The other day, I was thinking about my strategy of counting down and breaking down my time in various placements to reduce the stress that comes from having so much time remaining. In particular, I was thinking about how I use that strategy for marathons, breaking it down into 26 consecutive 10 minute chunks (on a good day, pace-wise). It then occurred to me that 26.2 is about the same as the number of months that I am here in Kyrgyzstan. Thus is born my monthly summary series, Mileage.

I’ve been here for a month now.

It’s been, all at once, one of the longest months of my life, and one of the shortest. I’ve had mostly highs with a few lows (who’s excited for the six month slump that we are warned is coming?), some major challenges and some minor ones. My experience has been the same as many around me, while at the same time wildly different. In short, we’re already seeing the ways that each person’s experiences will be as diverse as our group itself.

We arrived on April 25th in the wee hours of the morning, and spent three exhaustive days being introduced to the Peace Corps, and getting an overview of the Pre-Service Training program. Then, after just three days in country, we were off to our villages to join host families and begin our training.

So far, my average day consists of waking up around 7, eating breakfast with my host mom, then making the five minute walk to another house in the village where my language teacher lives. I study from about 9-3 in intensive class with five other trainees, going over as much of the language as we can in the two month period they have to get us to an Intermediate-Low level of oral proficiency in Kyrgyz.

You’ve probably taken a language in high school, but there is nothing quite like this. Never before have I experienced such effective and excellent language pedagogy before, and I’ve studied a lot of languages over the past fifteen years and even been to language school. This strength is even more surprising since pretty much no resources exist for English speakers to learn Kyrgyz apart from those developed by the Peace Corps. We have two massive coursebooks that teach the grammar and exercises, both written by my language teacher, while our 30,000 word English-Kyrgyz dictionary was written by the other language teacher in my village. Both teachers have been with Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan since the 1990’s, which is an incredible tenure for two truly remarkable teachers who live and work with trainees for several months each year.

I’ve been very lucky in my language skills – my host mother was a Kyrgyz teacher for 30 years, and so she is able to help me a lot (despite knowing no English). Additionally, Kyrgyz is grammatically very simple and elegant, and to top it all off, there is an enormous amount of shared vocabulary with Tajik, so much so that the hardest part of learning Kyrgyz hasn’t been the vowel harmony or any part of the grammar or vocabulary; it’s been the fact that “two” in Kyrgyz sounds exactly like “one” in Farsi. You’d think I’d have tripped over something else, but lo and behold, it’s “one” specific false cognate that I trip over the most.

On days when we aren’t in language class, we spend 9-6 at a nearby village for Peace Corps classes, including policies, sharing of experiences, safety trainings, and medical trainings. Those days are interesting because of the material, fun because we get to see all the other trainees, and exhausting because of the heat. We usually bring lunch from home, and it’s refreshing to hear everyone’s different experiences from across the oblast.

Some trainees have showers. Most have banyas. Some have indoor toilets. Most don’t. Some have a 1 hour commute including a change of taxi. I have a twenty minute walk to the hub site. Some host families are Turkish and so they get Turkish food more often than not. Most are Kyrgyz, while others frequently cook Dungan food. One village is right by beautiful hills so they go hiking several times a week. The rest of us don’t. One village has poppy fields surrounding it, so those trainees got a lot of really spectacular photos. We didn’t. My host family has little kids, but most don’t. In short, everyone’s experiencing the country in a different way, but I get the impression that we are for the most part staying strong as a group. We did have one person go home, which we are all a bit sad about since we knew how excited that person had been to be here with us, but we wish him the best.

What has this first of twenty-seven months taught me? That’s hard to say. I know that I’m learning the virtues of patience and solitude. We spent a good three weeks or so without internet access, which meant that I only spoke English with the same 6 people for three weeks, save three phone calls I made to the US during that period. I’m learning a lot about how to fill my time with reading, writing, and some computer games. I’m getting ready to add some physical activity back into my routine.

But I think what I’m doing most importantly is that I’m trying to dissect what has made the few bad days I have had so far bad days, and identifying the stressors, so that I can step back and work on not taking things personally, not getting frustrated with things beyond my control, and setting goals on how to feel a bit better and work better each day as I go along. I hope that some of what I’ve built up in the past month can help me later on in my service, when I’ll undoubtedly hit much lower lows than I’ve hit during training.

What do the next few months look like? I have the luxury of variety. I have one more month here near Bishkek, then I head to my permanent site for a little over a month, then it’s back to Bishkek for a month, then it’s back to permanent site. Plenty of variety therein will keep me engaged and excited hopefully. There’s still lots of new and unknown experiences, including a lot of cultural things that many others have already experienced… Banyas, besh barmak, koi soi’s, kymyz, and a lot more that I literally know nothing about.

I’m only one mile in on this marathon, and there’s still much more to go. In the Boston Marathon, the first mile is ten minutes (for me, that is – the winners do it in half that) of jubilation and excitement. It’ll level out and evolve soon enough. Let’s go.