All posts by djarmul

I am a Peace Corps volunteer in Moldova, in Eastern Europe, serving in the small city of Ialoveni with my wife, Champa. We are from Durham, N.C., where I was the head of news and communications for Duke University. You can follow our adventures on my blog, notexactlyretired.com.

Preparing to Return

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If you spent more than two years living outside the United States, what would make you anxious about returning home?

  • Finding housing, a car, where to live
  • Seeing/hearing Trump everywhere
  • Big grocery stores
  • American work culture
  • A different me reintegrating into a hometown that hasn’t changed

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These were among the responses posted on flipcharts by members of our Peace Corps Moldova volunteer group this past week when we gathered at our “close of service” conference. We discussed everything from writing site reports to preparing ourselves to leave our Moldovan friends and each other.

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Volunteers also wrote what they anticipate most about going home:

  • Driving on the backroads
  • My dog
  • Being with my family
  • Access to Taco Bell at 2 a.m. 
  • Freedom

And what they’ll miss most about Moldova:

  • My host family
  • Sunflowers
  • House wine
  • Fresh fruit & veggies
  • Waking up to fresh snow

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Our three days at a rural conference center outside the capital were emotional. Together we have shared a life-changing experience. Now we will head our separate ways — to graduate school, new jobs, our families. The conference helped us make sense of what we have experienced and what lies ahead.

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“As soon as I’m no longer a PCV,” one question asked, “I can’t wait to”:

  • Date 
  • Take a bath
  • Hold new nieces and nephews
  • Not check in/out
  • Go backpacking with my brothers

And the members of Moldova 31 also said what makes them most proud of their service as Peace Corps Volunteers:

  • Our students’ improvement
  • Community impact
  • Surviving rutiera (minibus) rides on hot summer days
  • Language learning
  • Seeing the youth gain a more positive impact on their futures
  • Finishing

Two months remain until the departures begin. Champa and I are in the first group, which leaves on July 3. We still have so much to do until then. We are dreaming of reuniting with our family and friends back home — and dreading saying goodbye to Moldova.

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Visit to Iași

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Visit to where? If you’re an American pondering this post’s title, let me help you with the pronunciation. It’s not Eye-a-see or Ee-ah-sigh, but Yash (with a slight ee in front).

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However you pronounce (or mispronounce) it, this Romanian city near the Moldovan border is a fun place to explore, as Champa and I discovered when we drove there with Nina and Andrei from our host family.

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Together we visited a lovely botanical garden, a “palace of culture” with four museums, a giant shopping mall, churches, gardens, a historic theater and a synagogue. The latter was closed but we enjoyed chatting with two Israelis we met outside, whose family has local roots.

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Iași is among Romania’s largest cities and a traditional center of cultural, academic and artistic life, with several universities. It has an international airport and an impressive industrial base, which we passed on our drive to the city center. If you’re coming from Moldova, it’s where you can find a Starbucks latte, a Subway sandwich, an H&M sweater or an adventure park, as well as an assortment of churches, museums and wineries.

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If you’re a tourist or shopper, you might visit Iași as a day trip or weekend excursion from Moldova, or as part of a larger Romania trip that includes Transylvania, Bucharest, the Black Sea or other popular destinations. Whatever. No matter how you end up there, you’ll probably enjoy it — and you might even learn to pronounce it correctly.

 

 

Riding the Rails

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Champa and I have become fans of Europe’s rail system. We used trains recently to travel from Vienna to Budapest to Bratislava and we found them to be reliable and fun to ride. They were also easy to navigate even though we didn’t speak the local languages.

All of the ticket vendors spoke English. The automated ticket machines were available in English. So were the signs. The schedules were online. Our Visa cards were accepted everywhere. The seats were comfortable. The toilets were clean. There was even free wifi on some of the trains.

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Vienna’s central train terminal, Wien Hauptbahnhof, and the Austrian trains we rode were the most modern. Like some of our own train stations back in the United States, the ones we used in Budapest, Keleti and Nyugati, felt much older, as did the main Hlavná station in Bratislava. However, we felt safe and comfortable in all of them and were impressed by the architecture and design, as with the mural in the Bratislava station shown above and the exterior of Budapest’s Keleti station shown below.

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We’d heard good things about Europe’s trains but were uncertain since we’d never ridden them before. Now we plan to use them often if we visit Europe again after we finish our Peace Corps service in Moldova. We expect many of them to be even nicer than what we saw, especially in western Europe. All aboard.

