The End of the Beginning

Here’s the cliché post that we were all waiting for. PST is coming to an end and I am preparing to pack up all my things into the two suitcases I brought and leave for my site on December 10th. In the next two weeks we will finish language classes and have our final language test, final program interviews, and a number of HUB days at which we will be loaded down with all sorts of papers, a Peace Corps sleeping bag, and (fingers crossed) a small space heater. Along with our water purifiers, it should be a bit of a hassle to get to site.

I will miss those who I have grown close to during PST, but am looking forward to the end of PST. It will be a huge relief for all of us to be done with the rigidity of the language and technical classes, of trips to Sumgayit for HUB Days and sessions with the CEDs, who through no fault of their own are two horrible bus rides away (one is actually a marshrutka), during which I invariably have to stand the entire hour plus duration. For my birthday, my cluster mates let me sit on the buses. That’s how I knew they cared.

I yearn for the chance to wear jeans instead of khakis, to sleep in, to discover a new community and city, to meet a new host family, and finally have some time to myself. I’m open to suggestions for hobbies to take up to pass the time, by the way. Twiddling my thumbs, counting tiles in the ceiling and contemplating my belly button are all options that spring to mind. Seriously, though, the sky seems the limit. Painting? Guitar? Writing? Don’t know. It could be a long winter.

Part of me is terrified of the impending lack of concrete. Part of me is thrilled. The last two months have been planned and replanned. Every hour of each day has been laid out on sheets of papers we received in the first few hours of arriving at the hotel. And now it’s up to me. Ahhh, freedom. I worry about too much freedom. I worry that I won’t push myself enough, that I won’t be able to motivate myself to put forth the effort to create events and activities when it’s hard, when the going gets tough.

I worry about the loneliness that I may feel. It will be strange to go from having a next-door neighbor whom I can go over to see to vent and talk to. It will be hard to adjust to a new host family, a new city, and a new routine. The latter will be my first priority, a routine. It should help keep me from going insane, if nothing else.

Amidst all my worries about the next step, I am truly happy to see it come. The suspense has been killing me and I am excited to begin trying to do the work I came here to do. I’m ready to develop some kiddos.

Addendum Several Days Later: With the end of training approaching rapidly, as well as other events around me, I have been thinking often of the ending of things and the scariest realization of all, that life goes on for our friends and family back home. This is probably worthy of a blog post unto itself, which I will probably come back to at some point over the next two years. When we left, we took an idea of what our lives were like before we left. It is of course silly and selfish to think that things would stay the same for two years. People come and go. People die. They would come, go, live, and die with or without us in the United States. We know this when we leave. But at a certain point, when things actually do start to change, we really KNOW. Lately, I’ve been re-taught this fact.