fall is in the air

It’s late August and I’m afraid summer is over. This last week in Petro has been overcast, rainy, windy and chilly. I wasn’t here last year to know exactly how the inevitable transition from gorgeous sunny summer to cold and blustery winter happens, but I do remember seeing the year’s first snow in late October (and the locals saying it was late that year). I’ve been back at site for a week now, and have another before school starts on the 1st of September. We said goodbye to Forrest, a Kaz-18 who was leaving early to enter a graduate school program at Harvard, and to Gulmira, my local girlfriend (email me for details) who returned to Arizona for her second year of college there.

However, even though there is a sense that life is deteriorating, spirits here are high as we prepare for the new school year. I’ve spent this week working with Saule to discuss and plan. I’m full of ideas that I’d like to try, and she seems willing so far to give some of them a try. My main goal is to set up a weekly one-hour AP-style English class with one group of 15-20 10th and 11th grade students. It would be an extra class on top of the students’ load, and I would teach it by myself. Because I’m not an actual teacher here, it wouldn’t be a class that goes on their transcripts, but it would be written into the schedule and the students would get grades for it. It would give me a chance to plan out a class on my own, using outside materials to get away from our infamously bad textbooks. I’ll know sometime next week if the administration will allow it.

I’m getting excited about the one full year I have as an English teacher ahead of me. I’m hoping I can make a little bit more progress with the students than I did last year. It is a normal Peace Corps statistic that PCVs rarely feel like they are effective in their first year, that only in the last 12 months (or even 6) do they feel like they are comfortable in the culture, proficient at the language, and effective in their work. As my first full year in country comes to an end (I arrived in Almaty on August 23rd), I feel like I have adopted, or at least adapted to the culture, I can speak enough Russian to handle most situations (although last week someone on the street asked me for the time and I couldn’t spit it out. She was nice though, smiling and saying she’d ask someone else), and I feel confident in my abilities as an English teacher. The new PCTs (they’re Trainees until November) arrived in Almaty last night, and we’ll meet them in October during site visits. I remember meeting the first Kaz-18s at Thanksgiving and thinking how cool and confident, put together and experienced they were. As I’m now in that position for the Kaz-20s, I see how wrong I was. There’s no way I’m as experienced as I thought the Kaz-18s were at this time last year, but it is true that I can buy train tickets and plan a country-wide trip without much difficulty – something I wouldn’t have dreamt of trying last fall. Regardless of whether I’m as cool as I thought the 18s were, I’m looking forward to putting my abilities and experience to use this next year to make it as smooth and productive as possible.