This is the park i walk through every day to work. Beautiful.
Another exhausting week of “work”. This week was as the first sentence suggest exhausting. It went by ridiculously fast, and now I find my self trying to remember all that happened. Since Tuesday. Much less the same as the week before to be perfectly boring. Spent my mornings at work with the agriculture NGO. That went smoothly without any real problems. I do recall one day where I was the only one in the office for a couple of hours having the pressure of answering the phone and letting people know I was here nobody else was and where they were if they really needed to speak with them.
Answering the phone is horribly difficult. I have good days and bad days at this and more often then not I am nervous the whole time and can’t understand what is being said on the phone. There is no miming, there is no… oh he’s an American and has been here a short time… nope they expect to be talking with an organization that can speak to them and respond well. I have had a few calls where I repeated poftim? Or the equivalent of im sorry what did u say? Then we both hung up in confusion. Just like my language days are good and bad so are my phone conversations.
Any who I had a really good day on the phone. I answered 3 calls and understood what was going on and answered appropriately. I left completely satisfied with my work for the day knowing that I let the three callers know that I was the only one in the office, where other members of the office were, and sent them off with have a great day :-).
Also I got a handle of some completed projects my organization has done in the past. In it are the proposal for the project, the budget and why it is important. I found it interesting and I was glad to finally have somewhat of a vague idea of what I have gotten myself into working over here. I also was told that in the spring life will pick up and I will be out of the office a lot staying longer then 4 hour days. This is good news but it also means that I will have to sacrifice days at the children center and possibly weightlifting class. But I will see if I can find ways to work some of both in.
At the children’s center they days went by fast. My german counter part brought in a severely annoying card game from Germany that involves a bell in the middle of the table and the ringing of the bell when certain matches come about. It is now the cause of little Russian speaking kids yelling and excitement over there and helps break the monotony of playing the card game Solo which is the german equivalent to uno in the states. Its starting to get cold. I dunno why I decided to write that but its true. It was -10 Celsius this morning and I was thoroughly aware that I was in the northern part of moldova.
Also I bought a bag of cookies for the kids at the center for a snack to go along with their bread and jam they eat. I came in put the bag next to the other food forgot about and went about my day. I found out 2 days later that those cookies had not been touched because they didn’t know who brought them and I wasn’t there to ask if I had so they assume it was the directors cookies and thought nothing else of it. So I cleared that matter up after I found out the misunderstanding and we all had a good laugh about the whole thing.
Did laundry this week, and cleaned my room like a fiend. Lucky for me this new host family is just as passionate as my old host family and Friday I was given my lesson on how to clean my room properly by my host dad. I helped of course, beating the carpets outside with this tennis racket looking object then mopping the floor to make sure to kill any piece of dust that showed its ugly head in my room. Its pretty clean in here. Pretty clean.
This week in basketball I had a good time with my weightlifting guys who came to join in on the fun. They are horribly under practiced, given their school doest have a coach or the opportunity to play afterschool over there. I brought them up to speed with the basics and laughed heartily as they attempted to play. There was a fun unfair of rookies vs regulars where they rookies were stomped 32 to 6 in a 20 min game. I of course stepped in to play full time defense under the basket for the rookies and proudly evened the game out. Also at weight lifting we were able to really get in some great workouts. They were near to tears after a few exercises and I managed to work up a real sweat as well, something I have needed for a while. They are a good group of boys and I am counting on taking them with some other kids and starting a community action club so they can start addressing issues they feel they can correct in their community. The plan is to meet once a week, with a project and then have them do it, meet the following week and discuss and critique. Of course who knows when this will happen. I will need to wait till the holidays are over so at least a month, and my language skills have increased ever so slightly.
This weekend was fun. I met up with some other volunteers and just hung out speaking English and swapping stories. You need those breaks, to just escape sometimes and I am rejuvenated, though I am in need of some sleep as is the normal repercussion of hanging out with volunteers you haven’t seen in a while and there is catching up to be done.
Ok so now im sitting I my spick and span room, getting ready to settle down and relax after a long week, with little free time and enjoy it thoroughly. I will talk to my family tonight on the web cam and to what is my understanding my grandma june will be joining in on the conversation, so I am looking forward to tonight.
Christmas is Jan. 7th so I will not be celebrating it on the 25th like all of you in America but I will be thinking about you. They have put a great big Christmas tree in the center of town here and decorated it all up. I will get a picture of it this week and post it soon. My host families son from Chisinau and daughter who is living I America now with her husband and their son will be staying with us starting next weekend for 2 weeks for the holidays and my site mate comes back this week so the fun will only increase as time goes by here.
Also Moldova was in the new York times for those of you who missed it:
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-moldova-christmas.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
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