Today’s Adventure: Warming Up

Here’s something I’ll bet you never thought about before:

When you are heating buildings made of concrete or brick with only wood or coal fires, they get very warm and retain the heat surprisingly well. But if you don’t heat them for a few weeks, they get REALLY cold and then it takes days and days to warm them back up.

I was on vacation for 2 weeks and when I came back my room was freezing. I was expecting this. But what I wasn’t expecting was that even though I made a bigger fire than usual, a few hours later it was barely warmer than it had been when I got there. I don’t know the physics behind this phenomenon, only that it seems like you have to de-thaw the concrete walls before they’ll keep a room warm for you.

I thought I might have just screwed up my fire, but then when I got to school the next day – the first day back after the 2 week vacation, the school was freezing. All the sobas (wood burning stoves) were lit in every classroom but it was still freezing and like standing in a cold hole outside. All the teachers assured me that it’s always like this the first day back after vacation and that it will take a few days to warm up and retain the warmth like normal. There is always something new here.

Fortunately, I discovered through this that, as I have long suspected but never confirmed, my sleeping bag plus my blankets is more than enough heat to sustain me though the night in an essentially unheated room, even when it is about negative 5 degrees outside. Don’t get me wrong – I have to stay the hell under those blankets. But (knock on wood) I don’t think I will be in any danger of freezing to death in the night, even if I somehow fail to make a good fire one night. A margin of error can be a very comforting thing.

Noape Buna!

2011 In Review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,600 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Today’s Adventure: You Dance in Circles? Well We Dance in Lines

I taught my kids the electric slide last week as a reward for their good behavior. I wanted to film it but they really didn’t get it together enough to be filmed. The video would have just been me doing it over and over again by myself and hollering, “Come on! It’s not hard! Just try it!” while most of them hung around the edges staring at my feet.

I was surprised – given then they do the hora (traditional circle dance) at every celebration, I imagined they would like line dancing since it’s basically the hora only not in a circle. But it weirded them out.

Then as a last resort (I really wanted them to have a good time since the whole idea was that it was a reward for them) I pulled up the Macarena. And everyone lost their minds.

Moldovan kids love the Macarena. I guess it makes sense since it’s so easy and they can’t understand the words to the song anyway. I was lucky I even had it on my iTunes since I haven’t listened to it since I was about in 4^th grade.

Anyway, I will be giving another class the same reward soon and am hoping to get them trained well enough to maybe film it. Fingers crossed. Noapte Buna!

 

Today’s Adventure: The Boss is Coming, So Stop Working!

Sometimes, in Moldova, the ministry of education visits schools. I’ve gathered that no matter how small a school you are, you are liable to have at least one to two visits per year. These visits should probably be unannounced but they are not. The school knows when the ministry is coming and they prepare accordingly.

One of the most important things about life in Moldova is keeping up appearances. That means that it’s not actually important what your everyday practices are. What’s important is what the ministry sees when they come. Also important is that your school acts as a good host for the people from the ministry. That means that you should throw a masa (big feast for lunch) and encourage them to drink a lot of wine before they do their job.

This is probably not the case in all schools in Moldova, but it certainly is the case in mine. Starting a few days before the ministry arrives, the kids start getting coached. They know that their good behavior is of the utmost importance, and they will possibly be murdered by their homeroom teacher after the visit if they don’t make the school look good. The teachers want the ministry to think that their students are learning well and are super smart (smarter than all the OTHER schools) so they meet with a classes that the ministry plans to observe and goes through the lesson they will get and gives them all the answers. That way the kids know exactly what to expect and what to say when the ministry is watching. The kids are also made to wear their best outfits when the ministry visits so they are also the most attractive students the ministry has seen that week.  Never underestimate the importance of being attractive in Moldova.

On the day that the ministry visits, leading up to the moment they get there, my experience has often been that one or both my partners will tell me that I have to teach our classes alone that day because they will be in the school kitchen preparing a masa. I sometimes notice other teachers doing the same thing, although for these teachers there is no American who will babysit their classes. They just give the kids something to read and leave them alone.

The teachers then always want to re-arrange all the furniture to make it more frumos (pretty) for the ministry visit, and consequently, if you are working on lesson plans in the teachers’ lounge (like SOME American blog writers I could mention…) you will get yelled at to stop working because the ministry is coming and you need to be helping with all the preparation. They once made me stop working so I could sit at the table with all the food, along with all the other teachers, so that when the ministry walked in we would all be sitting at the table smiling at them like trained dogs. I asked them, “Don’t you think it will look better if the ministry walks in and we are all working hard on lesson planning?” But they just stared at me.

