Last week

Welcome to the last week of my training here in lovely Ecik. Actually, today I felt like I was back in Wisconsin, outside of the fact that there are no trees, mountains right in plan view, and everybody is trying to run each other over with cars. It's always the little things.
Anyway, this last week was a conference in Almaty to meet with our counterparts, with a little side project of spending a few tenge on supporting the Russian and Kazakhstani vodka industry. Everybody's hurting so every little bit counts. So my counterpart is Sara Ustazhanova and should be a good counterpart. She speaks English fairly well, has a law degree, but is pretty shy, so that will probably a slow building of trust. It will also be interesting because most of the English teachers at my school are 25 and some of them are single, so the hope is that this doesn't descend into a Kazakhstani game of the Bachelor. Well, maybe if they're cute. Haha.
Anyway, it was a lot of meetings and meetings in meetings, which can be extremely frustrating, but the fact that we're having means that they were deemed important by past groups of volunteers. It was nice to get out of Ecik for a while and just be pampered. Taking a shower everyday almost made me feel like a lush. I was dirty for being clean, which is the most ridiculous oxymoron out there, but it had some relevance.
It's actually kind of sad to think that we're all going to be scattered to the 4 ends of Kazakhstan in a week. I mean, I got lucky since I'll be in Akmola oblast where everybody is a few hour bus ride away from each other. But there are so many people I get along with who are going to be in the middle of nowhere or a 2 day train ride away (I'm not kidding, there are 2 day train rides here). But this is what we signed up for, being the only American person and helping develop this country in anyway possible. Well, there's not much to add, because I've been lounging around the hotel in useless meetings with a not very talkative person. Pretty soon I'll be in a new place with new stories. And maybe I'll post pictures of my clean-shaven self since I can't really have a beard in my region. Sucks. Well, I could be in the Domican Republic.