Moving to any new place includes new routines. Most of us don’t think about what “routine” actually means very often, but Peace Corps’ help manual defines it as anything that you can do without thinking. This means, brushing your teeth, washing your hair, cooking eggs, walking to work, etc. Peace Corps warns you before you arrive in country that your routines will be disrupted because you’ll have to be thinking about every tiny thing you do in your new environment because everything will be different. So I was prepared for this when I came to Moldova.
The thing about Moldova, though, is that it’s close enough to Europe and the rest of the West that in any given village you can find at least a few families that have amenities like we have in the states (a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, etc). Peace Corps obviously wants us to be as hygienic and safe as possible in site, so volunteers often end up living with families like this – who have basic amenities like running water in the house and it ends up feeling somewhat like living in America, just with the added curiosities of culture and traditions.
My first host family had basic amenities – they had a vacuum cleaner, a mop, running water and a sink. They even had a bathtub. The only thing they didn’t really have was a microwave, which is negligible, especially when I wasn’t’ doing any of the cooking.
The new place is a little more “Peace Corps.” It has no sink or running water inside. All the water comes from the well by the gate or the spigot by the barn. Because I use well water most of the time, I have to distill it with the distiller that Peace Corps gives volunteers without running water. It looks like R2D2 and will filter 3 liters at a time. It does this by boiling the water and then filtering the condensation from the steam back into water and dripping this, one drop at a time, into the receptacle at the bottom. Any water that I drink or cook with has to be filtered or I run the risk of Hepatitis and other well-related diseases.
I don’t mind this novelty of domestic life in most Moldovan houses, in fact I’m kind of enjoying the challenge. It is amazing though, how much water we use without thinking about it when it’s just gushing from the tap. If I had had to guess how much water I used total on a daily basis, even just at my old host family’s house, I would have guessed maybe 3 or 4 liters. Turns out it’s more like 5 or 6. I’ve been slowly working my way down and I’ve managed, after my first week, to get down to about 2 or 3, but it depends on the day. A day when I bathe is naturally going to include at least an extra liter or two, and any day when I make pasta also uses an extra liter.
You also make fun little discoveries about the very subtle order of operations when you’re bathing, brushing teeth, washing dishes and cooking all from a bucket. For example, I thought I was pretty smart and settled in to wash my face with my leave-on soap and brush my teeth the first morning, which was all fun and games until I rinsed my soapy hands off in the water and realized that now I’d contaminated the water and couldn’t use it to brush my teeth. So I grabbed a cup and some more water and brushed, spitting in the bucket. But then I realized that since I’d spit toothpaste in the bucket I wouldn’t be able to use it to rinse the soap off that was still on my face. So I had to throw a mug of water on my face instead (I only have one bucket at the moment). I vowed to do a better job of thinking ahead the next morning and promptly did the exact same thing by accident, being a slave to habit and forgetting where I was.
All in all, I like the challenge and I don’t mind the extra labor to go get the water every time you need it. I end up feeling a little more “green” this way, especially since I give all my food garbage (tops of tomatoes, banana peels, etc) to the animals, which means I’m generating almost no trash. And the tree next to my house is getting a nice increase in water what with all the buckets of toothpastey-soapy water I’m continually have to heave It’s way. Noapte Buna!
