We won a grant!

During my brief days in Tvarditsa this past month, we’ve managed to write 3 grant applications. The first, submitted through an NGO resource center, is for a SOROS-Moldova grant to establish a children’s theatre at the local kindergartens. A group of teachers and administrators from the two kindergartens wrote an impressive application for assistance in purchasing necessary materials for an educational theatre. We learned last week that the grant application passed the first level of regional scrutiny, and now it is being sent to the national committee for consideration. Keep your fingers crossed for them!

Another grant application we are just finishing up is for a garbage truck. Not very glamorous, but let me tell you, very useful! The village has no organized means to collect or dispose of municipal waste, and unfortunately it shows. The Primaria (Mayor’s office) is re-working the budget to purchase the requisite standard trash containers, and if the grant is awarded for the garbage truck, we can hope to begin some clean-up efforts along streets, parks and streams.

The third grant we wrote is the one I just learned was approved. Peace Corps manages some USAID funds every year via the Small Project Assistance (SPA) program. Grants are for no more than $3000 and have very specific guidelines. The Tvarditsa Local Council of Children and Youth, also known as the “Children’s Primaria”, wrote a grant application to help support a series of Peer Trainings.

The project is very exciting. Members of the Children’s Primaria, over the past four years, have been attending various trainings, workshops, and summer camps sponsored by such organizations as European Youth Exchange-Moldova, UNICEF, Peace Corps, and others. Some of the kids have begun conducting similar trainings for their friends and classmates, such as the GLOW Day seminar I helped a couple of “alumni” of the national camp conduct in May. They would like to expand these opportunities to a wider audience, specifically to youth in under-served villages. For example, many small communities are not aware of the trainings, seminars and camps conducted regularly in Chisinau and other large-population centers in Moldova. Even if they are informed about them, the children and/or their parents may be afraid to attend, or their parents too nervous to send them. And in particular for the minority Russian-speakers, announcements and invitations in Romanian may only further alienate this disconnected population. So, the Tvarditsa Children’s Primaria decided to do something about it.

The project plan begins with identifying 5 other Russian-speaking villages to invite, along with Tvarditsa youth, to a Peer Training series where children will be taught on various topics as well as be taught how to be Peer Trainers. Seminar topics will include Life Skills (such as conflict resolution and teamwork), Leadership, and Children’s Rights and Responsibilities. Over the course of 7 months, the project hopes to train as many as 300 young people. The kids were awarded a small grant to subsidize transportation to and from Tvarditsa, provide one meal during each of the trainings here, and to purchase some supplies for the trainings. The community contribution is unusually significant (over 60% of the budget), as the visiting youth will stay with “host families” here in Tvarditsa and thus the largest expenses of food and lodging will be donated by members of the Children’s Primaria and their families.

Winning the grant is a great boost for the kids here, and for me too. I leave for vacation on Thursday (10 days with Pierre in Germany!), and it is exciting to know that I will return at the beginning of August with a lot of work ahead of me on a project I feel really good about. And once again, the words of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers ring true. It’s taken me an entire year to get settled in, adapted, and integrated into my community. My work will really begin along with the start of my second year as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Foreign Exchange program

For the last 2 weeks, I taught at Pre-Departure Orientation (PDO) for the American Councils’ Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) program. 35 teenagers, 15-17 years old, from various regions of Moldova were selected from hundreds of applicants to participate in this year-long study abroad program in the United States. Youth from many countries of the former Soviet Union participate every year in this scholarship program. I had a great time working with the kids, and it was incredible to meet such enthusiastic, energetic and active young people.

