Peace Corps Emaily #9

Original Sent Date: 

January 28, 2005

Hello all!

It has been far too long since I’ve written… I feel like I’ve sunk into a world where I only speak in Romanian and watch horrible Brazilian soap operas dubbed over in Russian.  Ooof.

The weather here has taken a turn for the colder.
It’s not so bad, since I only live about 100 feet from where I work, but it’s still cold.  Actually, I fell pretty hard yesterday and have a huge, black, bruise all over my entire butt.  I would like to take a picture and put it up on my website, but I imagine that wouldn’t make Mom very proud.  It is a cool bruise though!
Because the weather is colder/warmer intermittently, people have been freaking out about “THE GRIPPA!”  The grippa, in my understanding, is what we could call a bug—pretty much any all-purpose illness is called the grippa.  At the center where I work, all of the children are wearing necklaces with cloves of garlic strung on them.  I thought that maybe it was to ward off, you know, vampires since we are pretty close to Transylvania, but no, it’s for the grippa.  Silly American, with my confused way of thinking—of course it’s to ward off illnesses.  Garlic, the miracle drug…at least I learned the Romanian word for vampire because of this.

Things at work are going well. I’ve been teaching English, Computers, and doing physical therapy.  I’ve
also been writing a lot of grants.  By the way, if anyone has any resources about physical therapy they
would like to share with me, I would really appreciate them…even websites are good. 

So, the water has turned back on in my home.  Apparently, the lack of water for most of 2005 had nothing to do with the water supply.  No, someone on my street wasn’t paying their bill and the water on the whole street was just turned off for everyone.  Oh communistic values.  The person finally paid, so now I can bathe in my town!  Which, by the way, is probably a good thing.  A little girl at the center, Lenuta, asked me when I planned on washing my hair next.  It had only been 4 days—I’ve been able to make it up to a week without grossing myself too much.  Good for a girl with naturally oily hair.

I have been receiving letters mailed to my site address!  Thank you all for you letters… it’s been amazing to hear from you all.  Just to let you all (ahem) know again, my site address is: Darcie Brownback
deleted the address.

Have a great couple of weeks and I’ll think of you all as I’m eating pickled watermelon.  It’s surprisingly
good!

Take care,

Darcie “Super Volunteer” Brownback