Holiday Season

Alright, I know. This is quite late. Moldova is just coming out of its holiday season which had me quite distracted. Anyways, I hope you all had a nice holiday season at home with friends and family. And now, hopefully staying warm and safe!

My host mom spent five weeks in America, leaving just before our Christmas. All of her family lives there, and once she got the visa to go, her family booked her a ticket right away! That was definitely a bit of a struggle here for me personally, as she is one of my best friends here and well also, she does all the cooking and cleaning, and runs the house! I helped out where I could, but it turns out my host dad is an excellent cook, so that was great. I woke up early each day to braid the girls' hair for school.

Additionally, the doctor in my village died right before Christmas. This was a very sad time for my village, as she was quite young, in her 40s with two children, but she had cancer. She was highly respected and everyone loved her.

As for the holiday season:
In Moldova Christmas isn't normally celebrated until January 7, according to the Orthodox calendar. For December 25 I had five volunteers come to my village for our own Christmas celebration complete with a Moldovan wild turkey that my tutor killed and cleaned for us. Many homes here have small guest houses attached and it was nice to have all of my friends hanging out in the guest house for a few days, cozied up to our wooden stove.

For New Year's I took a short vacation to visit college friends in Riga, Latvia, which was great! After returning to site on January 5 I only had a couple days to relax before the Moldovan Christmas. I went to the Orthodox midnight mass. I only stayed for about an hour since the service lasts until 4 in the morning. Even as I walked home there were several people on the street celebrating as they were coming home from celebrations or going to the church.

Christmas Day a colleague of mine, Nadia, invited me to her home where we ate and drank from 2 p.m. until 10 p.m! It was a great party, with her son and daughter-in-law and grandkids coming from Chisinau, as well as several local guests coming in and out throughout the party. As usual they were quite interested in the work we are doing here, but also her son was really interested in the cost of goods and life in America. Normally I can get annoyed when I constantly hear "how much is this, how much was that..." but I could tell he was genuinely interested in the difference, so I tried to paint a good picture for him. But this is always a tough conversation to have, because America is so huge and different, and I hate to generalize, especially when it comes to money, how much money people earn, and how we spend our money.

On January 14 was the Old New Year holiday and although I didn't celebrate this at home with my family at work we had a nice party.

A week later was St. John's day, according to the Orthodox calendar and since so many people in our village our named John (or "Ivan" in Russian) we also had a big party at work and toasted to all the husbands, uncles, brothers, and friends we knew of this name!

Avagail's 7th birthday was also in January and when my host dad and I took a cake to school, all the kids raised their hands eagerly to stand and give her a toast to health, happiness, and success!

There were also two holiday programs I attended during all of this, one for Avagail's class. All the kids wore costumes and sang songs and recited poems around the New Year's tree. The older classes had more of a talent show and competitions between each grade. They also wore crazy costumes: snowmen, snow princesses, snowflakes, and Santa!


And now that the holiday season is mostly over, or at least I think it is, it's back to work as normal. My work partner, Svetlana, and I just returned from Chisinau after working on a project plan there... we plan to do an overhaul of the sewage system at the school. The students have to go 100 meters from the school to use the restroom, and the chemistry and biology classes can't do labs because they have no way of dispensing their waste from the 3rd floor. The water only runs into the first floor of the building.

In addition, last Sunday along with another volunteer, Laela, we gave a presentation to 16 teen girls at the Jewish Center in Chisinau on body image, self esteem, and leadership. We are part of the Peace Corps group G.L.O.W. (Girls Leading Our World) which gives presentations and camps to young girls and teens. This is being done in not only Moldova, but in other Peace Corps countries around the world!

Anyways, the presentation went well. I would like to go back and do more work with them on other issues. As for the language of our presentation, after about an hour we realized the girls knew pretty good English and so we ended up switching back and forth between Russian and English the whole time.

In other news, my English Club is continuing to go well and is still my favorite part of the week. The Public Achievement group I meet with has decided the problem they want to tackle is the lack of activities and professional development for students in this village. They are now doing research within the school to decide what type of programs their peers would be interested in participating in, as they have decided they want to create a "youth club" to meet these needs. I helped them create a survey last night, and I was excited to see them doing this all on their own, with their own initiative.

Here's a video of the skit Laela and I did. In the first scene Laela is a teen who doesn't care much about life besides playing on the Internet, smoking, and going to the disco. In the second scene, Laela plays an old grandma who I visit to try and help, with heating and food, for which she has no money. If you speak Russian, I'm sorry for our errors.

GLOW Presentation, Jewish Center, Chisinau