This Blog, Again?!

After a year-long absence, I am reviving the blog but this time to record my Peace Corps experience (for my mother) and my Georgian language experience (for me~). I leave next Wednesday for Peace Corps - first a few days of pre-departure orientation in Chicago, then a post-departure orientation outside of Tbilisi, and then three months of "staging" where we learn Georgian and about how to become effective teachers and to work in Georgian society. I am very excited to leave, though nervous about finishing packing and cleaning before I go.

I am going to be a primary/secondary school English teacher, so hopefully I can use my struggles with previous language learning attempts to be an effective and empathetic teacher. I gained some teaching experience last summer at the Oakland International High School as an English Language Teaching Assistant working with recently arrived refugee and immigrant students, and it was a very informative and educational experience. It made me very happy to know that I will be working with a Georgian co-teacher and will not be alone in a classroom. I also taught a cultural orientation class for refugees at the International Rescue Committee from June to April, which helped me become more comfortable with public speaking and working with (adult) non-English speakers, but the situation there was very different than it will be in the Georgian classroom. I am very thankful that we have several months of training to prepare.

So far my language study has been limited to watching the Peace Corps Georgian language podcasts , which are pretty helpful - I've been told that all I really need to do before getting there is become familiar with the alphabet and that we'll learn everything else we need to in the classes we have during staging - every morning, six days a week, for three months! The one other thing I plan to do before departing is work on Memrise to fully cement the alphabet. One small step at a time. My goal for Peace Corps is to become conversational in Georgian and hopefully learn how to write letters and other basic things like that. I've read that Peace Corps language training often focusses on pure survival communication, but I would like to try to move beyond that, which means I will have to focus and practice. Other than that, I hope to maintain most of the Arabic I've learned so far. I have a few Arabic books packed and there are several other volunteers that I know of already who are either fluent in Arabic or have taken some coursework and I would love to practice with them! My year of taking Russian and Arabic at the same time at Tulane should have helped me prepare for keeping everything straight in the brain -_-

That's all for now, and I'll write again from the other side.