Language barriers...still

So Tina, my neighbor told me immediately when I got arrived home to my apartment yesterday, that a lady of age 42, got a sponsor. She said "o fata a fost sponsorizat." Which...means, a girl was ..I thought "sponsored."

Romanian is a latin language, if I don't know something, I can usually get clues from the roots. Economy = economie, crisis = crisa, foundation = fondatie, etc...

So, after a 10 minute conversation of me asking who sponsored that lady and for what? A marathon? college?....and Tina telling me that she didnt' know why that woman was sponsored. I finally just nodded and gave the *that's cool* shrug.
____________ the next day after work____________
Someone drops me off at the main road and I see my neighbor standing with 4 other momish looking ladies at the entrance to the cemetery. I asked them "what are you doing?" and they answered "we're watching" and I asked "what are you watching?" and they answered "other people watching a burial, " and I go "oh, another person died? or is this the same body I saw 5 minutes ago?"

Turns out that they were watching the sponsored lady of 42 years old get buried.
Clockwheels turned in my head and I understood that "sponsorizat = suicide" at least that's what my neighbor meant (I tried to google translate suicide and it does not = sponsorizat!).
So ...the lady committed suicide..and I asked why, and they told me it's because she's a concubine.......

Which I understood to mean she's an adulteress, or a slut, or a prostitute...and at the time I didn't want to assume the air that I was judging her (she was dead and needed respect, not judgment).

The ladies see my all too familiar face of confusion and tell me that her boyfriend of many years (she's not married to him, so she's a concubine?..odd choice of words) would beat her all the time, so she hung herself 2 days ago. She had no kids.

Which made me recall my meeting last week of a brother-in-law who was caring for the 3 children of his sister-in-law who's husband also drinks a lot and was taking a liking to electricuting his wife (while drunk) with smashed but plugged in light bulbs, on the head.

It's a touchy subject here, a very sensitive one, but it's scary and I would never ever ever stand for any kind of domestic violence. I actually have had guys here, young guys my age tell me that they of course would beat their spouse or girl friends to have them behave!!!

That's a dealbreaker! Not all guys are like this! here! lots of them don't hit any women or children! Granted, the domestic violence in my village (that I've recently been aware of) have all been under the influence of alcohol. eh.

So....my day: got a shipment of wood because it's started snowing (again) and the truck got stuck in a pit of mud in my yard, so we spent 30 mins shoving the car out of the mud and using my new wood blocks to prop the wheels, then I went to teach Chinese for 2 hours at a school (only 5 kids showed up..oh well) with my clothes splattered with mud, then I went to the mayor's office to find out that I got stood up...and my person didn't think to call me and save me the journey thorough the snow, and then I got dropped off and met the ladies...then went home to start my fire, and clean clean clean cause there's mud EVERYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYWHERE!

I saw 2 funerals today, one in front of my work and one next to my house (I live..300 meters from a cemetery). It reminded me of when our co-worker Vicktor died. He had a stomach ache at age 60, and he thought he'd fix it by drinking a shot of very strong Romanian whiskey (tuica) and then he vomited blood and didn't make it to the hospital and he died. I saw him Thursday at work, and he died on Saturday, and we had his funeral on Monday.

I kissed his cold dead hand and forehead, cause all my other co-workers were doing it too. He was a co-worker, but we weren't that close, but it's sad he died while I was there. Here I got to participate and observe a full on Romanian funeral. His co-workers were his family, so ergo, I was a part of his family during his funeral. Not a lot of pictures were taken by me because I felt uncomfortable doing so. Just a few in his memory:




There's never really a boring day in Mastacani. My story went on a tangent...but it's because there's so much to share still, that I want to share, but that I haven't shared yet.

I woke: Snow Surprise! and last day of school!!

Tuesday morning I awoke to snow. It was snowing; soft bits of dust.

All over...

That morning, was the beginning of a long but festive day.
The day before, I went and saw a class give a Christmas presentation to their parents. They dressed in the appropriate Christmas apparel and presented about the history of Christmas in Romania and sang carols.

Then I went to another school and saw more caroling, and dancing goats dancing to the beat of a drum...and they were tall and were made of trash bags...or they can be made of hay.

The next day! That LAST DAY OF SCHOOL! (okay, not my last day, but the kids')
I saw little kindergartners sing and dance!! So cute! and they had to say a poem too but some can't speak well yet, so it was way cute. P.S. That little girl is a goat, and she was a sad sad little goat who wanted out of the costume. Awww. I give her credit for keeping it on (a brave face) until the very end.



Then scary Santa was bashing on the window from outside and came in to give all the kiddies their gift from Santa. In Romania, there's Saint Nicolas who comes and leaves a gift in your boot on the 6th of December, and then there's Santa Clause who comes and leaves a gift under the Christmas tree on the night of the 24th. Ergo, you need a Christmas tree. In general, people here have sobas/ceramic stoves or a heating unit in apartments (no chimneys).

Those were the small kindergartners ages: 3-4.
THEN: I went to Mastacani and I watched 8th graders read an epic poem about Christmas, and I took lots of pictures. More like I gave "trained" students my camera so I could be in the pictures =)


Muahahahah

Then we were playing in the snow =)

I don't even know if the kids had class...maybe it was recess, maybe not, but oh well, I'm not their teacher.


See! Not the photographer! I'm being photographed!


