(Former CU Cross Country All-American Erik Heinonen is abroad with the Peace Corps and is working on a very special project. He is going to blog for the next few weeks to give Buff fans a look at the wonderful work he is doing in Moldova.)
Welcome and Bine Ati Venit to "Help Build Our Field of Dreams." Over the coming weeks, I will be blogging about the Peace Corps Partnership Program project I'm working on here in Moldova, and a little about my experiences as a health education and life skills teacher.
October 9
For those of you who tuned in for Moldova, "Field of Dreams," here is a video showing the project from start to finish. Enjoy and thanks again for your support.
August 11
It was the sweetest melody I've heard in Moldova, a mix of squeaking chains, laughter and basketball striking pavement.
The project's opening day of activities, which started just before noon, had long since finished, and I was returning from a celebration dinner at the mayor's office and a subsequent walk through the village with two Peace Corps friends who had come to take part in our big day. But as we approached the small bend in the road that just hides our project site, the noises that greeted us in the falling darkness—noises not heard in this village for decades—were not hard to discern: dozens of kids jumping, swinging, dribbling and spinning in the Sunday evening dusk.
Although it lacked a little in organization, the push to finish last-minute details meaning that preparation for the opening ceremony itself didn't quite get the attention it ought to have, the day had been an unqualified success. The few dozen children and parents gathered near the gate at 11:30 a.m., by noon had become more than a hundred, then two hundred, then three, as our planned program quickly turned to all-comers-welcome games of beach volleyball, basketball, and soccer, while little kids swarmed over the playground and parents sat in the shade chatting and eating ice cream and watermelon. With our program clearly out the window, I just drifted, trying to suppress the urge to organize or find something that needed to be done so that I could soak up the moment as best as I could and get out of the way of the kids who had waited so long for this day.
In the end, that's the ultimate measure of this project. We set out to provide the children of the village with a place to play, a place just for them, the kind of place that every child deserves. And we did it. In the evenings since, the complex has been overrun with kids, high schoolers and pre-schoolers alike, making this the kind of community gathering place I had envisioned—realistically or not—when we first began working on this project.
Theoretically, since those early discussions nearly a year ago, everyone who took part in the completion of this project learned something: about community organizing, about working in a team, about analyzing and solving problems. Those are the pillars of a community project, and the reason why the Peace Corps, whose first goal is developing capacity in the countries where volunteers serve, exists. It may be a while before we see the results of the lessons learned here, but there is cause to be optimistic. There is still work to be done. We need to reseed grass in several places, plant trees around the perimeter, and another gate would be great near the gymnastics bars, among other improvements or additions. Most of those things will have to wait until the fall, and whether or not they happen will depend on what money the school and mayor's office can find in their meager budgets and in the community. But that realization, that the work isn't done yet, is there. To maintain the facility, in a country where so much infrastructure has crumbled over the last 20 years, will require the same kind of effort it took to build it, but the hope is that knowing they put in so much time and heart over the last year, the people of Bravicea will fight to make sure it is taken care of.
Nonetheless, for me, whether I like it or not, this is the end, when I have to take the final step of letting go, of allowing the community to assume full responsibility for the project. And I could feel it in the hours and days after the opening, the same kind of euphoric sense of accomplishment giving way to a weary depression that reminds me of the end of a cross country season. So much energy goes into the process, you think about it, obsess about it every day, and when it's done, after all the cheering of championship day fades, it leaves a hole not quickly filled. Several days later, as I clean out my room and pack my bags in preparation to head back to the United States, the cloud of melancholy still hadn't lifted.
I'm not alone in it, however. As the mayor and I sat down in his office the day after the opening to go over what needed to be done in the weeks to come, we recognized the emotion in each other, the mayor likening it to the feeling of the final days of his two years in the Soviet army three decades ago. Your body, he recalled, just feels it, that you've finished, but in the fog of weariness neither joy nor regret outstrips the other.
For Veronica and Mariana, two of my 12th graders who had been amongst our regular volunteers over the last month-and-a-half, painting, watering and pulling weeds for hours at a time without complaint, it was more the latter. It's awesome to have this place, they said, but it's sad knowing we're not going to meet Monday morning to work.
