Tipova

Yesterday I ducked out of work in favor of a trip with host mom, her fellow teachers, and a large group of their students, perhaps 100 seventh-graders. Which, for the record, is about 97 seventh-graders too many. We went to Tipova, a monastery two hours northeast of Balti.

We arrived at a small church sitting on a hill surrounded by fields, with the Dniestr river in the valley beyond it. We each paid our two lei admission, the girls tied on head scarves, and we entered the church. There was a torrent of picture-taking, and then five minutes later we exited. It made me not feel so guilty for being a tourist with even the natives having a sort of hit-and-run approach to site-seeing.

We made our way from the church to a set of stone steps carved which lead down to the monastery. The Tipova monastery is carved into the hillside, which is comprised of a sort of stone that reminded me of the stone which some of the old buildings were made of in St. Augustine, FL, sandy and full of sea shells.

The kids ran like maniacs up, down and around the monastery while the adults sat outside muttering about "kids these days" and fanning themselves. I ducked into a room away from the kids, dank and wonderfully cool, and hid from the sun, which had really begun beating down.

[Note: while it is really interesting for the way it was built, I now understand why the only pictures you'll find of the monastery are taken from a distance: it is entirely covered in graffiti, either written on or carved into the stone. Thank you, Sergei, for letting us know that you were here in 2001 and Metallica Rocks.]

Soon it was time to herd the kids again, quite a challenge with new waves of students from other schools continuously arriving. We walked down a hill toward the river, to what would be our lunch spot. In the boggy water at the river's edge frogs were going crazy. Finally we made our way to a shady clearing by a stone well with a six-foot-tall cross behind it. The kids scrambled to drink the water and dump it on their heads and then eventually just throw it at each other, and I commenced pouring cup after cup of it on my own head, feeling like quite a rebel since none of the other adults were doing that and certainly not any of the women present. It seemed so cold and lovely, I really wanted to drink it, but thoughts of the exotic buggies other volunteers have caught from unboiled water were a strong deterrent.

We ate our lunch and rested under the trees, though my mood was spoiled as I watched the others leave their wrappers and empty water bottles where they'd sat. I was relieved when at last one mother carefully bundled her trash into a bag and tied it closed. Phew, I' m not the only one!

"Hey," she called to a nearby student, "walk over to the trees there and toss this somewhere that people can't see it for me, won't you?"

The student walked a few steps before giving the bag a great big swing, launching the whole thing up into a tree where it ripped apart and fell back down on the ground.

I walked back over to the fountain for another refreshing head-pour, noticing a chips bag floating in it. I stood there shaking my head in disgust at the garbage everywhere. Soda bottles and paper and plastic bags...this garbage had also been at the monastery, on the trails, everywhere. Don't they see it? Doesn't it look bad to them? Host mom came over at this time to fill up her water bottle.

"So, how do you like the trip so far?"

I thought about our PC training, the importance of cultural sensitivity and acceptance. I decided I didn't care.

"You know, I wish we had a different system, that they didn't throw their garbage all over on the ground," I said.

She laughed and continued filling up her bottle.

"We don't do this," I said, trying to make an impact, knowing at the same time that some of "us" do litter everywhere and trash scenic places. But I don't, my family doesn't, my friends don't...I guess that's the "us" I was referring to.

"Yes, when I was in Poland they had garbage cans on the trails, and we threw our garbage in there. Too bad they don't have garbage cans here."

So if they don't exist, you just dump your waste in rivers? waterfalls? all over one of the few lovely natural areas your country possesses?! I considered walking around picking everything up, but didn't. As PC always reminds us, projects don't mean much if they aren't thought up and wanted by the community, even projects as small as me going on an anti-littering tirade while on a field trip. If preserving nature wasn't a priority to this community, me stomping around trying to make everyone feel bad wasn't going to change that, plus it would have the added benefit of leaving everyone thinking I was nuts or self-righteous or both.

Happily, our guide later approached everyone and asked them to pick up the garbage and put it in a burn pile. Burning a mountain of plastic...certainly not ideal, but seemed like an improvement.

Having lunched and rested, we then trudged off into the trees, following our jolly guide to The Biggest Waterfall in Moldova. As we stepped out into a clearing and beheld this wonder, I got a bit of a surprise. There before us, a foot wide and 30 feet tall, trickled the waterfall. Drip. Drip. There is one thing I can say about it with enthusiasm, however: it smelled like a waterfall. Ignoring the two-liter bottles bobbing in the water and the wrappers caught in the grass I sat there with my eyes closed and sniffed the good river smell and thought about waterfalls at home and I was happy.

Having taken all this in, we scrambled back up a dusty hill toward waterfall number two, which turned out to be a prettier, wider, shorter version of the first. It reminded me of one of the waterfalls on the Silver Falls trail, which falls over a rock face shaped like a bowl which cuts up and under so you can walk around behind the waterfall. It was then on to waterfall three, shorter still, not so much a waterfall as a very pretty creek cascading over stair-stepped levels of stone.

For some reason I haven't been sleeping well lately, and the night before the excursion I'd tossed and turned till maybe 5am. When our guide announced there was a fourth waterfall, I was dreaming of home and a bath and a nap, sunburnt, and quite done with the kids. Clinging to rock faces and branches, I grumpily made my way through a small ravine to our destination. Then, suddenly, there it was: another bowl-like formation, but much steeper. Water jetted through a round opening in the uppermost rock formation overhead, and the late afternoon sunshine shone down on turning everything golden. The water crashed down from the opening to a slab of rock where the kids stood and played before tumbling into the deep green pool below, and everywhere around us white puffs from the canyon's cottonwood trees floated by. All in all: magical.

To get back to the bus we back-tracked a bit, then made our slow hot way along a scorching trail cut into the hillside, walking high along the edge of the canyon. The river valley below was bright green with trees and life, while the hills around us with their scrubby plants and bushes reminded me of the Central Oregon desert. Many of the members of our group, probably unaccustomed to any sort of elevation, were uncomfortable with the height and unable to look down as we walked along.

As we crested the final hill, host mom asked me if I'd liked our excursion.

"This is what I've been missing," I told her, "this is like home..."