Another Week in Moldova

So my jar of peanut butter finally ran out, and I feel like my service in the Peace Corps has finally begun.  It’s been just over two weeks since I left for the Peace Corps, and two weeks ago, I was on a bus headed to JFK airport.

The Peace Corps has kept all the volunteers immensely busy.  I wake at 7 and don’t get home until 6 (perhaps this is standard for many of you, but for me it has been a bit of a drastic transition), and after that I have between 3 and 4 hours of studying and various training activities to get done.  At the same time I’m supposed to be integrating, becoming a part of my host family.  Which is all to say, I apologize that the second post has taken so long.  I am eager to share with you what little of Moldova I have seen.  So here are some pictures I took when I went for a run around Ialoveni, my Neighborhood.

A bull in the fields above town.

Here is a bull in the fields above town.  The whole country is fields.  Fields of corn, sunflowers, potatoes, cabbage, etc.  The best kinds of fields are the fields of flowers that are used for bouquets, because when you look at a hill of them, it looks like a surrealist landscape painting.  I have no photos of such fields, but hopefully I’ll get farther away from town where they are with my camera soon.

Here is a father and son walking down a road in the back of town.  I just looped through the fields and am headed back into town on my run.  Perhaps I chose this photo of all of them to show, because I expect to explain over the course of this blog the way that Moldovans are not all that different from Americans.  At least in their sense of values.  They are obviously in a more dire economic situation, and that has definite effects; and they obviously under soviet rule only 20 years ago…. so maybe they are a little different.  But I’ve already watched TV with my host mother, and downloaded an illegal copy of Madagascar off torrents with my Host-Cousin who is 8.  Here is a picture of him:

This is Kristy, who became completely addicted to video games on my computer, and who I fed the last of my peanut butter when I had to baby sit him last Sunday and “cook.”  He is holding a map of my Pre-Service Training Town that me and the Russian volunteers living in the same town made according to one of our daily assignment.  Kristy also went with me on some of my runs, though they often turned into us pretending we were driving cars with nitro buttons or piggy-back rides.

A random text.

So, here is a Random street — back on the run.  You can see a man walking, and he is likely texting on his cell phone.  Not many people have smart phones, but everyone has a cell phone.  If you don’t have a cell phone, you are either over 70 or there is something wrong with you — much like the United States.

This is a transformer.  I feel like this is important to share, perhaps because when you think of the Peace Corps, you think of mud huts.  I don’t live in a mud hut, but I do go to the bathroom in an outhouse regularly and beers do cost about 40 cents here.  A reasonable trade off, I figure.

I landed back on the main street, leading back into the town center.  You can see the local Eastern Orthodox Church.  Just up ahead is one of the many icons to Christ, “Jesus Statues.”

Yep.

lastly, I’ll show some pictures of where I live.  The two men working are my host-cousin, Ura, and a family friend.  The woman in green is my host mother.

Front Gate

Ura and family friend painting a part of the family Mac Truck

The front way.

The backyard where I bathe.

My host mother, Lilly.

And lastly, one more landscape picture of Ialoveni.

Ialoveni from a hill.

Oh, and one more picture of me on my run.

Ben on run.

Don’t let the fact that I’m upside down confuse you, it all seems right-side-up on the other side of the earth.

I miss everyone and everything there, but it’s going pretty swell over here, and the Peace Corps takes really good care of everyone.

All my love,  More to come,

Ben