Beşalma 2

Any trip to the south of Moldova should include a visit to the museum in the village of Beşalma devoted to Gagauz history and ethnography. I made my first trek out to Beşalma in 2010, and this year I thought a second pilgrimage was in order.

Beşalma

First, a brief digression about villages. We don’t really have villages in America; we have towns. A village is essentially a place where people have been living and farming for a long time. There are very few amenities in a village. They usually have one or two churches, a few stores, a bar, a mayor’s office, a few schools, and the rest is individual houses with vegetable gardens. Villages are not always tiny; they usually have a population of at least several thousand.

If you’re still not sure if you’re in a village, ask this question: Are the toilets indoor or outdoor? If the toilets are outdoor, you’re in a village.

There are two basic reasons this museum is so cool. First of all, it’s in a village! Villages are not exactly known for being centers of culture, so it’s incredibly strange to find a good museum in a place where the main occupations seem to be farming and shepherding. 

 Nobody understood why Karaçoban wanted this stuff!

Secondly, the museum’s founder Dimitri Karaçoban, completely on his own, without any help from the government, collected all of the objects in the museum and designed the exhibitions. Mind you, this was during the Soviet period, when nobody did anything that wasn’t sponsored by the government. Moreover, in the 1960s and ‘70s, people though it was completely bizarre that Karaçoban wanted to make a museum dedicated to Gagauz culture. During the time that Karaçoban was collecting Gagauz artifacts and making films about village life, the Gagauz language wasn’t even being taught in schools and hardly any books in Gagauz were being published. 

But first some more background about Dimitri Karaçoban. He was born in 1933 and graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Leningrad in the early 1960s. This in itself was amazing at the time. Karaçoban’s community was ravaged by war, repression and famine in the 1940s. Illiteracy among the Gagauz was very common at the beginning of the early Soviet period. Literacy rates increased considerably in the early 1950s thanks to Soviet literacy campaigns, but many people still only finished elementary school before economic necessity forced them to quit school and start working. So Dimitri Karaçoban’s matriculation at the Literary Institute was like a Native American kid from the rez enrolling at Harvard. It was incredibly rare.

According to my host dad Grigori, who grew up in Beşalma, after Karaçoban graduated from the Literary Institute, he could have taken a prestigious job in Chisinau and worked there. But Karaçoban turned them down. All he wanted to do was go back to Beşalma and write poetry. And so he did, riding around town on his bicycle, periodically pausing to jot down his latest stanza. The government-controlled publishing houses weren’t interested in publishing Karaçoban’s poetry, so he and his wife were poor. All the same, they were well-liked in the village, and kids like my host dad would come visit them and listen to Dimitri recite his poetry.

Display of books by Karaçoban in the museum

After the so-called national-awakening of the 1980’s and ‘90s, the museum started to get the respect and funding it deserved. I made the trek to Beşalma with a researcher from the Czech Republic to check it out once more.

This is a collection of women's tools from a traditional Gagauz home. In front you have a loom, in back you have a stove. If you look closely, you can see irons above the stove!

This is where people stomped on the grapes when making wine. Quaint as that is, I'm rather glad they don't make wine that way anymore.

I know this looks like a medieval torture device, but it's actually for making wine.

Moldova was caught between the Red Army and Romanian fascist troops during World War II. The shoes on the left belonged to a Beşalma resident who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. According to the guide, these are the shoes he wore as he made the long journey home after the war.

This is actually a sleigh. I'd like to ride around on this thing!

Much like in the U.S., handmade embroidery was an important part of a woman's dowry. This time around, I watched a short film of Gagauz wedding traditions recorded by Karaçoban in the 1960s. It could have been recorded in the 1860s! It was awesome to see—in color!—the lively wedding festivities. I don't have room here to describe them all, but one did involve making the couple kiss over a goose. The problem is that the goose generally tries to interfere.

We got to hear some traditional violin music in the film.

My travel companion Milan gamely made the 2 km trek with me to the cemetery to pay our respects to the grave of Karaçoban and his wife. The director of the museum was quite embarrassed about the weedy state of the cemetery and warned us in advance.