Yet that it's sad, depressing even, is at the same time beautiful, because it's that very longing that gets you moving on to the next goal, the next problem to be solved. And that too is what should define a community project, not just building capacity and knowledge, but also the kind of hope, belief and desire that eventually leads to action. To do so in Moldova, a country where many seem to have given up after seeing what was a better life in the material sense crumble, will be a long battle, but maybe we've taken a small, but important, step in this village.
One afternoon in late July, as we were installing and painting benches, an older woman from the neighborhood who had passed through the complex earlier in the day and launched into a long—and not unfamiliar—monolouge about the "the war" and the Soviets and about what you could buy for a couple rubles back in the good old days of the USSR, took the short cut one more time through our work site.
"What, you're still working?" she asked, in a tone of voice that perhaps was to meant to have been amuzement but came off as something closer to you're-a-fool. "It will all be in vain. You're wasting your time."
My patience for that kind of attitude long-ago worn thin, I snapped back that it will be in vain if everyone thinks the way you do, and cursed under my breath as she ambled off.
"What do you mean, wasting our time?" I asked turing to Ion, the skinny, brown-eyed first-grader who was helping me scoop earth from two freshly dug holes, as if expecting the 6-year-old to draw on his wealth of hard-won wisdom to answer my rhetorical question.
Frowning, Ion glanced at the baba disappearing up the road, contemplated a moment, then turned back to me and smiled.
"We're not wasting our time, Mr. Erik, we're going to play here."
There is still hope.
August 3
The big news in Moldova this week is the re-run of the parliamentary election, three-and-a-half months after the the country's first efforts led to violent protests in the capitol, charges of fraud and other improprieties, and a stalemate that forced two-term communist president Vladimir Voronin to dissolve parliament and schedule a second election.
After winning 60 seats in April, one short of the 61 necessary to elect a president, the communist party again won the largest share of seats Wednesday, at 48, but the major opposition parties upped their combined total to 53. What exactly that means is not yet 100 percent clear. If the opposition manages to pick off eight seats, it can form a a coalition government and elect a president, however that's going to be quite a challenge. Not a single opposition delegate voted for Voronin following the first election. Thus, a a massive game of political chess is probably about to follow, with the possibility, if no compromise is reached, that another election will be necessary next year.
While I've been doing my best to—apolitically, as per Peace Corps rules— follow the race, which without doubt will be a momentous one for a small country struggling to keep its head above water, I've been watching with equal—if not greater attention—the weather forecast for the upcoming weekend.
After nearly a 11 months of planning and four months of work, our project opening day, Aug. 2, is nearly here, and it looks like we're going to have of sun and blue sky: 28 degrees and clear.
We've still got plenty of last-minute work to do before Sunday morning, however, none of it particularly momentous—retouching, raking, weeding—such that the euphoria of "we're finished" has started to creep in.
One thing that is totally finished is all the administrative paper work for the project, which I turned into Peace Corps last week. Looking one last time through the small mountain of receipts and work contracts, I had to smile at the modest project we started with—and some of our slightly unrealistic estimates of the materials we would need, for example 10 trucks of sand, which ended up being closer to 50 after we added a sand volleyball court to our plans. That was a risk we—a mayor, school director, librarian and volunteer—ran putting together a project without hiring a professional with whom to consult, but in the end the gamble seems to have paid off.
Our initial budget of $8,000 has grown to more than $20,000, thanks to the generosity of the nearly 130 individuals who donated money through the Peace Corps Partnership Program, and, heartening for me, on the part of the community. One of the Peace Corps requirements that must be met for a project to be approved is a community contribution of at least 25 percent. Our initial projects had us just scrapping by, at around 26 percent, and our village fundraising efforts we're particularly fruitful. But by the time I sat down to add up the final totals, figuring in all the donations of materials, mostly by the mayor's office but also from individuals in the community who saw our cause as a good one, that number increased to nearly more than 40 percent of our project total, allowing us to build a playground and the sand volleyball court, which we hadn't included in our initial plans.. And neither do those figures take into consideration all the hours of volunteer work, the vast majority coming from village children, who left their games to haul wheelbarrows, paint playground equipment, pull weeds and dig post holes.
"Mai degraba as lucra cu copiii decit adultii" said the mayor, whose push to improve life in the village is a constant battle against the latent pessimism of the Soviet-era, with a laugh one evening as we sunk used tires along the margin of the children's playground area while a crew of village kids stomped down the dirt around them.