The kids were divided into 3 groups, with two groups coming the first week, when we had 2 teachers plus 2 FLEX alumni as Teaching Assistants. The second week we had only group, so only my TA and I taught that week. The 4-day PDO began on Tuesday, with sessions for both the kids and parents. I’m gaining a great appreciation for how difficult it must be for Moldovan parents to let their children participate in this program, to spend an entire year far away from home. 5 girls from Tvarditsa attended the GLOW camp a couple weeks ago, and seemingly daily one mother or another was calling me or stopping me on the street to ask if I’d heard anything from her daughter. Families here are much closer than the typical American family, not only because of multiple generations living together but also because they don’t travel as much as typical Americans – kids don’t attend summer camps for weeks at a time, or move far away for college or study abroad in the summers. One married woman in her 20’s I know in Tvarditsa asked me one day if it was true that American kids move out of their parents house. When I said Yes, we usually move out, she just shook her head and said “And we want to live with our parents!” She’s young, married, and not only perfectly content to live with her parents but actually prefers it – quite different from American culture! Another woman I know told me how she was encouraging her 18-year-old daughter to apply to universities in Bulgaria (which she considers to have better opportunities than Moldovan universities). Her daughter won’t, though, and her reason is that she can’t imagine living so far away from her mother.

But back to the FLEX PDO. The curriculum revolves around preparing kids for some of the more drastic cultural differences, such as family life, school, and extra-curricular activities. Most of the exchange students will live in small towns or suburbs, which already challenges their expectations that all Americans live in huge cities like LA or New York. They may be disappointed at first to realize they won’t be living next door to Britney Spears or Mel Gibson (who they seem to forget is actually Australian, not American), but such a letdown is usually quickly forgotten. They are fascinated by the fact that they will choose most of their own classes in school, as the curriculum in Moldovan schools is completely mandated by the Ministry of Education with no concept of electives involved. They are intrigued by the prospect of receiving $125 monthly stipend, and despite various budgeting activities and simulations of monthly expenditures to help them understand that it’s really not that much money in the U.S., they begin to feel themselves rich. They are concerned about the different kinds of food, about putting on weight and getting fat “like Americans.” They can’t comprehend it yet, but we talk about stereotypes and appropriate behavior when they meet people who look and behave differently.

It was interesting for me, after 10 months of up-close-and-personal examination of Moldovan life and culture, to be the fly on the wall during discussions of American life and culture. One essay about Americans in the orientation handbook described our obsession with time. According to the author, if you ask a European how far away someplace is, he/she will answer you in distance, by kilometers. But if you ask an American the same question, they answer will invariably be about time, in minutes or hours. I’d never really thought about this before, but it’s really true! I have no idea how many miles my hometown is from anyplace, but I can easily tell you that it’s: 3 hours from Cleveland, 2 1/2 from Cincinnati, 7-8 from Chicago (depending on how you drive), 7 from Nashville, and 8 from Washington DC. I lived 7 minutes from my gym, 10 from my parents, and 15-20 from work, depending on traffic. When someone tells me how far someplace is here, the answer always baffles me not only because I have to convert the kilometers to miles (silly stubborn Americans who refuse to adopt the standard metric system like the rest of the world!) but also because I then automatically convert it to a completely irrelevant amount of time, totally unrelated to how long it will actually take to travel in Moldova.

Food, as I mentioned, was another popular topic. On Alumni Night, previous FLEX participants joined us for a panel presentation, sharing their experiences and advise, and then stayed for dinner and more casual conversation. I overheard one young man say he just didn’t like the salads in America at all – “they put in a whole tomato, not even cut or anything!” I assume he was talking about cherry tomatoes, but even so, the tiniest of cherry tomatoes will look gigantic when you come from a culture that I am sure invented the concept of “finely diced.” In Moldova, the more infinitesimal the vegetables are cut, the better the salad.

We pushed the kids to do some things during the PDO the “American way.” We replaced the formal form of “you” in Russian and Romanian with the polite phrases used in English to convey respect, such as “please”, “thank you”, “excuse me”. Teachers sat with the kids at meals and socialized outside of the class time, and classes were conducted in an interactive, casual manner. All things that challenged their experience of the way things “normally” are done. One of the biggest challenge was on Movie Night. Watching videos in English wasn’t such a big deal, but laying on the floor proved to be just too much from some of them, who ended up bringing chairs from their rooms to sit on. Here, you absolutely never, ever sit on the floor or ground – not with a pillow or a blanket even.

