Take your time.
That’s what Peace Corps staff told us during training: Learn about your community, form relationships, win trust. If you do that, your projects and work agenda will emerge naturally.
They were right, of course. But I’ve had trouble letting go of old habits. I keep checking my cell phone for messages. I don’t go home until I’ve completed every item on my mental “to do” list.
Back when I was at the university, I used to advise new communications employees to meet people and get the lay of the land before they rushed off to produce their articles and websites. You’ll be busy soon enough, I told them. Soon enough, they were.
During our training here, we were told essentially the same thing. You’d think I would have internalized the message. Yet, although I’ve been actively meeting people, attending events and learning about my new surroundings, I can’t get the checklist out of my head.
Champa finds this amusing. “I thought you were ‘not exactly retired,’ ” she told me.
She’s right, too, of course. My new life is not as hectic as my old one, but it’s rich and productive, like those of so many of the other volunteers here. On Wednesday, I had a great chat with the president of the raion council, or county government, where I work. He’s an impressive and thoughtful man, working long hours for little pay to serve his community. After I got back to my office, a colleague dropped by to tell me about a local archaeological project that needs support, leading me to spend time online exploring possible funding sources.
In my inbox was a message from a North Carolina State University expert on grapes and wine production. I’d written her to ask if she might have any training materials to share with a colleague here. It turns out she visited Moldova not long ago and has an entire website.
I got another message from the communications director of Dreamups, the local entrepreneurial hub I wrote about in my last post, setting up a follow-up discussion for us to share ideas about how they might reach out to the international news media.
A Peace Corps colleague contacted me, too, to answer some questions I had about an upcoming “Let Girls Learn” conference.
On my way home, I went to the local telephone store to upgrade my wifi account and to the grocery story to buy food for dinner. Champa and I splurged by buying several flaky placintas — cherry-filled for breakfast, cheese-filled for lunch. The store has a plate for each kind, including one whose name we didn’t recognize. I asked the clerk whether she knew the word in English. “Halloween,” she said, which we eventually understood to mean “pumpkin.”
When you add it up, it was a rewarding day, even before I studied Romanian after dinner.
Starting on Monday, I’ll reunite with my training group for two more weeks. I’m expecting the staff to remind us anew to be patient and have faith in the process.
Once again, they’ll be right. This time, I plan to pay closer attention. Really. I may even put a reminder in my electronic calendar.
Matei joined Degeler on the stage, both in armchairs, one wearing shorts, the other a black T shirt. A projected slide behind them showed the event’s sponsors — local companies, media partners, the U.S. government and others.
Back when I was in Durham, I interacted with the thriving local startup scene, which I helped publicize through articles such as 
“It’s a nightmare to juggle everything,” says Dee, who discovered the problem during her first few days as an English teacher in the small Moldovan city of Calarasi. Her own schedule kept changing along with everyone else’s. School officials could use existing software to develop new schedules, but they had to pay high fees to print each version — this in Europe’s poorest country.
To be sure, Nepali was harder for me at the outset. Its sentence structures seemed so bizarre that I walked out of my first language class, ready to quit in despair. Within a few days, though, I got the hang of it. By the end of our training, I was able to have a simple conversation. Today I still speak it easily, if imperfectly.
Fortunately, I had an incredible teacher, Diana, who was skillful and tireless in helping my classmates and me learn everything. That’s her in the flower dress with us. With Diana’s help, I ended up with a good score on the exam they administered before we swore in as volunteers last week. She kept telling me I was doing fine, and I guess she was right.
Worldwide, Americans over age 50 comprise about 7 percent of the nearly 7,000 Peace Corps volunteers now serving in 63 countries around the world. With its better medical facilities and programs in fields such as business development that attract people with lots of real-world experience, Moldova attracts higher numbers.
We differ from our younger counterparts in some ways. Learning a new language may be tougher for us, although many of us are doing fine in our Romanian classes. We may run slower in a group soccer game, if we participate at all. When several younger friends went to get tattoos recently, they knew better than to invite me along. They also may party harder and make surprising cultural references. When I was in the Peace Corps office the other day, a Carole King song started playing and the young woman next to me said, “Hey, it’s that song from the Gilmore Girls!”
"Not Exactly Retired" 