Springing Forward

During the past week in Romania there was a lot of celebrating.  The first nine days of March is Mărțișor, where the coming of spring is celebrated, also March 8th is Women's Day.  During this time women and girls receive charms, called mărțișoare, that have a red and white string tied to them, the string symbolizes the changing of the season cold to hot and also the cycle of life, white for life and red for blood.

On March 8th, two of my 12th grade classes brought me flowers.  One class sang me "Happy Birthday" in English which was very cute.  There is a common confusion because the song that is the Romanian equivalent of "Happy Birthday," called "La Mulți Ani" which translates "to many years" and is sung for pretty much every celebration: birthdays, weddings, anniversaries and baptisms.

Flowers from 12A and 12B

For my own celebration of Mărțișor, I baked cookies at the beginning of the week and brought them to the teacher's lounge.  On the 8th I baked scones and filled them with raspberry jam.  I gave half the batch to my landlady who often brings me food.  We trade baked goods and scones are the one thing she asked for the recipe of.  I brought the other half to the foundation, as Angela, Saskia and I had a coffee date in the afternoon to celebrate.  I had been sick the past couple weeks and not teaching English as I didn't want to risk getting anyone else sick so we had a lovely time catching up.  

When I returned home I discovered in my e-mail inbox that we had been awarded the grant we applied for in February which was a great surprise.  We applied for a VAST (Volunteer Activities Support and Training) grant from Peace Corps to purchase additional educational supplies and a laptop for the spring sex ed programs that the foundations runs in all six high schools in my town.  With these funds the program will be a more interactive and technologically advanced.  It's a small grant, but it will go a long way, helping to educate over 500 students!

This weekend, Julie came to town to visit.  We always like to share when we find more unique ingredients and she had found coconut milk in her town.  I had some green curry, so we combined them and made Thai Green Curry Coconut Sauce, which, in my opinion, was quite possibly the best food we have made in Peace Corps. 

Also while Julie visited, she helped me change out one of the filters in my water filter.  Filters are supposed to last for three years with regular cleaning, but mine simply struggled.  The PC medical office was nice enough to have a filter couriered to me. You are supposed to be able to scrub off the outer layer dirt to make the water flow better, but the dirt and metals got so absorbed into my filter that even after cleaning, water barely trickled out.  The filter on the left is my old filter, after being scrubbed.  Yuck!  Julie holds my new filter on the right.  Yay!  This filter should happily clean my water for the last four months of my service.

Old and new water filters

Side note: while I did title this post Springing Forward, daylight savings time has not actually started yet in Romania.  While it did start in the United States today, it doesn't start in Romania until March 25th so now is the funny time of the year where I am nine hours ahead of Seattle, instead of the typical ten.  Anyone for a Skype date as we are a little closer in time?