Finally I can Post!

I am up and running. Slow connection so pictures will come at a slower pace but at least i can post my blogs :). Please let me know if you are reading, by adding comments :)

Be advised my blog is censored and my views do not necessarily reflect the views of the Peace Corps or the other volunteers. We can be sent home for writing negative things on our blog… scary :).

9-10-07

The pre-service training briefing was great. I got to stay in a nice hotel in Washington D.C. and meet some great people who have been running the organization for our program class. The 40 other volunteers are great people. I am glad to be serving with them and after only two days with them I feel as if I have made a lot of friends. We are all antsy and can’t wait to go. I will fly to Germany tomorrow then off to Moldova. Is it weird that we are flying on September 11? Wish me luck. Please I hope you can all comment on this blog if you read it and feel like communicating with me. If not just hit me up on face book or email kylestremme@hotmail.com.
This was the best choice I could make in my life. After meeting everyone and then listening to supervisors it really is a wonderful opportunity and I hope to represent American’s proud as a whole.
Until I have something of interest to say …. Goodnight.
Also if my grammar is poor or spelling is off please excuse it Id rather write with my thoughts flowing rather then think about what I am going to say and then write it. More honest this way.

9-11-9-14: 23:20

Guess where I am? Chisinau… that is probably not spelled right and I am too lazy at the moment to look it up. The flight was not to exciting, we slept on the floor in Frankfurt Germany for a couple of hours after we got in from D.C. then sat around in the restaurant eating, talking and playing cards for 5 hours or so eating breakfast and then lunch without getting up. I had wiener schnitzel… greasy veal yum! Blah blah blah I made it to Moldova and we were greeted by a cheering crowed of current peace corps volunteers and the local staff. From there a quick briefing and then pizza and beer with some current volunteers. Then bed.

Hotel is nice all things considered. I have a good view of a street and a statue of someone who is either Stalin or Stephen Cel Mare, their hated former leader or their hero from the past. We met the staff and language instructors. We also met our program director and were briefed on some basics like our emergency action plan and how our stay is going to go while here.

Blah blah blah the women in Moldova are outstandingly beautiful! I would venture to say that 9/10 girls near my age are amazing. The guys are all drooling over them as they walk by and give none of us the time of day. The country is poor… infact the poorest country in all of Europe but this city paints a different story. Most everyone on the streets we see wear designer jeans pointy shoes for the guys and high heals for the girls complemented with a very sharp and clean appearance. Despite this the buildings look as though they are falling apart on the outsides, the roads are pot hole city and the sidewalks cracked and broken. There are stray dogs running freely through it all dodging the crazy drivers in tiny cars and maxi taxis or vans with a sliding front door packed full with people.

Everyone is so somber looking, I guess communist rule and then the collapse of it really wears on a person. Everyone looks as though their dog died, their spouse cheated on them and they lost their job and they found out putting a horrible scowl on their face which they are happy to share with any passersbyer they see on the street or as they attempt to run over you in their James bond cars.
I commented on their poor moods to our language instructors and one of them said : “they are frowning and looking angry all the time because they save all their smiles for their family”. Positive thinking at its finest.

Our language teachers are really good. They are enthusiastic and very patient with us. We have been divided into groups of 5 students per one teacher and are going to have our lessons from 8-1 every Monday Wednesday Friday Saturday Sunday. Tuesday and Thursday are for technical training and field trips. This will last around 10 weeks. I am assigned a host family for PST (pre service training) for those 10 weeks. The family is made up of 4 people. Mother Maria, Father Stephen and Brother Tudor 14 and sister Valeria 17. I move in on Saturday and then will be taking classes in the village there. They don’t speak English and if they do they are instructed not to speak it in my presence so that I learn Romanian. Talk about emersion. I am a little nervous about it and I can see sitting around the dinner table being the most awkward conversation ever as they try to speak to me and I just sit there going “no inteleg!”.

No plumbing is a given where I am going and I hope power is working, I am told I might be able to get dial up internet but that is wait to be seen. I will try to write as soon as I can but as I am doing now I will continue to just log my work on word and post it when I get a connection.

9-17-07: 17:58

I have made it. I am living with my first of 2 host families. What a great fit. I am stationed in Perisechnia that’s how it is pronounced and once again to lazy to figure out how to spell it. Perisechnia has a population of about 7,500 people and is primarily an ag based community. I went into this with no expectations for the most part with the mindset that I would take it however it was. I had preconceived motions and thus far they have been mostly smashed.

