Still alive - just a bad blogger!

Ok, so it is rather obvious as I am now posting my first update and have been in country for six weeks or so that I am not the best blogger. I will do my best to improve going forward.

It has been a good six weeks here and even though it feels like six months at times, overall the time has passed quickly. We arrived here the evening of Sept 24th and spent our first few days in training as a full group of 44 volunteers. Was nice to meet everyone and start to make friendships with the people I will be spending the next two years with here. Busy days that passed by relatively uneventful with one sort of big exception. I somehow developed a crazy infection on the 24 hours or so of travel over here from a little blister I got the day prior from a new pair of shoes. The next week involved several antibiotic shots (nothing says welcome to Azerbaijan quite like a shot to the butt), and then another weeks worth of oral antibiotics. Was just the craziest thing to have happen, but I received great treatment from the medical staff here and after a few days I actually had an identifiable foot that I could once again walk on and fit in a shoe!

The Wednesday after arrival we broke into our "clusters" by program type and moved to our new towns with our host families where we will live until the first week of December. I am living in a small town called Ceyranbatan along with 10 other CED (community economic development) volunteers. My family is great - I live with a mom, dad, grandma, and four host brothers under the age of seven. The kids are a ton of fun, and although my family does not speak English and my Azerbaijani is very limited, we manage to communicate with a lot of gestures, simple wording and use of a dictionary. I am in school six days a week and the day is split between language study and technical sessions. For language we are a group of five along with our LCF (language cultural facilitator), Mahira. The other CED's study language separately and then we all come together as a group of eleven for our CED classes. The days are busy and the nights pass quickly with homework and other projects.

We are not in a place accustomed to foreigners so we are generally stared at a lot and people aren't certain exactly what we are doing here. There are also choruses of "hello" "hello" "hello" by pretty much every kid in town when they see us. Some are quite sweet and others not so much, but our entertainment value has declined ever so slightly over the past weeks as we settle in and there are now some familiar faces to exchange greetings with as we go through town.

On the major event side, we all partook in site placement interviews last week with Elmir, our CED program manager. During this time we discussed what we are looking for in our permanent placements. Things like organization type (NGO, micro-finance institute, municipality, etc..), how structured of an organization, city vs village, site-mates or no site-mates, etc.. We will find out our official placements this coming Thursday and I think we are all anxious to see where we will be spending the next two years. I promise to do a better job of posting a timely update for that.

Overall, things are going really well. I am enjoying the experience of living here and getting to know my family, fellow volunteers and country staff. I am enjoying learning the language and although it has been somewhat difficult for me I am remaining patient and diligent with my studies so I can continue to improve. "Inshallah" I will speaking well soon!

Hope everyone reading this is doing well and I will speak to you all later.