I'm a Real Boy... I Mean Teacher!

After an unexpected hiatus for over a month, I now have both the time and the internet connectivity to resume activity on this site. PST became extremely busy during the last four weeks, due in no small part to practice school. This is a time when we TEFL and Health Ed. volunteers are given a classroom full of Moldovan students and three weeks to try to figure out how to teach. Peace Corps does a great job of training us during PST, loading us up with all sorts of teaching theory, creative ideas for in-class activities, books, and an excellent support network. Practice school is kind of like the test at the end, where we find out how much we still have to learn about teaching in Moldovan schools. Personally, I love being in the classroom, and I've found Moldovan students so attentive and so intelligent that I am often at a loss as to how much I really need to teach them.

After Practice School, PST rapidly came to a close with one more week of language training and a Language Proficiency Interview (LPI), in which we all found out how much language we still need to learn. I scored dead center with an "Intermediate Mid" and I'm pretty OK with that, for now.

Now I'm at my permanent site, which is a wonderful town in the center of Moldova filled with friendly people and several highly-remarkable schools. Friendly people can be found everywhere in Moldova, but I consider myself uniquely lucky to have been given the opportunity to teach at the lyceum (roughly equivalent to high school) in this town. The teachers are all top-quality, and the director (read: principal) seems to be universally loved, not only in the school but also in the town, the raion (kind of like a county or district), and by just about everybody who has ever heard of him. The students are, of course, of no lesser quality; it is of these students, primarily, that I formed the aforementioned opinion about being in Moldovan classrooms.

In Moldova, school starts on September 1 (or the following Monday, if it is a weekend) -- a day in which students assemble in what need only be described as clothes that look better than anything any volunteer has ever brought with them, ever. I decided not to wear my suit, mostly because I know that I cannot compete with the impressive accouterments of Moldovan students. Had I thought ahead, I would have taken my camera to capture the sea of well-clad students standing in the courtyard before the school, waiting for the school year to be introduced.

At this point, I really didn't know any students at the school, and I tried my best to hide off to one side. The students, as they milled about, cast curious glances at me which seemed to say: "Who are you? You're not a student, unless maybe you've transferred in from Romania or somewhere. Maybe you're just visiting somebody? Hrm..." Just before the ceremony began, the director, the mayor, and the regional minister of education appeared at the top of the steps, drawing the attention of most of the students. The director, seeing me, motioned for me to join him, stimulating a new set of curious glances from students, this time implying: "OK, so you're not a student. You're standing next to the director, so you must be somebody of some importance. Hrm..." I tried my best not to make eye contact with anybody for more than a second or two at a time.

Speeches were made, most of which remained shrouded in the veil of my own personal language deficiencies. Gifts were given to certain teachers, and to certain students. After pretty much everybody at the top of the steps had spoken, the master of ceremonies said something in Romanian, the only words of which I could really understand were "Corpul Paci" and "Jeffrey Zundel" and the microphone was passed to me. The students, their questioning glances answered, promptly delivered to me a surprisingly enthusiastic cheer. I sputtered some broken Romanian about being happy to have the opportunity to teach English and, trembling ever so slightly, retreated to the side of our director.

Every moment I have spent inside the school since then has been great. The daily schedules are still a bit unstable, and I am still figuring out how to be most effective in my role, but I have a great set of students, talented partner teachers, and a generally positive attitude. With luck, I'll still have all three by the end of the year, too.

Staying Positive

I love this country.

I have been sick and injured for the past two weeks, solid. Pre-Service Training (PST) is stressing me out, as usual. I'm hungry, thirsty, and extremely tired. And yet, as I walked home from where the routiera dropped me off, I noticed me shadow stretched out in front of me.

I have tended to be a poet, in the past. Perhaps this is a continuing trend. In any case, I could not help but think, as I observed my casually elongated profile pacing the ground before me, that Moldova (or perhaps someOne) was trying to tell me something. For me, a poet, shadows usually symbolize memories and the past; but here, in the rural landscape of a Moldovan sunset, my shadow crosses the ground ahead of me -- the future, quite literally.

The decision to join the ranks of Peace Corps volunteers and wander off into the developing world was not an easy one, though perhaps too many of us realize this simple fact only after weeks have passed without State-side-quality sanitation, infrastructure, communication, and so forth. I joined because "it felt like the right time," and I still hold to this. But I admit, now, that I had no idea what that really meant, and means still. It means that I am in a completely different place, no matter how similar the climate, the wine, or the people. It means that I am apart from my friends and family, without whom I would have been abysmally without hope, long ago. It means that I can't go see Sigur Ros in concert, when they pass through Portland in October. It means that more responsibility and more expectations rest on my shoulders than ever before. And it means that every day is a challenge.

But seeing that shadow walking in front of me caused me to pause, and to think, and to look around. Moldova is an amazing country, and I consider myself entirely lucky to be here.

For a long time, I have wanted to live on a vineyard. Today, as I looked out over rolling hills covered with grape vines, it occurred to me that I have realized this dream, simply by living within the borders of the remarkable vineyard known as Moldova. Of course, Moldova is so much more than its wine, but this thought brightened my day. It made the particular challenges of the past two weeks seem worth the sweat.

Site Visit

I am a fairly relaxed person, as a general rule. I enjoy challenges, and I may even be known to seek them out from time to time. However, when the challenge has been exhausted or sufficient effort has been consumed to the challenge's end, I appreciate opportunities for me to kick back and decompress. Pre-Service Training (PST) in Peace Corps does not, to my inexpressible dismay, afford such opportunities.

Aside from the usual schedule of language training and cultural orientation, this weekend I was required to visit the site where I will teach English for the two years immediately following August 20. To say that the weekend was overwhelming, exhausting, bewildering, confusing, and mildly understructured would be only the most broad and polite description of my experience. Of course, I should also say that my future site is wonderful and full of innumerable avenues of potential interest. Ultimately, what made my site-visit difficult was the simple fact that I was expected to make a decision, with only a few days' investigation, about which family I prefer to be my host for the next two years -- hardly rock bottom, I know.

To make matters even more difficult, almost every family I visited was absolutely wonderful. Different, yes, but wonderful in their own ways. The differences between potential host families' houses were too often only a matter of the color of the walls and the shape of the toilet. (Perhaps that is an oversimplification. Nonetheless, the differences were menial, by my standards, indeed.)

Now, the site visit is rapidly becoming only a blurred memory of PST, and I still have very little basis for my decision. I know I chose a host family, but only by default; it was an unfortunately hasty requirement, but one that will invariably result in an interesting (and likely pleasant) experience.

Like so many other PST activities, however, the site visit has left me feeling entirely drained of energy. If I did not have such excellent support from my PST host family, from home (in USA), and from my fellow volunteers, I cannot imagine how I could continue. This continues to be an interesting, if trying, experience, and I can't wait to look back on PST with a sigh of relief.

More energetic and enlivened posts to follow, once I regain sufficient energy to see straight.

Post Script: My full report on the nature of Moldovan condensed-water-vapour economics was rejected by all reputable journals on the grounds that no such industrial sector has yet been identified by any leading economics monitoring or research organization. The editor of the Decianual Journal of Applied Atmospheric Hydrodynamics singularly respond with praise for my lovely diagrams. I stand, nonetheless, starkly offended by the lack of scholarly interest by global economics experts. I turn now to the artistic community. See below for diagrams.