My family is made up of Stephan, Maria, Veronica, and Tudor. English translations for Tudor is Ted J and Maria is Mary or so they tell me. They were very happy that my mother has the same name as theirs and I feel as if we have integrated wonderfully. They have been extremely nice to me. Of course they laugh at me as I do no speak any Romanian for the most part and do funny gestures to relate to what I want from them and vise versa. I am quite the mime and have thought about a new profession to fall back on…. I will be a force to reckon with in charades let me tell you ;-).

The ages of the family are around early forties for the parents and 17 for the girl and 14-15 for the boy. The girl has been taking language classes and is fairly fluid in English witch helps me out greatly but might hinder my performance in language class if I rely on her too much. This could also strain our relation ship because all of the family asking to translate for them and vise versa. I buy her chocolates for her services and continually say thank you for her help.

The house is very nice, very clean at all times, with no dirt that I have spotted anywhere. We are required to take our shoes off which helps. I have my own room upstairs where I think I have put out Veronica who now sleeps in her brothers room and I feel awful about that, another reason for the chocolates and thank yous. The family owns a very nice computer and the son and I have had fun sharing games and knowledge of how the computers work. He is very impressed with my flash drive which he borrows from time to time so that he can transfer music to his friends with ease. He has taken most of my music from my computer and I have sampled some of his as well. He is very into techno pop music and American rap J.

The toilet is outside in the outhouse and is a simple whole in the ground. The house has plumbing and running water but I have to use the distiller on it witch takes up to 6 hours to prepare 1 gallon for me. They even have a shower with hot water though I did not know how to work it and took the most frigid shower I have ever experienced to date. Veronica and Stephan the father showed me how it worked after and laughed as I displayed how cold it was for me.

The food is excellent! I assume they grow and raise everything they eat. In the backyard they have a small vineyard and a chicken farm and rabbit farm. The food is wonderful and they have a great variety. Stale bread is the staple in any meal along with some type of soup and meat mixed as one. Some great salads and potato dishes have me asking for more as well. They have two dogs chained to the fence which are adorably small and cute but we are not allowed to touch because like the rest of Moldova they believe the dogs carry disease and that they are dirty. I named them both Maggie because they did not have names and they had a good laugh about that.

I showed them pictures of my family and they were very complementary on just how good looking they all were. Veronica who enjoys taking tons of pictures of her self on her cell phone snapped a few of my sisters with her phone so she can show her friends. I have distributed a potato peeler and calendar along with flower and chocolates to the family thus far as gifts for allowing me to stay with them.
Yesterday I played soccer with the neighbor boys for around 3 hours and then went to a family gathering. This could because it was Sunday or because of someone’s birthday or for me I have not deduced which. The grandma is 83 and they are very impressed my grandma’s both made it to 83 as well. I entertain the children with simple removable thumb tricks and the sticking my finger in my ear using my tongue on my cheek to act as if it goes through. They all laughed historically and reenacted it repeatedly. They might take that to school then pass it around until the entire town has seen this some what immature trick.

At the family gathering I had the chance to blow out a candle and sit with the family around a large table with a ton of different types of food. They had everything from sardines and other fish to rabbit. The wine is excellent though this is somewhat of a gray area for me. The father pushes it on me constantly to drink it with great affection but the host daughter Veronica (who is basically my mom telling me to stand up straight and to fix my hair and even how to look both ways before crossing the street) read the contract they signed before taking me in written by the peace corps about how I should not consume too much if any alcohol. She is very strict about this and if I have a glass she makes sure I only have a little and that I do not tell anybody about it. The mother is the same and I have not signed or read the contract so I am unsure if it says I can’t have any or what but I will not test the rules… too far that is J.

Back to the dinner with the family and extended family I was given the task of going with to little kids who are my new friends Michi and Stephen to get the grandmother’s cow. This involved walking 10 minutes to get the cow which consisted of watching little MIchi run to the field and slap the cow and then it led us all the way back to the house. For this task the grandmother milked the cow for me and gave me a bottle. Ahh MILK!!!!!! I told her she will have to teach me this art of milking and she agreed smiling broadly.

To wrap up this entry we had school today from 8:30-12:30 language class then 3-5 technical training. The language is intense and I need to begin my homework soon then go out and get a game of Frisbee started. I hope to get on the internet sometime soon and post this to the blog, but who has the time to find out things like that? Not me J. Much love to everyone reading this.

9-21-07 22:20

Another full day of action packed Pre Service Training (PST). This week has been monotonous as the language classes take up most of the day. From there we have our lunch break where I get to walk from school 30 minutes for a 2 hour break until we start again with something else in the afternoon. The language is killing me. I have a rough time learning a language to begin with but at the pace we are moving at it is really difficult to take it all in. At home I am very good at communicating with my family with gestures and sounds but outside of saying a few words like chicken or dog or eat drink please thank you with a question or statement if necessary I am fairly hopeless with the language.

