One small step for me, one giant step for a community project

Today was the big day. After weeks in the making, we had the community project meeting with all the town’s English teachers. Also on hand were several people from our local education department as well as someone from Pavlodar. It was a really incredible thing to be in a room full of English teachers. These are all people I probably should have met much sooner, but I hope now that this will help to propel my service in a new and exciting direction.

I put together a few PowerPoint presentations for the conference today. One was about me and my experiences in Kazakhstan so far. The other was about the community project. A final presentation I used was a Russian language presentation about Peace Corps. Don’t be too impressed, I didn’t put that one together. Peace Corps gave it to us. Also, they gave us an English version of the same thing, so my translation work was minimal.

It was a fairly surreal day for me. Before the conference started, I was working the room getting everyone’s name and welcoming them all to the conference. And when it was show time I hopped up to the podium and did my thing. I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought that I was suddenly catapulted back into my PR role. Guess my previous work experience paid off, because I felt like things went really well. I think I flubbed maybe three words in the presentation. Made up lots of time that had been lost by folks going over their scheduled speaking times. It was cool.

Now all that remains is to see how this all turns out.

There were definitely some hurdles to overcome on the lead up to this day. I think I was able to help head off some potential problems early on. Unfortunately, I also didn’t anticipate a few things that might still lead to difficulties later. However, there’s no need to worry about them until they actually become issues.

I did have what I would call a Peace Corps moment yesterday during the final prep for the meeting. My counterpart likes to have control of situations in which she’s involved. In regards to wanting to have control of things, she and I are very similar. Our approaches to regaining that control are very different, though. When I don’t have control I tend to take a very systematic, one step at a time approach to solving the problems. When my counterpart doesn’t have control, it tends to stress her out, and when she’s frazzled she runs all over the place trying to address all the problems at once. She’s tough to keep up with, too. The woman has some kind of energy when she’s under stress!

At one point yesterday afternoon we had finished almost every detail related to our conference. All that remained was to finish the speech outline for our director in Kazakh and Russian. The Russian was spot on because my counterpart did it and all her schooling was in Russian. She knows Kazakh, but she usually asks students to help with the translation of that. As she sat looking at that translation with our two zavuches (vice-principals), all three realized that things were not quite right. They all quickly began to correct the speech. And I just sat there. At first, I was a little annoyed that I was just sitting around watching other people work on aspects of this community project without including me. Then I realized that’s exactly what we’re trying to get our communities to do as Peace Corps Volunteers. We want them to take ownership of the projects. We want them to be able to repeat the steps laid out in this project to accomplish other future projects after the Volunteer has left the site forever.

That’s when I had my Peace Corps moment. I realized that everything I was working to achieve by the time I left was already happening. And it was happening much sooner than I would have ever imagined! Not a bad way to end a long day.

And the ending to today’s long day? I made a presentation on Peace Corps to every English teacher in this community. I took steps that will hopefully involve the entire community in my project. Hard for the end of the day to top that mid-day capstone.