2 down, only 102 left!!!

This was what I realized on my way home from work on Friday-2 weeks down and only 102 weeks left in my PC experience. Depending on if you are a glass is half full or glass half empty type of person, this could be either awesome or really overwhelming. Well thankfully for my sanity and the tone of this blog, I’m a half full kinda guy…

Week 2 on the job was about the same as week one, but with 2 big changes. I got a translator/language tutor who comes in for 3 hours each afternoon to help me communicate with the work gang. Her name is Ferana. She is 18, really funny, just got back from an exchange program where she went to her senior year of high school in Michigan, is a freshman at the local university, and is probably the cutest girl I’ve seen here so far! What that means is I now have a big motivation to get better at language 3 hours each day (and it makes work a little more fun). Big change #2 is that I finally had a talk with my boss to see what the deal is with my job/his expectations/why there hasn’t been anything for me to do. The deal is this: our office of the ministry has spent its budget for the year and is just coasting till January 1st. What this means for me is that all I have to do for the next 3 months is work on language which is great, but kinda odd. Welcome to government life I guess. Thankfully I have a couple of side projects I’m already starting to keep me busy too. My boss also seems really big on he and I doing some big and really good projects-putting computers in schools, fixing up a hospital in a village, fixing a busted bridge to help people get to their village, etc. It really sounds like he was to do some great things, so that gets me really excited about being here-I just hope we can get the grant money, organize everything well, and make a lot of good things happen for the local people.

Most of the people who are reading this know me, and therefore know I’m a little weird (to put it nicely I’d imagine). Well what would top that already fun insanity really good? The PC seemed to know and sent me my first batch of Malaria pills! That means 1 day a week I get to have really intense dreams and go nutz for free! Tom and I chose Wednesday since the middle of the work week always sucks anyways. Sadly I just got them and can’t use Malaria pill insanity to explain….

This week’s gross part of my new life came during a huge storm the other night. I woke up at 1:30am needing to go potty big time. Well, I looked outside and it was raining so hard I couldn’t even see the 60 step path to my squatter. I then saw an empty 1 liter water bottle on my floor by my bed and decided that was the best option I had at the time. Nothing like using the light from your cell phone to make sure you don’t miss a little water bottle when you are ½ asleep during a storm to make life fun! We’ve got a big weekend in the US of A coming up. OU is going to crush UT hopefully. Thankfully Spencer has agreed to tivo the game, burn it to a dvd, and mail it to me. Boomer Sooner Baby!!!

The picture in the blog is of me and a guy named Josh in Gobustan (where they have carvings from 10,000 years ago) doing our best “Titanic” impersonation. One of our buddies decided to put the PC motto on it and send it to me. The other is my friend Rachel proving that Duck Tape is one of the greatest inventions ever. They don’t have walking casts over here (her cast was known in the hospital as the “American Cast”), so she bought a crappy sandal and made her own….