Lindsay in Moldova

I forget which of you sent me sidewalk chalk, but my kids went ape over it.

As classes wind down and the temperature climbs up, student spend more of their time outside. My seventh grade threw a fit when I told them we couldn’t have class outside this week, although they calmed down when I had them do role plays about offering each other drugs (More on that later.)

So yesterday, instead of having our weekly club meeting, I brought three frisbees and a box of chalk to school. We threw frisbees for an hour, attracting more and more students till we had at least one from almost every grade. Then, I busted out the chalk, and the kids looked at me with their “What is this American magic you bring us?” faces.

They adapted pretty quickly, though. Almost immediately, they started writing “Gabriela <3 Ion,” each others’ phone numbers and more obscene sayings, like any American kid would. I made them scratch those out, which is when they discovered they could rub their hands in the chalk and then smear it all over their faces. They loved it.

After a while, I gathered the chalk and went home, leaving the kids at the school well to wash off before they went home.

This morning, little Maria came up to me and said she and the other kids had washed all the chalk off the building. I was shocked. That must have been a lot of work, and I’d told them the rain would wash it away.

Later, the director of the school passed me in the courtyard and pointed to the wall where chalk had been. He smilingly and politely repeated the kids washed the wall this morning. He said it had been a shock to the teachers this morning to find a wall covered in squggles and hearts, but he understood our club was not doing anything wrong. It was the nicest he had ever been to me. I figured I must be in big trouble.

So it looks like we won’t be using the chalk anymore, which is OK because the kids pocketed most of it. Plus, as little Vitale said, “I didn’t care that we had to clean the walls. It meant we got to skip first period.”

In her series “Huh?” Lindsay answers reader-submitted questions about life as a volunteer, her decision to join Peace Corps, etc. Submit your questions in the comment section, via email at LindsayMToler@gmail.com or on Facebook at facebook.com/peacecorpslindsay.

I found (your story about Moldovan Easter) even more powerful when I realized that Moldova was part of the USSR and I’m wondering how religion was affected during that time period. – Kristin Millis, on Intersect.com

Moldova is a deeply religious country, and by religious, I mean Eastern Orthodox. According a Gallup poll, 96 percent of Moldovans claim to be Orthodox, either with the Moldovan (Russian) church or the Bessarabian (Romanian) church. The only other easily-accessible, non-Orthodox religions I’ve seen are evangelical Christian denominations, especially Jehovah’s Witnesses, Baptists and Mormons.

When I ask Moldovans how they maintained their religion during their stint under the USSR, they give the Moldovan shrug that means, “What do you mean? We just did it.” Valentina, my host mother, says our village banded together to prevent the Soviets from destroying our church, an Orthodox chapel built in the early 1900s by Alexey Shchusev, who designed Lenin’s mausoleum and the Moscow terminus of the Trans-Siberian Railway. “We were strong and united enough to keep them away,” she said.

However, one villager-turned-Stalinist-lackey managed to destroy the wooden church across the river from our house by running over it with a tractor. Afterwards, he became very sick, and his daughter was born unable to use her legs, which our village attributes to God’s anger.

Today, Moldova’s Communist party has a long-standing relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church. When they were in power, they reputedly gave the highest-ranking cleric a diplomatic passport, according to the State Department. 

Religious education is a huge part of school here, and my students take a weekly psychology class that is more about Jesus than Freud. I sat in on one of the lessons, which was about the soul. Some of my favorite quote from the teacher included:

• “The soul is the beginning of life. We pray through our soul, which is where God lives.”
• “In a life without God, there is more death than life.”
•  “When we die, our soul goes to the next step.”

Last fall, the school librarian Natalia asked if we could go to church instead of having our usual weekly meeting. Turns out, a traveling group of missionaries brought the bones of a saint to our church, and teachers had canceled class so students could come and see. Our priest taught the kids how to climb under a table to receive the saint’s blessings and then anointed them in holy water. Teachers brought towels to catch the holy water for sick family members. I remember thinking how outraged American parents would be if teachers cancelled class for a religious ceremony.

Moldova does not have a mosque, but the first Islamic group was recently registered with the Moldovan government, allowing them to buy property, open bank accounts and hire employees. Islam’s registration with the government caused some controversy.

Religion is a huge part of life here, and non-religious or non-Christian volunteers often have a hard time explaining their beliefs to their host families. But the churches and monasteries — and especially the sung litanies — are absolutely beautiful.

Day of the Dead meets American Thanksgiving – this is the best way I can describe Moldovan Memorial Easter.

Moldovans celebrate Easter much like we do in America: colored eggs, church services, big family meals. But the Sunday after, villagers pack a feast of breads, sweets and wine and head to the graveyard for Memorial Easter, a day to honor their dead.

