It’s hard to believe it, but I only have one month left living in Kyrgyzstan. It’s been two years almost to the day since we landed at sunrise at the airport in Bishkek, and now my service is finally winding down with some good final memories, some bad ones, and a few special projects coming to a satisfying conclusion.
The month started with a medical trip to Bishkek to take care of my standard closing exams, some blood tests, and some dental work after chipping an old filling and cracking a tooth on a pebble in my plov. I personally was terrified the first time I went in to see a Kyrgyz dentist; having now spent over two years living and traveling in Central Asia, I knew about the region’s reputation for…shall we say “blingy” dentistry. By my second trip in a year later, I was almost secretly hoping to get a gold filling so I could be part of the club. I was pleasantly surprised to receive two composite fillings with the same standard of care as my dentist in the US (granted, this is the clinic where all the expats go, so don’t expect this just anywhere)!
I landed from Bishkek on Tuesday, and on Wednesday I was on the 6-hour bus ride across the mountains to Daroot-Korgon in Chong-Alay again, this time to deliver a training to the Village Health Committees of the 27 villages in the region and a second training to teachers from the 17 schools in the region (the region is home to only 25,000 people, so not every village has a school). Thanks to this project, the culmination of a year-long partnership with the region, over 1,000 students in the region will have an updated evidence-based health education curriculum in their schools for the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile back in Osh, there hasn’t been too much to report. As the city has thawed out, I’ve finally been able to get back to running. Unfortunately, the Peace Corps has a policy that post-COS conference, you aren’t allowed to leave the country (and you’re expected to not leave your town), so even though it would have just been for a weekend, I wasn’t allowed to go run the Almaty Marathon last weekend. Despite being present in the region for 3 Almaty Marathons, it looks like I’ll just have to come back to run that race. I’m also going to miss the Run The Silk Road Marathon in Issyk-Kul this year after an ankle sprain set back my abridged training schedule by several weeks.
I did get some athletic excitement anyway, though, when an interview I recently did with icenetwork.com went live! In the interview, I talked a bit about my life since leaving competitive figure skating in 2012 and how Peace Corps has put me on the exciting path to my next steps as a Fulbright Scholar.
While almost all of my work has now quieted down and concluded, there are two projects that were new to me this spring that I’m absolutely loving working on. The first is Business Skills Group, and the second is a series of trainings on the US college admissions process.
Business Skills Group came as an idea back in January, when a group of women held a panel discussion to talk about the book “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg. The book is a fantastic and easy-to-read look into the gender gap in the workplace and ways that both men and women can work to reduce these gaps and strengthen their partnerships, both professionally and personally. Well, one of the young people I work with at a youth center here happens to have a copy of the book in Russian, and I posited to her the idea to have her organize and lead what is basically a book club for the book where students can talk about themes, read chapters, and share experiences about some of the soft skills of navigating the business world, like managing ambition, career planning, finding mentors and networking with people, and things that I thought would have been useful to me in thinking ahead during university. Back in March, my mom and her friend Jennifer joined us for one of our sessions to share their entrepreneurial and leadership expertise. It’s been such a fun project to work with and I feel so lucky that the participants and some of the guest speakers want to make it into a regular program here in Osh.
The other project is a series of trainings at some of the top schools in the country on the US admissions process. Back in March, a friend of mine in Bishkek invited me to talk to a group of his students about the process, partially because I went to Harvard and he knew the students would listen to me, but also because his school and the network of affiliated schools is trying to build up a program of college counseling akin to what I received in private school in the US. Well, thanks to prep school, I think very clearly about how to apply to universities, and the trainings wrote themselves. I’ve now worked on them in two regions of the country, and I’m very excited that in the very last week of my service that I will become the first Peace Corps Volunteer in over a decade to lead a project in Batken Oblast, which has been closed to volunteers even for travel since around 2000.
There are three weeks left in Osh for me, which is hard to believe. Some work, some rest, and some difficult goodbyes lay ahead. And by this time next month, I’ll be back in the US, reflecting back on these two incredible years of my life and the 6th country I’ve called home.