Time: It’s on my side

How my housing situation was solved:

The crazy landlady who told lies about me wanted me to vacate the apartment by December. Packing up my things and cleaning the apartment wasn’t difficult, as it took me only 45 minutes to put my belongings into a big backpack, a day bag, and a large rice bag.

On December 1, I still hadn’t found a new place to live. This wasn't my only problem.

Due to a banking issue, I was unable to access my bank account in Kazakhstan for about 3 days. It really wasn’t even the bank’s fault. To make a long story short, I could not find my account number (the landlady had a habit of taking down the lock to my room and rearranging my stuff. I eventually found my bank number and a great many other random things of mine while cleaning for the last time), and it took the bank longer than they thought to issue me a new one.

My director, manager, co-workers, and family were very concerned for me, especially with the housing problem. I wasn’t really alarmed. I was without a home and without money, but the reason I did not worry (much) was because I had a very powerful resource on my side: time.

I was very lucky that Mid Service Training (MST) happened to be the 1st week in December, when I was without a place to live and when I couldn’t access my money. MST is a big conference that is a chance for volunteers to reflect on what they have done in their first year, and begin planning for their second year and beyond. For me, MST gave me enough time to find a new place and to sort out the banking problem.

Outside of giving me time to solve my problems, I was worried that MST would be a waste of a conference. However, I was pleasantly surprised. MST allowed me to step back and really take a look at what I had done this year. I really have accomplished some of my goals such as:

• Assisting people and organizations. This is unrelated to MST, but during the last week, I received phone calls and text messages from people who I worked with over the past year. Some called to wish me a late birthday, others just to update me on their lives (I’m especially proud of 2 students that are attending university in Astana studying English, and my old director that has finally started construction on her new NGO).

• Language acquisition: I took an optional Russian language test that is offered at MST. Back in training all of the Kaz-20 OCAPs made a pact to never tell their results, and I will never break that promise. I will say that my results “exceeded my expectations”.

• Professional/future career: I’m getting closer to narrowing down what I want to do when I’m done with Peace Corps.

My gamble of using MST to buy enough time to find an apartment paid off. With the help of my manager, we located a small apartment. As soon as the conference was done, I moved in. My new landlady is nice, prompt, and above all, sane unlike the last one. While I like the place, I barely had enough time to catch my breath before I hit the road again; this time back to start a community project in Karabulak.