Day 259 - Residence #4

Hotel Codru

Our move back to the Hotel Codru suite was supposed to be just temporary. With our household effects in temporary storage in the annex building and the Embassy furniture in our suite, we didn't initially get ourselves too comfortable. It was winter and there was still not much heat in the building. We had oil bath heaters to heat up portions of the rooms, but after about 60 minutes of use, the walls covering the wiring became very hot and there was an odor of burning paper. So we didn't use them much. In addition, the wall of the bedroom of our suite adjoined a stage where plays were held on weekends. Loud, noisy plays that went on late into the evening. The embassy furniture made the suite more comfortable, but not quite yet comfortable.

Walt with his Moldovan fur hat

We were looking forward to moving again. Walt had located a two-story house at a little greater distance from the embassy than the others that both he and the Moldovan government encouraged us to rent for the ambassador as her official residence. She didn't like the floor plan. The two stories had identical layouts - two bedrooms on each, a living room on each, a dining room on each, and a kitchen on each. But the living and dining rooms were small, too small, the ambassador thought, for her to be able to entertain. So we began the negotiations with the landlord for Alex and me to move into it. This house needed very little done to it. Just titivating, as my English husband described it. But an important step we needed to take was to have the title to the house investigated to be sure any lease we signed would be with the rightful owner. And that's where things fell through. The local lawyer that we used to conduct the equivalent of title searches reported back to us that the house had been built straddling the property line of two parcels owned by different people. The two owners couldn't agree on a solution to the dilemma, so we had to walk away from the negotiations.

Walt had located another house not that far from the embassy, so we began looking more closely at that house. We settled on a price and the landlord agreed to do the clean-up GSO David requested. David was in charge of making sure the work got done. Alex's and my first visit to the house was a week or so before we expected to move in. It still looked like there was a lot of work to be done to us, but David was certain the landlord would come through.

At the end of that week, now just days before we understood the house was going to be ready for us to move in, Alex and I went to look at it again. What we saw might have seemed like improvement to someone - most of the trash that had been piled up in rooms the first time we saw the house had been removed. But what was most distressing to me was that instead of fixing the lock on the back door, the landlord had left a dog in the house to keep those who shouldn't be in the house from entering. A dog - unsupervised, unfed, and un-cleaned-up-after. But we kept looking. In the bathroom, we found the medicine chest still had a variety of pill bottles in it. The kitchen cupboards still had food in them - some canned, some not. And there were bugs. In other rooms we found smaller piles of trash that we had expected would be gone by then.

After our experience with Mr. Saitsky's promises and our two moves within two weeks that resulted from his not fulfilling his promises as we had expected, I decided that we could not go through another experience of getting a house ready for us to move into. When I told the ambassador I would rather stay in the Codru suite than go through getting the house ready while living in it, she warned me that if I made that decision, I needed to be prepared to stay in the Hotel Codru for the duration of my tour. While I had very much looked forward to getting out of our suite, I agreed that we would remain where we were and get the new house ready for one of the other staff members to move into. Within a few weeks, Johnny moved into that house.

Peace Corps Director Mary Ann

A few months later, when the Peace Corps was getting established in Chişinău, the Moldovan government suggested a house to serve as their offices. Peace Corps had been operating out of a series of rooms in another hotel. Moving to a house with larger spaces for offices was their desired next step. Since none of the Peace Corps staff had been in town when Walt was searching for houses for us, none of them knew the back story of the building they ended up leasing. It was the two story house Walt had found for the ambassador's residence that we had instead expected to move into, but there was a problem with the title to the land.

Was there really a dispute about the title to the land? I don't know. In my personal life, I consider coincidences like this to be signs, signals that something was supposed to happen. In my professional life, I considered coincidences like this to be signs, signals that someone is manipulating events to make sure they get what they want.

But then I remember that Moldovans are the nicest people in the world.