It’s going to take me a little while to process the incredible week that was my week in Washington, D.C. at the Peace Corps Top Bloggers’ Tour last week. As I’ve mentioned a few times, I was one of 8 amazing bloggers from across the Peace Corps world who won the 2016 Peace Corps Blog It Home blogging contest this summer, which earned me a trip to Washington this week to participate in this tour of trainings, professional development, and the chance to share the cultures of our countries with middle school students and Girl Scouts from across the DMV. I’m pinching myself so hard, because in the past six months, things have just gotten more and more amazing.
It doesn’t get much better than suddenly having access to unlimited Thai food, though.
I flew into town a bit early because I knew that I was going to want the rest, what with there being about 30 hours of travel and 10 hours of time difference, but also so I could spend the weekend visiting my friends in the DC area and going out to fun events like Texan line dancing and, of course, brunch and the DC staple: brunch and happy hour.
Fun fact, it turns out that one of my favorite DC bars that happens to be the closest to my old apartment is actually owned by a guy who grew up in Kyrgyzstan! I learned this after he spotted my kalpak. Another woman spotted my World Nomad Games jersey – turns out she worked in the office at the State Department that funded our participation!
The excitement built as we met each other for the first time and made our way over to Peace Corps Headquarters. I honestly had no idea what to expect, just that the other winners were super cool and have blogs that are all WAY better than mine (links at the end of the post). We had received a schedule and plane tickets and per diem, and the rest pretty much was a surprise. But what a wonderful surprise it all was.
The Blog It Home Tour is partly composed of presentations about our countries of service as a part of the Third Goal of the Peace Corps, which is to improve understanding of other countries in the US. So, we spent part of Monday getting presentations prepared for several events.
Our first big event was a recruiting panel at American University, where we got dressed up. In the photo below, meet my new friends: Zach (Samoa), (me), Olivia (Madagascar), Bukhtawer (Ethiopia), Gabriella (Guyana), Brittany (Peru), Jenni (Mongolia), and Brooklynn (Peru)!
I spent the last two months before departure gathering small things from across Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan that I could show on my table at the fair. Because I live in a city that has both Kyrgyz and Uzbek culture, I thought it would be cool to share objects and traditions from both.
On the Kyrgyz side of my table, I had several hats, including two kalpaks, a skullcap, and two tubeteikas. I also had a track jacket for Team Kyrgyzstan, my toguz korgool set, my handmade leather wallet (which has since sadly been stolen), an ooz komuz, and a miniature shyrdak. On the Uzbek side, I had a handmade Suzani from Bukhara, a “wedding belt” (part of formal dress) from the bazaar in Uzgen, some handmade pouches showing traditional handicrafts, and an Uzbek doppi.
The next day, we spent the day at local public schools around DC giving presentations to middle school classes. I had a really bright group of students that I did a bit of geography with before getting them all on their feet to learn a bit of the traditional Kara Jorgo dance. I was particularly impressed by the star pupil who asked difficult questions like “What is the current status of relations between Kyrgyzstan and Russia,” and who immediately knew the answer to “Who is this guy?” when I showed a picture of the Osh Lenin Statue.
At our second school, I did a bit different of a presentation, but still worked in some great videos that show the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and how different Osh looks from the rest of Kyrgyzstan. My stories about eating sheep eyeball and horse meat were absolute hits too.
On our last day of presentations, we got to do another panel discussion for staff at Peace Corps Headquarters about our blogs, where we live, our work, and how much it means to us. Given how few staff from Headquarters get the chance to come out and see our work first-hand, this was a particularly special presentation, because it helped us appreciate the work that Headquarters does to support us, and allowed us to remind them who they are helping and the work they are supporting at the grassroots level.
Our last panel was another set of tables and questions with a group of over 100 Girl Scouts and their families. All of us had stories to share about our work with girls’ empowerment and the Girls Leading Our World camps we’ve worked on, and other inspiring women that we’ve had the privilege to work with.
After the presentation, a young Girl Scout and her parents came up to take a look at my table. I heard them speaking a few words of Farsi, and I surprised them by switching to Farsi/Tajik. They were quite surprised to learn that Tajik is actually a language spoken in Osh and southern Kyrgyzstan. It was a wonderful moment of connection across such a wide range of cultures and histories, showing how we’re all a lot more connected than we realize culturally and linguistically.
Alongside all these chances we had to share our experience with families and students in DC, we also had the chance to get mentorship from some of the best in the business. At Peace Corps, we spent an entire day’s worth of time working on our resumes and networking, workshopping our blogs with each other to learn new ways to work with our platforms, and reading the variety of ways each of us had approached our work.
We spent two hours working with Peace Corps’ media specialists and official blogger to talk about their careers and how they’ve gotten to where they are, as well as to learn from them how they approach blogging, writing, storytelling, photography, and everything else that goes into making a blog like this tick.
