Day 2: October 26

Day Two started and ended pleasantly. The in-between hours were pretty chaotic and stressful, though.

Alessandra arrived late last night. She, Cristina and I talked for an hour or so, and then the two of them stayed up even later talking after I finally went to bed around midnight. Tuesday morning, Cristina was off to work before 9, but Alessandra and I decided to take it a bit slower. We asked all the requisite questions and found out a lot about each other. She is 29 (actually, tomorrow is her birthday, so we get to have a party already!), from Italy. She studied law and international relations. She worked for one year for an Italian NGO in Tajikistan, and then spent the last year working as a UNV in Kyrgyzstan. She’s already given me quite a bit of insight into the beast that is U.N. Bureaucracy, and I’m very grateful for her experience with UNV as she knows all the right questions to be asking, knows what we should be receiving, what we need to know, etc.

So, we putzed around the apartment all morning and finally headed to the UN House, where Cristina’s office is located, around 12 and made a few calls to see apartments. By 12:30 we were off to the CRDP office, which is about a 5 minute walk up the street from the UN House. This was Alessandra’s first visit to the office, so there were lots of introductions to be made, and both she and Pavlo were anxious to talk with each other about the project. Micezyslaw, a.k.a. Mietek, and I compared some notes about our progress in the apartment hunt, I checked email, and then the slow process of getting a large group of people out of the door to go to lunch commenced. It took nearly an hour to actually achieve that small bit of progress, and we had lunch at a nearby cafeteria-style restaurant.

Tuesday afternoon one of the CRDP drivers took us around the city to see apartments. It seems the most common way to find housing is through an agency, and the standard commission is 1/2 of one month’s rent for the apartment you rent. We had contacted 3 or 4 different agents and we quickly had a half dozen appointments scheduled. Cristina’s lease is ending and she needs to find a new apartment, too, so that meant a troop of 4 UNVs (Cristina, Mietek, Alessandra, and me) searching together. We realized pretty quickly that we all have different expectations and requirements for our respective housing needs, yet we all have the same monetary restrictions. We saw one place today that we all agreed was a good place, but being the first day of apartment-hunting, no one was ready to fully commit to taking it. We left a deposit with the agent and said that one of us would take the apartment, we just needed another day to decide which one of us would take it. Crazy, huh?

After about 4 hours on the apartment hunt, Mietek, Alessandra and I ended up back at Cristina’s apartment. We prepared a late dinner, drank some wine that Alessandra brought from Italy, and got to know each other better. Mietek is full of interesting and funny stories. We learned he has a 16-year old daughter and a son at University in Poland. Mietek loves to travel and we talked about the many travel opportunities on weekends and holidays around Ukraine. We all want to see Odessa and the Crimea, and it sounds like Mietek’s knows some good not-so-touristy spots that are really worth seeing.

Tomorrow we will mainly focus on finding housing. This is a pretty stressful introduction to our new lives here in Kiev, and poor Alessandra – she’s never been to Kiev before, probably won’t get to do any sightseeing for awhile!

A Whole Different World

Monday, October 24, 2005
I arrived this afternoon in Kiev, Ukraine, as one of the new United Nations International Volunteers for the Chernobyl Recovery and Development Program. The plane landed at 3:30 pm and less than 2 hours later I was seated in the CRDP office, trying to focus on an impromptu “staff meeting” with 2 other UNVs and our program director, Pavlo. Yugesh is from Nepal and has been with the project for a little over a year now. Micezyslaw (pronounced something like Me-ches-slav) arrived from Poland earlier today. Pavlo is Ukrainian. Alessandra, the fourth UNV member of our team, is to arrive later this evening. Pavlo speaks Russian, English and Ukrainian. Yugesh speaks Nepalese, Russian, English and a little Hindi. Micezyslaw speaks Polish, German, French and Russian. Alessandra speaks Italian, English French, German and Russian. With only 2 languages in my command (and one of them not so well commanded after 2 weeks in the U.S.), I am not feeling very impressive.

