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. 

Slight Hiatus and a Busy Summer

I apologize for the hiatus. I've been pretty busy since my last post at the beginning of May. Let me catch you up to date and include some pictures of the experience since then. PS. This is a particularly long post

May and on:
I successfully completed one year of teaching here in Georgia! There were times when I thought I couldn't handle it and just wanted to walk out of the classroom. But then there were those moments where I felt like I was making a difference, and those moments are worth everything. I witnessed "Last Bell" which is the event put on by the 12th graders as their last contribution to the school before exams. There were dances performed, singing, speeches thanking the teachers for putting up with them all these years and words of wisdom spoken to the students as the approached graduation.

At the end May I prepared for my one week visit to America. That's right, America. By this time I couldn't contain myself and had to quickly buy souvenirs for family and friends back home. My host family here was so sweet and bought gifts for my family members as well. Their gifts included a drinking horn set for my father, a silverware set for my mother, perfume for my two sisters, cologne for my brother, a ceramic vase for my grandparents, and miniature wine vases for my aunt and uncle. I somehow managed to pack all of this and more (I helped a fellow volunteer out who was leaving Georgia to travel after service by taking some of her stuff back to the States so she wouldn't have to travel with all of it.) into my large suitcase. That last weekend of May was a crazy one because I had so many meetings at the time and I had to force myself to be productive and not just slip into vacation mode quite yet.

June
June 3, 2014 at 8:30 pm I arrived back in America after a whole year and a month of absence. My mother, father and aunt greeted me at the gate with a sign and promises of a Mexican dinner after I picked up my bags from the baggage claim. We promptly went to dinner where I had my first taste of proper Americanized Mexican food in over a year. And let me tell you that Mexican food has never tasted as good as it did that night.

My parents and I in Knoxville, TN

After my short night in Atlanta, GA,  my parents and I started our trek to Knoxville, TN where I was to begin my Big Great American Tour. I joked to them that I should have made an event on Facebook labeling it "The Great American Tour: For one week and one week only. See Anneke Valk as she travels cross country to three different states, participates in a friend's wedding as a bridesmaid,  helps her sister pick out a wedding dress, eats tons of American food and takes her first proper bath in a year!"

 Needless to say that the trip was a whirlwind of tears, laughter, hugs, questions, toasts, confusion and then some more laughter. I didn't have much time to relax...but who needs that anyway?

 I was honored to be part of one of my best friend's weddings and to witness her and her now husband Ben start their lives together. They had their beautiful wedding in my hometown Greeneville, TN and the reception afterwards at Mary's house. The night got pretty crazy with a 50 person party train, Star Trek dancing, and sangria. We all wished the happy couple off with a sparkler tunnel. Shout out to Mary and Ben, may you have many grand adventures together!

Wedding Rehearsal Time!

Ben and Mary running through the sparkler tunnel as they leave the reception 

 I also went back to Knoxville where it immediately felt like home again.You know you are good friends with someone when you walk into their apartment, see them for the first time in over a year, hug them, and then promptly use the bathroom with the door wide open as you catch up with them. This is a shout out to you Alyssa. You also know you as super friends with people when you accidentally break into their house to meet them only to find that they aren't in their house and the first thing you say to them when you do see them after a year is "So I broke into your house...did you know your door isn't locked?" Shout out to Forest and Kayla!  And last but not least you know that you are friends with someone when you lay on a make shift futon couch looking at each other not saying a word and cracking up because you know what the other one is laughing about. This is for you Yaz!

Emotional moment with Yaz as we meet at  Flashbacks, Whatever

Very familiar Thursday night shenanigans with friends

I also spent time with my whole family catching up on what had happened this past year, checking out the new improvements to the house and grilling out like old times. I shared some Chacha (Georgian moonshine) and some homemade house wine with them. Not sure if they really liked the taste, I told them it was something you had to get use to or just submit yourself to when you need a drink. My family and I also went bar hopping in Asheville, the beer capital of the states to make up for all the good beer that I've been missing. Georgia has beer but it's nothing to brag about plus the only have two types of beer, თეთრი ლუდი (white beer) or შავი ლუდი (black beer).

