The Project

(From 9/14)
As a part of pre=service training, every village has to do a project for their community. This year, our projects were funded by an unnamed businessman in Kant. Most villages did clean-up projects in the local schools or parks, but my village decided to go beyond that. At the local primary school (where we held our English clubs), there are five outdoor stage areas where the kids can play. They look like this:

We were concerned by the rotten floorboards, since they are obviously a safety hazard if kids are going to be running around.

We wanted to replace the broken floorboards, but the director of the school was only interested in having the stages repainted, so we agreed to do both. We spent most of the last two weekends working. The girls started scraping at the old paint, while the boys (and a random but very helpful Kyrgyz man) replaced the floors.

We also had the help of a few Kyrgyz boys one day.

(in our sunglasses, so the paint chips didn’t fly into their eyes)

By the end of the second full day of scraping at dirty old paint, we had made great progress, but we were all exhausted and tired of scraping.
(Jess, Joni, and Serena)

The final product, however, is really exciting. The floors are now safe and much better looking than before.

The walls are my pride and joy, after spending hours on them. We used a pattern Jessica’s mother made for the cushions she makes, and added a creation from Micah, our resident artist.

After finishing completely, the last six volunteers still standing

The final product!

Peace Corps was here.

After our second day of painting, we were proud and a little loopy from exhaustion and paint fumes, so we had a photo shoot, using my camera’s timer:

Three Musketeers style

“Sword” fight. I’m throwing paint on them, if you can’t tell (we ran out of brushes to pose with)

Too cool for school

Perfecting the Kyrgyz squat

Can can

Normal group shot: Me, Micah, Chris, Jess, Joni, Serena, and Mike

Also at the school, this is a normal slide for little kids to play on. The top looks much the same.

Other than the project, everything is coming to a close right now. This Thursday is Swearing In, when I will officially become a volunteer (because until then I’m just a “trainee”), and on Friday, I leave for Jalalabad with my counterpart to start my real work. I’m really excited to start, but sad to leave my village with my family and friends and the whole PC group.
Also, my language group has adopted two dogs who hang out around the house where we have class.
This is Puppy. He’s grown a lot while we’ve been here.

This is Mangy. He doesn’t like to stand still for pictures. He’s usually very wiggly. This is the best I could do.

9/17

Tomorrow is the big swearing in, and the official end of PST. On Friday, I head down to Jalalabad, and I start work on Monday!

I don't know when I will get to the internet next -- I may stick around my village at first to get oriented and everything there, but the city isn't far away.