Success!

As I have said before, this business of peace-building is a tough line of work. You rarely see quick results -- or any results for that matter -- and most of the time you really have no idea of what you're doing. That's why, however, it is so sweet when you do achieve a small bit of success.

Back in December, my main counterpart, Bahitgul, and I attended a week-long seminar conducted by Peace Corps. It covered loads of topics from team-teaching to cross-culture to project development, implementation, and evaluation. There was definitely some good stuff in there. Well, now that we are back in Olgii, we decided to share that good stuff with the rest of our fellow English teachers.

Yesterday Bahitgul and I put on our own seminar. We've been planning it for a few weeks and we invited our school's other 7 English teachers. While only 5 showed up -- and they were all close to 45 minutes late -- the whole thing seemed to be successful. We were very professional: we had an ice breaker, slideshows, structured 40-minute sessions, and even a tea break complete with some of Ashlee's homemade oatmeal raisin cookies that everyone was quite impressed with. We covered lots of ground: Peace Corps, Peace Corps Mongolia, American culture, team-teaching, games, life skills, time management, English clubs, and critical thinking. Everything seemed well-received and the teachers all enjoyed themselves. It was also the first real test of mine and Bahtigul's working relationship. We made quite the team and I could not have done it without her. She really came through in setting up the time and place of the seminar, procuring a computer and projector to show our slideshows, and preparing her sessions. With that said, we will see how things go from here.

In other news, things are going well. The weather is marginally improving -- this past week has seen some above-freezing temperatures! -- and we are sliding ourselves into March. We have our eyes on the ball that is our California vacation in about three and a half months. It's going to be awesome. We've already got a list of the restaurants and eateries we want to patronize and the family and friends we want to visit -- err, family and friends being the more important of the two...

Also, those of you who have been following our blog the last few weeks may remember that my family has been on pins-and-needles over my father's thyroid cancer recurrence. Well, after a tough few months and a battery of tests, I am happy to report that my father's oncologist has assured him that with the proper treatment, he will completely fine. Needless to say, it is a load off of our minds.

With that said, however, being the natural worriers that we are, we have found something new to worry about -- ha, it certainly doesn't help matters that we have so much time on our hands here. As you may know, we burn lots of coal. On average, I'd say we burn at least 50 or 60 pounds of coal a day. Heck, I think we must have gone through 2 tons of the stuff in 6 weeks during January and the early part of February. Well, lately our carbon monoxide detector has been going off daily -- which is a huge hassle. It means that we have to open our door and window to air our place out, which means losing our precious heat to the freezing outside temperatures. We also sometimes get headaches and general "funkiness" -- and again the worriers that we are -- we are paranoid that they may be coal fire-induced. Needless to say, we plan on bringing up the issue with Peace Corps. We have been keeping a log of our fire schedule and every time our alarm goes off along with whenever we feel light-headed or head-achey. I believe that in the past when volunteers have had such issues, Peace Corps has provided them with new living arrangements. So who knows, perhaps next year we will find ourselves in an apartment -- with a whole host of different problems... Ha, just living the dream here, ya know?

With that said, we're thankful again that March is practically here. Hopefully it will be a busy month for both of us what with some upcoming English competitions, a two-week school break, a major Kazakh holiday, Ashlee's attending a HIV/AIDS education seminar in UB, and our sitemate Laura's three-day English seminar for all English teachers in our province that she has asked me to help with. June will be here before we know it, right? Right?!?!