Well, I made it. It took more than three years after I first accepted an invitation to serve, but this week I took the oath and officially became a Peace Corps volunteer. And now I’ll share some information about how I got this far and what you should do if you want to do it… Read More »
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in an Albanian-speaking area of the country. So far, all my language classes have been in Macedonian, which presents some challenges. For one thing, I don’t get practice in the language I’m studying; for another thing, I have trouble understanding the words spoken around me when I go out. I… Read More »
OK, this is weird, but I finally understand why people in many countries are amazed that Americans don’t have electric kettles. Shortly after arriving, I got a small pot that I could put on a hotplate to heat up water. I poured that water into a mug with some instant coffee in order to get… Read More »
Studying Macedonian isn’t easy, but I’m making progress. Most weeks, we have four days of classes, usually about four hours a day. Our classes meet online via Zoom, which is less than ideal, but it’s working fairly well. One major challenge is the alphabet. Macedonian uses a Cyrillic alphabet, so the letter forms are like… Read More »
Here’s something that I found rather surprising about life here: There’s a lot of English in use, and in many cases, it appears to be used to avoid showing favoritism to any of the local languages. Take, for example, this can of Del Monte peeled tomatoes that I bought in a local supermarket. The front… Read More »
On Friday, Oct. 7, we checked out of the hotel where we had stayed for almost two weeks and met our work counterparts and people from our resource families. I have two work assignments, so I met my counterpart from one of them. He’s Fisnik Xhelili, a co-founder of the Center for Equal Opportunities “Ladybug.”… Read More »
I got my assignment today. I will be in the Tetovo region of the country. My work will be divided between two places, which isn’t unusual for community development folks in the Peace Corps. One will be the Language Center at South East European University; the other will be at the Center for Equal Opportunities… Read More »
For those who are interested in the English language education part of Peace Corps service here, check out Joe Dodson’s blog, To MAK and Back. Since I’m in community development, his work will be substantially different than mine. (Also, I’m a little surprised that he has a blog since I thought that was something only… Read More »
We learned where the sites of service are going to be, though we still don’t know who’s going where. (For those new here, I’m one of several community development Peace Corps trainees who recently arrived along with English education trainees to serve in North Macedonia.) For community development, all but one of us will serve… Read More »
My Peace Corps cohort landed at the airport in Skopje, North Macedonia, at about noon local time on Monday, Sept. 26. After we were tested for COVID-19, we went through passport control, which went smoothly because they’d made arrangements for us to go through a special line. A bus took us to our hotel and… Read More »