More difficult than I thought

I tried to call my favorite person and broke down crying when I listened to the voicemail message. Just hearing his voice made me question my decision to be here. Which is interesting because until that moment I was eager for this adventure, the ups and the downs. I guess that was my first hurdle. I did some breathing exercises and came back to center. I know that this is exactly what I should be doing and now I've been reminded that it's not easy.

Learning Azeri is also not easy though I can see small victories. Yesterday we had a tutorial on the alphabet and numbers. I'm pretty good at the numbers but definitely need assistance with pronunciation of the alifba. Our group tried to sing the alphabet song but it didn't really work because the Azeri alphabet has fewer letters; thus the song ended early. It was a cute moment.

On Monday I'll meet and begin living with my Pre-Service Training (PST) host family. I will be their guest and daughter/sister for 10 weeks. I hope to get a lot of speaking practice with them. I've never lived with a host family and am nervously excited.

During training we'll get intense sessions in language, culture, hopefully some Azerbaijani history, and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). Us TEFL folks aren't expected to attain as high a level of language mastery as the Community and Economic Development (CED) and Youth Development (YD) folks because we will do more practical activities such as co-teaching and sample teaching. It will be interesting to be back in a classroom and I look forward to it.

Also during training we'll learn to be community development workers. I haven't done or learned anything about community development work - assessing the needs of a community and working with the community to meet those needs based on community strengths  - and look forward to that too.

I look forward to all of this, even the unwanted attention and occasional harassment (how will I react?), even though my heart is elsewhere. Sigh. I'll get through this and I think there's a good chance I'll be an awesome volunteer. Fingers crossed!