keep rolling....

2.15.08

“cause he gets up in the morning,
then he goes to work at nine.
Then he comes back home at 5:30,
catches the same train every time.

Cause his world is built on punc tu ality it never fails

And hes all so good,
And hes all fine.
And hes all so healthy in his body and his mind.

Hes a well respected man….”

“A well respected man” – the kinks

That song cracks me up. I heard it off the movie Juno which I am in love with to say bluntly. It’s a good heart warming film tackling the issue of teenage pregnancy, with an underlying love story in it enough to make me a sap. I do enjoy a good love movie now and again and have a sweet spot for the meg ryan, tom hanks combo. You can stop judging me now :-).

I am in a wonderful mood! Enough said really. I am a tad lonely in the respect that I don’t have anybody to hang out with tonight. (its Friday night for me… about 6:30). But outside of that im doing well. I just got back from my second meeting with this volunteer group I organized. This meeting went really great. I felt good going into it because of how I prepared for it this week. I spent a good amount of time with my tutor this week… well about 3 hours so not all that much time but more then I have for sometime now. To go off on my tangent now I designed my tutoring sessions to really just help me with this group of volunteers. I write up a plan for Friday when we are to meet and I prepare all the material in Romanian and then ask my tutor to correct them and talk with me about my ideas I with her input when it is possible as a way of productively learning the language. I just don’t have it in me to sit there and study the language with the intent of just learning the language… I need a goal.. like in order to hold this meeting I need to have material prepared… so I need to write it all out and make sure it makes sense then write a script so I know what I am going to say in the meeting in Romanian.. then wallah! And excuse to study!

So I got back from a wonderful meeting that in all fairness I was scarred nobody would come. This meeting had more meat in it then that last one and I put a lot of thought into how I am going to go about teaching project design and implementation from brain storming ideas, to picking the ones that are feasible based on certain criteria, then how to actually go about writing a project proposal so that it has all the structural points that it needs to have to have a chance to get funded. Now to jump again… last Friday was rough!

I left you with a cliff hanger I know… well last Friday … oh geez… I held the meeting, and to be honest, I was not have a great language day. I was speaking almost all English that day with my site mate and even reading English at work because I found a new book on agriculture that has grasped my attention so I am putting in some time reading it… all those excuses put into the mix I held me first meeting with not a complete idea of why I was forming the group or how I was going to teach or assist the group. There was a lot of self doubt, complicated by a language barrier. I was going back and forth on ready to call the volunteers to come or not that Thursday night.

Well I decided to do it. I was a little nervous when the meeting commenced but I began rolling. I created an agenda for that day on kind of an outline about what we were going to talk about and why I asked them to all meet up. Wow did I butcher the pronunciation! Aww it was awful. It has never been my strong point.. always my weakness… and so it was here. Well about halfway through I had a language break down and just could not speak. Its like freezing in a speech it was just awful. The kids were nice, they either understood what I was trying to say or acted like they did. I got some nods like they would come the next week at the end but I was skeptical.

I know… I already ruined the story by telling you how wonderful today was but I have to set you up for how low my expectations were for this meeting today. I really thought at most 3 would show up. Guess what! 11 showed up! One more then showed up the week before! And 3 of them were new. One of the volunteers that did not show called ahead and said she could not be there, and the other one I dunno what happened. She probably was like… eh this guy can barely speak better then an infant.. what can I learn with him?

Anyway the group was great. My material worked great. I wrote a whole script like I said to run the meeting off of, asking for volunteers to read the material I prepared so I didn’t’ have to butcher it and the tempo of the meeting really had pace to it. We now have formed 4 groups where each one had to come up with some ideas for projects in their city/town. This was their assignment last week and this week I had them write them down and we discussed feasibility so they could get feedback. Wow did this turn out great. By the way I was having an on language day so I could actually respond give them feed back and spur conversation when needed. The students came up with some great ideas. And we had really good feasibility discussions, and they were providing good feedback to each other. There homework is to fill out some questions I prepared, and to narrow down their project ideas to one per group. They seemed pretty excited about the whole thing and I feel like this has a possibility of really a great thing.

Really.. lets think about other things.. hmm at boxing, I did purchase some bag gloves and a helmet and mouth guard. Everything was really expensive and ill have to recover a month or so because our salary here doesn’t give a huge amount of leeway to go spending our money on boxing equipment. It has picked up over there with boxing. I took a really great shot in the chin, that I feel proud to be standing after it and came back with a great counter combo to earn me some respect over there.

Work is.. well not really anything going on over there. I just read and practice my language by doing some translation for agriculture terms and mostly work on my volunteer group material. When I have time I read about the basics of agriculture. This week I have begun to get into soil basics (exciting I know.. but I am getting into it a little…).

This last weekend at Chisinau was a good time. Got to see some good people, went bowling in the city there and just a bunch of great laughs. Not to much to really talk about. I talk to my old host mother in the city are her work and had a fun chat for about an hour or so. They are getting another volunteer I think the 1st of march. So I dunno if I can still go over there to stay the night or not. Well see.

Emotionally I am still doing really good, really positive. I can only wonder what the future has in store for me… am I on the hill going up the roller coaster… am I on the verge of the drop? I dunno… guess ill find out.