Getting down to business

The summer once again flew by. After all of my visitors left, I spent a couple weeks studying for the GRE. It was hard to explain to the Moldovans why I was studying English vocabulary, but they understood that the test was important so they kept wishing me luck and telling me not to come to work but to stay home and study. At the end of July I went to Istanbul to take the test. (It is not offered in Moldova, and since I had to take it out of the country, I thought I ought to at least pick a destination to which I haven’t been yet.) I arrived at night and took the test first thing the next morning (man I’m glad to be done with that!), and then spent the next three and a half days taking in the sights. Istanbul is beautiful! I traveled around with my friend from home, Mary Linda, and we had a wonderful time. It was my first time in a Muslim country, which was interesting. We went into a few mosques, checked out the palace and the harem, smoked a water pipe (no tobacco! as I have never smoked before, that was a little tricky), and took a boat up the Bosphorus Strait to the Black Sea, where we stopped in a little fishing village on the Asian side to have lunch and hike up to the ruins of an old fortress. There is so much to see in Istanbul, and I would have loved another day or two!!

Now that all of my traveling is over, work has started to pile up. The rabbit project is going less than smoothly. My relationship with my old host family has been less than pleasant since I moved out, and now it is very difficult to continue the project as planned, since my old host mom was one of the two primary beneficiaries. Some of the rabbits died, which really stinks, since one of the main points of the project was to teach them how to raise them to not be susceptable to diseases. None of the 6 other beneficiaries have received their rabbits yet, and I’m have a hell of a time trying to track down receipts from all of the purchases to use for project reporting. Needless to say, it will be a headache trying to wrap this up before I leave. And I don’t want to just wrap it up so that I can report to the funder that we did everything we said we would, but to actually leave the project feeling like something was learned, and that these women are better off.

The bee project is going along fairly smoothly. The kids have been coming once a week all summer to take care of the hives, and the first harvest was last month. We had XX liters of honey from 3 families of bees. Before I leave, we will wrap up the business classes and make a plan for carrying on the business next year. It’s been a lot of fun to see how some of the youth have really taken responsibility and get really excited about the project.

Back in May I worked with two young entrepreneurs on putting together business plans, which were then entered in a regional competition. I helped them think about all of the things that enter into an income statement and a cash flow statement, as well as to better predict what their incomes will be. We also did a lot of research on where the best place to buy their supplies would be, as well as the marketing. Last week I was pleasantly surprised when one young girl told me that she and the other young man whom I had helped took first and second place in the regional competition! Their business plans have now been sent on to the national level, and if they place their, they will receive partial funding for their businesses.

English classes continued through the summer. Five girls showed up twice a week, and with all of my guests the past few months, they got a lot of practice speaking. I’m really quite pleased with how much they have been able to accomplish with so little time and resources.

Most of my work over the last month has been for the women’s development course. We ended up winning a grant from the Global Fund for Women, which is allowing us to do the camp as we had planned. We’ve been busy with training the counselors/instructors, signing contracts for logistical things, recruiting participants, developing activities and materials, and improving our methods of evaluation. The 5-day course starts next week, and I am so excited. We’ve got a great group of instructors this year – 10 Moldovans and 5 other peace corps volunteers. Four of the Moldovans are former participants in the TARE course, and it makes me so excited to see what TARE has done for them – the impact that they are having in their communities and the self-confidence and motivation they demonstrate in their daily lives. I can’t wait to give another 75 women this experience! Camp starts on Monday!