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fultas01 · 7 years

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Hello reader 🙂

As you may be aware, it’s currently summer! That means heat here in Moldova, and generally a lot of it with very little to no (more likely no) airconditioning. Just this last week, everyday was above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. *Note, this is a reeeeeeally long post.

Europe on one August day

Last summer, I spent my time learning Romanian and sitting in technical sessions where we discussed how to be a teacher (I honestly don’t think I learned much in these sessions, just due to my background in education). So, as this summer drew closer I was faced with the question: what will I do this summer? So today I’m going to talk about some of my exploits up to what I’m currently doing and planning.

Well, for me, summer began May 31 as the school year closed. Here in Moldova, the chool year begins on September 1st, with the First Bell ceremony, and ends on May 31st with the Last Bell ceremony. I love these ceremonies because they are a great symbol of how the school year has changed the community. It neatly book ends the school year and gives school a high level of importance in the community. Community members are invited to these ceremonies and both students and teachers dress formally for these occasions. Students share their appreciation for their teachers at these ceremonies with flowers from family gardens or florists. I was present for the final bell ceremony at school where we recognized all of the different accomplishments of our students, and said goodbye/good luck to the graduating class. I was able to say bye to some of my seniors and hangout with my partners for the last time for a couple of months. Then, I took a hot rutiera (between the months of May and October there are only hot rutieras) to Chisinau to pick my parents up from the airport.

That entire day I had been trying to message with my parents to check on their travels, however that was difficult as they had to wait for wifi (and as people who are not necessarily tech savy, they often did not connect with it when it was available). So I ended up at the airport, just hoping that they had made all of their planes and that I would be seeing them in the next hour. Sitting down to wait for their plane to arrive made me realize just how excited I was to see them. It had been just over a year since I had seen dad last, and exactly a year since seeing my mom last.

When they walked out of the doors into the main airport I called for Mom (which in an English speaking country might have been dumb, but I was probably among a small number of English speakers, and we were surely the only native speakers in the airport. After the teary hugs, we left and they were able to get their first real glimpse of my current home.

*I’ll go into actual details of this trip in a separate blog post.

We spent 4 days in Moldova, two with my host family in Gordinesti, and two days in Chisinau where they were able to meet some of the other volunteers that I have been luck enough to serve with. From there we had a whirlwind vacation across Europe hitting: Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, Salzburg, Venice, Milan (kind of), Djon (kind of), and Paris. We traveled by train through 5 countries as we worked our way around the continent. But our 14 days together came to an end too quickly for each of us. On our final morning together we taxied it to Charles De Galle and I had the weird experience of watching my parents leave. It was surreal seeing them leave and know that I won’t be seeing them in person for another 13/14 months. Then I waited in the airport to for my flight (which was muuuch later in the afternoon, but I still made it back home much faster than they did).

After I returned to Moldova, I spent some time in the capital trying to recalibrate to speaking Romanian full time again. Then I went back to my village for two week to plan for my other activities them summer. During these two weeks I hung out around the house, made plans on what I would do next (The Launch event, and camp). I also slept like the freaking dead. I slept for a good 10 hours a day. Waking in the late morning and falling asleep around midnight or 2 am every night.

My next planned event for the summer was an event that I was working to create along with seven other volunteers. This was called the Launch Event, and its goal was to bring the new volunteers and older volunteers together in one place. The older volunteers were given the opportunity to share information about their regions, and talk about a topic that interested them. Along with presentations, we also shared volunteer groups with the new volunteers so they could find ways to be involved with different campaigns across the country.

My group planned this event for approximately 2 months, and when the day finally came together I was happy to see it unfold. Of course this day also happened to be a hundred degrees with an unreliable breeze and held on the second floor of an air-condition-less building. Leading up to the event I spent the night in the capital, and that morning I had gotten lost in the city. Even though I have lived in Moldova for almost a year at this point I still found myself in a completely new area because I left my apartment so happily and I confidently turned the a different way thinking it would be a short cut (nope!).

With the lack of AC and the overall stress of the morning before the event I can’t really remember if the event went well or not. People have told me that it did, so I’m going to say it was at least some what a success. I’m pretty sure all the M32s are going to remember about me is my shouting to get their attention and some manic energy that I had towards the end. Oh well!

That night, I said a final goodbye to an M30 friend who had finished her service. She was planning on leaving in the next few days to go home, so I gave her hugs and wished her well, while trying not to tear up. Her leaving was a sign that others would soon be following, as the older volunteers (the M30s) were beginning to close out their service.

Thinking about this, the changing of the guard, really sucked. So, that night and for much of the next day I just hung out and moped. Not the best use of my time, but what are you gonna do? Some times you just need lazy days So I laid in bed and moped, until one of the friends I was staying with came home and convinced me to get out of bed and be at least semi-productive and help her prepare for the dinner party she was throwing that night in our apartment.

The dinner party was to celebrate a successful Launch, welcome the beginning of camp GLOWTOBE (which started the next morning), and really just to say hi to some friends. We had two Moldovans over, and 5 volunteers including myself. While I couldn’t help with the cooking (not a cook, and my friend didn’t seem like she wanted to teach me right then), I was able to keep everyone entertained with music, buzzfeed quizzes, and just my charming personality. 😉

With a successful dinner behind us we spent the rest of the evening putting things together for camp, packing, and dancing. Why dance? Uh, why not??? We played music until some time around 1 am before our most responsible people (not me, obviously) finally grounded us to our rooms to sleep for a couple hours before camp in the morning.

