Trees & Germany

One of the projects of the mayor's office is reforestration or beautification of the village. To that end, one of the schools has been growing sapling maple trees for the last couple of years, and a couple days ago they dug them up and started planting them in a huge field on the outskirts of town. I think the basic idea is to grow them there and make a kind-of park, or possibly dig them up again after a few years and transplant them to line some of the roads of the village. Anyway, it's a nice idea and hopefully villagers will stop grazing their cows and sheep near the saplings so that all their new shoots get eaten like last year... We had some really beautiful weather as you can see by the pictures.

As I was walking home from my tutor's last night, I saw a huge tractor-trailer unloading all kinds of stuff into the Cultural Center. So I stopped by and turns out it was a huge load of humanitarian aid from Germany. There were bags of clothing, bikes, desks, paper for printers (actually, very useful here because paper is pretty expensive), some stoves and refrigerators, and even what I think was a chair for our hospital to do OB-GYN examinations or births.

This gift, which will I'm told will be followed by another truckload of 40 (old) computers at the end of May, comes just after my Russian tutor (who also speaks fluent English, German, and Turkish) led her class to an international conference of students from 11 nations at a high school in Germany. I mentioned this during an earlier post, but did not at that time write about all the hurdles that they faced in actually going to Germany because I was afraid to be too critical of any persons or organizations lest they raise even more objections. But now that the trip is (successfully) completed, I can tell you the basic gyst of the matter... The school director refused to allow the trip to go forward without official permission from the Ministry of Education (which hasn't done $#!% for the school ever). Some official in the Ministry refused to allow this trip - a once in a lifetime opportunity for many of these students to travel outside of Moldova, let alone meet peers from 11 nations - to move forward because the students would miss one week of school. All the kids and parents and my tutor were beside themselves because they had already secured a bus for the 3-day trip since it was the cheapest mode of travel, been writing with their host-families, visited the Polish and Germany embassies numerous times to secure the necessary visas, and just plain excited to go. Ultimately, it took a call from the bashkan of Gagauzia (sort of like our governor, but with a much cooler title), who hails from my village, Copceac, to the Ministry to get the necessary permission.

By far the most difficult thing I deal with here is the fear or reluctance to take advantage of great opportunities. But it's like magic when you find those few people who are ready.