THE ECONOMIST: YOUR (ROMANIAN) PASSPORT: From the Economist’s Eastern Approaches blog: HISTORY means that many European countries ihave kinsfolk either outside their borders: Estonians and Latvians in the slivers of territory they lost to Russia during Soviet rule, Lithuanians in Poland and Belarus, Poles in Lithuania and Belarus, Ukrainians in Russia and vice versa, Hungarians in the Trianon territories…the list goes on and on. Sometimes the very existence of such people is controversial. Greece does not like the idea that it has a “Macedonian” minority that speaks a slavic language identical to that spoken in its nameless northern neighbour (hello trolls: you need read no further but start posting at once). The pinch point is often passports. In what circumstances can, should, or may a Macedonian apply for a Bulgarian passport? Or an ethnic-Polish citizen of Lithuania for a Polish one? Or a Moldovan for a Romanian one? Sometimes this is simply a badge of national identity. Sometimes it has a strong economic dimension. A Hungarian living in Mukhachevo1 may find a Hungarian passport a life-changingly useful document. A Hungarian living in the Slovak city of Istropolis (look it up) will find the same document makes no big practical difference, though carrying it may be a big symbolic decision. All the more reason to welcome a  thoughtful study by the Soros-funded thinktank the Romanian Center for European Policies which looks at Romania’s policies on recovering citizenship. These are controversial in other EU countries, which think a) that Romanian is undermining Moldovan statehood and b) allowing Moldovans and Ukrainians into the EU labour market. The report argues that these fears are overblown and that Romania’s policy, though haphazard and ill-run, is similar to those of other European countries such as Germany (which offered ethnic-based citizenship to Germans from the former USSR), Spain (which gives citizenship to descendants of Civil War refugees and others, Britain (too complicated to go into here), plus other countries described above. The authors, Andrei Avram and Andreea Valentina Dimulescu, deserve particular praise for the compilation of comparative statistics. Print it out and take it to the beach. 

Casey is a Real Man, and Real Men don't buy girls: I feel obligated to post this after I’m 99.9% sure I just witnessed the purchase of a mail order Moldovan bride by a middle-aged American at my upscale hotel in Chisinau in broad daylight. Here at the LeoGrand Hotel I’ve also seen Germans, Russians, and (extremely bombastic) Brits leave the hotel bar with prostitutes. The Turkish manager clearly condones this, as during my time here I’ve seen how he micromanages everything, so for him to claim that he’s unaware of what’s going on is about as believable as Kevin Costner’s accent as Robin Hood.  The hotel is not coincidentally owned by a Turkish conglomerate; Moldovan authorities struggling to stop human trafficking in Moldova with the assistance of IOM and the US State Department have run up against a lack of initiative, to put it mildly, by Turkish authorities to stop Turkish middlemen from selling Moldovan girls into slavery. Don’t worry, the first night I saw it happen I filled 5 napkins with notes; narrative forthcoming.

“Ladies and gentleman, the problem has been found, we are shooting the trouble, and we have some administrative tasks to complete, so we hope to be flying soon. Thank you for your patience.” - The pilot of my Austrian Air flight, which had to taxi back to the terminal because of a smoking oven in the kitchen. I should also add that Austrian Air stewardesses are dressed like villains from the Wizard of Oz; that the interior of the plane is decorated like a laser tag arcade; and that the pilot has a Schwarzeneggeresque accent which only makes this all the more comical. None of that, however, is quite enough entertainment to make less horrifying the fact that I’m sitting in the middle of a loud, bombastic church group going on a mission trip to Macedonia, a group whose comments about how the Eastern Orthodox hordes need to be converted are giving me an aneurism.

So, since I returned to the U.S., I began working in the field of international development. Tomorrow, I leave on my first business trip — to Moldova. I just found out I was going less than 36 hours ago, I leave on a plane in less than 24 hours, and I’ll be there for around two weeks. Right now, it’s a scramble to get ready, so I can’t say much. This video pretty much says it all, though. I’m back!

