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.