Painting the Playground

August 9, 2017 djarmul Leave a comment

These “Before” and “After” photos tell the story of what Peace Corps can accomplish with a local community, sometimes within a couple of hours.

All three photos above show a playground in central Ialoveni. The left photo, which I shot on Tuesday morning, shows how faded and dingy the equipment looked. The middle and right photos show some of the same equipment on Tuesday evening after a Peace Corps group joined with local residents to give the playground a paint job and makeover. (“Vopsit” means “painted.” The sign on the left says: Help us put the “love” in Ialoveni.)

Nine Peace Corps trainees who’ve been living in Ialoveni for the past two months organized the event, which included ice cream and games for children. They’ve been staying with host families and studying every day at Liceul Teoretic “Petre Ştefănucă,” a school near the library where I work.

Next week they will swear in as volunteers and begin serving in the community and organizational development (COD) program for Peace Corps Moldova. They’ll serve with a companion COD group of trainees who’ve been living and taking language classes in the nearby village of Sociteni. Those trainees held their community service event last week, a clean-up of Sociteni’s main street.

Both groups of COD trainees are looking forward to finally finishing their preparation and moving to their permanent posts to begin assisting local governments, libraries, nongovernmental organizations and others across Moldova. Two other groups of trainees— in English education and health education — will also swear in next week. Altogether, more than 50 trainees are expected to join Peace Corps Moldova’s current volunteers, most of whom swore in a year ago and will continue serving until next summer, Champa and me among them.

You can see the Ialoveni trainees posing here at the end of Tuesday’s event with Mayor Sergiu Armașu and a couple of local girls, Champa and me. We participated along with two other current volunteers (Reggie and Beth) and an impressive number of community members.

For both of us, it was gratifying to watch our two communities — Peace Corps and Ialoveni — come together for such a worthwhile cause. Ialovei is our home for another year and this playground next to the main piața, or shopping area, looks so much better now. If the kids loved it before, they’re going to love it even more after the makeover.

Hîncești Farmers Market

August 7, 2017 djarmul 1 Comment

Tomatoes are abundant in Moldova right now. So are cucumbers, peppers, grapes, potatoes and many other delicious fruits and vegetables.

On Sunday, Champa and I visited the farmers market in Hîncești, a regional center southwest of Ialoveni. We filled several bags with produce from farmers who gather in the outdoor market three days a week. Our host family invited us to join them on a shopping trip there followed by a visit to the Manuc Bey museum and mansion.

As I wrote recently about my peach pie, one can buy produce from farmers in Ialoveni along the sidewalks, but the Hîncești market offers a wider selection.

It’s still much smaller, of course, than the central market in the capital, Chișinău, shown above, where vendors gather daily to sell everything from walnuts to watermelons.

In Hîncești, there’s also an indoor pavilion where people sell meats and cheeses. Champa and I bought a big piece of brinza there, similar to Greek feta. It’s in one of the bags she’s holding next to Mihail and Alisa.

Most Moldovan vendors have electronic scales with which they weigh items and calculate prices. They may fill a bag with a bit more than requested, hoping to nudge up the purchase, but they’re ready to trim it back to the specified amount if asked.

My Romanian is now good enough that I often stop to chat after I buy something. The vendors are generally curious about us and enjoy our efforts to converse.

Occasionally, one of them surprises us by speaking English, like the guy you see in the 3-second video clip below. He startled me on Sunday by telling me to “have a nice day!” after I bought some peaches. I couldn’t leave without asking him to do it again for the camera so all of you could enjoy him, too.

Dollars, Euros and Lei

August 3, 2017 djarmul 2 Comments

These three photos show what’s happened to the U.S. dollar during the past several months.

I shot all of the photos here in Ialoveni, Moldova: the left one on October 26, the middle one on April 3 and the right one this past Wednesday, August 2. As you can see, a dollar sold here for 19.98 Moldovan lei on October 26, before briefly climbing above 20. Now it sells for only 17.89 lei, a decline of more than 10 percent.

