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!

Not the greatest blogger

In my defense, I would update a lot more often if it weren't so difficult to get access to my blog in this internet cafe... there's some shenanigans going on with the security that makes it so only one person in the whole room can sign into a Blogger account at a time. What a fine choice in blog hosts I have made.

What's going on? Well, we have language and TEFL training almost every day (except Sunday, hence why I am here), we have a 4th of July picnic coming up on Tuesday, in what will be our one and only day off of classes, and then August 18th, we get sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers and then get sent off to our permanent assignments. Ideally, I'll be able to update before then, but just in case, that's how it is.

You know what I'm noticing? It's a lot easier to avoid homesickness here *because* of the fact that we're so disconnected from the rest of our US friends and family (although we get free incoming phone calls, so they can call us all they want...) and the fact that we'll be here for so long. It's like our life back in the US is on pause, and we'll resume missing it only at certain times, like those winter months that Peace Corps says are big for homesickness or during the weeks leading up to a visit home (I'm still gearing toward July 2007). Of course, this could lead to issues when we get back to the US and find that our friends and family have not been on pause and that lots of things have changed, but until then, I'm happy to avoid homesickness. Not that I don't miss everybody, which I definitely do, but the Georgians are definitely hospitable and kind enough that the homesickness isn't an impairment. I could only be so lucky as to get another great host family for my permanent placement... that's really my primary concern right now.

So yeah. I'll post when I can, but if you really wanna know something, just shoot me an e-mail, and at least until permanent placement, I should be able to respond within a week, which is sweet and much better than what Peace Corps volunteers in some countries have access to...

Another airport!

I know these frquent updates must be less than interesting, but I#ll miss the internet at some point,# I#msure. We#re in vienna, about to leav e for Tbilisi (apparently pronounced 'Bilisi') and this keyboard is terrible, so I#ll go now.

At the airport

Well that sounds like the beginning of an exciting post, doesn't it? Kinda like today... how we checked out at 8 AM, sat around for two hours, rode a bus for three hours (why do staging at Philly if we're flying out of JFK? Maybe it's better... NYC staging would have consisted of me hanging out with existing New York friends instead of all this networking stuff), and now have sat around the airport for 4 hours. At 6:15, we will sit on a plane for 10 hours, have a layover in Vienna for 14 hours, sit in another plane for like 4 hours, and then hopefully Tbilisi will bring an end to the waiting. Training doesn't technically start till like Tuesday, but there's gotta be something we'll be doing... like learning the language perhaps...

On another note, I'm happy to point out that I'm way less miserable than I was when I first left for Philadelphia, and I'm actually excited to be going now. Maybe I like waiting...

Training commences

So we don't leave till tomorrow morning, but I'm thinking the whole traumatic part about leaving friends and family is over, soon to be replaced with chronic homesickness, which is hopefully more manageable. Maybe.

As a surprising turn of events, I seem to like most of the people here, which is always a plus. Everybody seems nervous, but even the general Peace Corps-based training without specific information on Georgia makes us feel a bit better. We're actually supposed to be taking a lunch break now, but it's the only time I feel like there's gonna be nobody trying to use the one computer in this giant hotel.

I don't know when I'll be able to send any more e-mails or make any calls or post on this or anything, but as default, just assume I'm okay.

Bienvenue, bienvenidos, wilkommen, etc.

You'll notice not one of the title "welcome"s is in Georgian; that could be because I can't distinguish between letters of the Georgian alphabet yet, much less speak the language. This blog's here for the benefit of you who wish to casually follow my Georgian Peace Corps adventures while you're bored at work, with the benefit of avoiding spam-my, impersonal e-mails with few relevant updates ("I still don't speak Georgian. Today it was cold.").

I hope this blog will capture your mild interest, and I promise here and now not to turn it into a publishable Peace Corps memoir when I get back.* There seems to be a market glut of those, and I think I'd only publish one if I had the notion to sell even fewer copies than Laveidem did.

I don't know how often I'll be able to update, nor where I'll be, nor much else... but I would appreciate comments on posts. Or letters. Or Swedish Fish. Or consistent access to electricity.

*Note: if something really cool happens that makes a memoir unavoidable, like me coaching the Georgian taekwondo team to world championship or becoming a star on Georgian reality TV, then this promise is null and void. I'm just saying that the likelihood of a book about "personal growth" and such is fairly minimal.