Care ghiveci vreau sā maninc?

Translation: which ghiveci should I eat?  (Ghiveci is pronounced like kvetch but with a g instead of k.)

My host mom just told me to go down to the beci (root-cellar) and choose a ghiveci for lunch.  This is always a job I love, because normally I just end up choosing my favorite.

This is a section of our basement, with all its wonderful assortment of ghiveci, compote, and every kind of fruit preserve imaginable.  Did I mention this is only a section of the basement?  And winter is more already half over at this point.

Ghiveci, by the way, is a kind of preserved and canned (and maybe fermented?) vegetable salad.  My dictionary says the English equivalent is hotchpotch, but I have absolutely no idea what that is nor have I ever heard it before.  So, per Peace Corps custom re: words/concepts we have never heard before our service, I will continue to simply call it ghiveci.  (This also goes for things that are so specifically Moldovan that the English word just seems inappropriate.  In Peace Corps lingo, the market will always be the piața, and the speeding death traps mini-buses will always be a rutiera.  English rules of pluralization and declension still apply.)

This is the ghiveci I ended up choosing.  It's my favorite, a peppery mix of eggplant, onion, and carrots.  MMM!

Cross-Cultural Reflections on Professor's Day

October 5 in Moldova is "Ziua Profesorului", or Teacher's Day.  (Yes, the word for teacher in Moldovan is profesor.  As an American, it's great to be called Mr. Professor.)

What this firstly means is that I get lots of roses, sometimes gifts, many congratulations, and listen to many poems and a lot of prose about "The Nobel Profession."  Seriously, what could make one feel better?  (Okay, maybe societies that didn't continually cut teacher's pay, combine classes into ever larger unmanageable melees, and parents that didn't pull kids out of school to harvest...but at the superficial level, what could make one feel better?)

Secondly, at my school the way they run things is that the older students teach class that day, which means I don't have to prepare lessons, and instead get to sit back and watch students teach my subject.  Then I get some food and permission to go home early.  Awesome!


Though less stressful than my typical day of exercising as much magnanimity as I can muster while herding cats teaching the world's future leaders, it's no intellectual free-ride.  In fact, approached analytically, it is one of the best pedagogical learning experiences ever.

It's surprising how quickly as a teacher one can become caught up in the perspective from the front of the classroom.  Going back to sit in the kids' seat immediately renders teaching methods, personal styles, and subject specific information in a new light.  After watching an 11th grader teach nutrition using some techniques I myself used last year, it is clear I definitely have a lot more thinking to do about my methods before attempting that subject again.

Finally, there was this very intriguing cross-cultural nugget from the end of the day.  A group of my 9th graders had to arrange the following values in order of importance: education, family, health, career, citizenship, religion, liberty, and economic security.  This is what they came up with:

1. Family
2. Health
3. Citizenship
4. Religion
5. Education
6. Career
7. Liberty
8. Economic Security

In the notes scribbled to myself, I wondered:

• How would we as Americans arrange this list?
• How would I list Moldovan values based on behavior?
• How would American values be ranked if based on behavior?

It's one of the most felicitous activities for cross-cultural understanding there is, so I'm curious to hear readers' opinions.  Thoughts?

Nunta Moldovaneasca (Moldovan Wedding)

I finally got to a Moldovan wedding!  Last Sunday, September 18th, my host sister Rodica and her longtime boyfriend (a Moldovan she met in Montana) Andrei finally tied the knot in Chisinau.

I'm trying something new this time, and going to tell the story through video.  It's my first try at making a video, so, here goes!

The Day of Monday, August 15, 2011

Written two weeks ago, but forgotten in the shuffle of preparing for the school year.

Sometimes one experiences one of those day.  The kind of day that captures wonderfully the rhythm of life here in Moldova, all the while betraying little idiosyncrasies that if understood, can show something much larger about the culture.  Today was one of those days – extraordinary for the normalness of its rhythm, and revealing in comfortable responses to a syncopated tune that is so different from the American melody of daily life.

So remarkably normal, it seemed worth sharing.  I try to point out the cultural aspects that might be amusing or illuminating to an American audience, but I certainly can’t explain them all. So, in simple bullet point form, I present the day of Monday, August 15, 2011.