That’s consistent with what’s been happening to the dollar around the world, as the New York Times reported on Tuesday, juxtaposing the dollar’s decline with a rise in the U.S. stock market.

How does this affect Peace Corps volunteers in Moldova? Actually, not much. We are paid in Moldovan lei, buy things in lei and have little reason to track exchange rates. Champa and I have lived comfortably within our Peace Corps budget, so have never sold U.S. dollars for lei except when we first arrived and exchanged a small amount. We rarely use our credit cards since Moldova is largely a cash economy. We also don’t buy much online, transactions generally calculated in dollars anyway.

Many Moldovans work abroad and send money home, so exchange rates matter to them. However, they generally pay more attention to the Euro than the dollar; indeed, prices for some goods and services here are quoted in Euros rather than lei, as we learned when we considered renting an apartment. The Euro has not fluctuated as much as the dollar recently.

Banks and money exchange centers here also focus on the Romanian leu, the Russian ruble and the Ukrainian hryvnia — not so different from Americans paying attention to neighboring currencies such as the Mexican peso or the Canadian dollar.

Peace Corps Moldova calculates its budget annually, so it’s not affected immediately by currency shifts except in a few ways. For example, a small percentage of volunteer paychecks is designated for personal travel and pegged to exchange rates. The overall impact is so small, though, that many volunteers probably didn’t notice the recent dip. (That included me until I started writing this post.)

Moldova faces serious economic challenges but currency fluctuations here have been far less dramatic than in some Peace Corps countries. The agency’s financial planners elsewhere sometimes have to scramble in response to big swings, as do the State Department and other parts of the U.S. government, along with international companies, travelers and others.

A few months before we arrived here in June 2016, the dollar was even lower than it is now, so the rise above 20 may have been outside the usual range. I’m told it was a response to Brexit, the U.S. presidential election, Federal Reserve policy and other things I cannot claim to fully understand, much less explain here.

Nor do I really care. For me, a person who enjoys math and numbers, it’s just been something to notice occasionally as I walk to work.

One doesn’t become a Peace Corps volunteer to get rich. For all of us serving in more than 60 countries around the world, our mission is to serve our local communities and promote friendship between Americans and other people. Ultimately, that’s the currency that matters, not the ones shown on the ever-changing bank signs.

Peach Season

July 31, 2017 djarmul 4 Comments

You don’t need to go to a special farmers market to buy fresh produce from local farmers here in Ialoveni, Moldova. You just stroll down the street.

I bought some delicious peaches on Saturday from the woman you see on the left, who harvested them in the nearby village of Mileștii Mici. She was displaying them on the sidewalk near the center of town along with two older women also selling produce. Her husband is behind her next to the car.

I bought three kilos of peaches from her, which she weighed with a hand-held scale. They cost 8 Moldovan lei per kilo, or 24 lei total. That’s roughly $1.30, or about 20 cents per pound. As I picked out my peaches, I chatted with all of them about how I planned to bake an American-style pie, showing them a picture of a peach pie on my phone. The husband, who spoke some English, encouraged his wife to try saying “peach pie.” They also asked me several questions about what Champa and I are doing with the Peace Corps.

After I placed the peaches in my daypack, I walked to the nearby market to buy some vanilla ice cream and other items, then headed home to start baking. I listened to podcasts while I prepared the dough, peeled the peaches and finally put the finished pie in the oven.

You can see below how it turned out. It was still hot by the time we finished our dinner but we didn’t care; the ice cream cooled it off and we cleaned our plates. We also shared much of it with our host family. By tomorrow, we’ll probably polish off the rest. Then it will be time to see what other fruits our local farmers are selling.

A New Way to Rent a Car

July 28, 2017 djarmul 1 Comment

We rented a car during our recent trip home but not through a conventional car-rental company like Hertz, Avis or Budget.

Instead, we rented our blue Toyota Camry through a new online company called Turo, which is like an Airbnb for car rentals. It cost us about half of what we would have spent otherwise, including the cost of the insurance. We interacted mainly with the car’s owner — Kim Dinh, shown here — instead of waiting in line at a rental car counter for an overworked agent to upsell me and ask me to write my initials on forms.

