Visual Update

It's been a while since I wrote, so I'll try to squeeze it all in here, mostly through photos.

Biznit:




This past weekend, Amy, Bryan, and I held one of our Poosk business seminars. Fifteen students attended, and I think they had a great time and learned some important lessons - particuarly about marketing. [Pictured below: one of the "commercials" to tout the effectiveness of the black, padded folder on the right over the difficult, plastic folder on the left.] There's nothing like teaching in a foreign language to give you a little bit of confidence. At the end of the seminar, we organized a "haunted house" to celebrate Halloween, complete with bobbing for apples and boxes containing a (macaroni) brain, eyes plucked from bad students (wet grapes), and severed ears (dough shaped into an ear). Always nice to toss in a bit of American culture along with the lessons. Afterall, we did hold the seminar in the newly minted American Corner in Ceadir-Lunga. And the kids baked us a cake!

Corn:


The corn collecting is done. This was the big work of the village the past few weeks. Unlike in America, where we think of corn as being harvested and eaten while the stalks are still green and the corn is fresh - or at least that's how I personally thought of it - corn here is allowed to brown and dry out in the fields. Then the husks are cut by hand with tomahawks, placed in piles in the field, then loaded onto tractors and carted off throughout the village and deposited on the road in front of someone's house. Most people have certain rows of corn for which they are responsible during the year. Then people sit for days shucking the corn, which will be used to feed animals during the winter. The dried leaves will also serve as feed and the husks serve as fuel for the "sobas" (like the old-fashioned coal furnaces) to warm houses. Here's me working for a little in one of my neighbor's rows.

Wine:

Corn wasn't the only thing being collected. Grapes were harvested a few weeks ago and I helped my brother gather ours from our small (by Moldovan standards) garden out back. Then we carried the buckets and deposited them into the contraption you see below. There's a hand-crank that turns two grooved cylinders, which squish the grapes as they're pulled through. The juice collects in a large wooden container. When all the grapes are done, buckets of the juice are carried into the basement and poured into large wooden casks. Sometimes sugar is added, sometimes not. In a week, you've got wine to last the whole year through.