I’m feeling much better and have had an exciting week. On Sunday I went to a second hand market. It was enormous and secreted away beyond the railroad tracks. I had to cross over a large overpass to get to it. Clothing is shipped from the UK and Europe and then given to be to sell here. I bought a couple tops for $4 ea.

I also visited the longest cemetery in Europe which is just up the road from my house. Over 200,000 people are buried in the cemetery and it is half a mile long. I like the cemeteries here because all of the gravestones have pictures on them. They also have table and benches on top of a lot of the gravestones so that families can have a picnic there on special days.

As I was walking through central park the other day, a very stern looking police officer was standing over a tiny boy who the police officer had just forced out of the fountain. I had seen the little boy in the park often. He was part of a Roma family who often came up to us asking for money. For a lot of Roma, asking for money is a way of life in Moldova and around Europe.

I also wanted to spend some time talking about the caregivers at the orphanage. I’m now able to carry on simple conversations with them. I was talking to a caregiver named Lilia the other day. She said she lives in a village far from the orphanage and has two grown children. She had been working at the orphanage for four years. When I asked her if it was okay, she said yes but also difficult. She works 12 hour shifts every other day, which is what most of the caregivers do. They take turns working 24 hour shifts. One caregiver and one nurse must spend the night with the children. They sleep in the rooms with the children. I didn’t ask her how much she gets paid, but I know it is very little. The caregivers working in my group are very nice and love on the babies when they can. Despite this, the babies spend most of their time on their backs in cots or cribs. I bring the caregivers cookies once in a while, along with diapers for the children. If the caregivers are happy they’ll pass it on to the kids. The caregivers have pretty difficult lives and if I can make it a little easier by letting them know I appreciate the hard work they do all the better. In my room, there are now 19 babies for 4 caregivers. Feeding time is a madhouse and we’re scrambling to pick up a crying child to feed. Three new babies came this week, all of them born premature and abandoned at the hospital.
Ana is five months old and is the size of a newborn.

Vlad is also five months old, a bit bigger but his body is very rigid. He clearer hasn’t been held very much because he gets very stiff when I pick him up, but relaxes when I put him back down.

I am now down to 2 weeks here. Time has gone so fast!

