Abingdonian 2017

80 The Abingdonian The Moldova Project Undeniably, not ‘bright eyed and bushy tailed’ we arrived at the coach park at 3am on Monday 10 July. Fourteen bleary eyed and shattered Abingdonian sixth formers were ready to spend the next 10 days in one of Europe’s poorest countries. Intrigued by the prospect of what lay ahead, we embarked on our journey to Moldova. After a short flight to Vienna, and a delayed flight to Moldova, possibly looking for William Pearson’s case that went missing somewhere in transit (much to the amusement of us all), we finally arrived at Chisinau airport and were met by the ‘legend’ (we’d heard so much about him from previous years) Nicu, Director of Agape, the charity we support. It didn’t take us long to realise this was nothing like England, not because it was around 30 degrees and perfect for topping up our tans, but because of the sheer lack of development – this came as a shock to all of us. Ialoveni, a small town approximately six miles from the capital was our destination for the first few days. After arriving, we were introduced to our host families and after a ten minute walk, luggage trailing behind us, we arrived at what we thought was our accommodation. A four-storey block of flats stood before us, only a few of the windows had glass in and many of the doors were boarded up. Max Paton and I looked at each other, gulped and thought we were in for a long week staying somewhere like that! Fortunately, it wasn’t our accommodation, as we were staying with a lovely family in a nice house around the corner, the only downside was having to share the sofa with Max! Prior to this trip, we all spent a Saturday morning running, cycling and rowing the length of the Dniester, the longest river in Moldova and raised over £1,500. On our first evening in Ialoveni we could see first-hand how this money was helping the community as some of it had been used to buy a selection of books for the local library which we presented to the Mayor and Head Librarian. We then decided on an early first night as we knew we had a more demanding schedule than previous years. Mr Jenkins