The humble grave of Lyudmila Pokrovskaya, a professor of Turkology from Leningrad who made the trek to Gagauzia to create a Cyrillic alphabet for the Gagauz language in 1957. Upon her death in 2009, she requested to be buried in Beşalma.

Dimitri and Zinaida Karaçoban

Beşalma

This Monday, I went with some European volunteers to a village about 20 km outside of Comrat called Beşalma. We went because this village is home to Gagauzia's ethnographic museum and we wanted to check it out. I took some pictures because it seemed like a nice example of a Gagauz village to show everyone.

Disney movies...they are everywhere, including the gates in Beşalma.

To quote one of my students, "I never saw such interesting cars before I came to Moldova." These Soviet vehicles keep on truckin'.

The village's medical center.

There are crosses and shrines like this everywhere in Gagauzia.

Ah, agriculture.

A lot of villages and towns in Moldova depend on well water. This is one of the less picturesque wells.

A small store with a tile pattern that I found interesting.

I don't really get how these villages depend on well water but have fountains! But here's a nice fountain. They really loved building fountains in the USSR.

A super-cool fish.

A much more picturesque well.

This one is for my dad: Beşalma's city hall. The flag on the left is Gagauzia's, the flag on the right is Moldova's.

A statue outside the ethnographic museum.

Beşalma's church, which was built in the 1840s. Beşalma isn't a large village, but it still has a gorgeous church. I am always impressed by Gagauz churches. They have great paint jobs.

I love these cupolas, it's so cool to see them as you look at the country landscape.

The museum at Beşalma was really great. It is normally closed on Mondays, but they were awaiting a delegation (which never came) so they were open. The museum was founded by the work of one man who single-handedly decided to put construct a museum in this small town. We got a great tour from a very competent guide and learned a lot about the history of the region.

Now I am cursing myself for not taking pictures of the cool ethnographic displays, but rest assured that they were pretty sweet. It was really interesting to see things like a pair of shoes that were handed down from generation to generation because real leather shoes were so rare among the peasants. It was also interesting to see a traditional stove, which people used to cook, keep themselves warm, and sleep on. Another nice display for me as a former knitter was a large loom and several examples of homemade textiles. The amount of work that had to go into one dress was amazing.

We also learned about events in the 20th century here. Moldova was a battlefield between the Nazi-allied Romanians and the Soviet army. They had a display of German helmets and other accoutrements found in the fields here after the war and a pair of shoes that were worn by a concentration camp escapee who ended up in Beşalma. I didn't know that collectivization affected this region so much. More than half of the residents of Beşalma died in the artificial famine caused by a drought and the appropriation of food by the Soviet government. Then there was a display about the second half of the 20th century, which our guide said most people remember fondly because they felt economic security. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the entire agricultural system collapsed and still hasn't really recovered. During Soviet times people didn't have to leave the villages to go на заработке (na zarabotke) abroad in order to make money. There were also pictures and articles from the times when Gagauzia gained its autonomy (they declared independence, but it never really caught on).

I think it's a great thing that such a museum exists to preserve Gagauz history. It's definitely a treasure for this community and I was glad to have visited.

Thoughts from "In the Field"

When I hear the term "being in the field," my brain always jumps to images of Indiana Jones conversing with natives, dashing around temples, and kicking back shots in a bar.  As I sit typing on my computer in a comfortable house with a nice view of the rose garden outside, it's hard to conceive of myself of doing anything close to that. Nevertheless, things occasionally happen that remind me that I am actually "in the field."

I am lucky to be staying with a host family that loves to talk. I mostly just ask them questions and then sit back and watch the show. The other day I was talking to my host mom and she told me about her youth in a village near Bessarabka, which is also in the south of Moldova. The south of Moldova has been ethnically mixed at least since the late 18th century, when the Russian Empire invited Bulgarians, Germans, and Gagauz to settle here. My host mom described the families that lived on the street in her village and listing off their ethnicities:"Moldovan, Moldovan, Gagauz, Ukrainian, Gagauz, Gagauz..." She added that there were Jewish and Gypsy (sorry, no politically correct terminology here) families practically in every village as well. Her point was that in the Soviet period, you knew your neighbors' nationalities, but that didn't keep people from living together and getting along.

