Site Placement!!!!

SITE PLACEMENT!!!!!

Hi everyone. Sorry for the 2 postings in a row. Its been a few weeks since I’ve gotten to internet, so I want to catch you up.

This last Thursday was the big day for us. Site placement announcements. Peace Corps told us where we are spending the next 2 years of our lives. All trainees (I believe there are 47 of us) were together on a hub day. They made us wait until the end of the day while we listened to other sessions. The excited and somewhat nervous energy was in the air. You could almost feel the electricity. PC put up on the wall (through a projector and computer) a picture and name of a region and then put up the faces of the trainee(s) who were going there. Everyone cheered, the trainees went up and received packets of information about their areas, jobs and host families, went and stood by an Azerbaijan map and pointed at their sites while people took pictures and everyone cheered. 

My placement. I am being placed in the region of Shaki.(pronounced Sheki) Here’s a little of what I know about it. It’s in the north of Azerbaijan, about 5 hours by private vehicle from where I am now. (6 hrs by bus) In the region of Shaki, there are 175,995  people, 63 villages. Its 675 m above sea level, (2215 ft) and is surrounded by high mountains.  It’s a very historic area, some of which still stand date back back to the 18^th century (the Fine Fortress built by Haji Chalabi) and monuments attributed to different periods are there in Old Shaki including the 5^th century Albanian temple and a barracks built in the time of the Czar.

Here’s a blurb from my info package: “Residents of Shaki have earned a reputation for having a good sense of humor. In Soviet times, Shaki was often described as Azerbaijan’s Gabrovo. Anyone in Azerbaijan will tell you at least on joke about Shaki. The jokes are about the Shaki accent and the local people calculating skills. The biggest source of laugh is the highly contagios Shaki accent.”

The name of my work site is : Azerbaijan University of Languages- Sheki Branch.  “The Sheki Branch of the Azerbaijan University of Languages is the biggest one after Baku University of Languages. The department of languages has 28 teachers, 14 of them are English language teachers. This University is preparing specialist on foreign languages. The university offers undergraduate and graduate programs, new educational policy.”

The packet than says I will be doing:

-Conversation clubs

- to improve English language knowledge of students through different types of teaching techniques

-to assist in the elaboration of new English language training Curriculum

-IT computer skills training  (stop laughing)

-Establishment of Communications with other US educational institutions

That’s all I know for now about my job. It looks like primarily I will be working with college age kids, but I will also have the freedom to work with younger kids on my own through conversation clubs, projects, etc. On Tuesday PC is hosting an all-day conference with us and our counter parts. On Wednesday, we will go with our counterparts to our sites, meet our new host families, find out more about our work, Sheki etc, hopefully meet up with the other volunteers who are there and make our way back to Jarambatan (which is where I live now) by ourselves and continue our training. The purpose of going now before training is finished is to check out our new homes and spend time with our counterparts/work so that we can get advice/help from PC about anything we need before we actually move. All I know about my new home is that Im living in the middle of the main city there, there are 4 people in the family (father is a TV producer and mom is a Russian teacher.. no little kids, older students) So, maybe they will have internet? Or at least I imagine they will have a land line so I can get a modem!!!

That’s it for now.  Im so excited. I will hopefully be able to blog next weekend when I get back to let you know how it went. I hope you are all doing well. I miss you!

This is my assigned mentor Kathy who is here with us on our Baku trip. Kathy is an AZ9 (she came last year and was part of the 9th group to come here. Im an AZ10) and is also posted in Sheki with one year to go. Yea!!!