Living in Another Language

After a short delay because the library computer ate my flash drive, I have my blog back up and running with my first entry from Moldova in 2 years!


One thing that’s always strange to adjust to is living in another language. For a person who appreciates a well-chosen word, it’s initially a bit depressing to go back to struggling to express basic concepts. Today [5/29/12] my vocabulary was quite overmatched by the prospect of describing some ancient artifacts in the National Museum of History. I then got myself in quite the word tangle when I tried to explain that unlike Boston, Chisinau’s mains streets are on the grid system. Of course, five minutes after the conversation occurred I remembered a key adjective (“квадратный! of course!”) that would probably have done the trick.

The other thing that’s hard to shake is the sneaking suspicion that you’re offending everybody. My friend Andrew once told me the story of a student in Japan who attempted to explain to his host family that the air conditioner in his room was broken. Unfortunately, the passive voice in Japanese suggests that the person you are speaking to performed the action, so the host family thought the student was accusing them of maliciously coming into his room and breaking his air conditioner. Stricken by his unwarranted accusation, they apparently ignored him for a week. (This anecdote made me really appreciate the fact that people in the former Soviet Union generally keep it real to a fault.)

While I’ve never experienced anything that bad as far as linguistic mistakes go, I do have a tendency to replay conversations in my head after the fact, asking myself, “Did the use of the perfective imperative make me sound like a jerk?” When in doubt, I try to do something nice on a separate occasion in order to make up for my inadvertent rudeness. This probably makes me seem like I have a split personality, but at least it eases my conscience.

When I’m not worried about coming off like a jerk, I’m irritated by my inability to defend myself when other people are acting like jerks. Russia is the world capital of People in the Service Industry Who Hate You for No Good Reason. In these situations I am  usually so astonished at being yelled at by a total stranger that I am struck dumb with embarrassment and horror. Luckily this behavior is more rare in Moldova than in Russia, but I still haven’t overcome my inability to react in these situations. I find it somewhat comforting to remember the advice of my professor Danko Sipka, who once told us that when a Balkan waiter is rude to you for no reason, console yourself with this fact: Of all the people in world, he hates himself the most, then his boss, and only then you, the customer. You’re only third on his list of people that he hates!

On the other hand, I seem to have no problem reacting verbally when being yelled at by jerks that I actually know, but then I usually end up spitting out words that don’t quite form coherent sentences. I’m not sure if I would be any better off if I were able to craft withering put-downs for such people, but it would probably be more gratifying than the impotent rage that I currently experience.

All in all, the frustration of being unable to express oneself is certainly not too high of a price to pay for having the chance to practice speaking a foreign language. At the very least it keeps you humble and appreciative when you are dealing with non-native speakers of English. I’m continually impressed by many of the foreign students I’ve met at Harvard, not to mention the people I worked with in Kosovo. At the end of the day, you’re never going to be a native speaker, so you just have to give yourself a pat on the back for the successful interactions and vent about the negative ones to your friends.

Back in the USSR

Adventures in Bessarabia is back! As I'm going to be doing research in Moldova this summer, I thought it would be a good idea to restart the blog. My research is about educational achievement and integration among the Gagauz minority community in Moldova, and I'll be returning to Gagauzia to conduct research. I'm looking forward to living in Comrat again and I already have a few trips to Ukraine on the agenda as well.

I'll be back soon with a real update, but in the meantime, I want to note that I am gratified to discover that I had 72 pageviews in the last month despite not updating for the past 2 years. I am somewhat disturbed, however, that one of my most recently viewed pages is my entry on killing a centipede. Maybe not my best work, but I'll take what I can get.

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.

The 10-Day No Water Challenge

The water stockpile

Apparently (and I say "apparently" because I only hear about this stuff through word-of-mouth), from May 10 to May 20 residents of Comrat will not have any water. Every year they clean out the pipes through a chlorination process. So far the water has been mostly shut off, but some people have reported having extremely green chlorinated water flowing through their pipes off and on.

What really knocks me out is the fact that there's no official way of notifying people about this. There's no signs, notices, whatever. I don't read Comrat newspapers because they tend to be pretty boring official government stuff written in a quite Soviet style ("Respected Students, we congratulate you on the first day of the new academic year!"), so I can't say if they put something in the paper. Actually, I don't watch much of the local news either, so perhaps it's my own fault I don't know anything. Still, in the U.S. they'd at least leave a flier for you or something.

It reminds me of a sociology class I took in the Global Studies department, where our professor explained that in traditional societies, all interactions function to strengthen community ties. In a way it's sort of logical. If the only way to get information is through your relationships, you will probably cultivate better relationships.

(As if to prove this point, as I was writing this, Jen, one of the Peace Corps Volunteers here, messaged me on Facebook to tell me that there will allegedly be water tomorrow. This is exciting news.)

Thankfully, I heard about the water situation beforehand from the Turkish girls and was able to stockpile water and do three loads of laundry before it got cut off. There are certain interesting challenges of living without running water. I saved about 50 liters of water, but it's really not enough. Without water, you can't flush the toilet, do dishes, take a shower, wash your clothes, brush your teeth, etc. You can do some of these things with bottled water, but some of them take up a surprising amount of water. I swear it takes a liter to wash one small pot! And don't even get me started on how much water it takes to flush a toilet. I may have to buy myself a bucket and use well water.

