In which I have injured myself…again

Last week I was in Darkhan for mid-center days which is why I didn’t update. I thought about it, but I figured if I was going to write about being in Darkhan, it’d probably be better to wait until I left so I could describe the whole shebang. Good thing too, because the “best” part aka the part that inspired my title happened the night after I was going to update.

So mid-center days is when PC Mongolia brings all of us trainees back into Darkhan to sit through both technical and cultural sessions together and teach us more than they have when we’re all out at our training sites. I’m a really bad auditory learner, so these sessions are almost impossible for me to sit through. I ended up getting in some quality doodling to keep my hands busy in an effort to focus. I’m not sure how successful I was, but my pen exploded the last day from the strain of constant use for three days, so I consider that a little success. Minus the part when it exploded on me and I didn’t notice for a few minutes, that was just unfortunate.

The “best” part that I mentioned was when our second half trainers and PCVLs decided to organize a dodgeball tournament with teams done by sites. Our site being who we are, we trash talked everyone for a few days. A couple people bought eye black and we rocked that during the game. We even got our country director to wear it when she played on the PC/M staff team. We won our first game, but were taken out by the stacked non-TEFL team which had the advantage of 20 people, mostly big guys, while our site could only wrangle 8 because people didn’t make it back in time. Sad, sad day. That team ended up winning the whole tournament, but we convinced them to make an All Star game, TEFLs vs. non-TEFLs which we ended up winning. I obviously didn’t play during that game, but my site mate Stephanie ended up being the last person standing making TEFLs victorious and making us feel a little better. And since I can’t go for very long without injuring myself, I forgot the part where throwing things is BAD for my shoulder and ended up straining it a little bit. There is never any ice to be found so I had to just stick with trying to not whine (which I mostly failed at) and taking ibuprofen to ease the pain. Which is what the PCMO guy suggested, so I’m good.

Now I’m back at site and only have three more weeks of training, which is completely ridiculous. We find out our site placements on August 15 and we’re all very anxious to get to that point. I’m pretty much over training and over being here and just want to find out where I’m going to live for the next two years. These few weeks are probably going to go insanely fast, so that should help ease the anxiety.