UPDATE

Life is good, crazy as always and down to only two weeks left of Pre Service Training! Afterwards, I will be living in the middle of KSTAN on the Eastern side. The city lies approximately 500 km west of the Chinese border. It is a small town with a “Gi-normous." Which is actually the second largest lake in Central Asia! A sandbar effectively divides the Lake into a western half, which is fresh water and an eastern half, which is saline. It has been reported that the Lake may be on its way to the same fate as the Aral Sea; the lake has already shrunk by over 2,000 square kilometers.

There is already one Volunteer living there, who has been there for a year and has one more year to go. There are two main streets just like my town back home! I will be working at a boarding school / orphanage. It is a Kazak speaking school. Kazak is the national language of Kazakhstan; I have only studied a few hours and have minimal skills with that language. The nice thing is that everyone here speaks Russian AND Kazak, but foreigners who speak the Kazak language gain more respect (and get better bargains at the Bazaar) and Kazak is actually a really pretty language and I wish I knew more. I visited the town last week, for the week, it is 10 hours away from where I live now by bus. The people were so nice and the children were SO hungry for attention kind of from anyone, even people who don’t speak their language! This works out well for me because I have about 200 “helpers” to “help” me and a really good base for “volunteers” to help me with future projects! AND I SAW STRAY CAMELS!

The Peace Corps requires that Volunteers have secondary projects in addition to their main “baby,” of course some people have to rely more on secondary projects for work because their organization sucks, I don’t think that will be the case in my organization, but I am more excited about secondary projects than about what I’m actually going to be doing, which I don’t even know what that is because my director doesn’t really know, the only thing I know for sure is that I will be in charge of English club and an Ecology club at the school (I am now learning about Ecology :-))

D you know about the free website you can use to text me? http://www.sms.one.kz/ in the little box put my phone number 323-7862, then hit the button that starts with an “O” I hear it’s fairly easy. Please remember to sign your name to them though, I wanna hear from ya’ll!