Sunday, April 6, 2008

My site!!!

The name is: Mastacani and there's smiley face accents over the first a and the 2nd a.


It's a small town located East, sort of South East of Romania.
It's next to the Danube River, and it's seriously right at the border of Moldova and Ukraine.
I am north of the city of Galati.

The stats:

Population: 6,100
I will be working in the Mayor's Office 4 hours a day (20 hours a week)
They've never had a PC member before.
I will be working in an office with 70% female staff.
What they need from PC: working on their water pump system, development of tourism, teaching IT, Environment, and English courses to children, and development of training courses for the community including project writing and networking.
What they wanted most from a PCV:
Management, project management, information technology experience, some teaching experience, experience with goverment.
(Seriously, does that last part describe me or what? I have all those skills, or at least experience in what they want).

I am very very very happy with my site!
I got to see the 12 sites available to us in my sector: CED and I didn't want to get my hopes too high, but it's a small rural community which is what I wanted and it's next to water and fishing!! which is one of my hobbies (too bad I didn't bring my rod and bait and all that fishing stuff I got for Christmas! (fish = peste with a swivel on the s)
This site also needs more management of small activities instead of hard core Business experience, which I lack, who am I kidding. I know advertising and marketing due to being a US raised person and from Desktop publishing in HS, and from projects in college, but nothing real serious.

There's still lots of business I'll probably be working with, but I feel like I can do this. Maybe I'll be wrong, but as of now, I feel confident enough.

Not everyone is as happy as I am....there will be things probably bad about my site too like lack of internet....which I hope won't be true.

I've tried to look online, but it's late and I need to go home to dinner.

I am definitely not good enough at my language to be out on my own, but like most other volunteers, I am ready to have my own place. 6 weeks is the point where the role of guest is changing and there's a large gray fuzzy line on what roles we need to play in our families.
I guess we're spoiled in that sense, since having a place of your own is a large luxury that many Romanians don't get to enjoy until well into their adulthood and they can afford it. That's what I've been told though. I was also told that EVERYone eats meat here and it was an awkward embarrassment when I tried to explain vegetarianism over dinner and they knew what it was....

Pa...until next time.

Along with our practicum projects, trying to study as much as I can, chores involved with living, gazda day, earth day, and sports......blogging is getting a little difficult to be consistent with, but then again, I think you've all heard it all, and there's really less to report these days.

p.s. to help me with my poor sentence structures I bought Harry Potter in Romanian. It was Matt's idea and I copied him. The first book is easy enough in Englez and HP is the most translated book in the world next to the Bible right? I think that's right. Okay, gotta go seriously now. Ne vedim mai tarziu (talk to you later).

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Awesome Cynthia... I can't wait till we can visit you. Also, the bible was most likely translated from greek (or potentially Hebrew or Arabic). Now I have to go to bed, these lake visits are draining me. But they are just not the same without you.

Cynthia said...

=( I know. I miss WF and trical stuff.
Now: why? kirkish. Details....

Unknown said...

Details will come in the form of an email... hopefully later this week... but not alot has changed since last year.

Anonymous said...

Great idea! I bought HP in Spanish to help with my Spanish skills. It's great fun.