Lessons in Cultural Diffusion

It had been a long day - again. After 7 hours of lessons and briefings in Ialoveni, the sauna-like routeira back to Vasieni was the icing on the cake. Looking around at the gaunt faces of my fellow travelers, it was obvious. The one thing we all needed happened to be something Moldova had plenty of – beer. Quickly passing the word, we decided to meet at a “bar” run by a volunteer’s host mother.

Now, in Moldovan villages, bars don’t exist in the sense they do in the United States. Rather, they are all purpose stores which happen to serve lots and lots of alcohol. Occasionally you’ll find some stools to sit on, and a table to sit at. You couldn’t ask for much else. In Moldova at least.

We all went and had a beer or two. A few of us a couple more, but it was late in the day, and we were tired, so after an hour or two volunteers started trickling back to their host families. More time went by, more volunteers left, until only a few of us remained, surrounded by a mountain of beer bottles. The rest of us cleaned up and left, mostly heading home.

What happens when 13 Peace Corps Volunteers drink one bottle of beer? That’s right, same as in America, you get 13 empties. Let’s say they all drink two? 26, bravo! A few others drink some more, and the count reaches into the 30’s. That’s a lot of empty beer bottles, but two beers a person is hardly excessive (it’s probably just about right, a beer is about 50% larger in Moldova than in the States). Unfortunately, being foreigners, and being American (a.k.a. loud), we attracted attention.

No one complained to us directly, so it wasn’t until the next morning that we heard about there being a problem. During class, we were confronted by our LCF’s, who had heard from multiple sources that the Americans had gone on a binge at the bar, had made a ton of noise and left a mess to be cleaned up. “It isn’t good to leave the impression that you drink a lot,” our LCF’s scolded us.

Being the ‘Honest Abe’ I am, or maybe just a simple braggart, I made the mistake of admitting in class that I had drunk 5 beers myself. Responding calmly, my LCF helped me figure out, in a painstakingly slow equation akin to torture, exactly how much alcohol I had consumed that night. In Romanian. You try that hungover.

Some of us were a little dumbstruck. There were 13 of us – of course there had been a lot of beer. And I thought we had done well cleaning up after ourselves. We just hadn’t gotten used to the fact that, in essence, we were all living in a fishbowl. No matter how many times you are told about it, from other volunteers and trainers, it doesn’t actually prepare you for the sensation of constantly being judged (maybe High School does, but few other things). 13 Americans in a village that had hardly seen any before was certainly going to attract scrutiny. It didn’t matter how much each individual drank – 30 bottles is still 30 bottles.

It reminds me of something that happened to some of the other COD volunteers a couple of weeks into training. Walking to and from the school every day, we would be stopped by the odd villager and asked questions.


“Who are you?”

“Where are you going?”

“Why are you here?”

“Ce faci in Moldova????”

Most of the time it was pretty innocent, and we were happy to practice our emerging Romanian skills. So, when one of the volunteers was asked to play basketball by one of the local kids, he accepted without a thought. Bring a couple of your friends, the kid had requested. Setting a time, the volunteer went to class and recruited a couple other COD’s to meet him at the basketball “court” later that day.

During the assigned time, I was picking cherries with my host family (yea, laugh it up), so I unfortunately missed the spectacle that followed. In short, the volunteer had unwittingly agreed to an apparently earthmoving match-up between Moldova and America, when he had thought he had been agreeing to a small pick up match between some kids from Vasieni and a few out of shape volunteers. Half the village showed up, complete with cheering girls and old men drinking outside the fence. Scrawled in big red chalk on the side of the building was “MOLDOVA WIN”. Standing in the middle of the dirt court, looking at the crooked hoops, bouncing around the soccer ball that was to be their adhoc basketball, I’m sure the volunteers were wondering what they had gotten themselves into (Inconsequentially, they ended up losing the game. But really, only because the Moldovans were in incredibly good shape. Plus they didn’t play by the rules, I mean you can’t tackle people in basketball, right? And how come there was no time limit?? We couldn’t play forever, you know!).

These aren’t stories about miscommunication. They’re stories that encapsulate the unique experience it is to be an American volunteer in a foreign country. It may sound arrogant, but there is an undeniable buzz surrounding your presence. You may have to get used to the scrutiny, the criticism, and even some ignorance in order to do your job right, but it’s exactly that attention which empowers volunteers to do their job at all. People are interested in what you are doing, and why you are doing it.

If you’re good enough, you may just be able to sell them on it.