Our sort-of staff meeting with Pavlo is conducted in Russian, the only language we all have in common. I struggle to follow the conversation: (a) I’m a bit out of practice, (b) I’m not used to any of these accents, (c) I’m more than a bit tired, and (d) I’m totally overwhelmed. With lots of concentration, I can understand most of what they say, but Yugesh’s Nepalese accent and Micezyslaw’s Polish accent make their Russian sound like something I’ve never heard before. I have a weird sensation of how I must sound in Russian.

There’s an international conference next week in Chernihiv, an old and apparently very nice city 2 hours north of Kiev. Participants will come from all the Ukrainian regions our project works with, as well as from Chernobyl-effected regions of Belarus and Russia. Pavlo says something about how our participation will be very helpful, but I didn’t quite catch what it is we’ll be expected to do. I’m too worried about where I am going to live to think about how I might be able to help with the conference next week!

All three of us newly-arrived UNVs have to find apartments this week. Gone are the good ‘ole days of Peace Corps holding my hand through things like this, we’ve got to find our own accommodations. Yugesh and other staffers are all offering to help, which is some comfort. Rental prices have apparently gone up tremendously in the last year in Kiev, so we’re not sure how we’ll find places within the housing allowance UNV provides us. Cristina, an Italian woman who is our Program Officer (and is the person I’ve had the most communication with over the past few months), tells me that she’s trying to lobby Headquarters to increase housing allowances for UNVs located in Kiev. All UNVs in Ukraine receive the same stipend, but those living in southeastern Ukraine (where another UNV project is being implemented) may have to pay only $100/month for an apartment, whereas I’m being told I’ll be lucky to find someplace for $700. I’ll have to worry about that tomorrow, I’m too tired today.

After an hour or so at the office, Yugesh invites me to have dinner with him and Micezyslaw. We stop at a grocery store on the way to his apartment to get a few things. Micezyslaw and I have a few minutes to play “20 questions” with each other. I’m guessing he’s in his early to mid-50’s. He tells me he has been a city mayor, worked for art museums and journalist organizations, and most recently taught at a University. There are more details in his answers but I have a hard time catching it all. I tell him a bit about myself, and when he hears that I’ve been living in a small Moldovan village for the past year, he seems quite interested and asks more about Moldova. Of course he’s heard of the wonderful Moldovan wine. I like him right away, he seems very kind, and I would bet his students loved him at the University – he has a very kind and patient demeanor, and I can tell there’s an impressive intellect that matches his extensive intellect, yet he doesn’t come across as snobby or condescending at all. In the grocery store, as I realized I was feeling overwhelmed, he made a comment of how this must be quite a change from village life. Yes, I say, it’s a little different. After I picked a couple salads from the deli case, he gently and kindly managed the selection of the rest of dinner with Yugesh. I was on the verge of wandering around aimlessly, staring wide-eyed at the cramped rows of boxes, cans and bottles. The aisles were incredibly narrow, barely enough room to squeeze past other shoppers, and the check-out lanes seemed to have been a last-minute thought, jammed into the front of the store with enough space for one customer, the rest of the line fighting with other shoppers for space in the clogged aisles.

As we check-out, I notice how the deli worker had put each of our 5 or 6 small containers of salads into individual plastic bags, and then put each of those plastic bags into a larger plastic bag. The cashier sllloooowwwwllllyy extracts each container from the layers of bags to scan the price sticker, and then returns them to their bags-in-a-bag, ultimately to put them all into yet another plastic bag. I comment to Micezyslaw how I remember it was in 1992 when I was studying in St. Petersburg – plastic bags were about as rare and valuable a commodity as gold bricks. He laughs, remembering, too, and says “It’s a whole different world now.”

You can say that again.

Hi from Kiev!

Hi Everybody!
I arrived safe and sound in Kiev on Monday, October 24. It’s been a hectic couple of days. 2 other new UN Volunteers arrived on Monday as well, and the 3 of us are trying to take care of a million things – thank goodness for them because I don’t know how I’d do all of this on my own! I have a whole new appreciation for how much Peace Corps “held our hands”. The number 1 pressing issue is finding decent, affordable housing. We are beginning to realize that rental prices in Kiev are approaching New York levels, and our volunteer living allowances are no where near New York salaries! Our colleagues have taken pity on us and today started calling their friends, family and anyone else they know even remotely to try to help us find something decent that will still leave enough money to feed ourselves.

