Day 4-6; 17-19 Sept. 2014

If I manage to keep my water bottle through service training this week, it will be a miracle. I just keep leaving it everywhere.  Also, it’s something that identifies us as a foreigner and a behavior that confuses the Macedonians/Albanians here.

We did an intercultural training, and it was neat to learn about some cultural differences. I don’t want to give them away now, as I’m sure I’ll be blogging about them first hand when I start living with my family (I meet them on Saturday!). We’re all getting antsy and nervous about meeting our families...especially since all we know how to say in Macedonian is a simple greeting (hello, good day/morning/evening/night), I’m from America, I’m from America too, how are you, good/very good/fantastic, nice to meet you, good bye. Let me just say that with the intercultural training, they kept telling us to communicate with the families and tell them all these preferences about our schedule, foods we do/don’t like, when we take showers/go to bed, etc...and it all seems hard to navigate even if we were speaking English, as we are supposed to be indirect when making requests because being too direct is rude and we don’t want to offend anyone.

Since I’m placed in the dual language program, I am with an Albanian-speaking family (which is a language a lot like Basque and has unknown roots and is a branch of language all on its own, but thankfully uses the latin alphabet)...and we’ve learned all we’ve learned this week in Macedonian, in 2.5 hours today during Albanian-language training. Albanian (Schqip) is much harder than Macedonian, it seems.

I’m a little nervous about living in a Muslim community in terms of my freedoms and liberties I’ll have as a young, single woman.  We’ve talked about many of the restrictions we’ll have, and so I’m aware of what I’ll experience...yet what I’ll actually experience is something completely different. I want to try and jog a little bit, ride my bike, hike, and/or just go for walks...but even in a Macedonian community this is one of those “confusing American behaviors” and female athletes aren’t really a thing here. There are still volunteers who continue to be active and defy those cultural norms, and one (in an Albanian community) has even started a running club at her school and the kids really like it.  I don’t know what my type of activity or level of activity would be, but I’d like to do something.  I’ll just have to get my feel for my family, community, and level of safety; I’d also have to carry a stick or rocks to throw or threaten stray dogs with if I went out.

We’ll all be placed with our families tomorrow for our PST (pre-service training) sites.  We will only be staying there for 3 months and this is where we’ll get our training in language, culture, and procedures.  Four days a week, we’ll have 4.5 hours of language training--2 days Macedonian, 2 days Albanian.  There will be 9 of us living in Debroshte, a village of 4,500 which is just about 15 minutes outside of Tetovo (where we are now) and is about 90-95% Albanian.  Apparently the Albanians have more luxurious and larger homes, so the 4 of us who were assigned an Albanian family will probably have a very different Peace Corps experience than what is typically brought to mind when “Peace Corps” is mentioned.