Never in my life have I seen such a neatly-packaged karmic episode as what I witnessed just now on my flight to Baltimore, when I suffered through listening to a well-dressed, gorgeous, twentysomething girl of vaguely south Asian descent shriek into her bedazzled iPhone for 45 minutes (we were waiting at the gate to leave) about the high quality of the diamond engagement ring she had just received from her unnamed, featureless, obviously passive and unimportant boyfriend; when I found in the eyes of the gentleman across the aisle from me — a bespectacled redneck wearing Wal-Mart jeans and reading a pulp Christian novella — that he shared my pain; when he furtively stuffed into his lower lip a wad of Skoal so large and dense that it could have been fired out of a gun at a clay pigeon; and when he spent the next hour spitting into a Sprite can, dip juice dribbling down his chin, as the newly-engaged girl next to him squirmed in horror and tried in vain to hide her visceral displeasure behind a pair of $300 sunglasses and a game of Angry Birds on her iPad.

25 abandoned Yugoslav monuments that look like they're from the future

I was organizing my computer files the other day when I came across the site history report that I had to prepare before leaving Moldova. Basically, these site history reports are used by Peace Corps staff in deciding whether to continue placing volunteers in a given community and with a given partner or host family. Clearly, a site history report will reflect the opinions of whomever wrote it, and a Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) who has a bad experience in a given town or village will write a different story than a PCV who had a better experience. More importantly, however, the site history ideally should reflect a given PCV’s truthful opinions about his or her site, opinions unfettered by concerns about who might read it. The report is only useful if it’s honest and tells the whole truth. I was never dishonest about what I wrote about my service on this site, but I was certainly selective about what I chose to write. Being a PCV with a blog can be a bit tricky, because anyone can read what you write, and for obvious reasons we are supposed to shy away from saying negative things about where we live or whom we work with. After enough time passes after a breakup, we all tend to remember the better things about our exes; and so it is with me and Moldova (though it wasn’t a nasty break-up, and the good always outweighed the bad by far). Looking back, I found it interesting to read my site history and to be reminded of the difficult parts eight months later. And so do I present my site history report for your reading (n.b.: names have been redacted): Site History Report - Anenii NoiSite SummaryAnenii Noi is a raion center with a population of less than 10000 and about an hour by bus from Chisinau. The town and its nearby villages has been host to a number PCVs in the past, and it is in general a community that is welcoming to PCVs.My primary partner organization was Liceul Teoretic Hyperion, a secondary school located in the town center. Hyperion has a student body of about 400 children in grades 10, 11, and 12. Students come to Hyperion from all over the district, and some live in an adjacent dormitory while classes are in session. The current director, Mr. E— M—, was installed as director at the end of the 2009-2010 academic year, following a sort of coup against the previous director, Ms. G— B—. Ms. B— herself was only director for the fall term in 2009, having just been elevated to the position following the retirement of the long-serving previous director. Ms. B—, a French teacher who I believe is no longer a faculty member at all, was anonymously accused of impropriety and denounced in a letter that was sent to national corruption investigators. She was hospitalized for stress when she was informed of the investigation, and did not return to the school for some weeks; she was replaced on an interim basis by the then-adjunct director, S— M— (who has since left for Italy). From what I was able to find out, it was not clear that Ms. B— had done anything improper, and instead was the victim of the ambition of Mr. M—, who apparently had long coveted the directorship of the school. Mr. M— has outwardly never been anything but friendly and supportive of my presence, but I got the sense from my former host mother (who works at the district education office and knows these issues well) and my partner teachers that such machinations on his part (as in, the type that he may have committed in the lead-up to Ms. B—‘s departure) are not out of character. In short, Mr. M— is an excellent resource and takes his job seriously but is not to be trusted unequivocally. As for Mr. P—, the present adjunct director: he was always suspicious of me and I am not convinced that he is very good in his present position; I often overheard students gossiping about his awkward, forced attempts at flirtation with his female students. Other teachers at the school are generally open to the presence of a volunteer, though some more so than others. The gym teacher, N— V—, was especially supportive and helpful.At Hyperion I worked with three partner teachers: J— P—, H— S—, and P— L—. Mr. L— is very bright, speaks the best English of the three, and is very Westernized (he has been to Iowa and Great Britain for extended trips), but has some health problems due to his age and does not prefer to dedicate much of his energy to his efforts in the classroom; he is more interested in raion politics that go on across the street from the school than teaching. He has also been known to miss school for weeks at a time, ostensibly for health issues but possibly for drinking binges. He is, however, a valuable partner in after-school undertakings such as Odyssey of the Mind, has useful connections