Pictue posting

I thought i looked cool here, this is another excursion picture. thats farina flashin the peace sign.

This was the kind of scenery we were exposed to on our excursion

Thats the gang from england with me and farina.

This is why i love villages. This is what the houses look like

This is the Cave "Castel"

days in june

6.15.08 12:04

I am doing fairly good right now. Let me try to recap a little bit here. I finished off last week at work. Nothing all to exciting happened to my knowledge. I am kind of in the grind of things just living day to day falling into some sort of normalcy here. I spent the weekend with a phil and some friends down in the central part of Moldova. We had a nice relaxing time just walking around, laying around just speaking English and talking about our futures. We spent some time with some Moldovans and went out to the forest near a lake and made a fire, ate some shishcabobs and allowed the mosquitoes to feast on us.

This week at work I spent my time working a little on that bench project. Wrote out a few marketing strategies for us to raise the money. I also completed my brochure for my agriculture extension office. I have completed the questionnaire as well and plan on getting out and trying to put the word out for our organization. I get crummy feedback from my partners on it, I mean they give me the whole oh good look at you well done kind of speech but I can’t convince them in the importance of it. They still don’t understand the goal of our organization, or if they do they just don’t care and realize my efforts here might put more work on them.

I spent one day in the field with my partner. We weeded around some rows of watermelons then for about 3 hours or so then spent a little time in the Russian steam bath then went off to work to finish the rest of the day toasting beer as we sat in our office. (I sipped my cup of beer trying appease my partner while not ruining the day by getting drunk at work).

One of my evenings I spent behind one of the high schools exercising on the jungle gym apparatus they have there. I started just doing pushups and pull up variations when some teenagers came up and started working out too. We conversed for a while and showed each other different variations of workouts. I was impressed by the flexibility in skill of one of the boys who could do some really crazy variation pull ups exercises. We will all meet up again in the future and hopefully I found some new workout buddies.

Thursday morning I went the market with my partner to write down produce prices and walk around killing time. Some woman selling cherries and strawberries gave me a free bag full for some reason. I didn’t protest thanked her and then ate them as we walked.

Thursday evening I went with the people from the center for the children (so Farina, my Romanian professor, and the director of the center) to meet some volunteers from England. They are all medical students studying in Edenburrow, Scotland (that’s not spelled right.. don’t’ care) . There goal is to come to Moldova and find a organization or project that other medical students can come and volunteer during the summer for like 3 week stints. … So we all met them and then had dinner at Farina’s house. It was fun to talk to them and translate… (though Farina was the expert in translating, a really humbling experience for my language).

Friday I spent my morning cleaning my room then the rest of the day at the center with the kids. We (the volunteers from England, Farina and me) got them together and went to the stadium and played frizbee and a hacked version of baseball. This time with my bat I took from Chisinau just to make the game a little more dangerous. Then later that day we went to a local summer camp that the kids stay at for a period of up to two weeks. The camp was really cool, with little houses depending on which group you were ( such as the elephant group, heart group, swan group… they all had drawn on their faces).

I was just tagging along with the volunteers to see what kind of games they were going to play with the kids. (300 kids). I ended up leading a group of about 50 kids in some random games, like the hookie pokie, duck duck goose, and head shoulders knees and toes). After all of that madness we were guests at the kids concert they put on, which was a just a bunch of skits/dances the kids did to music. They were all decked out with leaf costumes and everything. (did I mention our transport to and from the camp was an old ambulance van?... well it was.. and it was awesome ;)

Saturday farina and I took the group on a excursion to a small village outside of the town. We took them to this town about 15 minutes away then wandered around asking people where this castle that some person told us about. We carried some old woman’s groceries for her as she led us about 20 minutes of the way till she found her house then we just wondered down the road in the direction the womans pointed us in. we actually luckily stumbled upon a group of 16 year olds carrying food and drinks and were all heading in the same place. So we tagged along, I got stuck carrying the other side of this bag with about 50 pounds of water and drinks in it. We sweated and slipped on the mud as we made our way to our goal. We found it after a good hour walk through this rainforest type environment up hills and down valleys. We then discovered the castle was just this cave. We snapped a few pictures and then some scenery pictures then made our way back the long hike back to the road to grab the last transport heading back to the town.

