We won a small grant and it motivated a lot of people!

I, along with a partner from my community, and some major translation help from my host brother, wrote a grant proposal to Small Projects Association, which gets its funding from USAID.
We won three thousand dollars to build an aqueduct and pump to pump water up to my neighborhood here in Moldova. The households in this area were running very low on water and many still do not even have running water because of the shortage. Now that we have begun construction all of the households included will now be able to have running water and enough water for irrigation in their home gardens. Men, women and children have been out working hard to make this happen. Everything is done by hand so its a lot of work. It has been so inspiring to see people engaged in the improvement of infrastructure in their own community.

Every couple of hours or so someone from the neighborhood would bring out some small glasses of cold wine or a plate of snacks so that everyone who was working could rest and cool off a bit.
Also, one household would always provide lunch for everyone involved. Nothing like a nice Moldovan masa (meal) in the middle of a hard work day.








My hardworking partner Ştefan on the left. None of this would have happened had he not put in the long hours of work and research with me.

"Village"; A Civics Education Project

The "Village" is a project for hands on civic education. The project was started in the U.S. and has been successful in other countries in Eastern Europe including Poland and Bulgaria. Two motivated and innovative Moldovan women who head up an NGO called Speranta, and direct an elementary school in the south of Moldova are now introducing the project to Moldova with hopes to make it a part of the national school curriculum. These two women, along with their partner Peace Corps volunteer, have won funding from CEC (Citizens for Engaged Communities), to start the initiative in Moldova.

I was invited, along with a partner from the community where I volunteer, by a fellow Peace Corps volunteer who works with the two women from the Speranta NGO, to participate in the ten day "Village" training camp. I went with a Romanian teacher from my school to get the training we needed to do the project with students from our school.

There were about 20 other participants, which included other Peace Corps volunteers with their Moldovan counterparts. Together we created a mini-village with small village citizen dolls we represented, called peeps. My peep is shown below. His name is Nacho and he is a retired wrestler. He is now a staunch pacifist and environmentalist. Nacho was a strong supporter in the village for the building of the Buddhist temple as well as the Orthodox church so that all of the citizens' religions could be represented and all could have a place of worship who wanted one.

During the training we learned what we would be doing with the students in our own communities. We voted on a form of government. We divided up public and private land. We made village money. We constructed our houses on our private property and then constructed public buildings and developed on public space as well as reserved space as green space. Essentially we learned all that goes into civic participation and creating laws, etc.

Because the training was only ten days, and the most important part for us was learning exactly how to facilitate the project for our students, we did not have much time to take part in creating businesses and trading, and just living our lives out as our peeps in the village. That is what we will be doing with our students though.

When the school year starts, in our respective schools, we will be picking groups of students from grades anywhere from 5th to 9th. Generally its best with the younger grades, but it also depends on your school. I think in my school for instance we will have some students from 6th, 7th and 8th grades to comprise our "village" group.

Needless to say, we learned a lot during our training and we can't wait to begin the project with our own students and watch them learn real civics through the actual hands on creation of their very own mini-society.

Me with my village peep, Nacho.

The village has its own measuring system, called villi-meters. Each villi-meter is four centimeters. The scale of the village is 1:25 in comparison to real life.

Heads of the Speranta NGO and "village" training camp facilitators.

This was the plan I came up with for our village. I thought it was pretty good.

Another PC volunteer and I decided to share our privates space and make our house a duplex so that we could take advantage of our space and make our area more green. As we were building our screened in porch we had a visitor.

My partner Marcela making our village hospital. Her peep was the doctor.

Our visitor. She could sense how environmentally friendly our house was.

Taking another vote.

A little rest after a long day of village construction.

I loved my house, wished it was mine in real life.

Our beautiful Buddhist temple.

The recycling center.

Our zoo next to the river.

I think we were all very proud of the way our village ended up. Now its time to do the real thing with our students. The project will last 9-12 months with the students as an after-school activity. Stay tuned for pictures and updates from my community's school village project. Its going to be great!