Inainte

last post from Moldova

2006-10-17T18:25:00.000+03:00

well, that's it. I am leaving moldova tomorrow at 8am. I finally finished all my documents, I bought my souvenirs, I said goodbye to my host family, partners, PC admin, etc. I'm happy mostly because I have managed to finish all the stuff that needed finishing.

Moldova is no paradise. All of the things I've said over the past 2 years are true. There is corruption, many public institutions are dysfunctional, there is very little work, people tend to be both poor and unhappy (because they used to be wealthier, or at least had a more guaranteed source of income), rural areas are devastated, etc etc. In spite of all this, I have gotten used to moldova, and moldova went and got used to me too. Generalizations about something as large as a country are fun to say, but the reality is there are great people and bad people everywhere. I've met some great people, and for that I am appreciative. I will be sad to leave, and I will be sad to leave them.

I am starting a romanian language blog which will be about my travels back in the states at scrisoridinamerica.blogspot.com if you want to check it out. I hope it helps me keep my language skills from dying completely.

Goodbye Moldova. Maybe I'll see you again soon.

Ghita

2006-10-11T15:15:00.000+03:00

Moldova holds claim to a famous singer both in Moldova and Romania named Pavel Stratan, whose original style and lyrics that have captured the thoughts and actions of rural moldovans. He writes a lot about town life, about drinking and depression and family and relatives, among other things.

His three year old daughter Cleopatra has recently produced her own CD, and her video is on all of the MTV like stations in both Moldova and Romania. It's called Ghita (pronounced Ghitsa), and is best appreciated while watching the video. Check it out here .

Anyway, I like it, so check it out.

Shooting the moon

2006-10-05T14:06:00.000+03:00

I am now getting ready to leave Moldova. I have complained about it for nearly 2 years, and now, at the end, the things I’ve come to like are surfacing like sunken glaciers. A typical life consists of 95 percent little things, and 5 percent big things. I thought I was complaining about a lot of little things in conjunction with the big over the last 2 years, but I wasn’t – they were just big things after all. Little things tend to be so little they don’t even enter our conscious mind. I guess that’s why when you make a big change in your life, you have certain somewhat unexplainable feelings which are your body’s reaction to the 95 percent of little things shifting suddenly, as if dumped all the marbles out of a chinese checkers board.

The thing about dumping out all your marbles is you start to get the feeling you have, in fact, lost them. Big things and little things get mixed up, as does cause and effect, means and ends, possibilities and opportunities. In putting my marbles back, I seem to want to use the last picture I had of them while in place – the picture from Moldova. I want all the little things from Moldova, because they are me as I know myself now. So in constructing my future, I am drawn to Moldova like a magnet. Yet being a self-aware person (even without marbles) I know that my future self will readjust and Moldova will wash slowly out of my list of internalized preferences as new little things build me up from new. This is natural, and understood by everyone, without any unnecessary chinese checkers metaphors.

However – we tend to forget something. We could decide to keep our marbles as they were – that is, I could decide to keep my Moldovan marbles. Our self-awareness gives us the realization that we can reorganize them, but it does not force that action upon us. We feel forced, but it is in fact a decision. Sometimes we plan so long for something we forget that we are living a life in which we decide, and we act, under the sole jurisdiction of our minds – not other peoples’ minds or preferences, and not even something created by our minds, like a plan or an idea. Every day we can completely change our lives, regardless of whether we actually do so.

Perhaps just realizing this is good enough. Changing the plan is risky, with uncertain outcomes, long odds, and probably lots of unhappy endings. Or so the thinking goes… so few people ever try it out, it’s hard to really know.

right and seems right

2006-09-11T10:55:00.000+03:00

So today is the first day of the fifth year since September 11, 2001. There was a documentary on Romanian TV about the jumpers and their story (or their story’s story). I talked briefly with my host family about it. Nina seemed genuinely interested – she had seen some other program about it on the 10th. She said “with all of the bad things that God does to punish us, why do people have to do bad things to each other?”. If the human race was collectively trying to minimize its punishment, that would be a great question.

Today is the only day of the year when I feel like praying, even though I don’t believe in God. It is similar to the time we went to the basement with the tornado flew over our backyard and took out the willow trees. I was young enough to not have decided about God, but I was praying regardless of that decision. I guess when you lose all control over your most fundamental rights (security, happiness, life…), you appeal to the only thing you’ve ever heard could help you. I assumed that closing my eyes and putting my palms flat against each other would have saved me from being torn out of the basement of our house by the blackness and roaring that was outside, so I did it. I would do it now if I thought the same. I almost do.

That is the effect of terrorism.

There are many random causes of death completely outside of our control which are done by God. Terrorism, however, is done by man. We forgive God because we cannot kill him – for many of us, killing him means killing ourselves. We never have to forgive men – and we have perfected the art of killing men for thousands of years. And so we kill them by the tens of thousands.

Like me almost praying, at least it feels right.

do I have to share my candybar in Denmark?

2006-09-07T11:52:00.000+03:00

I received a comment from a person from Denmark who noted that he comes from a society in which there is a thriving version of “institutionalized sharing” of a similar type to what I described in a previous post. His point being that taxes are a form of sharing, and certainly a forced sharing (perhaps similar to my description of “not sharing is a sin”), and yet society runs and runs well.

Well, I agree, Denmark has a model economy by most standards, especially in recent years since its unemployment rate has dropped significantly. However, I think that the comparison (of Denmark and my “not sharing is a sin” remarks) is flawed. When I pay taxes, though I am certainly sharing, I am doing so in a very institutionalized way, that is, in an almost contractual way. If I pay 500 dollars a year for roads to be repaired, I can rightly assume that roads will be repaired. More importantly, I can rightly demand that my money is spent correctly since I have somewhere to demand to. However, in the more general version of “not sharing is a sin” that I was talking about, you can demand nothing. Not only can you demand nothing, but you have no one person or intitution to demand it from. Government is accepted on a contractual basis by the people (though not by every individual seperately), and though we are born into it (therefore having the contract forced upon us before we can really accept it) it remains a contract in the sense that I have some control over its conditions and stipulations on how it affects me. Especially in the case of Denmark, this contract is beneficial to nearly everyone, and so you can’t say you receive nothing as a result (unless perhaps you’re a childless upper-class entrepreneur in perfect health). So though part of the taxes in Denmark are redistributive (from those who have to those who need), a large part are also a simple, efficient unification of services like health care, child care, pensions, etc. I would not consider this part of “not sharing is a sin”. Finally and most importantly, in the case of taxes, the government has the capacity to seek out and punish those taking advantage of the system (regardless of whether it does it well or not… but anyway…). In the case I describe, it is impossible to punish cheaters without taking on the risk of looking stupid yourself by doing the punishing.

I am interested to know if the sort of sharing that I described – the giving-a-piece-of-my-candybar sort – is perhaps more prevelent in Denmark or in other countries. Though I think it’s very possible that culture has some effect, I still believe that the chaotic result I described is logically inevitable if you are morally obliged to give up a part of anything you receive (see both posts 1 and 2 (called Our Water Bottle)).

Thank you for the comment Henrik :).

Aid: the big, ugly secret

2006-09-01T21:33:00.000+03:00

I have had trouble writing this article, because I don’t think I can express the deep disappointment and frustration without the reader having actually having had my experiences. I want to remind people (so they don’t think I’m an ignorant ass) that I’ve had a decent 2 year experience dealing with aid organizations and have had many conversations with aid workers, integrated into communities of people who are competing for aid, talked with people and their perceptions of the west, etc. This is what I have determined.

Aid is a big, rotten apple. It seems so extreme to me; it’s almost like the story about the king who has no clothes. We depend on beauracracies, officials, control agencies and others to be able to judge the value of any given non-market (government or aid) activity, yet for overseas aid work it seems that the naked king himself is giving us the report that yes, actually, the king is clothed. That is, we ask aid “are you helping”, and they say “yes we are”.. And we believe them, time and time again. We believe that aid has a positive effect and the fallacy goes on. Why? There are so many reasons, I’m just going to list them:

