here i am.

if you had asked me where i would be at this time a year ago, i never would have told you that i would be living in kazakhstan. i might have told you about vague plans for grad school of some sort, or i'd tell you i'd be working some 9 to 5 office job, but never in a million years did i imagine life in kazakhstan as being part of my future. its something so unfathomable, that i just never quite thought would happen. but here i am, living (quite unexpectedly) in a city surrounded by the kazakh steppe. and what a very large and endless steppe it is.

similarly, twelve weeks ago, i never quite thought i would make it to the end of pre-service training (known as PST, because the Peace Corps loves acronyms just as much as Georgetown does, it seems). to pass the time on my very first weekend with my host family in my training village, i made a calendar of PST, outlining the twelve weeks in various shades of crayola magic marker. as i made this calendar, i thought that twelve weeks was an ridiculously long amount of time, and that swearing in as an official Peace Corps volunteer would be eons away, and i'd never make it.

yet, here i am, officially sworn in as a Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteer. for the next two years, i will be living and working in Lisakovsk, a small town about 120 km away from Kostanai, a large city that is the center of the Kostanai oblast (an oblast is similar to a state in the US). just as i had thought twelve weeks ago that swearing-in day would never arrive, i sit here now thinking that my Close of Service (COS) date will never happen. but, i know it will, and i'm sure the next two years will simply fly by; it's just hard to wrap my head around it all now.