Graduation Ball Waltz Video

On June 18 the liceu (high school) where I work hosted its annual Graduation Ball, which is the Moldovan version of a Graduation Ceremony rolled up in prom.  It is for all the graduates, as well as teachers, families, and the rest of the village in general.  The evening begins with the Ball, which includes speeches, flowers, and a releasing of the doves, and then moves on to a feast at the local banquet hall (normally used only for weddings), where the feasting, dancing, and toasting go until sunup, at which points the graduates depart their parents to watch the sun rise over a lake on the outskirts of town, and continue their celebration with barbecue and more feasting well into the next day.

Not so different from American Prom, this is the occasion when many boys buy their first suit, and the gown shopping for the girls, well, I guess some things just transcend cultures.

This year, the graduates decided they wanted to perform a waltz at their ball.  For reasons still unclear to me, they also decided I was the most qualified person to teach them how to waltz.

The trophy, erm, statue, I got for teaching.

So, beginning back in May, we started going over the basic waltz step.  A month and a half later, after most of the class became casualties and the traditional Viennese Waltz was declared "insane and impossible" due to its speed, the remaining four couples danced beautifully to the first waltz I've ever choreographed.

One of the beautiful things about Peace Corps is that one inevitably ends up teaching things one is dramatically under-experienced in and has little relation to the primary program assignment.  Prof. John Riker and Marcia Dobson, wherever you are, I'm glad I dropped in your ballroom dancing classes during that last month of college.

Oh, and afterwards, they embarrassed me with a far too gracious speech and this statue.  Very Moldovan.

Another beautiful thing about Peace Corps is that even when you don't fancy yourself a dance teacher, it doesn't make you any less proud of your students at the end.

So, without further delay, the Waltz of the Graduates.

(Email viewers will need to enable images to see video)

Medical Center Success – pairwise ranking session!

My Program Manager recently asked me to lead this summer’s training sessions on medical center work for the new health volunteers.  Thus, while the events of this post took place a couple of months ago now, it constitutes one of my bigger successes here in Moldova and is something I’m thinking about a lot while preparing to teach the new volunteers.

One of the hard parts of the Health Education program is that we straddle worlds – we must work in both the highly structured educational system, and the much more fluid world of community medical centers.  Work at the school begins very quickly after arriving at site, and similar to English Education (EE) volunteers, the fruits of our labors become quickly visible.

Facilitating a needs assessment session at the med center.

At the medical centers, however, our job is much closer to that of Community Organization and Development (COD) volunteers – work at the organization goes in fits and starts depending on how busy they are and how effective we are at identifying projects they are motivated to collaborate on.  These two cultures can often be hard to bridge, with the fast pace of the school making it harder to be patient with the incremental change at the medical centers.  This is one reason I think so few healthies work at their medical centers for the entire two years of service.

As a result of the less structured environment of medical centers, the needs assessment stage is a much longer process.  Facilitating good needs assessment, in fact, is not just necessary to choosing the best health education topics, but is in of itself a key skill we need to transfer.  Good needs assessment is also the first step of any long term planning process.

After coming up short for months in trying to get my medical center to write a one year health education plan, we’d had a number of needs assessment discussions that fizzled.  I finally decided it was time to try a different approach, and reached out to my COD friend Craig.  One of the downsides of bridging programs is it doubles the number of competencies a successful volunteer needs to possess; one of the upsides of Peace Corps is that we have colleagues like Craig who bring the perspective of a different program.

As part of its heavy emphasis on local sustainability, Peace Corps teaches the PACA  approach to needs assessment, (Participatory Analysis for Community Action).  More than a set of tools, PACA is a whole philosophy that calls for empowering community members instead of the development worker to set the agenda through participatory activities.  It also includes a toolkit of creative needs assessment activities.  The results are better needs assessments and thus an increase in the number of stakeholders, which lays a stronger foundation for resulting actions.  The analysis itself helps build consensus amongst participants by demonstrating that the agreed upon needs were not a foregone conclusion.

For my medical center, Craig recommended we try an approach known as Pairwise Group Ranking,

One Year

I just got back from a post-school year vacation in Odessa, and suddenly lots of 1 year anniversaries are crashing over me, much rougher than the gentle waves of that Black Sea port.  Today, June 8, marks one year to the day since I reported to staging in Philadelphia.  Yesterday marked my departure from Denver, and the day after tomorrow will make 1 year in Moldova.  It’s still 10 more weeks until the August 18 anniversary of taking my oath and officially becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer, but with the school year now over and the new trainees arriving in a couple hours, those 10 weeks seem more like a formality.

It’s half over.

Soon, there will be fewer days in front of me than behind me.

I’m more about metaphors than theories of physics, so I’m not sure what the Theory of Relativity has to say about the actual passage of time, but it feels a lot like reaching the peak of a roller coaster: the first half of the ride, the climb, goes much slower than the plunge back down.

This could provoke all sorts of reflections; hopefully in the weeks to come some will make it into this space.  But for the time being, perhaps in the most telling sign of reaching the halfway point, there is little time for reflection.  Despite classes being over, I have a full roster of community projects to implement and training sessions to design for the new volunteers.

