One-month Anniversery

11:45 10 August 2008

I’ve officially been in Kyrgyzstan for over a month now. It seems like such a bizarre state of being. Some days, when language is going well and I’m in a good mood, it feels like I’m completely at home and have been here for years and the time has flown. Other days, if I am frustrated or can’t get my point across, I feel the newness of my being here and can’t imagine another twenty-seven months of the same. Fortunately enough, I have had more of the former kind of days and was kind of astonished when I realized that I had only been here a month.
Pre-Service Training overall is full of up-and-downs. The Volunteers we come across are constantly letting us know that it gets better at site, and at first I didn’t realize what they meant. I understand to a better degree now, PST has a lot of elements that add to the frustration, and your attempts to integrate are only just getting started. Our days are usually filled with some activity or another. Biweekly three-hour long technical educations are obviously necessary to teach us how to teach but can be tedious. We were recently evaluated and it has a lot of people upset, they believe that our teachers hardly know us an have little right to give us performance evaluations. I’m ambivalent on the matter (possibly because I received a favorable one) but I understand the confusion and hurt that could accompany seemingly arbitrary adjudication. These combined with homework that seems more busy-work than practical, again have upset some people. When people are frustrated, tired, and fed-up, stress levels raise and people take out their frustrations on one another. Peace Corps told us to expect this and realize the underlying factors when we found ourselves in fowl moods, but that doesn’t stop me from regretting it later if I snap at someone out of frustration at some beyond their control.

Wow! I just found out that there is a secret hiding place/storeroom beneath the floor in the house! My Baba was making tomato juice to jar for the winter months and Papa Kolya just came in, lifted up the carpet and went into the secret hiding place! Cool!