I am going to spend a lot of time this weekend studying in review of what we did this week. I have a hard time finding time to study when I have a family here that loves to communicate and there is always something to do or talk about (miming if necessary) .

In class this week during one of our cultural learning events we were briefed on the situation here in Moldova as a country. The quick history is that Moldova had a capital system until 1945 when Russia took it over. Then all private land became communal and any wealthy owners were deported to Siberia, many of whom never returned. Through that the system of communism ran through the country where everyone had a job and land to work together with a specific job. Moldova has very rich soil and produced up to 1/3 of much of the food for the soviet Union during their union. Moldova had the latest farming techniques of the times and had a wonderfully functional system for farming that put it among the worlds most advanced farming communities.

In 1991 Moldova got its independence from the Soviet union where the people where then in a weird state having nobody to tell them how much to produce or when to produce anything. For a few years they made due but needed help taking their country private. The United states volunteered a plan to help the country and began enacting it in 1994.

This plan consisted of a lot of complexities I will not go into and do not know about but the quick and dirty version is that of the communal farms that existed before the monetary value of all the equipment was split between the farmers not in money but in equipment. Not in whole equipment either but in pieces, for example one person might receive two tractor wheels, half a wagon and 300 horse shoes. His buddy receives the tractor engine, 3 horses and a sheep. As long as they are equal who cares right…. Uggg. This is also how the land was split up. The private zoning is set up so people live in villages and then own farm land out in the country. But not conjoining land… people all own the same amount of farm land from the communal farm but they are not located as one piece of land. The land is mostly 10 miles or more from the village and then split up in strips so that you own maybe 6 hectares of land in 4 different locations of a 50 hectare land plot. All your neighbors have the same thing going on so you end up with this weird zoning problem. That is just the start of the problems with this plan to privatize land in Moldova…

We also had some volunteers talk about what they were working on. One guy talked about how he worked on the micro finance side and set up funding for entrepreneurs with this program called keva. It sounds like a great program and it seems to be having success. This gives a positive outlook on a future potential job for me but who knows what I will end up doing.

Today the group of all 40 of us… (39 because one of us left for the states after one look at his house or living situation so goes the rumor but I digress… )had language class in the morning then were driven to this park where we were set free for a while to play Frisbee or football and even soccer. I was happy with my skills with all three devices of fun and showed off my skills as a renaissance sportsman.
Today was team bonding day. We did the usual trust games and puzzles in teams to get to know each other more as we swapped stories of our living conditions and funny stories that we have encountered. The most popular topic of conversation is do you have a toilet? Is it outside or inside? Does it work? Do you have a hole in the ground for a toilet? A shower? Running water? Do you have the runs?.. I digress. Over all it was a fun day that was topped off with a spectacular meal of all different types of meat and salad. I ate so much meat I just know im going to be spending some time at the hole more then I want to ;-).
I am so tired… time to go to sleep. Good night.

9-26-07

The weekend is over, and this week is half over. I am trying not to write when nothing is really going on so I have been writing more infrequently. A quick recap of what happened these past few days… lets see language class on Saturday morning topped off with a short cultural lesson pertaining to the history of Moldova. I learned that Moldova has been tossed around as a country. They were apart of Romania for a time as a province of Romania … along with Transylvania and Romania as a kind of tri-power country. From then the wars came Moldova became part of the soviet union and with it came communism. We were given first hand accounts on the positives and negatives of that situation. The positives included always being fed, with full employment so nobody was left without a job and for the most part people were happy. On the opposite side there was mandatory respect for the country and sessions weekly that would give the history of Lennon and his party and its rise and where it was currently. Other fun stuff like all the of intellectuals of Moldova were shipped off to Siberia never to be seen again and land owners stripped of their land…also when the soviets were in power Russians were sent to Moldova to all parts of Moldova to integrate the two counties better. To this day some parts of Moldova are primarily Russian because of this and they will refuse to speak Romanian because they still think of themselves as Russian…
The rest of the day I spent with my family and the neighbors. I finished off the night with some poker with a fellow PCV and some neighbors and listened to some awful techno. Also that night Jess (another PCV) invited me to join her to “pick corn with her family” that next morning. I woke up at 6:45am so I could leave by 7:15 to begin my fun walk to her house where I was greeted with a large breakfast which I quickly consumed. From there we loaded into the Uncle’s car 6 of us in a tiny little LADA (I with my seat belt of course up front) and off we went to their field. The family that Jessica lives with consists of 2 girls and their mother. Their father works in Moscow and sends money home which is not uncommon here. They hired a guy who has helped before to help out as well. We drove about 10 minutes to our field and once we found it I was in awe. It looked like Kansas… corn fields and sunflowers as far as you could see minus the village down the hill in the valley. Then I was handed a small hatchet and given a quick lesson in cutting down the corn. I picked it up fairly rapidly and began to perfect my technique for the next 3 hours. After cutting them down and putting them in piles I helped shuck the corn? Or pull the corn out from the plant itself. This was a long job but a social one as we could all do this while sitting next to one another. Next we piled the corn and bagged it finishing off with pilling the rest of the plants to be burned or left. We helped the neighbors put theirs into a big truck and then hitched a ride back to town in it. I was then fed a wonderful meal of spaghetti and cookies and arrived home around 6pm just in time to eat again with my family! I just don’t see myself losing weight here J. I have some good pictures from this adventure that will be posted when I have the ability to access some internet with some kind of speed or the time to wait for it to upload.
At home I have just been bonding with the family working around the house when I can. I did some hoeing with my brother in the backyard for a couple of days and a couple of hours. I helped take a ton of grass (or what looks like just long grass) from a trailer to the back yard then with pitchforks and towels carried it next to the rabbits where it will serve as their food. The rest of this week has been intense language classes. I am having a rough time still but I hope that positive attitude and determination will get me through it, it has always worked in the past so I am counting on this to work now J.