So, here’s to the first year of memories and the plunge into the second!

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.

Secondary Projects

In PC lingo, a “secondary project” is any project that falls outside of one’s primary program goals and partnerships.  In my case, that would be anything outside of the health education domain.

Most, if not all, PCVs worldwide have secondary projects.  For many, in fact, secondary projects often become primary projects, if not formally at least in the amount of time they take up.  There are a number of reasons for this.  First, it’s often unclear where a program ends and a secondary project begins.  At my site, for example, my work at the mayor’s office and the soup kitchen are both outside of the primary assignments at the school and health center that the HESC program manager set up for me.  But both include a significant health promotion component.  So is it primary, or secondary?

Second, the very nature of long-term intensive grassroots work in rural communities is such that the partnerships Peace Corps arranges for a PCV before they get there are often not the most fruitful collaborations.  Sometimes the organization doesn’t have two years of work, sometimes the local counterpart didn’t fully understand that a PCV normally means more work, or sometimes everybody just agrees there’s a different local organization the PCV can better help.  Peace Corps understands this, and it’s one of the reasons the organization is flexible and encourages secondary projects as a way to find the best uses for one’s time.

Finally, contrary to popular opinion, PCVs are human beings, and few human beings find total life fulfillment in their work life.  It just so happens that PC is so all-life encompassing that just about any non-work non-familial social activity is likely to be a secondary project, whether it’s playing basketball with community members or playing with kids at the pre-school.

There are two main categories of secondary activities: the kind one does at site, and the country wide Peace Corps activities.  Posts tend to have a number of these activities, which are run by volunteers and tend to focus on key national level development priorities.

Besides working at the soup kitchen and mayor’s office, I’ve also been working on a number of the country wide initiatives.  It’s fun to work with other volunteers, as it so often seems much more straightforward and there’s no language barrier.  At this level, my main secondary activities have been the Gender Workgroup (GWG), the Small Project Assistance Program (SPA), Girls Leading Our World (GLOW), and Haiducii.

Greg Mortenson, and when it’s hard to know how many cups there are in three cups

The humanitarian philanthropic world is aflutter this week over the news of Greg Mortenson – literally, he became a trending topic on Twitter two days ago.  For those unfamiliar, Greg Mortenson is the co-author and main protagonist along with his charity the Central Asia Institute (CAI) of the bestselling book Three Cups of Tea and its recent follow-up Stones Into Schools.

The mountaineer turned humanitarian started building schools, primarily for girls, in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan after a failed attempt summiting K2.  Or so everybody thought, until 60 Minutes aired an investigative wackjob last Sunday that called a number of books’ claims and CAI’s finances into question.

Some serious questions are already being asked of 60 Minutes’ reporting, but if its story holds – and indeed it has been followed this week by a much more in-depth, researched, and less sensationalist work by Jon Krakauer – then Greg Mortenson is in danger of becoming the Bernie Madoff of international philanthropic humanitarianism, not because Mortenson is being accused of anything criminal (yet), but because he risks becoming the symbol of something much larger.

March Wrap-up and my Great Trek North! aka, Site Visits (slideshow at end)

Well, March was certainly an action packed month!  At site, school had a week of spring break, my nurse partner and I held our second public health education activity for the community, my work with the soup kitchen has been going full speed ahead as we finished off a grant application, I planned my first seminar for the teachers at my school, and I facilitated a raft of needs assessments with partners.

A lot of these projects were long on the to do list, so spring break came at a welcome time to do some catch up.  Break it was not, and come to think of it, neither was it spring (though the latter was finally making some progress this past week, with the exception of last Monday’s rather unfortunate snow…)

Both for better and for worse, action packed also meant a month when I was away from my site far more than normal – a full third of the month by my tally. Previous posts have already covered the exciting 50^th Anniversary Kickoff  and even more exciting visit by Vice President Biden.  Aside from that, other travels that pulled me away from my non-routine routine at site included facilitating two GLOW seminars (Girls Leading Our World, a global Peace Corps girls empowerment program) and an extended trek through the north of Moldova to 5 other volunteers’ sites during the final week of the month.

“Site visits” are a practice heavily encouraged by Peace Corps.  There are a number of reasons for site visits, but they generally involve some combination of work, learning through observation of fellow volunteers, and cultural curiosity/travel. I’ve hosted a number of volunteers on visits at my site.  Melissa came to facilitate a Schimb de Experienta for my youth club – twice, in fact, as the you may recall the first one was snowed out.  Craig came out of a general curiosity in the HESC program, and another time just to keep me company when my host family was away.  Most recently, Lindsay (my BFF here in Moldova) spent the night after we co-facilitated a GLOW seminar in a neighboring village.  Yet despite all my own hosting and Peace Corps’ encouragement, I had yet to pay visit to other volunteers.

My own trek north was an odyssey of long-overdue social visits, youth programs, and classroom observations.  It was my first time north of Chişinău, and in the space of a week I doubled the number of raions (districts) I’ve visited, from four to eight.