You can never accurately determine the effects of aid. Aid, like everything, works in the real world and is trying to change concepts as general as “initiative”, “willingness to take negative risks”, “democratic values”, “wellbeing of the population”, etc. It is impossible to determine if you really “increased the wellbeing of the population” or if some other factor did so.
Because of the inability to measure the effect of aid, there is a constant fudge factor that aid workers play with when measuring what they’ve done. If the economy has grown 8 percent in a year, I might claim that our program of donating tractors caused some of that 8 percent to happen. If youth’s attitudes have changed about democracy over the course of 5 years, I can claim that our program affected that change. The combination of the fudge factor and the aid is usually done on a competitive contract basis, there is a huge incentive to fudge when things don’t work out. This makes improvement impossible when you can’t even sort out true successes from failures.
Even when measured at the small, project level, aid suffers from a host of incentive issues. For example, I am a small projects coordinator who is in charge for economic development in a county. I might be a host country national (a native) or an American, but either way my wage and wellbeing is attached to my ability to “get results” – that is, to show (using methods as close to scientific as possible) that my work caused positive results. Let’s say I have a seminar about using condoms – my proof is the signatures of the participants and perhaps a few pictures. No one shows up – either from lack of interest in the community or lack of promotion on my part. I can forge the signatures (or get my family to sign them) and no one will ever know – because no one really knows what I’m doing but me! There are a thousand and one examples or this and I’m not going to get into them all.
The command structure is fundamentally top down. Because government aid is, in the final analysis, politically motivated, it takes a long time for changes on the ground to become changes in the goals and objectives. You can imagine the sort of situations that arise as a result of changing administrations, or how changing issues on the ground can effectively make current overall goals obsolete.
Money gets doled out in big chunks. There are companies which contract with government aid organizations to fulfill their goals. For example, the US has 8 million dollars to promote democracy. I can write a competitive contract and win that 8 million dollars from the government, promising to accomplish its stated goal of promoting democracy over 5 years. However, the goal itself could be unrealistic (especially because of the top down command structure) or the goal could be accomplished easily with only 2 million dollars. In either case, you’re wasting a lot of money, though the government probably won’t know it because you can fudge the numbers enough to make it look like a success. In fact, you have to; otherwise you may get a bad reputation and lose the contract for 10 million dollars in aid in some other country, especially many large aid contractors work in a large number of countries.
Corruption. This is an easy one and it gets in the press most often because it’s sexy. There is a lot of corruption, some in the direct stealing sense, but mostly plain old immoral favoratism and back scratching.
Because of the fear of corruption, sheer amounts of money being handled (especially in third world countries), and difficulty in determing success versus failure, there is a HUGE beauracratic structure in aid organizations. Beauracracy is really about making clear, concise decisions with a fixed rule structure on a large scale. In aid, it is impossible to make decisions clear, and it is often necessary to quickly change the rule structure as situations change.

I think these last two are the most important:

There is a constant pool of individuals from donor countries (US, Europe, etc.) who want to travel the world. They are people with varying degrees of wunderlust, and their primary goal is that travel and change should be a permanent part of their jobs. This is a preference, and as a preference it is fine. These are the sort of people who work for embassies or aid organizations who serve 1 – 5 year positions at posts all over the world before switching to another post, from Peru to China to Ghana to Moldova. They are interesting, experienced, worldy, and generally good people. At the start of the career, they are idealistic genuinely want to help. As the rottenness of the apple becomes apparent to them over time, they have different reactions: some become jaded and self-serving, some fudge the numbers and believe their own bullshit, and some hope to change the rottenness from the inside out. Why does no one blow the whistle? If they realize the ineffectiveness of aid, why don’t they tell someone, make a stink? Partly, it’s the simple little reason we love to hate: money. Partly it is their wunderlust and the fact that no other job could provide the travel and lifestyle of this one. And partly because people, like organizations, having difficulty changing course, especially when they’ve been moving in one direction for a while. And so no one blows the whistle. They talk among themselves about the problems, paradoxes, corruption, incompetence, and general inefficiency of aid, but that is all.
Finally, and most importantly, there is an endless source of money. The effectiveness of aid is probably last on the list of things that affects government’s decisions to use it. Monetary aid is a form of doing good without knowing exactly how. It’s a way for people to feel good about themselves when they complain about poverty and injustice in the world, their “get out of jail free” card when someone else brings it up. It’s domestic politics, it’s international one-upsmanship, it’s plucking heartstrings, it’s pictures of fly-ridden babies and ox-driven ploughs, it’s a great advertising scheme – and it has nothing to do with what is actually wrong because it can’t ever touch the actual problem.

What is the problem? It is simple: you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Don’t ever, ever, ever forget that. If you bring water to the horse, he’ll come to expect you to keep bringing it. If you force his head in the water you can’t tell if he’s drinking anyway. Eventually, he’ll get thirsty and he’ll drink. It might take 10 minutes or it might take 10 years. There’s no sense standing there wasting time waiting for him. Go get something done elsewhere.

We need to take this lesson heart.

But first, we have to be willing to hear it.

Sovesti and how to ruin a good thing

2006-08-23T11:41:00.000+03:00

Sovesti is a well known Russian word in Moldova with no exact translation in English. It is (in my opinion) a word oozing of communist mentality. You usually say “don’t you have any sovesti” – with the sense that “don’t you realize that sharing is the right thing to do (don’t you appreciate me enough to share something with me (even if you don’t, I’ve done a lot of stuff for you so I deserve it (and so if you don’t do this, I’m not going to do stuff for you anymore either!)))). Funny how quickly sovesti becomes a game of counting favors. I don’t mind counting favors, but I’d rather count them upfront – in the first set of parenthesis – not in the plotting, back stabbing back of my mind – in the fourth set of parenthesis.

But more generally - is morally enforced sharing a good thing? That is, is it really a good thing to create a society in which not sharing is a sin?

Back to America: I buy a candy bar, and you are standing next to me. In a “not sharing is a sin” world, I automatically feel bad for not giving you some of it. I, by the simple act of purchasing something for myself and wanting it for myself, have committed a sin. If you are bold enough to ask, I must give it to you. However, you probably won’t ask for it (since asking is presumptuous) and so I have to offer it to you – I have to give you something I want to keep, and I have to make you take it. If I don’t, you could scold me for my sin as our kindergarten teachers did when we didn’t share the glitter. WHAT CRAZINESS!

You might be saying that if I was a good person, a true sharer, I would not feel bad by giving some of my candy bar to you. I would, in fact, feel good, the sharing would touch my spirit of goodness and inject even more dopamine into my brain than would have been injected by eating that tiny bit of candy I gave away. Equally, I would realize that over time, my sharing and other people’s sharing would equal out, and we’d all be better off. Well, it’s true, I’m not a true sharer – but the world will probably not equal out because there will always be those who intentionally take more than they give (see my water bottle story). Worst part is, they usually are the most vocal sharers. They’re the ones who leave 5 dollars less when in large groups at restaurants, or do nice little tasks - like cleaning up a room – while expecting much more valuable tasks to be done in return, through the natural process of sharing, of course. They are such vocal sharers because they depend on the system to continue in order to take advantage of it.

It’s not that the people are inherently bad – it’s just that everyone figures out how to maximize their happiness, which often (though not always) means maximizing profit while minimizing work. But we should never create systems in which deviants – those whose actions run against the tenets of the system – can thrive without being detected. If we could easily detect and openly finger and correct those individuals who take and don’t give, the system could continue without being systematically taken advantage of (this has been tried – it didn’t work out). But we can’t, and so it goes on in the cheaters’ favor.

And so this is why I think the system of “not sharing is a sin” is fundamentally flawed. It doesn’t mean I’ll never give you a piece of my candy bar – I might. But I don’t have to. I will feel no remorse in not giving it to you, and you should feel no anger for not receiving it. So my act of kindness will be just that: a conscious, unforced kind act, a plain old good thing - not one forced on me by some societal idea of sharing, leaving me jaded and annoyed.

And so we will both have sovesti which we will count in every transaction seperately, and the back stabbing, favor-counting parts of our minds will have nothing to mull over because it will all be brought to the surface, where public thoughts and actions should be.

all hands in the cookie jar

2006-08-19T12:28:00.000+03:00

I recently went to pick up some wood with my host father. We went to the local government nursury/forestry station which also sells wood. It was quite the ordeal, rather poorly organized though I heard that usually they had the wood cut and stacked for you, but we had to run all over the forest finding what we were looking for. They were running a little behind, I had heard.

In any case, I talked with the main forest ranger. I asked him what exactly he did, and what purpose the nursury served and the station in general. He expained the nursury was for trees that they replanted (either in other forests or parks) and was his main job. Secondarily, he obviously had to protect the forest that was under his jurisdiction. Finally, there was the saw mill which he oversees. After working for 10 years in the same position, he still receives only 500 lei a month (about 40 dollars). That’s not even enough money for gasoline for his car for a month. It is worthless. And so, like forest rangers all over moldova, he draws money out from the saw mill. He has 3 workers, who also get paid no more than 400 lei (32 dollars) from the state, and he steals enough to be able to double their salary. He steals by overestimating the amount of waste material (bark, unusable wood) and underestimating the amount of usable wood. So with that usable wood that actually remains, he sells at a 100 percent profit without the state knowing, and with that money he raises his salary as well as the workers’ salaries.

He said this is the case all over Moldova. In fact, it must be – no one can live on 500 lei a month.

This is a classic example of what the state does – it creates situations in which people cannot possibly survive, and then makes all possible escape from said situation illegal. Since people must survive, everyone does what is illegal and because everyone is doing it, the state must look the other way. As a result, laws no longer have value, and people learn that the state is not only weak, but false. Another result (which is must more sinister) is that those with political power can use this situation to their advantage. If the whole world is cheating, I will send the cops to bust only those who are cheating from the opposition party. And so police, instead of being a force which maintains justice universally, becomes a political tool.

