Bishkek Bound

19:45 5 March 2009

The reason for the aforementioned laundering of all of my clothes was because I am headed to Bishkek soon for our second In-Service seminar. This conference, entitled Project Design and Management or PDM, is centered around us learning how to design projects with our counterparts, how to secure funding for them, and how to run them once we are implementing them. My counterpart at school has a variety of ideas of what she would like to do with potential grant money and hopefully this seminar will give us guidance on whether the projects w have in mind are valuable, sustainable, and viable.

Directly after this trip, I will be taking my first “new oblast” trip to Naryn City to participate at the Diversity Week that a PCV is holding there. I’ve been working with a fellow PCV and Peace Corps staff to try and start a Diversity Committee within PC Kyrgyzstan. I think there is a large need for that here, and ideally we would do something in every oblast aimed at educating the Kyrgyz population about inter-group relations and how they work in the States. There are a lot of misconceptions about race, religion, and sexual orientation in this country and hopefully by showing how things worked in the United States we could encourage tolerance and acceptance within the country.

So while IST (In-Service Training) seems like it was only a week ago (it was actually 2.5 months ago), it will be really great to see everyone again, this is the last opportunity we have to all get together until our COS (Close of Service) Conference.