Site Visit

I am a fairly relaxed person, as a general rule. I enjoy challenges, and I may even be known to seek them out from time to time. However, when the challenge has been exhausted or sufficient effort has been consumed to the challenge's end, I appreciate opportunities for me to kick back and decompress. Pre-Service Training (PST) in Peace Corps does not, to my inexpressible dismay, afford such opportunities.

Aside from the usual schedule of language training and cultural orientation, this weekend I was required to visit the site where I will teach English for the two years immediately following August 20. To say that the weekend was overwhelming, exhausting, bewildering, confusing, and mildly understructured would be only the most broad and polite description of my experience. Of course, I should also say that my future site is wonderful and full of innumerable avenues of potential interest. Ultimately, what made my site-visit difficult was the simple fact that I was expected to make a decision, with only a few days' investigation, about which family I prefer to be my host for the next two years -- hardly rock bottom, I know.

To make matters even more difficult, almost every family I visited was absolutely wonderful. Different, yes, but wonderful in their own ways. The differences between potential host families' houses were too often only a matter of the color of the walls and the shape of the toilet. (Perhaps that is an oversimplification. Nonetheless, the differences were menial, by my standards, indeed.)

Now, the site visit is rapidly becoming only a blurred memory of PST, and I still have very little basis for my decision. I know I chose a host family, but only by default; it was an unfortunately hasty requirement, but one that will invariably result in an interesting (and likely pleasant) experience.

Like so many other PST activities, however, the site visit has left me feeling entirely drained of energy. If I did not have such excellent support from my PST host family, from home (in USA), and from my fellow volunteers, I cannot imagine how I could continue. This continues to be an interesting, if trying, experience, and I can't wait to look back on PST with a sigh of relief.

More energetic and enlivened posts to follow, once I regain sufficient energy to see straight.

Post Script: My full report on the nature of Moldovan condensed-water-vapour economics was rejected by all reputable journals on the grounds that no such industrial sector has yet been identified by any leading economics monitoring or research organization. The editor of the Decianual Journal of Applied Atmospheric Hydrodynamics singularly respond with praise for my lovely diagrams. I stand, nonetheless, starkly offended by the lack of scholarly interest by global economics experts. I turn now to the artistic community. See below for diagrams.