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.