SO the title of this post is in all caps because this was the day that I have been waiting for for MONTHS. See, when you apply to the Peace Corps, you are told your country of service and the sector in which you’ll be working. For the vast majority of volunteers, this means that you will be teaching English, but that also means that you have just about no idea where in the country you’ll be heading. In my case, as a Health trainee, I know that I get to work on health issues, and from my side research, I know where some of the areas of need are, and what kinds of organizations the Health program usually places volunteers into. BUT, none of us had any idea what our jobs would be, or where we would be. Until today.

I’m excited to announce that I have been placed in Osh city, the second largest city in Kyrgyzstan and regional center for southwest Kyrgyzstan. The south is a very exciting placement for me because I get to be a part of reopening the south and resuming work in the south that had been previously suspended. I know we’re all very excited to open or reopen the sites that we are headed to, and I hope we can work with our counterparts to build a lot of capacity to make up for the years when we weren’t working there. There are going to be a few of us working in Osh oblast, including people working as English teachers in the city, some working with local economic development organizations, and some like me working on health projects, and we’re really excited as well about the potential intersections for side projects with additional organizations.

My specific placement is with a Health Promotion Unit (HPU) in Osh. What does that mean? Kyrgyzstan has a unique rural health system called Health Promotion, a system which has been very successful in addressing areas of need and getting health information to the people who need it most. The system includes Village Health Committees (VHC), individual volunteer committees in villages that share information with local villagers about common health issues and what they can do to prevent them. Above the VHC’s are the HPU’s, which supervise and train members of up to 50 or 60 VHC’s in their rayon (region). They report upwards towards the Ministry of Health.

HPU’s have a lot of work to do, and in the past volunteers have worked a lot on organizational development and skill building, and some volunteers placed at HPU’s have even worked themselves out of a job, which is the ultimate goal of our capacity building work here. Different HPU’s are, of course, different, so it’s hard to say right now what my impact five years from now will look like, but I’m excited to learn about the system from the inside and figure out how best I can help them develop their organizations further.

I was also given a dual placement working with a local NGO that works on some targeted health issues in Osh that I’m excited to learn more about and begin working with. There’s so much that I have to learn in Kyrgyzstan about their system, so I hope that my counterparts can teach me as much as they can so that I can also share Kyrgyzstan’s successes with other organizations further on in my career.

It’s hard to say at this point what my service will look like, what form my work with these organizations will take, or what kind of impact I will have. What I do know is that I’m excited to begin working with them and to learn, and I hope that we can work together to have the biggest impact possible.