Tag Archives: David Jarmul

Busy, Busy

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My schedule lately rivals the busy American lifestyle I thought I’d left behind.

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At my primary job at the Ialoveni library, I’m co-teaching three robotics classes, tutoring a student in English and working with the director and others on various projects.

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I’m mentoring a team of four girls for the upcoming Diamond Challenge competition that promotes youth entrepreneurship.

I’m working with several other Peace Corps volunteers to develop training materials for Moldova’s tourism industry.

IMG_7617I’m helping a local Romani leader trying to establish radio stations to serve her community in Moldova.

I’m traveling to the Peace Corps office every Friday and working with them online throughout the week on Peace Corps Stories and other communications tasks.

I’ve been helping several volunteers and community members individually with articles, grad school applications, media challenges and other things.

I also write regularly for this blog and elsewhere, trying to advance the Peace Corps goal of promoting understanding between Americans and other people.

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Champa’s been busy lately, too, with school and other activities ever since classes opened again on September 1. The two of us also do everyday things like buy groceries, cook dinner, read books and, of course, hang out with our host family. This past Saturday we hosted a dinner party. This coming weekend we plan to attend both a jazz concert and a local cultural festival.

In other words: We’re busy. My life is not quite as intense as when I was running a university news office, but it’s a long way from being “retired.”

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We have only about ten months before we complete our service and return home. Until then we’re trying to do as much as we can to serve the people of Moldova. We’re not alone in this. As I wrote recently after a conference with the other Peace Corps volunteers in our group, many of them have abundant to-do lists as well.

Simultaneously, many Peace Corps volunteers in Moldova and around the world, especially those serving in smaller communities, have found a quieter life where they may still be having a big impact. Each of our experiences is different; “busy” does not mean “better.”

And here’s another thing: Many Moldovans, especially women, are even busier than we are. They’re raising families, working in offices, sowing crops, feeding animals, tending gardens, cooking meals and helping neighbors wth vastly fewer resources than we have back home. Yet I’ve never heard any of them refer to a “fast-paced Moldovan lifestyle.” Maybe they just haven’t had the time to tell me.

 

 

Action! at the Library

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I produced this dramatic “movie trailer” on iMovie to highlight new services available at Ialoveni’s library. Also available on YouTube.

Animation Club

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Disney Pixar? These young animators are producing original videos at Ialoveni’s library for children. Watch what they’re doing! (1:40. Also on YouTube.)

Street People

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I yearned for Duke’s famous basketball coach when I took the #9 bus to the Moldova Peace Corps office on Friday.

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The bus drove along a street named for the Moldovan writer and artist Gheorghe Asachi, turned at a street named for the poet Vasile Alecsandri and continued past a street named for a lawyer, Avram Iancu. I got off at a street named for another writer, Alexandru Hâjdeu.

Finally, at a street named for a Moldavian historian, Grigore Ureche, I reached the Peace Corps, which is named for … well, nobody. Here in Moldova they might have called it “Peace Corps John F. Kennedy” or “Peace Corps Sargent Shriver.”

Moldovans are passionate about naming streets and institutions after prominent people, especially writers and political figures. The central street in Chișinau, the capital, is named for the beloved king Ștefan cel Mare și Sfânt, or “Steven the Great and Holy.”

Other large streets in the city honor everyone from Orthodox church leaders to Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. There are also streets named for famous dates, like “31 August 1989,” when Moldova adopted Romanian as its official language.

In Ialoveni, where we currently live, we have adjacent streets named after famous dates in May, as well as many streets and buildings named for people. The library, where I work, and one of the two main schools are named for Petre Ștefănucă, a Bessarabian sociologist who died in a Russian gulag. The other main school, where Champa works, is named after Andrei Vartic, a writer and physicist.

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Seeing all of these names has been a learning experience for me. I grew up near New York City, which has a systematic grid of streets and avenues with numbers. Many other U.S. cities have numbered streets as well. For many years, Champa and I lived near Washington, D.C., where many streets are named after U.S. states. In Durham, our home now back in the States, our subdivision has streets named after trees; ours is Pine Bark Trail.

