The Last Few Months of 2014 and The Future

Like most bloggers, I'm running a bit behind on my posts. I've been pretty busy since October and it seems to never let up. This is what I've been up to:

1) Halloween
We had our annual Halloween party at my school again. All the teachers and students were asking about it as soon as October started. This year we had a costume contest, slide show, dancing, and students reading the history readings from my students about Halloween during our presentation.

2) All-Vol
This was my last All-Vol conference. Every November all the Peace Corps volunteers in the country gather together to conduct trainings and interviews for next year's committee members. This is also the time that we get together and have a Thanksgiving feast with the U.S. Ambassador.

The Thanksgiving Cooking crew

Anthony and me

Finishing our All-Vol Thanksgiving

All the Volunteers: G13s, G14s, and Response Volunteers

3) Thanksgiving
I celebrated Thanksgiving with a few friends in Tbilisi at another friend's apartment. We made pumpkin pie, a gratin, mulled wine, chicken, hummus and veggies. Yum yum.

4) GRE and graduate school applications
Ugh, not fun especially when you have to take the GRE two days after Thanksgiving. Also applications and personal essays are the worst. I want to earn my masters degree in social work so I'm currently applying to graduate schools. I've narrowed it down to seven different schools and so far have submitted four of the seven applications. Trying to coordinate transcripts, recommendation letters, rough drafts, application fees, final drafts, and communicating to various admissions offices overseas has been a juggling act. Wish me luck and I'll keep you posted about how it turns out.

5) Grant Project
Finally finished!!! I mentioned a few posts back how my counterpart and I were awarded a grant for our school. Well ,we finally finished it. Now all that's left is to submit the paperwork

6) GLOW Camp Preparation
We have our Winter GLOW camp in less than two weeks so I've been busy finalizing our camper and counselor list for camp. Having a camp in the middle of break and making sure that all of our campers and counselors can be present for the whole of camp has proven to be challenging. I'm so glad that my recruitment part of camp is almost over....just gotta get them there. 

7) NESC Regionals
We finished the second level of our competition! Now for the big push in March for our national competition. This is going to be a big task too but fortunately it's after GLOW Camp so I can focus on it afterwards. I've got to coordinate volunteers and plan and manage the resource fair among other things.

6) Christmas
Christmas was much needed after all this stress and cold weather. Ten of us rented an apartment in Tbilisi for a few days to celebrate Christmas. We made/ate tons of amazing food that we normally don't get to enjoy (take out Chinese food, fresh veggies, tacos, tomato soup, mulled wine, hot chocolate etc.). I even got to Skype with my family back home.

7) New Years!
My host family rang in the new year Georgian style. We cooked and prepared food all day for the midnight supra that we would have when the clock struck twelve. At midnight my brother, mom, sister, and I set off fireworks in our front yard and toasted to the new year.

I'm ready to take on 2015! It's going to be a year of change for sure with my sister  and a ton of friends getting married, finishing up my two year service here, returning home and hopefully starting grad school in August. 

Halloween in Sakartvelo!

So I don't know about you but I'm a huge fan of Halloween. Each year I try to decorate my apartment, create the perfect Halloween costume, watch all the scary movies I can, carve pumpkins, and of course pig out on candy. I decided that though this year will definitely be different, that I would try to bring Halloween to Sakartvelo (What Georgians call Georgia). Georgians, like most of the world don't celebrate Halloween, so finding Halloween themed stuff was difficult. I was fortunate enough however to receive some Halloween decorations in a care package that my aunt had sent me.  My brother, my sister and I hung orange and black streamers around our living room.  Finding pumpkins in my town was also a challenge because the pumpkin season doesn't start until around Christmas time and even then, the pumpkins that are available are usually more green than orange and are often cantaloupe sized. (This proved to be a problem when we tried to use the pumpkin carving kit that my mom sent because all the pumpkins were way to small for the designs). Despite this, we were able to create some very cute jack-o-lanterns. My family and I had the most pimped out house in all of Georgia.

Persimmon/rouge apple jack-o-lanterns

My family's pumpkins 

Seeing as I'm a teacher to 100+ kids, I decided to do a fall festival in the school gym after school on Halloween. To prepare for this I asked each grade to draw and label pictures of bats, monsters, ghosts, spiders, skeletons, or pumpkins. (These pictures served as decorations in the gym during the party). I also asked if students could either donate or bring their own pumpkins/persimmons from home since the bazaar in my town was not selling pumpkins yet. (Most of these kids have a pumpkin or two growing in their backyard. The persimmons were for backup if they could not locate a pumpkin). On Halloween afternoon after classes, my students dressed up in their costumes and attended the fall festival. We had a game of duck duck goose, bobbing for apples, apples on a string, pumpkin carving contest, costume contest and a make your own scary popcorn hand station (those of you from east TN know what I'm talking about).

My sister, my brother (part cat, part superman, part TN volunteer) and me as a cat

Apple bobbing

My counterpart Zaira and I 

The party was successful but in a chaotic way. It was just me, my two counterparts and a few leader girls that were trying to keep the 80+ kids out of pandemonium. I had kids swarming everywhere demanding plastic spider rings and candy....a little less organized than I had planned.

After all of this planning and facilitating, I decided to attend PC volunteer party in the city of Kutaisi planned by my friends Ann and Lady. About 20 something volunteers from all over Georgia got together this past weekend to play a city wide assassin's game. We were handed a map of Kutaisi with all of the mission spots labeled on it, as well as the name of the person in our group we were trying to "kill" and how to "kill" them. For my target, I had to somehow get a hold of my friend's phone without them knowing that that was my mission. When a new group of friends approached us in the city, we would all become suspicious and paranoid of them until we learned who was "dead" and therefore not playing and who was still alive and hunting. It was definitely a good way to see the sites of Kutaisi while still having some kind of involvement with the rest of the larger group.

Some of us at lunch (first time I've had Chinese food in Georgia!!!)

Assassin Mugshot ("Arrested for kidnapping a wine truck")