Happy birthday, Gramalie!!!!

August 5 - Happy birthday, Gramalie!!!! I hope you guys are having a great time, I love you, and I am celebrating your birthday with you in spirit.

Summertime in Armenia is treating me well. At first, after coming back from London it was pretty hard to settle into things and getting used to being here again. We had a mid service conference about a week after that at a really nice hotel. It was a great conference and was very motivating for the year coming up. Plus, we have these initiatives that the volunteers participate in as a group - PR, Gender and Development, HIV/AIDs, and Environmental Action. Peace Corps is giving my group a brand new initiative - Volunteerism (V2) and $50,000 to start it. How cool is that? So for the fall, we want to plan festivals in a few of the larger cities, and in the summer have a new V2 summer camp for kids where we actually do direct volunteer projects such as taking them on field trips to play with kids at an orphanage or help seniors. The PC admins gave us full creativity for these projects too, which I think is great.

GCCI and I decided to write a SPA grant (Peace Corps' Small Project Assistance) for a playground across from the orphanage. We'll turn that in on August 27. September 1, school begins as well as applications for my business club. We are also going to try to begin a big brother - big sister program at the special school and the orphanage, and I want my business club to volunteer once a week to be a big brother - big sister.

Yesterday we had a round table discussion for our Anti Corruption NGO. We had representatives from people all over our marz. My language is finally getting good enough where I can understand about 75% of the basis of such a discussion. It got very heated when they started telling little stories about what they have experienced, and every body was laughing about the discussions.

Our group started at 48 and now we are all ready down to 35.

Love to everybody,
N