"is he prost?, no hes american. Oooh"

12:1:2007 10:03

So it has been a week since I graduated and moved to my permanent site, worked my first full week at my job and experienced more loneliness then I have thus far here in moldova. Of course I am having family withdraws of having to leave my second family who I had grown to enjoy tremendously. My current situation is just different. There are no kids in the house the house is situated to where I have my living space and they have there’s and we meet in the kitchen except it seems I eat alone most of the time because my host father eats earlier then I do to leave for work early in the morning and my mother doesn’t eat… at least I have to see her sit down and eat. So I don’t have the 2 hour dinners and the 1 hour lunches every day chatting it up, I have Russian television to keep me company [let me just tell you its not that comforting, Russian is not exactly the most comforting language to soothe your troubles to rest].

It really is not bad at all. I just want to put out there the differences in my situation and where they are now. My living area is nicer, the bathroom situation is improved (to a point, I miss the outside toilet for weird reasons that im not going to get into on this blog and you will just have to talk to me to hear about that if it is really tearing at your curiosity button… whatever that is). The food is really good. My new host mom loves to cook and is intent on making gain 20 lbs before I leave. I keep telling her she has time to do this but it is if she must make me gain 20lbs by next week. I protest between mouthfuls but she seems determined to succeed. I mentioned to her there was a time when I was eating an enormous amount of food (nearly 8000 calories a day) when I was trying to bulk up for weight lifting and how I didn’t even enjoy food but I think I only managed to challenge her.

Lets see what I have accomplished this week. It really is not much but I blame it on the snow and me needing to adjust to a new location. I found my office that I will be working at. It is about a 20 min fast walk through the haunted forest where the rabid hungry dogs live past the frozen lake and broken down soviet monuments. I wave to Lenin every day as he points past me in to the distance always intent on moving forward. It really is a pretty walk. In the fall I took a lot of pictures because the leaves were colored and the water slowly waving in the lake as the fish ( which I am not allowed to eat for obvious pollution reasons) would swim and enjoy their paradise with the coca cola bottles. There is some very artistic graffiti along this concrete wall that is built bordering the park. They have such things like bart simpson on his skate board saying eat my shorts to tupac with the phrase live by the gun die by the gun. I am glad American influence has reached the hoodlums over here giving them material for their works of art. The trees are all bare now, the lake is frozen and the dogs are hungry. It is still pretty and I have enjoyed the walk everyday on my to and from work.

My work setting is really ideal. From the horror stories I have heard from other volunteers having partners that just leave them alone in the office as they go off and do things without them to partners telling them they are not want they wanted and they just need to go find somewhere else to work mine seem rather pleasant. My routine now is to sit at my desk they set up for me and do whatever I want until I can speak the language. I really am not even required to go into work as my partner told me because my language skills don’t allow me to really function as part of their team just yet but I can do what ever I want. So I come to work every day from 10-2 sit at my desk and translate articles from the month old newspaper they let me have. It is slow and grueling work but it passes the time and it is somewhat constructive. I have a routine where I spend about an hour and a half doing my newspaper work then I spend another hour or so writing my old host family a letter in Romanian that is painfully difficult trying to spell everything correctly with the correct accent marks on the keyboard. In between that I take short breaks have conversations with my partners such as;

“no thank you I don’t want tea.. I know im crazy I just don’t like tea as much as you… I know its good for you but no thanks I had tea with my breakfast that I didn’t want either but my host mom forced me to drink it… yep thanks but no thanks..”

Or

“I am learning Romanian as fast as I can, no I haven’t begun to learn Russian yet… I know it would be very useful but I think I need to get Romanian down first a little better before I confuse myself and begin to learn Russian… give me a year and I will try to learn Russian then..”

Yesterday we had a conference with all of the members of the rayon in attendance. I work in the center of the rayon and there are around 11 or so other smaller villages that report to this rayon for my organization. I was able to meet them all yesterday and stand up introduce myself in my amazingly poor Romanian. They all seemed nice and after our conference we ate meat and cheese and cake with vodka and juice.

