Is This Thing Still On?

Sorry for the silence. Training was a crazy experience, but it was a lot of routine and not much of note to blog about. I have now been a volunteer for one month, and I am in a village in the Carpathian mountains, near Romania.

Serving as a volunteer is so dramatically different from training. In training, everything was scheduled for me, and I was surrounded by people providing support and speaking English. As a volunteer, no one seems to have much idea what I should be doing, and I'm having a hard time finding people who speak much English at all. Socially I can muddle by with my three months of Ukrainian, but at the office it is much more of a challenge. I don't understand much about the projects they are interested in, so I'm having a hard time getting started on anything. However, with help from Google Translator, I know I will get through!

Another challenge for me is that I'm in a village. It's a large village, just under 10,000 people, but still a village. I have always been a city girl, so dodging goats and horse poop is very big culture shock for me. The upside is that my food is amazingly fresh. I have met the chickens that laid the eggs I eat!

I'm still waiting for internet in my apartment, and I don't like spending too much personal time on the internet at work, but I will try to keep up and post more about my region soon. For now, here's a photo of the view from my kitchen window (and my laundry drying during a rare break in the rain).