To be sure, New York also has the George Washington Bridge, Lincoln Tunnel and FDR Drive, and many cities in America have streets named for Martin Luther King or other people. My personal favorite is Champa Street in Denver. But we also have plentiful streets with simple names like “Main Street” or “Market Street.”

Well, simple if you’re an American, I suppose. For a Moldovan visitor, “Lexington Avenue” or “Rock Creek Parkway” may sound as foreign as “Strada Mihail Kogălniceanu” does to me.

I’m sure Mihail was a great guy. I can’t help but think, though, it would have been easier if they’d handled him like our own famous Mike in Durham and just called him Coach K.

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Faces of Change

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IMG_7370There are few galleries in Moldova where young artists can show their work. This weekend, though, more than 20 of them are taking part in an exhibit inside an old museum, featuring more than 100 portraits ranging from painting to caricature.

IMG_7406Lucia Codreanu and Maks Graur, both young artists themselves, organized and curated the free show in downtown Chișinău, running through Sunday afternoon. You can see some of the work here.

Lucia, who just graduated from high school and will soon begin studying art at a university in Romania, is amazing. She’s already assembled an impressive portfolio that includes my own favorites, her whimsical Moldovan reinterpretations of famous paintings.

I came to know Lucia well during last year’s Diamond Challenge competition that encourages entrepreneurship among young Moldovans. She was one of the three high school students on the team I mentored, which ended up placing second nationally in the business category. It was a joy to work with her and the other two students. Lucia was the designer for their project to create a personalized children’s book, which she showed in this video clip:

I encouraged one of that competition’s judges, an American who runs a web development company here, to give her a look. He loved her work, hired her and says she did a great job working part-time on web projects while finishing her final year of high school.

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Lucia’s partner in this weekend’s “Faces” exhibit is also impressive. Maks Graur, who you see with Lucia in the gallery here, has been studying art in England. He recently completed a Draw for Dogs project in which he drew portraits for people who donated to charities that assist stray dogs.

When Champa and I visited on Saturday morning, Lucia told me the question she and Maks have been asked most often is why they organized the show for free. Volunteering, at least as we know it in America, is not a strong tradition in Moldova, which is why people here often have a hard time understanding why Peace Corps Volunteers would leave their homes to serve others.

Young people like Lucia give me hope that things can change. Surrounded by the portraits she and Maks pulled together, she looked to me on Saturday like the face of Moldova’s future.

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Celebrating ‘Our Language’

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Suppose America organized a big party every year to celebrate the English language.

That’s what Moldova does with Romanian through its annual Limba Noastră holiday, which it celebrated again on Thursday. IMG_7223The words mean “our language” in Romanian, which is the official national language here.

Simultaneously, one in four Moldovans speak another language as their native tongue, mainly Russian, Ukranian or Gagauz, all of which have official status in certain regions.

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Limba noastră is also the title of Moldova’s national anthem. Just as The Star-Spangled Banner honors the American flag, Moldova’s anthem proclaims the Romanian language to be a “treasure” that is “more than holy,” a heritage that “surges from deep shadows the past.” You can see a video of the anthem at the top of this post or on YouTube.

The Limba Noastră holiday goes beyond language to celebrate Moldova’s heritage more broadly. It occurs immediately after the country’s Independence Day, adding a cultural counterpoint to the politics of Moldova’s identity. Both celebrations are followed by First Bell, on September 1, when schools across Moldova hold colorful ceremonies to open the new year and ring out summer.

Here in Ialoveni, hundreds of people gathered at the Casa de Cultură, or cultural center, on Thursday to celebrate Limba Noastră. There were musical performances, dramas, dances and poetry, some of which you can see here. The library where I work, Biblioteca publică orăşenească „Petre Ştefănucă,” organized the program together with the town hall, or primăria, and the cultural section of the county government, or Consiliul Raional. It also created a series of exhibits celebrating Moldovan authors and the Romanian language. That’s library director Valentina Plamadeala speaking at the ceremony in the photo above.