I promise to post more this weekend. Off to see more apartments now!

Back in the U.S.

My two weeks in the U.S. were, to put it simply, crazy. I saw lots of friends, and even got to visit Tanya’s new house in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and Jenny and Bob’s new house in Athens, Ohio. I took care of a million little things that needed my attention, from banking to medical and dental appointments, from clothes shopping to getting my laptop updated. I also managed to squeeze in time for some shopping, and spent money like it was going out of style. I think I spent more in those 2 weeks than I have in the last year. Of course, that statement is mostly a reflection of how little I spent in the last year, rather than how much I spent in these 2 weeks. I stocked up on a few things my Moldovan experience told me I would find valuable in Ukraine – good shoes (4 new pairs altogether; I will never again buy cheap shoes, it just isn’t worth it to have sore feet all the time); a down winter coat; and coffee coffee coffee (I am ashamed to admit that yes, I drank the instant stuff most of the year, and even kind of got used to it, but for at least the next couple of months I’ll have good, real coffee to drink).

I had many moments of thinking something like “My god, 1 week ago I was in Tvarditsa” or “Geez, I left Moldova just 10 days ago.” Lots of people asked me what I had missed about the U.S., and what were my impressions of it now after a year abroad. Initially, I would have said that I missed being in a place where things made sense, where things felt normal and understandable and I knew how to manage life in general. But a couple experiences made me realize that life here can be super-difficult, too. 2 days after returning, I found myself on a phone adventure trying to find someone who could verify to the pharmacy that I have health insurance. After a long and unsatisfying talk with a computer, I finally got a person who told me it can take 2-4 weeks for the Peace Corps insurance to get processed so I show up in the system. Since I was only going to be in the country for 2 weeks, and the insurance only lasts for 4 weeks, I found this rather ironic. The next day I had two more conversations with computer-phones to deal with a computer problem and an airline ticket problem. So much for life being easier and more manageable in the U.S.!

I hadn’t expected how much things would have changed in just a year. Ohio State always has tons of construction going on, but the last year seems to have been at a frenetic pace. I swear, there was a parking lot behind Townshend Hall when I left, and now there is an entire building instead. The Gateway Project, which was started 10+ years ago, is finally almost finished and it was pretty neat to see that progress. The new recreation building is open for business, the Oval was renovated, Page and Hagerty Halls are done. I didn’t even get to north campus, but I heard there are buildings going up there, too. Clintonville, the neighborhood where I grew up, had quite a bit of change, too. New shops, new streetlights, and a freshly paved High Street. And good grief, is that a Target at Graceland Shopping Center?

It was a bit weird how easily I could just “plug back in” to things. I thought it would be strange, maybe even a bit scary, to drive a car again. Nope, no problem. Conversations with friends picked back up right where we left them over a year ago – work gossip, dating stories, and what the kids did at school lately.

Some friendships have changed, though. I knew that would happen, but it surprised me which friendships feel different now. Some people I feel closer to and others I feel more distant from. I knew when I left in September 2004 that I was doing something that would change my life forever. It was such a clear and tangible change, it was like turning the page in a book to start the next chapter. I knew I would never be able to go back, and I also knew that my own feelings about my life before Peace Corps would change over time, too. Now, 13 months later, I see it more as finishing one book and starting the next one. Some of the characters are the same, but their roles are different now in the plot.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to go home for a couple weeks in between chapters of this new book in my life. I understand, though, why people living abroad try to visit home for amonth or longer – there is just too much to do and too many people to see! It’s apity I couldn’t see or talk to all the people I wanted to. Hopefully we’ll see each other next time!

My own tough decision

The last 6 weeks have been both exciting and stressful, and even a little bit frightening. As I watched my good friend Emily depart from Moldova, I was also struggling with a tough decision of my own. Let me start from the beginning.

