated cabins with a table and grill between them for 490 lei ($40). After settling in and marinating the meat, we headed to the beach.

The beach at Vadul lui Voda is a small feat of Soviet engineering; tons of sand were dumped decades ago in order to create a beach that's wider than the river it edges up to. On the other side—which, upon checking a map later, I discovered was not actually part of the Transnistrian separatist territory, despite being on the left bank—stood scores of trees in perfect rows, creating a backdrop to the river. The river itself was split in half by buoys; the near side was for swimming and the far side was speedboats and jet-skis. Also on the near side was a large boat that blasted music and announcements in Russian, from which I parsed that they were conducting river tours in x number of minutes and they had пиво, or beer.

We had our own beer, which we had bought from a stand near the beach for 30 lei ($2.50) per two-liter bottle, an exorbitant price by Moldovan standards. We sat on the beach and poured ourselves ice-cold beer, which attracted some sort of small bugs that loved to jump inside our cups. After 15 minutes, a lot of the volunteers went swimming, but I passed, since I had recently cut my foot and didn't want to risk infection. Instead, I sat on the beach, drank my beer, and reveled in seeing hundreds of very attractive Moldovan girls wearing flattering swimsuits made of less material in the back than what would be considered normal in America.

We threw around a Frisbee, and were joined by an eight-year-old boy who spoke no Romanian and would always dive for the disc, covering himself in sand. After a couple hours and a few liters of beer, the wind picked up, creating a small sandstorm and clearing the beach in a matter of minutes. We went back, barbecued, drank more, made a late-night trip back to the beach (I can proudly say that I have peed in the Nistru), and returned to the cabins to get some sleep.

The next morning, we ate more leftover barbecue and then headed back to Chisinau, unanimously agreeing that we wanted to come again sometime before we leave Moldova. There's not much time left, though; as of that Monday morning, I had only 59 days left of Peace Corps service.

Ultimul Sunet

Thursday was the most emotional day of my life since I left America in June 2005. It was the last bell ceremony at school, the end of my second and final school year in Moldova. I had been asked several days beforehand to make a short speech, but I had no idea how I would react as I read it, and I didn't know how the rest of the day would go.

I woke up at my regular time and got to the school by 8:30 a.m. I went upstairs to the second floor, and as I turned the corner toward my toward my two classrooms, I saw Ecaterina Ivanovna, the Romanian teacher, and Nina Ivanovna, the geography teacher. A wave of emotions hit me, and I knew I needed to hurry to the solitude of my classroom; if I could barely handle seeing two teachers, that didn't bode well for my speech in front of 250 students, more than half of whom have been my students for a year or more.

At 9 a.m., the ceremony started in the shade of the school's front garden. I was busy keeping the 8th graders quiet, which was especially important because the microphone wasn't working and a single noisy student could drown out anyone speaking in front.

After several awards were handed out, Mrs. Lucia, the chemistry teacher, introduced me. During her introduction, several of the 8th graders around me kept saying, "Stay another year, Mr. Peter," and, "You can't go."

I walked to the front and pulled my speech out of my pocket, saying that I was too nervous to remember a speech (which you can read here in Romanian or English). I tried to improvise a thank you that I hadn't written at the beginning of the speech, but I choked up and had to turn my back to the crowd for a few seconds. I got through the speech well, although my voice stuck in my throat numerous times. When I finished, students blitzed me with dozens of flowers. In total, I received at least 40 flowers, enough to fill both a vase and a five-liter bucket when I got them home.

The ceremony continued with presentations from the first graders who finished their first year and from the 9th and 11th graders, both of which are leaving our school. After the ceremony, a few more students gave me flowers, including one of my 8th grade girls who broke down in tears when she started thanking me. Students then went to their homerooms to receive their grades, and I retreated to my English classroom. I opened the door and one of the windows, letting a nice breeze through the room, and I sat on my desk next to the window with my feet on the radiator pipes, looking out over the front garden and thinking about my two years of work. American hip-hop music was blasting in the garden, which may not have been the most conducive to thinking, but was somehow fitting.

A half-hour later, everyone in the school gathered again on the front lawn for Children's Day, which is technically June 1, but we celebrated it a day earlier. There were contests for chalk drawings on the cement in front of the school, poetry readings, essay-writing (for the elementary school kids), singing and dancing. The winners received prizes of candy and boxes of chocolates. After the concert, the boys played more music and the teachers and kids danced. A handful of kids asked me to pose for pictures with them.