The Valk women at Green Man Brewery in Asheville, NC

Coming back to Georgia was painless. Yes I'm going to miss my family and friends again, and yes I will miss food and American conveniences, but Georgia, believe it or not regardless of my frustration at times has become my home. I missed my family here and my friends here when I was in America. You know you've officially made a space in your heart for a place when you start to miss it.

Anyway, enough with the reflection stuff. About an hour after i arrived in country I met a bunch of volunteers for drinks in Tbilisi. Somehow we managed to stay up most of the night which led me to only get four hours of jet lagged sleep before jet setting to Khashuri to meet the new-soon-to-be volunteers at a picnic meet up. After a few hours of mingling I, and few other volunteers made our way to Kutaisi that evening. So if you are keeping count right now you will have noticed that I have been back in country for less than a day and have already traveled through three different cities. What can I say, I love to travel and see my friends no matter how tired, how jet lagged, or how dirty I am. From Kutaisi I traveled to Oni to stay with a friend and check out his site. That makes four cites/towns in three days and still jet lagged. I did happen to doze off on the marsh, something which never and I mean never happens so that was nice. Finally I arrived home to Sagarejo tired, dirty, a little scraggly looking but in good spirits with gifts to give my host family.

Somewhere along the end of June I also participated in my first 5K here in Georgia. I ended up running in a dress and Keds because that was all I was wearing when I made the snap decision to run. I was at the Race for the Cure to help out and volunteer before the race. However my friends convinced me to run so I dug out a pair of Keds out of the free box of clothing at the PC office. I think it kind of took people by surprise because I had little girls on the side line cheering me on saying "Go dress, Go!" I wasn't too fast but I did finish the race. Now on to July...


July
I've been pretty busy these last two weeks. GLOW Camp is fast approaching and I'm on the GLOW NGO's recruitment committee. We are in charge of making the applications for both campers and counselors interested in attending camp, sending out said applications, conducting application workshops, collecting all the applications through hard copy or by email, interviewing potential counselors, selecting counselors who will then help us select campers based on their  application essays, alert all the girls who applied whether or not they are invited to camp or not and confirm all those who accept their invitation to come to camp. All of this really hit these past two weeks. I successfully managed to interview and select 14 new counselors for this year's GLOW camp, met/emailed all of those counselors with the 282 camper applications we received so that they can review them and pick campers, and  reviewed and helped pick our G14 successors for next year. It's been quite busy and I've spent a good portion of my time either running around Tbilisi meeting counselors and giving them their applications to review or working on the master excel spreadsheet with all the information about the 282 potential campers. I haven't had too much down time but I did manage to have a slight weekend vacation in the middle of all of this.


I know, i know, I just got back from America. But America was more like a marathon and less like a relaxing vacation. Between the traveling, meeting up with friends and family and attending wedding festivities, I didn't have that much down time let alone to breath. Which leads me to Kobuleti. Kobuleti is a sleepy beach town on the coast of the Black Sea. It doesn't get as much hype as Batumi nor does it get the amount of tourist but that's why we picked it. Ten of us went there to celebrate the 4th of July in style. We grilled hot dog like meat, made some potato salad and greedily stuffed our faces full of s'mores (a rarity since marsh mellows are no where to be found and that I happened to bring a bag of them back from the States). It was overcast most of the time but pleasant. There was an afternoon where I and two other volunteers had to work on plans for our various camps but other than that it was blissful.

Happy Birthday America! Fellow PCVs and I in our 4th of July gear

Beaching it up!

Currently I am now working on GLOW stuff (the norm these days) and on my grant project that was funded  back in April. Today I went shopping with my counterpart Nino and our deputy director Nana  for electronics for our new language and cultural cabinet. We bought a new computer,  a printer, a set of headphones, some speakers, a few posters, four dictionaries, a computer desk, a computer chair and some magnetic alphabet letters for our chalk board. We still have a few more things to do before we paint a world map on our cabinet wall or hold any computer training sessions. I'm still excited though because I actually get to see our grant coming together.