I’d planned to rent a car the usual way and was looking forward to it since we are not allowed to drive “in country” while serving as Peace Corps volunteers. Months before we left for our vacation back home, I began checking prices on travel websites and with the rental car companies. We wanted a mid-sized car since we would have several suitcases. We’d begin and end our trip at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., where we flew from Moldova on Turkish Airlines.

The sites didn’t vary much in their offerings and prices. They also were consistent in failing to provide clear information about what it would cost to buy complete insurance coverage, including liability. Champa and I no longer have a personal auto insurance policy to cover our car rentals, since we got rid of our cars when we joined the Peace Corps.
The car rental companies were generally opaque about what they’d charge for different kinds of insurance at Dulles, and what the policies covered. It seemed like they wanted me to make this decision at the counter, when I was hurrying to get my car and unlikely to read the fine print, especially if people were waiting behind me.

As I studied this online, I came across an article describing new companies trying to bring the “sharing economy” to the rental car market. Just as Uber and Lyft have emerged to challenge the traditional taxi industry, so are companies such as Turo, GetAround and FlightCar providing peer-to-peer options for car rentals.

I might have considered this approach too risky or exotic. However, our experience with Airbnb made us comfortable with it. For instance, we stayed in the lovely Airbnb apartment shown above in the historic city of Sibiu during our trip to Transylvania this past April. It had two bedrooms — one for us, one for our guide — and cost less than a single hotel room. We also used a ride-sharing service, Bla Bla Car, to travel from Ialoveni to Transylvania, and had a great experience with that, too.

After reading several favorable articles about Turo, I visited its website and found lots of cars we could rent at Dulles Airport, everything from a Chevy or a Honda Civic to a BMW or a Porsche. I could have even rented a Tesla, a Bentley or, for a mere $899 per day, a Lamborghini Gallardo. (I don’t think the latter includes a Peace Corps sticker.) There was also a clear description of the insurance options offered through Liberty Mutual.

We chose the Camry and the most extensive insurance coverage. Once we reserved this with our credit card, Turo put us in touch with Kim-Dinh, with whom we then worked directly. When we arrived at Dulles, I called Kim-Dinh after we picked up our bags, and he arrived at the terminal curbside a few minutes later. He drove us to a nearby gas station, topped off the tank and inspected the car with me, posting photos to the Turo site. He also lent me his EZPass so I could pay tolls automatically and a magnet to attach my iPhone to his dashboard, so I could see GPS directions more easily. I reimbursed him for the tolls later.

When we returned at the end of our trip, Kim-Dinh was out of town, so his friend met us at a gas station near a Metro station, shown here. He inspected the car and then gave us a lift to the aiport.

I can’t speak about this service generally or how Turo compares with its competitiors, and I don’t intend this post as an endorsement. However, now that I am back in Moldova, I expect I will recall our experience fondly the next time I am riding a crowded minibus.

More Than Pretty Pictures

July 26, 2017 djarmul 1 Comment

If you’re an American, you see infographics everywhere these days— on television and websites, in magazines, even with academic articles or corporate sales reports.

Not if you live in Moldova. Many institutions in this small former Soviet state are still learning to share information with their stakeholders, much less to present it attractively to engage ther interest.

On Tuesday, the library in Ialoveni where I work as a Peace Corps volunteer held a workshop to train more than a dozen colleagues from area libraries in using infographics. Within a few hours, they all learned the basics of producing colorful posters or web posts to highlight their activities and community outreach.

My library colleague, Lidia Rusu (shown left, pointing at the computer), led the training with enthusiasm and patience. By the end of the session almost all of the participants, even those with limited computer skills, were producing infographics more than nice enough to use immediately.

They used the free version of Piktochart, an online software platform popular in the United States and elsewhere. Lidia also recently began using PowToon, a platform for making simple animated videos. Even though she doesn’t speak English, she’s able to figure out software packages quickly, apply them effectively and explain them to others.

