ET ...
It may be that Amanda's reading this from America. If so, Merry Christmas, and I hope your trip went well - I'm sure after train travel in Kazakhstan your flight was a breeze.
ET stands for "Elective Termination", a melodramatic Hollywoodish term that means leaving Peace Corps service before two years are up. It is a term to which too much value shouldn't be attached - Peace Corps volunteers leave for all sorts of reasons, some of them good, some of them bad (for example, the Peace Corps will usually give a wrongdoing volunteer the option of ETing before they actually expell them). One of my good friends from PST, a Kazakh-language trainee, excellent writer (who wouldn't let me link her blog, but maybe now she'll change her mind, what do you say?), long-suffering Kazakhstani guy magnet, thoughtful and loving volunteer named Amanda has ETed from Kazakhstan for good, and, I hope, for better. Amanda was my first real friend in Kaz-15, since I was friends with her identical twin sister in college and had actually met her years before in college during a night as packed full of Slavic strangeness as any Peace Corps could produce. I guess the difference was that then there was a pancake restaurant to calm our tattered nerves after all that stress and sleeplessness. There are no pancake restaurants in Kazakhstan.
Amanda was a careful thinker and tough woman (as opposed to girl, in the American sense), and I have great confidence that her decision to leave was the right one. For her. But we're going to miss the hell out of her this January and whenever we get together until we hang out again in Chicago after two years are up. And Amanda, remember, that's a date.
ET stands for "Elective Termination", a melodramatic Hollywoodish term that means leaving Peace Corps service before two years are up. It is a term to which too much value shouldn't be attached - Peace Corps volunteers leave for all sorts of reasons, some of them good, some of them bad (for example, the Peace Corps will usually give a wrongdoing volunteer the option of ETing before they actually expell them). One of my good friends from PST, a Kazakh-language trainee, excellent writer (who wouldn't let me link her blog, but maybe now she'll change her mind, what do you say?), long-suffering Kazakhstani guy magnet, thoughtful and loving volunteer named Amanda has ETed from Kazakhstan for good, and, I hope, for better. Amanda was my first real friend in Kaz-15, since I was friends with her identical twin sister in college and had actually met her years before in college during a night as packed full of Slavic strangeness as any Peace Corps could produce. I guess the difference was that then there was a pancake restaurant to calm our tattered nerves after all that stress and sleeplessness. There are no pancake restaurants in Kazakhstan.
Amanda was a careful thinker and tough woman (as opposed to girl, in the American sense), and I have great confidence that her decision to leave was the right one. For her. But we're going to miss the hell out of her this January and whenever we get together until we hang out again in Chicago after two years are up. And Amanda, remember, that's a date.
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