"Hey Mom, I'm a vegetarian."
"Hey Dad, I'm a Spanish major."
"Hey family, I'm leaving for The Republic of Georgia for the next 27 months."
In defense of my spare moments not spent drinking wine and learning how to make cheese AND in a huge THANK YOU to all of my friends and family that donated to our LIFE Camp PCPP grant which was recently FULLY FUNDED (that's a lot of caps, I know, deal, we're so happy!) ... here is a blog post enumerating all the other Peace Corpsy goodness I've been up to lately. Dear friends and family, this is what you're supporting! I swear I work too!
Special thanks to Laura and Darlene who are the only people I know to thank! Your names both came up on the donor's list and if anybody else donated but didn't leave their names, I don't know who you are! Thank you Darlene and Laura and to the rest of you awesome (but apparently quite shy) donors!
SELF CAMP (June 29-July 2):
First of all, the dates listed there are something of a joke. I mean, those were our camp dates, yes, but two other volunteers and I started working on putting that camp together last November. Talk about a long time coming. But I think the most important point about those dates is that they're ooooooooovvvvvvvvverrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!! Hoo boy, are we ever excited to have one successful camp behind us now. Huge shout-out to Merissa and Brittany without whom I can't even imagine conducting such a huge endeavor.
SELF Camp is a girls-only fitness camp that's about equal parts lectures on health topics (hygiene & communicable diseases, mental health, reproductive health, drugs & alcohol awareness, gender based violence awareness) and sports and exercise (running, stretching, yoga, ultimate frisbee, soccer, basketball). We stayed with 40 girls, 2 guest speakers, 2 new trainees, and 8 counselors & jr. counselors, and 1 head counselor in a large renovated school in a small town near the Black Sea. The school had a cafeteria (?!?!) a beautiful auditorium (!!!!!!!!!) and showers with hot water (!!!!&^$%#!). The staff set up beds in the rooms and we just stayed there all 4 days. The camp was embassy-funded and completely free for the girls (many of whom would have not have been able to attend otherwise).
At the end of the camp, the girls had a talent show and a dance party and oooooooooooh were they ever sore! They traded phone numbers and signed their notebooks like yearbooks and my great hope for them is that they begin to form a network of women who advocate for their own health, who recognize that they deserve to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect, and who take an active role in deciding their own futures. Very most of all, I want to watch them crush the concept of "taboo topic" under their heels.
This isn't the camp you funded, but it's super important too. LIFE Camp caters not only to co-ed education but, also, naturally to more liberal open-minded families that are willing to allow their daughters to travel so far away from home alone and stay in a co-ed situation. SELF Camp is there for girls who aren't allowed to go so far. Even to get girls to come and stay at SELF Camp (which is a 3 GEL travel distance from my village), it was such a circus. Every single eligible girl at my school filled out an application ... and we had to re-choose girls 3 times to come up with two whose parents would allow them to come.
(Never fear, I have my LIFE camp campers set up and locked-in already, it just takes a little more legwork and a lot more persuasion. I ended up getting a girl camper for LIFE camp from the same family that allowed their younger daughter to come to SELF-- when they told me her older sister could come to the co-ed camp with me near Tbilisi, I about fell out of my chair. What a nice family!)
Here's a link to the pictures Brittany took of our camp with her super awesome camera. I've still yet to get mine back-- I gave it to one of my students to take pictures with her friends during the camp. I've got a trek ahead of me to upper Makhuntseti today to get it back ...
https://plus.google.com/
We also had a videographer at the camp and when we get that video, I'll share it too! I can't wait to see footage of that talent show!
The Gym Project (forever ongoing):
When I came to this village on my site visit waaaaaaaay back when over a year ago now (so crazy to think about that!) ... my school told my unequivocally that they wanted help renovating their gym. Now, the blanket advice I got from Peace Corps before I moved to site was to thoughtfully take my time figuring out what my village wanted me to do to make sure that I wasn't just picking some "American Idea" that nobody else here considered to be important. Ha. Ha. Ha. They were like: "We want a gym. We want a gym. WE WANT A GYM." I'm forever grateful to my school and village for taking ALL of the guesswork out of THAT process!