We also spent a lot of time reviewing the multitude of rules the kids must follow while in the U.S.: FLEX program rules, high school rules, family rules, and of course U.S. laws. As FLEX is a scholarship program, one of the program requirements is that they participants do a certain amount of volunteer activity during their year in the U.S. I was delighted to hear the alumni describe their volunteer work as often some of the most rewarding of their activities. They loved doing car washes, or teaching swim lessons, or even tutoring younger kids. A group of FLEX alumni continue to do volunteer work back here in Moldova now, too. They meet regularly to volunteer at orphanages; they served as judges at Model UN; they help with recruitment of future FLEX participants; and many other kinds of activities. It was refreshing and even exhilarating to hear a group of young people talk about their desire to stay here in Moldova, to work to make it a better country, with a bright and productive future. True, there were still many program participants who share the goal of escape to the West that most of their generation holds, but how wonderful to meet these passionate and active youth who are not disenchanted by everything that’s wrong with their country but rather are energized to be a part of positive change in their homeland.

Another PCV commented that programs like FLEX, which send smart, motivated youth to the U.S., where they learn about volunteering and making a difference, are by far the best use of international development money. We can send hundreds or even thousands of volunteers to Moldova, flood the country with grants and development projects, but nothing will ever have a bigger or better impact on this country than sending the youth to another country to learn first-hand about volunteerism and citizen participation. When they return to Moldova (which they are required to do by the program, as well), they will bring with them more insight and more creditability than I or any other volunteer ever could.

I’m looking forward to getting emails from the 2005-2006 FLEX program participants about their lives in America. I’m looking forward to meeting them again next year when they will serve on the alumni panel for the next PDO. They will return to Moldova just a few months before I will begin preparing for my departure, their peak into my world ending as my peek into their’s starts to come to a close. I’ll enjoy hearing about what they liked, what they didn’t like, what was surprisingly unexpected and unexpectedly surprising.

Happy 4th of July!

Let me catch you up since my last post. In short, I made 4 trips to Chisinau in the span of 9 days, leading to serious case of “bus butt”.

The girls going to GLOW camp were due in Chisinau at 11:00 am on Friday, June 24. I hadn’t originally planned on accompanying them, but it came apparent to me that their mothers were worried about them traveling alone, and the girls themselves seemed kind of nervous. Rather than risk a mother changing her mind about letting her daughter attend on account of an un-escorted bus ride, I decided to go with them. There were, of course, no problems as it’s one of the least complicated bus trips in Moldova – you get at the first stop and off at the last! To be fair, though, it does get a bit complicated once you’re in Chisinau, as the bus station is on the edge of town and you have to find the right bus or marshuka to get you to where you want to go in the city. We made it just fine to the designated meeting point, and I handed my 5 girls over to the camp coordinators. Not far away was conveniently located a travel agency, and I popped in to check on some possible vacation ideas. It turns out that Air Moldova was starting a new direct flight to Frankfurt at a great price, so I immediately booked a trip for the end of July! I’ll be visiting Pierre for 10 days in the lovely Rhineland, yeah!

After taking care of various other errands, I returned to the station for my 5:00 pm bus back to Tvarditsa. It was a long day, as I’d left at 6:00 am and got home close to 9:00 pm, but I needed to be back in Tvarditsa as Saturday night was the High School Graduation. That was quite an event!

