Always an adventure…

Albania is home to many Turkish toilets and I tangled with one this morning. If you are one of the many Americans unfortunate enough to NOT have an interesting experience with a Turkish toilet, I recommend looking them up online to see what they are. Or, use your imagination. My host family has a western toilet, the kind we Americans know and love. Today, at school we decided to give the T.T.s a try. Plan of attack: go as a group. Kenji, a site-mate, chose one bathroom and I chose the other, not knowing which was for boys and which was for girls (remember we are in an elementary school.) After choosing a stall, I shut the door oblivious to the lack of a handle on the door. Meanwhile, two boys ran out of the bathroom I had entered (oops) throwing the other site-mates into fits of laughter. Within minutes, I realized mistake number 2, no door handle to exit the stall. “HELP! I am stuck in the bathroom”, I yelled to the others who were still busy laughing. Kenji came to my rescue shouting, “Are you decent?,” as if I wanted to be rescued naked. They tried pushing the door and jimmying the lock as I pulled. Nothing. The door went down to the floor as did the walls. The only way out was to climb over the 7 or 8 foot high stall. There wasn’t anything to stand on or climb, so I used the minute ledge of the window on the door and pulled myself up. Once on top, I didn’t know how to get down. Imagine, a big silly American in hiking boots stuck on top of the the bathroom wall. T.T.s don’t scare me anymore, but bathroom stalls do!

Welcome to my website! Through this blog I hope to keep you updated on the stories of my life as a Peace Corps trainee and volunteer. As most of you know, in March 2007, I moved to Albania to serve with the Peace Corps. We are a group of 38 people from around the U.S. who are training to serve Albania as Peace Corps volunteers. As volunteers, there are three areas of specialists: community development, health education and teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL). Now we are in the three-month training portion of our service. Training entails learning Albanian, creating a community service project, community skills, culture, health/safety and technical training for our future positions. We are divided into language learning groups in several villages for training. My village has 5 trainees and 2 language teachers. We meet 5 days a week for language training and once or twice a week for technical training.