Ialoveni’s library, Biblioteca Publică Orășenească “Petre Ștefănucă,” hosted the workshop after being selected as one of the winners of a national infographic contest organized by Novateca, a nonprofit organization working to modernize libraries across Moldova. Ialoveni’s winning infographics, which I helped produce, are the two images on the left shown above.

Artiom Maister, an impact specialist with Novateca, shown below with Lidia, assisted her at the workshop, guiding the participants in how to modify templates, use icons, insert data and transfer their work to their websites, blogs or printed posters.

The session was just the latest way Novateca has been encouraging this country’s libraries — still viewed by some as dusty repositories of old Russian books — to embrace a new role as modern information centers and community resources. Through its five-year program, Novateca has provided hundreds of libraries here with thousands of computers and Internet access. It’s trained librarians on everything from how to find new funding sources to organizing robotics clubs or hackathons.

I’ve seen Novateca’s impact not only in Ialoveni but also in Bardar, where I lived during my Peace Corps training, and in other libraries. My best description is a word I don’t use lightly: transformative. As it approaches the end of its generous funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Novateca is now working to empower both local librarians and national institutions to carry on its mission. A representative from one of those institutions, Victoria Popa from the National Library, participated actively in Tuesday’s infographic session.

This kind of training is important not only to the libraries themselves, but also to the emergence of an open civil society in Moldova. By learning to use infographics and other modern communications techniques, libraries and other public institutions become more able to explain to citizens what they are doing and how they can serve them. Infographics here have the potential to be so much more than pretty pictures.

Back to America – II

July 24, 2017 djarmul 1 Comment

There were at least a dozen reasons why we enjoyed returning to the States earlier this month on vacation from our service in Peace Corps Moldova. I posted six last time; here are six more:

American Food

We’ve eaten well in Moldova but missed American foods. We wasted no time back home in enjoying goodies like those shown above: North Carolina barbecue, New York breakfast treats and Vietnamese pho.

Shenandoahs

We rented a lodge in Virginia’s mountains with our sons and their families. Together we went river rafting, visited Luray Caverns, made S’mores and played games.

Friends

We’ve missed a year with our friends in Durham and Washington, D.C. This was our chance to catch up with them.

Our dog

We also had a joyful reunion with Bailey, our dog. She is doing great with the family taking care of her. Good dog, Bailey!

Sightseeing

In Washington, we visited the new National Museum of African American History and Culture and other sites.

Perspective

Finally, our time away gave us a chance to reflect on our Peace Corps service and then return to Moldova with a renewed sense of commitment.

Now we’re back and gearing up for our second year. I have two important meetings on Tuesday, Champa is starting a grant project and we’re looking forward to all of it. Before long, we’ll need another vacation.

Back to America – I

July 22, 2017 djarmul 2 Comments

We just returned to Moldova after visiting our family and friends in the States. It was a great vacation for at least a dozen reasons. Let’s start with six:

Grandchildren

We’ve been dreaming for more than a year about the hugs we’d receive from these six children. We weren’t disappointed.

Family

We saw other family members, too, especially at a big party organized by our son and daughter-in-law in Philadelphia.

Parade

We marched in Philadelphia’s annual Fourth of July parade with returned Peace Corps volunteers from the area. It was great to hear so many people cheering for the Peace Corps, as you can see in this video. (Don’t miss Champa’s flag!)

Nature

We were reminded of America’s natural beauty in places such as Luray Caverns and the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens.

Changes

America has changed since we left. We wanted to see it with our own eyes.

Peace Corps

We remained engaged with our jobs, giving two talks about the Peace Corps in Durham and meeting with the leaders of the National Peace Corps Association in Washington, D.C.

In my next post, I’ll share six more reasons why we treasured our vacation back home.

Fourth of July Parade

Video July 21, 2017 djarmul 1 Comment

We carried flags for Moldova and Nepal in Philadelphia’s big Independence Day parade. There was a “small problem” with Champa’s flag. Video also online at YouTube.

Tasting Moldovan Wine

Video July 3, 2017 djarmul 1 Comment

We brought some homemade Moldovan wine back to America for a family picnic. Here are the results of our taste test. Also online at YouTube.