So all in all it was a good week. I made my way through gardens eating fresh strawberries from gardens, cherries off trees, made some new friends, locals and foreigners, cleaned my room and did a little work for my organization. Peace Corps.

picture post!

Thats me in my Baseball outfit!
That is our front entrance to the house. My host mom sure loves the flowers.





Just some spring pictures... or I guess the start of summer.

Click on the pictures to expand them.

where do i start?

6.4.08 19:04

Where have I been? What have I been doing? Good questions but I’ll most likely just wrap that up as fast as I can here. Lets see, the back thing was bad. I left of laying on the floor in pain. It got worse. I couldn’t stand up for about a day in a half. Then after that I could only sit up for a short while or walk just a small distance. But I recovered.

I painfully wrapped up our bench plan, put it together the pieces that they kids had done and filled in the best I could the areas they had yet to fill in. I worked out the budget making everything look nice with the only requirement being an editing job by them followed by them going to the school director then asking for donations from the kids at school.

Unfortunately, that week they needed me to go with them to school I had to be in Chisinau with the other members of my group for an action packed 5 days of seminars and training program extravaganza! Wasn’t all that thrilled with it, though the language part went well as I was able to communicate my needs to the teacher this time, since my language has improved a little. ( I am still weak, I can’t really carry on complicated conversations but I can get by) It is funny though the people whos Romanian is their second language as well seem to understand me better then native Romanian speakers. Such as most of the Russian speakers in my town that know Romanian understand me and we don’t care when we both leave out grammar that other might pick up and on get confused about.

Among my adventures in Chisinau, I had a fun 3 hour walk in a par of the city I had never been in with a good friend of mine Darren after we both got on a Maxi Taxi bus with the number to take us back to our hotel. No problem except we got on at 10:45 at night and they busses stop running after 11. And little did we know the bus was going in the opposite direction and as soon as it hits 11 the driver pulls over to the nearest bar and buys beer telling everyone to fend for themselves. (we were the only ones that didn’t know this and were left to our own devices and sense of direction).

We made it and had a good time just wondering around (and by no skill of our own finding our way back to the hotel.) we walked 3 hours before find a taxi who took us on a 3 minute ride to our hotel.

Nowadays my mind is occupied too much with being as productive as possible. I am constantly fighting an uphill battle here with attaining productivity here but I am fighting it… because if im not my mind or drive or whatever the heck it is that nags at me tells me to do something.

Last week me doing something was going to work, taking off my ipod out of both ears not just one ear like I had been doing and trying desperately to talk to someone. It really didn’t work but I felt better smiling and trying to be social. Once I got to work I just sat there and bugged the heck out of my partners trying to figure out something to do and putting pressure on them to take me places.

One of the days I went to work for an hour and left to go push some handicapped children with farina in the park to change stuff up. It was a really nice day that day. Almost every day after I got back from work around 2 or so in the afternoon I went to the stadium with some of the children from the center and we played frizbee and baseball and soccer.

Baseball I should have gotten a picture of it was two cigarette packets for bases two gloves, which is all I have and ball. The bat was a creation by one of the kids who went to a random trash pile found a plastic 2 liter bottle filled it with water and rocks, heavy and awkward . but we had a fun.

Highlight of my week was when a man from Chisinau came to visit our work (audit our work) and I was able to ride around with him and my main partner to 5 different villages where our local consultants work at to see how their work is going and what they need to change.

I learned a little bit about the different villages and got to see how they work. The auditor studied marketing and was hell bent on telling the consultants to make their offices very clean and repaired and to hang signs outside of the building to tell people they work there (very elementary marketing but very necessary). I was surprised when 2 of the places had no sign or anything telling people of their place of work.