I really don’t want to leave my current host family and I secretly hope that I just stay in the town that I am in and I can do my work out of here. I enjoy the town very much and about 8 out of 10 people that I say hi to respond with at least a mumble. ( I have taken up saying buna ziua to everyone I pass on the street). My family is really great and I can’t see my next family topping them. My sister told me at dinner tonight that she had a dream that the 3 months were finished and my stay with them had ended and she was crying in her dream. How nice is that? I responded the best I could to that with, “Bine, Am vistat despre strugrii” (I had a dream about grapes).
Much love.

9-28-07 22:40

I thought I would just type in some more thoughts tonight because there is a lot on my mind. First of all I am going to be able to milk a cow in the next week or so and possibly a goat as well. My brother and sister here both have yet to do either and this has made me lose just a bit of respect for their awesomeness. On the note of being awesome I am a being just that as for the past two days I have learned to hoe and pitch fork various things around the house. I helped my brother “mow” the back yard with the hoe for several hours. On top of all this fun we are given projects from peace corps on top of our language classes.

Our first project was to map the city and pick out key locations in the town. We felt like spies as we are walking around with cameras asking people if they have maps of the town and if they might tell us the most important locations in the town. Then we sketch out maps on the street and continue acting like spies. One group had a man point to the sky and say sputnik inferring they were mapping their town by satellite, we all had a good laugh at that.

Our new assignment is to locate the resources that our town processes. Such as any infustructure, natural lakes, highways and what not. We are supposed to come up with a need of the town and then what assests we should use or could use to solve this problem. I had a indepth conversation with my family tonight. Veronica my sole link through language and also my sister got bored of the conversation or frustrated as she found her self in the middle of a conversation she didn’t’ want to be in and left. I was then left to communicate with my very limited communication skills, miming and my favorite friend the dictionary to finish the conversation. What I got was depressing. It really wasn’t more then I already knew but it was the look on my parents faces when they talked of the corruption that was going on all around.

Their number one want is a sewer system. Currently all bath water goes into some tank I am told and emptied when it rains onto the street is what I have come to understand. They think this is awful and I totally agree with them. They say the bigger cities have it and it would really make things better. They also mentioned that they need some type of irrigation set up because when they have a dry season their crops really suffer. I witnessed this while cutting corn and the corn barley got up to my chest.

I explained that putting a sewer system was on to vast a scale for our little project but I will see what the other members in my group come up with. It sounds like a worth project but one that I have no experience in and can not even fathom the cost or feasibility of such a plan.
I asked why the government had not come in and done it but they just shook their head and said one word that explained it all. Russi Mafia. Along with that phrase the mom use the universal sign for ringing out clothes to explain their choke hold they have on Moldova. How do you fight that?

They asked me what I thought of Moldova and I said I liked it, I do in my sheltered little experience it has been wonderful. But they described it with a word I had to look up. It translated into English as tiresome, over worked, strung out. That is how they describe their country. My father wants to leave and work in Alaska or somewhere else in America and work for a couple of years to take care of his family. Currently he works in construction and I have witnessed to be back breaking work for little money. Everything is f-ed up. It is depressing to think of the whole situation and I continue to stay optimistic that there is something I can do for them, for any of them in the coming future. Compassion is not something I lack and this could really take a toll on me the longer I am here. Positive attitude is the only way through this.

How lucky am I to have been born with so much opportunity. If I can make some difference to those with less opportunity then I have leveled that whole life is not fair saying.. or atleast tipped the scale a smidge.

Love to all. Kyle