A Modern Traditional Wedding

This week I read Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond.

Autumn is the season for weddings in Moldova, and that season is in full swing. My host brother Sasha recently attended two weddings in one weekend, which is a feat rivaling an Olympic event, requiring about as much strength, endurance and recovery time. 🙂

The first wedding was in Chisinau, the second here in Tvarditsa. He shared some of his photos with me from the Tvarditsa wedding, and I will post them to Flickr.

A typical wedding celebration in Moldova can last a good 12 to 14 hours, and has many various components. The legal ceremony is separate from the religious ceremony, and a couple must register with the village Primaria. A small ceremony takes place there when the bride and groom sign the marriage certificate and become legally married (see pictures from Alyona’s wedding in February). The couple may have a religious ceremony, as well, which is by and for the church only (unlike in the U.S., where a service performed by a priest or minister can fulfill the legal requirements as well, as long as the proper forms are filed with the marriage licensing office).

Instead of a Maid of Honor and a Best Man, an engaged couple here will ask a married couple to “sponsor” them. The title actually translates to something like godparents, and in many respects these godparents fulfill a similar role as a baby’s godparents at baptism; they promise to guide the couple in their Christian marriage.

After the ceremony, a couple will visit a memorial and places flowers at the base. Often they visit a World War II memorial. In Chisinau, it is now popular to visit the centrally-located statue of Stefan cel Mare (Steven the Great), a Romanian warrior king from the Middle Ages. On a typical Autumn weekend, there is a line of wedding parties waiting their turn to place their flowers and have their photos taken at the statue. By Sunday night, it looks like a flower market! You can also hear the wedding parties driving throughout town all weekend, honking their horns.

The wedding Sasha attended in Tvarditsa had many of the same components. After the ceremony, the couple walked to the nearby WWII memorial to lay their flowers. Instead of touring the village by car, though, they opted for the more traditional horse-and-buggy, decked out in colorful hand-woven blankets and festive ribbons and balloons. My favorite photo is of the bride sitting in the buggy talking on her cell phone!

The real festivities start with the dinner and party. A Moldovan “masa” or celebration meal follows a usually pattern, no matter what the occasion – wedding, birthday, baptism, New Year’s Eve, etc. Long tables are set with so much food there usually isn’t enough room for guests’ plates. Bowls and plates of salads, meat, cold cuts, meat, bread, meat, vegetables, meat and fish will be placed about every two feet, more or less down the center of the table. Bottles of wine, champagne and cognac are intermixed. Sometimes there are serving utensils in the bowls, but more than often not. Guests serve themselves, usually taking a little bit from one or two dishes at a time. Each guest will have a small plate about 6 inches in diameter. These seem to be the only size of plates anyone every uses here for meals. After an hour or two of eating and drinking, if there were serving utensils, no one bothers to use them anymore; they just use their own forks and spoons and sometimes by then they even dispense with the “middleman” of their own plate and eat right out of the serving bowl. Most Americans have a hard time with this at first, but eventually you get used to it. As an aside, a visit to the Tvarditsa museum gave me some insight into this custom. In the museum is an example of an historical Moldovan villager’s kitchen, which included a small round table, about 2 feet or so off the ground, surrounded by small stools. In the center of the table sat a huge ceramic bowl. Even into the mid-20th century, many families ate sitting at one such small table and everyone ate out of the one large bowl. Babushka jokes that it saved a lot of time on dishwashing. 🙂 Although the dinner table is different these days, some cultural norms have continued, and it is perfectly acceptable to stick your spoon into the salad, and no will mind if you double-dip!

Of course, at parties the drink flows. Here in Tvarditsa, it is more common to drink a glass of wine relatively slowly, maybe in 3 or 4 swigs, but I’m told in other parts of Moldova it’s more common to drink an 8-oz glass in one shot for a toast. They don’t drink out of stemmed goblets, but instead, in what I think is a rather economical brainstorm, most beverages are drunk out of a standard style and size of glassware.
Cognac and other hard liquors (which are often all generically called “vodka”) are drunk by the 50- or 100-gram shot, though, even here in Tvarditsa.