Then came the grant. And the realization of how truly expensive new wood flooring would be. And, oh, the agony. Do we still write the grant for what we need or do we work on the blacktop outside (which would be cheaper but certainly not helpful in the winter)? I actually wrote the whole grant before I learned that for a tiny village like mine, the unofficial cap for grant money is $2,500. Shaved down to the barest minimum construction-wise we were at $3,300. We didn't even ask for wall paint. Any more and we would have been compromising the integrity of our project. On top of the grant money, we had 44% community contribution through reduced cost labor and a ton of money from the school's budget. I called Adam (poor Adam!) on the grant committee over and over. I turned that grant in and we all collectively held our breaths. In the passing weeks, I answered the "deadline" question to my villagers far more times than I could count.
"We'll know in two weeks."
"We'll know in a week and a half."
"Just a few days now, I swear."
I was in Istanbul checking my email 3 times a day waiting when we got the news. WE GOT FUNDED.
Well, as every volunteer knows, getting the money is just the beginning. Then came the wait for the money to come in from both the Peace Corps and the school itself. One month later, everybody is "rich" or poor. However you want to look at that one.
The gym teacher bought materials in Batumi yesterday and construction is set to begin today. Cross your fingers for us, I'll be headed up to the school this afternoon to check it out.
Gulnara (every dang night!):
This woman deserves her own darn category. Gulnara is my main English teacher counterpart and boy is she ever a trip! Now, we're all supposed to lesson plan with out counterparts. Lesson planning, aside from being great for a smooth day at school, is key for working on English with your counterpart. Now, there's a range of "lesson planning" for every volunteer-counterpart pair ranging from "What's lesson planning?" to a very steady schedule.
And then there's Gulnara. Whose "lesson planning" work ethic is so legendary that she earned herself a spot on the most recent Embassy exchange program to America.
Between her and my other English partner teacher, I lesson planned upwards of 1.5 hours every night during the school week for the entire school year. But, to be fair, "lesson planning" is a broad term that encompasses actual work, drinking tea, eating dinner, gossiping, and potentially dancing to Gagnam Style with surrounding small children. And I, in my infinite naivety, thought that this schedule would end with the school year.
Hahahaha.
Well, now we have the Teacher's Exams on the 10th. And Gulnara has been going to exam prep classes 6 days a week in Batumi. And our lesson planning has just morphed into studying for the exams. Now, I'm happy to work if she asks for help, but on top of that, I feel a huge responsibility to support her because she tries so hard for her own sake. I found myself coming home for the afternoon on the 4th of July to write essays with Gulnara before leaving to celebrate America's birthday with the other volunteers.
There's no escaping it. I will be "lesson planning" every night until the day I leave this village! Yesterday we studied together all afternoon, I went home for a while, then I went back to correct her essay, put antivirus software on her computer (arghhh fixing virus-ridden computers in Russian ... I think every volunteer could write a soliloquy on that) and my favorite to do a prenatal yoga video with Gulnara (who is a few months along now), her niece, and her 4 year old son sandwiched between us and crawling under our jungle gym of legs and arms.
On the quick topic of yoga-- thanks to Brittany at SELF Camp (who led an awesome "hot yoga" session) and to www.yogadownload.com (which gives free 6-month subscriptions to yoga video downloads to active duty military and Peace Corps Volunteers-- SO AWESOME), I have started doing yoga in my room here. Why didn't I do this a million years ago?!?!?! I feel SO much better. My bed is an old Russian spring mattress that is akin to a very lumpy hammock (I imagine the hammock would actually be more comfortable) ... and after a year of that, now I'm dragging the mattress to the floor every night in a desperate attempt to save my newly creaky back. Am I old? Can that happen to me?!? Enter yoga. Such. A. Huge. Difference. Now my host mom wants to learn how to do it. I need to grab a blank DVD in Batumi somewhere so I can burn her a video to do.
LIFE CAMP (gearing up):
This is the next move. I leave on July 9th for a dentist appointment in Tbilisi and a Gender Equality Committee organization meeting. From there, I will be gone from the village for an entire month (woah) traveling from camp to camp. The first three camps will be free in different larger towns around Georgia (so that we get good attendance) and the last one is FUNDED NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and will be conducted near Tbilisi in tents in true camp-style. We got a new partner organization (Charity Humanitarian Abkhazeti), so now we have two. The new organization deals solely with Internationally Displaced Persons, so instead of the original 20% of IDP involvement in the funded camp, now the vast majority of campers will be IDP kids and many of them will actually be coming from an IDP children's group home.
Obviously, when we get photo and video footage, I'll be putting it up for you all to see the end result of your donations!
Sorry for the infinitely long post about work, but I just really, truly want you all to see where your donations went and to know what a huge, grateful community is benefiting from your help.
More to come for sure!
Love,
"Aluchka"