My counterpart and deputy director being shown a chair they want to purchase for our cabinet

Don't worry, you're almost up to date on what I've been doing the past two months. On top of my GLOW stuff and grant stuff I am also in charge of planning our first annual "Jort Off" for the older volunteers after the swearing in of the new volunteers. It is a jort competition to see who can pull off  jorts, jean shorts, the best. I and two other PCVs are trying to make this a reality because what's more classy on a hot July day than debuting a jort creation to your fellow friends before swimming in a  lake to celebrate less than a year left of service. Whew, I think that's up to date now. Thanks for reading if you made it this far.

GYLT Month: Get Your Life Together Month

Ok, ok I know it's been a while since I've posted (at least that's what my mom pointed out when I skyped with her this week). That's why I'm calling this post GYLT Month: -conveniently pronounced guilt - Get Your Life Together Month. March went by so fast to be honest with you. I've been in Tbilisi every weekend this past month for trainings and meetings...mainly in preparation for the NESC competition this past weekend.

Things I've completed this past month:

1) Wrote and submitted my first Small Projects Assistance (SPA) grant proposal....all 20 pages of it...Crossing my fingers in hopes of it getting funded. I'm hoping to get funding to create a Language and Cultural Studies Cabinet in our school where we can use new technology and visual aids to aid in learning about foreign cultures and their languages.

2) Finished an online course in Epidemiology due to interests in going into social work and public health for grad school after PC. Not sure at this point whether I want to pursue a graduate degree in Social work or a degree for international studies. That being said I just started a new online course called International Human Rights Law: Prospects and Challenges.

3) I read  The Lonesome Traveler, Anna Karenina, Three Cups of Tea, and The Giver. Trying to read more if I can help it. My next planned book is The Red Tent by Anita Diamant followed  then  Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

4) Eleven months of service (March 23rd made it 11 months in country)

5) Finished up the Write On Competition  at my school. I had about 14 students at my school participate. I was very impressed with their creative answers to the questions given. Questions like "If you could invent a type of candy bar what flavor would it be and why?" or "If trees could think what would they think about?" All of this mind you in English, my students' second language...like I said I was very impressed by their writings.

6) Worked at the National English Spelling Competition  this past week. I basically helped out with last minute items for the participants, worked on their certificates and helped my fellow PCV Rachel with her role. On Tuesday we the G13 NESC Committee members were nominated for specific committee roles for next year since we will be facilitating all of this next year. My new title is Administrative Coordinator and I'll be in charge of keeping up with the spelling lists, creating transcriptions, translations (in Azeri, Armenian, Georgian, Russian and English) and coordinating all of this with the Project Coordinators for both the East and West regions of Georgia. Maybe this is a blessing in in disguise seeing as I'm not a great speller at all (might have had to look up disguise just to type this) so bring on the spelling words

7) Started running again the first time today. I didn't run all through summer, fall, and winter because of rabid dog obstacles, oogling  men, and cold weather. However, I've decided to use the town's local football stadium in the mornings since it's starting to get warmer. The stadium keeps the dogs at bay and it's kind of hidden..or so I thought. I still had an audience of 9 today, five men and four boys watching me run...guess I'll just have to get up earlier to avoid it.

8) Started my school's English Club back up. So far we have talked about Women's Day, St. Patrick's Day, and April Fools celebrations. We have also done fun activities related to adjectives, and readings in class as well. I think I might do an English Slang lesson this month.

9) Attended the Georgia vs. Romania qualifier for the Ruby World Cup 2015. It was really fun and actually was the first sporting event I've attended here that had the energy and fan base that I usually feel at a UT football game.


Things I'm planning on doing this month:

1) Work out more
2) Study Georgian more (I've kind of let my language skills go to the way side after learning enough to get by  on a daily basis)
3) Going out west to visit the town of Chiatura. I want to see the Katskhi Pillar and Stalin's Rope Railway
4) Celebrate Easter (the biggest holiday in Georgia) with my family
5) Attend my host sister's and host brother's dance recital at the end of April
6) Take more pictures of my town and of the Kakheti region
7) Meet the new volunteers, the G14s, at the airport in the wee hours and welcome them to Georgia.