To begin with, I had been told that the program would begin at 4:00pm. Feeling very culturally-adept, I headed to the hall at 5:00 pm, figuring on “Moldovan time.” They tricked me again, though, and the program didn’t actually begin until 6:15. I’m getting closer, though! J

The evening was more of a fashion show than anything else. Moldovan schools don’t have something like an American Homecoming or Prom, so graduation is “the night.” The young women buy incredible dresses, the young men fancy suits. The actual program lasted about 90 minutes – as each graduate was announced, s/he walked across the stage to receive a diploma from the school director. After every pupil had been congratulated and honored, it was the students’ turn to praise and thank their teachers. It was a very nice ceremony, all in all. The real fun started after the formal program, with the dinners, parties and all-night dancing. I opted out of those festivities, though, as Sunday morning would be another 5:00 am wake-up for my beloved 6:00 am bus to Chisinau.

Sunday night was Anya’s high school graduation in Ialoveni. I was honored that she wanted me to attend, and regardless I wouldn’t miss it for anything! As in Tvarditsa, it was a swank affair. Her boyfriend began the day’s activities with an afternoon concert in Chisinau. That warranted the “first dress.” They returned to the apartment in time for her to change into the actual “graduation dress” and we headed down the street to the school. It was a warm and beautiful day, and the ceremony was held in the school courtyard. As the graduates gathered inside, young ballroom-dancing students from the nearby music school entertained families and friends. Only 1 ½ hours later than scheduled, the graduate processional emerged from the school building, filing past the proud parents, and they took their seats. Similar to the Tvarditsa ceremony, each graduate was called to the front to be recognized, but this time each one was invited to say a few words individually. Most thanked their teachers and their parents, a few joked around, and a few more were too shy to say much of anything. Anya’s grandmother, Tamara Ivanova, as the school librarian, was among the many teachers and administrators invited to speak to the audience, and as any proud grandparent would do, she used the opportunity to embarrass the heck out of her granddaughter! J

That ceremony also only the beginning to the night’s events, but once again I respectfully declined the invitation to the all-night dinner and dancing, as the long days were quickly catching up with me.

Monday was another day of various meetings and errands, and I returned to Tvarditsa on the evening bus. Back again to Chisinau on Thursday for our last meeting before the FLEX Pre-Departure Orientation (PDO) begins; another tiring 15-hour day trip. The U.S. Embassy organized an Independence Day picnic on Saturday, July 2, but I opted not to attend given that I’d be spending the bulk of the next 2 weeks in Chisinau teaching at the PDO. So, I had a few quiet, relaxing days in Tvarditsa, working in the garden and meeting with my English Club. I actually made cherry pie 100% completely from scratch – picked the cherries, pitted them, made the crust, mixed the filling, and baked up an absolutely delicious good ole American cherry pie! My host family had never had anything quite like it, and much to my delight, they really enjoyed it. My other culinary attempts have usually been met with a polite smile and no request for seconds, so you can imagine my delight when they devoured the cherry pie!

I headed back to Chisinau on Sunday, July 3. I again had some meetings, and I wanted to spend some time with Anya in Ialoveni, before the FLEX PDO began on Tuesday, July 5.

Monday, July 4: Independence Day. One of my favorite holidays. Picnics. Family. Friends. Fireworks. Not quite the same here, unfortunately. It was any-old-working-day here in Moldova, for the most part. Some other PCVs “organized” a picnic in a lovely park in Chisinau. It wasn’t so much organized as it was a “if people show we can call it a picnic” kind of thing. I went for a couple hours, and then had some more meetings in the afternoon. I am grudgingly getting roped in to help coordinate Model UN for next year, and as it was just a “regular old working day”, we had meetings with sponsors in the afternoon. This evening, this is no backyard barbeque. There will be no fireworks for me at Whetstone Park. In fact, I’ll be in bed, fast asleep, by the time the fireworks get underway in Columbus, Ohio. Actually, it will almost be time for me to wake up on Tuesday, July 5, when the fireworks get started at Whetstone. I’ll be greeting the FLEX exchange students as they arrive for their orientation just a couple hours after the celebrations wind down at home.