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My Unpredicted Birthday

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I never could have predicted when I was a boy that I would end up celebrating my 65th birthday in a country called Moldova with my wife from Nepal making a celebratory dinner of foods from our home state of North Carolina.

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I’d never heard of Moldova. I’d never heard of Nepal. Even North Carolina seemed exotic to a boy growing up on Long Island in the 1950s and 1960s. For me, a big trip then was to New York City. There were no ATM machines, Internet or smart phones, much less QR codes to hop on a jet plane and fly halfway around the world.

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Now I find myself in the former Soviet Union, nearing the end of my Peace Corps service alongside a woman from the Himalayas who became my beloved wife, giving me more happiness in my life than I’ve ever deserved. Even after nearly two years together in Moldova, I still sometimes shake my head in wonder: How did I get here? How did a boy from Freeport come to celebrate a special birthday in Eastern Europe, receiving congratulatory Facebook messages in English, Romanian and Nepali from family and friends stretching from Singapore to Seattle?

My life has gone in such unexpected directions. I have been so lucky — and I haven’t even mentioned my greatest blessing of all, our family back home.

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Here in Moldova, people celebrating a birthday are expected to arrange and pay for the party. So on Tuesday, one day before my birth date, I organized an American-style pizza-and-cake lunch for my colleagues at the library. They surprised me with several wonderful gifts and sang “Mulți Ani Trăiască!” in my honor.

The next evening, our host family joined us for a traditional North Carolina barbecue dinner, which Champa spent several days preparing. As you can see in the video clip, they sang both “Happy Birthday to You” and “Mulți Ani Trăiască!” when they brought out a cake and candles. I received more wonderful gifts.

Thank you to everyone who helped me mark this special occasion, either here, by phone or online. If I’ve learned nothing else over the past 65 years, it is that all of us around the world have so much more in common than the differences that separate us or make us fear one another. We can all touch each other’s lives. We can touch each other’s hearts. We can become friends, even families, together.

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In one of my very first posts on this blog, I wrote: “When people asked me over the past several months why I would walk away from a job and colleagues I love to travel around the United States and Nepal, I spoke often of how Champa and I love to travel — which we do — and of our desire to take a break from the conventional routine. But it was more than that. After being tied to calendars and project schedules for so many years, I wanted to embrace the unknown.” In a later post I added: “One of my goals in being ‘not exacty retired’ is to recognize the richness of life’s surprises and make the most of them.”

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I am so thankful Champa and I decided three years ago to pursue this dream, to veer off the usual path and open our lives to new experiences and ways of serving others. We’ve had good luck, to be sure. Things could have gone badly. But we’ve ended up discovering a new country and new friends while learning new things about ourselves.

Now we are looking forward to reuniting with our family and friends back home. I expect to remain “not exactly retired” after 65 but don’t really know what will happen next. I am eager to be surprised anew. Celebrating this birthday has reminded me how rich your life can become when you let it take you places you never predicted.

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Ten Surprising Sights

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We saw lots of beautiful sights in Vienna, Budapest and Bratislava when we visited this past week. We also saw things that surprised or amused us, like the ten shown here:

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2. A Rabbit Outside the Opera House

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3. Lots of Windmills

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4. More Openness About the Holocaust

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Budapest

5. Reagan Beside a Soviet Memorial

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6. Delicious Matzo Ball Soup

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Bratislava

7. An Unexpected Book Enthusiast

8. A (Tarheel) Blue Church 

9. A Street Memorial for a Slain Journalist

10. A ‘UFO Tower’ and Bridge

 

Three Favorite Spots

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If you could visit just one place in a great city, where would you go? The Eiffel Tower or the Louvre in Paris? The Statue of Liberty or Central Park in New York? Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City in Beijing?

I have answers for three cities we just visited along the Danube River: Vienna, Budapest and Bratislava. My picks aren’t necessarily the most famous spots in these cities but they’re the ones Champa and I will remember the most. 

In Vienna, it was the opera house. Not inside the opera, where two tickets can cost more than our monthly Peace Corps budget, but the sidewalk outside. You can sit in chairs there and watch a performance live on a giant screen for free. We discovered this after we arrived in Vienna and saw the ballet Raymonda starting as we strolled by. We sat and enjoyed it for nearly an hour, returning the next day to catch part of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre.

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It was magical to sit outside on a beautiful evening and watch world-class performances in the Austrian city reknown for its music and culture.

