If you’re a Southerner who just has to eat a piece of cornbread, you’d probably slice it with a knife.

Not here in Moldova. My host mother, Maria, shown here with her husband Vladimir, is an amazing cook, so I’m going to feature her in occasional posts about Moldovan cuisine. On Sunday, while Champa was visiting, she served us mamaliga, which is a denser version of American cornbread.

In this brief video, she demonstrates the traditional method of slicing mamaliga with a string. You can hear Champa in the background admiring her technique. (You’ll find a recipe for mamaliga and other Moldovan foods at this excellent blog from a previous Peace Corps couple.)

Pofta buna! Enjoy!

I’d be glued to social media and the latest news about the Orlando shootings and aftermath if I were back home right now. But I’m not. I’m halfway around the world, in Moldova, training to become a Peace Corps volunteer.

It’s strange to be so distant when something momentous happens back home. I’m still an American. I still feel outrage. So do my fellow trainees, who opened Thursday’s group meeting with a moment of silence in memory of the Orlando victims. “What happened was hateful; it was evil,” our Peace Corps director Tracey told us.

Nonetheless, even though I’m following the news and receiving my Facebook feeds, the events feel far away. They are far away, at least geographically.

My current day-to-day reality is this: I go to language class all morning. I have tech training in the afternoon. I talk with Champa on the phone. I eat and try to communicate with my host family. I cram vocabulary lists and verb conjugations whenever I can. Then I go to sleep. The photos show what we did on Wednesday.

I’ve found myself thinking back to when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal years ago. My news sources then were a shortwave radio and a weekly international edition of Newsweek. My village postmaster looked forward to the magazine as much as I did, since we’d flip through it together before I went home. One week the Newsweek cover showed bloated bodies strewn in the jungles of Guyana. It was the Jonestown massacre, where hundreds of American cult members drank poison and died. The postmaster looked at the photos and asked me to explain how this could happen. I didn’t know what to say.

Years later, I was in Bangladesh writing a magazine story about a local scientist working to combat diarrheal diseases. He and I spent our final day together — a beautiful September day — visiting with families in the slums of Dhaka, then I took him and a colleague out for a farewell dinner. When I returned to my hotel and turned on the television, the World Trade Center was in ruins. The next morning, I was one of the few Westerners in the Dhaka airport. Everyone was staring at television monitors, watching the footage from New York and Washington again and again. Once again, I felt very American and very far from home.

So I should have known what to expect emotionally when I heard the terrible news about Orlando, followed by the controversy over Donald Trump’s response and everything else that has happened in the past few days. But familiarity is not a vaccination. It’s still been strange to watch all of this from a distance, discussing it with the other trainees when we get a moment between language classes. Soon enough, we’re back to memorizing the Romanian words for fruits and vegetables, or how to conjugate the feminine plural form of an adjective.

That’s what I’ve been obsessing about during this momentous week, for better or worse. Tracey reminded all of us that “you are here to do good,” to promote “peace, friendship and understanding” — the very values challenged by what happened in Orlando. Even though we are far away, she said: “Know you are in the right place at the right time.”

So, yes, even here in Moldova, I’m still an American. But I’m also an American here in Moldova. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out the conjugation.

Try to solve this biological riddle: When is a mother half the age of her daughter?

The top photo offers a clue.

Answer: When an older Peace Corps trainee lives with a young “host mother”and her two sons.

That’s what Champa’s been doing in the Moldovan town of Costeşti. Here she is with her host mom, Maria, in the white shirt, along with Maria’s two sons and mother.

Maria’s husband is in Tel Aviv, working construction to make money to send home, like so many Moldovans. Maria’s friend, who teaches English in the local school, stopped by last night and told us her husband is working outside the country as well, in Germany, as are all four of his brothers.

Maria lives in this lovely home along the road where you see Champa standing. It’s a short walk from the center of the village, which is not far from Chisinau, Moldova’s capital. If we were back in the Washington, D.C., area, it would be considered an outer suburb like, say, Leesburg or Germantown, although with more goats and fewer McDonald’s.

Like me, Champa has a nice living situation. Her house has a modern kitchen and bathroom, wifi and a dining room, as well as her own bedroom. Maria is very friendly and even speaks some English. Champa does have a long uphill walk to the school where she has her language classes and technical training, but she says it reminds her of walking in Nepal.

I saw all of this for myself this weekend when I left my own host family and village to spend a day with Champa. There are three married couples in our training group and we are the only ones allowed to leave our host villages unaccompanied during the first several weeks. Even so, we’re required to check in with Peace Corps at each step of our travels so they know we’re OK.

I had to travel all the way into Chisinau and then back out again to reach her, since there are no direct buses between our two sites. To use a North Carolina analogy this time, it was like traveling from Durham to Chapel Hill via Raleigh each time.

It was worth it — mainly to see Champa, of course, but also to meet Maria and her family. Now I have two adopted families here in Moldova! For dinner, Maria made plăcintăs — traditional pastries stuffed with cheese or other goodies. We enjoyed them with some wine her father produced, which is common here. The meal was delicious and we cleaned our plates.

We always want to keep mom happy, no matter how old she is.

Yes, my shirt says “Straight Outta Moldova.”

No, you can’t have it.

At a Peace Corps picnic today at a beautiful park in Chisinau, I was asked repeatedly where I got the shirt and, a bit less seriously, whether I’d consider giving it away or selling it.

Here’s Donna, one of the other trainees, trying to tear it off me. (OK, we were joking.)

