Well I missed a month in there of my monthly summaries. Oops. Probably because there hasn’t been much in the way of excitement here that I thought fit well with this grouping of posts, and that which warranted inclusion also warranted its own post (namely, my hiking misadventures). But, in the spirit, let me catch you up on what I’ve been up to these past two months.We got back from Bishkek at the end of Augusts very excited and ready to get to work, just in time for Kyrgyz Independence Day on August 31, which I don’t remember much of since I spent the day resting at home. That week, I tried to get a few balls formed before attempting to roll them the following week. One of the balls was a project that my counterpart and I refer to as “Mama Yoga,” because translating Prenatal Yoga For Expectant Mothers into Kyrgyz is too complicated for me to put in the effort.

Now for some classicheski Peace Corps Realness for you: the project involved training the clinic gynecologist to teach super basic prenatal yoga classes (really, just some good mommy stretches and deep breathing) to expectant mothers (just like the name implies! I love it when it works like that). This should have been simple and straightforward, and probably would have taken about five hours if I’d done it in the US. Naturally, for a variety of reasons, the process slowed, and it’s now been two months with no progress at all – almost nothing has happened since we wrote the plan. But, that’s OK, because a few other projects have been getting off the ground more.

One of my organizations asked me to put together a series of professional development trainings to help them all increase their knowledge and skills that they use in the organization. I’m really excited about that, and we’ll be launching that in the next few months.

I’ve also been helping out as a proctor for the FLEX Program testing. FLEX (Future Leaders EXchange Program) is a really cool exchange program that sends students from across the CIS to the US for a year, where they study in US high schools and participate in a variety of cultural exchange activities and leadership trainings. They live with host families (if you want to be a FLEX host family, let me know! The kids are all really cool!), and when they come back to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, they speak amazing English, have matured incredibly, and are just all around inspiring and so driven to help people in their communities. I’m really excited to continue working with them.

Then, we headed to a training in Issyk-Kul for program design and grant writing. Peace Corps has a few grant programs that allow us to get funding for small projects in our communities, and so it mostly concerned itself with helping us understand, apply for, and manage these grants. It was a great little break from Osh, and we got some great skills. I’m working on a grant now for a training that I’ll be running in December that I’m really excited about.

And then October flew by. It got cold, really cold, then it warmed back up. And now we’re expecting our first snow in the morning.

Winter in Kyrgyzstan has arrived!