Till You've Drenched our Steeples, and Drowned our Cocks!

First, Update on the Termites.

As yet actual birth/hatching/emergence has eluded me and all I find are curled bodies, sometimes being dragged away by a single ant (easily a quarter the size of a termite), but I count the new ones every hour or so when I'm home, averages 3 an hour until noon.

I've had one incident on the scale of the first one, since. Maria, in her infinite mothering, quizzed me afterwards on the genocide I dealt. It appears I used too much spray, but otherwise I am a competent warrior in the ongoing saga.

Yep.

Otherwise, summer is pretty sweet. If my life continued like this for years, I'd be a happy camper. Tutor some days, attend parties, getting taught how to make food from scratch, washing clothes... If anyone knows of private tutoring gigs anywhere in the world, I'll be there in a snap. Its good, fulfilling fun!

The downside of this is the great fattening that happens. It's stormed everyday for three weeks solid now. Yesterday's storm literally made the sky look the underbellies of slugs. For an agrarian society at the zenith of its growing season (we have 17 possible hours of photosynthesis time a day) its not so crop-hot. It also restricts my running and clothes washing capabilities. Meaning all the unpaved roads require Wellies, meaning, no running. And I just got the box from Mom with real tennis shoes! My first pair since... geez, since Mom was in charge of dressing me... I was so excited! My Quarter Life Crisis so far has had amazing impacts on my physical health... Halt, Health! Erika must remain sedentary!

Golly.

And the whole plants not getting enough sun and too much water means really oddly shaped fruits and vegetables. Except potatoes. Gods smile on the growth of potatoes more than anything except maybe the cockroach or bluebottle fly.

The storms are good for one or two things though. Maria and I devised a way around the clothes washing difficulty. Put out all clothes in Storm 1. During respite, before Storm 2, rub down all clothes with detergent. Storm 2 Rinses.

We're still working out the kinks in the drying theory, but, we'll get there. Sci Fi has taught me the human spirit is indomitable.

3 Awesome Things

In the past three days, three notable things have happened. I've been away for so much of June already, teaching the new kids in Chisinau and its surrounding villages, that most of my money is gone (Peace Corps does not subsidize food and travel even if you are instructing their new recruits for free for them) and I'm more than happy to sit here on my balcony and sip on the tasty coffee and eat a biscotti my mommy sent me. I've read almost all 400 pages of The Best American Non-Required Reading from 2006. I highly recommend it. This is as close to paradise I can get without a footrub.

So, I would like to share these things. Don't judge me for not writing regularly, I know you will not, because, well, so few of us are writing regularly enough anymore to even bother reading this. You've already judged I write no longer, and are gone. Verily:

1. Lulu.

2. Office.

3. Termites.

These are in chronological order. My favorite is the first.

Lulu is our new baby cow. She is the cutest thing I have ever seen and I mourn often throughout the day that she will not stay cute for long, but will soon be nothing but a cow--large, ugly, ornery. But for now she follows me and lets me pet her alot and jumps around in that way Disney always led us to believe baby animals do in farmyards. She is scared of the big turkey and scatters all the chicklets. Her eyes and nose are wet and her fur is pristine white and chocolate fluff. Despite the dirtiness of everything around her (it is, afterall, a barn yard) she is always clean. It's magical. She is magical. I love her. She likes to sleep by the wood pile.

Second, I went to my locked up office in my school yesterday to teach a couple girls some drawing basics (they found out I can draw and immediately decided to have art tutoring instead of English tutoring.) to find the door still locked but the room ransacked. We are on the second storey of a massive Communist-built cement cage of a building. There is no climbing in through our window, but it has happened before (and before I had school materials to lock up) that some gang or other of students jimmied our lock and wrote naughty words in Russian on the floor. This time the wrote nothing, but tore up some posters and knicked all my pens/pencils/markers and chalk and candy. They scattered my books all over the floor and up-ended a bag of garbage in one corner -- taking the bag. Such bags cost a leu a piece. One leu = 8 or 9 cents.

Lastly, and most like a horror film: I woke up this morning to strange noises. Small, but definite. At first I tried to block it out and return to the very nice dream about travelling in a car, but was too curious to do it. I had to look. What a weird sound. Like a dry rain falling in the third of my room dominated by my computer, printer and collaging supplies. Ie. my work zone. Flying ants in the answer. Flying ants of all sizes. Thousands of them. They were not there at midnight when I hung up the phone and turned off the light. Not one. They were just starting to land on my bed and figure out how to flap their wings when I woke up. They were so young they were still slightly damp and couldn't quite do it yet.

Assessed, I cleaned the area of things like extension cords and hardrives, magazines and glue. I moved the furniture and runner carpets, squishing as I went. The more I squished the more appeared. After a couple minutes everything was clear, but the clearness seemed only to invite more bugs to fill the wood-floor-void! Yep, seems pretty obvious now. Anyway, thus prepared I went in search of Maria. "How do I kill alot of bugs at once?" I asked her. She laughed and asked "termites?" I said yes. She opened a cupboard and shook a couple empty aerosol cans, finding them empty, put them back on the shelf. Found one nodded at some sound she heard, but I didn't and marched to my room, "Don't be scared!" she instructed. "I'm not scared, I'm angry" I replied, " I don't go in their space and overrun their things!" Ok, I couldn't figure out how to say "overrun" in Romanian, but that was the general idea. She sprayed them a couple times before there was just air coming out of the can, but she got a shot at the floor and a shot at my curtains (literally crawling with them, I'm glad I put on my glasses by this point or I would have thought myself delusional).