During its Soviet period, Romanian was called Moldovan to distinguish it from the adjacent country with which so many Moldovans feel connected. Some people still insist on calling the language “Moldovan” even though its differences with the Romanian spoken in Romania are slight.

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In places like Ialoveni that have strong ties to Romania, most people embrace the holiday, seeing the Romanian language as part of their ethnic identity. One speaker at Thursday’s ceremony recalled how he and others were forced to speak Russian in the years before Moldova’s independence. For them, limba noastră has a resonance that goes deeper than the language itself.

Elsewhere in Moldova, the holiday can be perceived differently. One of my fellow volunteers who lives in a Russian-speaking area said his host father calls it limba voastră, or your (not our) language.

The relationship between language and identity is complicated, in other words, and not always easy for an American to understand. We have plenty of experience with these issues back home, though, so the story can sound familiar despite the translation.

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Want to learn more? This article offers useful background about Moldova’s languages. Also interesting is this article about how language is perceived by different groups in Moldova. [Hat tip for the second article to my volunteer colleague Haley Bader, whose excellent blog you should check out.]

Oui. Da. Yes, Dinner

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Can you say “dinner” in five languages?

That’s the challenge we faced last week when our host family welcomed some friends.

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One guest was a Moldovan psychologist (below in the green blouse) who now lives in Paris. She speaks both French and English but her French boyfriend, who came with her, speaks neither Romanian nor English.

Champa and I try to converse with our host family in Romanian but often speak some English with them, especially with Alisa, who speaks English well. (That’s Alisa with Champa in the photo below.) The two of us also speak some Nepali, just like back home.

Our host family is fluent in both Romanian and Russian, like most Moldovans. When people visit, their conversation is often a mishmash of both languages.

IMG_7043In other words … well, yes: in other words. It made for an interesting dinner. I tried to speak French with the boyfriend (shown here, with the beard) since I studied it in high school and once spoke it fairly well. But it was frustrating. I understood much of what he said but sputtered in Romanian when I tried to reply. IMG_7046

Just to make the situation more confusing, Champa and I studied Spanish years ago, and she occassionally says por favor instead of vă rog here in Moldova.

So our dinner conversation was complicată, compliquée and complicated. As you can see, though, the food was delightful, as were the company and the conversation. We all laughed, toasted, ate too much and made new friends. It was a memorable evening of speaking and eating with many tongues.

Our Group Reunites

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Our group got back together this past week.

Champa and I came to Moldova in June 2016 with about 60 other Americans. We shared the rigors of Peace Corps training for two months before swearing in as volunteers and moving to our individual posts across the country.

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That was the last time we were all together until Peace Corps reassembled us on Monday for a three-day “mid-service” conference at a hotel in Vadul liu Voda, near the Nistru River.

It was great to see everyone, albeit without some who left during the past year. We compared experiences, swapped stories and spent time with friends who understand personally how transformative this past year has been. Our four program groups had met separately during the year and we’d seen colleagues around town, but not all together.

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We feel a bond with everyone despite the differences in our ages, backgrounds and job assignments. Champa and I are living as an older married couple in a small city near the capital, while some other volunteers are fresh out of college and living alone in villages. Members of our group, M31, work with teachers or are assigned to libraries, mayor’s offices, business incubators or other settings.

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As we were reminded at the conference, though, we share our mission of service and international friendship. We’ve all taken a break from our American lives to interact every day with our Moldovan host families, work partners, neighbors, students and friends.

Our conference included sessions on community development, helping people with disabilities, service learning, teaching life skills and other topics. We discussed our journeys as volunteers and how to stay healthy and resilient during the year ahead. We had a session on Moldova’s history. Since most of us learned to speak Romanian, we also got a crash course in how to say a few expressions in Russian, which is widely spoken here.