Monasteries and Medication

It all started with a bad fall. On Friday, I fell as I was leaving a room after placing a baby in a crib. I tripped over the doorframe and landed really hard on my bad leg. For those of you who don't know, my bad leg is my right leg which has been swollen since I was 18. It's a condition call lymphedema-due to the radiation treatment I received as a baby the lymph nodes in my right leg don't work as well as the should. Some of the protein that the lymph should be picking up get left behind and absorbed into the tissue which leads to the swelling. Luckily, I caught it early on and my swelling is fairly minimal.  I do wear a waist high compression stocking every day to keep the swelling manageable, but the condition doesn't have a huge impact on my life. However, if a leg with lymphedema gets injuries, due to the lymph systems' role throughout the body, severe conditions can occur.
         After I fell, I got myself up and checked out the damage. Other than a sore knee, I seemed to be okay. I carried on with my day, but by the time I got home my knee was arching. I put an ice pack on it and went to bed, partially scared about what could happen next. The next morning everything seemed to be fine. My knee ached a little, but not nearly as much as it should have. We had planned to spend the day in town but the other volunteers weren't feeling well, so we just hung out at home, playing games and chatting. I helped my host clean the house and felt pretty energized. That evening my throat began to hurt a little, but I didn't think too much of it. I was excited about our plans for the next day. We were going to go to a village to bring watermelon to poor families, some of whom I was going to interview for my research. We were also going to visit some famous monasteries and have a picnic in the forest. I was excited to do the interviews. I had already done two and was only planning on doing six total. We had plans to do four or five in the village and I was excited to finish the interviews in order to look back on them and see if I needed anything else for my research.   
        In the middle of the night, in a sleepy daze, I noticed I was freezing and part of my mind thought, "this isn't good". In the morning my throat was killing me, I had a horrible headache, and I knew I was not in a good condition. I also knew I needed to do these interviews. I just need to get through this, I thought and pushed myself to get ready. I mentioned I wasn't feeling well to the others but tried to force myself to get my act together. We first stopped at a monastery, and I felt okay wandering around. I had taken some dayquil and hoped that would help. I rested my eyes as we drove to the village. We stopped at a house and I interviewed the mother. I had a list of questions already written out and followed them. Perhaps, if I had been feeling better I would've been able to ask her more questions but I felt comfortable with what I did. The second house was the same but this time I tripped on my way up the stairs and I really knew I was in trouble. I've gotten pneumonia many times in my life. Although it seems I have a pretty good immune system against viruses and rarely get colds, bacterial infections are another matter. My lymphedema directly effects my immune system and so I think I am less able to fight off bacterial infections. Therefore, when I get sick, I go big. One time, in undergrad, when I was really sick with pneumonia, I tripped while walking to class and for some reason I knew I needed to see a doctor. I trip easily anyway, but when I trip while sick it feels as if the world is falling away from me and I know something is not right in my head.
           At the second house, I fought hard to stay cognizant of the interview. Once again, I followed the questions. After we left, I knew we had two or three more to do and just kept fighting to keep it together. My hosts asked if I would like to continue and I said yes but then the others said they were hungry and because they had to wait for me during my interviews we decided to just drop off some food for some families and then eat lunch. My host told me she knew of other people to interview and we didn't need to get it all done in one day. At that I let myself relax. I curled up in a ball and closed my eyes.
             We continued to another monastery to eat lunch. I got out because I had to go to the bathroom but after trying to eat a piece of bread, I went back to the car and laid down. I stayed that way for the rest of the day. After the monastery we headed back to my host's mom's house to eat dinner and pick up the kids. I laid on her couch but was able to manage some soup and felt a bit better. When we got home I got into bed and fell asleep. In the middle of the night I woke up to an extremely swollen throat and a very high temperature. I knew I needed to see a doctor. I waited until the morning and asked my host to call a doctor. In Moldova, you can call an ambulance and a nurse will come to your house to check on you. However, my host suggested actually going to the doctor instead. So I waited until they were ready to take me. At the doctor I was ushered into a room where a nurse checked my vitals. She handed me a thermometer and I instinctively started to put in my mouth. No, she said, and for a minute my heart stopped. Then she gestured to my armpit. I felt a little bit better knowing the instrument that had just touched my tongue had been in other people's armpits and not somewhere worse, but not by much. However, I was too sick to care much about it either way. I had a temperature of 100.5 (38). The nurse then took us to another room to wait for the doctor. The doctor diagnosed me with angina. Luckily for me, angina is not the same in Moldova as it is in America. When I first arrived to Moldova, my host told me her 1 1/2 year old daughter had angina. I was a bit startled until she mentioned her throat hurt and then I thought, in America angina is the constriction of the arteries in the heart, in Moldova it must be the constriction of the throat. When I was diagnosed with angina, I knew it must be some kind of throat infection. My host suggested that I got angina from drinking cold water on a hot day. Since I live in Florida and I drink ice cold water every day of my life, I doubt this is how I got the infection. It did come on rather quickly but my bet is I picked up the bacteria from the orphanage somehow (I'm usually covered in snot and vomit) and maybe the damage to my leg left me susceptable to an infection. The doctor wrote out a bunch of prescriptions and we stopped by the pharmacy on the way out. I had given my host 200 lei ($20) which was all the lei I had left (I needed to exchange more) and I think, I was bit out of it to pay close attention, the total doctor bill and medication came to around $40. When we got home, I went straight to bed and have moved little since.     
           Yesterday I woke up and my throat was still killing me, this time with the added fun of a swollen and distended uvula. I never thought I'd be able to say that my uvula was touching my angina but it felt like my throat was swollen, on fire, and had something caught in it. I kept on my regiment of medications which included: aspirin, anit-biotics, a throat spray, and a gargling solution. By mid-day yesterday I woke up from a nap and my throat felt numb, a relief from the pain I had been feeling the past three days. I could still feel my uvula but at least I could swallow again. Today I am feeling much better. I still have a headache and there is a lot of drainage in my throat, but I my brain is beginning to work again and I am able to eat solid food. For a while I thought I might have tonsillitis and wondered if I'd lose my tonsils to Moldova. My appendix is in Korea and it wouldn't surprise me if I need to undergo major surgery in every country I visit. Luckily, I am on the mend. I have three and a half weeks left in Moldova and, since this week will be spent mostly in bed, I have a lot to do in a little time.