"I'd rather work with kids than adults." I smiled and nodded in agreement.
And most importantly, our project has passed the kid test. Worn down by their constant pleas to play on the swings, slide, teeter-totter and merry-go-round, I've begun letting them into the playground in the evenings while we finish up the days work. I wish somehow I could share the glee the energy with which the kids line up to swing or go down the slide or ride themselves dizzy on the merry-go-round—as one told me recently as he painted the roof of our play structure, "I'd never thought I'd see something like this in the village"—with everyone who has contributed to the project back home, so they can know how much it means to these kids. At the very least, though, everyone in the village will get to see it, and hopefully be inspired to take on the next project, Sunday.
July 22
You know how it goes.
Beautiful blue sky, a hint of coolness lingers on a day that promises to be a scorcher, birds singing, and you've knelt down in the grass, a morning of work ahead of you.
Then you feel that unmistakable gooey wetness on the back of your neck and reach up to verify the identity of the substance, even though you know exactly what it is.
Bird poop. Joy.
In many cultures, including Moldova's, as rich with superstitions as any you're ever likely to encounter, such an event is said to be an augur of good things to come.
I'm not much into superstitions, Moldovan or otherwise, and it's worth noting that whatever the case, you've still got bird feces on your head, but at this point, I'm happy to take one for the team if doing so will bring us closer to finishing our project.
In the days since that little avian treat, we've enjoyed another kind of "gift from the heavens," in the form of rain showers that not only are absolutely necessary for the growth of the corn and grape crops on which many in my village depend, but have provided our grass, in the course of a few hours, with more water than we can muster in entire day with our single hose and pump drawing from a nearby well.
Realistically, we're not going to have a Folsom Field-esque carpet for our mini-soccer field by our project's opening date of August 2, and it may take another reseeding in the fall, if we can find money in the school budget, to get grass to grow in some patches where it has stubbornly refused. In many spots, though, it has come in beautifully, which meant that I had the pleasure, the other day, of mowing it for the first time.
I haven't had much cause to be homesick during my two years in Moldova, but occasionally there are moments when something
brings my mind back in a very visceral way to life in the States: the first crisp morning of fall that get the competitive juices of cross country season flowing, the taste of s'mores I prepared alongside some of my 12th graders on a recent camping trip with care-package marshmallows sent by Mom and Dad, and this past week, the smell and feel of freshly cut grass. It seems like such a mundane thing, mowing the lawn, and yet not having "experienced" it in two years, it provoked a surprisingly strong sensation of "home."
It certainly was a novel experience for the spectating crew of neighborhood kids, who pantomimed mowing the field with an imaginary lawn mowers, and frolicked in the grass cuttings left behind. Although there is certainly grass in other parts of the village, including at the soccer field in the center of Bravicea, the only maintained lawn belongs to the recently constructed Baptist Church, which kindly lent us its power mower for the afternoon. Otherwise, it would have been 1000 square meters of grass cutting by hand with a sythe—or leaving the neighborhood cows to graze it down, not exactly a precise option.
Our other bit of "good luck" has been a marked bump in the number of people volunteering to help. Perhaps that shouldn't be a surprise in that, as we draw closer to finishing, there are more eager hands, a kind of band-wagon effect, but in any case, after many days in which I worked alone or with one or two others, it was amazing to take a short water-break on a recent morning and count nearly 50 people at work, installing gymnastics bars, pulling weeds, painting the playground, digging post holes, preparing the basketball court to be marked, and carting wheelbarrows of dirt to help build the berm that will surround our sand volleyball court.
That made for a lot of ice cream to buy when we broke for a mid-day pause, but that's certainly another price-of-doing-business I'm willing to pay!
July 11
The wreck of the Hesperus.
It was one of those seemingly nonsensical sayings—at least to me, not being quite ready yet to appreciate Longfellow— that Mom used frequently when I was growing up, this particular one usually in reference to the disheveled state of my room.
In any case, I'm sure Mom—and Henry, too—would agree in my likening the current state of our project site to the fictional wreck of a 19th-century sailing ship on the reef of Norman's Woe.