After the eating and drinking comes the dancing. I like PCV Peter Myer’s observation: “I must say that it’s nice to dance in a country where everyone’s white and there aren’t any really good dancers.” Almost all dances involve a variation on a theme – stand in a circle, hold hands with your neighbors at about shoulder level, and follow a basic step dancing in a circle. The more skilled dancers can do this pretty damn fast and fancy, but the average Joe (or Iosef) opts for the simpler version. The free-form dancing is a blast to watch, and I always find myself thinking “You go, white boy!” I will never forget the New Year’s Eve party at the Primaria, with the short, pudgy Primar pumping his arms and shuffling his feet. Sadly, I am such a bad dancer, I am not able to master even the simplest dances here.

The eating, drinking and dancing will continue long past the wee hours. Sasha came home from the wedding at 4:00 am, and I suspect he probably was one of the first to leave because he had to catch the 6:00 am bus to get back to Chisinau and go to work (poor guy!).

A Moldovan wedding not only takes a toll on your sleep, it takes a chunk out of your wallet. Sasha spent 1/6 of his monthly salary on the two weddings. A basket will be passed numerous times during the party to collect money for the newlyweds, and that’s a contribution in addition to the gift you bought them. It can all really add up. In fact, when Sasha was invited to another wedding the next weekend, he decided to pass. You really can have too much of a good thing!

A Day in the Life…

I bought a bike a couple weeks ago. Talk about a whole new way to experience the crappy Moldovan roads! I joke that my bike has automatic transmission – the gears shift spontaneously as I bounce over the bumpy roads. I enjoy the exercise, as well as the opportunity to expand my regular treks a bit farther beyond the confines of the village. It’s also somehow liberating to know that I now have the ability to go somewhere else. It’s nice to know that I could, for example, go to Ceadir-Lunga in the afternoon, or on a Monday, or on any other day or at any other time when the one bus isn’t working. I don’t know if I’ll ever use the bike for more than just exercise, but the freedom and independence I feel just from knowing I have the means and ability to go somewhere is satisfying.

I mentioned in my last post the day last week when I had accidentally done everything I had to do by 10:00 am. I say “accidentally” because I do try actually try to spread things out over the course of a day or several days to fill up my time. My big mistake that day was actually getting up and out of the house too early. Sometimes I forget that I doesn’t do me any good to jump out of bed raring to go; I’ll just end up with inordinate amount of time with nothing to do.

When I got home, I considered going for a bike ride, but after a string of exceptionally unbusy days, I was aching for to something to accomplish. I told Babushka I wanted to work with her in the garden. At first, she balked and told me I should rest, which was the last thing I wanted to do anymore. I told her I was sick and tired of resting, that I really wanted to do work. She gave me a hard look, shrugged her shoulders, and said “Alright, we’ll work!”

This 75-year old woman never ceases to amaze me. She is tiny, but appears even smaller from being permanently hunched-over. A lifetime of work on farms, where most of the planting, weeding and harvesting was done by hand, has left her and many other women of her generation almost bent in half at the waist. She is incredibly strong, her mind is sharp, her hearing is excellent, and her 50-year old son doesn’t understand why he needs reading glasses but yet she doesn’t. In the summer, she spends nearly all day in the garden, and in the evenings she cleans and separates the wool that she will spin into thread throughout the winter. She is never still or without work.

So, on this day, I headed out to the garden with her. Our first task was to cut and gather grasses for the chickens, geese, turkeys and rabbits. A constant supply of greens is needed for their farm animals, and they are fed both wild grasses and weeds as well as plants from the garden. We walked down to the bottom of the hill, where a little stream runs, and started to work on an overgrown area. She cut the tall grass and weeds with a pair of garden shears and I piled it up onto a burlap cloth. When she decided the load was sufficient, I carried it back up the hill and piled it up outside the back gate. After about 45 minutes we had the area pretty well cleared, and so started working on the rows of grapevines. She trimmed off the stray, unproducing vines and again piled them up on the burlap cloth for me to carry up the hill to our pile. Cutting back the straggling vines served to both provide greens for the animals as well as clear the path between the rows in preparation for the grape harvesting, which will begin soon. Altogether, I probably made 15 or 20 trips up the hill with my bundle.