In my knowledge, the same exact situation occurs in education and police work (underpaid workers seek money through illegal means --> state turns its head), and I’m sure it occurs in lots of other places that I’m not aware of.

Resolving the situation requires change not just for forest rangers or teachers or police officers, but requires a complete revamping of the system. People are not stoic, and shouldn’t be. They need a reason to work and work hard, and love of country is not enough. They should never have to cheat to make a buck – making a buck should be integrated into the system – and if the system has no money, they need to tighten their belts.

a thinking pride

2006-08-13T00:27:00.000+03:00

In my lifetime, pride has always been defined as an attitude of meritless intensity. It has been made to mean, almost intrinsically, the setting of goals without rationality and the persuit of them without objectivity. These are the people who derive their pride from past events, before their birth, events that have effectively become myths, another world which we look at as if behind glass.

Pride, as I define it, is something which I choose to take responsibility for. I am as cognizant of the choice as of the weight of the responsibility. Pride of this type cannot be forced upon someone. It is purely merit based: when that merit is exhausted, so is the responsibility.

I am proud of the people and system of the United States of America as they work in this moment and for the moments in the future. Since I began my service in Peace Corps Moldova two years ago, that pride has grown as I realized the merits of my country of birth. Americans are self-dependent, trusting, and aren’t afraid to enjoy success; our system is based on opportunity and not punishment. It is deserving of my pride and love until it goes beyond saving – otherwise my pride will become that based on the past, on the myth, and it will serve values which I don’t believe.

This is what happened to so many people in Moldova and other former Soviet states: after the fall of communism, their pride flickered out. Since then, Moldova has given them nothing to be proud of, only a past so far gone (before WWII) that they could make not real connection to it. Stefan Cel Mare (a great Moldova/Romanian king from the 16^th century) replaced Lenin as the name of the main street in the capitol, but he could not have the same effect in the hearts of Moldovans: he represented the success of the past, while Lenin was calling for future greatness. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, trade borders were erected and Moldovan agricultural output, another source of pride, dropped like a rock as production returned to almost pre-industrialization levels. Realizing that the state would no longer assure their wages, people grabbed what they could and began to work, but they didn’t know what they were working for. They couldn’t work for money – money represented greed – yet they had to feed themselves and their family, and so they began living the lie of wanting something you have been taught to hate, resulting in self-immolation, depression, and alchoholism.

All the while, behind the glass in the myth world, communism remained. Politicians institute free-market reforms while stealing secret glances at a bust of Lenin, farmers complain of high taxes while wishing the state will buy everything they produce, producers demand the breakup of monopolies while pandering to politicians for no-bid contracts and government grants. Unfortunately, no one can have their cake and eat it too.

Though this example is focused on Moldova, it is in no way limited to it. You could just as easily make a case for how pride can just as easily drive as ruin the US or just about any country. I just happen to be here and so it’s easier for me to use what I have and experience. As I've seen Romania develop in the last 2 years, it's interesting to see how much of it is based on the promotion of pride. Recently they started a contest to determine the "most important Romanian". They have lots of traditional music festivals and other activities centered around promoting the idea of what it means to be a romanian person. For now, their pride acts as a motor built on the merits behind the glass - though not all of them are so ephemeral. When I was on the train, on the topic of Romanian development, some people said "you'll see in 10 years, romania will be a different country, a better country..." Now that's the stuff I like to hear.

I sent this to the daily show

2006-08-03T10:44:00.000+03:00

I just watched the Daily show the other day in the PC office, and decided to write the following letter to Jon Stewart:

Hey Jon and/or person who reads Jon’s mail. I’m a Peace Corps volunteer from Moldova (between the Ukraine and Romania, currently run by an elected communist government), and yesterday I was watching your show (yes, I’m in Moldova, somebody’s dad torrented it and sent it to us on DVD) and you were talking with a woman about oil companies. You stated “I understand that demand is high and supply is low and that prices go up, but why are oil companies’ profits so high? That somehow doesn’t seem fair when all the rest of us are suffering”. You were not implying collusion, you said simply that since we’re suffering, they should be too. Why do they deserve high profits? Why don’t I get some of their high profits, I’m suffering! It’s their fault! Couldn’t they give us a break, I mean, without us they wouldn’t have anyone to sell to. I mean really, they’re producing for us, right?

WRONG. They’re producing for themselves, they’re producing for their stockholders and the folks that made the company big and strong and wealthy enough to see times when oil prices were 70 dollars a barrel. In case you ever thought otherwise, let me tell you a little secret: their stated goal is to make a profit. If you want to bitch about something, bitch to your neighbor about his decision to buy an H2, bitch to your government about their excessive tax breaks and subsidies of the oil industry, bitch to G. W. Bush about how he brought us into a war on some very shaky ideological and factual grounds which is stirring up fear among investors in crude oil. If your response is “wait, regardless of the stated goal of the company, it is still located in America, and it is our society that has created the conditions from which it has thrived. It should repay that society for the priveledge of living in it.” First off… now that you see it written, can you see how ridiculous it is? Second – this society is successful for the very reason that people are assured that they can make money without it being taken away. Third, he’s already paying taxes (if he’s not, you have the right to be pissed). Fourth, do you really want a government that says “it’s ok to make profits up to a certain point (which we determine), at certain times (which we decide), and in certain industries (which we name)?

Jon Stewart, I am really disappointed in you… I decided to forgive you because I’m assuming you didn’t understand the basic economics of it (even though I don’t think that’s really true and even though my forgiveness probably means nothing to you). You’re great at letting compliments roll off your back, but even so I’d like to say I really enjoy your show and I think you’re a pretty smart cookie, and would even go so far to say that you’re helping move this country in the right direction in your own way. I just hope that little trickle of the we-deserve-it, he’s-too-rich, society’s-needs-too attitude was a slip up and not the real Jon Stewart.

In any case, I appreciate all the work you do and hope you continue in the future.

Greg Austic

Peace Corps Moldova, group 14

When smart people strike

2006-08-03T10:38:00.000+03:00

I’d like to forwarn people that I’m writing the following mostly for me… well, honestly, this whole blog is for me in a sense, but what I mean is that the following post was written so that I remember it and can read it later. That being said, read on, if you want.

I find Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged increadibly compelling at a personal level. It’s humorously similar to the Communist Manifesto in the way it affects you: you suddenly start looking at the world using a different yardstick. It even focuses on production and work and the value of that work as the basis for much of its arguments, just like communism. It even is centered around exploitation, but it is the exploitation of the businessment, not the workers. It is the exploitation of those minds and those individuals capable of efficiently running, and risking, their businesses in a modern industrial society. No one, it says, can be exploited if they willingly accept a contract. Those who want a society centered around values other than production yet continue to consume are people working towards death, not life. Those are the people trying to defy the statement A is A… they want to have their cake and eat it too.

Another big obvious difference between the theory in Atlas Shrugged in communism is that her’s is a completely egoistic argument. Every person is in persuit of his or her own happiness. Though where happiness comes from is never exactly defined, it can come from personal consumption, consumption of others, or following an ideal. The claim is that happiness is a sort of indicator for preservation of life, just as unhappiness is an indicator for destruction. And so, the persuit of happiness is generally also the persuit of life. Those who want to have their cake an eat it too persue policies of sacrifice and unhappiness with the guise that it is for societal good, when in fact by removing happiness as the drive for achievement and production they are exhausting us of the answer to the question “why should I work harder?”

I’ve simplified it a lot and missed a lot, but when you read it she’s pretty compelling. She also comes from initial assumption that life itself is worth living, and that in order to live you must produce. The value of your production, or your work and mind, is based on the market which is the most efficient valuation of any good. Money, therefore, is a direct representation of your work, and your work is an affirmation of the fact that you want to keep living. One of her main gripes is against those who claim that those who make money are indebted morally to those who don’t, by the very fact that those who do are successful. It is by virtue of their ability to understand the value of their own work and achieve that they must give to those who do not value their own work and cannot achieve. It is a system in which the highest moral priority goes to the moocher and the begger. Institutionalized moochers and beggers are, of course, governments… so those who spend their time milking governments become the best moochers, and those spending their time convincing governments that they are the poorest are the best beggers. It is a self-destruction system in the long run, and depends on the true producers themselves to be suckers: they must continue to believe (as a motivation for their work) in the ideals of production/value/money, while continuing to self-immolate for the sake of the “good of society” aka the moochers and beggers.

(Compare this to Russia or Moldova if you’ve been to either). When times are good, moochers and beggers have to put on a good act to get money from people. They must use excuses, short enough to understand but rational enough to believe (if you don’t put too much thought in them), and say nice things to the right people. This would be lobbyists or beggars on the main streets. When times are tough, however, moochers and beggars can’t hide their acts any longer – they need the money and the people who have aren’t willing to give it up, so the façade of blame-shifiting righteousness just doesn’t work. They turn to stealing and upfront lying. This would be the Moldovan government or thieves on the back streets. They have left the system and become deviants, their self-worth is no longer based on societal values that they can’t (or don’t want to) live up to.

