National Moldovan TV debut!

Good news – the rabbit project was funded! So now I’ll be busy with organizing technical seminars for the women, as well as working with them on marketing and tracking expenses. Right now the rabbit houses are being built, and in a few weeks we’ll be going down to a village near Chisinau to buy the rabbits. This week I’ve also got another business lesson to teach to the bee kids. The subject this time is Management, with a focus on goal-setting. Saturday I have a meeting with our new counterpart for the empowerment camp. We’re going to get them up to speed on what the camp is all about, and start with our advertising and planning for this year.

Last week I taught a budgeting/financial planning as part of a business planning seminar series in a region in the south of Moldova. The audience was about 15 40- to 50-year-old men who want to expand their rural businesses – buy tractors, build greenhouses, etc. So the audience wasn’t the usual women and youth that I’m used to, so I was a bit intimidated. I taught for two hours and we only got through half of the material. Going through the process of thinking about and calculating all of the initial costs and operating costs, and projecting income is not something that most people do. If they are looking to get funding via credit or grant, it usually goes something like this: ‘Put down 20,000 lei (Moldovan currency) for the equipment. Yeah, that sounds right. Oh, and another 10,000 for seeds. Yeah, that should do it.’ And that’s about it. There’s no researching vendors, no market research, no thinking about smaller costs that add up. Just one large estimation, which means they either end up paying interest on money they didn’t need to borrow, or they end up short and don’t have enough to get the business off the ground. So anyways, at the seminar we went through a sample budget for the construction of a greenhouse, which seemed to get them thinking, and I was able to leave lots of materials and some excel pre-formula-ed worksheets to help them in their planning.

I made my Moldovan national TV debut last Sunday. As I mentioned last month, my village choir sang at the 20th anniversary celebration of a tv show that discusses rural/agricultural issues. There were 4 musical groups from throughout the country who performed, as well as 4 famous Moldovan singers. I of course didn’t know any of them, but the ladies in my group were clearly star-struck being in their presence. We took a rutiera down to Chisinau early in the morning, and when we first got there we recorded our two songs. Then we sat around all day (seriously, like 6 hours) while they filmed the show, which consisted of important people talking about agriculture in Moldova, broken up by these cultural acts. There was the Minister of Agriculture, the mayor of Chisinau, and some other big wigs, but truth be told, I was kinda bored (and hungry). We finally went on in front of the cameras late in the afternoon, and more or less lip-synced while our recorded tracks played. I had learned our two songs to perfection by then, and being all dressed up in Moldovan national costume, you couldn’t even tell that I was an American. Good experience, but I have no desire to be a star....

While there are a lot of things here that really get on my nerves (like the horrendous customer service), I’ve had a few surprisingly pleasant experiences lately. For example, I was at the bus station in Soroca last week to buy a ticket to Chisinau ahead of time, and headed toward the ticket booth. There was a rutiera just pulling out, one that I have taken many times. The driver saw me, assumed I wanted to go to Chisinau, and sent someone out to run after me to see if I wanted him to wait. I said no thank you, but I would leaving later in the day. I was shocked – usually the case is that I come running up trying to flag one down, and they take off anyways. Another example, the driver who took me and another volunteer down south for the business planning seminar heard that we were in need of some art supplies when we got back to Chisinau. We asked him where we could find them (straws and cotton balls), and not only did he tell us, but he actually made two stops and made sure we found them before dropping us off at Peace Corps. Had we gone alone, it could have taken all day; instead, thanks to his kindness, we accomplished the mission in less than 15 minutes!

So the local grade school/middle school won a grant for a project to do activities with the students whose parents are working abroad. This week was the opening of the project, and all of the kids without parents from grades 1-9 gathered together to talk about their experiences. In a school of 250 students, 123 kids are living with grandparents, neighbors, aunts/uncles, or even alone. One 14-year-old girl hasn’t seen her parents in 13.5 years! Most of the kids say they think their parents have left them so that they can give them a better life. But in the end, they would rather have their parents home than to receive the candies, laptops, and clothes that their parents are sending them. I knew all this, but to see them all gathered there and talking about it, and realizing the true magnitude of this problem, was really heart-wrenching.

A happy event, on the other hand, was the ‘English Song Contest’ at the high school in Soroca. I and two of my colleagues were asked to be judges for this event, and it was awesome. There were 11 contestants, ranging from a quartet of girls singing ‘Sway’ to a lone young punk trying to rap to Eminem, to a girl singing Listen to Your Heart with 3 back-up dancers and two dudes who lifted her onto their shoulders during the climax of the song. Great stuff, really great stuff.