Since my last post, I have been working on greeting people in my village. Moldovans traditionally greet everyone they pass on the street – including strangers – with either “bunӑ ziua” (hello/good day), “bunӑ dimineața” (good morning) or “bunӑ seara” (good evening). However, there are certain rules to this practice. For one thing, as far as I’ve observed, the greeting is rarely said loudly or with a smile; it’s usually mumbled. Also, women aren’t supposed to make eye contact with men because eye contact is seen as an invitation. After two weeks, I think I’m starting to get the hang of this greeting people thing.

I’ve also been learning how to walk in the mud, which is an important skill when you live on a dirt road – and it rains for a week straight. I must not be good at walking in the mud because somehow my host sisters’ shoes never get as dirty as mine, even when I follow their footsteps exactly. But I bought some galoshes the other day, so now I can squish my way to school in as much of an unladylike way as I please. I still have to clean the galoshes when I get to school, though, because the custodians who work at the school where we have our training sessions won’t let us in the building if our shoes are dirty.

Like many families in Moldova, my host family has a large garden, and I have been eating a ton of fresh fruits and vegetables. My family grows potatoes, carrots, onions, garlic, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, beans, corn, cabbage, pumpkins, beets, radishes, cherries, apricots, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, melons, apples, pears, plums, grapes, and nuts. Their homemade jam is amazing!

My host family is wonderful. They called me Emilia for a while, but now they just call me Emie, and I love it. The other day, I coughed while I was working out, and both my host mom and host sister came up to me and expressed their concern that I was getting a cold.

In other news, the phrase “til the cows come home” actually means something to me now.

And so it really begins...

Staging and the first few days in Chișinau were a whirlwind, and the only thing I have to say on this subject is that, when our staging directors said that we need to get rid of all of our expectations about Moldova, they were right. My mantra before I left was, “I’ll be okay. I’m not going to the jungle.” Well, we arrived in Moldova in the middle of a heat wave – at least, I hope it was a heat wave; the temperature’s gone down a lot, and I hope it won’t spike again – and, on my first day with my host family, I got a bug bite on my ankle that caused my entire foot to swell up like a balloon. Don’t worry, my foot is back to its normal size now, and part of me is glad I got that bug bite because my swollen foot was a nice ice breaker with my fellow Trainees.

My host family consists of a couple, Eudochia and Pavel, and their three daughters, Caterina (who is married and pregnant), Eleonora (22), and Dumitrița (16). They are very warm and generous and take excellent care of me. Eleonora speaks English, but the past week has still been full of miming and looking things up in the dictionary. The other night, my host mom raised her glass to me and said, “rest in peace.” We all laughed super hard when I clarified how to use that phrase. Yesterday, I accidentally said “I’m sorry” instead of “nice to meet you.”

Training is intense. We have language classes every weekday from 8:30 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. and technical training from 2:00-5:00 P.M. We also have class every Saturday morning. Once a week, we go to our hub site, a larger town called Ialoveni, for more general training with the other Trainees. On Friday, all the Trainees met a park for team building exercises. We also have homework almost every day for our language and tech classes, and we have a community integration workbook that we have to turn in every two weeks. Right now, the thought of everything that I have to learn in the next ten weeks is overwhelming, but I keep telling myself that when Training is over, I will be so much more prepared to teach English and live on my own in Moldova.

I’ll end this post with a couple of lists.

Things that I am learning how to do:
-Watch American movies dubbed in Russian with Romanian subtitles
-Eat sunflower seeds. Moldovans love them – I have eaten more sunflower seeds in the past week than I have in my entire life
-Eat cherries straight off the tree. You have to check them for worms. (This one also falls under my next list.)

Things that I am still getting used to:
-Using an outhouse
-Eating different food. Most of it is tasty, though.
-Living with farm animals (mostly the rooster). My family has cows, pigs, ducks, chickens, and rabbits. The evening routine involves bringing the cows home and collecting the ducklings.

Things that make everything worth it:
-Laughter
-Nonverbal communication
-Kindness
-Tea and sweets
-The rare occasion in which I understand a whole sentence in Romanian.

Oh, and I went to the discotecӑ Saturday night.

And so it begins.

I've joined the Peace Corps.

For the next two years, I will be teaching English to eleven- to eighteen-year-olds in Moldova. (Moldova is in Eastern Europe, next to Ukraine. I didn't know where it was until about six months ago.) I will teach one class on my own and team teach several other classes with a Moldovan English teacher. I will also conduct English teaching workshops and engage in or initiate secondary projects such as after school clubs and summer camps. All the while, I will be immersed in Moldovan culture and working to accomplish the Peace Corps' goal of fostering international understanding and cooperation.

Tomorrow, I depart for Philadelphia for Staging, where I will meet my fellow Volunteers (there are about seventy of us) and attend a "brief, yet intense" orientation. From there, we will take a bus to New York and fly out of JFK. We will spend our first few days in Moldova in a hotel in the capital, Chisinau. For the rest of out ten-week Pre-Service Training, we will live with Moldovan host families. Training will consist of intensive language classes (I will be studying either Romanian or Russian), technical training, cross-cultural training, and lessons about health and safety. As an English Education Volunteer, I will also do a three-week practicum with Moldovan students.

My bags are packed -- I finished packing with over forty-eight hours to spare! (At this time, I advise that you take a second to consider whether reading this blog is how you wish to spend your last moments before the apocalypse.) I was hoping that, at this point, I would have something profound to say about my expectations, goals, or feelings, but I don't. The truth is that I have no idea what will happen when I step off that plane in Chisinau on Thursday. Yes, I have an itinerary; I know when I will sleep, when I will eat, and when I will have class, but everything else remains a mystery. Not a bad mystery, but one that makes me think of a phrase echoed throughout my childhood on the days when my family would pile in the car and embark on magnificent journeys to wondrous destinations: Civil War battlefields, the Grand Canyon, Home Depot. As we backed out of the driveway, Dad would make his familiar proclamation. Once those magical seven words left his lips, anything was possible. So as I set off on an experience that I'm told will be full of joy, frustration, learning, and embarrassing stories in miscommunication, there is only one thing I know for certain, one phrase which both excites and steadies me:

These are the days of high adventure.