We just has one of these visits this week and I’m hoping it’s the last one this year since it really disrupts things. The thing is, you can’t blame the teachers too much because if the ministry doesn’t like what it sees the school get s a bunch of crap and can also be shut down or lose funding. And the ministry dictates what they want to see, so if they wanted to tell the schools they want to stop seeing obviously fabricated lessons and having a bug feast instead of talking about work, they could. But they don’t. So we continue with the system we have, just trying to keep our soviet-trained heads down and do the best we can with what we’ve got.

Noapte Buna!

Today’s Adventure: What Have You Been Doing With Your Life In America?

The other day I finished class early so I told my 5^th graders that they could ask me any question they wanted about myself or America and I would answer them honestly. This was quite the gift and they were very excited about it. The questions were as follows:

Kids: How old are you?

Me: 25

Kids: Where are you from in America?

Me: The state of Washington

Kids: DO YOU KNOW BARAK OBAMA????

Me: No. And I live in the STATE of Washington. There is the capital, and that is a city. I live in the state. It’s on the opposite side of the country by the Pacific Ocean.

Kids: Have you seen Miley Cyrus?

Me: No.

Kids: Have you seen Michael Jackson?

Me. No. You know he’s dead, right?

Kids: WHAT????

Me: Yeah he died like 3 years ago.

Kids: Did you know him?

Me: NO.

Kids: Have you seen Justin Beiber?

Me: No.

Kids: If you haven’t seen any of the famous people then what have you been doing your whole life in America?

Me:….I don’t know how to answer that.

(At this point my partner, speaking to some girl in the front row about something, muttered, “Something, something, something, Celine Dion, something.”)

Me: THERE! CELINE DION! I HAVE SEEN CELINE DION!

Kids: Who is that?

Me: (In English) Dammit….

Noapte Buna!

Today’s Adventure: Veggies in Moldova in Winter

A new adventure for me, living alone this winter, is in deciding what to cook. Summer was fun because I had unending access to fresh fruits and vegetables right from my host family’s garden, which allowed me to make fresh salads, tasty tomato sauces, and generally pretty healthy stuff, which was a nice break after 8 months of giant chunks of pig meal boiled in liquid fat with sour cream dumped all over the top.

But now, all the fresh veggies have disappeared. Moldovans eat canned goods all winter, along with potatoes and parsnips, which will keep in the basement for months. Most of what’s in the cans is tomatoes and parsley and onion mixes, along with pickled cucumbers and watermelons. I had a lot of this last summer, and I relished every time a can came up from the basement because (and I want to make this very clear) there are NO vitamins available in winter food in Moldova unless you are bringing food in from the city or eating things you canned.  A common experience for volunteers is for our hair to start falling out in small clumps in the middle of winter due to vitamin deficiency. Before my grandmother calls me freaking out, I do want to add that this does not have long term health effects after only two winters, so I’m not to concerned.

The larger issue for me is just WHAT to eat. I’ve been bringing canned fruit and things like that in from the city whenever I’m there. They do have hot house veggies available in supermarkets in the city, like tomatoes and broccoli, and I like to pick those up as well. But sometimes I don’t get in to the city for a few weeks, and when that happens, my challenge is trying to make something tasty using only food I can get in the village. Grilled cheese is a new favorite, along with pasta with sour cream on it, which is a Moldovan specialty and has really grown on me. But these don’t have any nutritional value since they’re just fat and carbs.

The other day I found some big round black dirt balls in the veggie section which I THOUGHT were red beets. Red beets are tasty and full of vitamins so I picked them up hoping to make some borscht (Russian beet stew). But when I got them home and was preparing them to be thrown into a pot of water with some carrots, potatoes, parsnips and onions, I discovered that they are (I think) white beets, which, after a quick check on the internet, I discovered also have no nutritional value. So basically I ate what I like to call “root soup.” With some pepper an Italian seasonings. I actually thought it was okay, but it is definitely not a burrito or eggplant parmesan.

So, it seems that, with the exception of occasional dried and canned fruit, I will likely be losing a little bit of hair this winter.  But I’m sure by the end of it I will be able to make a mean root soup.