When it got too cold: Run to the Soba! Warmth warmth!

Pictures pictures with all. What would we do without my digital camera?
,

Kapow! In the head! But I still love the kids.

To top it all off:
The teacher's van slid backwards when at the intersection to the highway.

Instead of lending then a hand, I decided to take pictures. Watching teachers and school principles push a van is funny. I'm terrible.

Let the good times begin! -11C tonight! But there's snow!! Hurray!

Mini adventure out of my site

So, I was at my site for 2 weekends in a row, and due to the cold cold weather and the still considered "shorter days," I was young and restless and I needed to go somewhere!
Here was my small adventure to Cudalbi, where Nancy lives. Dan came too.
Here's a schedule for the public transportation, and then here's Cudalbi's downtown (more or less, and it's a lot more downtowner than ours!)

They have apartments with 4 levels! and shops! all along the bottom! How cool!

Nancy made a DE-licious stew in a cock pot she.."inherited" from a volunteer some time back. We've not seen any cock pots around here, so it was definitely From the US. Yum.

The next day we went for a walk. (Ziua urmeaza, ne-am plimbat)[zee-wah oor-may-ahzah nayahm pleem-baht] and we saw frozen water that we obligated ourselves to stomping on, and then we went to the cemetary.

See the many graves, and here we are next to a newer one.

Then Nancy's friends wanted to invite us over for a meal, and it was very hearty and they didn't understand why I didn't want beer. Oh well. Dan took this pic, so he was there too.

So that was my Small, one day adventure. It was about a 2 hour travel one way, but that's traveling for us here. It was cold last week.

Staying warm livestyle changes

Food my neighbor gave me. She gives me free food and I say: B-oo-dah Pros-tee. It means something in terms of blessing the soul of someone who just died. It kinda goes with the tradition that: if someone in your family or a close friend dies, you need to be giving and give away food and items such as clothes and furniture to people. This giving of material stuff is good for your deceased loved one's spirit. Yay for yummy foods! It's mamaliga (corn meil boiled) and curca (a female turkey boiled) cu soc de ustori (with garlic sauce).

So, I mean I am in Peace Corps, and I do live in the country, but I wonder...are some of these hobbies really normal? to me it's like same old, do what I have to do now, but that's how most of my thinking goes now these days. Maybe these things aren't that odd and I just assume they should be.
Anyway, here's how my village looks like during the Winter. It has snowed maybe 2-3 times now, and the biggest snowing was during Christmas (while I was in the U.S. of course). The river where I played with the kids has frozen and I think I can ice skate, but dang it, it's just too cold outside! How East coasters in the US do it, I don't know! I may try next year?

At the mayor's office a lady was heating up her lunch in the soba (the source of heating for us at work). I have tried potatoes and surprisingly, I did burn about 1/2 of my attempts, but I didn't think about cooking meat. I do have marshmallows now, from my vacation in the US, so I may bring those out on a festive occasion. (Is it weird people are BBQing meat for lunch in our heating source in the mayor's office?, cause I want to recall that in SJ, CA, USA this would be not normal)

So to dry my clothes on the clothesline outside not only takes FOREVER, it also tends to freeze the clothes = breakable if dropped (though easily stackable). Drying them on the bathroom line over the tub does work too, but since it's still cold enough to see my breath there, usually, it takes about 4-5 days for things to dry. I've learned, ON the soba it takes maybe a few hours (but there's the danger of burning/melting your clothes, so I build this clothesline between my wardrobe and my soba! For those larger load days, I use chairs.

So drainage problem STRIKES BACK: the sequel. I've you've been following along with news of my apartment then you'll have heard that I don't have hot water because it wasn't connected correctly and I paid a small ransom for electric last Summer. My landlord has been hiring people to look at the boiler and to do things to help repair it. Such an inspection resulted in a "water floor" for 10 days that spread into my hallway and resulted in lots of wet socks. I told my landlord the first day I saw and tried to do damage control, so I felt like I did my part.
Okay, now part 2:
My water all backed up and was coming OUT the ground of my bathroom and getting thus More socks wet. I could bath and do dishes, but I had to dump the water outside and not down the drain. The toilet is on a separate system (thank goodness!!) and I sometimes cheated and dumped waste water down that drain.

What has so far sucked the most: doing laundry by hand with ice freezingly cold water and then trying to wring them dry and then having to hang them on lines over your soba and having water drip on your head while tossing in more wood to heat the room.
I can't say it was fun, but now I have a response for people who ask me why I wasn't placed to Live in the city, and then commute to work. AND MISS ALL THE FUN OF EXPERIENCING HOW PEOPLE IN THIS COMMUNE LIVE?!?!
Nope, I'm glad I live here because I think now I can understand their problems better and I'm more driven to helping them overcome them. I talked about this problem for about 5-6 days before people came to unclog the drain. The whole system was blocked for the block, but the backwash only happened to ME, of course.

Look, a main pipe has a water fall of ice. The picture is 90 degrees in the wrong direction.



I am also soooooo glad I don't have to take care of these kind of problems myself. SO glad!
We have a small septic tank for the normal waste water and the feces water (one system in front of the block and one behind). I hear that a truck comes 2 times a year to empty it. A lady across the street said they have a septic area now too, but it's not enforced by cement. I told her that's not good especially since she's so close to a well.