Pre-Service Training and Practicum, juicy details, etc.

It's been awhile since my last post, so this one will be a good one full of juicy details.

 

We're in our 9^th week of Pre-Service Training (PST), meaning that we have only 2 weeks (*gasp*) until we will be sworn in as official Peace Corps Volunteers. PST has been a roller coaster of days of complete clarity when I know I'm definitely in the right place and days of complete confusion. Thankfully the confusing days have been relatively few and far between. The last few weeks we've been concentrating on completely all of our Practicum hours. This takes up about half of our training time and is a way for us Trainees to get our feet wet before we end up in the real working world of the Peace Corp Volunteer. To complete our practicum Youth Development Trainees must lead 6 hours of English Club (hour-long English lessons that are more games than lessons), 6 hours of hobby clubs (I'm working with the school's Leaders Group), 5 hours of content based lessons (we still haven't figured out what these are... we've done 4 hours of training on leadership, but Peace Corps doesn't consider that Content Based), 2 hours of trainings (we're going to work with the English teachers), and a service learning project. Our service learning project has consumed most of my time and sanity for the last month. Our project is teaching students to plan and lead a Halloween Carnival for their school. This sounds relatively simple, but consider the following things: no school funding, no supplies, kids here have no critical thinking skills, there is no consistency with students' attendance, all the meetings are entirely in Russian, people here have never heard of Halloween. Cross your fingers, dear reader, that everything will go as planned and the event won't be a total flop.

 

With all of these hours to complete in addition to 5 hours of Russian language everyday, my enthusiasm for training is quickly fading. I feel like we've been here an age, and am ready to move to my permanent site and start working, but at the same time these past weeks have flown by and I can't believe training is almost over. After being surrounded by other Trainees and Peace Corps staff almost constantly for 3 months, in no time at all I'll find myself pretty alone in a strange city with few English speakers.

 

The site placement process is complicated. Peace Corps tells us they match us to sites according to our our resumes, our aspiration statements (I wrote mine in approximately 12 minutes, you can imagine how thoughtful and thorough it is...), and how we've been doing in training. Despite this, I'm convinced that all the staff get together on a Friday afternoon, pull out the beer, and throw darts at a map. Let's face it, the dart process is way more fun and they probably get just as good of results. There's just no way to determine which site will be a perfect match based on 2 pieces of paper, so why not just have some fun, throw some darts, and hope for the best.

 

In non-work-related news, today a few Trainees and I trekked to Kazakhstan's largest bazaar to purchase winter coats. Please don't hassle me for not bringing a coat with me. I couldn't possibly have fit a winter coat in my suitcase, and based on my experience in Russia, I knew I couldn't possibly find anything in the US that would be remotely suitable for post-Soviet winter fashion. You can't blame me for wanting to try to blend in, can you? So this bazaar is called Barakholka, and is literally miles of bazaars that make up one giant bazaar mecca. According to my language instructor the best quality coats are in the "European Bazaar", but they're also the most expensive, so we went to the bazaar across the street instead. After trying on 8 different monstrosities, haggle the price down 3,000 tenge (about $20), and threatening to leave without buying anything twice, I bought a coat. I'm quite please with it. It's black and poofy and has a creepy fur hood that I'm going to remove. The seller insisted that it's down, and it feels like down, but the very Chinese label says it's 100% nylon, so who knows. My host family insists that it won't be warm enough for winter if I live in the north, but I think it will do just fine. Though I know winter in the US is different from winter here, I have done winter before. I think I'll be alright.

 

So that's what's been happening here in K-stan. The next big event is this-coming Saturday. We will all be gathered in a school auditorium for site announcements. It's going to be a circus. Peace Corps apparently makes a PowerPoint slideshow, with one slide dedicated to each Trainee. Our slide will show the city/town we've been placed in, the organization/school we'll be working with, and a picture of our site. That auditorium is going to be a madhouse of emotionally unbalanced Trainees who are all either rejoicing at their site announcement or sobbing. I'm crossing my fingers for anywhere that is not the north. That being said, I've probably jinxed myself and will soon be Peace Corps northernmost Volunteer. We'll see on Saturday.