There are a few things that I wonder about this whole idea. First, let’s say that the world was indeed a true meritocracy, and people earned the exact value of their work, and their happiness was based primarily on what that work was and not something else. Happiness related to achievements comes almost always from pride, and pride is almost always a competitive measure. That is, I cannot be truly proud of my work, regardless of its quality, if I know that I am not near the top among my peers. But someone will always be at the bottom. Am I saying we should take a lot of pity from them? No, but they still have to live and take pride in something. A man with pride in nothing will necessarily become a deviant, in order that his actions become successful (in only by a different scale). And so, if our lives are based on our work, and we are not the greatest workers, how can we live? What happens to these people? They might have legitimate excuses – maybe they are beginners, maybe there are part-timers, maybe they have handicaps and are happy to be achieving any sort of work. But there will always be those who are simply not good at what they do. Can we say that there are people who are, at an ideological level, worthless? Should we care if that’s true, if the theory is sound? I don’t know yet, but that’s a good question.

She does not mention that both the producer and the moochers and beggars can both come from competition.. A moocher or thief can win by cheating the system faster than a producer can win by doing things efficiently, and so why produce? Only if everyone has a strong believe in the value of fairplay does the system work.

I think our world today is a mix. Most people do take pride in their work and as a result their self-worth is connected to their productive capacity (at least in the US). Yet those who fall through the cracks tend to switch to the excuse/blame mechanism that destroys the world in Atlas Shrugged. Also, many less than moral people become moochers and live off the system. It’s always a fight, but I think the system reinforces the good ones, not the bad. Especially now that we collect so much data on world growth, the market and competitive systems are proving to be the right ones. It is sad, however, when smart people get tricked into the moocher/beggar attitude.

Moldova's Mukesh?

2006-08-03T10:31:00.000+03:00

I just finished a great article in Newsweek about the head of Mukesh Ambani (July 17, 2006), certainly a little known name in the US, but he is in fact the wealthiest businessman in India. His company, Reliance Industries, has had amazing growth in areas where growth takes effort: refining, textiles, agriculture and retail. You can’t have a funny idea, post it on the internet, convince thousands of people to visit it and make money in the petrochemical industry – you have to hire large amounts of skilled and unskilled people, buy billion dollars worth of equipment, work closely with state and local governments, and have a good mind for economic strategy. The article claims that this man and his father have created something out of nothing: a oil refining industry in India where it did not exist before.

Something out of nothing… that must take some effort.

His quotes make him sound like a man with a plan and a vision, someone who enjoys the challenge as well as the reward, and has no qualms in taking pride in either. Speaking of a plan to bring large supermarkets to poor rural India he says “there will be mistakes, but we are not scared. We will correct our mistakes fast and move on”. He talks in terms of “conquering markets”, even though he’s proud of the fact that he’s providing a good service that will help people. He wants to get into the rural energy industry, something that most countries have subsidized through its early development, selling bio-mass generators in thousands of remote villages, all “sold and serviced by Reliance’s rural network”.

Sitting here in rural Moldova, I sometimes forget that lots of people work because they want to achieve something. Lots of people work to get ahead, not to get someone else behind. Lots of people work so they can earn what they deserve, not deserving to work in order to earn what they need. Here, most people work for all the wrong reasons, and those without work use all the same excuses.

pickin' peppers

2006-07-31T12:42:00.000+03:00

previous post extended

2006-07-30T14:04:00.000+03:00

I guess maybe I never felt comfortable seeking out things that make me happy, sometimes because the seeking seemed wrong and sometimes because I couldn't define that which makes me happy. Like a stupid high school kid, maybe it seemed that happiness was “below me”. Or maybe I felt guilty for feeling happy, that I didn’t deserve it somehow. Maybe it was simple indifference, the same consuming indifference that haunts a lot of us. Well, in the end we choose indifference, it never chooses us. It’s our own desire for self-victimization that causes us to seek it out and hold it tight. It’s an excuse that shrouds our failures in the twisted happiness of the fact that we think we know what others don’t: the world, and life, is meaningless. It's a way of winning, of success, that occurs without a single word, not a sentence to be debated, not a thing produced or counted or scored. Every tired morning, every drudging step, all of the depressing minutes of the day are little victories proving the fact that you are strong enough to continue living in spite of the fact that life is meaningless. No one keeps score. There are no judges. It's a game we play that we win, again and again, every day, against a world that doesn't even know their playing.

Maybe it is, but it doesn’t mean you can’t create meaning! There is no principle question in life, there is no great answer, and it’s not our failure that we can’t answer the one thing we think we should be able to. It is, however, our failure that we think we should have to answer it.

It seems funny that the persuit of happiness should be so hard for so many people, including myself. It seems like such a clouded subject, both the persuit and the happiness itself. Odd something so fundamental to the functioning of life is so complicated... why is that? Now that is a good question.

The first wedding of the rest of my life

2006-07-30T13:41:00.000+03:00

Dramatic, isn’t it? No, it’s not my wedding, it’s Shie and Leigh’s wedding, two Peace Corps volunteers that met here and got married. I want to say congratulations and numai bine, un viitor lung impreuna, plin de dragoste si intelegere.

This was the first wedding I’ve ever actually enjoyed. It’s also my first wedding of my generation, with my friends, in which I felt comfortable with the majority of the people in the room. I’ve never danced before, hell, I don’t even know how, but I danced. I whooped and hollered. I felt truly moved by their vows and their nervousness, a sort of lack of professionalism compared to your average wedding that didn’t indicate a whimsical love, but a couple so excited to see look in each others’ eyes they sometimes trip over their own two feet.

This is one of the few occasions in which I felt I couldn’t have enough fun. I didn’t sulk. I didn’t think about what other people were thinking, I don’t I really had the time to consider it. People have always had a hard time describing what they like about dancing to me, I never accepted “it just feels fun” as a good enough answer, but I’ll tell you what I liked: I like holding other people’s hands; I like running and moving in a way that makes sense, following a beat of something; I like seeing girls at their physical best; I liked seeing other people happy too.

Before when I tried dancing, people always said “just let yourself go, and you’ll start feeling good”. Well, I couldn’t, I don’t work that way. I just wondered what does this mean, a bunch of people wiggling around in a way that you would never do on the street, you would never see anywhere? It seemed like a big institution that faded away with any real thought, like a two dimensional building seen from the side. I always tried to dance thinking that happiness would just come, “feeling good” would start as if someone pushed a button, but that’s not how it works either. Not thinking is not the solution to happiness; in fact, the very opposite is true. Think, focus on the music, pay attention to everything around you that makes you happy.

The Moldovan dance the Hora really helped me out. It’s a dance you do in a circle, similar to Jewish dances, and it’s something that I can do. I can focus on moving to the music, I can move my arms in a consistent motion, I can look across from me and see how what I’m doing is making: a big, pulsing circle of people!

Where is Moldova's real John Galt????

2006-07-29T00:19:00.000+03:00

For those of you considering to come to Moldova, I suggest reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (yes, even more than Playing the Moldovan's at Tennis... I know, it's clever, but it doesn't really say anything about Moldova damn it!). It's as if we're living in that dysfunctional world where no one says what they mean, all the smart people left, and the regular guy is determined not to think to hard for fear of getting himself into trouble (or realizing that he's already in it). Just like in the book, the most common word on the lips of people living anywhere that seems an economic decline is "blame"... it's an important word, I guess. Without it, we'd never figure out who to punish since those who are guilty are never going to finger themselves. If blame serves the function of pointing the finger at the guilty, it seems that in a "civil" or "polite" society, a society in which you can't even tell your neighbor to their face you'd like to buy their chicken out of embarrassement of not having your own even if you simply choose not to have them (don't laugh, it's true), you certainly couldn't confront someone directly with blame. You can holler and scream, you can stand at your gate and yell in the streets, eyes to the sky. Politicians can point fingers (in the air) and make stern (directionless) comments. But you can't go up to the fella that's guilty and say "you're the guy who stole all the cows", or "you stole half of the vegetable crop", or "you took the smartest Moldovan's and carted them off to siberia", because that just would just be too direct and might hurt feelings, besides the fact that he's probably got the goods on you anyway. Ah hell, in the end, who cares, right? It's all in the past. And so, everyone blames silently, screaming in the public consciosness all of the sins of the past, hoping that they will arrive at the ears of a real person without any return address. Though no one is held responsible, everyone is left with a distorted sense of happiness you get from being the snitch, but it's just a whole lot of mental snitching. Everyone can point their finger, yet no one has to fess up. What an amazing system.