My cousin Mark and his wife Cindy ordered the shirt for me shortly before Champa and I left to join the Peace Corps in Moldova. I’m sure they had no idea how much fun I’d have wearing it. Neither did I.

There were plenty of other thematic shirts on display at the picnic, which Peace Corps organized to bring together our training group with current volunteers and staff.

Here are Chelsea, left, and Rose, right, making their own fashion statements in support of peace and the Peace Corps.

Rose is eating some of the delicious Moldovan snacks Peace Corps provided along with fresh fruit and soft drinks. People played volleyball and soccer, strolled the grounds and enjoyed taking a break on a beautiful June day from our demanding schedule of language classes, technical training, cultural lessons and homework.

Champa and I have been training in different villages, so we enjoyed being together. We both have made lots of new friends, though, so we also spent time catching up with them. Here’s Champa with Reggie, a member of my language group and a fellow North Carolinian.

That’s a nice Durham Bulls cap she’s wearing, don’t you think? You can’t have that either.

Welcome to the many new readers of “Not Exactly Retired” and renewed thanks to all of you who have shared this journey with us from the start.

Since the blog’s audience is larger and more eclectic than ever, I want to take a moment to review what it’s all about.

Most obviously, “Not Exactly Retired” is chronicling the adventure Champa and I have been pursuing since I stepped down a year ago as the head of news and communications at Duke University. We took an extended trip across the United States, then in Nepal, and are now beginning our service with the U.S. Peace Corps in Moldova. You’ll find links to those earlier posts in the right-hand column of the blog’s home page.

The blog is also exploring larger questions about what it means to be “not exactly retired” — trying to live a full life of service and adventure after stepping away from a conventional career, or at any age. In addition, it is promoting the Peace Corps “third goal” of enhancing understanding among Americans of other people around the world.

Some new readers don’t know Champa and me personally but are looking for ideas for their own changing lives. Some just met us in Moldova. Others stumbled across the blog and decided to stick around.

To all of you: Hello, or “Buna!” as they say here in Moldova. I hope you’ll find the blog entertaining and worth your time, even if we’ve never met. Regardless of whether you’re a new or longtime reader, I welcome your comments, requests and suggestions. Please share them! I also invite you to sign up for the blog, even if you’re seeing it on your Facebook feed. Doing so will help me serve you better.

And now, back to the journey …

Meet my new language teachers, cousins Marcu and Ovidiu, both ten years old. Saturday afternoon I walked with them through the village where I will be living with their family for the next two months.

Along the way they taught me the Romanian words for tree, dog and other things, like this village well adorned with religious figures.

You can see vines behind Ovidiu and Marcu. Many Moldovan families grow grapes to make their own vin, which means … did you guess “wine”? Well, then, as my Peace Corps language teacher Diana likes to say: Bravo!

It’s hard to believe we were in North Carolina less than a week ago. We had two busy days of staging in Philadelphia, then traveled by bus to New York, where we waited for several hours at JFK before boarding Lufthansa flights to Munich and finally Chisinau, Moldova’s capital. Some of the current Peace Corps volunteers greeted us at the airport with cheers and signs. We drove through the city, ate pizza outdoors at our hotel and held our first orientation session before finally being allowed to crash.

The next morning we began intensive language lessons, which some volunteers continued late into the following evening with a vocabulary contest in the hotel lobby.

The orientation was nonstop. We received briefings about health, safety, money and local customs. We visited a local lab to provide blood samples. We walked around the city. Here’s one of our teachers offering advice about how to interact with our host families. Moldova is still very new to us but, so far, we love it.

The 59 volunteers in our group are divided among four programs: education, health, small business development and community/organizational development. Champa is in the first program; I’m in the last. Since each program is staying in its own village or two, Champa and I are living separately during the week and seeing each other on weekends.

My new home is just beyond the outskirts of Chisinau. Since Moldova is only the size of Maryland, Champa’s village isn’t far away. With local Sim cards in our iPhones, we can call each other easily. Here’s the home I’m sharing with the two boys and the rest of their family. I have my own bedroom, a good Internet connection and a house full of friendly teachers, some of whom don’t even ride bicycles.

What better way to get ready for Peace Corps than with some pan roasted lump crab cakes with lemon caper dill creme?

They went ever so nicely this afternoon with the cucumber cheese triangles, shrimp cocktail martinis and other hors d’oeuvres I enjoyed with a cold IPA beside a beautiful golf course.

I was attending a retirement party for a former Duke colleague, held outside at the Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club. I even wore a suit for only the second time since I retired from Duke myself nearly a year ago.

As a writer and editor, I know how to spell “disorienting,” and now I have a great example to illustrate what it feels like.

In three days, Champa and I will leave Durham to serve in the Peace Corps for 27 months in Moldova, in eastern Europe. We will be living on about $350 each per month, pursuing modest lives alongside our neighbors.

For the past several weeks, we’ve reduced our possessions to what fits in this small storage room in our house and some items in our attic. We gave away nearly an entire house of furniture to Habitat for Humanity and brought so many donations to the local Goodwill store that we probably could have asked for our own parking spot.

Our bags are now packed. Most of the rooms in our house are empty. Our kitchen shelves are nearly bare. We’re sleeping on an inflatable bed. Tomorrow I’ll turn off our internet service, and we’ll say goodbye to our beloved dog, Bailey, who will be staying with friends.

I suppose I should feel guilty about indulging as I did at my friend’s party. However, the crab cakes were delicious. I even went back for seconds.