(This is Part 1 of my series on my Virtual Service Pilot engagement in Moldova through USA Peace Corps. Featured image credit: Image by jorono from Pixabay)
In October 2024, I was contacted on LinkedIn by a USA Peace Corps staff member in Washington, D.C., about a voluntary (i.e. unpaid) service experience through their Virtual Service Pilot. They were looking for a participant with experience in libraries and managing online file systems, and basic Russian or Romanian. They had been having difficulty finding someone to work with village library and municipal staff in Volintiri, Moldova, and would I be interested?
I had qualms about doing this while launching my freelance career. Would it be too much of a distraction, and would it be a good experience, or confusing and disheartening? But I was flattered to be contacted, and longed to do it: as a younger person, I didn’t apply to be a two-year overseas Peace Corps Volunteer because of a chronic illness, and because I knew I might well not be asked to serve where my Russian skills or interest in Eastern Europe would be needed. (This was the process in the late 1990s, and has since changed.) In November 2024, after an application, reference checks, and an offer, I said yes to being a Virtual Service Pilot Participant. My service engagement started in February 2025, was scheduled to run through late June, and I extended it to late August 2025 in order to complete a few more projects with my colleagues. This experience could not have come at a better time for me. It fit well with the reinventing and exploring I have been doing in my career, and it was meaningful to me as an individual who cares about freedom and better lives for people everywhere.
Some history: my maternal grandfather was the son of a Slovak-speaking immigrant from Austria-Hungary, who became a coal mine stable foreman in Crabtree, Pennsylvania. Grandpa read the Slovak language newspaper when my mother was a kid, and sometimes went to Slovak Catholic mass after Vatican II made them possible. After studying Latin in high school and looking at which languages were offered at Ohio State in the 1960s, my mother majored in Russian, taught high school Russian in the USA for a few years, and even got a rare chance to study in Leningrad in the summer of 1972. She taught us kids about Russia and the realities of the the Eastern Bloc. There were Slovak nut rolls at Christmas and cabbage rolls at supper, and for a few summers we hosted a young boy from Belarus to allow him more fresh air and sunshine than it was safe for him to get, in his region that had received fallout from Chernobyl. We learned to play cards in Russian-English pidgin, and teasingly insult each other calling animal names: кит (kit), whale; гориль (goril’), gorilla.
I studied Russian myself, in university, and finally visited the country with Mom, on a group tour in 2017. I’ve learned more about the countryside near Prešov that my maternal great-grandfather came from, which is now in Slovakia. I’ve come to love foods and culture across Eastern Europe, with a lot of help from the shared word roots in grammar features of Slavic languages, and housemates and friends from Croatia, Slovakia, and Poland. Yet I knew nothing about Moldova until I was approached for this opportunity. I didn’t know that Romanian was spoken there, as it’s the same as what some people still call Moldovan. I didn’t know about the mixture of Romanian and Russian and other ethnicities in the country, or about the Transnistrian region which asserts independence from Moldova and is supported by the Russian Federation. I only vaguely knew about Russia’s interest in maintaining influence over Moldova, and how Moldova related to the goals of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Even virtually, I would be joining a sometimes tense situation in the country. Peace Corps doesn’t presently send staff to live and work in parts of Moldova closest to the war in Ukraine, including the Ștefan Vodă region which occupies the corner of Moldova closest to Odesa. Volintiri, the village in Ștefan Vodă that I worked withand is partly surrounded by the Moldova/Ukraine border. The current government of Moldova is pro-EU has put it on a path to EU membership, and many Moldovans living in Moldova and around the world also hold Romanian citizenship and vote in Romanian elections. At the same time, many people want the Transnistria region to maintain its connections to Russia, and some of them, as in any former Soviet bloc country, miss that era. The language Soviet leadership decreed to be Moldovan is once again referred to as Romanian, while many people in the country still speak Russian at home and in public life. Moldova is the poorest country in Europe, and gets various forms of aid from the EU, the UN, many NGOs, and until recently, from USAID. A great article for learning more about USA-Moldova relations is The Future of the U.S.-Moldova Partnership.
I’ve met a lot of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers (RPCVs), and I know how much it changes your perspective on the world to live and work in the countries where Peace Corps operates. It’s a huge adjustment to make the move to the kind of accommodations, food, and everyday life of some of the poorer places in the world. It’s a huge adjustment to return to American culture afterwards, particularly our huge SUVs and our shopping malls. In the months leading up to my engagement, I wondered what that adjustment would be like for an online engagement. I would not be immersed, and I would still be living in the USA. This village might be anywhere in the country, I thought, somehow forgetting to actually look it up on maps, and might not feel so impacted by the war in Ukraine from day to day. But it would bring me more in contact with ongoing hardships people face, in the village where my in-country partner lived. I signed my Peace Corps agreement a week after the US Presidential election of 2024, and I wondered how the plans for downsizing the US Government might affect us, during the course of my service engagement.
I did my best to stay hopeful and to prepare by brushing up on my Russian, borrowing an audio Romanian course from the library, and learning how to pronounce place names. Belatedly, I looked up Volintiri on the map, and realized that they lived quite literally next door to a country at war, and perhaps a half an hour of driving from the Transnistria region. I wondered what life was like for them, and how that might affect me, week after week. This is where I’ll wrap up this first in a series of posts about my experience. I have a lot more to share about how I made new friends, what we worked on, and what I hope will happen next.
(A note: statements and opinions here are my personal views, and not reflections of official Peace Corps policies or positions. Posts in this series have not been reviewed by staff of USA Peace Corps.)