Training is quickly coming to an end here in Kaz. I only have to teach for two more days. We take our language test next weekend and I am not quite sure I will get novice high on it. Our offical swearing in is on November 10th. I will probably leave for my permanent site on the 11th. Since I do not have a phone yet in the house I am moving into and there is absolutly no cell phone service in my village if anyone wants to talk to me they should do it before the 11th. I really liked my site visit and my village. It is very small and isolated. There is a bigger town 30 minutes away but it is difficult to get a taxi out of my village and the roads are bad. I think there are more geese and ducks in my village than people. My counterpart is really nice and I am excited to teach with her. The entire village was very welcoming and nice, but it will probably take me awhile to get used to living in such a small village without being able to really communicate with anyone. I know that eventually I will learn Kazakh or Russian but I still have limited communicative abilities at the moment.

I got my site assignment yesterday. I was dissapointed at first because I wanted to go further north. However only 3% of Kazakhstan is located by mountains and I happen to be by them. The closet thing I will be located to is China, as it is only 50km away. I am still going to be in teh Almaty oblast but about 6hrs north. So I am basically on the far east side of Kazakhstan about 1/3 of the way up the boarder. I will be living in a pretty small village, but I will be closer to a big town. I am also located near some other volunteers. My village is about 90% Kazakh and 5% Russian...which means I will be learning quite a bit of Kazakh also. Oh and everyone that lives in the states and wants to recieve text messages from me (it is relatively cheap for me to text the states) then you should call your cell phone provider and ask them to turn your international texting on. Right now I can olny text Ireland, I have be chatting with maeve and she got to find out before all of you that I will be living by China.