A funny thing about my office is that people come in and out all the time. I try to catch who they are but it is difficult and for the most part when people say their names I have no idea what they say. The names are so foreign to me just like when I say my name is kyle they look at me like kyle? They can’t pronounce it just like I can’t pronounce their names and then they say well kyle kind of sounds like colia which is a name I have heard before so I’m going to call you colia. And I am fine with that just like I hope they are happy when I call them by names I can understand for example.. Tacolpilia, Taco :).

Also my favorite quote that I understood was when a gentlemen came into the office and sat down talking in Russian with on of my partners. After about 10 minutes my partner goes into the whole do you want tea routine, I didn’t understand the first time what she said so she repeated a little slower for me and I answered with a negative maybe not with perfect pronunciation but she understood me. The guy looks at my other partner and asks him if I am prost (Prost is the equivalent to village idiot … a little slow in the head). My partner answers no hes not prost hes American. The guy understood with that explanation with an aww just a stupid American and went back to work. I just laughed and continued translating an article on what I have deduced to be about a women who raises chickens and sells them in the big city, really exciting stuff!.

Outside of work I did start coaching basketball with my site mate. She has been here a year and can communicate fairly effectively with the kids so it is not completely impossible to get our points across on what they need to do. Given I have never played organized basketball I am not exactly an ideal coach. But I am tall and they all think I played in America so I know what im doing. I tried my best not to shoot and give away the horrible truth or play with them during there games. That was the first practice how I did things not to give away my credibility. The second day at practice we only had 4 girls show up for practice so Myself and andrea my site mate (that means she is a peace corps volunteer also stationed in the same city) decided we would play so we could make the game 3 on 3. Now I am playing against girls aged anywhere from 15 -17 for all I know and feeling kind of stupid but ill be a sport and play. I got worked. It was me and andrea and another girl vs the two best girls we had that play for the sports school in the city.. whatever that means… and another girl. They were throwing picks on me throwing elbows fade away jump shooting over me … thoroughly humiliating me. But to give myself a little credit I did get a lot of stuffs and I was not playing physical ball. Given I really have no skills in basketball and realy on my size and strength to be a decent rebounder and defensive player they exploited my inability to play physical on them and laughed as stomped us. I think I lost all credibility in terms of being able to teach them something so I am going to have to read up on some drills to help them become better.

On the boys side it was the same story with only 4 boys so exhausted and perspiring andrea and I decided to play some bal with them as well. I did twice as good as I did agains the girls because I could play like a boy and gained a little self respect back along with some sore muscles :).

Also I have locked down a place to lift weights at. I visited this gym 3 different days missing the director who I needed to talk to before being able to workout there. Finally the 4th day I as able to meet up with him and I was given the Tuesday Thursday slot to work out for a hour on both days. I am grateful for anything I can get so I was happy and thanked him. But my two days are the on the same day I play/coach basketball for 4 hours a day which will leave me exhausted and wipe clean anything else I would want to do that day. I don’t care it leaves me exhausted and allows me to get my energy out.

I visited one of the high schools yesterday in order to hopefully find a tutor to help with my language skills. I want to do about 4 hours a week of supplemented help and direction. It was fun walking in to the school randomly finding a teacher stumbling through my question in Romanian and then being pointed in the direction I needed to go to find a teacher. I finally tracked down the teacher who was very nice and patient with me but said she doesn’t have time with the holidays coming up and the amount of papers she needs to grade but I should contact her after the new year. So I have a potential teacher in about a month. I will visit another high school Monday to attempt to start sooner but I am getting the feeling this is the answer I will be getting from everyone.

I want to thank my mother again for sending me my package with my jeans and a couple of shirts and dvds and such. The sweater fits wonderfully and so do the shirts and the jeans. THANK YOU! I received pictures from thanksgiving last week that I missed. Thanks Amy for that, it made me feel like was there for a little bit. Also it was great to see my family via web cam and see my sisters.

Also thank you to all my friends who are sending me emails saying hi keeping me up to date with what is going on in there lives. Love you grandmas who are reading this and anyone else.

Until next time kyle.