valerie
May 2, 2024 - my phone was unputdownable today as I had an opportunity to climb some small hills and had great views. not sure if anyone would recognize the mountains in the distance on the left, but I’ve shown those before in some of my morning walk/run photos
May 1, 2024 - left the bubble of my village boundaries and went on a walk towards a big rock/hill/small mountain I want to climb. this was taken on the way
April 30, 2024 - should have taken a hint from the fact that it seems to say “guacamole WITH avocado”, what else would it be with? tastes like weird mayonnaise with vague avocado flavor. still going to try my best to eat all of it considering how expensive it was. way better guacamole in my hometown
April 29, 2024 - was on a bridge over this canal with my host sister and her friend. The friend was wearing a pink hat, but a drift blew it off her head and into the water before she could catch it. the hat settled here for about a minute, then dropped and disappeared beneath the small waterfall
April 27, 2024 - we had a surprise emergency consolidation drill yesterday in which all volunteers in my country had to travel to their assigned consolidation point (usually their regional center). After a debriefing about how the drill went, we were able to relax. Here was my shared hotel room
April 26, 2024 - host family friend’s critter that I saw last weekend at their house. and they let me ride it. (I did not ask for that, I was more strongly urged to do it. But it was a nice and controlled stroll 😁 way less intimidating to me than riding a horse)
April 25, 2024 - this is Zoya. I asked why Zoya, and my host mom said, “because it is short and easy to say”. I accidentally let Zoya out of our yard last week. Luckily, some random guy on the street helped me get her back home. She’s almost 2 weeks old now. I assume she has a spine
April 23, 2024 - I love this picture, so I’m posting it for dreamy. house of my host family’s friends. We visited this past weekend, and I had such a large itch to climb all the hills around that I unfortunately didn’t get to scratch 😔 I wonder what it looks like here when it snows
April 21, 2024 - It’s hard to pick one picture for mountain since I live around them and take pictures of them almost daily. this one was from a recent morning run
April 19, 2024 - when in Bishkek, I bought a ping pong set for my host sister’s birthday (May). we don’t really have a table to play on…my hope is that she will still have some fun with it with her friends, and I’ll play with her as well. I plan to take it out of the plastic and put it in a gift bag
April 18, 2024 - was in a bit of a bad mood when I returned to school yesterday after only being out for 2 school days and found our chalk like this. the box of chalk under the yellow cloth was fairly new when I left. And my coteachers never buy colored chalk, it’s always me
April 17, 2024 - transcendence - my host mom’s cooking. she made these things for Ait. I don’t remember what she called it, something like sweet boorsok? She said it is Uzbek and she had never made them before, she just found the recipe on the internet and tried it. I love that energy
April 14, 2024 - cactus made by my best friend ❤️ I’ve seen cacti as houseplants here, but can’t remember about out in the wild
April 13, 2024 - a page from a book called Developing Writing: Writing Skills Practice Book for EFL, Beginning/Intermediate Level by Patricia Wilcox Peterson. I took a picture of this exercise because I would like to try it with my students and/or the teachers in my community
April 12, 2024 - this is a laminator sheet. problem is, there is no laminator at my school (and other things like a printer, but that’s for another day). however, yesterday I learned how to laminate my own papers using these laminator sheets and an iron, thanks to the magic of technology and YouTube
April 10, 2024 - wasn’t sure what I would do for ‘train’, but then we happened to go to my host mom’s village today. there are train tracks part of the way along the highway
