LA MULTI ANI
multi ani treasca, multi ani treasca, la multi ani!!!! ( happy birthday to you, Lisa, Dad, mikey)

Romanian men look young. THis guy Silvius was 25 and i swear he looked 20. It was an interesting night. NOt at all like a date which was relieving. He came with his sister and they dominated the conversation. i feel like people just want to meet me to practice their english and that is depressing. We spoke in english and i hestitated to use my broken romanian. when i did try to say something in romanian their faces twisted up in a look of total confusion as to what i was saying and so i shut up. english is safe but i am getting frustrated with it. what was the point of coming here if i can't even pick up conversational romanian? What is the point if no one will be patient enough to let me try? wow this has been a load off my mind. i needed a little venting session. The conversation was pretty typical. Both he and his sister study computer science at a flashy private school in Bucharest named American University. Everything was going well until they made some snide comment about too many gyspies and then they lost me to the food. I can't handle those racial slurs. It isn't a faux pax (or however you spell it) to rave about the "degenerate" gypsies, I have heard it all before, but i wasn't up to filtering my conversations last night. Once I was actually told that gypsies have a gene that makes them lazy. Not every one is like that though. On the up side i am going to Tirgoviste this weekend for a PCV birthday party. Josh is turning 27. It should be fun or at least a diversion from the usual laundry and god knows what else.

yeah so i am kinda going out on a Romanian blind date thursday night. forgot to mention it. it's more like a group conversational english date but as they say in romanian o sa vedem (we shall see). Daniela, my Romanian colleague set it up. "He is a nice, nice guy!" she claims. "A student from Bucharest!" Katherine is coming too. It will be a group atomsphere. At least we have some drinks and a few laughs. Don't freak out Mom.

The Lazy Blogger is Back!
I have started this blog three consecutive times with no promising prospects. My mind is in some kind of schitzophrenia at the moment. So for that matter is my apartment. Projects and project ideas lie floating on the couch, my bed, next to the toilet, by the stove, in every pocket of every pair of pants that still fits, and somewhere in the back of my head. Our In-service training was a full-scale attack of project ideas and grant writing. It made me edgy, time is passing and I am doing nothing! Armed with way too much spare time, this week I have been searching out secondary projects. Ideas so far include working at a soup kitchen (I am going to volunteer Friday morning for the first time), hosting a local radio show (I put in a proposal yesterday), planning a mini (very small, minute) GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) leadership camp at my apartment (set to be at the end of March), and a larger full scale boys and girls camp for this summer. The wheels are turning folks. Now if I could only start running on a regular basis. I feel as if the busier I am the happier I will be. You know me, if I'm not running around with my head cut off, papers flying out of my bag, I am not accomplishing nearly enough.
My kids want to start a recycling program at school, so today we have a meeting to organize the event. What we want to do is make recycling a competition between classes. The class that recycles the most amount of paper and glass (there is no plastic recycling) will win the money that the whole school has made. The incentive is money but hopefully we can make simultaneously make the kids aware of how much waste they are really creating. We are going to tabulate the weekly or bi-monthly figures in terms of kilos. We are going to chart the competition with a gigantic poster of naked tree. A paper leaf will represent each kilo and each class will have one branch on the tree. The leafiest (if that's a word) branch wins. This is only in the idea stage at the moment. We have to go through approval after approval before implementation. Bureaucracy rears its ugly head. Recycling has a pretty nasty history within the Romanian school system. During the Ceausescu regime students were made to bring in a certain quota of paper to recycle. It was not optional but a mandatory requirement and since that time there has always been hesitation about the issue. Recycling was never a choice or a benefit to society but an obligation and a mandatory one at that. It is hard to break that way of thinking. People wince still at the word volunteer. To volunteer under communism was never voluntary. They always ask me why? Why would I ever volunteer to come into a foreign country and help people who weren’t even my “own”? I tell them, somebody has to volunteer. If we don’t do for others, when it comes to our time, who will do for us? I’m not so philosophical today.