While we've reached the "homestrech" (read: all our money has been spent or allotted) the Monument, of late, is quite a mess.
Piles of sand, small rocks, gravel, broken paving stones, and plucked weeds, are scattered throughout the front side of construction site. Most of the recently finished basketball court is covered in a layer of sand that will eventually work its way between the cracks to keep the paving stones in place. Our refuse pile grows by the day as we've sifted dirt, dug post holes and the installed playground equipment, and the noble steeds who draw the horse cart we've used to transport many of the materials has left us some...treats.
In a way, it reminds me of the archaeology sites we studied as undergraduates in the anthropology department at CU, and in fact, it's not far off from being one. As we sunk tires around the perimeter of the playground area in the front corner of the complex, we repeatedly hit layers of brick and cement, remnants, I was told, of the sidewalk in front of the Casa de Cultura ("House of Culture"), a focal point of Moldovan village life that at one point occupied the plot of land that has become our project site.
Then there is the question of the mole I mentioned earlier, upon whom I've bestowed the nickname Voldemort—the prophecy from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix seems appropriate: "Neither can live while the other survives"—is still at large and making a mess of one corner of our soccer field. We've tried to flood him out, we've tried to poison him (let's hope PETA doesn't have a Chisinau branch), and we've paid workers to sit and wait until he begins pushing up soil near the surface then, well, dispense with him. No luck.
Yet amidst all the chaos, there is a modicum of order. Our three paid workers laid the final paving stones of the basketball court, and all that remains is to paint lines, install rims and hang nets. The metal legs for the facility's 15 benches have been sunk and cemented as well as the metal frame for the play structure, and the supports for two seesaws and the swing set. Later this week, we'll paint the 20 used tires donated by the mayor along with the sand box and play structure built by a local carpenter, the remainder of the playground equipment, and the gymnastics bars.
Which leaves continued watering of the grass, final touch-ups and general cleaning of our Hesperus.
I'll try to make Mom proud.
June 26
Give me a porch, rocking chair and glass of ice tea, and I am Mr. Wilson, the grumpy guy next door from Dennis the Menace.
"You darned kids, get off my lawn!!"
After our prolonged search for grass seed, two weeks of diligent watering, and much anxiety on my part, the first hints of green have fought their way to the surface, and I've gone into extreme cranky-old-man mode to make sure it doesn't get disturbed.
In fact, the neighborhood children who play near the Monument each evening, most of them waiting for the cows and goats to be brought back from pasture, have been relatively respectful of my pleadings to not hop the fence and play on our recently seeded field. But as in so many instances, old habits die hard, and there seems to be a relatively constant of flow of neighborhood people trying to take the short cut through our building site whenever the gates are open. As such I've scolded my share of neighborhood babas (old women) and lazy 12th-grade students, who just don't seem to get it.
Sigh.
Nonetheless, the grass has grown enough in some parts, especially where a few tall trees afford sufficient shade, to get me excited about how it will look after another couple of weeks of care.
Meanwhile, we've nearly finished with the basketball/volleyball court: the backboards are up, some 15-meters of paving stones remain to be installed, then we'll paint the lines, and install the basketball rims, si gata (and we're finished)! The other evening I brought one of the basketballs donated by the Wenatchee Valley YMCA in Washington state, and gave the court a little "test drive" along with two pre-schoolers and Andrian, one of the recent high school graduates who's been helping me grate sand and soil to prepare the playground area. It's going to be good.
The big challenge at the moment is trying to capture the rogue mole who has been tunneling beneath the soccer field, and leaving us a few new gifts each morning.
Our first few attempts have been unsuccessful, which has me thinking: Can we call in Obama on this one?
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Long jump pit
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June 9
As I stood to one side of the three metric ton piles of sand, watching as the wheelbarrow in front of me filled with sand, I couldn't help but smile.
I had been replaced.
To that point, it hadn't been a particularly good week for our project. With the weather forecast indicating the first rain in well over a month on the way, we had a terrific opportunity to seed our mini-soccer field and the spaces between the basketball court and now-completed running track. Unfortunately, the grass seed I had been assured was "everywhere and all cost about the same," was decidedly not. After finishing a two-day trip to run a team-building and leadership training with my Haiducii teammates in northern Moldova, I met the village mayor in Chisinau, and we began what turned into a two-day hunt for 30 kilograms of grass seed suitable for a playing field, criss-crossing the capital city of 800,000 and meeting with the same result again and again. Imi pare rau, n-avem asa ceva. Sorry, we don't have anything like that.