 Noapte Buna!

Today’s Adventure: Making A Fire

Some of you might be curious about this soba contraption that I keep mentioning (Ehem – DAD). I have finally mastered (I think) making a fire in it and will continue to do so all winter so as not to die of cold (yay!). I am including, below, a photo-documentary of how to make a fire in the soba so that it becomes more clear for anyone who is curious. Enjoy!

Step 1) Get your materials. You need a small armload of thin pieces of dry wood, a small armload of dried cornstalks and dried corncobs to use as tinder, a bit of paper to get things going, matches, and a bucket of fresh coal, plus an empty bucket and shovel for the old coal.

 

Step 2) Clean up the last fire. If you made a fire the day before, there is used coal and ash still in the soba so you have to clean it out. You shovel it out with the little metal shovel, drop it into the bucket, then I deposit it behind the house by the chicken coop. If you’re my host family you wash it off so you can use it a second time, but they insisted that I shouldn’t try to learn to do that, so I just leave it for them to pick up when they want to.

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Step 3) Tinder. Once the small space in the soba is cleaned out, it’s ready for a fresh fire. I start by crumpling up paper and ripped pieces of cardboard and putting it in there. Then you light it. Paper starts burning fast so then you have to load the dried corn stalks and cobs into the soba fast so they get a chance to start burning before the paper burns itself out. After you get all the corn stalks in there, you add a few small pieces of wood to it. The nice thing about a soba is that it is almost impossible to smother the fire because the fire is actually being made on a grate, and if you have the smaller lower door open underneath the fire, then oxygen is being sucked in from below and prevents the fire from going out.

Step 4) Add more wood from up top. Once the fire is going nicely, you shut the upper door, being sure to keep the lower door open to prevent all the heat from getting sucked up the chimney. Then you use a can opener (or a knife or whatever is lying around) to pry the burner off of the top of the soba. This is where, just maybe 25-30 years ago, people made food in the evening, and there Moldovans still leave soups and other things to stay warm. From here, you add the larger pieces of wood. You can just throw them in on top of everything and the fire won’t smother as long as the small lower door is open on the front of the soba.

Step 5) Once you’ve got all your wood in there and the flames are going nicely, you dump the bucket of coal in onto the fire. It starts heating up immediately and you can just put the burner back in place on the soba top. Then you’re done.

After about a half hour or so the coals reach their maximum burning rate and the soba starts radiating heat like nobody’s business. It can keep a small room like mine super warm all night. After the coals stop glowing orange you can shut the lower door to keep extra head in. The bricks of the soba, once heated, continue to radiate heat for several hours and if you keep all the doors and windows shut the heat will be contained in the room all night. It’s pretty cozy and gives you a great sense of accomplishment. The only bummer about this method of heating is that by morning it’s pretty much freezing again and that isn’t too much fun once January roles around. But that’s what long underwear is for!

Noapte Buna!

Today’s Adventure: I Want to Snuggle With the Invaders in My House

I want to preface this post by commenting that I know that I am the least practical person in the world. A practical person recognizes that vermin are vermin and should not be in your house. Needless to say, this story is about me doing the opposite.

So I have been living in the new place for a month or so now. It is a partition of my host family’s largest house and I moved into it for the winter because the soba (wood burning stove) works better in here than the one in the casa mica where I was all summer. It is a bedroom with a small entryway/hallway outside of it leading to the door to the outside. It is maybe half the total size of the casa mica where I was living all summer. I sleep, cook, and do laundry all in the same room because there is still no running water so I haul it in from the well. This has actually been really nice because the house, while still about 20 or 30 years old, is much, much newer and in better shape than the over 100 year old casa mica where I was all summer.

That all being said, though, the house has its structural faults. Moldovans tend to build the houses in the villages themselves and I have never seen nor heard from any other volunteer about any Moldovan ever building a “real” foundation to their house. They just kind of build the houses on the ground. Consequently, after only a few years, the houses start to shift on the uneven ground and end up with cracks in the walls, holes in every corner leading directly under the house and, most telling, doors that won’t close properly. I swear, it seems like no doors in Moldovan villages close all the way or will lock properly because the slight shifting of the houses warps the doorframes and makes it impossible to close them after only a year or two.