By the time the Soviet Union was falling apart, however, things began to change. Moldovan nationalists started chanting the slogan "Suitcase--Train Station--Russia!" in a not-so-subtle attempt to let Russians know that they weren't welcome in the country any more. Many Russians did indeed leave the country (including one of my current classmates at Harvard). Of the Jews who remained in Moldova--many Moldovan Jews died in the Holocaust--most packed their bags and left for Israel. The country as a whole became more homogeneous, although the south of Moldova remains ethnically mixed.

The very next day I was reading Nationalism Reframed by Rogers Brubaker, who challenges the way nationalism is traditionally understood through examples from Central and Eastern Europe. Brubaker suggests that we see "nationness" not as a stable phenomenon, but rather as an event, "something that suddenly crystallizes rather than gradually develops." People's sense of belonging to a national group fluctuates. It may be practically irrelevant for years, and then suddenly become the defining characteristic of a person. Almost without warning, public and private life are suddenly "nationalized."

Brubaker quotes at length the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic, who has an amazing gift for identifying and explaining facets of life in post-communist Europe. She writes,

"The trouble with this nationhood, however, is that whereas before, I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas my character--and, yes, my nationality too--now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because I am not a person any more. I am one of 4.5 million Croats... Something people cherished as a part of their cultural identity--an alternative to the all-embracing communism...--has become their political identity and turned into something like an ill-fitting shirt. You may feel that the sleeves are too short, the collar too tight. You might not like the colour, and the cloth might itch. But there is no escape; there is nothing else to wear. One doesn't have to succumb voluntarily to this ideology of the nation--one is sucked into it. So right now, in the new state of Croatia, no one is allowed not to be a Croat."

It is one thing to read Brubaker's and Drakulic's writings on nationalism, and another to see them in your everyday life "in the field." For a person like me who is interested in these phenomena, Gagauzia is a very exciting place to live.

Virtual Tour of Comrat, Part 2

The virtual tour of Comrat continues with playgrounds and memorials...

A cross I found near the cemetery. There are lots of crosses everywhere. I still haven't managed to catch a shot of one the roadside Jesus shrines.

A playground near the World War II monument. This is just a small part of it. It's a pretty cool playground.

Monument to fallen soldiers of World War II. Everyone who gets married has their picture taken by this monument. People from this part of the world take World War II pretty seriously. Like much of Moldova, the town was under Romanian fascist control during the war, so the street near this monument is called "The Street of Liberators."

Plaque on the monument with names of fallen soldiers. I'm not sure if the names are soldiers from Comrat or people who died defending the city.

Another plaque. People mostly lay artificial bouquets so they last longer.

No town or village in the former USSR is complete without a World War II monument. Almost every village you drive through has two major constructions: a huge sign with the name of the city, and a big monument to WWII. I'm trying to remember where Mesa's World War II monument is located. I know in one of the parks downtown there is a monument to the British soldiers who trained in Arizona during the war. There must be a formal World War II monument...somewhere. (I know there is definitely a monument to the pioneers in Pioneer Park.)

Waiting

When I find out I’m going to have to go to a government office in the former Soviet Union, I reflexively cringe. I’ve had enough experience with bureaucratic jerks that I know the experience is not going to be a pleasant one. Nevertheless, when I was offered the chance to interview the head of the Education Administration in Gagauzia for my research project, I knew I had to seize it.

My host father Grigory called an acquaintance of his in the Gagauz government and secured a meeting for me at 11:00 on a Monday. After a bit of confusion as to where the Education Administration was located, my host mother Zina dropped me off at city hall at 10:50, letting the secretary know that I had an appointment at 11:00. I took a seat in the antechamber near the secretary’s desk.

City Hall in Comrat

And the waiting began.

As the minutes ticked by on the clock, I got increasingly annoyed. At 11:10 I wasn’t too worried, but by 11:30 I realized that the head of the Education Administration wasn’t even in her office. When people came by to ask where she might be, the secretary just shrugged. She didn’t seem to be aware of my appointment. Another woman was waiting next to me. We spent an hour watching the secretary go about her job, which seemed to involve sorting papers in various file folders and telling the people who dropped by that her boss wasn’t in.