Planted intermittently between the grapevines are cucumbers vines. They’ve been pretty thoroughly picked, but we nonetheless continued to find cucumbers here and there, and had a good time congratulating each other on a particularly good find. Babushka and I have never been able to have much of an in-depth conversation as her Russian is even worse than mine; she’s spoken Bulgarian all her life and being an illiterate farm laborer, never had much need to learn or use Russian. We tried to chat as we worked, though. She told me the names of various plants and herbs in Bulgarian. We had one of our typical funny and perplexing exchanges:

“A woman is coming Friday?”
“Yes, my friend Joanna is coming for the weekend.”
“Where is she from?”
“She lives in a small village near Cahul.”
“She’s like you? An American?”
“Yes, she’s also a Peace Corps Volunteer. But she doesn’t speak Russian, she speaks Moldovan.”
“She doesn’t speak Russian?”
“No, only English and Moldovan.”
“But what about her husband? He speaks Russian.”
“She’s not married.”
“She’s not married?”
“But what about the husband? He speaks Russian.”
“She’s not married. She’s coming here alone.”
“But the husband speaks Russian.”

This went on for another minute or two, until she finally gave it up. I could tell she was trying to convey something, but she couldn’t say it in Russian and I couldn’t guess what it was. Truthfully, I was started to think she was losing it. Hours later, I suddenly realized what she had been trying to say. The word for “husband’ and for “man” in Russian are similar (“muzh” and “muzhchina”, respectively). She had been thinking of my PCV friend Igor, also in Cahul, who does speak Russian.

We worked in the vines for an hour or so, and then took a break for lunch. I was as tired as I was exhausted, so after a quick and simple meal, I went to lay down for a bit. During the hot summer days, Anya and I got in the habit of a siesta after lunch, when it’s too hot to be outside doing anything. Babushka took a break from the garden labor, but of course didn’t take a nap; she worked on her wool. I very rarely can actually sleep during the day, and instead I use my siesta time to read or write. This day, though, I slept like the dead for solid 2 hours. When I woke up, word had spread that I was in a working mood and Anya had a project waiting for me. She was cleaning hundreds of tomatoes and wanted me to run them through the food processor. Eventually, she cooked them up with some red peppers, onions, and spices and canned the sauce for the winter.

Babushka hadn’t forgotten that I had said I’d work with her again after my rest, so I headed back to the garden. She had already cleared 2 more long rows of vines, and piled the cuttings. I walked along the rows collecting the vines into my burlap and made another 5 or 6 trips to haul it all back up the hill. I felt good to see the fruits of our labor, 2 huge piles of fodder for the animals. “This will be good for a couple of days, I’m sure,” I thought to myself. So naïve! It was gone by lunchtime the next day.

It’s an incredible amount of work to feed all their livestock. Not only are the greens fed to the animals, but a significant portion of the vegetables, too – overripe and “defective” (misshapen, small, etc) cucumbers are fed to the pigs and birds; squash, melons, and apples are chopped up or grated into small pieces for the turkeys. Babushka methodically chops up our watermelon rinds, too, for feed. A “kasha” or cereal is cooked up a couple times a day for the pigs.

I’m embarrassed to admit that a woman 40 years older than me has more stamina and endurance, but it’s true! Babushka put me to shame that day, although she would never say so herself. She gladly accepted my help, even though sometimes my help is more work for her since I don’t usually know what I’m doing. She is always in a good mood, smiling and finding satisfaction in whatever she is doing, as long as it’s work!

Starting Year 2

My awareness of the New Orleans tragedy seems, sadly, to have followed the same slow timeline as the federal government’s. My host father told me something one evening about a big hurricane, and I figured it was a usual Florida one. A few days later, Pierre told me that it was actually in New Orleans and that it was really bad. Slowly, the news circulated amongst the PCVs, and ones with better internet and/or CNN and/or BBC access told me the true extent of the disaster. Watching the Moscow news one night, I was stunned to hear reported that President Bush actually turned down offers of international aid. So he not only failed to help with his own resources, but he also insisted that no one else needed to help either. How is this idiot still in office?

I had a moment of panic this afternoon as I walked through the village. A neighbor struck up a conversation with me, and asked if where I was from was anywhere near New Orleans. He expressed his sadness and sympathy for the losses, and then said “And then that tragedy yesterday. So many people. So awful.” Good god, I thought, what happened now? It took me a moment to realize he was referring to September 11, 2001, not 2005.

