English Club

Today was our first day of English Club. We had 14 participants, including two teachers from the school. I taught with the English Teacher from the school, Roma. We talked about why we were doing an English Club and why the students wanted to be there. We practice common English expressions like 'good morning', 'good evening' and 'nice to meet you'. It was an exciting hour and we are already talking about lessons we can do for American holidays. I just hope we can keep them engaged and motivated to attend every week! More to come........

Moldovan Gingerbread Cookies

Before I left for America for Christmas vacation I helped the teen girls of my center cook Moldovan Gingerbread cookies. I call them Moldovan Gingerbread cookies because we were lacking certain ingredients that allowed them to brown and also lacked any kind of formal kind cookie cutters. So in traditional Moldovan style we improvised and still had a successful and fun time.

One of the main ingredients that we were lacking was corn syrup, which I tried to make myself. But in my attempt to make it I ended up with a jar of hard, hard candy like substance. Needless to say it was not useable and we ended up with very pale gingerbread heads.

The girls reading the directions in Romanian and preparing the ingredients:

The measuring and mixing begins:

The Moldovan Mixmasters:

The girls putting the finishing touches on the cookies with pink and green frosting:

Enjoying the finished product with a cup of tea:

Anul Nou pe Vechi

The other day was Old New Year's Eve, according to the Eastern Orthodox calendar. I had the pleasure of being invited to a celebration at the Concordia Center in my village. Concordia is another NGO in my village that provides housing for elderly in the area, a meals on wheels program and programming for children. Concordia serves over 200 people in the Tudora community and has thirty-six other facilities in Moldova that serve communities in a similar way. I hope to start volunteering soon at the center in my village at least once a week.

The celebration consisted of copious amounts of singing, throwing of dried corn (to wish you luck in the new year), plays depicting a resurrected goat and dancing grandmothers or babushki as they are referred to here. All this was captured in my video, enjoy and Happy New Year! Here is the link to my video, sorry it is somewhere else, for some reason it just would not upload to my blogger page:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=493764871376