Merry Christmas from Moldova! You all should be jealous, my Christmas season starts on December 25th and goes until January 7th because of the Russian Orthodox influence in Moldova.
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| National Christmas tree of Moldova |
Two years is the minimum that I have committed to give to the Peace Corps, Moldova and my village in Moldova. But really, how long is two years?
By the numbers 2 years is: 24 months, 730 days, 1/12 of my life…..
I plan on completing my service sometime after the first week of August, 2012. When I think about 2 years in a US mindset it seems to be a long time. When I get back my youngest brother could be starting his first year of college, my sister will be in college or maybe in Central America as a missionary, my other brother will be doing something cool like college or a rock band or video game tester… I will miss going out with him on his 21st Birthday. I will miss high school graduations. I will and have already missed new children being born to friends and family. I will miss at least one wedding and probably more. My parents will be a little older, but I hope they will not have changed too much. The dogs at my family’s house will be a little older; Charley (a dog) has had some health problems so we will see if I get to see him again.
So, when I think in those terms, I feel like time is almost standing still and I will miss so much at home and in the US. But then again, if I was in the US who knows where I would be working, I might have missed these things even if I was in the US.
That was my thought process when it comes to thinking like someone in the US, but I am in Moldova and am working to think in a different way. So far I have been in country 6 of the 26 months I plan to be here. I have been in my village 4 of the 24 months I signed up for; I have completed 17% of the time I plan on being here…. That is crazy to me! What have I done in these 6 months? I have made some friends, learned an acceptable amount of Romanian, learned about a former Soviet Union country and made some contacts. I hope to accomplish a lot more like fluency in Romanian, projects to better my village and to share some of US culture with Moldavians.
When I look at time in Moldova, it seems to be flying by. I fear that one day, I will wake up, the two years will be over and I will not have accomplished much. But I think that is a healthy fear and will hopefully keep me motivated to make a difference. But who knows, maybe the only difference I will make is the way some Moldavians view American and to better understand who I am as a person… I think I will be happy with that.
It is amazing how the “speed of time” is in direct correlation with one’s mindset.
There are two churches in my village which is fairly uncommon. In Moldova 97% of people are Orthodox Christian, so to have an Orthodox and Baptist church in a village or 3,000 people is fairly unique.
The Baptist church has been in the village since 1926 but the building below was constructed in 1990 with the help of Eagle Rock Christian Church in Los Angeles, CA. This is the largest Baptist church in south-eastern Moldova and to my count can sit 200 people. The story is that the church has lost members, but the only reason is that they moved to the USA. I was also told that when the Soviet Union fell, a church donated a few thousand US dollars for them to build a church and at the time the exchange rate was great, so they were able to build a whole church for a few thousand dollars.
I have never missed gravity wagons more in my life. The manager of my partner organization also has a pasta manufacturing company. The other day I was helping him unload wheat at the local flour mill so they could make flour for the pasta.
In the US, a farmer would usually take his grain, by wagon or semi, to a local co-operative or business who would dry it and clean it, if necessary, then put it in trucks or trains to send to companies, such as flour mills, or possibly larger grain companies like Consolidated Grain and Barge, Cargill or other larger companies.
In Moldova, most grains are grown by small farmers will usually be used by the household and not sold to the market. All the corn my host family grew comes back to the house to be ground up for the chickens and ducks. In my village, the wheat is either taken back to the house to feed animals and people or taken to the flour mill.
Back to my flour mill story, generally in the US the semi or wagon unloading the grain will be weighed, then it will dump its load into a hole in the ground, which then the grain will be moved by an auger into a grain storage bin. Then the wagon will be weighed again to know how much grain was unloaded. Well, when I went to help the manager of my NGO unload his wheat at the flour mill, it was a three man job that took a couple hours.
The truck had a 8’x14’x4’ bed full or wheat. One man stayed in the bed of the dump truck and filled up 10 gallon metal pots, which another man and I each took a handle on each side and walked about 10 paces and up one step in the building to unload into a storage area so it could later be made into flour.
I started to think of ways to improve this set-up. If this mill had a place outside the truck could have just dumped its load of wheat in 10 minutes at the most instead of the 2 hours which it took us. But then I realized that the majority of people coming to the mill have the little amount of wheat they could raise on 0.5 hectors (1.2 acres) minus what they are feeding to their animals. Plus, the only reasons to make the mill more efficient in unloading wheat, is if the difficulty of unloading wheat is driving away customers and/or the mill wants to produce more flour.
So, for now I think the flour mill is working well. If they wanted to increase the ease of unloading I hope they come or I hear about it so that I can be involved.
Hram (dictionary translation: Feast day) is a like a city’s birthday but it is on the day of an Orthodox Saint. Each village has a saint, my village’s Hram is on the 22nd of May and our saint is Saint Nicklaus.
I recently visited a volunteer in my Raion (like a county) whose village was having their 600th Hram. Pretty wild if you think about it, a 3000 person village in Moldova on the boarder of the Ukraine is 600 years old. There were speeches, singing and dancing. Below are a couple of picture of a traditional Moldavian choir.
In Moldova there are four ways that I’ve seen to keep your house warm during the winter:
Electricity: I’ve seen small heaters around to keep rooms and offices warm, but I have not seen electricity as a means to heat an entire house.
Gas: My host family has a gas water heater which is used to heat the radiators and the sink water. This gas water heater does not have a larger hot water storage tank like many in the US; it heats the water as it is being used.
Sobă (wood stove): I would describe it as an enclosed fireplace/wood burning stove built into a wall. They usually have metal rings on the top of the stove, so you can use its heat to cook. People will burn wood, trash, corn cobs and the stalks of sunflowers for heat. Unlike a fireplace, it is completely enclosed with one door to take out the ashes and put in more material to burn. Depending on the size of the house, there could be 1 to 3 stoves because they can only heat the rooms which are on each side of the wall they are built into.
Fire heated boiler/outdoor wood stove: Generally just large buildings such as schools have boilers, but one of my friends has a small boiler system set-up at his house. There is usually a building outside of the building/home which has a metal cylinder which is where the fire is started (the fuel is usually wood or straw) around the cylinder with the fire is water being pumped in a larger cylinder, the heated water moves into the building and heats it through radiators and then returns to the boiler.
My host father was complaining that he could not eat fish without his glasses because he could not see the bones. But as my host mother was giving him her glasses he said that without glasses the only thing he can see are beautiful woman.
Needless to say, my host father did not get to use my host mom’s glasses for that meal.
FYI: My host father isn't a dirty old me, he just likes to get a reaction out of me and my host mother.
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| Bride and Groom standing on a towel with money beneath it |
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| A married couple who is suppose to give guidance during the couple's marriage |
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| Walking around the pulpit 3 times |
