Real Life

“PST is nothing like your real life here,” I was told recently, by a volunteer who arrived in Kyrgyzstan a year ago. My pre-service training – aka PST – is drawing to a close. In less than a week, I’ll leave the my little village outside Bishkek and the host family I’ve come to love, the cozy bubble of other volunteers and Peace Corps staff, my excellent language teacher and cultural guide, Temirlan. So much energy has gone into adjusting to this place, to settling into this new world – it has been easy to forget that my “real life” here hasn’t begun yet. I’m looking forward to moving to the town that will be my home for the next two years, to meeting the people who will be my friends and colleagues. At the same time, I’m trying to soak up every last minute here in Gavrilovka and enjoy the wonderful people around me now.

The past month has been busy! There have been a few downs – getting bit by a dog was a big one, for sure – but many ups. My Kyrgyz language is coming along, and every conversation with my host mother or a random stranger on the bus, every word that pops into my head just when I need it, is a small victory. Last week was “Culture Day” for Peace Corps trainees, and I made my harmonica performance debut, showcased my burgeoning knowledge of Kyrgyz customs in a skit and got to wear traditional Kyrgyz clothing. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know other volunteers, and feel very lucky to have scored such a great group.

On June 11, I’ll be sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer (provided I don’t really mess something up in the next few days) and move to my permanent site – a town called Toktogul, in the further-south province of Jalalabad I will be working at a Health Promotion Unit, essentially a local health department. Right now, I don’t know the specific projects I will be working on – that will depend on the needs identified by my counterparts – but I do know that my work will be fairly unstructured and, consequently, self-driven. My counterparts don’t speak English, so my Kyrgyz language will be forced to come along. It’s definitely intimidating, but I feel increasingly ready to take on that “real life” I’ve heard about, the ambiguity and challenge that I knew I was getting myself into. It’s all about to begin. And it’s very, very exciting.