A couple of weeks ago, our team split for a couple days to be involved in two different ministries. Rebekah, Rachel, Chris, and I went to one village to work with Campus Crusade students/leaders, while Abby and Suzanne went somewhere else to help a charismatic church hand out tracts and tell people about a Power Team event and learn how to interpret tongues or something. My group, after a long day of finding people out in their yards and asking them if they needed help with anything around the house (all a ploy to tell them about Jesus, of course), we slept in a school overnight so we could do the same thing the following day. [Side note: Moldovans will not sit or sleep on the ground. We were told they believe sitting on a cold floor will freeze your genitals and make you infertile. So the four Americans slept very comfortably on our sleeping bags on the floor of the classroom, while all the Moldovans fashioned beds out of tables and chairs and slept horribly.]
Rebekah and I decided to explore the school in order to find the bathroom. After asking a couple different people, who each spoke very broken English, we were led to an auditorium that had a row of sinks along one of the walls. We asked again about the bathroom, and the girl just pointed to the sinks. After trying to envision myself positioning my body over one of the sinks, and what do I do with the toilet paper, and what about things that come forth from my lower half that aren't fluids, I finally used enough charades to explain that we needed a toilet. They finally understood and just told us to go out in the woods.
Dumbfounded, I asked, "So, you don't have a bathroom here?"
The girl shook her head.
"So, what do the children do when they need to go to the bathroom?"
Shrug.
So Rebekah and I ventured forth from the school building to the very dark, very cold great outdoors, intent on finding the perfect spot to do what we needed to do. We ran into a couple of other Campus Crusaders, and after trying to explain again that we were looking for the bathroom (while they were looking for a translator), I finally had enough sense to ask for the "toalet!"
"Ohh! Okay."
And they lead us to where the concrete building of death/squatty potties lived. And I was so thankful I had just enough toilet paper in my bag to get us by. And all was well.
After three months of no one being able to understand my name, I’ve finally been given the Russian (they speak that and Romanian here) equivalent: Regina! It’s refreshing to finally feel like I’m not on the outside looking in, since all three of the other girls on my last team had universal names (Rachel = Raquel, Rachelle, Rahela; Rebekah = …Rebekah; Suzanne = Susana).
Other than my new Russian name, it’s pretty impossible to blend in around here, try as I might. In the last hour, we’ve been called out as Americans/English speakers (among a country of white people, mind you) at least four times, without even saying anything. We asked Fanel about all the ways people could tell that we’re foreigners, and he said it probably has something to do with the way we dress (hats, UGGs, sunglasses), our overall volume level (loud), the way we take pictures (smiling), walking around inside without socks on, where we choose to sit/stand outside (both cold floors and the sun are supposedly detrimental to your health)… among a plethora of other things.
Being clueless about everything Moldovan can be pretty annoying. The good thing about it, though, is that people ask us a lot of questions. “Where are you from?” and “Why are you here?” are pretty typical, and I don’t know how many times a day we find ourselves explaining the World Race. But if simply existing as a weird-looking American is enough to get quality conversations going with complete strangers, then… well, I think Jesus can work with that.