I grumpily woke in the morning and began getting around. My friends laughed at my childish pout, but understood that I am not a morning person (really, any time in the am is not my time). So we got around slowly for camp then left to head to the northern bus station to meet the other campers and counselors. We stopped by Peace Corps to drop bags off that were not going to camp, only for me to realize that I had left my phone at the apartment. I had to taxi it back to the apartment (which while we were on the way, one of my friends received a call from another volunteer to inform me that I had left my phone at the apartment).

We finally arrived to the bus station about 10 minutes late and met up with a group of waiting kids. We all hung out pretty much silently (there was some conversation, but for the most part the early morning and first meeting shyness kept the conversations pretty minimal). As more and more people filtered in we began to talk more and loaded the bus to go to the camp. Here, I lost contact with my bags because some awesome (not sarcastic) Moldovans decided to help me out by grabbing my stuff and putting it on the buses for me.

On the bus ride I slept pretty soundly, helping make up for the fact that I had probably only slept 5 hours the night before. and when I woke up we were at the camp and the week was ready to begin!

GLOWTOBE (Girls Leading Our World/Teaching Our Boys Excellence) is an initiative started by the Peace Corps that gets youth involved in many different areas. We focus mainly on gender equality and leadership; however, we also talked about volunteerism, diversity, team work, and how to address community issues. I think this camp, and other events held by GLOW are super important to bring new values and perspectives to the youth of Moldova, and enable us to (hopefully) make a positive impact on the future for this nation.

The week was spent working with the campers and counselors in sessions, playing sports, working in teams, eating, and just hanging out. I was a part of the Egyptian team (each team was name after a past empire), and my team was, of course, the best. We started we week out strong by coming up with a dance to show off at the talent show, which bonded our team. The next days, we worked on creating a hilarious video about diversity, talking smack, and just generally laughing and having fun. Did we get a whole lot of work done in team time? No, not particularly. Does that matter? Nope, not one bit.

During this week, I also realized that I had the best partner in crime. My partner counselor, who took things as seriously as I did (which was, not at all) and went along with all of my crazy schemes. One of which was on day two, when I stole two other teams’ flags. If you were at camp, I want to point out that I started this game of capture every flag, and my partner and I ended up stealing half of the flags without anyone suspecting a thing. 😉 He agreed on helping me hide the flags without me saying a word. He climbed high into a tree and duct taped the flags in.

Another amazing moment with my team happened as they cheered us on as I, and my partner-in-crime came together and performed “Thrift Shop” at the talent show. I talked him into this the day of the talent show, and we literally listened to the song two or three times before we got on stage and performed. The entire time, I couldn’t help but think: why did I do this???

After camp, we went back to Chisinau, where a friend sold me his guitar so I could use it this up coming school year. With guitar and two bags in hand, I returned to the village for the first time in around 10 days. When I got there it was late, but I was happy to see my host family again before passing out from an exhausting week. Over the next 4 days back at site I slept for close to double digit hours every day, and tried to beat the heat by staying inside during the day. I walked around my village approximately 5 times, learned 3 songs on the guitar, and was in general pretty bored. I had nothing else really planned for the summer, so now it was just time to hangout and see what would happen.

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The week I came back to site was also the last week that my pseudo-site-mate was going to be in Edinet (he is not in my site, but he is in my raion, so he is the closest other volunteer to me). So, I took some time and went to have dinner with him and meet some English speaking Moldovans who joined us. As it turned out, one of these Moldovans had just spent a year studying in the US and the other Moldovan was getting ready to leave to study in Michigan for a year. I was super excited to find out that she would be near my home state and we spent the lunch talking a lot about what the Midwest and America in general is like. I bonded with the Moldovan who had spent a year in America by talking about Starbucks and other food stuffs that you can’t find here in Moldova.

Once I said goodbye some of my M30 friends after they COSed, I was able to go and help facilitate a learning session with a group of the new volunteers (the M32s). I worked with a Peace Corps staff member to open up a dialogue about promoting gender equitable practices in the classroom and shined a light on some of the things that they as teachers or students noticed about teaching practices and how they could improve them. I think this session went really well, as there was a lot of open discussion, and the participants seemed engaged (though, I remember PST, and I could fake caring with the best of them, so who knows!).

Coming back to site after saying goodbye to more M30s, and meeting new M32s has made me think about what I want to do with the rest of my summer. I don’t want to spend my days sleeping, I want to be able to do something. So, I have continued practicing the guitar, hung out with my host family, and I am trying to work on a grant update the library in my community. At the beginning of August I went to a party called a cumtrie with my host family.

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A cumetrie is a party for the birth of a child. It’s similar to having a baby shower after the baby is born and baptized. The whole day lasted 23 hours for me from starting with me getting up and having my hair done, lunch, hanging out at the house, then the hours long party at a restaurant. We ate lots of food, toasted to the baby and family, gave gifts, danced, and played games. It was a lot of fun, while it was suuuper long and I ended up pretty grumpy by the end of the night.

After the party my summer was a little boring again, then we finished the summer with my group having our Mid-Service Conference, which happened about a week ago. Now, I have celebrated my second Moldovan Independence day here. And in a few days I will begin my second school year here.

Until next time!

Angela ❤

Oh-oh Those Summer Nights Hello reader 🙂 As you may be aware, it's currently summer! That means heat here in Moldova, and generally a lot of it with very little to no (more likely no) airconditioning.

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