September 15
And so it begins...a crew of 66 folks from around the country met up in philly today to get this whole ball rolling. the whole idea of "Staging" is give an introduction to theprogram and to get us all in one place so that there arent 66 lost americans trying to make their way to Kyrgyzstan. there are people from 36 different states with ages ranging from 21 to 59. needless to say it is a pretty diverse group! our group doesnt really fit the stereotypic picture of peacecorps volenteers. theres no long dread locks or pseudo hippies and ive had to dress a lot nicer here than i ever had to at home.
the meaty part of staging has not been very exciting. its basically been cheesy get-to-know you games and infomation meetings....except that none of the facilitators have ever been to Kyrgyzstan so you can imagine how helpful they are. but we did bond and we shared what are goals and aspirations are and what scares us the most. we were all able to agree that we want to buy fuzzy hats and we are all terrified of fermented mares milk and being eaten by giant toxic fish. i plan on buying a fishing pole and eating the fish before it eats me!

September 20
After 16 hours of flight and 6 hours of lay over in Istanbul we finally arrived in Bishkek airport at 1am this morning. there wasnt much time for cheers though,because almost immediatly we were herded onto a couple of buses and taken to our hotel. Our hotel is this huge, concrete, soviet style compound that must of been incredible during its prime, but has long since seen better days.
the past couple of days has pretty much been a repeat of staging except that it's been country specific and we've been able to meet all of the big honchosthat run the show over here. the mass of 66 of us were broken up into smaller groups which will be our training group for the next 3 months. each groupis given a language/culture facilitator and they will be the one who, you guessed it, will be teaching us the language and culture! each group with their LCFis leaving the hotel this morning and moving to our own village, which means that we will all meet our host families! there are 4 people in my group and ourLCF is Astr.
Im a bit nervous about meeting the host family, there's always that fear of ending up with the Adam's family, but in the end it will be nice to be able to unpack and to stop wondering what exactly im getting myself into.
wish me luck!machalla