After eight hours of hunting and running other errands, we decided to call it a day, and hit the highway north, discussing the possibility of a day trip to the Black Sea port city of Odessa, Ukraine to buy grass seed if we couldn't find anything in Balti, the primarily Russian-speaking city of 150,000 in northern Moldova. Just then the mayor spotted a gardening supplies store along the highway, tucked between an ice cream stand and woodworking shop, and pulled the grey, mayor's office Russian-made Lada sharply off to the side of the road.
By that point, I wasn't about to get my hopes up, and neither apparently was the mayor as he walked in and immediately addressed the first person in our path with a grin. Thirty kilograms of grass seed for sports, please. If we've got it, it's yours, responded the woman, chuckling and beckoning to a doorway in the back of the store. It turned out they didn't have it on hand, but they were pretty sure, the store owner said, that they could have it in by the next morning. The mayor gave her his cell phone number, and she promised to let us know.
That's usually code for you're-out-of-luck-buddy, but lo and behold the following morning the mayor called, and late afternoon found us unloading two blue 15-kg bags of grass seed at school, and figuring out what needed to happen the following day at the Monument, when I would be headed yet again to Chisinau to run a team-building session.
And so, my excitement turned quickly to exasperation when I called the mayor on Thursday night to find out that the effort to find volunteers to help prepare the field and plant the grass seed had netted nothing, and in addition to that, progress on installation of our basketball court had all but stalled out. The local manufacturer of the cement paving stones had promised us to have the entire quantity of 450 square meters finished within a month, but in fact managed only about half the amount, leaving our paid workers with nothing to do, and anxious to finish the work we've contracted with them so as to move onto the next job..
It certainly had the look of a week lost, something we can ill afford as we push towards a July 1 opening of the project.
Yet, while it may not have been our most productive weeks, it finished on such an uplifting note, that I will remember it as one of the special ones of this 10-month project.
Friday night, just after I arrived back from the city, Elena, the mayor's 8th-grade daughter, called to tell me to meet her father at the Monument. He, himself just having finished his work-day, had found a handful of neighborhood men, and they had set about digging the facility's long jump pit and beginning to shovel earth through a metal grate, sifting out rocks and other refuse, so as to be later mixed with sand to cover the seeded mini-soccer field. Taking advantage of the much cooler evening temperatures, and with our work crew swelled by several neighborhood children who deserted their usual evening games of hopscotch, frisbee and volleyball and were eager to help, two hours later our long jump pit had been dug, and several thousand pounds of soil was ready to go for the seeding we had scheduled for Monday.
Saturday morning, over the course of five hours, our small crew of volunteers, which included the mayor and the school's two P.E. teachers, sifted several tons of soil sand, before finally departing dusty, sunburned and famished (it reminded me a lot of just finishing a late-summer Wednesday run with the CU cross country team along the Marshall-Mesa trail), towards lunch, with plans to meet again in the evening to do a few more hours of work.
Although I was the only one of the group to show up for work at the Monument (the irony of a comment made earlier in the day by one of our work group members, noting the small size of our work group, about how, during the Soviet era, those who didn't show up for work were either fined, if not called immediately in front of the "comisie", and black-listed, was not lost on me; collectivism, right?) I was hardly alone. As I set into tossing shovels full of sand through the grate, Misha, one of my sixth-grade students watched, perched on a bicycle, fingering a cell phone that switched between Akon and Eminem ringtones , the melodies blending in with the usual village background noise of barking dogs, geese, chickens, and clinking of bells as goats returned from pasture.
After a few minutes, he slipped the cell phone into his pocket, put down his bicycle, and picked up one of the extra shovels I had brought and began shoveling sand into the nearby wheelbarrow.
It wasn't long before eight-graders Dorin and Vadim joined us, then Misha's classmate Simeon, fifth-grader Cristi, a seventh-grader from my neighborhood, Nicu, and then six-year-old Adrian, who had to walk up the small slope of refuse building up at the base of the grate to deposit his shovel fulls of sand. Slowly but surely we filled the long jump pit, unloading one wheelbarrow after another into the hole, where a group of first, second and third-grade girls played gleefully in the freshly sifted sand.
