Elizaveta

Well, I am now back in Ialoveni, have been since Wednesday night. My trip was ok. It would have been wonderful except it was sooooo cold. I arrived in Elizaveta Saturday late afternoon and visited with my counterpart and visited my organization. My organization "Contentus" is an internet center and does other stuff with kids, I am not quite sure what though. I do know my counterpart wants me to start an English club and we have a couple concerts for disabled children in the winter. So after visiting the NGO we went to see my first potential host family, I had two options. It was a nice house with a mother and her 10 year old son, the dad is working in Moscow and her 16 year daughter is studying in Romania. The house had an indoor toilet, a washing machine, two pigs (yumm, I do like pork), and chickens. We hung out there and had lunch/dinner and then my counterpart took off and I didn't see her until Tuesday afternoon. I had told her I wanted to meet the other family but she insisted this one was the best. So as I was hanging out with family number 1 and looking at their photo albums(I saw at least 10) I began to realize my counterpart was in a lot of the pictures. So I asked if she was a good friend, nope, she is the woman's sister in law. Great I will live with a family who is related to my counterpart, exactly what Peace Corps advised us not to do. It was fine though. The woman was amazing. So Sunday I went to the internet center with my new host brother and my counterpart's son. I sat around for 5 hours watching boys play counterstrike, sounds fun huh? They even tried to teach me but it was hard because the computers were in Russian, hmmm, too bad I don't speak Russian. So while sitting there doing absolutely nothing I began to question what I was doing there in the first place. And after some boys began making fun of me in Romanian (which I didn't understand) I was ready to board a plane home as soon as I returned to Chisinau Tuesday. It was everything I could do not to break down right there in front of everyone. But like all volunteers have told us, Peace Corps is an emotional roller coaster, one minute your up and the next your down only to return up again five minutes after. And this is what happened. As soon as I returned back to my future host family's house and was given a big bowl of popcorn and was offered to go visit the other potential host family I felt great again. I did visit the other family but it was already kind of decided I would live with family #1. What is funny though is on Monday the mother from family #2 came over and made placienta and bread all day with mom #1. It was so fun, except I couldn't stop shivering, even with all my clothes on that I brought and three pairs of socks. It was about 10 degrees C in the house. But I forgot all of that once the placienta was done cooking. Placienta is my favorite. It is a flaky pastry filled with potato, cheese, cabbage, or pumpkin. Delicious. All in All my time in Elizaveta was good, I am looking forward to returning there in November. I returned to Chisinau Tuesday and stayed there until Wed. afternoon for some conferences with the volunteers and their counterparts.