In July, during my vacation in Germany, I took advantage of being in Bonn to make acquaintance with some of my mom’s colleagues at the United Nations Volunteer (UNV) headquarters there. I scheduled a couple meetings in the hopes of making some connections that might come in useful next year when my Peace Corps service would be ending and I would start looking for my next job. The timing of my meetings turned out to have been serendipitous for a UNV program in Kiev, Ukraine. It seems that they have been looking for some time for “the right person” to complete their team of International UN Volunteers working on the Chernobyl Recovery and Development Program (CRDP). Apparently I impressed someone during my meetings at UNV, and within a week of my return to Moldova I was contacted by a coordinator in Kiev and invited to interview for the position of Community Development Specialist. I was flattered, but told them I still had another year of service in Moldova and wasn’t ready to consider another job yet. Despite my hesitation, they insisted they wanted to interview me anyway, and I decided it couldn’t hurt to make a good impression now so as to better my chances next year when I started looking seriously for work.

To make a long story short, they did an excellent job of convincing me that this is an great opportunity to work on a VERY exciting development program. I still hesitated, though, and asked to meet with them and learn more about the program in person since I already had vacation planned in Kiev in September. They agreed, and I spent several hours one day at the UN and CRDP headquarters in Kiev. It was even better than I expected. The work sounds incredible – challenging and stimulating – and the people are wonderful. It’s a step up in the world of international development, a management position that utilizes my combination of skills and experience perfectly. It’s not only an incredible opportunity for me, personally and professionally, it is a practically a dream come true. I couldn’t have hoped for a better opportunity, and the only downside is that it came a year earlier than I would have wanted.

I labored and stressed over this decision for nearly 2 months. I regret immensely that this unbelievable opportunity comes at the expense of my PC experience. Unfortunately, we don’t always get to have the best of all possibilities. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have a choice between two extraordinary opportunities. I have had my struggles in Moldova, as each and every PCV does no matter what country they are in. I can honestly say, though, that I have loved my experience. I have met incredible people, made wonderful friends, and have been blessed with the love and affection of two amazing families. In the last year, I have gained 2 more sets of parents, another grandma, 2 additional brothers, a sister, 2 nieces and a nephew. I couldn’t have asked for my life to have been enriched more strongly than it has been in the last year by so many wonderful people. One consolation is that I will still be close to my friends and families here, and I most definitely will be visiting as often as I can.

I joined the Peace Corps with the hope of making at least a tiny difference in the life of at least one person. What I didn’t expect was the difference so many people would make in my life. I never understood why authors put those long acknowledgement lists in books, but now I find that I, too, have a desire to put in writing the names of the many people who have given me their friendship, support, and love – the people without whom I couldn’t have done this. To my wonderful family in Ialoveni: Fyodor Ivanovich, Tamara Ivanovna, Alyona, Anya and Ksenia – you set the bar high for every other relationship in Moldova! To my incredible family in Tvarditsa – Anya, Gresha, Sasha, Vova, Babushka and little Gresha: you exceeded my extremely high expectations, and I couldn’t have asked for a better family. There is something particularly special about living with people who truly love each other and enjoy each other’s company, and for your love of each other, I am especially grateful. To the fantastic kids in the English Club, especially Natasha, Maia, and Galya: you are extraordinary, talented young women. I am proud to know you, and I am happy to know that the future is in the hands of people like you. To my best friend in Tvarditsa, whom I also consider one of my best friends in the world, Petya Popov – I thank my lucky stars that I sat in your seat on the bus! I will miss our crazy walks and our philosophical discussions. I expect our debates to continue by email! To my partners, Donna and Galya – thank you for your friendship and support. I came here to help you achieve your dreams, and instead you believed in me and helped me achieve mine. To my fabulous PCV friends, to M14, and especially to Emily and Joanna – I couldn’t have asked to serve with better people. I can’t imagine this past year without you. To my American family and friends – I thank you for supporting me in my adventures; for sending me packages and emails that reminded me I was not alone, especially on the days when I felt so far away from everyone and everything; and for never saying that I was doing something crazy. To all the people who have been following my life this last year, especially the past, current, new and future PCV’s, I thank you. It amazes me that so many people have found this site and have taken an interest in what I am doing.

