in the community: Emi & Mada

I mentioned awhile ago that David and I are tutoring a brother and a sister (Emi & Mada).

This is Emanuel (Emi):

And this is Madalina (Mada):

Don’t they look studious? They are fabulous and so is their family.  Their father, Marius, is an Orthodox priest in a neighboring village.  Their mom, Claudia, is a dental hygienist (Her whole family is in dentistry). We’ve met grandma and grandpa, an aunt, and great grandparents — they all live under one roof.

We tutor them twice a week for about 2 hours each time. The time flies by because it’s fun, the kids want to learn, and the parents are super supportive. We post-it note their house with English vocabulary. We sing songs to remember the months of the year. We do “Head Shoulders Knees and Toes” so fast we think we’ll get sick. We draw maps of imaginary zoos. We play a lot of Uno, make our own games of Memory, and make bingo cards.  It’s fun, interactive, creative learning and I think we’re all enjoying it.

Of course, David and I can’t and don’t want to accept money for the time we spend with Emi and Mada. But the Botez family has found a way around that.  Every time we’re there we’re fed and not just something to nibble on — a two-course meal.  Ciorba with fresh chicken (butchered in the backyard fresh), smoked pork (killed and smoked in the backyard) with mashed potatoes, the best sarmale either David or I have had. Of course there’s alcohol — homemade wine, afinata, visinata, tuica.  AND we’re sent home with bags of plums, apples and gogosari (Romanian peppers) (all from the backyard), bottles of wine, must (natural grape juice before it turns to wine), and sirop de brad (pine syrup which is quite sweet and tasty even though it smells a bit like Pine-sol).

But spending time with the Botez family is more than the tutoring or the loot we come home with.  It’s that for the first time in Romania, we feel included in family life and that’s something special when we’re far from home.  At home in the US, outside our immediate families, there were a handful of families in which we were included — the Mondays, the Gambles, the Sagans.  We didn’t think about missing that “adoptive family life” when we came here; I guess we took it for granted. But we miss family life and we miss those families.  Of course, we can’t replace them, but we can add to the group.  So now the Botez family is ours too and we couldn’t be more thankful.