• Woke up to an alarm.  Vague awareness that summer is ending.
• First morning revisiting my school year morning routine: drinking coffee while reading priority email/news, realizing it’s too late for breakfast, leaving late.
• Arrive at school, where we (the teaching collective) are all waiting for the district level officials to come so that we can choose a new director.
• Stand outside talking to male teachers about our summers for 45 minutes.
• Find out that the district officials won’t be coming today.  Modus operandi of the Education Ministry.
• Go inside, and almost get sucked into the teachers lounge, which promised to have been a 3 hour talkathon.
• Am saved by my amazing partner teacher, who suggests we go do some planning.
• We realize we can’t plan b/c classes haven’t been divided amongst teachers yet, which can’t happen without a director, which can’t happen without the district officials.  All teachers, however, are required to be at school, so we decide instead to discuss our general goals and ideas for this year, including new ideas my partner teacher received while being a mentor for the new M26 Health Volunteers, and various ideas I have that reflect health education theory.
• Brief aside in the Vice-Director’s office for plotting and gossip top-off.
• Back to planning.
• Convince my friend Victor (the art teacher) to come to our house to drink a ceai (tea), which is a pretext for a favor I have to ask of him (which he knows), which is itself a pretext for another favor I have to ask of him (of which he doesn’t know).  He accepts the concept of ceai, but refuses my offers of lunch.
• Victor fixes a painting I bought in Lviv, Ukraine, which had become somewhat loose on the frame.
• I meanwhile secretly communicate to my host-cousin who is more like a host-sister that indeed she should put out a full lunch.
• My host mother calls to inform that Vasile Kirilovici has asked for my cell phone number. Kirilovice (his patronymic) is the richest man in the village, running the agricultural firm that farms 2100 hectares (5000 acres) and employs 250 people (my host father included).  In a town where I enjoy incredible access – greeted by the traditional kiss and embrace from the priest, and being able to walk into the mayor’s office without an appointment – Kirilovici is the only key leader I’m not on regular terms with.
• As Victor finishes the picture, I insist he stay for ceai.  He accepts with the words, “well, as long as it’s just ceai.”
• I put as much food out for ceai as possible, including fruit, cookies, cheese, honey, lemons, bread, jam, etc.
• We sit down to eat, and I casually observe that a warm lunch has been set out us as well.  I proceed to insist he eat.  He is trapped b/c he knows I haven’t had lunch yet but can’t eat unless he does, and he knows I know he hasn’t had lunch yet.  I will later be congratulated on this maneuver.

Small Successes: the Mahala Boys

Mahala is a word deceptively simple given the complex construct it houses.  In fact, it is probably this complexity that makes the word so thoroughly Moldovan.  In Moldoveneşti, mahala means neighborhood.  It is descended from the Turkish (and in turn Arabic) word mahalle, a term introduced throughout the Balkans during the period of Ottoman rule.  In literary (i.e. Romanian) Romanian, however, mahala has come to mean more of a slum.  Before even arriving at the complexities of the actual Moldovan mahala then, the word itself is a signpost showing the historical fork between Romania and Moldova.  It is a very Eastern European dark irony that the word for neighborhood in Europe’s poorest country means “slum” in the same language spoken by its richer neighbor to the west.  If Romanians often point out politely that Moldovan Romanian is an archaic and rural dialect, then the word mahala captures the subtler unspoken chauvinism between these richer and poorer neighbors.

Even in Moldova, however, a mahala is so much more than a geographical boundary.  It’s an agricultural system, a living map of generations of familial histories, and a complex network for the exchange of gossip and information.

One never really leaves their mahala in Moldova.  The village knows where you grew up, and if you move, somebody has relatives there too.  Even if one moves to the city, they might well choose to live in an apartment next door to somebody else from their village – it simplifies the flow of fresh produce coming in daily from relatives on the morning bus from the village.  Our own small village has a mahala reaching as far as Billings, Montana.