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The most inspiring moment for me came during our final session, when the members of my community development group took turns describing their plans for the coming year. They spoke about dance programs, journalism clubs, robotics teams, English clubs, youth projects, women’s groups and much more. Their lists were so long, in fact, that the session ran well past its deadline. I was humbled to be part of such an amazing group of people, whose dedication is reflected in our three other groups as well.

The next time we assemble will be for our “completion of service,” or COS, conference shortly before we return home. In the meantime, we’ll continue interacting on projects, sharing news on our Facebook page and getting to know the volunteers in the group behind us, who just started their own assignments.

It’s an adventure we’re all experiencing together, even when we are apart.

The Material World

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No one is going to confuse Gemeni, a department store in the heart of Chișinău, with Milan or Paris, or even with an American fabric shop. Located next to a McDonald’s on the city’s main street, Gemeni is old. It’s cramped. It has no parking, no food court, no modern rest rooms. It’s more of a bazaar than a modern department store. Most of its shops are small or tiny.

But if you’re looking to sew anything from a simple shirt to an elaborate gown, it’s a great place to shop. The third and fourth floors, especially, are abundant with fabric, yarn, buttons, ribbons, zippers, thread and everything else you need. The prices are nothing special but the selection is great.

Champa and I learned this recently when we bought supplies for a big grant project she has begun to create a costume wardrobe for her school’s drama program. We shopped with Ana, the head of the program (middle in the photo below), and Ina, a designer and seamstress (left) who is helping with the project.

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Most of Gemeni’s vendors are women. They rent the stalls, which are arranged by category throughout the store. On the first floor, for example, are shops selling perfume, stationery and jewelry.IMG_6971

The store, whose name means twins in Romanian, evokes its Soviet heritage. It’s functional, not glamorous. Customers almost always pay in cash. They receive their purchases in cheap plastic bags rather than the store bags we expect back home. Customer service desks? Benches for resting? Fountains? As we say here at the blog: not exactly.

IMG_6961Bolts of velvet, cotton and other material surrounded many of the shops we visited. Champa and her partners visited one place after another to select the best cloth for the costumes they’re planning. They also bought buttons, gold braid, ribbons and other haberdashery supplies. Within a few hours, we were loaded down with bags, which we carried on a bus across town to Ina’s studio. She is now cutting and assembling the cloth for each costume — Romeo, Juliet, kings, queens and more.

During the next several months, Ina will join with students and parents at Champa’s school to sew these pieces into more than 40 glorious costumes, which I’ll describe in future posts. For now, one thing is for sure: They have great material to get started.

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Where Are You, Reader?

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Screen Shot 2017-08-12 at 11.27.18 AMMore than 12,000 readers have visited “Not Exactly Retired” since its launch two years ago. I was curious where all of you are located, so recently ran a search on WordPress, which hosts the site.

Here are the results, in order.

Not surprisingly, the largest group of readers is in the United States, followed by Moldova, where we are serving as Peace Corps Volunteers.

The Top Five also includes Nepal, where Champa was born and we maintain close ties, so that’s not a surprise either. Nor is Romania, which is next to Moldova, especially since I wrote a series of stories in April about our trip to Transylvania, some of which were featured on sites within the country.

Screen Shot 2017-08-12 at 12.02.12 PMSome of the other “Top Dozen,” though, surprised me. Who are all of you reading “Not Exactly” in Ecuador or the Philippines? Are you fellow Peace Corps Volunteers in those countries? How about in India, Germany and Italy? I know at least one loyal reader in Singapore (hi Corinna!), but who are the rest of you? The data provided by WordPress provide only a glimpse.

I’d love to hear from you, even if your country is not on this list. You may be in one of the other countries shown in yellow on the map. I’m so happy to be sharing our journey with you. Please comment here or send me a message at djarmul@gmail.com. Tell me who you are!