We also spent some time with Ryan Fouss at National Geographic, who worked until just recently as a video content creator for Peace Corps following his service, and he shared his career tips and feedback on our blogs as well.
The next day, we sat with a panel of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers at the U.S. State Department, hearing about their careers and paths and getting their advice on how to take our passions for storytelling and turn them into a career.
But by far the most meaningful part of our trip was our visit to the White House. Somehow, Peace Corps managed to not only get us on the list to tour the White House, but thanks to angels in the West Wing, we spent half a day there with some of the most inspirational people I’ve ever met in my entire life.
First was the actual White House Tour…
Amanda Lucidon coordinated the day of trainings, and started the day off by introducing herself as one of the official White House Photographers, who travels with and covers the President and First Lady. No big deal. She sat with us and showed us some of her photos and talked us through her thought process as she creates her photos, composes the shots, and occasionally whirls around to see not just the subject, but people’s reactions to it. Go early and stay late, and write down everything as you go.
Hope Hall joined President Obama’s team as Videographer in 2011, and sat down with us to talk not only about videography, but also about the unique point of access that we have as Peace Corps Volunteers. “You hold the key to the walled city,” she said. We have a unique perspective that we absolutely should leverage into our storytelling. Let your obstacles become your path. Hope has an incredible perspective on both videography and life in general, and she left us with a sheet of quotations on it that I’ve been reading and re-reading a lot lately. Our access is our potential.
Kori Schulman walked in and introduced herself as the Deputy Director of Digital Strategy for the White House, and sat down to tell us about how she leverages the ever-changing social media landscape to tell stories and get word out about what people in the White House are working on. She’s been with the Obama Administration pretty much since the campaign days, and she had an incredible perspective of just how much the media landscape has changed in the past 8 years.
She also posted this adorable tweet with all of us on her official Twitter account, and we all melted.
The last person on the official schedule was Sarada Peri, who is a Senior Speechwriter to President Obama. She’s in her late 30’s but has already been an assistant professor and one of the coolest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. She’s a grammar whiz, and says that grammar is one of the most important tools for clarity that a writer has. She shared her thoughts on storytelling, writing, and her experience as a woman in a male-dominated field and office. Her biggest tip: just sit down and start writing. Find your voice and don’t try to sound like anyone else. Only you know how to tell your story.
About halfway through all of these trainings, another woman (notice how all of the people working with us are some of the coolest strong woman role models EVER to grace the White House) walked in with a smile and sat down at the table. After a few minutes, Amanda pointed out that none of us knew who this addition to the table was.
“Hi everyone, I’m Tina Tchen, and I’m Michelle Obama’s Chief of Staff.”
Jaws dropped and we all looked at each other excitedly. Was Michelle coming?
No, she wasn’t because she was too busy being America’s moral compass (a job which she is very very good at and I fully support her doing that instead of having tea with us).
But she did share a message from the First Lady about how proud she was of our work with Let Girls Learn, which is a project championed by Michelle Obama that advocates for girls’ access to education around the world. Peace Corps is a key implementation partner, and each of us has worked on projects made possible through Let Girls Learn. Each of us shared stories about this, and many tears of gratitude were shed as we talked about girls we knew personally who had had their lives changed thanks to this initiative. Tina also began to cry, because this was one of the few times that she had the chance to hear first-hand from the field about the concrete positive impact we are having on the lives of young girls around the world. It was truly a special moment where it was clear how much these people at the top of the US government cared about the people in my community in Kyrgyzstan.
The week was crazy, whirlwind, fun, emotional, exciting… After bidding my fellow bloggers goodbye, I spent the Halloween Weekend in New York City visiting many of my best friends who still live there and reveling in the City on one of its most festive nights. And after a final wonderful night with some of my dear friends in DC, it was off to the airport to head back to Kyrgyzstan.
After 36 hours of travel, I finally made it back home… where I promptly fell asleep for 15 hours straight.
I highly encourage you to check out the blogs of my new friends and colleagues from across the world. They were already unbelievably good, and they’ve made them even better in the short time since we returned to our 8 different homes on literal opposite sides of the planet.
Brittany White, Peru: Siyah En Peru
Bukhtawer, Ethiopia: This Amharican Life
Zack Agerton, Samoa: Coconut to the Head
Gabriella Miyares, Guyana: Letters from Guyana
Olivia Prentzel, Madagascar: Color Me Madagascar
Brooklynn Adelman, Peru: No Sleep Till Peace
Jenni Myung, Mongolia: Jennifer Myung, Peace Corps Mongolia
If you’re interested in learning more about anything I talked about in this article, send me a message or let me know in the comments! If you’re an aspiring blogger, I’ll have some pro tips going up in the near future. And if you’re a blogger in the Peace Corps, it’s time to step up your game. You literally never know who you might meet and where it might take you.
