Settling in, hunkering down

Hey all who still check, I'm in my permanent site and am an official volunteer now! Hurray! Now I settle in to do NOTHING for a month. School starts the 18th, and my sitemate and I are running a summer camp during the mornings this week, but other than that, there's been lots of reading. And visiting internet cafes (hey-- I might get DSL in my house, and then I'd have enough spare time online to start putting esoteric Georgian anecdotes here instead of perfunctory updates!). On that note, I recommend the book "1776," which I read in its entirety yesterday.

My town seems quite wealthy, which to me suggests that Peace Corps has no faith in my abilities to withstand the village life of gardens and fresh fruit and squat toilets and bucket baths that I had strangely grown attached to. On the other hand, other volunteers seem to think I'm not going to quit, an opinion which I share (though we have lost 9 or 10 by now, 4 of those to un-Georgia-related medical reasons). I had my first parasite a couple weeks ago, but aside from losing all the carbohydrate-based weight I gained from being here, I came out of it okay.

In the meantime, I'll get back to reading...

The occasional update

Hello all,

So this whole blog thing is starting pretty slowly but brace yourselves... at my permanent site, there's a slight chance that I'll have internet in my house! Yay! And there's a high chance that my newly-renovated, English-cabinet-having, computer-having, internet-ready school in my well-developed, culturally-evolved town will leave me time for ample blogging while I'm contemplating what I could possibly contribute to the community. Oh, and my counterpart teacher has worked with a volunteer in the past, so she's all up on the communicative teaching methods we're supposedly "teaching" the teachers. Guess I'll start a Rotary Club or something.

But all in all, things are still great, and training is over in less than two weeks. I'm pretty bummed that I'll have to leave the people in my training village, especially my family and the other 4 Americans, both groups of which I'm really close to. We'll see how it goes, and hopefully someday I'll update again.

Miss everybody!