magda's travels

After a year at home in San Diego I picked up and moved to Tanzania, so I thought I would dust off the old blog again so I could keep people up-dated on my life. But as always its content is not a reflection of the U.S. government, Peace Corps or anything else.

Saturday, November 24, 2007

whirlwind summary

Hey there-

Ok I know I know, I have been very very bad at this lately! Well, yeah I have. But I have been busy. Since I wrote last there was Halloween, a pig roast, training of trainers project, gender training, and Thanksgiving!!! So there is too much to catch up on. I will try to do the best I can in brief!

Halloween was amazing, Tom and Ash threw quite the shindig down in Lankaran. It seemed like everyone was there, it was throngs of people in costumes. Some of my favorites were the Anchorman team, the jolly green giant and snow pea, a russian bottle of beer and I myself came as a bac'tress (a waitress for Tom's future bacon resturant).

After that I held a gender training in Sheki for a youth group, it was outstanding. The kids were very active and stayed involved the whole time. I believe there will be follow up trainings and other volunteers have already asked me to come to their regions and conduct similar trainings for them.

Then there was a week I spent in Ganja at Ben's it was fantastic, it started with a weekend pig-roast and end with a three day training session that I observed. I still can't believe we roasted a pig, it is possibly the most Peace Corps, Peace Corps night of myself so far! And it was delicious, a great pre-cursor for the week at Ben's. Honestly, when Ben and I hang there is always great food about. He made excellent egg sandwiches for me, chilli and baked potatoes and I made one kickin pecan pie and a quiche, both without recipes. Other than that we spent all of our after work hours vegging out watching the Office on my laptop! Oh this reminds me, I forgot to say hi to two people I know read this. One is Ram's mother, hi! Ram told me that you found my blog and ask if we are friends, we are. Your son is great one of the kindest and most talented people here. The other is Ben's mother. Hi Mrs. Wulf, I just wanted to thank you for all the great stuff you send Ben. I just wanted to let you know that he is always very generous with sharing things he gets from home and we all appreciate it. Also I don't know if I ever thanked you for the speakers you sent him, he's lent them to me, since I didn't have any. If I forgot to mention it before-- thanks!

Since then there has been Thanksgiving, which was another success. There was excellent food, another talent show which left me giggle-fitting. Also Lucas (AZ3)was in town on business so we got to hang out with him too!

This week I have gotten two killer packages from home(THANK YOU MOMI AND THANK YOU STEPH), saw Elmir (my pc program manager, who I love), had dinner at the hotel with my Norwegian friends and have some house guests for the weekend- in short it is an Awesome time here is Sheki. We even had our first snow fall of the season AND the greastest surprise, in one of the packages my father got me MY SO CALLED LIFE on DVD. So I just got to say, October may have rough for me but November is doing its best to shatter all memories of that and leave me the happy bubbly PCV I was meant to be!!!