It's a Skra-knock Life

I have made it through my first full week here in the village of Skra, please applaud appropriately (but not excessively because I hate excessive applause). This past week has definitely been a week of discoveries and new adventures, but I think I am finally settling into a routine. I am here for another 10 weeks so it’s probably wise to settle in.

Just as an aside, there is currently a loud conversation going on between my mother and father with some interjections from my brother. This is typical for my experience. I rarely really know what is going on around me. My comprehension meter is constantly swinging from “I get it” to “What in the world is happening?” this leaves me living partly in the Georgian world around me and my own world inside my head. Trust me, both are equally hilarious. Also my father just asked that I tell you all hello from him, he says greetings from Georgia.

Back to my narrative now. The phase of my Peace Corps service I am currently in is known as pre-service training (PST). PST is an intense 12 weeks of integration into Georgian culture and society along with preparation for our upcoming service projects. The first week of PST was orientation when all the trainees lived together in the weird old soviet compound. This current phase of 11 weeks is where we have been broken up into 10 or so clusters of 5-7 trainees and each group is assigned a village or city where they each individually are staying with a host family. Additionally, each cluster has their own language and culture facilitator (LCF) to help them learn Georgian and integrate into the villages- also they serve as a lifeline whenever there is a misunderstanding between the locals and trainees. In case you’ve missed it, I’m in the village of Skra with 6 other volunteers (Jim, Rachel, Bryan, Melissa, Alex, and Lisa) and our LCF Naili.

Rather than run through every day I figure it would be best to give a general overview of what we do every day. Training for us is actually 6 days a week so we are pretty busy Monday- Saturday. Most days begin at 9 AM with 4 hours of language class at the local school. We have been given a small room on the first floor and attempt to learn this incredibly difficult language. Naili has been a great teacher thus far and I definitely feel like I have learned a ton, especially when you take into account the fact that I only landed in Georgia two weeks ago. The school is for Skra and another neighboring village and serves grades 1-12. It was an old factory during the Soviet era and still carries that feel with it. Most of the rooms have a small wood stove to help heat; however, I would still hate to experience winter inside. Even now in the spring it is often colder inside than out. Go figure. Given that it’s a small school, everyone knows who the Americans are and where our classroom it. We attract plenty of stares as well as many “hellos” along with assorted English words.

Skra's wonderful schoolhouse, the third floor is unusable

My clustermates and I hard at work learning Georgian with Naili

Once we have finished our daily Georgian marathon it is finally time for lunch. I won’t go into more detail here since my last post was all about food. I will say that the lunches continue to be great. The families watch what we eat and what we don’t eat and tell each other, so slowly we are getting a lot of the same foods that they know we like. They are so eager to please, I love them. Also I would like people to know that I am forcing myself to eat more veggies in an effort to balance my diet. I have yet to see broccoli but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
Following lunch we head to our meeting point and a van comes to take us into Gori to meet up with others trainees for our technical sessions. Depending on the day the trainings are either for the entire group or for just a small group. We have small group sessions on pedagogical techniques and the larger ones tend to be general Peace Corps trainings like safety, culture, and health. The trainings vary in their level of interests, but the best part is seeing the other volunteers. We always gather to swap stories, compare experiences, and most commonly talk about our bowel movements and outhouses (it’s a common theme whenever you are outside of the US). We have only really known each other for a week but given our shared experience we've been able to bond fairly quickly.

There you have it a basic day in the life for a Peace Corp (PC) trainee in the country of Georgia. If it sounds like college or something that is because it basically is school from 9-6 pm 6 days a week. However, I can't complain too much because it seems like the alternative is a 9-6 desk job and I'll take staring out of a classroom window to a computer screen any day!

(Don't forget to check out the second part of my update for the more interesting moments from this past week.)