Sunday, September 5, 2010

heat...please die down

it is finally approaching the end of my last summer as a pcv and not a moment too soon. the heat is officially making me crazy. i look forward to a day where i don't sweat while i'm eating and sleeping. i also hope for the night i can sleep without fear of the dreaded mosquitoes.
right now life isn't the easiest. i have to find a new apartment and i'm finishing out a lot of grant work. in terms of the grant, things are going very very well. i'm both grateful and proud. i'm grateful because all the individuals who made commitments to me and to the project are, for the most part, staying true to their word. gulshan and i have physically built the English Language Resource Center and the volunteer teachers and students show up every day for training. the trainees are picking up information very quickly and i feel confident that they are interested in protecting their new ELRC resource. we spent a lot of money on books etc, but i can't help still feel like our ELRC shelves are still bare. all the English language fiction books we purchased came from Baku and they are very small in stature and low in quality. but, something is better than nothing! we also received a box of donated books from the states and the children books inside are great.
in terms of finding an apartment, well...it just totally blows. i'm not going to pretend to be enthusiastic about it. this will be the fourth place i've sought out over the last two years in Azerbaijan. the whole process is frustrating and disheartening for many reasons, but i'm just holding on to the hope that this is my LAST move before my service ends in November. keep your fingers crossed for me. luckily, my sitemate laura has let me stay with her for the past three weeks, but i really really need to find something soon. and if the heat would just die down a bit, well, then...i'll probably find an extra cache of patience.

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