For many years, being a Peace Corps Volunteer was one of my greatest dreams. The funny thing about dreams, though, is that they often don’t turn out quite as you expected. If there’s been any kind of theme in my life this past year, it has definitely been that the unexpected is exactly what you can and should expect. Thus, my life as PCMoldovAnn unexpectedly comes to a close a year early. I will go to the U.S. for a couple weeks before starting my new position in Kiev at the end of October. I plan to keep the blog going, though, and I hope you continue to find it interesting and worth reading.

Vacation

Recently I read Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer, and Lucky by Alice Sebold.

I had a fun and busy 2 week vacation with my parents. We started with a week in Kiev, Ukraine. It is a beautiful cosmopolitan city, and I was very happy to be back there again. We went to many places I had not visited before, as well as revisited several places I had seen on my first trip to Kiev in 1992. I still marvel at how the city has changed in the last 13 years, and I’m looking forward to digging out my photos from ’92 so my parents can see the drastic differences themselves.

Of particular interest was the Chernobyl Museum. Before the trip, I had printed a bunch of reports and articles from the web on the situation since the 1986 disaster, and I learned a great deal about the current ecological, public health, and social issues still effecting the people and the area. One of the rare benefits of disasters like Chernobyl is that scientists are able to study a real-life situation and develop new technologies that otherwise might never be researched. To most people’s astonishment, the negative ecological and health consequences of Chernobyl were contained better than one might expect, and scientists have even developed new methods to cleanse contaminated foodstuffs to make them safe again for consumption. Absolutely there are still severe ecological and health effects from the disaster, but the problems as yet to be addressed are the social ones – thousands of people displaced, they lost absolutely everything. One city was given 4 hours to evacuate, and people had to leave all but their most vital documents behind. 19 years later, a generation of young people lead reckless lives because they don’t expect to live beyond adolescence. It’s incredible to think that we are approaching the 20 year anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, in April 2006. I highly recommend the museum to anyone visiting Kiev, and suggest that you tour it with a guide. The displays are generally unlabeled, and the few descriptions and explanations that do exist are only in Ukrainian. We ended up listening in to English language tour and learned a lot more than we could have on our own.

Well, back to the lighter side of our travels. After a fun and tiring week in Kiev, we flew to Chisinau. I had arranged for a neighbor to pick us up at the airport so as not to impose the uncomfortable bus ride on my parents. We went more or less straight to Tvarditsa, after about 2 1/2 hours of errands the neighbor wanted to do. We arrived about the same time as the bus – so much for trying to find a faster way! I’d “forbidden” my parents to eat anything once we left Kiev, knowing that there would be a huge feast awaiting us in Tvarditsa. I was right, and we ate until we could burst. That was the theme for the weekend. It seems Anya was intent on showing my parents exactly every single dish in her repertoire, including the numerous vegetarian dishes she’s learned and/or created over the past year to meet my dietary needs. She said she wanted my parents to see what I eat so they could know I’m well fed. I don’t think they ever doubted that fact, and for sure they now agree wholeheartedly! In addition to the vegetarian cuisine, she also managed to serve a different meat dish with every meal – turkey, chicken, lamb, rabbit, goose. The only kind of their animals she didn’t serve was pig, but she promised to slaughter one next time Mom and Dad visit.

After 2 1/2 days in Tvarditsa, we went back to Chisinau for a day. My parents have been to Armenia several times, and I was quite surprised when they told me that Chisinau is in much better shape than Yerevan, the Armenian capital.