Valentina, my host mother, took me to her family’s plot where both her parents are buried. She introduced me to them, fed me and then sent me and Catalina to find the priest. If you give the priest a few bucks, he will read your family’s names from a list, calling on God to bless them and keep them safe. For Easter, the priest punctuated each list of names with a hearty, “Hristos a inviat! (Christ has risen!)”

That’s how we greet each other now. Instead of saying, “Hello,” or “Good day,” Moldovans now tell me, “Christ has risen.” In response, I say, “Verily, he has risen.” We’ll revert back to hello’s after a month.

Moldovan graveyards are much more colorful than those in the States, usually marking graves with a bright blue cross, which is painted by family members every year before Memorial Easter. The Eastern Orthodox cross has an extra horizontal bar under the main one to represent Jesus’ footrest. (Those condemned to the cross usually died of suffocation. When the Romans wanted to prolong someone’s death, they gave them a footrest so the person could push themselves up to breathe. If the person survived too long, the Romans would break their legs.) The footrest is tilted down to the left, representing the man crucified next to Jesus who went to hell, and is tilted up on the right, representing the man crucified next to Jesus who repented.

Memorial Easter landed on the same day I found out Osama bin Laden was killed, so it seemed an appropriate day to spend in a cemetery considering the effects death has on us. I remember thinking how happy everyone was, even parents who were laying feasts the graves of their dead children. Smiling, they invited me to share a shot of wine with them, reminding me to pour the last bit on the grave in honor of the dead. I think mourning a loss must be easier when you have an entire village to stand with you, offering what little food and support they can spare.

I measure summer’s progress by the appearance of new vegetables at dinner. First, there were tomatoes – tiny, mushy, brownish-red. Then watery-tasting cucumbers. Now, the tomatoes and cucumbers (or roșii and castraveții, as we say here) are fresh and delicious, straight from the weekly market down the street.

And yesterday, we added a new veggie: radishes. They have a clean, cold taste with a spicy finish that makes me miss Oxacan food and ranch dip. It’s nice to eat something that doesn’t come from a cow/pig for once.

Catalina, my 13-year-old host sister, and I had a conversation about our new culinary option last night at dinner:

Catalina: These are radishes (radiki). Do you like them?

Me: Yes, of course. I love radishes.

C: Oh, do you have them in the U.S.?

M: Yes.

(Catalina’s face: I don’t believe you. I think you only eat burgers and french fries.)

C: Oh. Good. We have a story about radishes in Moldova.

M: Oh, tell me!

C: One day, an old man is walking in the forest, and he sees a radish. He tries and tries to pull it up, but he can’t get it. So he calls his wife. She pulls and pulls, but she can’t get it. So she calls her granddaughter, who pulls and pulls and can’t get it up. The granddaughter calls her dog, who pulls and pulls and can’t get it up. The dog calls the cat, and when none of them can pull the radish out of the ground, they call some mice. Finally, when they call pull together – the mice, the cat, the dog, the girl, the lady and the man – they pull the radish out of the ground and eat it.

M: Cool! I like that story. Does it mean that we can only accomplish things if we work as a team?

(Long pause)

C: No, Lindsay. It’s a story. It’s just about a radish.

(Catalina’s face: Duh.)

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom, grandmothers, host mother and all the amazing women in my life who are mothers. In honor of them, here’s a little story…

Peace Corps gives volunteers money for 4 hours of language tutoring each week. Early in the school year, I sat down with Ecaterina, the Romanian teacher, and showed her a picture of my family – a snapshot of my mom, dad, sister, brothers and boyfriend taken during my cousin’s wedding.

Ecaterina asked me a few questions to test my language: What are my brothers like? Where does my sister go to school? Why is my boyfriend’s hair so long?

Then she asked, “Who is the person you love the most in the world?”

“Prietenul meu,” I answered. My boyfriend. I smiled, confident this was the right answer.

Ecaterina shook her head, clearly very disappointed. “No,” she said. Then she gave me one of my first solid bits of Moldovan wisdom.

“The correct answer is always mama.”

So here is to my mamica, the person I love the most. Te iubesc, mama mea!

I live in a country where peer-to-peer education is virtually nonexistant, where a day in the classroom means copying and memorizing long lines of text, and where students abandon extracurricular clubs because their parents need them plowing or gathering or sewing or planting so they’ll have something to put on the kitchen table.

And here, in this country, I have watched 11 high-school girls dedicate their afternoons and weekends to teach other students about human trafficking using engaging, interactive methods. This week, they will give 10 seminars to students between 5th and 12th grades, and then we’re taking our act on the road, presenting in the professional school, nearby villages and the county capital.

It all started when the international NGO Medecines du Monde offered to hold a seminar for my 9th and 10th graders. Villages in my county are particularly vulnerable to human trafficking (no one knows why), and I’ve heard about a few girls in my tiny village who’ve been victims. The NGO has been presenting county-wide to protect students, but by the end of our seminar, the director came to me with wide eyes. We can always tell groups who’ve had Peace Corps volunteers as teachers, she told me. They aren’t afraid to be active and engaged. When can we come back?