Saturday was our one-year anniversary in Moldova. I was in Chisinau for the weekend to facilitate a retreat about Peace Corps camps, and thus had the nice added benefit of being able to spend the evening with some other PCVs. We joked about the skills we’ve acquired here. I can now hold it longer than I ever thought humanly possible (one trip to a public restroom will explain why). I can pack light now (although I don’t know if I’ll ever reach my goal of being able to go for an extended trip with only a small backpack, but I did get kudos from the guys for the lightness of my weekend bag). I am, for better or worse, no longer a news junkie. I used to listen to NPR almost constantly from morning to night; at home, in the car, at work. But with no source to feed my addiction, I have been weaned. I still miss Morning Edition, though.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been here a year. We agreed Saturday night that the only way to describe it is that it’s been both fast and slow. The days can drag on, but the months have flown by. Last week I had one of those “Peace Corps moments”, the kind Returned PCVs try to warn you about and prepare you for. I made my usual rounds for the day, went to the library, went to the Primaria, chatted with some folks. By the time I got home, it was the whopping hour of 10:00 am. And I was done for the day. Not a damn thing else to do. I was a little baffled by the prospect of trying to fill the next 12 hours of my life. The last year has seen plenty of those kinds of days. Yet at the same time, all those combined hours and days are almost a blur.

As I was riding the bus to Chisinau Friday morning, I saw a row of chestnut trees along the road and I thought to myself, Geez, those look just the way the trees looked when we first arrived. And then I remembered it was exactly this time last year that we arrived!

The 17’s arrive this Thursday evening. I hadn’t been planning to go to Chisinau to greet them, but the more I think about it, the more I really want to. When we got off the bus at the Turist Hotel last year – dazed, confused, exhausted, overwhelmed, and more than a little shell-shocked – it was exhilarating to be greeted by a huge group of PCVs cheering and clapping. They carried our bags, shook our hands, smiled and welcomed us to this new world and our new family. I’m officially a Second Year now, and it’s not only my turn but also my pleasure to welcome the new group to our family.

What language can tell you

I have for many years joked that it really says something about Russians that the fact that the word “Hello” in Russian is one of the hardest words to say. I also joke with native speakers about how ridiculous it seems to me that the word “Help!” is a four syllable word. I mean, who has time to choke out that many syllables when you’re drowning?

Yesterday was another funny example of what you can learn about a culture from the language. I was helping some other PCVs translate into a Russian an invitation to a health expo. They had a seemingly innocuous sentence: “Please confirm your attendance early by email or phone to:”. I struggled over this phrase, wracked my brain how to say it, searched the English-Russian dictionary, and even looked through a bunch of emails from Moldovan NGOs about their upcoming seminars and activities – all to no avail; not a one of those invitations contained a sentence like the one I needed. I was getting some strange looks from my fellow Romanian-speaking PCVs, who seemed quickly to start doubting that I had any language ability at all. I finally called my host brother for help. I explained in Russian the general concept we were trying to convey, that we want people to call or email in advance so we know who plans to attend the expo. He asked me a couple questions, trying to grasp the notion. He tried it a couple ways, thinking out loud, but clearly nothing came to his mind as the common and usual way of saying what I wanted to say. He even asked the friend he was with to help. Finally they agreed on the phraseology, albeit with the disclaimer “it doesn’t sound really good, but it’s possible to say it like this.”

I managed to save face with the PCVs when I told them it wasn’t just me, even a native speaker couldn’t figure out how to say it. I remember hearing once that Eskimos have something like 30 words for different kinds of snow. This was a perfect example at the other extreme – absolutely no word or phrase to express a concept that doesn’t seem to exist in Moldova: R.S.V.P.! 🙂

Poverty, part 2

Last week I read The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova.

We are having an Indian Summer now in Tvarditsa, or perhaps a second spring. It was chilly for a few days, and I even got out a sweater, but now it’s sunny and warm again. The raspberry bushes bloomed a second time and we have a new batch of fresh yummy raspberries. The cat had another litter of kittens Friday night (6, although 4 have died in the first week), and the pig had another litter (or whatever you call it) of piglets Wednesday – 7 live births, 3 stillbirths.