So despite the new house being newer, all these structural idiosyncrasies are in play. There are cracks in some of the walls, a few in the floorboards behind my cupboards, and the door doesn’t close all the way. As you may have guessed from the title of this post, this naturally means that I have furry little visitors now and then.

In the old house, the kitchen was a separate room closed off by a door that actually latched shut, so I did not get too many mice in the room where I slept because there was nothing for them to do there and it wasn’t any warmer there than it was outside in the summer. Now, though, all my stored food is in the same room with me in cupboards and no matter how well you clean up after cooking, they can somehow smell is and want in. In addition, it is chilly here now and I make fires at night, meaning that it is infinitely warmer in here than it is outside, giving them further reason to want to come in.

So I hear a lot of scuttling around at night. Which, honestly, does not bother me too much. Spiders are my big fear, and I had hamsters as pets when I was a kid, so rodents don’t really bother me. The only time I care that they are in the room is when they are loud while I’m trying to sleep.

So one night, about a week ago, I laid down to go to sleep and proceeded to lay wide awake for at least an hour listening to a bunch of super loud rustling around going on right near my head. I was thinking about it and finally determined that it was coming from the cupboards where I store bread, potatoes and onions. So finally, I got up, turned on the light, took a deep breath and threw open the cupboard door.

At first I saw nothing, just the food there. I felt sure that something had been in there, though, so I poked a few bags, moved an onion or two around to see behind them, and found nothing. Then, all of a sudden I saw him. This little brown mouse was clinging like a mountain climber to the stack of clean towels I keep in the cupboard, looking at me like a deer in the headlights but keeping perfectly still. I almost didn’t see him.

At this point, I should say, I was really irritated because I just wanted to sleep and dealing with vermin in your house at midnight is not my idea of a nice night. And the second I saw him, I couldn’t help but think of all those old movies where women scream and freak out at the sight of a mouse and don’t know what to do. My reaction was a little different.

I almost died because he was so cute. I started laughing and that made him run behind the towels squeaking, which I thought was even cuter. Knowing that I should be trying to find a way to kill him, I instead started looking for a way to trap him so I could look at him some more. I managed to shoo him into a Tupperware container and get the lit on it. I then proceeded to giggle at how cute he was, running around in the Tupperware trying to figure out what was going on. I realize the ridiculousness of the situation. But seriously, you guys. He was SO cute!

Finally, after I’d jostled him enough, I took him outside and released him, squeaking, into the frigid night. Then I went back to bed in peace. The sad thing, though, is while I don’t necessarily like the idea of mice running around in my house, there is a part of me that really wants him to come back.

Noapte Buna!

Today’s Adventure: Planning A Halloween Party

Planning the Halloween Sarata (a sarata is a presentation that Moldovan kids put on starting in middle school that is a combination of an after-school dance, a pep assembly, and a party) has been an interesting experience.

I learned a lot about organizing presentations with my club kids from last year when they put together a peer teaching presentation to the kindergarteners. I have learned even more about preparing with Moldovans this year as we plan the Halloween sarata and I can sum all of it up by saying that they never look ready to an American when, in reality, they are ready. This happens for a couple reasons in my experience:

1)     Americans (not all, but in general) value having things prepared in advance, ready to go in plenty of time so there is no last minute scrambling. Thus, when I looked at my club last year and it was a week before their presentation and they didn’t have half their visuals made, I assumed that they were not going to be ready on time. Little did I know that they knew exactly what they were doing and no matter how far in advance we started preparing, they were always going to do that preparation the night before anyway.

2)     I mentioned this in a previous post, but Americans tend to be big picture  people. We like to bang out a basic outline, then move on to the general details of each step in the outline, then get to the minute details last. Moldovans (as least the ones I work with) tend to like to go in the opposite direction. The details are the first thing they want to talk about, and they could talk about those for weeks on end. They tend to want to put all those details together as a big picture last and this is something that my brain (partially because I’m an American and largely just because I am me) can’t handle.

3)     Moldovans tend to yell over each other a lot when making decisions as a group. The adults do this too but the kids are absolutely on a different level. I have never walked out of a class or a meeting since my service began, and always wondered why volunteers ever felt the need to do it (it is a fairly common story around here). But in several of our meetings for planning for Halloween I almost did walk out because there is so much screaming that you literally can’t hear yourself think. My Romanian is at this point solid and I can basically get myself in or out of any situation and even if I don’t know the word I want I can use my other vocabulary to describe the word I want. I can understand all my students and all the teachers individually. But I can NOT understand ANYTHING is everyone is yelling at once. Part of it is the sheer chaos and part of it is that the noise level is overwhelming to me. But needless to say, I have a hard time feeling too confident in a group is all the do is scream and yell because in America that would mean they are dysfunctional, whereas in Moldova that seems to be just one way to get things done. The teachers do the same things in meetings.

