It changed their lives

It was, by our best estimate, 14 years ago today.
And it’s still difficult to imagine, after all this time, what a crazy, mind-boggling experience I put my family through.
On Jan. 14, 1998, we left for Moldova, a country we’d barely heard of a year before.
There, for the better part of six months, I’d teach a couple of classes in the journalism department of the State University of Moldova in Chisinau, the capital. Sally would attend an international school with about a dozen students. And Connie would work miracles in the kitchen after bargaining with street vendors in rudimentary Russian to find enough for us to eat.
To say it was culture shock is putting it lightly.
To say it was a challenge for staff at the newspaper offices and printing company is an understatement.
To say it changed our lives would be spot-on accurate.
The challenge for Sally was probably the greatest. She was yanked out of her class at Judge Haynes Elementary School in the middle of her sixth grade year. That meant, among many other things, that she’d miss “reality store,” which she’d really been looking forward to.
The morning after our arrival, while we were still trying to adjust to the quirks of the apartment that the U.S. Embassy had found for us to sublet for a semester, Sally marked a date on the calendar in the front hall. It was the date we were supposed to head home. As far as she was concerned, it couldn’t come soon enough.
No matter how many times a parent tries to assure you that something is a great opportunity or a life-changing event, when you are 11, it just seems unfair.
Now, 14 years later, the fact that she majored in Russian and Slavic studies at I.U., went on to graduate work in the same field, and picked up Romanian along the way would seem to provide evidence that her parents were right. But that sure didn’t make it any easier at the time.
For me, the transition was probably easiest. After all, I was working. I had two classes to teach, started working on a study of regional independent newspapers for the ambassador, and soon teamed up with a Peace Corps volunteer to do a series of rough-and-tumble consulting trips on the back roads of a tiny, usually forgotten country left over from the break-up of the Soviet Union.
That work opened up more than a dozen other opportunities over the past 14 years and led to countless friendships with newspaper professionals all over the former Soviet world.
My wife’s transition was much tougher and much more basic. She’d left her job to follow her husband and to provide as normal as possible a home for us.
That proved to be a daily challenge. Language differences — both Russian and Romanian are spoken in Moldova — made even the simplest tasks complicated.
Was that shop open or closed? There’s a sign in the window, but what does it say?
What’s for dinner? Or lunch? Or tomorrow’s breakfast?
Do those tasty-looking pastries contain delicious local cheese? Or cold cabbage?
How do you get around in the wintertime in a city of a million people without a car?
What happens if someone catches a cold? What if it’s not a cold but something worse?
Why does the hot water keep disappearing? And why does the electricity go off at odd hours?
In other words, it was a daily exercise in basic survival.
Without her, Sally and I would never have made it through.
But we did.
And 14 years later, it’s safe to say we’re glad we went.
There’s a great Romanian toast I use often at the holidays.
It translates this way: “All that is good gathers together, all that is bad washes away.”
That says it all.[[In-content Ad]]