When I go back to the US, I'm going to take a long hard look at what it represents. I don't think I've ever really looked too closely, but I hope that if I do I'll find something that I'd like to live in. I hope we don't ignore responsability, victimize ourselves so that we can wallow in our self-pity, or ignore facts with the hope that they will go away (or don't exist) if we do so. I hope we're moving in the right direction, and that no one is defining that direction except the people who refuse to accept the fear, lies, and self-victimization.

less trips down the valley

2006-07-27T22:02:00.000+03:00

I want to preface this by saying that I, more than your average guy, am a direct product of my surroundings (both in time and place). If I watch someone build greenhouses and grow tomatoes for a living, I think that I should do so to; if I play Civilization III a lot, I tend to think as if I were Abraham Lincoln in control of the Americans; if I read a book, I tend to think in the style of the writer and judge the world through his eyes. Having said that, I have been reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (like it or not) and have found it extremely relevant to Moldova.

The past few weeks I have removed myself from the day to day work related to the irrigation water project. The water users’ association which exists is headed by a fellow with a rather unpleasant personality who I expect will soon get kicked out as president. I used to head down the hill and check on people using water after it was pumped, talk and help out moving pipes or fixing leakes, checking water meters at the station, etc. The last two times I was there, I got into two different arguments with two different fellows. They centered around the unjustness of the fact that water costs .60 lei (9 cents) per ton, how the payment was calculated, and in general the fact that someone is “checking” on how much water they are using. I’m not going to take issue with their arguments, because they are complicated and I understand where they are coming from. It’s not that I don’t have an opinion, but it wouldn’t make sense to write about it here.

In any case, my attitude as a Peace Corps volunteer is that whatever I can do, however much I can do to help, I will do. Help is defined as forward movement towards better long term solutions to problems than the ones that exist today (this can include implementing short term solutions as well). And so I thought I was helping by spending my days down there trying to get everyone to agree on how much water was used, and how much everyone should pay. Maybe this is a redundant position, maybe it doesn’t even need to exist… in that case, the association itself is redundant in it’s goal of regulating water use under the current conditions. That is a distinct possibility.

Well, I’ve gotten off track. After being yelled at, argued with, and told to basically go back where I came from, I realized that help is no good where it is not wanted. The main problem with these couple of fellas is not that they are fundamentally self-interested (this fact has made them rather wealthy), but that they don’t see the world in terms of clear social contracts, but instead as a nebulous cloud of negative no-talent corruption. You can’t sit down and talk with a nebulous cloud. You can’t change a nebulous cloud’s mind. You can’t even wring a nebulous cloud’s neck. About all you can do to a nebulous cloud is blow at it with a bunch of hot air to make yourself fell like at least your moving it, even if you’re not really getting rid of it. That’s what these guys do. They do it because most of Moldova is a nebulous cloud and has been for a long time. They don’t even know what to do when they meet a real person, a person who’s come to try to make a contract beneficial to both parties. All they know how to do is holler and blow hot air, but that doesn’t do anything except get real people angry, frustrated, and finally, fed up.

I’m not even sure if I’m not a nebulous cloud. I don’t think I am, I try hard not to be. I find it funny how amazingly similar some of the things that Ayn Rand says in Atlas Shrugged are to Moldova, mostly the pass the buck, who the hell cares (who is John Galt?) attitude and the resulting economic breakdown based on flight and theft. I know it’s not exactly the same: in her book, a sort of social responsibility/ennui on steriods comes out of an entrepreneurial capitalist economy and results in the state of economic destruction, whereas here, people were tought the social responsibility/ennui on steriods for generations and then someone threw an entrepreneurial capitalist economy in their laps. In any case, it resulted in a similar state of economic destruction.

My point? You can’t convince people to work together in a normal contractual way if they don’t really know what that means. You can’t make people like their jobs. You can’t force people to work hard. You can’t (almost ever) change people’s basic personalities, and you sure as hell can’t if they don’t want them to be changed. You can’t help people that don’t want to be helped. In fact, you can’t even call it help if they indeed don’t want it!

But you know what you can do? You can work hard (for yourself, or for someone who actually wants what you’re doing). You can work together in a clear contractual way and make progress. You can like your job. Why? Because, that’s why. The rest of them can go fuck themselves (I apologize for that comment for those members of my family who might come across this page).

negotiating

2006-06-03T17:37:00.000+03:00

One of the big problems in Moldova is the division of land - it's split up in tiny plots spread out over a large amount of space. For example, one farmer might have: 1 acre of arable land, .25 acre of orchard, and .3 acre of grapes but all split up, one being 9 miles from the other. The effect on efficiency is pretty clear. Now, as the better farmers slowly build up land (either buying it or renting it) there is a constant process of negotiating going on. However, because of the condition of rural Moldova, taking land from a townperson is like opening the mouth of a dog with lockjaw. Even though most arable land produces corn or wheat which, in the final analysis, bring no income whatsoever (in fact, they often cost more than they return), people see land as the only thing they actually have and their only source of income (even if it's also their greatest source of payments, let alone headaches).

The other day I was with a local vegetable farmer that I work with while he was negotiating to rent some land near his. The land was owned by a young girl who inherited it, probably from a dead relative, and had no knowledge or real interest in working it. In any case, she was just about to start seeding it with corn (using a hand pulled seeder) when me and Victor (my farmer friend) walked up to her and made the offer. He said "I'll give you 33% of the estimate value of the corn you would get off of this field (paid in corn), I'll pay for all of the mechanical operations necessary, and you don't have to do anything, if I can use your land to plant watermelon". It was a pretty good offer - the going value for rent here is 25% of the yield from the field payed in produse. He was offering 33 percent, PLUS he way overestimated their yeilds so the real sum was much higher.

The girl stood with her hand on her hip and blinked her eyes, stared off into the distance, and repeated "I don't know, I've never done this sort of thing... I just don't know". Looking at this girl you couldn't help wondering "what in the hell do you want this land for?". As she leaned against the manual planter, you could tell that she had no interest in ever actually producing something for sale, or even producing for herself in any sort of efficient manner. Neither did she really care. Yet she continued, year after year, to put things in the ground, watch them come up, carry them home so she could feed her chickens. If she had sat down for 2 seconds to wonder if it was really worth it (or if buying the corn from the market would be cheaper) she still wouldn't really REALIZE what she was doing was more of a knee jerk reflex than a conscious decision.

After about an hour, her relatives finally started saying "if it was my land, I'd do it", but she continued to repeat "I don't know" as if the issue would resolve itself. In the end, Victor converted the value in corn to sacks of wheat and added a little more to make the deal final.

The point is, land is not simply capital. Land has a special connection with people, and as much as we'd like to consolidate it and improve rural economies, people will be unwilling to part with the little bit that they have. I do believe in consolidation, but we always have to offer people alternatives to working land, that is jobs, and if they are untrained, training.

For those of you thinking "why can't that girl use that land as she wants? who are you to say that she's using it inefficiently? it's hers, and she can live as she wants!". Well, that's obviously true. But the questions is what makes up a healthy rural town, and more basically, what makes up a healthy society? Peasant farming might look ok to westerners who've never done it and have never seen it, and the farming itself is not fundamentally a problem. The problem is the type of society that results from it. It tends to be closed, very traditional and conservative, generally slow to innovate, and socially and scientifically backwards. You may think this doesn't matter, and maybe your right. But I think that choosing the path that leads to the greatest mental development of man and progressing his understanding of the world is the best path. If you think that you can create a lifestyle based around simple farming that promotes mental development, growth, innovation, spirituality, etc. go right ahead. But don't think that this type of lifestyle represents the majority of poor rural areas in the world, because it doesn't. That's a big western myth created by people who live in suburbs and dream about peaceful lives as buddhist monks living the "simple life". End rant.

There is going to be a lot more negotiating in Moldova until land becomes usable and efficient and a crucial part of a healthy rural economy. I just hope at the same time we can somehow transfer those currently in a peasant-like lifestyle to have other opportunities to generate income.

our first tournament

2006-05-20T18:24:00.000+03:00

Sorry, no pictures, I forgot my camera, but our first real baseball tournament we won 2 games and lost 0. I'm proud of my kids, I think they played good ball and made very few mistakes. The other teams also played well but I think our main advantages are our pitching and batting and our improved awareness in the field that comes from being a second year team. Next tournament I'll take some pictures so you can see our team, and hopefully in Tiraspol our regional all-star team will play as well as I know we can.

That's it for now. By the way - if there are any baseball teams (little leaguers) in the US that are interesting in sending us uniforms, gloves, bats, balls, etc (especially uniforms and ball) we'd really apprecaite it - we also have a lack of good equipment and it improves the play and confidence of our kids. Leave me a comment if that's possible.

bell pepper seedlings

2006-05-15T23:59:00.000+03:00

This is a group of people planting bell pepper seedlings grown in a greenhouse starting in early february. They are some of the nicest that I've seen in town, though he got them in the ground a bit late. The soild here is increadibly fertile and black.

