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.
Anka in Kyiv 