Spring, it seems, is finally on it’s way. There is a warming in the air, and with it, in the people. Everywhere I go lately, I seem to run into people that I met, in one way or another, during these long months of winter. Now though, instead of brief, bundled passings, we’re shouting out “hulloo!” across the street.

The smells of Spring are also out and about. The air is often moist, heavy with the scent of mud, but on sunny days, the roads dry out, and dust is in the air. The roads are also a bit of a surprise. During the winter, they were in valleys of snow, thick with ice, and mostly level. Today, they have grown, in places, to twice their width, thanks to the snow melt. But we are also reminded now as to how bad the potholes are. Where they had hidden under the ice for many months, today traffic weaves and dodges, paying far more attention to the holes than the yellow lines.

This olfactory stimulation is also transporting me back to my training village, it looks like now, oh, a full year ago.

That’s right folks, I’m a year out of America, and looking at roughly 15 more months to go. That, frankly, is a long time to be away from home.

Some things are getting normal, like dodging the mud puddles, and switching between Kyrgyz and English as a matter of practice. I’ve have now brought some friends home to my house, and as my family learns more about me through them, I learn more about my family. Our relationship is deepening far beyond the polite or convenient. We have now seen each other in many circumstances, both the comfortable and the non.

My language is coming along well, though progress is hard to gauge. I couldn’t say for certain what I was understanding before, what I wasn’t. I am still all too cognizant of my limitations. Fluency seems like a mythical beast, and the more I learn, the more I wonder what the word even means.

And work. Work is the wild card in the whole system. My experience here hasn’t been what I read in Peace Corps stories of old. We weren’t sent out here to build fish ponds or improve water systems; no one committed resources to us before our arrival. Instead, we were taught how to engage in a community, given a site with a vague order to “help,” and then sent on our way.

I feel like I have spent the lion’s share of my time learning the people, the problems, the motivation. I’ve helped with a few trainings to date, asked for some money and sold 25 laptop sleeves, at roughly 12 dollars a piece.

It’s a small contribution to a place I’ve come to call home, but barely to understand. I miss Chicago, my friends and my family on a daily basis, but the Internet helps people be close when they’re far away. It’s work, it’s life, it complicated. I’ve plenty of time left here to help, and most of all, it’s exactly what I want to be doing.