Our water bottle

2006-05-15T23:58:00.000+03:00

This is a story that exemplifies the difference between American culture and Moldovan culture, especially in small villages.

If you read the previous post, you know that I was at the opening day for the sports season. I knew that I was going to wrestle, so I took with me a 2 liter bottle of water. As I approached the mass of people surrounding the wrestling mats placed in the grass, I held the bottle in my hand, near my hip. Most of the people were village folk or kids from the school. I stood on my tippy toes to watch the match between two 8 year olds (the winner gets a rooster) and a man who I’ve never met asked me for some water. Well, you can’t really say no, so I gave it to him. Undestand that most people in moldovan villages have minimum 1 gold tooth and do not have the best hygiene (oral or otherwise). As a result, I immediately decided that I was not going to drink anything more out of that bottle. A fat man asked me for water. I gave him the bottle. A skinny man asked me. I gave him the bottle. Another random person asked for water for his young son, and I gave them the bottle. They both drank. When I saw only a little remained I said they could have the rest. He gave me the empty bottle back.

This probably won’t happen in America for a couple of reasons: 1) we know that if someone has something, they probably want it, 2) it is generally impolite to refuse if someone asks and 3) it’s especially unusual to ask for something from a person with whom you haven’t met formally. As a result, most people who would go to such a gathering in America would go prepared with their own water or other things that they would need because they would feel uncomfortable asking for it. If they didn’t come prepared, they would probably just suffer through it or at the most ask someone they know for water. However, in Moldova, there are other rules in this situation: 1) if you have something you are basically obligated to share it, especially men with men (if you don’t, you’ll be considered egotistic). As a result, no one brings anything because they know if they do they probably won’t even get to eat or drink it before they give it away. So no one brings anything and everyone is thirsty.

It’s a funny outcome. It seems that sharing is good, and even the fact that being open enough to ask for something from a person with whom you haven’t met formally is also good. The fundamental problem is the assumption that you MUST give something if you have it. If that assumption didn’t exist and I could say “no, I need this water” then the outcome might be different. But instead you end up with a lot of thirsty people and no water.

I think that any social interaction which ends up one party having to refuze, even politly, are avoided. In our culture there is a built in shame in asking for things that aren’t ours, and as a result we avoid interactions that could end in someone saying “no, this is my water”. However, in Moldova, there is no problem with you asking me for my water, in which case I end up having to avoid the situation of refuzal. The only way out is to accept and give you my water.

Final thought – humans are weird and impossible to know without living with them.

Me and my berbec (ram)

2006-05-15T23:37:00.000+03:00

Moldova is a country full of traditions, good and bad, like anywhere. When it comes to sport, there is a great tradition concerning the the deschiderea sezonului sportiv (opening of the sports season) which occurs in villages and regional centers across Moldova. Because inter-village play basically doesn’t exist, except a couple small tournaments for soccer, you can’t really say there is anything like an actual “sports season”, but it still manages to open with a bang. Many impromtu soccer and volleyball games occur, but more importantly there are certain competitions which have prizes. One is a race of about 100 yards in which the winner takes home a rabbit. The other is without doubt the most talked about event of the day – the wrestling tournament. Greco-Roman wrestling and other modern forms of wrestling exist in Moldova, but Moldovan wrestling – as occurs on the opening day – is pretty simple. A few mats on the grass, completely surrounded by spectators, no punching or poking or choking, and that’s pretty much it. Though the rules for winning vary, this year we played single elimination and as soon as two shoulders touch the mat the match ends. For kids, the winner takes home a rooster (cucosh), and for men the winner takes home a ram (berbec). Keep in mind that rams here are pretty ugly looking creatures, they lack the pretty, almost perm-curled hair of bred rams – they’re greyish colors and their dirty, oily hair is permanently in tangles. In any case, they have horns and can be made into soup and so they’re an acceptable prize for men.

Last year I tried for the ram (in romanian you say “ma iau la berbec”) and won my first match, but lost the second against a 200 pounder who I found out later spent time in the looney bin because he threw rocks at people from the top of the crane that’s been building the “new” school in our town for 16 years. Thanksfully, this year there was two classes – bigger than 80 kilos and small than 80 kilos. I’m 76 kilos (about 165 or so) so I fell in the lighter class, so meeting with my 200 pound friend from last year was out of the question.

Most of my best friends in town are kids, and they all asked if I was going to try and were great support when I wrestled. My first match was with a 38 year old fella who was pretty strong, but I managed to control his head and after a tiring couple of minutes I took him straight to the mat with a pin. The cheers from the crowd were loud and high pitched because of all of the little kids. The mayor shook my hand, surprised. In villages, if you work with computers, it’s pretty much implied that your weak and generally don’t know how to work, and I think that was his opinion as well. I said “I got a couple more to win” and he said good luck.

My second match was also tough and I was almost pinned, but luckely we fell out of bounds. Not long after, I managed to his head close enough to his knees that I locked my hands and turned him over. Another high pitched “huraah!” from the crowd.

The last match also ended pretty quick. The guy was smaller than me by 10 kilos, so I controlled his head and ended up locking my hands and turning him over like the second, and that was it! He was the last, I won! I took the berbec! Everyone congradulated me, kids and adults alike – they seemed surprised, partly because it is implied that Moldovans are tougher and stronger than Americans because they have a harder life and work harder. Hopefully I proved that wrong. I hoisted my berbec on my shoulder, took a picture, and sent him off to be made into soup. As is traditional, I invited all who wrestled to eat the berbec soup with me at another fellas house – since I don’t really have a house of my own.

In any case, there should have been better competition for the prize, but lots of people don’t participate for one reason or another, which is unfortunate. I’m happy that all that practice in high school paid off, even if I never really managed to win all that much back then, it turned out to be important. When trying to integrate into any community, especially more closed communities like small towns, gaining respect is crucial. Gaining respect means proving yourself (mentally, physically, socially) day after day while maintaining the values most important to that community. On the path to forming your personality in the eyes of the community you learn who they are, who you are, and how you can find practical solutions. Because of this, all of the little things I’ve learned add up to who I am and what I have to offer, both in terms of information and earning respect. Nothing learned is wasted – everything can come in handy, and you never know what that might be – so the more you do, practice, accomplish, learn, memorize, and understand, the faster you will earn the respect of those around you. Without people who respect you, you can accomplish only as much as a single person which is not much (if you’re not a genius). So even if I only won a handful of matches in high school, it wasn’t time wasted.

Complicated world

2006-05-13T13:39:00.000+03:00

I’ve been told that the more you learn the more you realize you don’t know. I think I understand that better now than any time previous. It’s more than just not knowing something, it’s a difficulty in even taking specific stances on various issues because you realize the complexity of them.

I think it’s unfortunate that the world is so complex that a normal person is completely unable to make well informed decisions about the wide range of issues that face us today. The average person can maybe make one or two well informed decisions at the national level, decisions in which our values coincide with the choice we make. However, most of the time we are most influenced by politicians, personalities, or parties – while the rest of the time we just don’t care. I feel that our democracy is in it’s infancy when it comes to making the right decisions on the basis of our true values. This assumes that our values are fixed, which in fact is not reasonable – we change our values on the basis of our experiences – another important issue for the development of ourselves personally and of our democracy.

It seems unreasonable to ask everyone to know everything. Perhaps we need to think a little more about the structure of our democracy – it seems to be an issue that is not seriously discussed. The are some issues that should be in discussion right now like the idiotic electorial college system or simple alternative systems of voting (as simple as the run-off). Others that might be more extreme, like multi-point systems of voting, or a completely changing the strcture of the exective, adding or removing elected posts, or overhauling elected positions (from top to bottom) all together. Without getting into specific ideas, at the very least these issues should be discussed seriously at some level without. Unfortunately, we are happy (or complacent) in the US because we have faith (and pride) in the system of our founding fathers.

If we should take pride in anything, it should be in our ability to learn and adapt and our realism. The reality is, our current system is fundamentally limited in it’s response to both short-term and long-term events because it depends on a public that is limited. We do it economically and socially and even our judiciary system is very adaptable. Perhaps it’s time to remove the do not cross tape from the some of the most fundamental aspects of our democracy and begin debating them more seriously in order to adapt, improve, and move forward.

Any ideas?

