Jewish Karma

Last Sunday, I went to help clean up the Jewish Cemetery in Leova. Leova is the next raion over from Hincesti and home to the fabulous PCVs Suzette and Matt. In spite of a few hiccups and a ton of rain, they did a great job organizing a worthwhile event.

I dressed for the rainy weather and left my house at 8:00am and headed to the gara (bus station) in Hincesti to catch a rutiera to Leova. Leova is about an hour drive on a good day and an hour and a half on a bad day. In addition to the varying travel times, the rutiera schedule seems to vary as well. Although there is a rutiera schedule it seems to only be loosely adhered to. My experience has been a rutiera can arrive roughly a half-hour in each direction of the time it is scheduled to be at the station. In order to account for all of these travel variables I left my house at 8:00 in order to arrive in Leova for the 10:00am start time.

The first mistake I made that morning was attempting to arrive on time. Everyone knows that nothing in Moldova starts on time. It is just a general rule here. After realizing this I have started arriving at work at 10:00 every morning instead of 8:00, and sometimes I still beat my partners in. My travel that morning went extremely well by Moldovan standards and I arrived in Leova at 9:15, forty-five minutes early!!!

I then began a series of waits. First I waited for the organizers, Matt, Suzette and Ohad, to meet me at the gara in Leova. They arrived at about 9:45 and then we were slowly joined by a few students, who are in Matt’s debate club. Together we then waited until about 11:00 for the bus from the Jewish center in Chisinau to arrive. When it did we all finally headed to the cemetery to get to work. Once at the cemetery, we discovered that the tools and workers that the Primaria (Mayor’s Office) was going to supply were not there, so we pulled weeds and picked up garbage with our bare hands until lunch.

At the cemetery, we also had what I referred to as the “safety meeting” before we got started. It probably would have been more accurately named the “soul safety meeting.” At this meeting we were all informed that only someone Jewish is allowed to pick up a fallen headstone and/or grave marker. I don’t know what the consequences of a Gentile picking up a headstone are, but I am sure they are “grave.” (Sorry!!!)

For lunch we were supplied with cheese and mayonnaise sandwiches. Luckily, the lovely Emily Getty kindly allowed me to share her PB&J. After lunch the tools arrived and it stopped raining, we really got to work. Matt let be borrow his work gloves, which turned my hands yellow. This led to my spending the afternoon saying I was jaundice and my liver was failing. I am not sure that everyone else appreciated this, but I thought it was hilarious. (As is the case with most of my jokes.)

I think that overall we did a great job. While there is still a lot of clean up left to do at that particular cemetery, but we made some progress and will continue come next spring.

Now many of you may be wondering why I would be interested in cleaning up a Jewish Cemetery, seeing as I am not Jewish. The reason is simple: Jewish Karma. (Yes, this is in fact something that I made up.) I have booked a trip to Israel in February with a group of other PCVs. I figure that in should start racking up the Jewish Karma to ensure that I have an awesome trip.

Here’s to the Chosen People…