Joe and Linda Wessling, formerly from Danbury and using Seattle, Washington as their permanent address, have been residing in Moldova since September 2005 where they are members of the Peace Corp.
Joe, a graduate from Danbury Catholic’s class of ‘61, was vice president and Chief Finance Officer for Cascade Natural Gas in Seattle before his retirement in 2005.
The following was emailed to Paul and Judy Wolterman who have passed it on for family and friends to enjoy. This is the final in this series of letters from the Wesslings. If more cross our desk (or email), we’ll pass them along.
No water again, going on three days now. (Jeez, if you read that again it sounds like the diary of Meriwether Lewis). When a trickle came back on before, I took for granted that it would stay on for more than five minutes. But I've grown wiser and have a prioritized list of tasks to plow through nonstop. Things like flush the toilet, fill the drinking water distiller (“Lest the men die of thirste”), fill the Brita for cooking water, wash myself, wash the dishesÉand so on. Some challenges were easier to overcome. For instance, I have two kittens from the yard in the kitchen right now, licking the floor clean. Pretty smart, huh? Joseph's in Chisinau where he's getting his worker's card replaced (don't you love the idea of JD with a Green Card?) and I've advised him to shower in the athlete's foot breeding ground up on Peace Corps third floor. That's the only shower lots of the volunteers ever see anymore.
It was good advice, too. Whole town is still dry, but not in the prohibition sense. To kill the thirst he and his Romanian teacher, a funny, brilliant man who taught at the university back when Soroca had one, decided to head out for a shot and a beer at 8:30 this morning. On the way to the bar, they picked up Mihail's friend the narc cop, and the three of them sat around drinking and discussing things like whether JD knows any CIA men and if he'd know if he did and what the salaries are in the FBI. All in Romanian, as neither Mihail nor the narc know a word of English. By the time they rolled out of there the joint was jumping. JD says sloshed couples were already on the dance floor at 10 a.m. He clearly had the time of his life and told me earnestly how much language practice he'd gotten in.
Yet another holiday is coming up this weekend. JD's birthday and Father's Day all in one. As his gift, I'm giving him a beautiful young French woman to play tennis with in Chisinau. Her husband heads Unicef here and we've been invited to stay at their real home with multiple bathrooms and servants on Embassy Row. D'ya think maybe we applied to the wrong organization?
Linda
P.S.
When given flowers in Moldova, it is incredibly bad form to unwrap them from the layers and layers of cellophane in which each one is individually encased. JD gave me these gorgeous roses for Mother's Day. One puts them in the vase, as is.
After a long, cold, snowy winter, spring has been very welcome. Soroca, our town of about 35,000, has suddenly started looking pretty attractive, with its many trees in full foliage and beautiful flowers in the parks. Spring has also produced new kittens in our front yard, some baby rabbits in the hutch, happier hens in the yard and the house next door has two new piglets running about. We've been going about in light jackets until just recently when we've doffed those for shirtsleeves. A walk along the Nistru River, looking across it at Ukraine, is a real pleasure right now.
It's never too soon to start planning for icy times, though. Before going to work at the Dacia Youth Center this morning I went with my Romanian tutor and friend (we've made friends with quite a few Moldovans with many being young people) to order firewood for the winter. We went to the forest management office on the hill (that's where the gypsies live) and ordered 3 cubic meters of wood. I paid 750 lei (about $56) and received a receipt with an official stamp (you don't do anything in Eastern Europe without a stamped document). Tomorrow, or some day soon, we will go someplace in the forest around here and pick out the wood which will then be cut and loaded into a trailer for hauling back to our apartment building where it will be cut into smaller pieces and stacked to dry over the summer. This winter we will cut it into smaller pieces to fit in our soba (small wood and coal furnace in our bathroom that is supposed to heat the entire apartment-3 rooms), kindling size. My goal is to be able to “fac un foc” (make a fire) without the landlord around now that the soba has been fixed and doesn't require special, tender care. Last winter it blew soot and steam all over the bathroom. Glad he was on duty when it happened!
We continue with our Romanian lessons and working with our organizations to try and make a little contribution. One of the continuing frustrations is that so many people speak only Russian and make no attempt to learn the national language- usually it's the older folks who miss “the good old days” of the Soviet Union. Democracy is moving very slowly here and comes with an enormous amount of corruption. Kids buy grades and even degrees. Parents buy jobs and pay their speeding tickets on the spot for whatever that cop's going rate is. Some things that functioned well 20 years ago, gas lines and water systems, for example, no longer work at all in some places and lots of Soviet-sponsored factories are empty, leaving fewer jobs. They may admit that the old system was smoke and mirrors, but they knew they'd always have a job to go to, whether there was work to do or not, a little money to spend and some unseen hand to pave the roads and pay the hospital bill.
But the younger people are excited by all the good things that are happening at the same time - more and better products to buy, a more honest media and fast-strides in technology. (I'm emailing this from our apartment, for example).
Linda had a big success recently where she received a $500 grant from the Disney Foundation to purchase toys for the handicapped kids at her school. (That's big money in Moldova where the average salary for teachers is $75 per month). It was quite a challenge getting the money here and working through the logistics to buy the toys in Chisinau and then transport them to Soroca, a 2 1/2 hour ride. The money was actually received in Chisinau but they didn't know what to do with it so they sent it back to Disney. Linda had to contact Disney directly and have them send a wire via Western Union. I actually thought Western Union was going out of business because I never saw or heard much about them in the U.S., but in this part of the world they are thriving. I guess where the banking system isn't well developed then Western Union provides a valuable service. Here in Soroca all the bank locations have Western Union signs out front.
I've been working on a proposal to develop the ground around the Dacia building. Our plan is to construct a couple of sport courts that will allow the youth to play basketball, volleyball, tennis, and maybe some other sports. Danbury's KC Hall/St. Patrick's church was my inspiration. I've finished the proposal, in English, (the language of most international proposals) and now must find organizations to read it and provide funding. I think it will take a while to find the right donor organization but we'll send it out to all the possible donors and see what develops. This is a little different than the way I raised money for Cascade Natural Gas on the stock market! We are also putting together letters of interest to send to Western European organizations that need partners to provide youth training and seminars. This is a project sponsored by the European Council that covers a 3 year period with a substantial amount of money. Since our focus is on youth we want to learn and benefit from more developed organizations in the EU.
Our adventure here continues to provide new and interesting experiences every day. So far we are embracing these new experiences and learning many new things about ourselves and life in general. We've now been here 9 months with 18 to go. Our group (each year 2 new groups arrive numbering 35 to 40 to replace groups that have completed their service) started with 38 members and now we are 32 with a few leaving voluntarily and some not. Last month our oldest member left which now makes me the oldest. Most of the volunteers are in their 20s and 30s and we've become surprisingly close friends with people younger than our kids. Maybe that's because I let the guys introduce me as their dad as a pick-up line when they're flirting with all the pretty Moldovan girls here.