Well,no one has heard from me for awhile as Tom has been doing most of the blogging,so I will give you the update from our All Volunteer Safety and Security Conference in Tbilisi this past weekend.
First of all, you may or may not know that Peace Corps' number one priority is Volunteer Safety. As we have inherently taken on more risk by choosing to live in an environment different from our native environment, we spend alot of time talking about those risks and how to minimize them. It's so important, in fact, that Peace Corps ponied up the cash for an entire 3 days in a nice hotel in the capital city so that we could have a dedicated conference to our safety.
So, for an entire 3 days, we settled in at a very nice hotel with HOT RUNNING SHOWERS!!! You know the kind where the shower head rests about a foot above your head and rains down on you. One of the days, I took two
showers and a bath, just because I could. Other Volunteers reported similar behavior.
Aside from the main focus of the conference, we also had some time to discuss with each other some ideas for secondary projects. Tom has taken a leadership role in the Ecological Project that Peace Corps Volunteers run in collaboration with the International Scouting and the Caucausus Environmental NGO Network. This project helps support environmental conservation youth clubs and runs summer camps to expose club members to camping and nature. I have chosen to become involved in a Teacher Training project. We will travel to sites around the country giving sessions to Georgian teachers about methodology in the classroom, grading systems, professional development and lots of other stuff. We are also working on doing a one week Teacher Training Camp in the summer of 2007. We hope to be able to work with a core group of very motivated teachers to do a little more in depth work in some of the topics we will cover in our regional trainings.
One of the highlights of the conference was a volunteer organized a Thanksgiving Dinner on Saturday night. We cooked in the kitchens of some wonderful members of the Tbilisi Ex-Pat community to make some traditional dishes and then sat down with the Georgian staff for a little cultural exchange. The food was excellent and it was really nice to sit down to a little bit of home.
We're back safe and sound now in Kutaisi. The weather has turned pretty cold and we even drove through some
areas that had gotten a few inches of snow on the way home. We're protected in the Imereti Valley from snowfall this early in the season, but on the other side of the mountains to the east, there was quite a bit.