Oh the Excitement!

Well, things have progressed fantastically (my new favorite word) here since I have been back. The first few days were rough, but I am coming along just fine, especially since I have been so busy. Let's all knock on wood so it stays that way! A quick rundown on things I have going now:

I am teaching 8 classes a week of English at one of the local schools. Each class is about 45 minutes long, and when I say teaching I mean I sit in the class and jump in with an activity on the board, or little piece of native-English-speaker knowledge whenever I am moved to do so. Not to shabby. This will help me get to know some of the people in the community outside of the Art School and other circles I run in here.

I FINALLY had a meeting with the Biologist I will be teaching SunChild classes with. It went fantastically (see, told you) and I have a copy (in Armenian, anyway) of what we will be talking about next month (or the end of this month, we haven't quite decided). Although he has no English, we used my dictionary and were able to figure out what most of the subjects where. We also decided on how the classes would run. Because of the language barrier, he is going to do most of the talking and 'teaching' teaching, and then I will step in for the last 20 or 30 minutes and run a relevant activity or game. Oh, and our first month worth of classes are about WATER and soil quality. I am excited!

On the topic of SunChild, I am teaching English to the kids along with participating in the Environmental classes. We had our first class in a while today, and I think it went pretty well. It was mostly a big review of Hellos, Present tense, numbers, and colors. I had some worksheets for them, and we played the ever-popular 'run and touch', which is always a hit. Tomorrow I will make paper with them, and on Saturday another English lesson. The entire lesson will consist of playing UNO and Barrel of Monkeys. UNO will help them work on colors and numbers, and is just a great time.

I am also working on a grant with my director at the Art School. We want to open a community center in some of the spare rooms in the school, complete with ceramics studio (we have a big art community here), computers, and a projector/screen for showing movies. I am working on making the idea coherent now, and then the Peace Corps hosts a 3 day conference in February to help us hash out the details and final plan before we apply for the grant. I will let you all know how that goes.

I was also invited to participate (in a support role) at an international training conference that one of the Youth in Action NGO is hosting in February for a week. It is themed 'Think Locally, Act Europeanly' and kids from all over Europe will be there. I am pretty stoked for it, to be honest. Oh, and the leader of the NGO here also asked me if I would start and English discussion club. We would meet once or twice a month and it would allow all of the English speakers in the Dilijan area to come together and practice. Sounds like fun, something that I will start next month probably.


It is still in the planning stages, but myself and another volunteer are planning to run computer classes here in Dilijan. We want to offer work-related courses to adults, and fun (please come back again!) courses to the kids in the community. Other volunteers are planning them all over the country, and when it pulls together it should be pretty great.

In the next few weeks, once my final schedule at the school hashes itself out, I also want to look into forming some type of Environmental something at the Youth Club that just opened up. It will probably turn into an Environmental English club, but we will see.

I am also going to start working with the Youth Bank group in Dilijan. Youth Bank is a group of young adults that were trained to read and rate grant projects and applications. Historically, grants in Armenia (jobs, even.) are rewarded based on who your friend or cousin or sister is. So the NGO trains the participants to rate the project on a number of different criteria, and the top rated are given small grants. They recently awarded 5 (or 6) small grants ranging from a garbage barrel project to a batik (silk scarf dying) project. They are moving into the monitoring phase of the program know, and hopefully I will help them to monitor one or more of the projects. I know a few of the young adults already, and it should be interesting.

I am also looking forward to start working on Green Camp stuff. Green Camps are Environmental camps that are run all over Armenia during the summer time. It is officially through the Green Tavush NGO, but Peace Corps volunteers plan and host them everywhere. Kids come for about a week, either as a day or overnight camp, and learn about different issues affecting the environment around them. Of course, as it is a camp, lots and lots of games and activities are involved, and the camps are a fantastic (there it is again) time. Right before Halloween I caught the tail end of one my friend Beth was hosting. The kids had a blast, and it was fun for the counselors as well.

Well, I have to finish finding the right words to describe our idea for the community center (the conference application is due the 18th!), so I am going to head out.

Oh, before I go. One thing that Armenia is really lacking is a Staples or an Office Max. School and office supplies here are seriously lacking (quantity and quality wise) , so if anyone is looking to send out a package, here are a few things that would help me out a ton:

sticky tack
construction paper
colored chalk
whiteboard markers
scotch tape (on the dispenser kind)
flip charts

also, if anyone has any lower level books they no longer use (children's books), I want to start a small library that the kids can use to practice their English.

There are a few other things, but they escape me now...

More in a couple of days, I love you all and miss you lots!