By 12:00, I was starting to get seriously irritated. I had an appointment for 11:00 had waited for an hour, and nobody seemed to think it was appropriate to let me know when the head of the Education Administration was going to be able to see me. I had nothing to do, so I kept going over the questions I had written and re-reading my notes from previous interviews in my notebook.

When I finally piped up with a question about when the head of the Education Administration might be back, the secretary realized from my accent that I was a foreigner. The secretary turned out to be a very pleasant person who was from the same hometown as one of my friends. We chatted for twenty minutes or so, with the woman next to me occasionally chiming in. I started to realize that my situation wasn’t so bad compared to hers. She had been waiting since 8:00 for the head of the Education Administration to see her and deal with her issue. Her problem seemed to be a simple personnel issue, something to do with getting the vacation time she deserved. I wondered why this issue couldn’t be dealt with at a lower level of the bureaucracy, but the woman seemed to have exhausted all her options and decided it was time to go to the top. She was from a village and she had come to town specifically to see the head of the Education Administration and get her issue resolved, even if she had to wait the whole day.

Talking with the secretary relieved some of my anxiety, since I stopped feeling like I was being personally snubbed. While we were talking, the head of Education Administration came in, evaluated the situation in the waiting room, announced that she wasn’t receiving anyone today, but said that she would see us anyways. She then disappeared behind a closed office door. After fifteen minutes, she invited in the woman next to me. After about a half an hour, I got invited in. 

After the annoyance of waiting for an hour and a half, my Russian wasn’t exactly in tip-top condition and I had some difficulty concisely explaining what I wanted. She asked why I had been sitting in the waiting room so “modestly” and I wasn’t sure how to respond. Was I supposed to bang down the door and come marching in? At any rate, she seemed eager to get rid of me, gave me some material to read, and told me to come back before 10:00 on Thursday if I had any questions. This lasted all of ten minutes.

I spent the next three days reading the material, which turned out to be extremely useful for my research. I arrived at 9:20 on Thursday armed with more precise questions, hoping that I might be seen earlier this time.

Two hours later, I made it into the office of the deputy head of education. I wished they had decided to foist me upon the deputy earlier, because the interview was worth the wait. This very efficient woman answered all my questions very precisely in the space of half an hour and even helped me arrange an interview that afternoon with the director of the vocational school in Comrat. (He ended up being extremely hospitable and we chatted for an hour about his vocational school while he plied me with tea and cookies!) When I left the deputy head’s office with my interview notes in hand, I passed by more people sitting in the waiting room.

I wasn’t sure whether to be outraged by the whole affair or to accept it all with an air of resignation. On the one hand, I understand that people who work in the government in Gagauzia are busy. But so are people who work in the government in the U.S., and I can’t imagine that I would be kept waiting for hours if I had an appointment with the superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, which, for the record, is responsible for the education of at least twice as many students. If they couldn’t see you in a reasonable time frame, they’d tell you to come back another time. At the end of the day, I consoled myself with the fact that I got the information I needed, even if it took over 3 hours of waiting.

Apparently my situation wasn’t at all unique. My Russian tutor said that you should expect to wait at least an hour in any government office, regardless of whether you have an appointment. My colleague from the university said she once waited an entire nine-to-five day in a government office just for one signature.

While I appreciate that different cultures have different conceptions of time, what I find the most appalling about this situation is the attitude that it reflects towards citizens. Their time is valuable. Your time is cheap. 

I’m not sure what could be done to fix this situation. It seems like a pipe dream to expect people to make a schedule and stick to it. Some of the problems (like the woman who waited hours to talk to someone about her vacation time) just seem like a pure failure to delegate. I don’t expect the government office culture of Moldova to change anytime soon, but it would be nice for secretaries to at least apologize to those people who have spent hours in the waiting room.