Setting a bad example

2006-04-30T22:19:00.000+03:00

Sit down with a farmer in

Moldova

and he’ll tell you all the things wrong with Moldovan agriculture – bad governmental policy, lack of market access, beauracracy, high taxes, low prices for produse, etc. etc. etc. It’s not that much different than farmers anywhere. However, when you ask what should be done to resolve these problems, their first response is “well, it would be good if agricultural were protected like it is in developed countries – it would be good if were guaranteed a price before we planted by the government”… uhhh excuse me? You named high taxes, poor government, beauracracy, and lack of market access and you want the government to work more closely with you? You mean like in Europe – the place that’s keeping the prices that you face internationally unreasonably low? Well, thanks Europe, you’ve effectively convinced markets with inherent financial advantages like Moldova that they can’t compete without government subsidies. Instead of saying “they should lower taxes” or “they should negotiate better bilateral agreements with neighboring countries” or “they should make it easier for us to do business”, farmers here are looking for handouts and a 9 – 5 like job that includes guaranteed wages. You might say that’s because of their communist past, but I think as much as anything it’s because of they have heard too many good things about the European system without really understanding the consequences of huge agricultural subsidies (both in country and internationally). You have to argue for hours before they believe that in America farmers work hard or actually deal with uncertain markets. Although their viewpoint is understandable, it is also unfortunate, and I hope that the hand-out attitude goes away before they lose a real good chance at making their mark on international markets.

the communist mindset in Moldova - just my opinion

2006-04-13T19:19:00.000+03:00

Someone asked me "so what is the "communist mindset"" and I am going to try to explain my version of it in terms of Moldova.

I will speak about what I know about, and I know about the system of Colhoz farms (Collective farms) that dotted the countryside of Moldova up until land privitization. In the Colhoz, no one owned land; instead the Colhoz owned the land and the worker was provided for by the Colhoz. Because I (as a worker) put nothing into it, if I exit from the Colhoz (which I in fact did not have the right to do), I got nothing - so in reality, I was dependent on it. My work was paid regardless of how much I actually accomplished - THIS IS THE FUNDAMENTAL FLAW. You're probably thinking "well, we have many professions that are salary based - teachers don't get paid based on how many kids get A's after all". That's true, but salary based systems usually include other incentives, like the possibility of increasing your wage, promotion, or improving your own CV (assuming you actually can switch jobs) by working hard - so in short, working hard does benefit you directly, if not exactly right now. In the Colhoz, working hard does not directly benefit you - ever. If we ALL work hard, then we COULD MAYBE receive a benefit, though we were never included enough in the decision-making process as to undestand what that benefit might be (besides meaningless propoganda). They were blindfolded to their future, bound to a single job, and given orders by their superiors, all while being told they should be happy that they receive 80 rubles a month and bread only costs 5 kopeech (cents).
In addition, the Colhoz was responsible for my work. That is, I really ccouldn't be fired. Regardless of how I worked, I had to be employed and paid by the Colhoz. That's right - the state assured me work and made sure that my pay was not connected to my output - sounds like a real winner...
and indeed it is. Societal laziness has some interesting effects (especially here). When you're lazy, you have a lot of time to do nothing. When you have time to do nothing and you lived in a closed society, you're pretty limited in what you can do. The usual result was something bad. Most often drinking. So you have a lot of lazy, drunk people whose definition of working hard 1 hour of working to every 1 hour of "resting" (read "drinking") and who have no understanding of personal initiative.
Ahhh personal initiative. I bet you didn't even know you had it as an American - well let me tell you that you do (this is where you pat yourself on your back). Because of the hierarchical nature of the Colhoz, ever person was responsable for his job and received his orders from the person above him. He had very little room to think outside of what the boss says. So there is a disincentive for personal initiative, and a general lack of incentive for thinking intensively about what you're actually doing.
I've been here long enough that what I'm saying is not just what I've heard - it's what I've seen. The communist system of learning and work, based most often on memorization and not on creative thinking and problem solving, affects people's ability to be flexible to work in many things at once, but most important, WORK MUST BE DIRECTLY CONNECTED WITH INDIVIDUAL BENEFIT. That's not a capitalist theory and I'm not a member of the burgeosie (so much so I'm not even sure how to spell it), that is the reality of being human.
We haven't even touched on the fact that the communists didn't teach classes about marketing, networking, or anything remotely connected with information sharing.
Anyway, that's enough, you get the idea. Have fun thinking in your fundamentally capitalism minds and be happy you have them.

dear Congress - get your damn act together

2006-04-13T18:37:00.000+03:00

and solve a problem instead of creating on for once: pass immigration legislation that INCLUDES amnesty for those already in the US - just give them a damn green card for christ's sake! You have the opportunity to resolve a problem that YOUR previous inadequate immigration policies created by giving hard working people the right to continue to work hard - or does that too much to ask?

I know you've heard the whole "America was built by immigrants" argument and your probably ready with some stale response that includes "the reality of the situation is..." and "I am not against hard working legal immigrants, however...". Well, you have 2 options: kick out millions of people and spend billions doing it, create huge practically unfillable holes in the workforce and raise prices on many consumer goods, and tear the American dream from the very hands of those who want it most, or you could provide amnesty, resolve much of the current problem, allow hard working immigrants to continue working and create a good, sustainable immigration policy that will assure that the same mistakes that led to the current situation will not be made again. Of course, when you imagine that A - many republicans are anti-immigrants and B - many immigrants are not republicans, you can see the real discussion about this issue is not occurring at the level of right or wrong, but rather right or left.

This type of thinking is the unfortunate destiny of democracy, and all we have left to do is scream so loud as a people that they can't help but get it through their ballot-box brains that what they do AFFECTS US. I'm glad that 500,000 people were screaming in LA, and I hope we continue to until the problem is resolved logically and in the people's benefit.

You can write a letter to your congressperson about this - go to congress.org and the For Citizens bar. It's a little scream, but it counts.

it's baseball season in Moldova

2006-04-10T22:21:00.000+03:00

Look on the form on that kid! We're preparing our team for the Moldovan baseball league - there'e even talk that the championship will occur in the breakaway republic of Transistria... can't do that in America!

The coming of a new and prosperous day… Amway??

2006-04-10T22:15:00.000+03:00

To put it bluntly, rural

Moldova

is a pretty uncultured place. I don’t say that in a snobby American way, I say that because certain things have not yet because norms (and other things remain norms) that we would consider not very cultured, like snot rockets (which everyone fires off) and burning piles of manure in the road creating a poopy smog for all your neighbors.

And yet, the pinnacle of culture and natural products has decided to enter the Moldova market - Amway. Moldova has more natural products than Amway has ever seen – and they probably never want to see them because real natural products don’t come smelling like mint and flowers – they usually smell like dirt, plants, vinegar, shit, or some combination.

I had not heard of Amway at all in Moldova over the past year, and in the last month there are at least 3 people in my town alone who are considering or already are Amway representatives. They all say the same things: I saw people who make 1, 2, even 5 thousand euro per month and they just stay at home. When you ask who in the world is going to buy the stuff, they use the same arguments too – who wouldn’t want high quality products (not the crap you find in a regular moldovan store) that last a long time. They even always start with the same example: “Let’s take your basic toothpaste as an example…”. When you ask, “isn’t this stuff a little out of your typical rural Moldovan’s price range?”, they just start the broken record again.

It amazes me that for all of the effort we put in to getting people raised in a command economy to understand the benefits of capitalism and a free market economy, ultimately it was Amway that stirred the Moldovan’s interest. Amway is like the American dream come to life, and there are always enough examples to make everyone think they have a chance, and to make everyone think they’ll enjoy being a toothpaste salesman. If I made a seminar about being a toothpaste salesman, I think I would have much less participants than Amway’s spin on the same subject – and to that, I give them credit for their ingenuity.

One of the people who was interested in becoming an Amway rep was a cabbage farmer… something which, to me, is a very real and profitable business. He has real potential in a real business, especially because of his good standing in town and his excellent knowledge of the business… and yet Amway has mucked up the space in his dreams with their system of “points”. Points are so simple, not like real life in capitalism where you have to worry about producing, finding buyers, paying workers, etc. etc., Like in the communist system, using Amway you can always imagine somehow that some smart person thought through the whole system (after all, I met people who actually make 1000 euro per month), and all I have to do is work a little and follow the rules, and I’ll win too. In a way, from the individuals perspective, advanced capitalism with large companies isn’t all that different than communism, other than the mentality of the those working as a result of the history required to achieve advanced capitalism.

Anyway, in the end, who the hell is going to buy this crap? I agree there are people, but if we have 3 representants in our town, we don’t have that many people who will buy toothpaste for 8 dollars a tube. Even if they do buy it, this isn’t helping the Moldovan economy, this isn’t adding value to anything, this isn’t producing anything, this is just handing goods from one person to another. Someone’s getting richer, but it sure isn’t Moldova.

The other reason why rural Moldova is slow to develop

2006-04-08T21:55:00.001+03:00

In forming an explanation for the cause of undevelopment of rural Moldova, we can always look at the usual suspects. The obvious economic factors are certainly working against development: the low avaliability of resources (natural resources, credit, land, etc.), relatively closed economy and difficulty of selling goods, poor infrastructure, huge administrative and political buearacracy and widespread corruption are all working against rapid growth in rural areas. However, attributing stagnant rural growth in Moldova to this set of issues only is incorrect, and only someone who has experienced Moldova through newspapers and press releases would do so. There are more pervasive, complicating issues surrounding the lack of rural development in Moldova, and I would even argue that Moldova serves as an extreme example of a general tendancy for all rural areas.

