A little behind

I haven't been too good at updating this thing, it has been about three months. Well what has been going on? I am now an official Peace Corps volunteer and successfully got through Pre-Service Training (PST). I now live in Rubik, Albania which is in Mirdita, the central north. PST was extremely busy, frustrating, exciting, and intense. I had classes 6 days a week for language, technical training in community and organization development, culture and government/politics. I was placed in a host family for the three months of PST in a small village outside of the city of Elbasan which is the third/fourth largest city in Albania. Twice a week during PST, all the 33 trainees in my group would travel to Elbasan where we would be briefed on Peace Corps safety/security, rules/regulations, Albanian culture/language, and sector specific technical training. The other four days of the week we would stay in our training sites and receive training in a local school with our respective training groups which consisted of 5-6 other trainees. My particular group consisted of three women, one guy, and myself; Connie, a 59 year old woman who most recently worked for OSHA in Oregon, Alex, a 23 year old international marketing graduate from Boston, Rachel, a 23 year old theatre management graduate from Virginia and Seth, a 23 year old international studies graduate from New Jersey. During PST my site mates and I became extremely close. In PST, due to the reality that everyone is going through the same difficult process people either grow close are grow to hate each other, I am really glad the latter didn't happen to us. I don't want to go into detail about everything that happened during PST because I have already sent out detailed e-mails to family and friends of my experiences but for the sake of goals two and three in the Peace Corps act I will mention the highlights. My favorite parts of PST consisted of milking a cow, traveling to Shkoder and Kruja, the Trainee camping trip, our community project and countless funny stories about my less than great host family. Part of PST in Albania is to develop and implement a community project within the 10 week period as practice for what work as a PCV (peace corps volunteer, there are all kinds of acronyms in US government work) will be like. Our community project was to teach a series of typing classes at the local high school along with weekly community youth events that consisted of fun games on the weekends and culminated in a scavenger hunt/dance party (Albanians love dance parties). We also had to write a PDM (Project Design Management proposal for the project and present it to a panel as training. My training site's project went particularly well and i would say it was the best project in our training group (our host village was Gostimё by the way). As for host family life mine was especially different, compared to the other 33 members of my group. I lived in an even smaller village than Gostimё (shtepanj) which was about a 30min walk to Gostimё but lived next door to Alex who i really got to know and am now close friends with which was lucky. My family consisted of a Father, who was 62 and spent most of my stay in Greece as a worker, a Mother, who did all of the house/farm work, a host sister (Lola), who was a 40 year old business owner in Gostimё, and a host brother (Luli), who was a 25 year old recently engaged dude who didnt do much of anything (except creep Alex out a little bit). There are many unusual things my host family did but i will only go into the really good ones. My host mother on the third day i was living with them decided to make soup for dinner (we actually had soup every night for dinner and sometimes the same soup the next day for breakfast) with a chicken from their property. I was in my room studying shqip and writing in my journal about what had gone on that day when i heard this horrible noise. It sounded like a cat was beeing ripped apart, it turned out it was a live chicked being ripped apart by my host mother. I went out on the porch to see what all the noise was about and saw her simply break the chicken's arms, dig her fingers in the hole that the broken bone had torn and began butchering the animal, still alive, with her bare hands. This was a great introduction to the house and made other occasions when i would come home to a group of women covered in blood, gossiping, and butchering an entire cow on the patio commonplace. Of course the night of the chicken i was given the best part (the organs) in my soup which consisted of water, oil, and a little bit of green onion. Looking back that was one of my favorite soups she made. The worst one being a thick liquid which consisted entirely of fat from a baby cow, which i affectionately call "fat soup." Annother great story of my family is that in the very last night i was at their house, i was having dinner with my host sister who did most of the paper work and delt with peace corps on logistics of my being at their home, casually asks me what my name was!! I had been a guest in there home for ten weeks and they didnt even know my name, kind of a funny story but also pissed me off a little. Not all of the experience with them was bad and i did get to see a lot of what life for an Albanian villager was like. One last thing about the host family, non of them spoke any english, which i initially thought would be great and my shqip would be good by the time i left, i was wrong and many nights i would be ignored so they could focus their energy on "Big Brother Albania." I did really enjoy hanging out with my host father when he wasnt in Greece and every so often there would be neices and nephews from other family members around who were fun to play with and actually attempted to speak to me in shqip. I guess i have more things to write about PST but it is getting kind of late here and i need to make dinner. If anyone is actually still reading this far down on this post i will try to update more often and finish talking about PST. Naten.