Dnepropetrovsk

After I left Odessa, I headed east to Dnepropetrovsk, where my friend and fellow ASU Russian alumnus Derek lives with his wife Katya. Dnepropetrovsk is a city in eastern Ukraine. If you know anything about eastern Ukraine, you probably know that there are a lot of Russian speakers and factories. Both of these are quite accurate descriptions of Dnepropetrovsk. During the Soviet period, Dnepropetrovsk was a closed city, which meant that due to the strategic and military importance of its industries, it was closed to foreigners. I got a very thorough tour from Derek and Katya, which I'll attempt to reproduce for you through my pictures.

Dnepropetrovsk was originally named Yekaterinoslav in honor of Catherine the Great. The Bolsheviks put the kibosh on imperial names and renamed the city in 1926 after one of the most prominent Bolshevik revolutionaries from Ukraine, Grigory Petrovsky. Despite being an old Bolshevik, Petrovsky managed to avoid being purged in the Terror, and the city still bears his name.

Derek and Katya running to catch the tram to the industrial district.

We took the tram past the main factory district, which for some reason felt like a ride on the monorail though a dystopian Disneyland. I believe this factory makes pipes. I find industrial wastelands endlessly fascinating. It's like the ruins of ancient Rome.

The factory's Hall of Fame, with pictures of the very best workers. I wonder if we could get one of these in Mesa. Dad, get on it.

Keeping with our Soviet theme, this decaying building was at one time something of a workers' palace. Now it's falling down and nobody has the money to just tear it down. I wonder what's inside...

Lest you think it is all gloom and doom in Dnepro, there is a very nice island in the Dnepr River that was once called Komsomolskiy Island (after the communist youth league) and now is named Monastirskiy after the newly-built monastery. There is a even a nice sandy beach. Derek and I took a break from our tour to enjoy a cup of cold kvas (a fermented, carbonated beverage that tastes like liquid bread) on draft. Swimming is prohibited...so of course the beach is packed.

Playing chess in the park.

Derek lives in a part of town that used to be an independent village but was absorbed into the city as Dnepropetrovsk grew. I found the patchwork nature of the city quite charming.

No city in the former Soviet Union is complete without an odd circus building.

Me and my friends Винни Пух и Пятачок (Russian Winnie the Pooh and Piglet). Thanks, Dnepropetrovsk, for a great visit!

Podcasts for Language Learning

I wrote about using podcasts to improve my Russian in a previous post, but I've been having so much fun with them that thought the subject warranted a blog post all its own.

According to Dr. Chaput, one of my Russian professors at Harvard, the best way to improve your speaking fluency is to listen to native speech that you can actually understand. This makes sense when you consider that this is how children learn to speak. In order to achieve this, Dr. Chaput recommended that we watch Poor Nastya (Бедная Настя), a Russian soap opera about the lifestyles of the rich and royal—future Tsar Alexander II, to be precise. Although the show has a historical theme, it’s not exactly the most historically accurate depiction of the Romanov family. Apparently the members of the Russian court were extremely tan. Hmm...

Anyways, I find that I don’t usually have much time to sit down and watch Russian soap operas, so listening to Russian podcasts works better for me. I’m already a big podcast fan (current favorite is NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour), so this fits nicely into my life. I can listen to them when I’m driving or walking, so they keep me pleasantly distracted without requiring a big time commitment. I found that by searching the iTunes podcast directory in Russian, I could find dozens of podcasts. There are tons of podcasts in other languages as well—all you have to do is click on "Podcasts" under LIBRARY on the column on the left of your iTunes window and then click on the Podcast Directory arrow on the lower right.

Right now, I’m regularly listening to the broadcasts of Эхо Москвы (Echo of Moscow), which the home of intelligent talk radio in Russia. They have guests from all over the political spectrum, including liberals, pro-Putinists, and Russian nationalists. (Strangely enough, they are owned by Gazprom. The plot thickens...) The best sources of their programming that I have found are Особое мнение (Personal Opinion) and their Улучшенный фид (The Best Feed), which are both available for free through iTunes.

I should add that I don’t get too stressed about understanding everything in the podcasts. If there’s something particularly interesting that I’ve missed, I’ll go back and listen to it, but otherwise my goal is to follow along without worrying that I caught every word.

I’m a big believer that language learning should be entertaining, so I’ve also found a few movie review podcasts for when I get tired of hearing about the travails of Pussy Riot (which is often). The Russian podcast world is still a bit limited, but there is a fair amount of material out there on iTunes and PodFM.ru.

