Dog Attack

Stray dogs are part of the landscape in my Romanian experience thus far. I see at least 75 dogs each day on my 45 minute walk to and from school. Most of them are harmless, but you occasionally will get one that is overly interested in you and barks or growls. It can be a little intimidating. Even the U.S. Department of State has a warning about dogs on their Romania page.

Throughout our training, we have been warned to never run from the dogs and if they try to bite or attack you to remain calm. On the 4th of July my dog attack training was put into practice. However, I was very lucky. I only ended up with a little drool on my pants. Evidence below.

In all seriousness though dogs can be a threat here and I am careful not to walk too close to dogs that look like they may be trouble. I hope to never have a real attack during my stay in Romania.

Another year and a little learning

Last week I turned another year older and my lovely gazdas had a birthday party for me. My gazdas invited two of my fellow trainees over for the party. Maria, my gazda mom, spent the day before the party making sour cherry liquor. We had a feast and she made an amazing custard/jello fruit dessert that was presented to me complete with a firework in it!


This week concluded the second week of our teaching practicum. The first week of practicum I taught 8th graders and after the first day I realized that my lessons were a little too low for the majority of my students because their English was very good. This meant rethinking my lessons for the rest of the week. After some initial stress and some boredom from my students I ended up finally figuring out how to make lessons that were challenging enough for the advanced one, but could also work for students who had lower levels of English.

My most successful lesson during the remainder of the week was a lesson that I did on letter writing and descriptions. After reviewing the pieces of a letter, I had everyone close their eyes and I gave them the following prompt, "Imagine you are looking at the person that you want to marry. They are beautiful or handsome. They are smart and educated. They are respectful and kind. They are talented, funny, and athletic. They are your perfect match. However, there is a problem this person is on the other side of the world and they only speak English." I had students then write a letter to help their future spouse find them and convince them that they are the right person for them.

After the students finished their letters I collected them all and passed them back out. We read them as a class and tried to decide who wrote each letter. Students with more basic skills stuck to just physical description of themselves. However, students with broader vocabularies had some very creative letters. In one of my favorite letters, a student told his future wife that she could be his Juliet and he would be her Romeo.

Fifth grade was more challenging for me. I admire the energy required to be an elementary school teacher. It's especially difficult when teaching another language to elementary students when you only know basic things in their home language. Throughout the week I got a lot of blank stares, but overall, I think they learned some things.

Travel in Romania

In Romania, I am part of Peace Corps group 27. In other words we are the 27th group of volunteers to come into Romania. Peace Corps started sending volunteers into Romania in 1991. Group 27 is made up of 44 TEFL+ trainees (we all hope to have the privileged of being sworn in as volunteers in August). We will all be assigned to teach in schools in Romania; the majority of our schools will be in rural communities. In Romanian students are required to take English from 3rd - 12th grade so we be teaching any/all of these levels.

Last weekend our group went on Integrated Field Visits (IFV) to see Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) currently serving in communities in Romania. The goal of the weekend was to see how to become an active member of your assigned community, to see schools where PCVs teach and see secondary projects in action. As TEFL+ volunteers we will be teaching, but also once we become acclimated to our communities we will be asked to take on secondary projects to help meet additional needs in the community. Past volunteers have done a variety of things including environmental education, adult English education, model UN, drama clubs and girls volleyball.

We went on our IFVs with our language classes and our instructors so that we could get tutoring over the 4 day trip. I went on the trip with Chelsea, Aron, Martha, and our instructor, Iulia. We went to Galati.

While traveling in Romania one always need to be prepared for delays and having a back-up plan is always a good thing. Instead of having the one hour stop in Ploiesti we were supposed to we ended up having a three hour stop. It was about 90 degrees with a great deal of humidity. My poor Seattle body was not too happy about this.

Another group was taking a maxi-taxi (similar to a mini-bus/shuttle) to their IFV and the maxi-taxi broke down so they had to wait for another one to come along to pick them up.

Chelsea and Aron on the Personal.

We were very happy when our second train came and we finally arrived in our destination after midnight.

Galati is a port city on the Danube in the Southern part of Moldova. The city is very industry, you can see the port in the distance in the above photo. We had the opportunity to walk in a park on the shores of the Danube that was created during communism. The sculptures below are from that era.

School was out of session for the summer at the school we visited although there were some students who were around to take exams and get results. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of the school. I will try to post more about the visit another time.

In the mean time, our practicum starts next week and we will spend the next two weeks teaching Romanian students English for half of the day. I am very nervous, but working on lesson plans so that I will be prepare. More soon!