I spent this week becoming familiarized with Afghanistan via State’s “Afghanistan Familiarization” course. I learned a little bit about a whole lot of topics, but mostly learned that I knew pretty much nothing about Afghanistan before this week. For all the bad news the media covers, they sure don’t tell us a lot about what it’s really like.
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One of the good things about working for the State Department is that they usually do a good job of preparing you for the country where you’ll be living. Often this means language training as well as history and culture lessons, but for countries that are designated high threat, there’s a course that is affectionately known in the Foreign Service as “Crash and Bang.” The reasoning behind this will quickly become apparent.
The past month has felt a little hectic. Besides the impending sense of doom at the thought of our upcoming packout, here’s what else has been going on:
Twenty-ten. Two thousand-ten. Whatever. I don’t know what’s up with me, but I’m not really in the mood to start a new year. Can’t we just slow down a little? Maybe take a nap instead?
As some of you may know, I spent a lot of time while we were in Kyiv working on starting my own business. Witty Designs is a line of handbags and accessories – both designed and constructed by myself. It has kept me busy over the past two years, but the biggest stumbling block in Kyiv was that I could not ship products anywhere. However, I was able to hold a few trunk shows during our last year in Kyiv. I am so grateful to members of the Embassy and expat community there who encouraged me with their ideas and, most importantly, bought my bags.
It’s been a weird holiday season for me so far. Between learning the Russian definition of “party” first-hand and seeing American consumerism at its best, I think I’ll just be glad when the holidays are over.
After experiencing the worst week of Russian classes ever, I managed to end the week on a high note. This afternoon’s report subject was “Moy Brat” (for my non-Russian speaking readers, that translates to “My Brother”).
So I know that I haven’t been a good blogger lately, but I have two really good reasons. I’ve been busy trying to find a part-time job and absolutely nothing exciting has been happening.