This weekend we played baseball (our American volunteer team vs the best Moldovan team in moldova) and we got hammered somewhere around 26 to 4.

http://www.protv.md/stiri/sport/meci-amical-de-baseball-la-cojusna.html

That is a video link. They had one of the national tv stations come and show the Moldovans how awful we are. L our problem was lack of practice. In all honesty if we practiced once a week and more then just one pitcher on our team we could hold our own and win. I guess I hope we could :)

This week .. well I spent some time in Peresecina with the old host family. I got to work in the fields for a good half a day hoeing the dirt in the cornfield. I really miss that environment over there. The small town village and the great food and the feeling of family over there.

So I got back Tuesday afternoon. Went to work after I ate lunch around 1 then hung out at work till 4 when farina called me to meet up. We talked a bit (she doesn’t have anything to do now that its summer and the kids stopped showing up to the center). We decided to hike to some far away forest in the distance and I got to see more agriculture getting outside of the city then I knew existed around my city. On our way back we were stopped by this old woman hoeing in here field speaking Russian (without teeth I might add, which makes a language I don’t’ understand even harder to understand) then finally she resorted into some Romanian after a hardy effort to get us to understand Russian. I told her I could help her in her field and she offered me about $30 to do the whole thing. I said no but id come the next morning and do some work if she didn’t mind. She said she didn’t and then we left. So that was yesterday, so this morning.

So I woke up early made some eggs and bread asked my confused host dad if I could borrow a hoe. The conversation went like this…

Me: Hey, Can I take a hoe out of the garden.
Him: Why, what are you doing?
Me: I am going to the field to hoe
Him: who are you going with? Why?
Me: By myself, I don’t know the persons name who’s field im working in.
Him: I don’t understand. But ya take the hoe.

So I took it, went to the field and started working from 7:30 till 12. It felt good to get out there again in the field and do some work like that. My back doesn’t like me for it. But I got some work done. Maybe about 1/5 of the work needed to complete it.

After that I went home grabbed lunch then went off to work. I sat in the office for the rest of the day and talked with one of my partners. I looked over an excel sheet he had that had his hours and then a percentage column next to the hours. It was a really messed up way of putting in your hours and his math was off. We had a fun little battle on math addition me using excel formulas and him his calculator and piece of paper. We both agreed excel rules but the table we were filling out was not correct so we decided to blame the math errors on the guys in Chisinau. ;-)

Out side of that, I gave my partner my plan of action which he told me was dumb but I told him I could not and would not and can’t just sit in the office playing card games on the computer like they might do.

My idea goes like this, I make a little marketing bulletin about our organization where I live with a little bit of who we are what do we want to do, what can we do, and a list of contact numbers. Along with this is a questionnaire asking simple questions like what type of agriculture have you done I the past, what worked what didn’t want did you learn…. What are you doing now… is there any information you contacts we can help you with? Oh ya by the way our service is free! So come and check us out! Buy some really cheap books on specific crops… and so forth.

My partner claims its stupid because he is all negative and claims everyone knows everything about everything in moldova so we really don’t need our organization. That, and claims the only reason our organization is around is because America donated a crap ton of money to get it all started and set up and they are just there to get a pay check. (all true, as I have observed the same).

And onward goes the mission to try to bring knowledge about our organization to people who don’t need it. But at least I will be doing something. I plan on going out on foot through the fields asking people and just talking to people. Either way I will be seeing agriculture and meet some interesting people… that is if they speak Romanian. The questionnaire part I am doing to find a legitimate project to do here. I can’t ask my partners because they just do what they want, it’s the people in the field with the tiny plots of land we should be catoring to, not ourselves…. It’s a wonder nobody comes to the seminars… so I am going to try to use the method of surveying them, then teaching that plan to the other consultants then we all do it, find out what the people want then go about doing it. I plan on doing atleast one demonstration plot based on the information if it is relevant.

Other then that I am just trying to smile more, enjoy life a little more, maybe starting learning language a little more…