Peace Corps Moldova M26 Health & EE Swearing In - Oath

On Wednesday, after 10 grueling weeks of training, 27 new Health and English Education Volunteers from the Moldova 26 group took their oath, and with that, officially began their two years of service.  As our Country Director, Jeffrey Goveia pointed out, it's the exact same oath of office every Federal official serving the United States takes.

One year ago Thursday I stood on a stage and repeated those exact same words; I'd already been in country for 10 weeks, had already begun working with Moldovan children and counterparts during practice school, was living with a host family, and struggling through my limited Romanian.  But still, I remember distinctly the chill that ran down my spine when taking the oath.  It was one of those rare moments of absolute clarity in life when one feels the full power of an ideal much larger than oneself behind one's actions, when that "something larger" you're a part of becomes so tangible it can be touched, if only briefly.

From here on out, it's now not just halfway, but less than a year to go.  To all the M26s who just took that oath: savor it, it goes quicker than you expect.  Also: congrats, you guys are gonna be great.

If Moldovans didn't think I was crazy before...

They certainly did if they spotted me today biking across 30 km of Moldovan countryside looking like this!

Laden down with Haiducii supplies, including the all-important and ubiquitous Haiducii Rubber Chicken.
Yes, I biked to Olanesti and back like this.

The occasion was for Ziua Sanatatii (Day of Health) which my rock-star raion-mate Shannon organized for her organization's summer long day camp.  The day included lots of outdoor activities, including some awesome relay races.  I was there to conduct some Haiducii activities in the afternoon.

Warm ups.  Very important.

The little kids got to cheer.

Water relay.

Sac race!

Which inevitably ends in this.

Balloon volleyball.

Explaining the rubber chicken game,
"Pirate's Revenge

awwww.

Summer it has been – summer vacation it is not, PLUS: Haiducii vid!

Adam leads his students in a Zen Walk.

If I was expecting summer to be somewhat more relaxing than the school year – I was – then I was clearly mistaken.  While there have been two nice vacations, they have only managed to condense the amount of time remaining for a chaotic eclectic assortment of tasks.  There has been teaching PST, a project at the soup kitchen, ongoing work at the medical center, and enough political intrigue in the village to require numerous visits to shore up friendships amongst the two main factions.  There was also a great 50^th Anniversary Concert in Chişinău that I MCed (credit to Ohad Sternberg for the post and photos linked to there).

While I like to stay busy, one downside of this is that there has been less time than expected for Haiducii, a secondary project I joined last spring (when still expecting a lot of free time in the summer).

Quoting from that last post:

Probably the coolest of my groups, Haiducii (pronounced Hi-do-chi) is a Robin Hood like character in Balkan folklore.  In Moldova, we are an injustice-fighting band of PCVs who go around teaching teamwork and leadership skills to youth through outdoor teambuilding activities (the type common in U.S. summer camps and low ropes courses).  We won’t really ramp up until the summer season, but as a throw back to my Boy Scout days, I’m looking forward to this group.  It involves lots of hitchhiking around Moldova, but then, isn’t that how Robin Hood travelled too?

Finally, with most of my partners now on vacation, I was able to lead my first Haiducii session up in Edineţ this past Monday for fellow volunteer Adam's Leadership Summer Camp.  Working with fellow Healthy and Haiduc Melissa – aka Yoga Mama – we made the 4 hour trek up there to meet a great group of future Moldovan leaders who were willing to brave the cold and rainy weather for our outdoor activities.

The Spider Web

It was a great group of kids to work with for my first session, and dare I say, after we made them repeat Spider Web three times, they even seemed to draw some lessons about teamwork.  My favorite moment was when we came to the conclusion as a group that without Alina – a very bright but shy girl – they never would have solved the mental puzzle to what is an otherwise rather physical activity.  They even got the take away – after a little prompting – that sometimes, good leadership means listening, because if you just shout and only the leaders get to say their ideas, the best solution might be drowned out, because sometimes the quietest person has the best ideas.  Now, if only our politicians back in the U.S. could come to that same conclusion…

Melissa debriefs. Alina, work done, yawns.

Then we played Jedi Knife Fight.  Theoretically, there’s a lesson in that game too, but mostly it just involves letting the teams whack each other with foam noodles after a hard day’s work while we try to enforce the games rules.  A casualty of that enforcement tends to be getting whacked yourself.  So, for all those readers who’ve been wanting to wallop me with a noodle but can’t because I’m here in Moldova, poftim (enjoy)!

Another Cup: follow-up on Greg Mortenson post

Three articles have caught my eye in the months since my first post about Greg Mortenson and the accusations of wrongdoing within his Central Asia Institute (CAI).  Unsurprisingly, they drew my attention in part because they pick up on two main themes of my post: the difficulty of verifying development dollars on the ground (which works in Mortenson’s immediate defense) and the uneconomical/unsustainable nature of the CAI solution (a longer term but also more damning critique).

We’ll start with the good: a February report by 16 education aid agencies currently working in Afghanistan offers two vindications for the CAI, (the Guardian also provides a nice summary). The report and article both contribute an arbitrating neutrality, having been published before the CAI news broke.  Two key points as they pertain to the Mortenson story:

First, the report points out the overall impressive gains in female education that have taken place in Afghanistan since 2001.  On paper, $1.9 billion has been spent on education, 2,281 schools have been built, and female enrollment has jumped from 5,000 to 2.4 million.

Secondly, the report simultaneously draws attention to the fact that these gains are significantly inflated on paper.  Potentially 22% of those new students are classified as “long-term absentees”.  A shocking 47% of the 2,281 “schools built” have no physical building, and school closure due to insecurity remains a chronic problem.

For CAI, the first piece of news is certainly a positive indicator that their efforts have been having some effect – they have been part of that collective school building campaign.  Let’s not forget we’re talking about one of the least developed countries in the world that is still battling some very repressive views towards female education.  In such a context, those gains really are impressive, and CAI is part of that story.

The second vindication is more bittersweet in that it demonstrates that many of the 60 Minutes’ claims regarding the schools themselves – the claims that suggested far less on the ground success than CAI claims on paper – are in fact not at all unique to the CAI.  Given those statistics above, in fact, CAI may be having far more than the average success in getting schools open in Afghanistan.

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!