Week 3 of PST

Hey everyone! I'm into week 3 (of 11) of my Pre-Service Training (PST), and boy it sure is a lot of work. My day consists of waking up around 4:00am thanks to the rooster that lives outside my window, and then waiting about 20 minutes for he and his flock of hens to migrate to the yard to feed, and then falling asleep till about 7:00 or so.

Roberto the Rooster

After that I get up and head off to school where I teach classes in the morning, and then I go to Language class as well. then I take my 40 minute walk back to the house where I do about 3 hours of homework and lesson planning, an hour of drinking wine, and then it's bed time. I'm looking forward to the time after PST when I'll have more time to myself. 

My school in Atskuri

(movie of the school bathroom)

This weekend I'm going to Ozargetti, which is about 45 miles away from the black sea, for the purpose of Job Shadowing an existing volunteer. It's going to be about an 8 hour trip, so I'm not looking forward to that too much, but it'll be nice to get to see a new area of the country. Next week I have my sight placement interview, so I'm looking forward to finding out where I will be spending the next 2 years of my life. Given the kindness of the people here I'm not too worried about any particular location, but It'll be daunting not having my cluster mates around me where I can see them every day.

Me, LCF Naili, Scott, Kayla, Drew, and Nichole, My clustermates

 

Internet usage is very limited for me at the time being, I'm signing on about once every 10 days (kind of like how often I shower now), but I will try to keep the blog updated as much as possible. Hope all is well in the US! 

Castle on the way home

Every Fart is a Gamble

Greetings from Atskuri!

I moved in with my host family, the Keshikashvelli's, and they are probably some of the nicest people I have ever met. The food here is rich in oils and fats, and they don't eat many vegetables. As a result, every single one of us has developed intestinal distress. I live in a village with 4 other PCV's, and our daily greeting ritual consists of the following dialog:

"Hi Scott"
"Hi John"
"So are you solid today?"
"I was yesterday, but now I'm back to the liquid state".

It's amazing how quickly I have become intimately familiar with my cluster mates.

It takes me about 40 minutes to walk to town from the house I live in, and while everyone else complains about not being able to work out, I'm finding myself quickly getting into the best shape of my life simply by existing. On the 6th I went with my brothers and sisters to the river to throw rocks into it (ie, rural weightlifting). Here is a picture of me and some of the children.

Internet is very spotty so far, but I've been told that after my pre-service training I'll be ale to have a bit more reliable service once I sign up for an internet plan. 

Arrival in Georgia

Wow what a whirl wind of activity that I've gone through in the past 4 days, it seems like forever ago that I was actually in the United States.

First, on april 28th, I celebrated my 30th birthday by going out to dinner with my mom and dad. It was really good food, but I have found out that it's hard to compare anything to the food that they have here.

On April 30th i flew from Raleigh to Philadelphia to participate in a brief orientation. That's where i got to meet the other volunteers for the first time. Just to show what a small world it is, I walked into the conference room and was greeted by my old roommate MaKayla Oster, with whom I lived while in oregon back in 2009. We got along fine when we lived together, so it was actually kinda nice to see a familiar face. We had a brief orientation about what the peace corps was about and some basic do's and don'ts. The demographics are interesting, I seem to be right at the median age, it seems to be about 40/60 male/female ratio, and I found that my 17 month waiting period was about average, with some volunteers waiting 3 years for this opportunity.  Finally it was time for dinner. Many people in the group had never been to Philadelphia before, so I thought it would be neat to take them to Joe's Philly cheese steaks, which is a place that is often frequented by the likes of Kobe Bryant, Will Smith, and Dr. J. It was good, and I think everyone enjoyed the experience.

The next morning we loaded onto a bus (which I was 5 minutes away from missing due to getting coffee), and then we made the drive to JFK, where we were to catch the plane to T'Bilisi at 5:05pm. While I was there I had the good fortune of having lunch with my childhood friend Ryan Walder, who moved to NYC in 2010. It was a good way to leave the country.

The flight could have been better; I ended up in the back of the plane right in front of 2 screaming babies. two Nyquil PM's and two Tylenol PM's weren't enough to overcome that volume, so I didn't get too much rest. We landed in Istanbul, and boarded the flight to georgia. I got a window seat on the left side of the plane, so I got to see a lot of the black sea, but then when we got closer to Georgia I got a great view of the Northern Caucus Mountain range shooting up above the clouds, and I tried to get a good picture of it.

Finally we landed in out host country where we were met with US Embassy officials, Peace corps officials, Georgian Gov't Officials, the media, and a whole mess of interested Georgians. We posed for pictures and were then escorted to the bus where we made a short trip to a restaurant to have our first georgian dinner.

(T'bilisi Airport terminal, about the size of GSO airport)

The place was actually pretty nice (as most of T'bilisi seems) and the amount of food that the Georgians eat is truly staggering. It was fun because we had no idea when the appetizers ended and the main dish began, so it was tough to try and pace ourselves. With great relief I found that I liked everything that was served, but the best thing was a dish called Khatchipuri, which is bread with a lot of cheese baked in. Fantastic! The place had some interesting folk art too, and a thatched roof, which I tried to capture in this picture 

From there we went to a store where I accidentally indicated to a tending merchant that I was interested in dating her (which in this country only requires you smiling at them, which is going to be hard to adjust to since in america I would smile and say hello to most and passing stranger), and then we traveled into a very remote region northeast of T'Bilisi for our orientation. Today was teh first full day of orientation, and it consisted of our first language class (I'm very glad I studied before I left), explaination of peace corps policies, receiving our medical kit, and initial interviews with the people that will be supervising us once our 11 week training is over. 

On Saturday I'll be headed with the group to some TBD village where I will live with my first host family for the next 10 weeks. from there language and culture training will continue, and I'll probably not have access to the internet as reliably as I do at the orientation site (which is an old Soviet Union Barracks that Free University converted into a conference center). 

So far, so good.