In response to my post on poverty, my friend Jenny sent me an interesting email. As I worked on a reply to her, it occurred to me that this is an excellent follow-up post for my blog as well. I hope she doesn’t mind that I’m posting her email here, to provide more context for my response.

I thought about your post about poverty. It seems like if someone would just jumpstart their economy, that would help a lot. What if GM started a plant there, or another big company like that. Wouldn’t it draw other business, force infrastructure to be built, and create cash flow?

Also, isn’t it hard to not try to help your host family too much? You know, if you asked each of your American friends / family members for $20, we would all send you at least that. Water heaters here are only about $180. You’d have that covered easily, and still enough to furnish an internet connection at their house – never mind going to the library!

But that reminds me of the movie about the Coke bottle “The Gods Must be Crazy”. The basic story was that some careless tourist tossed a coke bottle out of the door of his helicopter in Africa somewhere. It fell on a tribesman’s head, who considered it a sign from God. The tribe decided that this tribesman had been “chosen” to lead the others. He then had power, and of course abused it. conflicts were created, battles were fought… All because of the coke bottle.

Does the Peace Corps ask you not to interfere in that way? Are you not supposed to change the fortunes of your family, only teach the people in the village to “fish” (as opposed to bringing them fish)? I suppose that would make the most sense, but it is also a hard row to hoe, since it would be immediately rewarding (in some ways) to go for the quick fix and just buy them a new water heater…

Speaking of finances, how are yours doing? How much do they pay you? Are you able to live within what they pay you (even with all this traveling) or are you slowly diminishing your savings account? Are you comfortable with that? Does your family get some sort of stipend for hosting you?

I’ll start with the easier questions… 🙂

I get a monthly living allowance paid to me in local currency, Moldovan lei. Out of this, I pay almost half to my host family for room and board. The amount for base rent is set by Peace Corps and is not negotiable. Each PCV, though, negotiates an additional amount with their host family for however many meals a day, plus an amount for general household supplies, like TP, sponges, dish soap, laundry detergent, etc.

About 16% goes for my language tutoring (about 17 hours/month).

Then I have about 13% to cover travel expenses (bus fare, hotel if I need it, food, incidentals, etc).

Utilities: I reimburse my host family for my share of water, gas and electricity: 1/4 of the gas and water (since there are 4 of us who live there) and 1/2 of the electric bill (to allow for the disproportionate electricity use of my water distiller and computer). My share of these utilities, plus my long distance phone calls, usually ranges from 8 to 10% of my stipend.

The remaining amount I use for any other miscellaneous expenses, like cell phone service, toiletries, gifts, postage, internet cafes, and materials and supplies like books, paper, etc that I need.

In general, the stipend is perfectly sufficient to meet my needs, but not enough that I could really save up any significant amount of cash over the course of 2 years. It’s actually kind of liberating that there really is no point to save it up since you could at most, if you lived super-tight, save a couple hundred bucks during your service. So you might as well spend it and enjoy yourself! I can’t help but think that just having 130 Americans living in a poor country with a reasonable amount of spending money is in and of itself one of the biggest contributions of PC to a country.

I’ve dipped into my savings for my vacation travel, which is what I had planned it for. I’ve lucked out that both trips were relatively “on the cheap” – staying with friends always makes a trip economical!

Now for the harder questions. You really hit the nail on the head in terms of one of a PCV’s personal struggles here – knowing that I could “fix” some things quickly and easily with my own money or contributions from family and friends, but knowing that in the long-term that doesn’t help at all. There have been plenty of times when I was extremely tempted to pay for something myself – like buying a new modem for the library so I could have internet again! – but they need to work that stuff out for themselves. Also, I am very self-conscious about coming across as a “rich American.” They already believe all Americans are super rich, and the things that I have and can do, although I may consider them modest, are luxuries for many people here (laptop computer, frequent travel within Moldova, international vacations, etc).

