A Busy Beginning to Summer

Wow, I cannot believe that I have not posted a blog post since the end of May.  I doubt that those who read this blog regularly have been refreshing the site repeatedly hoping that I will post any second, but if you have, I apologize.  As I expected, June is a pretty busy month, and I have been too preoccupied with my organization, Peace Corps activities, and secondary projects to write a post.  I recently just finished Language and Cultural IST (which I will write about in another post), and we are on the verge of embarking on the Young Men’s Leadership Project, a camp for high school students. 

So this post will be a sort of list of all of the things that I was busy with over the last few weeks.  Much of what I will describe will involve secondary projects.  There are various secondary projects that are available to PCVs in Macedonia.  These include YMLP and the female version (Camp GLOW), Spelling Bee, Essay Contest, Model UN, Environmental group, and a Gender group.  When many of us first start as volunteers, we are tempted to join numerous secondary projects because we were all bored as hell.  For most of the year these projects do not require our attention.  However, they all decide to host their conferences/ competitions around the same time for some reason (usually at the end of May or June) and thus those PCVs who sign up for multiple secondary projects are inundated with much work.

Summer Camps- GLOW and YMLP

Peace Corps Macedonia hosts two summer camps, one for high school boys and another for high school girls.  They are both titled “Young Men’s Leadership Project” and “Girls Leading Our World” respectively.  Since I will be a counselor for YMLP this year and coordinator next year, I assumed that I would be pretty busy with this camp.  However, the only tasks that I have been involved with are thinking of ideas for electives and preparing for them.  On the other hand, I was pretty busy for a whole week with interviews for camp GLOW.  In Prilep around 4 boys signed up for YMLP, but 14 girls signed up for GLOW, and Husted and I were tasked with interviewing every single girl over the course of a week.  Since it is actually very competitive to claim a spot within camp GLOW, it was difficult asking the girls questions that would best distinguish them from each other.  But starting tomorrow, we will embark to Krushevo to start preparing for the YMLP camp.

Macedonian MUN

A few months ago, I randomly decided to join the organizing committee for the Model UN in Macedonia because many of my close friends within our group applied as leaders, and they mentioned that there were still not enough MAK18s to take the leadership positions.  I felt lucky to be accepted, but as the current coordinators started sharing with us the logistical problems with the committee, I soon came to realize that MMUN was a huge mess.  I will not get into the details within this blog post, and I am sure that sometime within the next year I will vent about the logistical nightmares we will experience.  But once we arrived at the conference, it was great to see all of the students enjoy the challenges of discussing diplomacy.

The conference was hosted in Kavadarci, so this was the first time since Struga (in January) that I had visited a new city in Macedonia.  I was pleasantly surprised by Kavadrci, as it had a large square, a movie theater playing some recent movies, and a few really nice parks.  The MMUN conference lasted the from 9AM to 6PM, so it was a very long day.  Most of our responsibilities involved running notes from one committee to another, since this was the only form of communication within teams.  In a way, nobody actually “wins” MUN, but it was fun to see the students argue and discuss international politics in the perspective of different nations.

Team Russia from Prilep

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AIESEC's Team

Dave Varen sharing some diplomatic knowledge

AIESEC Wrap-Up and Elections

For most college students in Prilep, school ended on May 15, and many began to take their final tests for the year.  Macedonia has a VERY forgiving testing policy.  If a student does not pass his test the first time, he has the chance again a few weeks later.  If he does not pass the test the second time, he can take it again in September.  So even though classes were not in session during the end of May, many of my counterparts were busy preparing for the exams.  However, at the end of May, AIESEC Prilep was granted permission by AIESEC Macedonia to continue again as a Local Committee.  Thus, we were able to hold elections to select the new Executive Board for next year.

I decided to take the leadership position for the Outgoing Exchange functional area since it was the part of AIESEC that needed the most improvement.  Once we finished elections, we hosted a series of meetings to prepare for the transition of our Executive Board and to prepare our activities over the summer.

Christening the new LCP of Prilep

By the time I was finished with all of my primary and secondary duties at the beginning of June, I was unable to settle and plan at site since Peace Corps required Language and Cultural In-Service Training was organized from June 10-14.  However, it was a very relaxing week and will be explained in the next post.