I wanted to take these lessons from last year and apply them this year. So after the first meeting or so of planning when there was just non-stop yelling and no one could sit still long enough to explain what they wanted in terms of big picture stuff, I just sat back decided to let them yell it out.

This was partially, I admit, due to my own apathy and unwillingness to engage in a screaming match just to be heard over a din in a foreign language. But I also wanted to see what would happen if I just left them to their own devices. This is an important point in the service of any Peace Corps volunteer, I think. When you get to the point where you realize that you can’t make them plan and act like Americans in all things. If their methods (terrifyingly disorganized to my American eyes) get the job done, then it isn’t better or worse than the way an American would do it. It really is just another way of doing things.  After over a year here, it starts becoming clear that I really am not here to change their cultural practices. My job is to help them learn to improve practices that don’t work (for example, new teaching methods to help kids learn better) but I’m not here to make them all act like Americans in everything they do. I can offer suggestions if they are interested in other methods, but ultimately, suggestions aren’t heeded if they aren’t solicited.

So I just sat back and gave up/let them figure it out their way and something amazing happened. They planned it all themselves. They didn’t even really need me except as a consultant as far as what activities we do on Halloween in America and what kinds of food they should have. They organized all the games and activities themselves, made all the advertisements, and got a schedule of events put together. In watching this, I realized that trying to impose my American order on the whole planning process was just confusing to them and that it was necessary and good that I stepped back a little bit.

The sarata is this Friday so we will see how it goes. Pictures to follow!

PS – I wrote this blog before the Sarata and am posting it a week later. Photos are from the party – it went pretty well!

Today’s Adventure: Believing In Yourself

I’m going to get all sappy for a short minute.

I started making my own fire recently (see other post for full details). The lead-up to this began last spring when I was moving out of my first host family’s house and whenever I insisted to the Moldovans that I wanted to live alone they would say, “But who will make your fire in the winter?”

To this I would usually respond, “Um, I will. Is it hard or something?”

The answer to this varied from “No, of course not, but you don’t know how,” to “For an American, of course it’s hard,” to “Yes, it is and you will freeze to death if you don’t do it right.” While I recognize and appreciate that most of these responses came from my villagers just wanting what was best for me, they also came from the Moldovan mentality that a young woman does not have any life skills until she is married and has a baby. Until then, we are considered dependants and wanting to do anything for ourselves is just a ridiculous idea.

But here is the important and sappy part that I wanted to say: After hearing people worry for months and months that I wasn’t going to be able to make a fire, I started getting nervous that maybe I couldn’t. I mean, I’d seen the Moldovans do it and, apart form a few details of order of operations, it really is just sticking wood in a hole and lighting it on fire. I have a bachelor’s degree and have never had any major accidents, so naturally I initially didn’t have any doubt that I could do it myself if I just learned how.

But when you hear people tell you that you can’t do something for long enough, you start to believe it. You second guess yourself about being able to do the simplest task. You start having thoughts like, “Maybe they know something I don’t about it and that’s why it’s me against all of them saying I can do it.”

So I was really starting to worry that maybe I couldn’t do this thing and maybe I was going to freeze to death or have to go crawling to my host family and ask them to make my fires for me. But then something happened – I started making my own fires and guess what? It’s freaking easy. I knew it would be easy the whole time but –and here is my point – if people tell you that you can’t do something for long enough, you will start to believe it. Even something as simple as starting a damn fire. And once I realized what had happened to me there, I couldn’t help but think about all the people in the world who want to do something different but are surrounded by people who tell them that they can’t. This can have a devastating effect on how you perceive your own capabilities, and believing along with everyone else that you are not capable is a huge tragedy.

This is not really about Moldova, and could have happened for a lot of reasons in America too. My point is just, for anyone out there who wants to do something but is surrounded by people telling you that you can’t do it….do it anyway. Because you probably can if you really want to and you never know if it will turn out to be as simple as starting a fire.

Noapte Buna!