Tuesday we flew to Bucharest. It was so totally different from what we all expected! It’s a large, bustling city, with a population of approximately 2 million. We were staying in the busy University district. Wednesday we walked around a bit on our own before taking a city tour in the afternoon. Our guide, Oana, was a lovely young woman and we learned more about Romania in those 4 hours than I could have imagined possible. It always saddens me to realize exactly how little we learned about other countries, especially Eastern bloc countries, in school. I knew absolutely nothing about Romanian history, and all three of us listened with great interest to Oana’s description of the revolution that ended Ceausescu’s dictatorial rule. One of our favorite stops was at the Village Museum, a large outdoor museum where traditional Romanian village houses have been relocated from around the country. I was quite surprised by how the architecture differed so drastically from traditional and historical Moldovan homes. The main difference was the amount of wood used. As I’ve mentioned before, Moldova is far from rich in trees. First, it’s part of the steppe, like the Plains in central U.S., so there never were expansive forests here. Second, so many trees have been cut down for fuel that the Ministry of Ecology has started an urgent tree-planting effort throughout the country. Romania, on the other hand, has vast lush forests, bountiful supplies of wood, and a decent amount of oil resources to boot. We learned that Romania is able to meet 50% of its oil needs with its own natural sources, a fact which alone enables the country to be light years ahead of it’s eastern neighbor. Moldova is dependent on Russia for most of its oil, and Russia has no problem raising prices whenever it is displeased with Moldova. The price of gasoline has nearly doubled within the last year, and is now higher than in most of the U.S.: about $1/liter (~$3.70/gallon). And this in a country where the average monthly income is under $60.

Thursday we took a day trip with a guide to Sinaia, where the first king of unified Romania, Carol I, built a huge and absolutely beautiful castle in the late 19th century. Carol I was actually from Germany, and thus the castle’s style is very Germanic. From there we went to Brasov, in the region of Transylvania. It is a town originally settled by Germans, and the town square looks exactly like any one of the old town squares I saw in Germany in July. Next, we drove to Bran, where another beautiful castle is located. This one, however, is hundreds of years old. It is advertised as “Dracula’s Castle” but in reality, Vlad the Impaler never lived near that area. The truth is (a) there was no Dracula, and (b) there is no Dracula’s Castle. Bram Stoker made up the story, loosely based on some legends, but he himself never even saw Bran Castle. The historical figure of Vlad the Impaler, also know as Vlad Dracula (which means son of Dracul) lived in Wallachia, the southern region of modern Romania. Stoker just thought the word “Transylvania” sounded cool, and thus set his fictional story in that region. Our guide told us that when Romania started to open up in the 80’s to foreigners, many Western tourists came in search of Dracula’s Castle in Transylvania, and were very disappointed to see the boring and rather decrepit ruins of Vlad’s castle in Wallachia. The facts weren’t encouraging the budding tourism industry in Romania, so some smart “entrepreneurs” decided to dub the better preserved and more “romantic” castle in Bran, Transylvania, as Dracula’s Castle. Score 2 points for commercialism, I guess! The castle was nice, but the town seemingly exists only to profit from the ignorance of Western tourists.

Friday we strolled around Bucharest in the morning, had a leisurely lunch, and eventually met up with fellow PCV Mark, who had also been vacationing in Romania. He and I rode the overnight train back to Chisinau together Friday, and my parents flew home on Saturday. The train ride from Bucharest was much easier than my previous train trips to Kiev. Our documents were checked at the border only one time on each side, although the Moldovan guard seemed to have a hard time believing that Mark and I had only one backpack apiece, as he asked us about 20 times where the rest of our luggage was. I also got to experience the famous change in track gauge. One of the Russian tsars (I forget which one exactly) thought it was a strategic idea to use a different size of train track within his empire, to prevent any would-be invaders from storming the country by train. Thus, when you enter Moldova from Romania, each train car is lifted by a hydraulic lift and workers change the undercarriages. All passengers must remain on the train during the procedure. I had heard that it was a noisy, jostling experience, but honestly, if I hadn’t been specifically watching out the window, I’m not sure I would have noticed it.

I got back to Tvarditsa Saturday night, tired and happy to be home.

Back from vacation

I’m back from 2 weeks of travelling with my parents. It was a lot of fun, great to see some familiar as well as new places, and nice to spend time with my parents. I’ll write more later, but just wanted to let you know that I’m still alive over here! I haven’t disappeared completely, I was just too busy during the travels to get anything posted.