throughout the town, and is a veteran grant proposal writer. He has some connections with other NGOs in town, and should be a point man for any community development projects.H— S— is also very bright – she likes to read Shakespeare in English and also speaks very good French – and enjoys her job more than most teachers. She is the youngest of Hyperion’s English teachers, but is also very, very conservative, and can make inappropriate (by American standards) comments in class about religion or sexual orientation. She has two very young children, and will unexpectedly miss days at a time to care for them. She has a tendency to ignore weaker students and in general to give the students work that is much too difficult along with a lot of superfluous vocabulary. She is ambitious, and is a bit of an outcast among other faculty for her ambition; she has a tendency to rub people the wrong way. Her teaching skills require the most work, and as she can be stubborn it will take a very strong-willed volunteer to break her of her bad classroom habits.J— P— is, in short, the best partner a volunteer could ask for. Her English is the weakest of the three, but she is very, very good with students – she effortlessly makes lessons entertaining for students while still ensuring they learn – and she is always open minded about new methods and activities. She understands what is truly important in the classroom. She also is a straight-talker, and is a valuable resource for a volunteer trying to understand goings-on in the school and in the community.Anenii Noi has a hospital near the middle of town and quite a few people who speak English well who could be potential tutors. Internet, banking services, and mobile phone service are all ubiquitous. There are at least a dozen buses to Chisinau every day that leave from the new, modern bus station; the trip takes an hour and buses generally leave every twenty-five minutes. The train stops outside of town near the road to Bulboaca and Cobusca.Anenii Noi is generally safe. I did hear one unsubstantiated story of a teenage girl being raped and possibly murdered behind the outhouses at the local discotheque this summer. Having been to that disco myself, I can say that the fact that this might have happened at this spot is not surprising. I’ve also heard a story about a string of unresolved murders a decade or more ago, and another story about local mafia meeting in the woods on the edge of town.In general, people in Anenii Noi are receptive to the Peace Corps. The Russian school, unfortunately, has had a string of bad luck with volunteers who terminated their service early under less-than-ideal circumstances, and one female volunteer there in particular established quite a negative reputation for herself in the town. The two Romanian schools, on the other hand, remember their volunteers fondly. A recent agribusiness volunteer was quickly forgotten; I did not meet anyone who knew him during my time in town. In my experience, it is not made clear to town members that volunteers are not paid a teacher’s salary and are in fact volunteers; advertising this fact better would go along way for increasing public opinion in the town. Romanian speakers will have some difficulty, as most people speak Russian on the street, and I would estimate that 80% of conversations I hear are in Russian. People working at local restaurants and shops often will only speak Russian and do not understand Romanian at all.A— and V— D— were my hosts for the first six months at site.  They are supportive, wonderful hosts, and I had no complaints. After that, I moved into a house in the nearby village of Bulboaca. The house is owned by a man named V— who owns the AutoService next to the gas station in Bulboaca. The house is old, has a sink with running water, but no refrigerator, bath, or indoor toilet. During the winter there was a serious rodent problem. V— wants to sell the house, and will overcharge you if he thinks he can get away with it. I cannot recommend that a volunteer stay in this house again. For more housing possibilities, I would recommend calling J— P— and would avoid asking teachers at the Russian school for recommendations. Another possibility is A— D—; she is a American high school exchange program alumna and may have housing suggestions.Work SummaryIn addition to teaching at Hyperion, I also was involved with the local basketball team and coached an Odyssey of the Mind team at my school. I can strongly recommend that subsequent volunteers get involved with Odyssey of the Mind; there are a number of local kids with experience in the program, and its goals align well with the goals of the EE program. Before I left, I was set to begin a new civic education project with P— L—, and this is something he is still interested in; I still feel that such a project has great potential and would recommend following up on it. V— S— is a good contact for local athletics and youth programming. He has been to the United States and enjoys working with volunteers, and is interested in working with future PCVs on sports camps and the like.Final RecommendationsI can strongly recommend that another PCV be assigned to Anenii Noi, and in particular to Hyperion. My students and partners all expressed to me that they would like another volunteer. I would recommend that any future volunteer at Hyperion be particularly good with older students and be much more than just an English teacher, as the high quality of both the English teachers and the students demands a volunteer who can share other skills and experience with them. Anenii Noi would also be a good site for a community development volunteer. There are opportunities for work in both civic education and in general youth development. I would strongly recommend, however, that any community development volunteer be trained in Russian rather than Romanian.

