The previous post was a lie apparently, I have no free time

I have gotten a lot of questions about why I haven't posted in a while. It's because I'm busy. super busy. Yeah, right, you point out, your last blog post was about how much you did nothing at all. Well that changed once the weather did. Spring looks to finally be here. The sun even came out for a few days last week. And with all the new growing things, my list of projects and items on my to-do list seems to be growing too. Looking at my calendar I have no free time until mid may, and it already seems like my summer is getting jam-packed.

Back in the middle of March my counterpart and I went to a Peace Corps project design and management training for all of the education volunteers here. It was really helpful for us to have time to sit down and go through the steps of our first project together, an English cabinet for our school. The grant is due soon though, so we are hitting the ground running. ( I tried to teach my counterpart that phrase and its meaning but it didn't work out so well....kind of like how today I tried to teach "its raining cats and dogs" and only got questions about why it would rain cats or dogs.) It also helped that the conference was at a 5 star hotel with a balcony overlooking the Black Sea, and with a spa facility offering a 50% discount. The weather was beautiful too so after the sessions each day we went out and walked along the boardwalk.

Last weekend a group of volunteers went out to a village south of Kutaisi to help out with a really great English language competition. Over 100 students participated and were judged by interviews and writing essays. It was really inspiring to see that a village where a volunteer used to be had so many motivated people, but it was also disheartening a bit because I barely convinced 8 of my own students to come for an essay contest the week before.

And this weekend was another birthday weekend. We saw a really great puppet show followed by drinks and bowling. I think it would have done us girls better to have done the drinks after the bowling rather than before, but we still had fun even if the boys did beat us

My remaining time in the village has been spent learning some Georgian dances from some of my 12th grade students, which are fun but the arms seem to go against what I would naturally do which made them ask me if there was anything like it in America where you have to train your arms. As a result, I thought it appropriate to teach the girls to tap your head and rub your belly. I think they thought I was being strange, but it gave me some sort of satisfaction to know I could do it and they couldn't.


My everyday schedule seems to be filling up too. I teach the other teachers English twice a week after school and I do a club with the older students. I also teach various people from my village who have come in to the school and asked me to help them learn or improve their English. I also have a lot of weekends planned in the coming months to help out with various projects across the country, I have to study it up for the GRE test in June, and I'm going to go see my training host family next weekend before the new group of volunteers comes in for 3 months. I can't believe a new group is coming in already! It will be interesting to see them in training and be able to compare to what I was thinking at the same time last year.