What a crazy few weeks I have had.  Before I get into the details of my life I have a couple administrative things to cover first.  Some of you know that my Website is having problems.  I had my hosting site move it from Windows based to Linux so I could add a new blog tool called Wordpress.  I mentioned earlier wanting to password my blog but I was unable to do it with the one I was currently using so I had to change me site to allow me to ass this new took.  I will be spending a lot of time in the near future putting my site back up on line and getting the new blog up and running with the password protection.  I will send out passwords to everyone who has asked and to everyone I know is reading it now. 

Now in the last entry I posted I mentioned that we were doing some teaching.  We did and I think it went well.  Josh and I created four lesson plans for an Intro to Computers class we were asked to teach.  We had between 5 and 7 students at each session and taught them the basics of windows, MS Word, the internet and some tools and utilities.  After our classes the two other IT guys taught website design and everything went well.  At the same time the four of us were also asked to work on a website for the Peace Corps Armenia.  We put together some ideas and got approval to move forward on that.  This will be an ongoing project for the next couple years for us and we will hand it off to others in the future to maintain.  Once we get it going and up on a site I will let everyone here know so you can take a look at it.  There will be some content for everyone to see and other content for current volunteers behind password protection.

In addition to teaching and the website we also had to finish up out community project which was to help tourism in our village by creating two pamphlets, one for tourists and one for tour operators.  We were pretty swamped during that time because we also had language classes and central days where we all attended lectures together.  As busy as we were was not nearly as bad as what the TEFL team had to do, they had to teach 14 classes of English to three different age groups, come up with lesson plans and create a teaching portfolio.  My hat goes off to that team and the others who had to teach so many classes. 

One really great thing that happened at a central day a couple weeks ago was a medical lecture on healthy eating.  It really wasn’t a lecture, some current volunteers from the A15 and A14 groups made us food using local ingredients.  It was great, we had lots of food that we were all missing and didn’t think we would get for a long time.  Unfortunately a few people ate too much or the food disagreed with them and they ended up with a bad case of Loots (Armenian for Diarrhea).  I enjoyed it a lot and didn’t really have any problems afterwards. 

Last Tuesday we hit another major milestone with our Language Proficiency Test.  This is the test given at the end out our training period.  We have to pass the test with at least a Novice High in order to swear in, in fact if we don’t they will still swear us in but make us get a tutor for 6 months and take the test again.  It was a bit stressful knowing this was coming up and having to take it but it went well.  I made mistakes but everyone did.  I scored a Novice High so I was happy.  I know others did better including at least one Intermediate High but I want striving for excellence, I was afraid I would fail it all together. 

Now a brief discussion of Politics.  Many of you may have heard about the issue with Georgia and Russia.  That issue was really a War, at least Georgia officially declared war on Russia.  It was a fast war as those things go.  Georgia got their asses kicked.  But the result was that the Peace Corps volunteers in Georgia were forced to high tail it out of the country.  As the nearest Peace Corps country they came here.  It happened so fast that many of them didn’t have any luggage with them and a number of them did not even have passports which caused some delays at the border.  All this enforced in our minds how important it is to keep a “Go Bag” ready, especially if there is diplomatic trouble brewing.  When I get to my new site later this week and unpack I will put together an emergency bag and set it somewhere handy.  I will probably need to add to it if the need to leave arises but it is good to have a head start just in case.  

All this means that by the time this gets posted I will have been sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  It should be a good ceremony, I hope to take pictures and put them up on the blog.  It has been an extremely difficult 10 weeks here.  In fact we lost a total of 5 people, or 10% of those we came with who decided this was not for them.  They are all missed and I am sure we will think about them tomorrow but our main focus will be on the ceremony and then getting ready to leave.  Everyone heads to their sites first thing on Friday.  They don’t want to give us any break before we head off to places unknown, or in my case the short drive to the city that has been our central location for 10 weeks.  For me the swearing in ceremony will be bitter sweet.  It means that PST will be over and we can get on with the jobs we signed up for, but it also means that I will not see many of my new friends for a few months. 

Well that is it.  More to come later. 

Cheers

Brian