The other struggle is to make sure I am helping them do something themselves, and not working on a project by myself, or as you put it, “teaching them to fish.” It doesn’t do them any good if I do all the research about grant opportunities, talk to sponsor organizations myself, and write a grant application by myself. In the long run, that’s just a reversion to the old Soviet system, in a way, when somebody else took care of everything. They need someone to help them learn how to do those things themselves. I’ve let many a good idea die because no one wanted to work on it themselves, but instead thought I would do all the work. I know I’ve ticked some people off, too, and have left others wondering what the heck I am here for if I’m not bringing in $$ for them. I’ve gone round and round with one person in the Primaria who keeps telling me to find them a grant and then they’ll decide what to do with the money. I have tried to explain, until I’m blue in the face, that it doesn’t work that way. They have to decide first what their priorities are, which projects they want to work on, and then we can search for specific grant opportunities that address those issues. The few people who have stuck with it and worked on the grant ideas and applications with me, they are the ones I am investing my time and energy in. Hopefully others will begin to understand that the hard work really does pay off, and they too will take more initiative and responsibility for grant writing and project development. One unfortunate risk, though, is that they lose their motivation if their first attempt at a grant isn’t successful. I try to keep them encouraged, and reassure them that we can submit the same project to numerous sponsors, or resubmit during another grant cycle, but “try, try again” is not a notion with which they are particularly acquainted.

Another struggle sometimes is to keep focused on the issues that the community thinks are important, which are not necessarily the ones I think are important. PC history (and that of many other international development organizations) is rife with stories of well-meaning Volunteers who tried to “fix” a problem that really didn’t need fixing. There’s a story posted in the office now of a PCV in an African village where the women walked hours every day to and from a far-away well for water. The PCV realized how much time and energy would be saved if there was a well right there in the village, so he got funding, organized workers, and they dug a well. There was a big celebration to “christen” the well, and people used it for awhile. A few years later, the PCV returned to the village and was confused and distressed to see the women again walking miles to the far-away well. When questioned, the women said the time to and from the well was the only time they had together as women, when they could talk, gossip, and socialize. The PCV had failed to consider the cultural and social implications, and he had tried to fix a problem that the community didn’t really think needed fixing. I may find the lack of reliable transportation to and from Tvarditsa infuriating, and although I can think of plenty of ways to remedy the situation, I have to remind myself that it just doesn’t seem to bother the residents as much as it bothers me, and until they see it as a priority themselves, I need to put it on the backburner, too. Vice versa, there are problems that they want to address that don’t strike me as particularly pressing, but if it’s meaningful to them, then that’s what we ought to be working on.

Another challenge is to keep focused on the sustainability of projects. It’s sometimes faster and easier to “do it yourself”, but in the long run that won’t help the community to solve the problem next time. Thus, the best results of Peace Corps are not likely to be seen in the short 2-year span of a PCVs time here. Many PCVs get involved in short-term projects, like summer camps. These are great, and the satisfaction of seeing a project to completion cannot be discounted. The risk, though, is getting too involved in those projects, and forgetting about beneficial, but more difficult, long-term sustainable projects.

I’ll give you an example that we are struggling with right now in PC/Moldova. PCVs have been organizing and running several summer camps for many years. They require a lot of time and work to prepare and run, involve a large number of PCVs, and are becoming increasingly expensive. Although the camps all are managed with a Moldovan partner organization, the perception (and some would argue, the reality) is that the camps are primarily PCV run. There are, of course, pros and cons to the infusion of PCV time and energy.

Traditional and typical summer camps in Moldova are a place where kids go to “rest.” They may have some activities, but they are not at all like what we think of as “camp” in the U.S., where both kid and counselor come home exhausted and exhilarated from an intense and fun educational experience. Thus, PCVs are slowly but surely trying to introduce the notion of a camp with purpose. This year, over 400 kids from all over Moldova participated in the 5 national PC camps. Most participants will say they’ve never experienced anything like it before, and they are often crushed that they can’t participate in the same camp again the next year (most of the camps limit participation to one year so as to reach as many kids as possible). GLOW camp, the second-longest running PC camp in Moldova, had over 500 applications for the 120 spots this year, so you can see that there is incredible demand and interest.

