Four days into 2012 and I feel like I should at least acknowledge what a crazy year 2011 was before I look ahead. To start, I rang in the New Year in San Francisco with my best friends at MIIS. By the next month, I had learned not only I was medically cleared for Peace Corps but was given my 27 month assignment to Macedonia. Leaving in September. So instead of spending a relaxing stress-free summer at home, I decided why not apply for and take an internship at an NGO in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Build some experience working with NGOs, use Russian all summer, live in a part of the world that is at best known by most Americans as the "Stans"...what's not to like? So I bought my $1700 roundtrip ticket and sent in for my business visa to get me through the summer without getting booted.
However, before I could embark on this particular journey, I needed to knock out another semester of grad school at MIIS. This entailed totally rocking several group project assignments (and brought me out of the Stone Age on social media topics), managing to write a 10 page paper in Russian on bureaucratic corruption (given that I couldn't put together a basic sentence in Russian around June 2010, I'm fairly proud of this), a 3 week intensive seminar on development project management, and topped off with an epic going away party in San Francisco with my best friends from school. With everything academic done in mid June, I had a week off to pack up my life, or sell/donate it, because I was getting lean and mean for my upcoming Peace Corps service. So I shipped everything I wanted to keep or take with me to Macedonia to Springfield, packed my remaining bags with stuff I needed for my summer adventures. Which started with a family vacation in the Canadian Rockies! My sister's family road-tripped from Seattle to Canmore, AB while my parents and I met up in Calgary enroute to Banff National Park. It was an short but amazing trip, and I have never seen such consistently beautiful mountain scenery. More than that, it was one of the best family trips I've ever had, and it was going to be the last time I would see my sister's family in person until Christmas 2012. So my parents and I took the same flight back to Virginia at the end, and after a 24 hour breather I repacked my bags and departed for Istanbul enroute to Almaty.
Let's just say the travel to the eastern end of Central Asia is pretty killer. Since I rarely sleep on planes, I was beaten down and exhausted by the time I arrived in Kazakhstan, and it took me a good week to get on a normal sleep schedule. But I dove right into the work at the NGO, got involved in a bunch of different project ideas and proposals, stumbled at first and eventually found my stride in Russian, and before I knew it the summer was over and I was heading back to Virginia for another short breather before heading across the Atlantic again, this time to Macedonia. I was fortunate to have some time with my parents and catch up with a few old friends before catching a train to Philadelphia for Peace Corps staging. Somehow we managed to get a hurricane and tropical storm flooding in that timeframe, and I just missed an earthquake. Not exactly natural disaster-central in suburban northern Virginia, but hey, why not. I arrived in Macedonia on September 11th, and the rest is in my other blog posts that I don't feel like repeating.
It's been a strange, fascinating, and exhausting year. Fittingly, I welcomed the New Year not by attending some big celebration or house party, but instead doing absolutely nothing except relax, listen to music and enjoy being warm. Perfect way to end a crazy year. Looking forward to seeing what the Year of Macedonia has in store me.
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