First Post!

I will likely have another post by this name when I am assigned my first post sometime in October because homonyms are amusing.

My name is Niall O'Donoghue and I have been selected as a volunteer in Kazakhstan with the United States Peace Corps. I will be working in the field of education, probably teaching conversational English in some way. This blog will be updated at convenient points during my two years of service and is intended as a way to provide some degree of edification to those who read it on life in Kazakhstan, as well as a way of sharing my experiences and impressions.

This blog is censored; it will be registered with and reviewed by the Peace Corps and to my understanding is not permitted to present a negative image of the people or the country with which I serve. For safety reasons, I believe I am also prohibited from providing specific details of location or travel plans. There are, undoubtedly, additional aspects to this of which I am presently unaware, and will certainly be apprised of during the exhaustive training program.

At present, I am in California where I will remain until Staging begins in Pennsylvania in a little more than a week. Much of this remaining time will be spent studying Russian, which is one of the two official languages of Kazakhstan, along with Kazakh. We will spend a few days in Pennsylvania, then take a two day trip to Kazakhstan.

I found it very useful to read Peace Corps Blogs when I was applying, so I'll contribute back by providing a summary of my application process:

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with my life after I finished my B.A. I did enjoy teaching, and I wanted to become fluent in a second language. Although I had studied several, I had never gotten to the point of fluency, and the last two I had studied, Ancient Greek and Latin, were quite dead. I had interest in history and international development, which are not so far apart, and so I began to seriously consider the Peace Corps as an option. I looked into it more closely and liked how it was run and so I applied in the Summer of 2006.

I had a good interview, and a very strong resume for a position as an education volunteer, and so I was nominated around October and shuffled on to medical clearance. I sat on the paperwork while I sorted myself out, having recently moved to D.C. Eventually I got back on track, scheduled the appointments, and was rejected because of an error I had missed in my records. I said "ARGH!" and rescheduled some appointments to document that it was an error, and was accepted and placed in KZ20.

My advice to future applicants: Stay on top of the paperwork and don't let it sit on your desk. If something goes wrong, find out how to fix it. The people in the office are reasonable, but have a job to do.

Hopefully this will have been the first of many (I dare say) helpful notes on my experience.