Nearing the End

Wow. It’s been an exhausting (but awesome) week. I’ve been working hard trying to figure out a lot of the stuff for my fitness center. Unfortunately, right now there are contracts and bank transfers involved that use vocabulary I am unsure of. I guess this is a good thing, because most decisions are going thru me, but not necessarily done BY me. We are really encouraged to be facilitators in our projects as PCVs, and as a facilitator we can direct things, but we shouldn’t be DOING everything. This project has been great for that. I had an idea, and now everyone in town is getting into it; from preparing the room, to writing the contract, to raising more money, to negotiating with the store, everyone is doing something. Sometimes I have to keep myself motivated and on track, while my Georgian counterparts are waiting for me to catch up. This project has been all I could believe and more. The gamgebeli, or mayor, of my town wants to hire someone full-time to work at the center. So, now there’s work for someone, too. People from the USA may think our 7-9% unemployment is bad, but they can’t imagine the 25-40% unemployment is places like Georgia. So, work, any work, is a great thing to provide. Still, I couldn’t have done it without everyone’s donations. So, again, THANK YOU.

I also spent last weekend with some friends at a ski resort north of Tbilisi, near the border with South Ossetia, called Gudauri. This is one of the most famous resorts in Georgia, and is an up and coming attraction for Europeans looking for new slopes. I have not been skiing since I was 7, and I have never been snowboarding. It was a friend’s birthday, and she wanted to have a party here (she’s a big skier). I decided to try snowboarding, and my friend said he’d teach me a bit. Well, he stayed with me for about 30 minutes, and then my friend whose birthday it was stayed with me for another 30 minutes. I just kept falling on my butt. I wasn’t on the bunny slopes either; I was on the lower-intermediate slopes. I fell A LOT!! By the end of the trip I was starting to get the hang of it, but I took a really nasty fall on my last time down and decided to stop. Great vacation, though.

Then we returned to Tbilisi for our Close of Service (COS) conference. Here we learned a lot about reverse culture shock—something I haven’t thought too much about, but something it seems most returned Volunteers face—finding jobs, health insurance, and all the paperwork and medical tests we have to go through before leaving. We got to stay at a new, and very nice hotel in Tbilisi—the Holiday Inn. You may laugh at that, but the Holiday Inn here is like a Radisson in the USA (the Radisson here is like heaven). On the last day we had a big dinner to celebrate the end. We also got to meet the ambassador and had a reception with news crews to discuss our service. It was great, but sad at the same time. Many of the Volunteers in my group I will not see again before leaving Georgia. We came over together, and we’ve done a lot together, and now this is it. In three months I’ll be out of Peace Corps and looking to the next thing in my life. What will it be? I don’t know yet.

These are my updates for now, but I’ll write more this weekend, because I need to catch up on my blog posts.