Let me begin by saying that we are speaking as much about social and political development as I am about economic development. Economic development, in my opinion, is usually conditioned upon a minimum level of social and political awareness among the population. Social and political awareness are developed (literally) by civil society and the institutions which make it up, with civil society in a position of extreme importance for all aspects of development, rural and otherwise, most importantly in cases in which there is a generally non-functioning centralized government and poor infrastructure. In such a situation, there is an absolute necessity to communicate and cooperate. Individual efforts are often in vain when confrunted by the huge variety of problems that appear in every aspect of life (certainly true in Moldova). Institutions that directly represent people on the local level counterbalance these otherwise confounding factors and provide a forum for them to discuss common problems and create localized solutions. Development without civil society is dependent upon top down change, which is usually wasteful, poorly targeted, and poorly implimented because local concerns are rarely represented and no one is checking to make sure things are happening as they should. The only real solution is bottom up change, which means the development of civil society at the local level.

Unfortunately, once again, there are many factors retarding bottom up development of civil society – the mass exodus of young, educated people from rural areas (and Moldova in general), the ubiquitos communist “the government must fix it” mindset, the lack of trust as a result of the theft and destruction that followed land privitization, and others. These are factors that I will not discuss here, but are certainly common to the problem of poor local institutional development.

I would like to make another argument about why rural Moldova has such an underdeveloped civil society, one as true in Moldova as it is in other countries. In my opinion, the prevelance of traditional behaviors (which occurs most often in rural areas) hinders civil society development because those activites consume so much time. Traditional activities are more prevelant in small towns for several reasons. First, small towns have better reinforcement mechanisms for traditional behavior, conversely punishing non-traditional behavior (by non-traditional, I mean activities which deviate from the norm – of course, today’s deviance may be tomorrows norm). Because “everyone knows everyone elses’ business”, non-traditional behavior is not given enough time to develop. That is, when hidden from public judgement, people are more willing to try such behavior and reinforce the deviancy before “going public” with it, whereas non-traditional behavior which occurs in the open is immediately punished and cannot gain lasting strength. In addition, because of limited information flow in small towns, new non-traditional ideas often don’t even get discussed, and because rural areas are often agriculturally based, the extreme low risk agricultural mindset further restricts the their flow and uptake. So not only is there a very small set of existing non-traditional behaviors to choose from, their integration into society is a long and difficult process. As a result, rural areas tend to be slow to develop and the strength of traditional activities is difficult to challenge.

To have an idea of what is meant by “traditional behaviors”, let me give you some Moldovan examples. Planting corn on small acre/2 acre plots is a traditional activity because the corn is almost always planted at a loss, and has been for several years. Also, you could purchase corn cheaper on the marketplace than producing it yourself, especially using the methods that they use (often without fertilizer, and almost never using herbicides or pesticides). Not working on holidays (of which there are 120 in a year) is another traditional activity that seriously affects people’s productivity. A traditional idea might be that it is shameful to buy a chicken from another person in town, because you should have your own chickens. And the list goes on. These activities hinder development in so many ways it would take a book to write them all, but in the end it is clear there are many and varied.

And so we come to the point of this discussion: being that there are so many traditional behaviors and they are so inefficient, they literally crowd out any time for the creation of an active, healthy civil society. Almost more important than physical time, people spend so much mental time concerned with maintaining the status quo that forming the institutions that make up civil society, even ones that represent their interests, tends to take a back seat. The active reinforcement of traditional ideas often keeps good, efficient ideas out of rural areas even when they are very advantageous to the individual.

Along the same lines, the agricultural lifestyle of Moldovans is also not conducive to institution-building because it is so unstructured, further reducing any plannable free time to meet, discuss, and build an active civil society. Between the crowding out of traditional activities and the non-structured work ours of small farmers, there is literally no room left for civil society (though I must say that the non-structured work ours in agriculture often act as an excuse for people who are really just averse to engaging in non-traditional behavior, even things as simple as meetings).

I could give you a hundred examples of traditional activities “crowding out” non-traditional ones, but I’ll just give you just one. Several grape farmers got together to form a marketing cooperative for table grapes. When they discuss it, everyone is very excited and agrees that the future of grape sales will require them to cooperative in order to sell in larger quantities. The date for the first meeting came around, and one left for the capital, and two others said they were busy planting potatoes. As a reader, you might say “well, this could be as a result of a lot of things: maybe they weren’t really interested in the first place, maybe potatoes are crucial to their existence, maybe they don’t trust the guy who set up the meeting…”. If you are thinking that, your wrong. These people simply decided that planting potatoes (which is not crucial to their existence) is more important than the meeting, because they have not connected this meeting with the formation of the cooperative – they don’t want to go to the meeting, but they’d still like to form the cooperative. Their decision was based both on lack of time, but also skewed priorities based on life-long reinforced ideas about traditional activities (planting potatoes) and non-traditional ones (going to meetings).

I think it is worth mentioning that it is ultimately hard to judge any behavior because it can often have both work and pleasure aspects to it. For example, hoeing a garden by hand might be both a fruitful and enjoyable activity, and even if a rototiller is more efficient some individuals may choose the hoe. However, from my experience I do not think that most people would prefer the inefficient solution to any problem, especially problems which form a part of their livlihoods, as in the case of agriculture in rural areas. So I would say that most often it is a tradition-based mindset that obstructs non-traditional behaviors from entering into practice.

So ultimately there are many reasons why rural Moldova is so slow to develop, but slow development of civil society resulting from the excess time spent on traditional behaviors is certainly one of the main ones. When I return to the United States, it will be interested to put this theory to the test in rural areas there and see how things compare.

veggie madness

2006-03-08T13:23:00.000+02:00

When you think Moldova, think of women chatting about the importing things in life (funerals and weddings) while stuffing dirt into little plastic tubes. This is our back yard, IN one of three greenhouses, we started early (though others already had their greenhouses heated and planted by late january) and hope to get a high price on the chaotic market for fresh vegetables.

Opportunities to make a living abound - the problem is no one is left to take advantage of them. As hard as life is in Moldova (I read a survey that Moldova's combined ranking of happiness and income is 5th from the bottom in the world), those willing to take risks, be creative, work hard and move forward might one day find that they are the only one's left standing!

FORWARD VEGGIES TO THE MARKET!

the up and coming

2006-03-04T23:08:00.000+02:00

oh yes, they ARE better than you

Well, if you ever wondered what ag volunteers in Moldova do in their free time, you can add "creating world dominating 14 and under table tennis teams" to your list. These kids were playing with wooden paddles made of half cardboard before I came, and now they are playing with chinese made rubber paddles (oh yeah, Peace Corps Africa can't hold a candle to what I'm doing here!). Anyway, it's a good activity, and as silly as it seems, it keeps kids occupied - and it keeps me occupied too.

PING PONG IS GREAT.

2006-03-04T22:52:00.000+02:00

FORWARD!

blaaaahgs - I guess I'll just jump into it

2006-03-04T22:24:00.000+02:00

Well, I guess I'll just get started writing crap. For those of you who don't know, I am a Peace Corps volunteer in Moldova and I'm working in agricultural development. My situation is pretty open, that is, my partner didn't really work out and I find people to work with. Here, as a newcomer into a small town of 2500 people, the hardest thing is understanding your social position relative to other peoples'. One minute you think you're the big cheese, and the next you realize that everything just thinks they're going to get money out of you or send their kid to work in the US. It's impossible to know what you've done, and what has happened simply as a result of the passing of time and the natural development of the village. Ah well, I suppose that's what life is like too, it's all quite murky.Today I helped build a greenhouse in our garden space in the back yard - it's twice as large as our other greenhouse. My town (called Balauresti, pronounced Balauresht) is quite famous for it's vegetable production - mostly because a large part of the population in town knows how to produce vegetables (for sale and home consumption) - probably half the damn town have greenhouses in their back yards - lots of people start heating them up in January! We will be planting tomatoes, which were very profitable last year, though there are large price variations year to year, and it's a bit of a lottery picking the produse that will make money, though there are some that are better bets than others.I'm working on a variety of projects, god only knows if anything will work out, but I think there's a good chance on a couple if we keep picking away at them. I'm working with another volunteer and the head of the Artizans Union to create a seminar to promote export among small producers through creating a cooperative, an online store (which other countries, like Romania, have), or at the individual producer level. It's the culmination of a lot of work that I did last year which was mostly pretty naive on my part - it's increadible how much time you can waste if you aren't working with the right people.Well, that's about it. Can't complain much about Moldova - I have internet at home, I mean, that's not very third world. But I have to say, as cushy as it feels sometimes (mind you, that's after a year and a half of getting used to it - probably if you came you would think it was pretty... well... underdeveloped), there is a lot of work to be done here. I only hope that the next 15 years sees more positive steps forward (free markets, reduced corruption, simplified beauracracy, opened trade, and the death of all of the old communists and the mindset they forced on the hardworking people of Moldova - I'm not bitter). I am sure it will - the worst part is over.