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.

This post is going to be awesome. Yay!

I recently ordered some iPhone camera lenses from an online company called Photojojo. The lenses weren’t quite what I expected, so I e-mailed Photojojo to find out how to return them.

“I’m so sorry you weren’t into your order!” responded Christina, the “Smile Distribution Coordinator.” She advised me how to return the package, concluding: “Once we receive and inspect it, if it’s in okay shape and it’s got all its packaging, we can give you a refund for the cost of the item, if it’s totally used we’ll getcha store credit.”

“Into your order”? “Getcha store credit”? Phrases like that never would have made it past my red pen when I was the head of news and communications at Duke.

But Christina was just getting started. After she received my package, she wrote back:

“Hey Hey,

“We have received your returned goodies! (Yay!)  I’ve just refunded $54 buck-a-roos to your credit card.  The moola should be racing your way as we speak (erm… type?) and should show up in a day or two.

“Let me know if you have any questions, I’m only a keyboard away!”

I wrote Christina to thank her and asked whether she was trained to use this kind of language, which is abundant on Photojojo’s website. Her response: “I’m native in Photojojo speak 🙂 Have a sweet day!”

“Hey hey”? “Returned goodies”? “Buck-a-roos”? Yikes! I felt like Lou Grant when he said to Mary Tyler Moore: “You know what? You’ve got spunk. {pause} I hate spunk!”

Then I stopped to ponder that my cultural reference was from a TV show that aired 46 years ago. Perhaps I’m just ancient. After all, I was impressed with Photojojo’s products and service, and with Christina’s helpfulness.

Sure enough, I found this review from another Photojojo customer: “I just wanted to hug the person who responded. They talked to me like I was their best friend in the world. They were nice, personal, helpful, and still professional. They also said that I can refund it, and the way they used very personal language like ‘snazzy’ and ‘easy peasy’ just made me know that I was an appreciated customer. This is customer service.”

Wow. Now there’s an alternative viewpoint.

I’m also mindful that Champa and I will soon be serving alongside Peace Corps colleagues who are, for the most part, much younger than us. One of the best parts of my job at Duke was interacting with bright, talented younger people. I’m really looking forward to doing that every day.

I’m not sure what to make of all this. Am I clinging to outdated language and editorial standards? Does the future lie with Photojojo’s approach? Help me out! Please write a comment and share your opinion.

I might even say “yay!”

As Peace Corps people who avoid shopping centers, buy things on sale and keep clothes for years, how did we accumulate so much stuff?

During the past several weeks, I’ve been hauling bags of clothes, kitchen goods, books, toys and other stuff to local charities. Here are just some of the receipts I’ve accumulated from Goodwill and others.

Champa and I have been cleaning out closets, cabinets, dressers and shelves. We’re getting rid of everything we can’t fit into a small storage room or bring with us to Moldova, where we’ll be serving as Peace Corps volunteers. Each of us is allowed to bring two bags weighing 50 pounds or less. The bags need to carry winter clothing, summer clothing, dress clothes, boots, shoes, electronics, photos, gifts and more, including school supplies for Champa.

We just met with a representative from Habitat for Humanity, to which we’re donating almost all of our furniture. We’re keeping only a couple of couches, two beds and not much more, depending on how much space remains in our upstairs storage room. Once everything is stored or removed, we’ll be living in a nearly empty house and sleeping on an air mattress until we depart on May 29.

It’s been humbling to confront how much stuff we’ve accumulated during 36 years of marriage. We don’t think of ourselves as materialistic, and we’re not hoarders. But all of those suits I needed for work, the books we bought for children and grandchildren, the sports equipment, kitchen gadgets, old sneakers, photo albums, CDs, LPs, DVDs and so much else — well, it added up more than we realized.

Getting rid of it has been liberating. We’ve already downsized so much that our house will be nearly empty when we return, which will probably motivate us to sell it. We’ll worry about that later. For now, we feel like we’re unloading the excess baggage of our old lives. Already we can sense how this lighter load will give us more flexibility to seek adventure and embrace what life has to offer.

Leaving my job and then joining the Peace Corps was the nudge we needed to undertake this process. Now that we’ve nearly completed it, I feel like someone who waited until a heart attack to get serious about losing weight. I wish I’d begun moving in this direction years ago. Stuff happens in life, for sure, but it doesn’t need to accumulate in such a large pile in my closet.

We’re excited about traveling to Moldova in less than six weeks. This brief video shows you where we’re going. As Peace Corps volunteers, we’re not approaching it as a “travel destination” — but you can.

We’re also looking forward to the music. Last week we went to see the Romanian brass band Fanfare Ciocarlia perform here in Durham. Although we’ve begun studying Romanian, the main language in Moldova, we weren’t able to follow what the singers were saying. (Not yet!)

If you have a house, cars, a dog and a modern American life, how hard would it be to leave it all behind?

It would be hard. Really hard. Trust me.

The hardest thing Champa and I will be leaving to serve in the Peace Corps is our two sons and their families, especially our grandchildren. We expect to stay in regular contact but will miss them terribly.

During the past several weeks, though, we’ve been so busy taking care of everything else that we’ve barely had time to think about this.

This photo shows the stuff we’ve begun moving into a storage room in our Durham house, which we’re renting while we’re gone. We hired a local property manager a few weeks ago and just heard yesterday he might have found renters for the first year.

Tomorrow we’re driving to Winston-Salem to meet again with a family that may adopt our beloved dog, Bailey. A friend is buying Champa’s car and I’m giving my car to my son.

I still need to cancel everything from my library card to our gym memberships, forward our mail and shut off our electricity, gas and other utilities. I have to call our bank and credit card companies to alert them to our travel plans. I already ordered an additional card from a company that pays for foreign ATM withdrawls.

Absentee ballots? You bet, since North Carolina is likely to be a swing state in the election. Medical insurance? I’m suspending our current coverage while we’re covered through Peace Corps. I can’t forget the EZ-Pass device in my car, which bills me every month. So does Netflix, so I’ll need to cancel both of those. I’ve also been scouring our bills to make sure I don’t miss anything else.

On Tuesday, I’m visiting our bank to add my sister to our checking account and give her power of attorney while we’re gone. I still need to check our wills, buy souvenirs for our host families and create electronic copies of important documents in my file cabinet.

We just bought Champa her own laptop and spent several hours loading it with apps and documents. We bought shoes to walk on Moldova’s muddy roads and boots to survive its winters. I now have a new winter coat, too. We still need new suitcases. In fact, as I look through the “suggested packing list” we got from Peace Corps Moldova, we need a lot of things.

Simultaneously, and ironically, we’ve been downsizing and purging 36 years of stuff from our house. We’ve donated hundreds of books to the Durham library and dozens of bags of clothing and household goods to local charities.

Back when I joined Peace Corps the first time, as a 24-year-old in 1979, I threw some stuff in a couple of suitcases, said goodbye to my parents and headed for the airport. Now I feel like we’ve already proven the old Peace Corps slogan that serving as a volunteer is the “toughest job you’ll ever love.” Who knew it would be so tough even before we left?