Happy New Year

January 3, 2008

Well Happy New Year and Merry Christmas! This last month has been really busy with all the things I’ve been doing and seems to have slipped right by. I hope you all were able to enjoy everything the holiday season has become in America. Being this far away has really made me miss all the little things.

They teach us many things in training here and one of the most important is about ourselves. They taught us that our service would be full of emotional peaks and valleys. This last month has been one of those valleys for me. I don’t know if it’s because of the holidays or just the fact that up to this point I really haven’t had a valley yet but I really missed home friends and family this past month. Now that the month has passed and it’s the start of a new year I can feel myself climbing the hill again and hope to be at that peak again soon.

The biggest event of this last month was our IST (In Service Training). For this all the volunteers in my class, the AZ5’s, went into Baku and spent three nights in a hotel and had trainings during the days. It was really pretty nice how they scheduled it. They had us all come in on Christmas day so that night we were all able to be together. We had an entire floor to ourselves so in the large common area we moved all the sofas and couches and almost all 50 of us ordered pizzas and sat around catching up with each other. Things like this are always kind of bitter sweet. It is all sorts of fun to be back around all the friends I grew so close to during our training, but then it’s always much more expensive than the money PC gives us for our Per diem. Then to be back around all those Americans again it can remind you of home that much more.

During IST I had my LPI (Language Proficiency Interview) During my training some of us didn’t score high enough so a few others and me had to retake the test during our IST and this time I passed. It was a great relief since before the test sometimes I was scared that I was going backward in my language skills but as it turned out I was able to go in there and relax and just have a normal conversation in Azeri. I still sound like a what talking to a three year old sounds like not getting all of my tenses correct in each sentence but I am able to understand and communicate.

The other exciting event of this past month was going to one of my student’s homes for dinner. I have this amazing student who is also my Azeri tutor and she just really has things figured out. So a few weeks ago I learned about this opportunity for youth to be involved in something called the youth fund where they are given the responsibility of distributing grants to different projects youth apply for. To be on this committee would really increase someone’s opportunity to be selected for other programs here to study in other countries. She wasn’t able to attend so I got the video and some applications and told her roommate to let her know I wanted to come over after dinner that sometime that week to tell her about these things. Well, her roommates English isn’t as good as I had thought and she didn’t understand so she told her that I was coming over but didn’t know why but thought I wanted her to cook me dinner. So when I got over there she had this huge meal prepared that she and all her roommates had worked on all day long. When I got there I was able to explain it all and we had a good laugh. After getting the through the language barrier we all had a great time and it was the most fun I’ve had with host country nationals since I’ve been here.

Just in case some of you have forgotten my address, here it is again : -)

Donald Stevens
Məzkəzi Poçt
Tələb Edilənədək
Zaqatala, Azərbaycan
Az 6200 Azerbaijan

note: i just looked at the address and the upsidedown e"s did not appear. anywhere there is a square put an upsidedown e.