I was talking with another volunteer recently about our experiences planning with Moldovans. Planning happens with our partners and also with our students when we work with them to plan events for the community or school or help them put together presentations for peer teaching.
The most marked cultural experience that volunteers tend to have with their Moldovan partners and students when planning (that I have seen and heard of) is that Moldovan partners tend to be very, VERY focused on details. Don’t ask me why.
We first tend to encounter this in Practice School. We have a vry limited time to plan a lesson with our new partners and the American tendancy is to bang out the basic skeleton first, then add details later. The Moldovan tendency (not always but often) is to get every detail perfect and then move to the next tiny detail. This manifests during Practice School as the American trying to moveforward with the lesson planning while their Moldovan partner wants to hold off on moving forward until the EXACT right synonym can be found for the verb “explain.” This tends to let up a bit once volutneers and partners get used to each other and they can meet in the middle. It also decreases a bit once the directors of Peace Corps aren’t there assessing the lessons. Many Moldovans are very testy about authority figures and are terrified to make a mistake. This can be so pronounced that at least two volunteers have told me that their partners have actually cried or not shown up on days when the director has asked to sit in on a lesson.
The other way that this attention to detail can manifest is when we plan with our students and rather than working on big picture first and then adding details, they can sometimes get hooked on one tiny insignificant detail and then refuse to move on to anything else until they’ve argued about the detail for at least an hour. My friend told me that recently he was working with his students to plan a short film. They started discussions about the plot and the story that the film would showcase and instead of starting with a basic idea, someone shouted that the film should definitely have a shot in it of a girl crying at a window looking at the rain. My friend then said, “Well, that’s fine, but we’ll need to determine why she’s crying and everything else in the film…” But by then his students were on to arguing about whether or not it should be raining, how big the window should be, whether there should be a window at all, etc. And this is all before anyone had determined what the film was even going to be about.
It would be kind of like if a screenwriter in Hollywood sat down with a partner to plan a movie and just said, “Look, I don’t care at all what this movie is about, what it’s rated and whether or not it’s funny. All I care about is that there be one scene with a giant spider. I don’t care why there is a giant spider or whether or not it’s good or bad. There just has to be a giant spider.”
One of the challenges we run into here is trying to meet in the middle with partners and students to plan lessons and events when we have such drastically different ways of going about things. In this sense, it is really more the communication that is difficult because the Moldovan students and partners seem to plan events and lesson plans without us just fine. But if an American is thrown into the mix, they discover really fast that they have to change the way they do things so that we can keep up and not lose our minds. It’s another way of thinking and, ultimately, probably good for us. But that doesn’t make it any less baffling.
Noapte Buna!
