Orientation & Staging

Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City

It's the last night of orientation - I've been with the same 58 people on the outskirts of Tbilisi for the last week and it's been weird. The U.S. Embassy and a MacDonald's are in view but out of reach. None of my pictures of Georgia are loading, but I haven't really been anywhere yet, so it's ok.

We had staging in Chicago, where we had a few introductory sessions on Peace Corps (PC) policies and Georgia and got to know each other. I got there a day early and couchsurfed with a botanist and went to a willow identification and cocktails event which was a good time. Other than that, I met many other PC volunteers, one college friend, biked 7 miles, drank some very fancy tiki beverages, went to the Art Institute, and fell in love with a dead architect. 

After that we had a 26 hour journey to Tbilisi, where we had the pleasure of arriving at 3:45 am, to the sounds of the G16/15s and staff members yelling and clapping at us. We got to see our first Georgian sunrise and then began our first day of orientation 6 hours later. Since then, we have been more or less confined to a hotel and its grounds, which becomes very claustrophobic very quickly. I've wandered off a bit to see the surrounding marshes and ponds (many frogs! some turtles! one tropical-looking lizard! middle-aged fishermen enjoying afternoons alone!) and on the last day, to the bread/liquor stores at the main road. There are a lot of wild dogs that people are worried by but they seem more scared of me than I am of them. The food is good, the coffee is instant but constant, and the hotel we are staying in is odd but pleasant. Georgian is somewhat difficult but I feel prepared to learn it, and have not struggled too much in my (2) classes so far. I have yet to figure out the Georgian keyboard on my computer.

We leave tomorrow for our pre-service training (PST) villages, where we will be in individual host families, with five or six volunteers per village. I am very excited to finally go out in the world, after this week of pacing one way around the track and then the other. 

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.

Happy 2016!

It's been a while, so I thought I would update so that when I have something important to share there won't have been a two year long gap in between posts.

I apparently stopped blogging after the glorious madness that was Eid, but I'm hoping to re-start, if only so that my language learning goals are accountable to the void that is the internet. CLS was a wonderful experience, and despite the fact that we were in the middle of a 100 degree desert for two months, I felt it was over too soon.

According to my end of program OPI, I now speak Arabic at an advanced level. I don't ~feel~ like I speak it that well, but that discrepancy just makes me want to keep learning, until my confidence matches my skills on paper. To do that, I have continued to take the Arabic courses that my school provides, Business Arabic last semester and Modern Arabic Culture and Conversation in this coming one. I'll talk more about those in a future post, but because of the difference in my skills and those of most of my classmates (thanks to a year abroad in the Middle East), I knew the Arabic classes would be relatively easy. So I took Russian too, which has been a challenge, but has also re-awakened the feelings of glee that come with learning something totally new. I had been in a bit of an Al-Kitaab inspired rut with Arabic, but Russian is new and exciting every day, and I think the enthusiasm is rubbing off on my desire to study Arabic as well.

As for this year's language resolutions and goals:
1. Re-connect with my Omani language partner, who I adore but failed to maintain contact with.
2. Talk to my fellow Arabic students in Arabic more often.
3. Return to the Middle East. (A distant dream...)
4. Be more outgoing, and speak Arabic with friendly strangers and strange friends and all of the above.
5. Read the Arabic books I have, keep searching for new ones.
6. Basically, don't move backwards!
7. Practice Russian for one hour each day.
8. Read more books by Arab and Russian authors, in translation or not.
9. Encourage more people to take interesting, non-European languages, and share my experiences abroad, encourage people who might not otherwise to apply for things like CLS.
10. Find a job or post-graduate internship or whatever that allows me to use my language skills on a regular basis.