All that said, the controversy over sustainability loomed large this year. PC staff repeatedly question what the Moldovan partner organizations are doing and how the PCVs are working to “hand over” camp leadership and management to their partners. Unfortunately, there is a lot of “reinventing the wheel” among PCVs, partially due to the nature of our 2-year assignments here. One group of leaders may barely have time to bring the new PCVs up to speed before their service ends, leaving the next year’s coordinators to scramble and sometimes start nearly from scratch. Many camps have had a hard time finding a committed, stable partner organization, and thus it is challenging for the PCVs to continually be teaching and mentoring the Moldovans while at the same time figuring things out themselves. The end result is more often than not the age-old dilemma – “it’s easier to do it myself than to explain it to you” – which of course doesn’t build sustainability at all. And if there are no Moldovans willing or able to take over the leadership and management of the camps, we have to ask ourselves why we are doing them, and even consider the possibility of not doing them anymore, and instead turn our energies toward more sustainable projects. It’s a tough call.

Another twist is the seemingly contradictory messages we sometimes get from Peace Corps. There are several grant opportunities available to communities via Peace Corps, yet those grants require the presence and participation of a PCV in the community and to oversee the project implementation. This, to me, is counter to the notion of sustainability, since it creates a reliance on PC and PCVs, as communities or projects not involving PCVs cannot apply for these funds. On the other hand, I recognize that “start up” money is crucial, and the availability of those grants often ensures a project is undertaken. It’s another tough call, I think. Personally, I had no intention of ever applying for one of the PC grants. However, when I realized we could quickly and relatively easily get the small amount of funding we need for the Peer Training Series the Children’s Primaria designed, I must admit I succumbed to the temptation, and about 35% of the project will be funded by the PC Small Project Assistant fund.

I think I’ve digressed quite a bit from Jenny’s original questions, so back to original focus.

An infusion of business and industry sounds like an easy “quick fix,” but there are several complications. First, the infrastructure is so underdeveloped and/or in such a state of disrepair, I don’t even now how a company would begin to set up a new factory. The roads are terrible and the train routes look like they were designed from a 2-year old’s scribbles – it literally takes 12 hours to get from Chisinau to Tvarditsa by train, as the tracks twist back and forth across the country; the bus ride is 3 1/2 hours; the actual distance is about 100 miles. Many towns and villages still do not have gas lines or running water. Electricity and telephone service is unstable.

If all that weren’t enough disincentive, the “environment” is not particularly conducive to entrepreneurs and/or investors. The law forbids foreign ownership of property in Moldova, so I imagine s0me businesses wouldn’t really want to set up a plant on land or in a building they can’t own, especially given the amount of money they’d have to invest to build and develop the site. Also, from what I’ve been told, the amount of official paperwork and unofficial bribing that must be done to get a business started is prohibitive and overwhelming.

All that said, though, there are some interesting developments and it is clear that things are sometimes, more or less, pointing in the direction of development and progress. I recently met with a new internationally-funded organization that will be focused on employment and training. With the overarching goal of combating human trafficking, what makes this organization particularly great is they are tackling the issue at the root cause – the lack of reliable, profitable job opportunities in Moldova. They have identified that there is an excellent network of vocational schools in Moldova, and that there is a reasonable (and growing) number of employers. There is, however, a vast disconnect between the skills and professions being taught in the vocational schools, and the skills needed in the existing industries. One of their first projects, they told me, will be to survey thousands of employers throughout Moldova to assess what kind of skilled labor they want and need, and then they will work with vocational schools to develop the appropriate curricula. It’s brilliant, and I really hope it works out as they foresee.

The Happiness Factor

Recently I’ve read: Harry Potter & The Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling; The Jungle, Upton Sinclair; and The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, Clea Koff. The latter two books deserve some commentary, which I’ll keep brief. About The Jungle , I have 2 comments: Thank God I’m already a vegetarian, and How incredibly sad that so little has changed for so many people in the last 100 years. About The Bone Woman, I will say only that I read it in one day, unable to put it down.

In the last PC/Moldova newsletter was included a copy of a Time magazine article “It’s a Glad, Sad, Mad World” about a study of self-reported happiness, or Subjective Well-Being. The relatively crude study indicates that money truly does not buy happiness, but rather that happiness, and the value of personal happiness, is cultural. Thus, the overall happiness rating in some poorer and less developed countries was higher than one might expect, and it was lower in some richer and more developed countries than expected. Sadly to say, Moldova ranks low in all categories: poor, underdeveloped, and bottom of the chart in Happiness.