Some of my 7th- and 8th-grade boys asked me to come to the pond with them, and I gladly joined them. When we got there, the boys all stripped down to their skivvies and ran in. I didn't swim, but took off my shirt, socks and shoes and sat on the grass near the pond. When boys wanted a break from swimming, they'd come out and talk with me for a while. After an hour, I walked back with a few of the boys, including one who didn't feel the need to wear anything more than a t-shirt and his boxer briefs as he walked back into the village. I went home, ate some lunch, and took a quick nap before returning for the school dance that evening.

After checking whether the boys organizing the dance needed any help, I went over to a nearby bar to grab a beer. I was accompanied to the store by one of my 5th grade students, who was going there to buy gum. Not wanting to buy a beer alone in front of one of my students, I was glad when I saw Vasile, one of the school's groundskeepers. I bought us each a beer and some peanuts and we talked for about 45 minutes. I then went back to the school, where the dance was starting to pick up momentum.

The boys had set up the speakers and sound system outside so that we could have the dance in front of the school. The weather was perfect for dancing, but the outdoor setting made my students and graduates think that it was acceptable to smoke at the dance. I had three ways of dealing with the kids, depending on their age; with the 11th graders and boys who had already graduated in years past, I told them to smoke on the road, not at the school. With my 8th graders who were smoking, I took the cigarettes out of their hands and stomped them out. (One of my 8th graders apologized and told me, in English, "Mr. Peter, I'm only smoking when I'm drunk." The fact that that was an acceptable rationale in his mind tells me there is a fundamental problem with attitudes toward alcohol and tobacco.)There was one other guy, about my age, who was not from the village and kept saying, "Show me the rule that I can't smoke at the school." I stood within two inches of his face, puffed out my chest, and harassed him in both Romanian and English for about three minutes until he put out his cigarette; if he wanted to be a jerk, I wasn't going to let my kids see me cave in to him, and I wasn't going to let him enjoy his smoke.

The dance was scheduled to end at 11:30 p.m., but we teachers were lenient and let the kids play music until midnight, on the one condition that it be Moldovan music so that we could dance the hora. When the dance finally ended, a handful of teachers stayed at the school and talked with Doichita, the security guard. Teachers repeatedly told me, "Don't forget us."

I finally got home at 12:45, happy to go to bed after a long day full of memories.

Ce am spus la Ultimul Sunet (in romana)

This is the speech that I gave at the last bell ceremony at my school in Mereșeni on May 31, 2007. I'm sure my Romanian isn't perfect, but this is how I said it.

90 de ani în urmă, un scriitor american, Robert Frost, a scris o poezie care se numește "Drumul Neluat". Se începe așa:

Două drumuri s-au separat într-o pădure galbenă,
Și parîndu-mi rău că nu puteam să merg pe ambele
Și să fiu un călător, mult timp am stat.

Doi ani în urmă, eu am stat, gândându-mă la viitor, vădând două drumuri: un drum în America, cu o viață cunoscută și comodă, și un alt drum în Moldova, o țară străină în care nu aș știe limba, nu aș fi alături de familie și prieteni, și aș primi o zecime de salariu. Trebuia să aleg un singur drum. Ați putea să spuneți că eu am luat drumul neasfaltat.

21 de luni în urmă, am stat aici cu voi prima dată în fața școlii. Pentru voi, eu am fost un străin, și pentru mine, voi ați fost mai multe de 250 de fețe necunoscute. Dar incet, incet, am învățat numile tuturor elevilor mei. Voi repede v-ați deprins cu metoda mea de predare, și din cauza ospitalității voastre, după numai câteva luni m-am simțit ca acasă.

În al doilea an, am avut noroc să vă învăț și informatică. Mi-a plăcut să vă văd folosind calculatorul, înțelegînd un instrument care, pentru mulți din voi, a fost ceva nou în viață. Mi-a plăcut tot să vorbim la lecție în limba voastră că să știu mai bine personalitățile voastre. Sunt mulți copii și adolescenți minunați aici în școală, și sunt mulțumit că am putut să vă cunosc.

M-am uitat aseară la câteva poze din anul școlar trecut, și nu mi-a venit încredere cât de mult v-ați schimbat. În pozele mele, Denis Boincean este un baiățel mic și nedisciplinat, dar anul acesta s-a slăbit la față, s-a crescut, și a fost un lider adevărat la lecții de informatica, dar tot rămâne puțin șmecher. Ion Cătană din pozele mele este un elev pe care îl dedeam afară în aproape fiecare zi, dar anul acesta el întotdeaună facea tema pe acasă și leniștia clasa când era gălăgioasă. Când eu am sosit în sat, Tanea Cazanji și Doina Bufteac erau fete liniștite și pasive, dar s-au transformat în timpul de doi ani că să fie două din cele mai active eleve. Mă uit la elevii din clasa a 6a și îmi pare că toți s-au crescut cel puțin trei centimetri.

