Perm-site!

07:45 23 August 2008

I haven’t written since I found out about my permanent site placement. On Hub Day Wednesday we had our permanent site placement announcements. This was a very exciting time as it determined where we will be living, who we will be working with, and who we will be seeing the next two years of our service. There had been an enormous amount of speculation to where we were all going, and it was nice to finally figure things out.

I am extraordinarily happy with my site placement. I am going to be in a village called Kyzyl-Suu or Pokrovka, depending on whether you talk to a Kyrgyz or a Russian. Regardless of the name, it is apparently a beautiful village on the South side of enormous Lake Issyk-Kul nearby to Karakol, a resort city on the Eastern side of the lake. It is supposed to be really nice and warm and comfortable there in the summers and extremely cold in the winters (just what I wanted). The other nice thing about the south side of the lake is the proximity of the mountains. There is very little area between the lake edge and the stunning 5,000+ m. high mountain peaks. Less than five miles (as the crow flies) from my village is the peak of a mountain that is over 14,000 ft.! I can’t wait to get there for my site visit, I am sure it is stunningly gorgeous.

In addition to the site being a physically attractive area, I have heard a lot of really positive things about my job and the other people around me. There is a decent amount of volunteers in the area, so I won’t be wanting for American interaction, and I was happy that some of my closer friends were placed in the same oblast (Kyrgyzstan is not a big country, but poor roads and unreliable transportation combined with the rugged terrain make cross-country travel difficult and really lengthy). The school is also one of the better secondary schools in the area so hopefully I will have motivated students. I also found out recently that JICA, the Japanese equivalent of Peace Corps has two people in my village, so I can establish even more cross-cultural connections with other ex-pats.

Our site visits, a five day long sojourn to check out our host family, school, and get to know the community somewhat, begin next week. I am very excited to make the six hour long trip.