The stories at School Number Five filter out like water through a logjam, written in the first ten minutes of class using magazine pictures they have selected from a pile I spread out as starters. As they read their work aloud, we adjust syntax, mine intuitive as a native speaker of English, theirs percolating through a mixture of learned grammar, magazines, TV, the Internet. Eventually their stories are complete in powdery white chalk on a blackboard in front of the class of a half dozen middle-schoolers. Six stories, fifty minutes, wiped from the board after the bell with a rag dipped into gray water in a red plastic bucket.

Why do they want to learn English? To get a job, says Mihai, a self-professed computer fanatic in 8A, one of the two sections of 8th grade. Besides, he points out, you can’t really use the Internet unless you know English. Nearly every website worth visiting is in English (all nod), as are the instruction windows which tell you what’s the matter with your computer.

Hadn’t thought of that. Other reasons?

Watch American movies, ignore the subtitles. Read books. Read magazines.

Two days later, three seventh grade boys, lounging in their desks after class, offer a discussion of “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.” It’s their favorite computer game, about stealing cars and fighting the police. I express interest.

Out of their pockets come word lists, code for the game. Code sheets, computer print-outs in English and Russian, each with handwritten Romanian equivalents.

Is this why I’m here, to teach English for computer games? The game is violent, not something I would choose. Yet it’s in English, the language they want me to help them learn. They have taken the initiative to translate. They’re using words, concepts.

Really, how bad can a computer game be? Romeo and Juliet, my backup lesson plan for next week, thrives on street warfare, three murders, a double suicide and a near miss on bigamy. It’s taught people English for three hundred years.

Walking “home” over broken streets in the afternoon dusk to the two-star hotel where we volunteers stay for the three-week life of this project, I wonder if I will ever know whether I am making a difference by being here.

The house in the yard, so-called by the Romanian teachers in the main building of School Number Five, consists of two small classrooms in one story of beige stucco capped with gray metal. It’s where I teach conversational English. Nearly all buildings in town are roofed with the same material, even the three domes of the Orthodox church looming behind School Number Five.

Everything is starting to feel gray to me. The chill is constant and damp. An overcast November sky mirrors grim resolution in the faces of people I pass on the way to school. The terasse regulars down the block nurse their beers inside now; the weed patch next to their favorite outdoor table is frosted over. Everyone smokes.

Even problems, finally, look alike. There is not enough money for anything, whether roads, health care, heat or education. Everyone is adept at making-do or going without. Design seems unaffordable. Carpeting, tile and wall coverings from available sources coexist in clashing patterns.

I find myself searching out pre-communist buildings to appreciate their ornately sawn wood roof-trim boards. I enjoy the clopping of horses pulling farm wagons full of cabbages over concrete streets, the clang of the handbell rung by the hall monitor starting and ending class. I like watching the Romanian flag wind-drifting, splendid in primary colors of blue, yellow and red, through some political accident virtually indistinguishable from the flag of the Republic of Chad.

It is the first day of snow. Three boys sit in the house in the yard: Ionut, doubling as the fire-tender; Cesar; Marius. They were part of another class I had last week. Actually, they were the entire class that afternoon, three girls never showing up. It was the day they told me about Grand Theft Auto.

They wear their hats and jackets at their desks. I huddle by the warm brown ceramic stove, listening while they work on The Old Man and the Sea, reading passages I have marked. They like the ones about the sharks.

During a break Ionut stuffs a split of poplar into the stove, then goes to the board beside me and begins to write the names of his siblings and their ages in a column. All older, three brothers. Then the name of his father and the number 43.

Below that he writes the number 39. What would that be?

“My mother’s age.”

What is her name?

“She is dead.”

What happened? He hesitates. Am I prying, I wonder?

He’s still not saying anything, looking at his classmates for help. Probably doesn’t know the word. Marius gives it.

“She was pregnant.”

Maybe writing on the board is easier. You get your thoughts up there for people to respond to if they like. You can be more fluent in a second language while writing than while speaking. And while you are communicating, you face away.

The afternoon class of ninth graders over at the High School, four boys and a girl, are waiting in the library when I arrive. The girl seems studious, treated by the boys as an equal. I tell them I’d like to have us talk about “People Who Changed Our Lives.”

It starts off slowly.

Let’s use examples of people who invented things we use now and what change they made. I’ll start.

Alexander Graham Bell. The telephone. Can you tell me what the effect has been in your life of his invention?

We can talk to each other.

Go on…

Over long distances.

Great!

A boy volunteers: “Bill Gates.”

What was his innovation?

“Microsoft.”

What was the resulting change?

Murmured conference in Romanian, some English. Back and forth.

Finally, adjusting syntax, we conclude (in English) that he made it easy for the average person to use a computer. I write “Bill Gates” and “Computer” on the flip chart, large enough for everyone to see, under Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone.

What about ideas? Can people make a difference inventing an idea?

Silence.

OK, I’ll go.

Abraham Lincoln. He freed slaves in the United States. Resulting effect? He changed North American human rights.

Mohandas Gandhi, another idea innovator. He demonstrated the power of a specific idea, non-violent resistance, in securing the freedom of his people.

I may be getting too complex. I’m doing all the talking. This should be about their stories. Where can I go from here?

“Mihai Eminescu.”  The girl is speaking.

I turn from the flip chart. The others are nodding agreement. I ask for the spelling of the name so I can recognize what they are saying. They spell it, mixing Romanian and English pronunciations of the names of the letters. Finally, I get it right.

Who was he? They point to his picture on the back wall of the library.

Oh. What did he do?

They confer briefly.

A poet, a writer. In the 1850’s.

What did he write about?

Love poems, things about personal life.

Why is he so important?

The girl takes over. She has a long, braided ponytail. We are at a hard spot. She hesitates, dives in.

“He wrote about personal feelings. Before him, everybody wrote superficial things.”

Did he actually change Romanian literature?

“Yes! Yes!”

She is smiling now. I’ve gotten it. She’s made me understand. In English.

I look at the picture again, one in a long sepia row along the back wall. This is a library, after all; these are probably all famous Romanian writers. And he was the one they picked.

It looks like a formal sitting: a young man with longish brown wavy hair, black bow tie, a vest under his coat, gazing into a middle distance somewhere to the left of us. After a hundred and fifty years, he still moves them.

It is the afternoon of Friday, my last day. The English teacher assigned to look after me shows up, Larisa. The High School is her first assignment. She has been at it now for seven weeks. Class is over, she announces.

Larisa looks at the flip chart. I have used up what was possibly their last, perhaps their only, blank flip chart.

She smiles. I have seen that smile before. In Paris. At the Louvre, on the Mona Lisa. She walks me to the door, says goodbye.

I walk back to the hotel through the city park, past old people on benches. Young women tend toddlers in a new playground donated by a Turkish man who bought the ball bearing factory here in Bârlad from the Romanian government. The park benches are painted blue, green, yellow, red. Some slats are rotted, others are missing. People sit on them anyway.

Mihai, the computer wizard I met in class at School Number Five on my second day of this project, diverges toward me through the park with a couple of his friends. He extends his hand.

We do the handshake that starts horizontally and switches midway to thumbs-up, the solidarity shake.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”  Grins all around.

“Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” Again, smiles.

Everybody moves on.