Acestea sunt numai câteva exemple de schimbările care am văzut în doi ani de zile. Fiecare din voi s-a crescut, s-a maturizat, a avut experiențe și bune și rele, și a învățat multe lucruri noi despre viață.

Când mă gândesc la toate lucrurile care eu am învățat de când am venit aici, mă gândesc la poezia aceea, a lui Robert Frost, despre două drumurile într-o pădure. Frost a terminat poezia cu cuvintele acestea:

Două drumuri s-au separat într-o pădure, și eu--
Eu l-am luat pe acela mai puțin călătorit,
Și asta a contat cel mai mult.

Eu nu am luat drumul mai ușor, dar mă bucur acum pentru că pe drumul acela am sosit în satul acesta și la școala aceasta, care adevărat a devinit a doua casă a mea. Dacă nu aș fi luat drumul mai greu, mai puțin călătorit, nu aș fi ajuns aici niciodată, și niciodată nu aș fi făcut cunoștință cu toți voi.

Peste aproape două luni, m-întorc în America. O să-mi fie dor de voi, și o să vă țin minte întotdeaună. Vreau să vă rog un singur lucru: să nu uitați cuvintele lui Robert Frost. Lumea este foarte mare, și voi o să aveți mai multe drumuri posibile în viață voastră decât parinții și bunicii voștri au acum. Sper că voi întotdeaună veți lua drumul mai puțin călătorit. Eu așa am făcut, și asta a contat cel mai mult.

Vă mulțumesc de nou că m-ați facut mereu că să mă simt acasă, și vă doresc mulți ani de învățămănt, sănătate, bucurie, și succes. Mulțumesc.

Ce am spus la Ultimul Sunet (in engleza)

This is the speech that I gave at the last bell ceremony at my school in Mereșeni on May 31, 2007.

90 years ago, an American writer, Robert Frost, wrote a poem called "The Road Not Taken". It starts like this:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood...

Two years ago, I stood, thinking of the future, seeing two roads: one road in America, with a familiar and comfortable life, and another road in Moldova, a foreign country in which I wouldn't know the language, wouldn't be near my family and friends, and would receive a tenth of the salary. I had to choose a single road. You could say that I took the road unpaved.

21 months ago, I stood here with you for the first time in front of the school. For you, I was a foreigner, and for me, you were more than 250 new faces. But slowly, slowly, I learned all my students' names. You quickly adjusted to my teaching methods, and because of your hospitality, I felt at home after only a few months.

In the second year, I was lucky enough to also teach you informatica. I enjoyed seeing you using computers and understanding a tool that, for many of you, was something new in life. I also liked that we spoke your language in class, so that I could better know your personalities. There are a lot of wonderful kids and teenagers here at this school, and I'm thankful that I could know you.

Last night I looked at some pictures from the last school year, and I couldn't believe how much you have all changed. In my pictures, Denis Boincean is a little boy without any discipline, but this year his face is thinner, he's taller and he has been a true leader in computer class; but he's still a little bit of a punk. The Ion Cătană in my pictures is a student whom I used to kick out of my class nearly every day, but this year he always did his homework and quieted down the class when it was too noisy. When I arrived in the village, Tanea Cazanji and Doina Bufteac were quiet and passive girls, but they've transformed over the course of two years to be two of the most active students in class. I look at the 6th graders, and I think all of them have grown at least three centimeters.

These are just a few examples of the changes I've seen in two years. Each of you has grown, has matured, has had experiences both good and bad, and has learned many new things about life.

When I think of all the things I've learned since I came here, I think of that poem by Robert Frost about the two roads in a forest. Frost ended his poem with these words:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I didn't take the easier road, but I'm glad now because the road I took lead me to this village and this school, which has truly become a second home for me. If I had not taken the more difficult road, the road less traveled by, I would never have come here, and I would never have met all of you.

In about two months, I'm returning to America. I will miss you, and I will always remember you. I want to ask you to do one single thing: Don't forget the words of Robert Frost. The world is huge, and you will have many more roads open to you than your parents and grandparents had. I hope that you always take the road less traveled. I did, and it has made all the difference.

Thank you again that you always made me feel at home, and I wish you many years of education, health, happiness and success. Thank you.