In Budapest, we’ll most remember the Chain Bridge and adjacent funicular, which provide stunning views of a picturesque city. We’d already taken a boat ride down the Danube, sailing under the bridge and past the Parliament building and other sites. As in Vienna, we’d also toured the city with Big Bus.

However, nothing topped the view from the historic bridge that spans the river between Buda and Pest, the western and eastern sides of Hungary’s capital. Well, nothing except the historic cable car that climbs to an even better view from Buda Castle. 

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Our biggest Bratislava memory will be St. Martin’s Cathedral, and not only because it’s a landmark of the Slovakian capital. For us, it was also the view in the window of the Airbnb we rented across the square. We could admire the three-nave Gothic church while sipping our morning coffee and then walk a few steps to tour the interior.

A sidewalk, a bridge and a cathedral weren’t the only places we enjoyed during our eight-day trip, the last vacation of our Peace Corps service. We saw lots of other things, too. Some were surprising, as I’ll explain in my next post. For now, you can see for yourself that many of them were amazing.

Vienna, Austria:

Budapest, Hungary:

Bratislava, Slovakia:

 

Jimmy Kimmel, PCV

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Should Jimmy Kimmel join the Peace Corps?

That’s what Rep. Joe Kennedy III jokingly encouraged on Wednesday when he appeared as a guest on the comedian’s late-night show. (The exchange begins at 2:00.)

The exchange was light-hearted but highlighted how little many Americans know about the Peace Corps, and how even fewer regard it as something they might do themselves.

Kimmel opened by asking Kennedy about his famous relatives, then switched to his volunteer service in the Dominican Republic. “What goes on in the Peace Corps?” Kimmel asked with a smile. “Do they come to your house and they take you to another country?”

Screen Shot 2018-04-06 at 4.45.00 PM“No, you actually have to get on a plane,” replied Kennedy. “That’s the ‘volunteer’ part.”

The Massachusetts Democrat went on to describe the Peace Corps as “an organization close to my heart [that] does an awful lot of good around the world” and his service as “the most impactful experience” of his life. 

Back in 2011, Champa and I heard Joe Kennedy speak eloquently about his Peace Corps service at an event at Arlington National Cemetery honoring the organization’s 50th anniversary. He announced his candidacy for Congress a few weeks later.

On Wednesday, when he said Peace Corps is “not for everybody,” Jimmy Kimmel quickly agreed. “It is probably a great experience,” he said, “one that I and no one in my family will ever have.” Both he and Kennedy laughed.

Screen Shot 2018-04-06 at 4.46.26 PMFair enough. If I were Jimmy Kimmel, I wouldn’t walk away from a network talk show and millions of dollars, especially with a young family. More to the point, if the thought of leaving America for two years to serve in a distant community sounds unappealing, then it’s not a good fit for Jimmy Kimmel or anyone else. Especially during the past year, he has emerged as an important voice on health care, immigration and other issues. He and others can pursue meaningful lives in so many ways.

Indeed, Kimmel said, “You know if I did that, everyone would think it was a joke. Nobody would believe I went to volunteer for the Peace Corps.”

I’m a big Jimmy Kimmel fan, so I’m glad he didn’t take the idea seriously. But maybe some of his viewers did. The Peace Corps is mentioned so rarely on television that it’s all but invisible to many Americans, some of whom might make great volunteers. I hope this exchange caused at least a few of them to give it some thought.

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That’s one of the things I’ve been trying to do with this blog, albeit on a smaller scale. Some readers of Not Exactly Retired, especially those nearing retirement, have written me to say it helped them picture Peace Corps service and consider it for themselves. I’ve treasured those messages. (If you’re reading this and have a similar story, please let me know!)

As Joe told Jimmy: “There’s no age limit on volunteers. You could sign up today.”

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Goodbye Winter (Photos)

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Winters in this part of the world are a lot colder than in our home town of Durham, N.C. Now that it’s April, here are some memories of what we saw the past few months. We’re hoping we don’t have an unexpected spring snowfall like we did last year.

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I Love Moldova. Really.

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Moldovans sometimes ask me whether Champa and I like Moldova. IMG_7936When I tell them we’ve come to love Moldova and will miss it when we return home, they are often surprised.

Their eyebrows go up. Their eyes widen. “Really?” they ask in disbelief that an American might admire their country.

Yes, really.

IMG_5608Inevitably, they respond with “but what about”: But what about the bad roads? What about the overcrowded buses? What about the low salaries? What about so many people leaving the country to work elsewere? What about the corruption?

In a recent poll, 73 percent of Moldovans said the country is going in the wrong direction; 76 percent said young people do not have a good future.