I'm already disgruntled and it's only Day 3. I may have to escape to Chisinau this weekend in order to bathe.

Making Water

Practically the first thing travelers seem to become aware of in any country is the water quality. Everyone knows, for example, that you shouldn’t drink the water straight from the tap in Mexico unless you are jonesing for a case of Montezuma’s Revenge.

Arizonans who travel abroad sometimes tend to generalize this to all foreign countries. My mother once had a student ask her if it was ok to drink the water in France. My mother, bemused, assured the student that the EU had higher water quality standards than the U.S.

What is interesting to me is how much water quality varies among developing countries. Water purity seems to depend more on accidents of nature than infrastructure development. In Armenia, where the water comes from sources high in the mountains, everyone drinks tap water. The water in Armenia tastes better than Tempe tap water, and I don’t think I ever got sick from it. My friend Derek says it is the same situation in Kyrgyzstan, which is also a mountainous country.

Meanwhile, Russia, which has a per capita GDP about three times that of Armenia and twelve times that of Kyrgyzstan, has famously toxic tap water. Even in St. Petersburg you can get girardia (a wicked parasite that will have you running for the bathroom for several months) from drinking the tap water without boiling it. The Russian woman I lived with seemed to think there was something inherently wrong with drinking water from the tap, no matter how hard I tried to explain that in lots of other countries you won’t get sick from the tap water. (Of course, her solution was boiling water and putting it in a little jar with a silver spoon in it. Never quite figured that one out, but it seemed pretty gross to me, considering all the strange sediment that collected on the bottom of the jar.)

I think that one can entirely explain the Russian obsession with tea with their poor water quality. People there seem to think it is actually unhealthy and even weird to drink plain, clean water. (I know!!!) Meanwhile, tea is the elixir of life. Go figure.

The situation in Moldova seems better than Russia, but not by much. Locals and foreigners alike avoid drinking the tap water, opting for filtered water or store-bought water instead. Today I finally bought myself a water filter so I could stop lugging 5 liter jugs of water to and from the store every week.

Once you have a water filter, you must do the activity that Stephanie, my fellow Fulbrighter, calls “making water.” First, you have to boil the water to kill all the critters. Then, you have to wait for the water to cool and the pour it in the filter. Ta-da! Potable water.

I consider myself lucky to live in Comrat, actually. In Ciadir-Lunga, the next town over, water apparently comes out of the tap yellow. People have to go to special taps in the city center to get free water that you can actually drink. Yikes.

Against the Arizona Immigration Bill

Dear Governor Brewer,

Hello, my name is Erin Hutchinson and I just wanted to write you to express my concern over the recent immigration bill. I am currently serving as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Moldova, but the news from my home state of Arizona has been worrying me lately.

I had the opportunity to study in Russia in the summer of 2008. Overall, I enjoyed my visit very much, but one thing that disturbed me was the right that Russian police officers have to ask anyone for their documentation. It creates an atmosphere of fear. I personally avoided even looking at police so that they wouldn't bother me--even though all my documents were in order. The ability of Russian police officers to ask anyone for their documentation on the slightest pretext is frequently used to harass dark-skinned people from Central Asia and the Caucasus. When I was living in Russia, I was proud that such things "couldn't happen in America."

I hope I won't be proved wrong. Please don't sign the immigration bill!

Best wishes,

Erin Hutchinson

Graduate of Arizona public schools, 2004

Graduate of Arizona State University, 2009

(For more information on this bill, read this editorial from the New York Times.

To read about how John McCain has completely reversed his stance on the issue, read this blog post.

For a Catholic perspective, you can read the Cardinal of Los Angeles' blog post against the immigration bill.)

Buyer Beware

At today’s department meeting, war was declared on grade inflation.

Why?

One of the schools in Comrat hired a graduate of Comrat State University to teach English. Apparently, she’s not very good at it. Since then, officials from this school have been blackening the name of the university, saying that they won’t hire any more CSU graduates based on the performance this teacher.

So, people at the department are reasonably upset and trying to do something to stop this. They seem to think that grades are getting out of whack and so subpar students are graduating. What this means in practice is that nobody should give out perfect scores on tests anymore.

The problem?

Apparently the school that hired the CSU graduate in question never actually looked at her grades. If they had, they would have seen that they weren’t so good. They never thought to ask for references from the graduate’s professors. If they had, they would have heard that she wasn’t exactly a stellar student.

Now, I don’t want to say that the university shouldn’t put more effort into quality control. Of course we should be trying to improve the level of English instruction. That is obviously a worthy goal, and there’s certainly plenty of room for improvement in the English department (yours truly included).

But if you are going hire someone to work for you, you should do some due diligence and actually see if this person is WORTH HIRING. You can’t expect that every person holding a university degree is going to be a good teacher. If you’re not willing to go out there and do a little research on the person you’re going to be putting in front of a bunch of captive students, then it’s your own fault when the person you hired turns out to be less than what you expected.

Any time you’re going to be paying somebody money, whether it’s a teacher’s salary or a used car or a new computer, it’s best to remember what the Romans figured out 2,000 years ago: Caveat emptor.