I'm Officially Official

I don't think I've written in four weeks - a lot has happened in that time, obviously, here are the highs and lows:

I taught my first class in Romanian - wooo! I felt great after this and pretty much said to myself, "Teaching in a foreign language - no big deal! I got this." However, I would like to point out some reasons why this went so smoothly. One, I planned and taught the lesson with my American friend who, oddly enough, speaks English which was the language we planned and wrote the lesson in initially. Two, our lesson was only 20 minutes long. Three, our "students" were our American buddies who had been prepped on what to say during the lesson and who were overwhelmingly supportive of us because they had to teach that day too. Still, it felt like a big accomplishment to teach a lesson on "The Influence of Mass Media" in Romanian.

Following the week of this first lesson we spent the next week preparing ourselves for what I like to call The Sanity Breaker, officially called practice school. Practice school lasted for two weeks; the last two weeks of PST. The first week we taught four classes (35 minutes each) in Romanian with our future Moldovan partners to real live Moldovan youth. This doesn't sound so bad right? In reality it wasn't...for me, as I had a FANTASTIC partner. The other trainees were not so lucky. There were tears, lots of tears, from the stress of this week. Imagine meeting your new partner that you'll spend two years working with, who you can't understand either in vocal or body language. This partner has been thrown into the world of PC HE procedures and requirements and is just as anxious about the coming years as the Americans. Now add a dash of time crunch, the panic of having to write three different lesson plans in broken Romanian with this stressed out partner in less than 24 hours and you get a big sticky mess of emotions.  As I've said in previous posts, Peace Corps Moldova is a well oiled machine and especially in the Health Education program everything we go through in PST has been tried, tested and tweaked until the outcome is the best for the trainees - even if we can't see it at the time. This first week of practice school was well, horribly rough, but in the end we all have a sense of the challenges we are going to face (interpersonal relationships, communication barriers, creating a curriculum with little pre-existing structure, finding a happy balance between the Soviet era teaching style and our vision for an open, creative class room) as well as the benefits (interpersonal relationships, the rewards of working with youth, thinking outside of the box and developing a kick-ass, interactive and engaging lesson that sneakily teaching kids about a healthier life).

Last week was our second week of practice school. This time with a new partner and instead of teaching three separate classes we taught the same class all week in the format of Health Club. In the HE program we teach normal classes for 8 hours a week and have at least 1 hour of club each week. This doesn't sound like much but when there is no curriculum and you have to write long term plans and lesson plans for each class, the work piles up. Eventually, when we get used to the teaching work, we are expected to branch out and work with community organizations as well as. Club week was funny because we were all kind of dreading another week of practice school and were incredibly nervous about the "surprises" that would cause mental collapses. However, out of all the challenges I could think of that would pop up during this week it never occurred to me that a communication breakdown between two Moldovans would happen. Club week was different than lesson week because we had three teams teaching the same club, just rotating hours. This meant that there were three Americans and three Moldovans all trying to plan lessons together. Our club happened to have one partner who had difficulty with communication and resulted in my partner (who is as outstanding as my other partner- I totally won the teaching partner lottery) playing mediator for the whole week. It was ridiculous. We made it through though and our club's project (a giant children's book about the cold and flu that they presented to the younger classes) turned out great. One of the other trainees caught their presentation on video so I'll post that when I can get a copy.

What does this all mean in the end? PST is over and on Wednesday I took the same oath the President takes and was sworn in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer! Yay!!! Now when people send me things you can write PCV instead of PCT this is very exciting for me, honestly. It feels bitter sweet that PST is over because I'm going to miss my little family of 8 trainees, two amazing language instructors and host family very very much but I'm excited to get down to business.

As always, feel free to post questions in the comment section. I'll be able to post at least once a week now and hopefully, more frequently when I get internet at my new site. Next week I plan on flooding you with pictures, get ready.

Officially yours,
PCV Kindle