These and other problems are very real. No question about it. But so is the beauty of Moldova’s countryside, its glorious churches, its delicious fruits, vegetables and wine. I love the laughter of its children. IMG_5584I love the grandmothers talking in the market, the mothers carrying babies, the dads holding their children’s hands. I love everyone’s hospitality and generosity.

I love so much about Moldova. It’s been a privilege to serve here. Champa and I are both grateful to have had this opportunity.

We will return in July to a country with profound problems of its own. Yet even though recent events have sometimes led me to despair, I have never wavered in my pride about my homeland. Yes, we have a messy democracy and corruption in our own politics. But we also have backyard barbecues, Saturday Night Live, Fourth of July parades and Little League. We have LeBron James and Beyonce, overstuffed aisles at Costco and food trucks lined up beside our farmer’s market in Durham.

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Living abroad has reminded me how lucky I am to be an American.

I wish more Moldovans would recognize and celebrate the wonderful things about their country. After living here for two years, I’ve come to believe their biggest problem is not politics or the economy. It’s the “glass half empty” view of life I encounter so often. I’ve lived and traveled in other countries much poorer than Moldova, with deep challenges of their own, but the people I’ve met have generally been proud of their homelands. Here in Moldova, there is a “cloud of pessimism,” as Eric Weiner described in The Geography of Bliss. Not always, not with everyone, but often.

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To my foreign eyes, Moldova’s negative self-image is out of alignment with its reality. Even recognizing its many challenges, I’ve come to know it as a beautiful place with dedicated, hard-working people who have the skills and hearts to make it prosper.

First, though, they have to believe in themselves. When they ask someone from another country whether they like Moldova, they have to expect the answer to be yes.

In any case, that’s my answer, and I know other Peace Corps Volunteers who feel the same way: I don’t just like Moldova; I love Moldova. Maybe that’s something Moldovans need to hear. Really.

Laminated Memories

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I got my latest certificate on Friday, an especially nice one from our city’s mayor, Sergiu Armașu. He gave it to me during an event honoring library projects, librarians and volunteers from across the district. Our library in Ialoveni, the district capital, hosted the program.

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IMG_8995Certificates and diplomas are a big deal here in Moldova. They are awarded at sporting competitions, school ceremonies and other events. A certificate typically includes the official stamp of the organization and may be laminated.

Moldovans start collecting certificates as students. By the time they graduate from high school, they often have a thick folder of them, which they may proudly show to you.

This seemed strange to me at first. During our Peace Corps training, the local librarian arranged for us to meet some kids in our village. She asked one of the girls, a talented artist, to show us her certificates from painting competitions. The girl explained the certificates one by one.

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As I thought about her later that evening, I recalled the many trophies and medals my two sons accumulated from their sports teams, science fairs and other activities. Their trophies filled two large boxes when we cleaned out our house before joining the Peace Corps. I also had my own stash of certificates, diplomas and congratulatory letters.

IMG_1276In other words, as the walls of many American doctors’ offices make clear, our traditions are similar in many ways. Here in Moldova, though, certificates are way more popular, not to mention cheaper, than sports trophies. Kids here sometimes also receive medals, like the boys on our robotics team shown below.IMG_0968

Last month, before Champa’s school held its big celebration of its new drama costumes, we needed to produce nearly 30 certificates to give to the teachers, students and parents who assisted the project. We also needed certificates for my partners in our library’s Bebeteca project. I was able to laminate all of these certificates with a machine at the Peace Corps office, which has undoubtedly been put to good use over the years.

img_1392.jpgCertificate ceremonies in Moldova are usually filled with pride and appreciation. The speeches are heartfelt, the smiles are genuine and the certificates themselves are lovely. The moment is always captured with a poza — a pose for the camera.IMG_7617

After they receive a certificate, Moldovans may use it to prove their eligibility to receive a job promotion or a raise in salary, or to apply for a new position. More often, they hold onto it as a souvenir of a memorable activity.

When I told a Moldovan friend what I planned to write in this article, she laughed and said, “I don’t want a certificate. Give me some cash.” She had a point, just as one might reasonably ask whether Moldova’s teachers would be better off receiving fewer flowers and bigger paychecks. As a foreign visitor, these questions are not for me to answer. I can only say I have come to enjoy these certificate ceremonies as a distinctive part of Moldova’s culture.

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Champa and I now have our own folder of certificates, which we look forward to bringing home to America with us. They’ll be laminated memories of our time here.

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