Livin my life

I went to my new village last week to check it out. I can’t say for sure that it was a fair realistic preview of my life for the next two years. I went to this village with only 6 weeks of language training and cultural knowledge. Needless to say, the particular weekend was very frightening. You can ask just about any current volunteer and they would probably say they had the same experience. I left from the north bus station in Chisinau, and took a 2 and a half hour bus ride north to the Floresti Raion. I got off in the town of Ghindesti, which I think means “you think.” There I met my partner and he took me the rest of the way to my town of Rosietici. I’m not gonna lie, it was a very beautiful town. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that I had one of the prettiest villages in Moldova. It’s situated right on top of the valley of the Raut River. I posted some pics on facebook, you should check it out. The scary thing about my town is there is no one hardly there my age, few people speak English, none of which I will be working with, and the village is small, about 500 people. The people are nice and so is my new host mom. I think while I was visiting the town though, I started to panic and worry if I had made a huge mistake by coming to the Peace Corps. I think what I thought the Peace Corps would eventually make me do, finally started happening. For the first time in my life, I knew I was going to have to completely rely on myself, and that is seriously a scary thing. When I came back to my training village, I didn’t know if I wanted to come home or not, and I honestly couldn’t think of a good reason why I should come home, especially if I wasn’t at least going to give volunteering a fair chance. I called my friend Amanda and was telling her about what I would be going through and she reminded me just to laugh at everything. If you have to take a shower outside for 2 years and the water is heated only by the sun, just laugh. If you are talking to someone in Romanian and you accidentally tell them not to pack a bitch instead of a knife, which I’ve done, just laugh. I’m gonna be laughing my head off for three months. I ought to know by now that nothing worth having ever comes easy. And, if I ever get scared, and there’s no one to hold my hand, I can just hold my own, I guess it’s better than nothing.

Bronchitis is not fun...

I have had bronchitis for like 2 weeks now, maybe more. I can't even keep track of it anymore. I was on the verge of getting over it, but all of a sudden I had a relapse. UGH, MY LIFE. So I heard that A&M had it's ring day? Kinda early? Well congrats to those who got their ring early, or extremely early, Robin Blunck! I found out my new site in Moldova. It is a small town called Rosietici. It is in the north of Moldova, in the Raion Floresti. It's gonna be out of control. It's really small, approximately 570 people. I will find out this weekend if I have the common American luxuries such as running water and an indoor toilet. I'm not gonna worry though, life is going to be great and I think I'm really going to like my job. I'm gonna be helping out at a small business startup organization. We apparently help with local economic development and things like that, and I think we get to build a park. Yay, so I miss everyone and I'm also getting tired of our dollar losing value, what seems like, daily. FIX IT! NOW! Oh and can someone send me some sour candy?

4th of April

So, I’m getting better at the language, and I starting to really love it here, but I feel like I’m neglecting people back home. It sucks because when I want to call someone, first I have to make sure that person would even be awake, then I have to try and remember his or her number. My host parents speak English so they usually know what I’m saying, but if I talk fast, slang, and Texan enough, they can’t tell what I’m saying. I wish someone would mail me some sour candy, they don’t sell it here in Moldova, sigh. Next Monday, we find out our future sites, so exciting, so next weekend, we go on our 3 day site visits. I will stay with a new family every night and everyday I will go and check out my new job. After that, I go to Chisinau for 2 days for a sort of debriefing conference. I can’t believe it’s already April, and I’ve already been here for over a month. Time seems to fly by. I learned a little Russian the other day. Our language classes went over the Cyrillic alphabet, just FYI, their H is our N, their B is our V, their C is our S, so on and so forth. I was really sick for like a week and a half, it was terrible. One night I coughed all night long, and finally fell asleep at like 3:30, but now I’m better, hooray. Also, I’ve been able to keep up with Lost, so that has been really awesome. Anyways, I miss everyone back home, so send me stuff, NOW. Addy is on Facebook.

Another Post

So things are going really well here in Moldova! I don’t think the newness has worn off yet. I feel like I’m getting a pretty good grasp on the language, although I still don’t really know anything. We went to visit one of the Ag volunteers at his village of Valcinet, and the guy seemed to have a pretty good thing going on. He had several different tasks occupying his time. I hope I can be as good of a volunteer that he seems to be. The day after that, we all went to the city of Soroca, which sits on the border on Ukraine. We got a lot of interesting history of the country, as well as a lot of history about Rroma. We are going to find out our future sites pretty soon, and I hope to get placed in a “so to say” business development center, but honestly I won’t care where I get sent to, because I’m ready to see what I’m capable of in the Peace Corps. Yesterday, me and the fellow Porumbeni volunteers met with our mayor and discussed the problems in our community, so that was really cool, and I also got to go with my dad to a neighboring village and make chicken feed. Tonight, I’m going to a birthday party for one of the volunteers and we’re going to watch arrested development. Yay! More later!