Terrifying!

And not in a good way. You think you understand how important communication is to you (or maybe you don't), but it is very, very discomforting to be totally bereft of the ability to understand social cues or expectations, much less have a meaningful conversation.

We finished staging earlier this week and flew to Almaty by way of Frankfurt. In Frankfurt we had an 8 hour delay because our plane's landing gear was broken. They were unable to fix it, but eventually gave us another plane that had recently flown in from Cairo, which meant it took several hours for them to turn it around and prepare it for a trip to Kazakhstan. It meant that we didn't have any time between landing/traveling to the sanitorium (hotel/conference center) and beginning our in-country orientation. Some of us got some sleep on the plane, but I don't think anyone slept well during the flight, and we were all quite tired. There was a 10 hour time difference from staging in Pensylvania and 12 or 13 from California.

We had a very nice welcoming presentation which included a song-and-dance routine by the cultural facilitators and several traditional musicians. We also had a medical briefing and suchlike, as well as an afternoon of immunizations and medical interviews. Most people also attended an optional language session which was the only opportunity to learn how to introduce ourselves before we met our host families the next day.

The morning held more policy meetings and an address by the current US Ambassador to Kazakhstan who will be retireing in just a few weeks. In the afternoon we hauled our stuff out of the sanitorium and onto a truck which dropped us off in our training villiage where we met our host families. I am fairly fortunate to have a host mother who speaks excellent English, and teaches it herself, I believe in a university. I am hoping it will make the initial transition easier than having no way to communicate other than charades.

Tomorow, Saturday, we will begin our formal training program with four hours of Russian, and I am hopeful I will be able to say, "The food was excellent!" Thereafter we will have class 6 days a week and about 6 hours a day, though some of the time will be spent on technical training or policy/medical discussions. Assuming I don't fail the evaluations, I should know my final site on October 4th.

You may note that these posts are not regular and are, in fact, backdated. Hopefully that function will work on my blog, so I encourage you to go back a bit to check out the cool posts that may have been posted at the same time as the most recent post but have been backdated earlier.