My SPA Project

You may have seen some random postings on Facebook and mentions of something called a ‘SPA project’ and in case you thought I was writing a project to get a jacuzzi put in my village or something, I wanted to clear the air of the lovely Peace Corps acronym alphabet soup (SPA, PCVs, CD, PMs, etc.) and let everyone know what I’ve been working on lately.





As you probably already know, I work for the mayor’s office which is located in a building called the գյուղապետարան (gyuhapetaran) or the village hall. In this building is a rundown auditorium that hasn’t been used since the Soviet times. It was full of old furniture and radiators, the window frames don’t have any glass in them meaning that birds are flying around inside the room, and the walls and floor need a good paint job. In April and May, I worked with my counterparts and the mayor to write a Peace Corps SPA grant (which means a Small Project Assistance grant – a program that gets money from USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) to make small grants to Peace Corps volunteers and their community partners). We found out we were approved for funding at the end of June and the grant money was transferred into my bank account at the end of July.





The project work actually got underway the third week of this month with the cleaning out of the room. After the room was clean, we began making plans to purchase all the materials and supplies needed for the renovation: spackle, primer, paint, window glass, paint brushes and rollers, cement, plaster, and cinder blocks. Now the materials have mostly been purchased and the renovation work will begin soon. The plan is to have the renovation complete by November and then we will have a great ‘grand opening’ celebration. We are also purchasing a projector, microphone, large speaker, and a dry erase board/flip chart easel that we can use for club meetings, trainings, and community celebrations.





More pictures to come as we make progress on the renovation!

Finding My "Cause"

As August approached I began to think about the fact that a year from now I will be finished with the adventure that has been my Peace Corps service and heading back to the U.S. and for the first time in my life I have no idea what is next for me. I’ve always had a plan so that when one phase on my life has finished I was prepared to move on to the next big thing. I know you would think that someone who joins the Peace Corps is a carefree hippie who just floats from one adventure to the next not worried about what tomorrow holds, but that is not exactly my style – I am a little too Type-A for that! So being my Type-A self I started researching possible next steps and how exactly one begins a career in the mystical field of international relations. Through this research I found two career guides on jobs in international affairs and development in hopes of finding some guidance. I was hoping to find maybe some advice on how to figure out what I want to do and so far both of them have said that the key is to find your “cause” or your “purpose.” They say that you should think about what tasks you want to do every day and their advice on how to figure out these very important keys is to do a little soul searching. So far these guides haven’t been overly helpful in this area. While they have nice lists of all the possible careers that expand the possible options as far as helping me figure out what in the world I want to do I’m not finding them all that helpful. Trust me I already know that if you want to have a meaningful career you should do something you love and are passionate about (I’ve heard all the cliches before), but when their only advice for figuring out these things out is soul searching I’m stuck. I’ve been soul searching and I still don’t know what my “cause” is or what kind of things I want to be doing. I feel like I’ve spent the last year soul searching and I am not getting very far. Now I feel like there are a million options and different cities and I don’t know where to start. So if anyone has any advice on how exactly one goes about finding their purpose I would love to hear it.