A Long but Fun Week

I know this is a lot of pictures, but a lot happened last week, and I think it's a lot more interesting to illustrate with photos. So, here was my week in a nutshell. I went down south to Dan's village of Zberoia last week for his 23rd birthday party. It was a lot of fun. Not only is Zberoia a beautiful village (it's right next to the Pruit River, and you can see Romania across the river), but his family was really sweet, and the birthday party was a lot of fun with other volunteers and locals from Dan's village. In the picture on the right are Dan, Greg and Rok, all of whom were in my training village of Rusestii Noi when we first came to Moldova. All really good guys that I have come to appreciate and enjoy hanging out with. The girl in the picture with me below is Masha. She's Moldovan, but speaks English fluently. She came to Zberoia for the party, and I really enjoyed getting to know her better as well. The group in third picture consists of other volunteers who journeyed to Dan's village for the party. They are, from left going clockwise: Chrissi, Jessica, Craig, Mary, Adam, and another Greg. I stayed in Zberoia for three days, and had a blast. After this, I traveled back to Chisinau for a conference run by Peace Corps about working with our Moldovan partners. My counterpart, Ala (president of the NGO I work for) came and we worked together on the plans for a project called "Generation House" which would primarily serve the elderly of our community and would try to bridge the generation gap between the youth and elderly of our community. The fourth picture in this series was taken at that conference. My counterpart, Ala is the women on the right in the front. The conference lasted three days. I got some helpful information from the conference, but think it could have been condensed into a day or two. But it was nice to have hotel rooms with showers and hot water! Woo hoo!:) I can't complain!