A few weeks later, I spread the word that the NGO would train students to travel the county teaching about human trafficking. I hoped for 5. I got 11.

When these girls present, they are confident, beaming, laughing, intrested. They ask thoughtful, probing questions and thank students for their responses. They explain complicated concepts with ease. But at the end of each seminar when I ask the girls how they think they did, I can see the nervousness bubble back into their faces. They sigh with relief when I tell them how incredible they were, but they push for suggestions. They’ve decided to meet Thursday so we can discuss what we learned and improve each team’s presentation.

I’m so proud of my girls. They are finding their voices and proving they deserve to be heard. They are preventing a crime so rampant that the U.S. is threatening to pull all aid funding from the country. They are kicking ass.

After training the girls to hold their own seminars, I wrote each of them a little thank you note. Kids here don’t usually get notes, let alone from teachers, but I wanted to tell them how much they meant to me. This is what I wrote:

“Dear ___,

Thank you for coming to the Medecines du Monde seminar. I am excited to work with you. I believe in you, and I think we will have a lot of success together. See you Thursday, Lindsay.”

Yes, it’s corny, but by the end of the day I had a line of girls outside my classroom waiting for their very own (very first?) note. And besides, they deserve to know, to see it in writing:

I really do believe in them.

I think an old man tried to attack me with a saw today.

Decked head-to-toe in camouflage, he was hanging out by the painted cross downhill from my house. I’d seen him a few times before — old, hunched over, just staring me as I walked by. I decided to ignore him. Bad idea.

I heard a faint “Buna ziua! (Good day!)” over my music and turned to look at him. I said hello back, and all of a sudden, he started screaming at me. He raised his saw in the air, shaking it at me and screaming as though I’d insulted his mother. He started towards me, so I ran past the bend until I was sure he’d stopped.

When I got home, I told my family about it. They think it’s this retired police officer who started going off his rocker and into the bottle as he got older. Right before he came at me with a saw, he returned the flag he’d stolen from the mayor’s office yesterday.

Now, to be honest, I’m not totally sure what really happened. This is the hard part of cultural integration: I sometimes miss out on interactional clues that Moldovans find obvious. I couldn’t understand a word of what he was saying, so there is a good chance he was just trying to tell me something in a very loud, gesticulative manner. If it is the man my family is thinking of, he has a very brash manner.

All I know is, my host dad said he’d handle it. And when Ion puffs up like a protective bear and says, “I’ll talk to him,” I can trust that I won’t have a problem with this guy again.

The snow is finally melted, and the forest that envelops my little village is sprouting the tiny purple and white flowers that mean spring has sprung.

My students spend their breaks picking every bud they can find and bringing them to me in big bunches. Dorina, my teaching partner, cut a mini-vase from our water bottle, and I put the rest in the colored duct tape rolls my grandmother sent me.

Happy spring!

Google is all decked out for Marțișor this year! 

They used a red-and-white tassle to spell out Google, and when you scroll over it, a little box with “La mulți ani de marțișor!” pops up.

For more on Marțișor, click here.

Long, long ago, the sun would descend into villages as a brave young man so he could dance at weddings and holidays. But one day, an evil dragon ambushed and capured him. The whole world grieved: birds forgot their songs and the laughter of children turned into deep sorrow. No one dared fight the terrible dragon.

One day, a brave man stepped forward to set the sun free from the dragon’s prison. Everyone gave him their strength to help with his difficult task. He walked through summer, then through autumn, then through the frosty winter until he found the castle of the terrible dragon. A dreadful fight for his life began. The man and the dragon fought mercilessly, shedding blood in the crystal snow.

Both the dragon and the man were very strong. At last, the brave man killed the dragon and broke the walls of the prison, setting the sun free. As the sun sprang into the sky, nature began to revive. Flowers bloomed, birds sang — but the brave man did not live to see the sring. His warm blood dropped on the thawing snow and growing flowers. The last drop of blood fell from the young man’s arm on the first of March.

Since then, in his memory, girls knit two tassels – one red and one white – as a sign that spring is beginning and give them to the boys they like. The tassles are called Marțișor (MAR-tsee-shor), which is the diminutive form of Martie, the first month of spring. Red stands for love of everything that is beautiful and for the brave man’s blood. The white symbolizes happiness, health and purity, like the fagile snowdrop on the first flower of spring.

On March 1, Moldovans give each other Marțișor, and we will wear them for the rest of the week. At the end of March, we put them on a tree, bringing a good year and bountiful crops.

I found three beautiful Marțișor on the main street of Chișinău, Moldova’s capital city, and bought them for me, my father (whom I will meet in Istanbul this week for spring break) and my mother.

Happy Marțișor!

Update – Cătălina got me my own Marțișor!

A Marțișor from Cătălina!