Then came the small yet meaningful moments that have made these past two years so amazing. Victoria, a cheeky kindergarten student, who plays most evenings in the road in front of the Monument, picked up a used shovel and, despite the fact that the haft was easily a foot longer than she is tall, began scooping sand into our wheelbarrow.
That raised some eyebrows amongst the remaining boys—how many times have I heard "that's man's work" or "that's women's work" since I've been in Moldova—but given they were starting to tire, they didn't protest. With the barrier broken, at least for this night, soon Alina, Nicoleta and Cristina were helping as well, taking turns tossing sand through the grate—and more importantly enjoying it. Replaced by the older girls, but not content to be left out, Victoria began filling the frisbee with sand and tipping it into the corner of the wheelbarrow, which Simeon pushed at a run to our nearly full long jump pit.
And so it was that I found myself, in the fading light of the late spring evening, with nothing to do for the first time since morning, but to watch and wonder that as important as the completion of our project in terms of providing the village kids with a place to play, perhaps more important are the little lessons about volunteerism and real collective responsibility learned along the way.
May 29
We built a track today! Well, not quite. But pretty close!
Until this week construction at the Monument has moved along at a..."steady" pace. Perhaps not quite what we had imagined last winter when we laid out our building timeline, but given that much of the work completed to this point has required a few skilled hands rather than sheer manpower, hurrying things along hasn't been a very realistic possibility. I do what I can to pitch in after I finish work in the evenings, moving paving stonses for Alexei, Gheorge and Mircea to place, hauling water from the nearby well, and filling wheelbarrows with sand, but any kind of large-scale volunteer effort of the sort we had initially envisioned has proved elusive.
As such, it was uplifting in the extreme to stand on the front steps of the school and watch as high-school age boys arrived, each carrying a shovel or spade (no girls, despite my urging: gender roles are very much entrenched here—we're working on that, though!). By 8:30 a.m. we had some 40 boys from grades 7 through 12—admittedly not heartbroken to be exempted from their morning physics and history lessons—at the monument working on the track. By noon, we had transformed 12 piles of dirt, huge mounds of limestone gravel and sand, and concrete slabs scavenged from elsewhere in the village into a 125-yard running track, that, all things considered, far surpassed my expectations. Victor, Dima, Jico and their 7th-grade classmates filled in the meter of space separating the basketball/volleyball court from what will be the track straight-aways, creating a gentle slope from the court to the inside curb of the track, which a group of 9th graders put down, checking the distance from inside curb to outside curb every few feet with a tape-measure. Ion, Petru, Sergiu and the rest of the 11th-grade contingent filled the D-shaped space between the court end-lines and the curve of the track, while a crew of 7th and 8th graders unloaded paving stone from the back of a flat-bed truck for the continuing work on the basketball/volleyball court.
Although, I had to run back to school to teach my last lesson of the year with one of my 12th-grade classes, I literally did get to role up the sleeves of my blue dress-shirt, discard my tie and do a little bit of everything—enough to have blood blisters to show for it, although I was careful not to let anyone see! The general reaction here to the idea of an American, and a "city boy" no less, engaging in any kind of "real" work is one of bemusement, such that when I offer to help my host Mom around the house or in the garden, I generally get a chuckle and "Ei, las'" ("Leave it"). A full day of manual labor is very much a reality for a large percentage of Moldova's rural population, in that other forms of work are scarce in villages, and commercial-scale farming with a high-level of mechanization is far from being the norm here. Tens of thousands of Moldovans, including most of my neighbors, head to the fields every summer, to weed by hand the vast vineyards and tracts of corn and sunflower fields that cover the nation, a ritual that has carried on more or less unchanged for centuries.
I was not invited to partake in the quintessential rural Moldova institution that is the "prasit" (hoeing) of the fields last summer, but, with the school year ending and the prospect of a little more time on my hands, I will keep working at the Monument in hopes of getting called up to the "Big Leagues!"