"I will come at the hour of one and thirty"

This week new volunteers arrived-six of them! One is staying with me in the village while the rest stay in the flat (sorry, my American English is being taken over by British English). The one that is staying with me is here for a month. On Sunday night, around midnight, we will be joined by one more volunteer staying with us in the village for two weeks. Two of the volunteers who were staying in the flat only stayed for a week, which is definitely not enough time. Two weeks isn't even enough. It is so little time to spend with the children.

This week was also the last week of my online class and, since I finished my homework early, I was able to spend a lot more time at the orphanage. It has been so hot here, that we take the children outside every day, which seems like a strange thing to say but since the rooms are so hot, and they don't believe in opening windows, it is much cooler outside. There are two large cribs sitting in the shade and we lay the children in them. One of the volunteers is working with me in my group and it is nice to have a companion to speak English to, although I am working on my Romanian.

My day speaking Romanian usually goes like this:

I enter the room and say "Good day'' in Romanian, even though I should be saying 'Good morning' but can never remember how to say it. The children are usually being fed, and in order to ask if a child has been fed yet or not, I'm pretty sure I say, "Anton I eat?" or "Anton I eat already?" because I'm not sure how to say he or she eats and definitely has\ve no clue how to use the past tense. I then feed the baby and say 'Na' (here) when I want to get the baby's attention to take a bite. When the baby is eating well I say "Bravo/Brava" (Good boy/girl). If I need a bib for a baby, I can ask for it (sounds like shortz). I also can warn the caregivers when a child has peed/pooped/vomited. And I can say "What Anton?" when a baby cries or makes a loud noise.
After feeding the children, I say "Anton outside?" "Yes" answer the caregivers and then we wrap the babies up in multiple layers as if we are living in Siberia, despite the 70-80 (20-25 Celsius) degree weather. I sometimes say "stroller" and they say "yes". Most of the time we take all the children outside and lay them in large cribs sitting in the shade. Outside is such a relief from the stiffing heat inside since the caregivers believe that any draft coming from a window will kill the children. We play outside and I can say brief sentences to the caregivers using the following words or phrases:
 I am, I have, You have, How much, I come, I need, I forget, I like, here (baby and normal versions), rain, I make (which in Romanian sounds like the f-word), I speak, in my arms, kiss, booboo (hurt), why, airplane, car, apricot (apricot), cherry, juice, pretty, don't do that, stop, finished, yuk, pretty, hot, cold, little, big, stand, walk, and Let's come to Jacy or Let's come to sister, which is what the boys call me, etc.
 Around noon, we head back in and feed the infants their bottles. To ask whether I should put a baby in their crib to sleep, I'm pretty sure I ask "Anton I sleep?"  When all the children are in bed for their afternoon nap, I get ready to go to lunch and say, "I come at the hour of one and thirty." I know there is an easier way to say this but for some reason I remember it this way.
After lunch, I return and again say "Good day" which I think is appropriate now. Once again, I ask if I can eat a child and then feed them. Sometimes we go back outside, and sometimes we just play inside. At the end of the day, I tell the caregivers "Tomorrow" or, on a Friday, "Monday." They are very excited whenever I speak Romanian and often speak to me. I repeat their words back the them and usually give them blank stares because I don't understand. They keep asking and eventually I say yes to be agreeable.     
 A couple of weeks ago, I was riding on the van-bus (a van that is used to bus people around) and noticed the door had a sign on it that said "Nu trintiti USA". I wondered what it meant. Were Americans not allowed to ride on the bus? I know 'Nu' means 'no' or 'not' so it could also mean something like "Don't _______ USA." I kept meaning to ask my hosts what it meant and kept forgetting. Finally I asked  and my host laughed uproariously at me. It actually means "Don't slam the door" Usa is door. So now I know how to say that too! I actually said it to one of the boys at my house the other day!

Main street of my village

My street

One of the many crucifixes in my village

The school where I teach ESL