Sworn-in and Settling-in

Since my last post, the next day we had our official Peace Corps swearing-in ceremony at a large restaurant/special event facility near Kumanovo on Thanksgiving Day. The US ambassador to Macedonia, Paul Wohlers, was in attendance and personally led the swearing-in, and gave a short speech before being followed by several officials from the Macedonian government. But the biggest moment (and a bit nerve-wracking) for me was my chance to give a speech thanking the people who helped us get through our training successfully, only it was all in Macedonian and in front of roughly 200 people. The speech was a team effort because another volunteer gave a translation of the speech in Albanian after each paragraph, and we tried to make it light and funny, while still sincere and meaningful. Anyway, when I able to get laughs from the Macedonian audience after the first 'funny' part I knew we were in good shape, aside from 10 sec of terror after losing my place while trying to read tiny Cyrillic text with my glasses and microphone in the way.

So after the ceremonial portion, it was a mad dash get some Thanksgiving turkey and the massive variety of side dishes prepared by the host families and some of the volunteers. And before we knew it, the event was over and everyone went home, and it didn't really register that I wouldn't see most of the other volunteers I've gotten know well until at least a few months, maybe some not until our June inter-service training next year. Although, I suppose we have it pretty good compared to most PC volunteers who are in larger countries with much less developed transportation infrastructure.

The next day I moved to my permanent work site in Obleshevo. I am living with a home-stay family for the duration of my service here. My room is a decent size (see photo), with essentially a large sectional couch for my bed and plenty of storage space. My host family includes two parents (Silvana and Venco)( who are both teachers at primary schools and Dedo (Lazar) who is a retired veterinarian. And of course two cats, one kitten named Marko and an older, less crazy one named Boni. Marko likes to pretend he is Spiderman and you are a large building to be climbed. But he's great and usually just likes to hang out and fall asleep on you. The parents also have two children, but both are away studying, one in Skopje and other in Austria at a music school. The son in Austria plays the accordion, and Silvana showed me a video clip of his accordion skills, so hopefully he'll give us a free concert when he comes home for the holidays. Everyone is very nice and I already feel much more comfortable here than I did in my previous homestay in Kratovo.

For work, I've been at the main office in the Opstina (municipality) and basically have spent the majority of my time reading material about the region and some various things to help me get more familiar with what what's going on around here, along with building my work vocabulary in Macedonian. My exposure to Macedonian is constant since it is rarely spoken at the office (usually either if people want to practice or if I look particularly lost during a conversation) and my host family does not speak English. It will definitely accelerate my language acquisition but it was a pretty intense first few days.