May 4, 2009

Spring Finally!

The weather at last is nice! Trees are blooming, sun is shining, roads are dry, flowers are sprouting up, and there are baby rabbits, baby goats, baby sheep, baby geese, and baby people! Yes, baby people! One of my Moldovan friends, the social worker with whom I used to share an office, just had her second child, a healthy baby boy. I’ve been working (for a long time now) on knitting a blanket for him. I’ve been getting help from the home ec teacher, and I just have the border left. I hope to have it done in time for the baptism!

Work has been going along as usual – rabbits, bees, English, women’s empowerment camp, informal computer lessons, and random side projects. One of the random things I did lately was subbing for the civic education teacher for a day. She left the topic open to me, so I chose to talk about volunteersim, a relatively new concept here. The ninth-grade class was a bunch of brats, but the 7th-graders were really great. They decided that they wanted to get together a bunch of kids and clean up the cemetary before Easter of the Dead. (This is a holiday the week after regular Easter, in which families take elaborate picnics to their loved ones in the cemetary. They give gifts to the dead (usually a special round bread, a candle, and some candy), and the priest comes around and says blessings.) They asked me to help supervise, so one afternoon we met at the cemetary and picked up all the trash (sad, probably left from last year’s Easter of the Dead), trimmed hedges, hacked weeds, and fixed up benches. They worked for about 4 hours and didn’t get nearly as far as they wanted to. Well, some town council members saw what they were trying to do, and the town hall ended up paying some money to have it cleaned up for real. I was very proud of those kids for taking action and for leading others to take action!

Unfortunately, planning for the women’s empowerment camp is going less than smoothly. Peace Corps has issues with its ‘sustainability,’ and we had to spend a lot of time convincing them. Also, due to the less than wonderful state of the economy, our two major funders will not be funding us this year. Hmmmm. Well, part of our long-term strategic plan was to become as locally-financed as possible, so I guess we’ll have to switch that over to our short-term plan, haha. We are exploring different options for corporate sponsorship, as well as applying to other funder organizations. The biggest cost is of course the feeding and housing of the women during the camp. Through fellow volunteers, we may have found a campsite that we will be able to use for free and only pay a minimal price for food. We are keeping our fingers crossed that this will work out! We are also focusing a lot this year on working with our Moldovan counterparts (a young woman who was a previous counselor at the camp, and a youth development NGO in Soroca) to transfer more of the planning and implementation responsibilities over to them.

We (my local counterparts and I) also have been having problems with the local savings and loan. The new loan cycle was supposed to begin at the end of March, but because of the economy and the problems with the elections, the national bank didn’t distribute the money when it said it would. So 50 people in my village who were relying on around $1000 each in order to buy seeds to plant their crops, or to pay for weddings, or to buy animals, or what have you, have been left waiting. They were expecting the money at the end of March, and it is now the beginning of May, and they are just starting to receive it, but just a few people at a time. For those who wanted to buy seeds for planting, the time to plant has come and gone! What are they supposed to do now? People keep calling or stopping me in the road to ask when the money is going to come, and I don’t know what to tell them, since we ourselves don’t know when the bank is finally going to give it to us. I feel so bad, but I don’t know what I can do to help the situation, other than to sympathize with them and try to explain as best I can.

In other news, I recently switched host families. I decided it was time for a change, and with only 6 months left, I thought it would be good to see how another family lives. I’m now living with my counterpart and her family. The two girls (7th and 12th grade) learn English from me, and we get along great. My new host dad is one of the most talkative Moldovan men that I’ve met, and I appreciate that he’s always telling interesting facts and takes the time to translate the most important things when watching Russian television. And since I’m living with my counterpart, we’ll be able to work more often together. I’ll have to get used to new routines, new food, and different personalities again, but that’s what this adventure is all about. And it will be a lot easier this time around, since I already know the language and the family!

So next week I’ll be taking an 8-day trip to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and I can’t wait! I’ll finally get to see if all of my learning Russian efforts are going to pay off. I’ve been doing little lessons with the Russian teacher at the school, and many people in the village know that I’m going, so have been greeting me and making small talk in Russian to help me get ready. Also, these two cities are two of the main destinations for Moldovans trying to earn money abroad, so I was flooded with offers to meet up with husbands, wives, friends, neighbors, who are currently living there. I’m am armed with a cell phone sim card, and telephone numbers of these people, including a taxi driver. I also finally received my visa. I had to make two special trips into Chisinau and face the scary people at the Russian embassy in order to get it. And luckily I had help from a Moldovan friend, without whom I’m sure I would still be standing at the gate trying just to get in! Ooh, and the best part of all this is that my traveling companions will be my sister and brother!

Well, I suppose that is all for now, I wish I had an entertaining story or two, but I guess I have gotten so used to everything now, that nothing seems suprising or unusual anymore!