End of training

There are now only 2 weeks left of Pre-Service Training and we will be officially sworn is as volunteers and move to our permanent sites. We are both healthy and doing well and ready to officially start our volunteer service. Mike and I will be living at Issyk-Kul lake in a town called Balykchy. Mike will be teaching English at a gymnasium school (which means that the children pay to go to school there and live in dormitories) so he will probably have good students. I will be working at an NGO called Children of Tien-Shan (www.geocities.com/children_tienshan). This organization provides services to at risk youth, neglected children, orphans, and children in foster care, and their families. We visited our new site and new host family (who is actually just one Russian lady who we are renting from) this past weekend. We are required to live with a local for 3 months before living by ourselves, but at least we will be living together again.

The past few months have been really busy here. Between Russian classes, technical training and community projects, we have had little time. We cleaned up the sports center which was littered with trash, broken glass, and unfortunately, needles. Myself and a fellow volunteer have organized a round table discussion with local youth to talk about American culture and to compare and contrast challenges youth face in Kyrgyzstan to America. We hope that this will help to dispel myths about America and give them ideas on how they can organize themselves to volunteer and contribute to the community. We have made a few trips into Bishkek to eat American food and we went to Issyk-Ata for a short hike- which was beautiful. We also had to participate in Culture Day, which is when all 60 volunteers got together and each group of volunteers in each village demonstrated through role play or skit, some cultural aspect from the different nationalities of people who live in Kyrgyzstan. Our group did a Turkish wedding and Mike’s group did a smorgasbord of song and dance, which was hilarious. We also helped build a yurt, ate lots of food, and danced to Turkish and Kyrgyz music.

On a side note, it is very difficult for me to keep updated on local, national and international news. I will welcome any emails with this information so I can stay connected with what is going on in the world. We hope everyone at home is doing well. Please continue to email us to check in. It is always nice to know that we are still connected to people back home even though we are on the other side of the world.