Week 1
One week until the end of the school year here in my village, and we've officially entered crazy time. Today the fifth and sixth graders put on an incredibly cute Spring Talent show that they proposed and organized themselves. Sunday my Active Citizens club students are going to an orphanage in the neighboring district to organize games and activities for the kids there and distribute shoes and clothing donated and shipped to Moldova by the CU Student Athlete Advisory Committee (Go Buffs!). Next week my teaching partner and I try to coax one more lesson out of my health class students (who've been smelling the finish line since April), finish the My Village photography contest, and prepare for the Ultimul Sunt ("Last Bell") end-of-the-year school ceremony— then on the road for the first stop on our summer series of teambuilding and leadership trainings for kids and young adults.
Life of the Peace Corps Volunteer!
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The outdoor PE area currently
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And in the meantime, there's plenty of work to do at the Monument, the plot of land where our community project, a sports facility consisting of a basketball/volleyball court, mini-soccer field, and gravel track, is taking shape.
We're at the seven-week mark of construction, and there's still a lot to do. We had hoped to be ready to open the facility on June 1, which internationally is celebrated as World Children's Day, but it's looking more like July 1 will be a realistic finish date. Nonetheless, I feel good about how things are going so far. The land where we're building, which used to be a vacant lot, next to the village's war monument, where kids played soccer and animals grazed, is more or less flat—flat enough for our purposes, in any case. The fencing, which will keep those grazing animals out, has all been installed, but for one section that we will put up once we've transported the last round of building materials to the site. The foundation for the basketball/volleyball court, gravel and sand, has been put down, the basketball standards, which we—more accurately, Alexi, Mircea and Gheorge, our three "hired guns"—crafted are installed, and the court's paving stone surface is about a quarter put down.
Although it's still a long ways from being the finished project we envisioned when we first started planning in early fall, it's pretty amazing to think back to how far we've come, how an idea often-debated in this agricultural village of 4,000 people, but more in the wouldn't-it-be-great-if vein, has come to life.
The need for the project has been clear for a long time. The school where I teach, Stefan Cel Mare Lyceum, is consistently one of the best in the district, despite some significant obstacles, a major one being that we simply don't have enough room for the 500 students in grades 1-12. With 16 classrooms, including three that seat just a dozen students, we have to have a two-schedule system. The first-graders and students in grades 7-12 have lessons from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., and students in grades 2-7 have classes from 1:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. In the early 1990s, at about the same time the Soviet Union, of which Moldova was the smallest republic, was crumbling, school officials decided to demolish the sports and festivities hall to make room for an annex that would at least in part solve the lack-of-space problem, even more pressing at that time, when the village population was significantly larger. Unfortunately, the annex project never moved passed the laying of the foundation, and 17 years later, neither the annex, nor a new sports and festivities hall, seem likely to be built any time soon, the weight of worldwide financial crisis falling hard on a country where most of the rural population lives on less than a few dollars a day, and money for infrastructure improvements is exceedingly hard to come by.
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The indoor PE area
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With the gym torn down, students and PE teachers have made do with the school grounds, a cramped room in the basement during the winter, and when weather is good, the patchy grass and dirt field at the Monument, just down the road from the school.Not surprisingly, when my Active Citizens club kids conducted a village needs assessment last fall, creating some sort of place for kids to have PE was on most people's "short-list" of projects that needed doing. After further discussions with the village mayor and school director, we decided to move forward with our plans for a sports facility, that, while modest in the extreme by U.S. standards, would significantly expand the options of the school's PE teachers and students. We spent most of the fall putting together our budget and project proposal for review by the Peace Corps Partnership Program, which currently facilitates and oversees some 150 projects in the more than 60 countries where volunteers serve. Our project was officially approved in January, and I spent the next three months searching out the financial support we needed to match the financial and in-kind contributions on the part of the village.
It took a lot of work, but it's pretty inspiring to see the wide range of donors—more than 140 in all—who pitched in to help make our project happen: from Olympians and shoe-company execs to grade-school students in my hometown of Eugene, Ore., and former teammates, coaches and professors. In all, we raised more than $10,000, and we just need to pull in another $1,100 to cover some cost overruns that have cropped up along the way.
As beautiful as it will be to officially cut the tape and open our project, I'm looking forward almost as much to hanging up the collage of donors I'm working on at school, to see the faces of so many important people back home who've reached out to help my community here!
Have a great week!
Toate Cele Bune and "All the best,"
Erik
AV 
