Thankful

Cathedral and bell tower in the central park of Chisinau

First off, a big thanks to all those who came to our aid for the basketball project. We started the season this week, with our home team earning a respectable 1 and 1 record in the first day of the tournament. We certainly aren’t the best out there, but my boys played hard and they played clean. I have been harping on them all year to play by the rules, and regardless of the behavior of the other teams, and the less than perfect refereeing (we volunteers were the refs), they stuck to their word and played like gentlemen. We still have our hopes to go the championships despite the loss, and we are definitely the dark horse “country” kids, with mismatched shirts, ripped shoes, and only five on the squad that made the 3-hour journey to compete. Regardless of the outcome, we have had and will have fun. Thanks everyone again for your support. Without the donations my team wouldn’t have had the funds to make it there, and this tournament really means a lot to these boys. I will keep you posted on how we do, and will put up some pictures once I get my camera back.

As for the rest of life, it just keeps marching on. We are still waiting on spring, which is ever so slowly ambling our way. We have had two false starts thus far, the last one being last weekend when all the snow finally melted, only to be greeted on Monday morning with 8” on the ground. It snowed at least a little bit every day this week before finally turning to rain on Friday. We were teased with sun and snow today, the sky failing to make up its mind, but at least it was dry enough out to put a few clothes on the line.

This of course means that I actually did laundry this week, a major event. Only the third time this winter. I have to admit to being largely spoiled here. Despite the fact that we don’t have running water in the house, we did have a jerry-rigged washing machine. My host mother suffers from fairly constant hand pain, thus prompting her to scrimp and save a few years back to acquire a LG Automat. This modern device doubles as a counter in the kitchen, and typically had been fed by a hose connected to a cistern in the attic that we filled as needed.

When the decision was made to go whole hog and try to get running water in the house, the hoses from the cistern were severed and the water system hooked up. This lasted a week, and was subsequently destroyed with the hard winter freezes.

We only heat two rooms in the house regularly, and the “bathroom” is definately not one of them (bathrooms in a house without running water make great closets). As the water system was surface mounted there, when the –20 days started to show up the system went rock solid, with ice creaping down the lines to the pump that we thought would be safe below ground level. As I haven’t done laundry for two months, you can imagine what the fate of our pump was.

Yesterday, haveing realized that I was wearing my last t-shirt that didn’t smell completely funky, I resigned myself to a morning of prune like hands. Not a horrible experience, though not my idea of a rip roaring good time. I have certainly washed things by hand before, but normally it is a pair of socks or a dress shirt that I really need the next day. I have never really washed what one would consider a “load” of laundry by hand.

Why have I decided to absorb some of the valuable electrons and disk space of the world wide web with this wonderfully mundane information? For the simple fact that it is another chance in life where I have gotten a window into the world outside of my pampered existence.

Most Americans of my generation have largely never had to deal with the daily rigors of life that are avoided by our modern conveniences. While I have adapted fairly easily to dragging buckets of water into the house for our needs, and relying on our constantly attended fires as a sole source of heat, this really didn’t stray that far from my experience of living out of a canoe for two years. Even for my 30-day wilderness expeditions I had the chance to come back home and chuck all my soiled stuff in the machine and forget about it. Two hours plus of dragging water around, heating it, scrubbing and twisting before finally trudging out into the snow to hang stuff in the weak winter sun certainly gave me a new perspective on the term “housework”. The grayish pond that remained after my final rinse didn’t really inspire much jubilation either. I certainly have a great deal more respect for my host mother and her stories of washing all the clothes for a family of four by hand.

Thus, I have had a mini day of thanksgiving on the coattails of St. Pat’s day. I am thankful for all that I have had, what I currently have, and whatever hardships I may be blindly protected from in the future. Even though I am “going Moldovan”, I still realize what a charmed existence I am living here, with no real worries about the expenses of life, a complete sense of job security (not like I can be fired), families on both sides of the pond that take care of me, and the ability to basically meander down whatever path I feel like pursuing in the name of lending a hand to the people of my village.