We volunteers, on the other hand, come from outside the system – we arrive mahala-less.  So often, we are reminded of the frustrations that implies when trying to work with our adult colleagues – not knowing the right person to talk to in order to cut through the red tape, not knowing a particular history that prevents two potential partners from working together.  But our tabula rasa also grants us some potentially powerful freedoms, particularly with students.

Ziua mea de Naştere, or: my Moldovan Birthday

I love having a September birthday.  Being a nerd, it has always struck me as appropriate that my birthday comes just as classes are starting, and happens to fall in my favorite season (punny, right?).  My birthday also is perfectly spaced during the run-up to my favorite set of holidays: Halloween and Thanksgiving.  Throw in Christmas and New Years and September 19^th basically becomes the kickoff to a whole holiday season.

September has also, however, tended to be my month of settling into new homes, which has made birthday celebrations a constant unknown.  Take, for example, my first year in college, when nobody even knew it was my birthday.  (This was pre-Facebook, kids…)  But I learned my lesson that year, and since then, have never shied away from making sure people know ahead of time my exact moment of birth.

This year was no exception: having only arrived at my permanent site at the end of August, and with my birthday falling on a Sunday, I knew any celebration would depend on my Moldovan hosts.  Well, never again will I doubt their party-planning capacities.  They delivered with a full-scale Moldovan style birthday bash.  From the top!

The weekend started Friday night, when my host parents’ daughter and boyfriend Rodica and Adrien arrived from Chişinău. 

Why I adore my host mom…

A few weeks ago I helped my host mom pick cherries.  We had done this the week before too, so there wasn't much low hanging fruit.  Now, I assumed the natural course of action would be to use a ladder.  Right?  Wrong.  I'm in Moldova.

Instead, we pulled the branches down, far past a point I would consider safe for the tree, and then picked the newly accessible fruit.  Twice during this process we heard significant branches breaking, and had to quickly let go.  Each time, my host mom looked surprised.  Both times, I asked myself how, if this is the normal way of picking cherries, this could surprise her.  Then I asked myself why after 58 years of this nonsense they hadn't bought a ladder.  Then I thought maybe they had a ladder and it's broken or on loan to a neighbor.  Then I looked at the poor tree, remembered I was in Moldova, and decided "no, they probably just break branches every year."

Then we went to go get a hoe.  A garden hoe.  An implement of destruction.  NOT harvesting. 

Anecdotes from Settling In

Cultural integration is a lot of fun, occasionally terrifying, and often hilarious.  As promised, sketches of integration:

Move it like it’s 1985

Riding back with my host family from a welcome celebration on my first day at site in Bardar, I had a spontaneous moment of loving Moldova, sparked by nothing other than our vintage Lada.  Yup, straight out of the USSR.  Now, this is no small feet, as the roads here are generally constructed of mud, large potholes, and rocks.  How this antique has held up, I don’t know, but here’s a tip for conserving fuel: turn your car off when going downhill.  Living on the side of a hill has meant that about half my time in the family Lada has just involved coasting.  This fete is aided by my host father Gheorghe’s incredible sense of timing for turning the car back on.  Somewhere in the midst of my spontaneous Lada bliss, the car ran out of gas.  Not losing a beat, Gheorghe got a gas can out of the trunk, started a siphon with his mouth, and added enough fuel to get us back up the hill.  Ladas are pretty normal here; word is still out on how typical the mouth siphon is.


“Err…I’m allergic to raw eggs.  Oh, thank you for opening it for me.”
Being the polite Peace Corps volunteer that I am, I generally say hello to everyone I pass in the village.  On one fateful occasion, this involved a neighbor.  Showering me with Moldovan politeness in return, he naturally asked me in for a glass of wine.  Most families make there own wine, and it is an strong point of pride.  It was the end of the day, and I was done with homework, but out of an American sense of caution, I declined.  So he decided to simply show me around his garden instead.  Which happened to lead us to his cellar.  Which happened to be where his wine is kept.  After drinking his own glass (wine is taken in large shot form here), he filled one up for me.  Now, walking down into the cellar of a stranger is something we would never do in the States in the first place; that’s how 20/20 specials start.  Being an ambassador of sorts, however, made it incredibly hard to say no to such a polite and persistent offer.