So, sprayed and empty she told me to sleep in the living room with Karen, the previous volunteer for this village who is staying with us a week and had asked me YESTERDAY if I had seen the termites. "no" i said. "oh, you would have seen them by now -- they must have sprayed this year." Karen woke up when Maria and I came in. Maria explained quickly and Karen apologized for cursing me.

This was three hours ago now, and there are no bugs in my room at all now. two sprays and they all went into hiding. The magazins are open finally so I'm off to spend the last of my June allowance on Raid.

Spring

So, April finally happened.

I did not just live through a horrid winter just to not enjoy the wonder that is wearing only three layers a day and only one pair of socks and sleeping without a hat.

I have a bench outside my house where, after school, I do most of my work, but am in the market for a TV Tray so as to not hunch for hours while out there.

I Make Fire

Since the onset of cold, we've been making fire. Naturally.

Most houses in Moldova run on wood/coal burning water boiler systems called Sobas. My family, being rather well off, has two with great systems of pipes and radiators. The main part, however, is a giant, porceline tile wall with a fairy tale-esque stove top and two openings for fuel. The openings are stacked one on the other, separated by a grate. The top is where you stick all your fuel, the bottom collects all the ash. Yep, straightforward. I know, I know... You're thinking -- "oh that Erika, she's a super fire chick. Been making fires since she was knee high to a bumble bee (or whatever the phrase is). She was a girl scout and her dad a park ranger. Obviously she's been helping make such straight forward fires!"

And you'd be dead wrong.

Nope. Maria, my host mother and fire tender, cook and maid (she will forcibly clean my room sometimes while I teach. It really gets me going.... gr.), will not let me help with fire ever. I am a teacher and cannot afford to get dirty. Teachers must be frumos (beautiful).

But I love making fires! Its so creative! Look at all that creation and destruction at once! and its useful! and necessary! and -- to boot -- it's damned pretty!

I am an artist! I need to help make fire!

Nope.

Until today. Today, Maria and Laurentiu (host dad will make fire if Maria is absent and he gets cold enough) were both gone!

So I copied all the steps:

Clean yesterday's ashes out.

Collect:

Sawdust soaked in lighter fluid.

Old cracker boxes

Corn cobs from the animal yard out back

Little chunks and flakes of wood

Bigger chunks of wood

Stack in a nice aireated manner

Light.

Close door.

Maria was so surprised! She laughed at my dirtiness and has left me in charge of my own soba in my room. I am so proud.

Moral: Observe until left alone and enact!

Today's Oral Experience

Eat a clove of garlic. Fresh.

Brush teeth.

You will not be disappointed.

Re: The Beatles are Magic

So far... just having problems with my partner...

She really liked My Heart Will Go On, so we spent two or three class periods singing it. I was forced to lead a couple times and it was... well some students liked it when I impersonated Celine Dion and basically dropped some true Diva Tears on them, but otherwise it was truely boring.

She did not like All You Need is Love (contrary to all her other tastes in music) and kinda edged it out of class. Thus, the real power of this idea will not commence until next year when I have the whole Beatles syllabus planned.

In other news I get to teach Billy how to Hora tomorrow night. The Hora is a traditional Moldovan circle dance where we all hold hands, step three times to the right, kick your left foot, kick your right foot then step three times to the right... Repeat endlessly.

This is unlike anything you with your innate American 4/4 rhythm brains can fathom. It seems easy, but keeping it up ad infinitum to music whose beat is not only something obscure like 6/8 but is also not at all in time with the fancy foot work.

And just when you think you can muddle through they add the hands which are, in fact, bobbed to 4/4 time.

I gave up. Billy still has lots of New Kid Optimism however, so it'll probably be a riot.

It's good having him here. As a natural tour guider, I tell him only all the really great things that I notice and partake in here, thus, my own motivation goes up a bit.

He has already noticed the roughness and frustration of trying to integrate and speak the language, and can't wait to move to Paris where he will be able to communicate.

It's predicted that winter will drag on to April this year. I've moved temporarily into the tiny room next to mine for warmth.

The Beatles are Magic

I think I have come up with a perfect, teenage friendly, semester long plan.

Every week I have classes with 11th graders and 12th graders who have no textbook to speak of.

I'm photocopying Coraline for them to read. Most like it but its a bit fantastic for some.... thus....

Beatles lyrics!

How did I not think of this before?! Later Beatles lyrics are rife with consistent tense usage, parallelism, fun teenage themes... Then! at the end of the semester they can be rewarded with an absurdly angsty film featuring all the language they've already learned: Across the Universe. Thus rendering it long term pay off for all their concentration! hell yes!

I'll let you know how it goes. We're starting with All You Need is Love.