I can’t say that any PCV was surprised to find “scientific documentation” of the glum demeanors we each encounter every day. It was, however, surprisingly (if not strangely) refreshing to have confirmation that “it’s not just us” who think the average Moldovan has a damn depressive outlook on life.

Casey, another PCV here, recently attended a Peace Corps conference in Bulgaria. One of the unexpected observations (isn’t it always the unexpecteds that give us so much to reflect upon?) that Casey noticed, after several days of interaction with PCVs from Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, and Mongolia, was that all of them found the local populations with whom they work relatively positive and hopeful about the future of their countries as well as their own personal futures. That optimism surprised Casey, and the rest of us when she told us about the conference. Why are people in those struggling countries more optimistic than Moldovans?

I’ve heard from several Moldovans about a study mentioned on the news last week. I don’t know exactly what it was about, but I heard repeatedly how “only Zimbabwe is worse than Moldova.” Interestingly, in the Happiness study, Zimbabwe ranks slightly higher on the happiness scale than does Moldova, so in whatever way Zimbabweans are worse off than Moldovans, they don’t seem to be quite as unhappy about it.

Most of the PCVs here have noticed and struggled with the sometimes overwhelming sense of hopelessness and helplessness in Moldova. Yet we recognize that life here ain’t as bad as it could be. The girlfriend of one guy in my group is a Health PCV in northern Africa, working with incredibly poor women and children, many of whom are HIV/AIDS infected. He told me once how he feels so guilty about his own depression and frustrations here when he talks to her – a typical bad day for her would be when “her favorite baby in the village died.” PCVs in Moldova don’t deal with that kind of suffering and grief at all, yet we find ourselves weighted down, overcome with the gloom and despair of life. Why? What makes Moldovans so depressed?

I can’t claim to be an expert on Moldovan history, culture or any other factors that may contribute to the general pessimism that seems to be endemic here. My observations have led me to a couple conclusions, though.

The greatest factor, I think, was the loss of the Soviet Union. Not only do people miss the financial stability, product availability, and social order of the Soviet era, but I think they miss the sense of being part of a great and powerful nation, a world leader. The struggles to rebuild after World War II were national struggles, and the successes of the Soviet Union were the successes of every citizen. The heroes of the Soviet Union were the heroes of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. Moscow or Baku or Vladivostock may have been thousands of kilometers away, but they were part of the same Superpower country as Chisinau.

Overnight, people lost that identity. Instead of being citizens of an important, powerful country, they became citizens of a country that most of rest of world has never heard of and probably can’t even find on a map. Instead of being one the richest countries in the world, they became the poorest country in Europe. Instead of being one of the best countries in the world (at least according to the propaganda), they became one of the worst, second only to Zimbabwe.

I can’t imagine that kind of loss. I’ve tried to create a scenario in my own mind that would be comparable. What if suddenly the United States ceased to exist? Instead of one mighty, wealthy, influential nation, tomorrow we were 15 separate countries? How would Ohio fare on the world scale? Would anyone care about my little country?

It quickly becomes overwhelming to think of all the treaties and negotiations that would have to be arranged with hundreds of countries around the world, including your own neighbors who yesterday happened to be part of the same country. All the services administered and provided by the federal government – suddenly your new tiny country has to do all that itself. Wow.

When you’ve suffered that kind of loss, the loss of your national identity… I don’t even know what to say about it. In that context, I can understand better why Moldovans aren’t very optimistic.

When I step back and look at society here, I can see the signs of slow progress. Villages are building infrastructure for water, gas, and electricity. International aid as well as investment are bringing new goods and services to some regions. I recently received an email from a PCV who served in Moldova 1993-95, in nearby Ceadir-Lunga. She said that although she tried to live on her own, she hadn’t been able to find enough food in the market to sustain herself, and without a plot of land to grow a garden, she had to move back in with a host family. The market in Ceadir-Lunga is now one of the larger ones in Moldova, and I think Kassie would be quite surprised to see it now.

It’s highly unlikely that Moldova will ever achieve the fame or glory of the Soviet Union, but perhaps as the country slowly develops a stable economy and government, the standard of living improves, and the younger generation grows up with opportunities and abilities their parents never had, perhaps then not only will a new national identity develop, but also a sense of optimism and hopefulness.