Someone had a good night last night on my neighbor’s stoop.

A WORD ON THE CELEBRATIONS: From The Economist’s Democracy in America blog: “I DO not currently have a television in my apartment, which is located about ten blocks north of the White House. So one of the ways I learned of Osama bin Laden’s death on Sunday night was from the hooping and hollering outside my window, as revelers made their way down to Lafayette Square. One of the nice things about living in Washington is that you often find yourself in the middle of history, so I joined the crowd and followed them to the president’s house. The scene there reminded me of a fraternity party—overexcited young people in silly red, white and blue outfits mindlessly jumping around. The whole thing felt a bit tacky, but, importantly, it didn’t feel wrong.” Click the link for more. The author’s opinions mirror my own (and we seem to live in the same neighborhood, sans television).

Dan’s Cafe, Adams Morgan: where they give you a filthy bucket of ice, cans of Coke, a plastic ketchup squirt bottle filled with Jim Beam, and tell you to make your own damn drink. And the pool table is covered in a tarp.

Moldovan: And how is your health?

American: Good, and yours?

M: I'm great, but your [host] brother here has been bothered by his back lately.

A: How did he hurt his back, carrying a girl?

M: Ha! More likely he hurt it lifting a glass of wine.

Chernobyl, My Primeval, Teeming, Irradiated Eden: In light of what’s going on in Japan this weekend, this already captivating essay makes for an even more interesting read. An excerpt: IT WAS SOON AFTER 1 A.M. on the night of April 26, 1986, that one of the world’s nightmare scenarios unfolded. Reactor 4 in the huge Chernobyl power station blew up. The causes are still the subject of debate, but it was some combination of a design flaw involving the control rods that regulate reactor power levels, a poorly trained engineering crew, a test that required a power-down of the reactor, and a dogged old-style Soviet boss who refused to believe anything major could be wrong. At any rate, it was spectacular. Eight-hundred-pound cubes of lead were tossed around like popcorn. The 1,000-ton sealing cap was blown clear off the reactor. A stream of raspberry-colored light shone up into the night sky—ionized air, so beautiful that inhabitants of the nearby city of Pripyat came out to stare. When it was all over, estimates former deputy chief engineer Grigori Medvedev, the radioactive release was ten times that of Hiroshima. …  ONCE YOU ENTER THE ZONE, the quiet is a shock. It would be eerie were it not so lovely. The abandoned backstreets of Chernobyl are so overgrown, you can hardly see it’s a town. They’ve turned into dark-green tunnels buzzing with bees, filled with an orchestral score of birdsong, the lanes so narrow that the van pushes aside weeds on both sides as it creeps down them, passing house after house enshrined in forest. Red admirals, peacock butterflies, and some velvety brown lepidoptera are fluttering all over the vegetation. It looks like something out of an old Russian fairy tale.

Gubbi of Arabia: Things I Learned in the Desert: Reflections on International Women's Day from Dubai: I don’t often do this reblogging thing, but this is too wonderful to pass up: gubbiofarabia: In honor of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day today, I thought I’d share some observations from my experience as a woman in the Middle East. This is certainly a part of the world where the role of women is a growing flashpoint - both within local societies and for external… Well done.

VP BIDEN HEADED TO MOLDOVA TO COOL HIS HEELS FOR A WHILE: As part of a trip to Finland and Russia, Vice President Joe Biden will be stopping in Chisinau on March 11th. He’ll be relaying America’s support for ongoing democratic and economic reforms and for Moldova’s aspirations for European integration. I suspect he will use the trip to take advantage of the spring weather in Moldova as well as to let the heat die down a little back home, as he is wont to do.

theydothingsdifferentlythere: abcworldnews: theeconomist: Daily chart: global alcohol consumption. In 2005, the world drank 6.5 litres of pure alcohol per person. Moldovans drink more than anyone else, beating the Czechs into second place. 30% of the world’s liquor was brewed at home.  We learn something new about Moldovans everyday… Reblogged for One Bloc East. I don’t really think there’s anything else I need to add to this.

I’m impressed that this actually seems to have been filmed in Moldova. I might have to see this.

My friend Alistair over at They Do Things Differently There had a good idea yesterday (or was it...

