At Last! Site Announcements!

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Written Wednesday April 4, 2007
It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here five weeks. Last week was our halfway through training mark and we found out our site assignments and job descriptions. First, though we had a half day of language “assessment” where we rotated through six different stations with our language teachers pretending to be shop keepers, restaurant waitstaff, postal clerks, our gazda families etc. putting us into situations where we had to speak Romanian with them, so they could give us feedback on what we need to practice.

I didn’t study too much before the day because I didn’t want my results to be artificially positive, and I’m satisfied with my feedback – four B’s and two A’s but I still have a long way to go. Anyway that in the morning and site announcements in the afternoon made for a very exciting and emotionally exhausting day.
My site where I will be living for the next two years is in the city of Deva which has approximately 71,000 people.
If you go to the Wikepedia site for Deva in Romania, you’ll know about as much as me because a printout of that is what I was given along with some information about my organization. There was a fortress there built in the 1300’s on some nearby mountain top – and it exploded I guess, but the ruin is still there, and apparently it’s a nice mountain in a city surrounded by the mountains of Transylvania.

I’ve been told in Deva I can look forward to modern connivances like mobile phone service, and the internet in my apartment which make it a little hard to believe I’m in the Peace Corps, but then I will be doing my laundry by hand since everyday things in the US like washing machines are not common.
I’ll be working with a six year old NGO that has never had a volunteer before. It’s called Mara Foundation (Fundaţia Mara) and provides services and resources to at-risk youth in Hunedoara County. From the information I’ve been given it looks like Mara Foundation focuses on formally institutionalized children who were in orphanages, children with HIV and mentally and physically handicapped children and their foster parents. It sounds like they wanted a volunteer with some new and different ideas to help them recruit volunteers, fundraise, help with public relations and hopefully do a little bit of programming as well.

My Program Manager in Peace Corps told me there were two places they were thinking of placing me and this is the one where I will have less opportunity to work directly with the kids, but I’ll also have plenty of opportunities for side projects in case I want to go to the local high schools and start an English Club or a Service Club or something.
After a busy day of site announcements and language assessment, I still wasn’t done. I got on a train for the nearby city of Pieşti and volunteer for one day on a Habitat for Humanity Project. It’s our opportunity as trainees to get out of the school on the weekend and do some manual labor – and its all expenses paid by Peace Corps.

While I was there I met TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) volunteer who currently lives in Deva. So I was able to get some info on the town and learn a little bit about what to expect. For example, there are three grocery stores and pizza and sandwich delivery is available. I’m told the best coffee shop in Romania is there (although we’ll have to see, I heard about a really good coffee shop in the Miamurişt area). It sounds like I’m pretty lucky and I have pretty reliable train and bus access to the rest of the country and surrounding countries. I’m six hours from Budapest. Three hours south of Clug – a big tourist spot. Apparently “Phil” was able to get on a bus in Deva and travel to Istanbul. And he might be moving there after PC so if he as a couch to crash on…

I also met his girlfriend, a PC volunteer in Pieşti who’s from the Mississippi Gulf Coast – so we talked about my volunteer experience there! Even though they’re both leaving Romania in July it’s nice to have someone who can introduce me to the town and help me get situated (besides my second host family, I’ll be living with for the month of May, that is) and it was cool to talk to someone else who knew what I was talking about when I mentioned my experience in Mississippi after the hurricane.

The work on Saturday was enough to make you proud after you did it. We ended up deepening two sixty foot trenches each by three feet, laying the pipe that will eventually bring indoor plumbing to the house that was being renovated and then burying the pipe again. It wouldn’t have been so bad if it weren’t for the fact that we were digging into clay with large stones buried in it. And that it was so cold that after digging for three hours I still didn’t want to take off my sweatshirt. But I’m not complaining. It was good to get out in the aer liber and have some physical exertion even if my back and shoulders were already sore from carrying my bags before I even got to the Habitat Site.
In other news, (briefly) I was able to spend some time in Bucharest on my way back to Ploieşti last Sunday so some other volunteers and I were able to attend a craft and flower fair, held ever Palm Sunday at the Peasants Museum. Due to connections with a friend of a member of Peace Corps staff who works at the museum I was able to see the MOST AWESOME PUPPET SHOW EVER even though it was for kids. Perhaps I will post on just the puppet show at a later date. I was very glad I decided to go to the craft fair, although carrying my weekend bag around Bucharest after a day of digging trenches in clay was not my idea of fun and I was sore for not less than two days afterward. In fact, I’m still a little sore now.

Other adventures of a theatrical nature include, I went to see the show Biloxi Blues playing here in Ploieşti, although it was expensive $50 RON and I had to get money out of my checking account at home. I knew the story from having seen the movie about two years ago. My friend, Micah didn’t fair so well because he saw the movie when he was eight, but it was interesting to watch the story unfold and practice listening to Romanian while only understanding a word hear and there. The best part was hearing amongst all the rapid-fire Romanian the words “Biloxi Mississippi.” I was especially interested in seeing the show having recently spent time in Mississippi in close proximity to Biloxi. Luckily the characters in the play are mostly from other states or I would have felt compelled to point out that Mississippians pronounce it “Bluxi.”