This memorial honoring local heroes who died fighting for the Soviet Union in World War II is the first thing I see when I open my host family’s gate every morning.

The memorial’s base shows the names of the fallen. There are several men named Sava and several others named Tonu. I now live with a family named Sava and previously lived with the Tonus. For their extended families, as for people across Moldova and the rest of the former Soviet Union, the war brought unimaginable suffering.

When most Americans think of World War II, they think of Normandy, Iwo Jima and other battles where our soldiers died. My own father fought at D-Day, navigating a plane that was shot and almost didn’t return to England. He was part of the “greatest generation” whose enormous sacrifices kept our country free.

The war’s impact on our own history was huge. Yet many Americans don’t know that the Soviet Union suffered more than 50 times as many deaths as we did, according to some estimates. It’s hardly a surprise, therefore, that the war’s legacy here is profound, even after Moldova broke away from the Soviet Union in 1991 to become an independent country.

My current village, Bardar, is hardly alone in having a prominent memorial. They are everywhere in Moldova. The second photo shows one in Dereneu, a small village we visited a few weeks ago. In Chisnau, Moldova’s capital, one of the main tourist sites is the Victory Memorial and eternal flame, five giant marble pillars representing the five years of Moldovan involvement in the conflict.

In Ialoveni, where Champa and I will soon be living, there is a memorial outside her school honoring a local soldier who died in Afghanistan. Across the street is the town’s World War II memorial, imposing with its dark stone, shown in the photo below.

Adjacent to that memorial, though, are two smaller memorials in white stone. They are topped with crosses, which tells you they were built after the Soviet era. These newer memorials honor the Moldovan victims of Soviet repression under Joseph Stalin. Large numbers of intellectuals, political opponents and ordinary people were exiled to Siberia and elsewhere.

I knew almost nothing about this history before coming here, but Moldovans have been eager to share their stories with me. I avoid local politics since I am a Peace Corps volunteer. Still, the history of this country, so unknown to Americans, is proving fascinating.

When I open my gate every morning I know I am just beginning to learn what it all means. So far, the impression is monumental.

International agreements are often excruciating — look at how long they’ve been trying in the Middle East — so I’m pleased how smoothly my Moldovan partner and I came to terms on Wednesday.

We started discussions on Tuesday and reached an understanding before noon the next day, just in time to join our fellow Peace Corps trainees and partners for a pizza party.

Peace Corps brought all of us all together in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, to align our plans and expectations over the next two years. After reviewing the history of the Peace Corps and its activities in Moldova, the conference leaders reminded our partners that we are volunteers with a special role: We’ve come to share our skills and perspective, empowering our colleagues and others to blaze their own paths after we leave.

It also reminded the trainees that we need to listen to and learn from our communities. We are here to serve, and our success depends on mutual trust and respect.

These ideals were fundamental to the Peace Corps when I served four decades ago, and they remain so today. My service in Moldova differs in so many ways from what I experienced in Nepal, from the local food to the speed of communications, but the mission is unchanged, still reflecting the original vision of President Kennedy.

My partner at the meeting was Igor Condrea, shown in the top photo with the Romanian version of our agreement. He will be my primary liaison at the Rayon Council, or county government, in Ialoveni, the town near Chisinau where Champa and I will be living. Even though my Romanian language skills are not yet good enough to communicate easily with him, we’ve already begin to form a close relationship. He’s a talented and thoughtful person.

The other trainees in my “community and organizational development” group came to the conference with their partners from across Moldova — mayors, village librarians, NGO leaders and others. Each pair worked together to clarify how the volunteer will learn about his or her post, develop a work schedule and deal with inevitable disappointments.

Together, we discussed how we might use tools such as community mapping, surveys and SWOT analyses to focus on which problems most concern our neighbors. We taped some of our findings on the wall, much as in a U.S. management seminar.

It was a good meeting. I felt like Igor and I came to know each other, laying the groundwork for a successful collaboration. I will now return to my final month of training with even greater motivation, which was already substantial.

In other words, I’ll be busier than ever. If anyone wants to recruit us to help out with the Middle East, though, just post a comment here and I’ll be happy to get back to you.

Exactly one year ago, I walked away from a great job to explore a new life of adventure and service. On Thursday, Champa and I marked this anniversary with a big ceremony, although it wasn’t just for us. Rather, we and the other Peace Corps trainees were all taken to a parking lot, blindfolded and guided one by one to spots on a giant chalk map of Moldova.

We were then handed envelopes and told to remove our blindfolds and look at the name of the village or city on our envelope, which corresponded to where we stood on the map.

The name on the envelopes for Champa and me was Ialoveni (pronounced Yah-lo-ven). It’s a big town close to Chisinau, not far from our training sites. After Champa and I finish our training and swear in on July 29, it’s where we’ll be living.

We and the other trainees had been wondering for weeks where we’d be posted. Now we know. Champa and I couldn’t be happier at both our location and job assignments. We’ll be traveling to Ialoveni this weekend to meet our host family and respective work partners before returning to our current villages for a month to finish our training.

Thursday’s announcement was the culmination of an extraordinary year for us. This past July, just a week after I left Duke University, Champa and I took an 11,000-mile road trip around the United States. We saw up close what an amazing country we have, from the badlands of South Dakota to the bayous of Louisiana. After that, we spent nearly two months in Nepal, visiting our family there and welcoming ten members of our American family for an unforgettable group trip in the Himalayas. (See my earlier posts for the details.)

Now, for the past month, we’ve been immersed in our most challenging and rewarding trip of all, our pending service as Peace Corps volunteers in Moldova.

At my group’s tech class on Tuesday, we discussed how Moldovans and Americans differ. One of the charts we filled out, shown in the photo, compared each culture’s tolerance for risk. The green tags represent Moldovans; the red tags represent Americans. As you can see, our group saw Americans as being more willing to take chances in life.

That’s been true for Champa and me this past year. I wouldn’t exactly use the photo’s words, “risk tolerance,” to describe our adventure. Rather, we’ve learned to let go of our old life with growing faith that the world will reward us if we open our eyes and hearts to new experiences. It’s been a life-changing journey, one that’s exceeded our greatest hopes.

The two years we expect to live in Ialoveni will be twice as long as our initial year of being “not exactly retired.” Based on what’s happened so far, and on how much we already love Moldova, we can’t wait to see what lies ahead.

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.