Relationships

One of the things I will miss the most here is the relationships I have developed, no matter how big or small.

I love the 5th form girls who like to walk with me to and from school. I was walking home the other day and ran into some of them. These girls are so easy to love. We talked about English class, America, and all sorts of things. The whole time they listened to me and they were so interested in what I had to say. It was so difficult trying to explain to them why I’m going home this summer.

I appreciate the head maintenance man at our school, who never says a word to me and mistook me for a student the first month I was here, but he always greets me with tilt of his head.

Trips the local store are really pleasant because the women who work there recognize me and are very patient with me while I try to tell them what I want to buy.

I’m going to miss Veronica, who is a teacher at my school and she met me in Chisinau to take me to Criuleni for my first visit. She always greets me with a huge hello and a smile on her face, and then proceeds to tell me I look nice or checks to make sure I’m okay.

My host mom is always so kind to me. She’s patient with me when I don’t understand the Romanian. She compliments my cooking. And she often checks with me to make sure everything is okay.

It’s nice to have these good relationships; it’s going to be the people I miss the most when I leave.

What I've Done So Far

With the end of my service quickly approaching (4 months), I’ve been reflecting on my time here. And sometimes it’s much easier to remember things that weren’t successful rather than what I did accomplish. So I decided to make a list of my accomplishments to put things in better perspective:

• Partner taught grades 5-10, in which I’ve introduced student-centered activities to my partners
• Communication director for GLOW/TOBE (Girls Leading Our World and Teaching Our Boys Excellence), a work initiative that teaches youth gender empowerment and leadership skills
• Taught an adult English class at UNIT, the town’s youth center
• Lead an English club for youth at UNIT
• Tutored English for 10th form students
• Developed an English resource room for partner teachers to keep all English resources we’ve made and collected
• Created numerous resources for English teachers
• Created individualized lessons for beginner students

I Choose Happiness

I feel like I’ve been kind of whiney lately. I want you to know that I am happy here. Despite the difficulties and oppositions I face, I like my job. And although there are numerous things I would change (if you couldn’t tell from the last couple entries), there no other place I would rather be right now.

But with the difficulties of this job, I can sometimes forget to be happy. I’ve recently heard the phrase that “you choose to be happy”, so I’m trying to make sure I’m happy. And I have plenty to be happy about. But sometimes it’s easy to think about what you don’t have and what else you want instead of what you already have.

I know that’s what I have a problem with here; I always want more. I want more passion or more dedication or more resources. But I wouldn’t be needed here if they had those things. So as it turns out, teaching my partners how to be thrifty with what is available is not only helping them, but helping me as well for it is teaching me to make the most of what you have. Be happy with what you have; there lies true happiness.

I also have a problem with comparing myself to other volunteers. If you ever join PC, the biggest piece of advice I could give you is don’t compare yourself with other volunteers. Each volunteer’s work is relative to the abilities of the village. Every time I hear a success story, I can’t help but think “Why can’t I do that?” I also had decided to focus my work on dedicating my time to building resources rather working on obtaining grant money to purchase things, which limits a lot what I can do as volunteer.

I tend to create this “Super Volunteer” in my head. I hear success story from one volunteer and then a different one from another. In my mind, I add them all together and feel like everyone else is Super Volunteer doing everything.

Well, Super Volunteer does not exist, and I must remind myself of that every once in awhile. But that doesn’t mean I can’t try my hardest and be happy with and I can achieve.

Serenity Prayer

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 

The courage to change the things I can, 

And wisdom to know the difference. 

I’ve always loved that prayer, and it never rang so true until I had this job. Everyday, I have to tell myself “You can’t do everything”, and everyday I try to prove this statement wrong. But I’m must face facts and be okay with not being able to fix everything.

It’s a real challenge picking what I can change and what I can’t. It’s like saying what do I care more about, or picking which problems are fixable as opposed to lost causes. It’s not always an easy decision. And finding the serenity to accept I can’t change certain things is difficult.

When PC first told me about my assignment, they told me that it was very likely I would see corporal punishment in the classrooms. Luckily, I haven’t seen that. But what is seen as acceptable for how people talk to each other is hard for me to handle. It’s acceptable for people to call each other stupid or yell at them to shut up; this goes for teacher-to-students as well as peer-to-peer. Anger is more often expressed. On numerous occasions, I’ve seen students cry and no one does anything about it.

There are also problems with way the education is valued (or not valued). Moreover, all the other problems I’ve mentioned before.

I end up putting a lot of energy into trying to inspire change with certain things without ever seeing a result. It’s very tiring. And although I know I must accept I can’t change everything, sometimes I wonder if it’s okay if I never stop trying to change certain things that may be impossible for me to change.

Why Is Peace Corps So Difficult?

There is a reason Peace Corps advertises that this job is “the toughest job you’ll ever love”; this job is incredibly difficult. But sometimes I wonder what makes it so hard. Of course I miss my friends and family back home, but not to the extent of tainting this experience. And I miss several luxuries I had back home, but I have indoor plumbing that works most of the time, the public transportation in my village is easy, and I have good quality clothes for the winter weather. So what’s the hardest part of this job?

To me, the part that makes this job so difficult is that I’m working to inspire change within a foreign system that is somewhat restraining. I have to work with poorly designed textbooks that we must teach by and we can’t stray to far from. And I try to work with it. I can see that the textbooks are poor, but complaining about them won’t make positive change. Instead, I work with my partners to make the best of the situation.

Teachers here don’t have previous pedagogy training that is current. So I work with them to include new pedagogy and teaching methods in their lessons. Additionally, I hope to inspire them to enjoy teaching with these up-to-date teaching techniques.

There’s also corruption in the system. Nepotism is often overlooked, despite the evidence of poor performance. Moreover, many college professors allow students to pay for their grades. It’s difficult to teach the value of honest and not cheating when this is allowed later in life.

Furthermore, I’m not causing direct change. When you have money to donate, you can see the products bought with said money right away. When you volunteer to build a school, you see the physical structure. But I work to inspire change. I work to teach my partners how to be better teachers, and that’s not something I can see right away.

So it’s that leap of faith that makes this so hard; hoping and trusting that the work I’ve done is a positive change that remains once I’ve gone.

Teaching Profession in Moldova

The teaching profession is quite different than America. First of all, there is no or little pedagogy training in college. My understanding is that teachers get a degree in what they will teach. To be an English teacher, the only requirement is that you speak English. Since pedagogy isn’t taught, many teachers don’t understand best practices. And while there are seminars the teachers can attend once they are teachers, the seminars are taught by other teachers, who also didn’t receive pedagogy training.

Teaching is in this terrible cycle. The teachers aren’t taught how to teach, so they teach how teachers taught them when they were students. The students receive this teaching. The students become teachers and don’t receive pedagogy training. So they teach how their teachers taught them. And the cycle of using outdated teaching methods continues.

As a passionate teacher myself, it was very upsetting when I learned that often teachers here become teachers because it’s the only job available in their village or town. This explains why so many teachers lack the passion (and sometimes ability) to be good teachers. It also explains why many of them don’t spend extra time to prepare for lessons outside the school hours.

Furthermore, the job is highly underpaid. One of my partners mentioned how much she was paid per month, and it was the same amount I pay for my utilities here each month.

This isn’t to say there aren’t good teachers here. There are some who care and work hard to learn. But the majority is how I mentioned.