March through Dupont Circle in DC in support of the protests in Egypt.

March through Dupont Circle in DC in support of the protests in Egypt.

YE-oo-jen ee-oh-NEH-sko. And PS, count me among those who want to read the rest of your Moroccan...

NYT: RUSSIAN PRIEST CHIDES SKIMPINESS: A top official for the Russian Orthodox Church on Tuesday...

A Russian, a Ukrainian and a Belarussian all sit on a chair with a nail pointed up. The Russian...

BOOK REVIEW: WORLD AFFAIRS JOURNAL: The Cold War—is it finally over? It shaped world history during...

Walking from my house down the hill and into my village in Moldova, I would frequently pass a baba...

WHY WESTERN AUTHORS ARE IN LOVE WITH MOTHER RUSSIA: “The country’s appeal to Olga...

EUROPEAN VOICE: PRO-EU PARTIES FORM MOLDOVA COALITION: The Economist’s EU-specialty paper is a...

THE WAIT IS OVER, FOR REAL THIS TIME: As it turns out, the reports of a the Communists and the PDM...

What I see in this chart is that even at its height, the Soviet Union was never really close to competing with NATO’S arsenal. I also see that I don’t really want to drink the water in Nevada, the South Pacific, Xinjiang, southern Algeria, or southern/eastern Kazakhstan. Finally, it seems that the Fifth French Republic has had a bit of a Napoleon complex. ilovecharts: Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project’s “Trinity” test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan’s nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea’s two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing”the fear and folly of nuclear weapons.” It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming. -xwidep

Some of you may have noticed that I put ads on the site: I’m using Google AdSense, obviously, and I installed it more because I just wanted to see what would happen rather than because I expected to make anything off it. For the privilege of earning a grand total of $0.02 over the last month, I’ve been given the above as the sort of ad Google’s algorithms have deemed to be relevant to the content here. The first ad, frankly, makes me sick. I can only assume that ‘AnastasiaDate.com’ is the only advertiser Google has paying them who associates their services with the word ‘Moldova’ (though it has occurred to me that maybe I’ve written too much about Moldoveancas here and I’ve done this to myself). The second ad makes sense; it’s the third ad that I don’t really understand. Is it because I’ve mentioned that having all my teeth and being in my late twenties put me in a minority in my village and thus made me an especially eligible bachelor? Or do visitors to this site leave and go shop for coupons? Or for tooth whiteners? Proprietary algorithms are such a mystery.

“This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds. One...

THE ECONOMIST: DROP IN FOR A BITE WITH VLAD TEPES: From the Eastern Approaches blog over at The...

goodcabbage: fuckyeahrussianpolitics: Good Morning everyone! Here’s Putin singing Blueberry Hill lol  MY MOM AND I WERE FREAKING OUT YESTERDAY Wow. Putin is like a real live Chuck Norris joke. Just when you think he can’t outdo the photo ops of him horseback riding shirtless, doing jujitsu, or standing over the tiger he just killed with a machine gun, he goes and does this.

FROM THE ECONOMIST: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM, AMERICAN HYPOCRISY: I, for one, am tired of hearing...

Despite what I reported before, nothing has been finalized yet between the PDM and the Communists,...

THE MOLDOVAN POLITICAL STALEMATE FINALLY ENDS: While I was a volunteer, I wasn’t supposed to...

… there is a carpenter in Georgetown who uses his power drill in such a way that, muffled...

From the Economist’s Eastern Approaches blog: Germany, Austria and Italy are standing...

My friends are awesome. This is a local news report about my friend Bailey and the brewery she’s opening in Nashville. Watch the video, then go follow the Jackalope Brewing Company tumblr, Blogalope. I can say that I was there when Bailey started learning to brew. Our first beer was pretty simple — I forget what it was — but we almost accidentally used tap water instead of spring water to make it, and I’m going to take full credit for thinking last minute that we needed to go buy some bottled water. That was really all I ever contributed, even though we brewed together for almost a year — it was always the Bailey show, and she knows her stuff, so I was happy to just see her genius in action. We had our successes and our mild failures in our year or so of brewing together — including a Strawberry Steam ale that was overcarbonated and didn’t taste like anything — but Bails has really hit her stride since I left and I had the pleasure of tasting a few of the Jackalope brews back in June. So check out Jackalope, and ask your local stores and bars to buy some!