Its pretty easy to get down on oneself here. Its cold and grey, there's not a lot of vegetables, you don't speak the language-blah blah blah, complain complain complain. Most of the problems brought up are those that will be minimized in the long term (language, not knowing people, etc) and its usually better for volunteers to look at the short term. Peter Hessler wrote that in the Peace Corps, the "pragmatists survived, and the smart ones set small daily goals" We need these goals so badly because most times they're the only way we can feel successful.
So here is a small list of some small success that have come my way recently.
-Finding a just opened Cinema Club, which has free wifi, coffee, tea, and hookah. Introducing myself to the owner, asking if girls can come there
-One of my teachers now uses an interactive teaching method without me prompting me to (its called sentence cross-out)
-Starting a conversation club with Lannea that has become a surprising success-we still have to turn people away from the door
-Starting a conversation club with my teachers, where we didn't do the lesson plan, but we began to plan an upcoming English Party
-Convincing the teachers that tackling Shakespeare for this English Party might not be so wise, lets start with fairy tales instead
-Getting my kindle to download new books
-Correctly telling the shop owner that 'I need a half kilo of Holland (yellow) cheese) instead of pointing and grunting
-Using grunts and pointing to get behind the counter to check out the wine they have
-Finally finding the 'good' cheap Azeri wine
-Visiting a new friend in a village, playing chess with him
-Figuring out that direct and indirect objects totally mix me up in Azerbaijani and getting my Azeri teacher to give me homework specifically on that
-Learning how to wish someone happy birthday
-Getting on a daily greeting basis with maintenance staff at our school
-Getting kids to prepare a Bingo board in less than 20 minutes
-Teaching kids how to play charades
-Watching them get better at playing charades
-Getting teachers to begin using drawing as part of their lessons
-Finishing the massive PCV first month report
-Finalizing my first intra-country teacher training
-Troubleshooting and fixing a counterparts computer problem
Not necessarily moving mountains here, but we've all got to start somewhere.
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