My latest experiment is listening to a French podcast. Considering that I spent 7 years learning French, I was disappointed that it has atrophied so much. I never seem to have any reason to use French, but it seems like it could come in handy one day.

I found basically the perfect podcast for me, La musique fait l’histoire (Music Makes History). I just listened to my first episode, “Les années disco, les années homo.” As you can probably guess from the untranslated title, it was pretty entertaining! It was a bit weird to realize how much better my listening skills are in Russian now compared to French. No matter how long I study it, sometimes French just sounds like the grown-up voices on Peanuts to me. Happily, the second time I listened to the episode—while killing time in the cell phone lot at Sky Harbor airport—I was much more successful. Once you get used to hearing French again, it just starts to sound like weirdly pronounced English with some different words thrown in. 

What I like about listening to podcasts is that they entertain you enough so that you hardly realize you are learning. So, in addition to improving my French, I also got to hear about about the gay subtext of disco songs from the ‘70s. Spoiler alert: This includes every Village People song! Shocking! There was also the additional amusement of hearing a French professor pronounce the word “funky.”

So, for me podcasts are a free, low-effort form of language maintenance. While zipping around on Valley freeways, I have turned my mom’s hybrid Camry into a big, white, fuel-efficient, language-learning machine!

“Horizon,” the Theoretical Lyceum

Last week I went to a Turkish-English private school located in Ceadir-Lunga, not far from Comrat. I was asked to visit by Adem, one of the students from the Turkish student groups. He had been asking me to come for about a month, and it only just got organized last week.

I was fairly apprehensive when we were setting up a time to visit the school, because Adem started talking about me going there on “MondayS” and not just “Monday.” I was like, oh no, do they think I’m going to be teaching there every week?! I’m all about helping young Moldovans learn English, but I don’t really have time in my schedule to spend three and a half hours getting to and from Ceadir-Lunga and prepping for two lessons.

So I found Adem bright and early. Actually, it wasn’t bright at all--I don’t think I’ve seen the sun in four days here. Anyways, we took a taxi to Ceadir-Lunga and Adem started telling me all about the school. It seems pretty interesting: basically, it is a private boarding school founded by a rich Turkish lady. Instruction is in Russian and Romanian for the humanities and in English for the sciences. The students also learn Turkish. Many of the students are from Gagauzia, so Turkish is not that hard for them to learn, since they are both Turkic languages. Adem teaches Turkish to two students there on a weekly basis. Athough he attends university in Comrat, Adem actually commutes from Ceadir-Lunga everyday. I guess he likes living there better than living in Comrat.

My Turkish students are always complaining that Comrat is boring. I kind of see their point. After all, we don’t even have a movie theater. There isn’t much going on on weekends--just a few cafes are open. It’s a nice change for me to live here after going to school in Phoenix (after all, Phoenix is the fourth largest city in America, as I constantly tell everyone here), but I can see that coming from Turkey to here is pretty much a let-down for them.

Anyways, the students I met on the first day were somewhat awful in their general rambunctiousness and liberal use of profanity that they learn from rap and American movies. I’d like to mention first that I was NOT told that this was an all-boys school until I walked in to the classroom. “Hmm...there are no girls here. This must be an all-boys school. Thanks for the heads-up, Adem!” was my internal reaction.

It was quite the culture shock coming from the university, where all of my students are nice village girls. These boys were kind of insane...one kid was actually playing his PSP in class. Seriously, a PSP. I talked to Adem about it later (turns out he also is their dormitory monitor) and he told me that the students there have money because their parents work abroad. What they don’t have, unfortunately, is real parental figures. It’s the side of labor migration that we don’t really think about. All of these kids are at a boarding school with just the monitors and teachers for guidance. A lot of them haven’t seen their fathers or mothers in forever. Hence the brattiness. Unfortunately, Fulbright didn’t give me any training in classroom management.

This week, I visited again. This time I had class with two other groups as well. The first group was some fairly well-behaved eleventh graders. The second group was once again the crazy rambunctious kids. I actually had to call in their teacher because I wasn’t going to deal with the swearing and their complete unwillingness to listen. (I should say here that only 1/3 of the class is really bad. 1/3 is in the middle, and the other 1/3 yells at the other kids to shut up.) I guess their teacher got really mad because they sent me to another class for the final period. This, I guess, was supposed to be a chemistry class, but I got to take over.

The school apparently divides the twelfth grade into the good kids and the bad kids. These kids were like angels compared to the other class. First of all, two of the kids had been to America. They had qualified for this uber-prestigious State Department program administered by ACTR here. One was in Wisconsin and the other was in Hawaii. So their English was awesome. Actually, the other kids spoke pretty well, too. One kid was even making English language jokes. This kid was always running his mouth but he was entertaining. While another student was introducing himself, he was like, “He likes to box.” I asked the student in question if he actually liked boxing, and he said no. The kid then says, “I mean, he’s wearing boxers. No, actually, he sleeps in a box.” I was kind of floored by this, because I haven’t met many people here who could actually play around with English words, much less kids who are still in school.

After I left that class, the students from the bad class mobbed me in the hallway and were like, “Do you forgive us? If you forgive us, our teacher says we can have lessons with you the next time you come.” I am a softie. I forgave them. At any rate, if I can at least have one class with the nice kids it should be fine. I also have an ulterior motive--since I’m teaching for free, maybe I can convince the school to give me free Turkish lessons next semester. They already gave me a free mug. Maybe I will appeal to their sense of patriotism. Hmm, that shouldn’t be hard to do.

(The students from the rambunctious class have a YouTube video online, which they insisted that I watch, but as it is filled with heavily accented English profanity, I'm going to refrain from posting a link here. I can't be responsible for spreading this video around.)

This is How We Roll

This last Wednesday I went to the Gagauz village of Kazaklia to do some interviews with school principals for my research project. Kazaklia is a bit out of the way, so we had to hop on one of Moldova’s many minibuses to get there.

For those who have not traveled much in the developing world, minibuses are how people get around. The usual brand here in Moldova is a Mercedes Sprinter. Imagine a big school van that has be refitted to jam in as many people as possible and you have the right idea. In the former USSR these minibuses are called marshrutky. The word actually comes from the French marche route. Russians turned this French phrase into the noun marshrutka in order to indicate that these minibuses travel along a fixed route. 

Marshrutky on Abovyan Street in Yerevan, Armenia.

In urban areas, minibuses are used for intracity transportation. In Armenia I rode a minibus to university every day. I even wrote a pseudo-poem about it which I will dig up and post here at some point. In rural areas they travel between towns and villages. 

The main advantage of traveling by minibus is the price. The two-hour trip to Chisinau costs about $3. The smaller size of minibuses means that they run trips more frequently. Minibuses also stop anywhere along the route in order to pick up passengers, which is convenient for people in small villages along the route. Villagers just stand by the side of the rode and flag down a passing minibus.

Our trip to Kazaklia on a marshrutka was...a unique cultural experience. First of all it was incredibly hot during because they had no A/C. Secondly, the thing was stuffed. The drivers have an incentive to pick up as many people as possible in order to make money. Adam counted 33 people in a bus that should really hold about 20.

This is when the minibus was moving. 

Photo by Adam Julian.

Being in such close contact with people is always...interesting. Sometimes people are nice, sometimes they are grouchy, sometimes they are a bit smelly. Come to think of it, it’s not all that different from riding the bus in the U.S., except everyone is much closer to each other. This can get awkward fast. I once had a drunk guy fall asleep on me. Not cool. When we got on the bus there was this strange political argument going on between two extremely unhappy women. One cursed out the city of Tiraspol, the other leapt to its defense, and sure enough they started yelling about the war in Transnistria in the early ‘90s. Fun.

I think marshrutka drivers are probably the former Soviet Union’s biggest badasses. There’s really no way to describe them without swearing. This particular driver was pretty cool. He managed to pick up people in one of the towns we passed while simultaneously getting himself a cold cup of kvas (a traditional beverage) from a roadside stand. All without leaving his seat. Smooth. 

My view from the front seat.

Note the icon made out of CDs. Strangely ubiquitous.

After arriving in Kazaklia after our sweaty tour through the Moldovan countryside, we were pretty exhausted. Luckily on the way back we managed to hitchhike. In the former USSR, hitchhiking is one of the best ways to travel. You just stick out your hand and pick up a passing car. It’s customary to pitch in a few bucks. The driver gets money for gas, you get a nice, quick ride home. Mutually beneficial. The only problem is that, of course, hitchhiking alone is sketchy. But doing it in groups is just fine. This particular car had what my mom calls “4 by 40” air conditioning. 4 windows down, 40 miles per hour. After our uncomfortable ride to Kazaklia, it was positively refreshing.

For those who'd like to try this form of transportation for themselves, I wrote a post about important Russian phrases for to travelling by minibus on my short-lived Russian language blog.

The Post in Which Erin Praises Peace Corps Volunteers

The garden in front of my homestay in Comrat

Since living in Moldova, I’ve always felt that people don’t have enough respect for Peace Corps Volunteers. There is an idea floating out there that Peace Corps is something to polish one’s resume. While having “Returned Peace Corps Volunteer” on one’s business card is certainly nice, I think people who criticize Peace Corps Volunteers haven’t the faintest idea of what they deal with on a daily basis. It seems to me that short of going to jail or joining the military, it’s one of the more hardcore things that a person from the States can do.

Although I’m certainly not living on the small allowance of a Peace Corps Volunteer in Moldova, I can definitely appreciate all the adjustments that one has to make to live in a town in rural Moldova. 

First, there are adjustments that have to be made for basic personal hygiene. This is probably not a big shocker to anyone, but people in developing countries do not shower every day. There’s an old, bad joke about France: “In France, they go to the grocery store once a day and shower once a week. In America they go to the grocery store once a week and shower once a day.” This isn’t an entirely inaccurate description of living in a less-developed former Soviet region. (I heard a Russian say on TV today that she showers twice a day and I’m not sure if I believe her or not. I guess that’s the difference between having a per capita GDP of $16,000 per year in Russia instead of $3,000 like here!) 

If you’re living in an apartment by yourself, of course, you can shower whenever you want—well, as long as you have running water, which is not a given! But when you’re living with a host family (as the majority of Volunteers do) you have to accommodate them at least a little bit. Right now I’m getting used to showering once every three days. It’s actually not as gross as it seems because your body adjusts to small changes like that after a few weeks. The real difficulty is when you are living in a village (or a city with chronic water problems like Yerevan, Armenia) and you can only shower once a week. Luckily I’ve never had that problem, but I know lots of people who have.

There are also adjustments to diet and exercise that can be much more pleasant! The diet here can be pretty heavy: lots of potatoes, dairy products and fried food. There’s not much spice and there is dill on everything. (One of my classmates in Russia swore he saw dill fields in his sleep.) On the other hand, in the summer you get fresh fruits and vegetables that are chock full of vitamins. It’s easy to get all your food groups. Plus, the amount of processed food is limited and everyone makes their own food. Homemade preserves, fresh eggs, and fruits fresh from the garden are the norm. I literally never drank a full glass of tomato juice in my life until yesterday when I had some home-canned tomato juice. Wow! It was chunky and delicious. Today at dinner I had cherries that were picked earlier that afternoon. How many times can you say that in the States?

Another thing that takes getting used to is exercising in a different way. I was quite used to living without a car in Cambridge but now I live on a hill and I curse it every day! I’m walking probably an hour and a half a day now. Thank God for iPods! Unfortunately there isn’t much of a gym culture in the former Soviet Union, and the gyms that do exists are mostly a male domain. I’m not sure how they’d react to Stick-Arms here trying to beef up my triceps. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how to do my Pilates routine at home without a mat...

At any rate, living in Comrat isn’t very difficult compared to what Peace Corps Volunteers are dealing with in the villages. I may not be able to drink the water straight from the tap, but at least my water doesn’t have giardia like the next town over. Ugh. But I think most of the people who criticize Peace Corps Volunteers as hippies looking for a free ride have no idea what it’s like to lose control over basically your entire body! It’s not as drastic as joining the army, of course, but it does take some getting used to.