Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Language Proficiency Interview

The last hurdle to overcome before my swearing in tomorrow was my language proficiency interview. Although most of the volunteers agree that it isn't necessarily that important, as Peace Corps has never sent someone home for doing poorly on it. However, almost all of us were at least a little stressed about it because we wanted to do well and receive an accurate assessment of our language skills after all the hard work we put in so far. For my interview I was lucky to have an interviewer that worked at the Peace Corps office and who I was pretty familiar with. The interview mostly consisted of questions about who I was and what I would be doing in Moldova...later the interview shifted to questions about where I was moving to and how I planned to help my new community. The last part of the interview was a situation that I was asked to read in English and we role played the situation in Romanian (I was meeting the mayor for the first time). Mostly the interviewer was trying to test my ability to conjugate verbs correctly in the present, future, and past, the extent of my vocabulary, my ability to make comparisons and use descriptive words.

After the interview I felt pretty satisfied with my performance, although I had made a few errors and misunderstood a question I still felt that I did the best I could have done and didn't get as flustered as I had been getting when I discussed with other people. After I was finished my interviewer asked me if I had studied Romanian before I came to Moldova which made me feel even better about the interview.

The interview was recorded and will now be assessed by someone at Peace Corps and they will label me as either Novice, Intermediate, Advanced or Superior. I am shooting for a Intermediate-Middle which would be awesome seeing as how I had zero knowledge of Romanian 2 months and a week ago. Though Intermediate-Low would be just as satisfactory.

Tomorrow is my swearing in and I am completely packed and ready to go with 5 bags. I will be picked up in a van tomorrow morning at about 8 to head to the capital and swear in. Afterward I will leave right after for Scumpia at around 1:00. So at about this time tomorrow I will be at my new site and I will only know three people....my partner teacher, my host brother, and my host grandmother. And as far as I've been told my partner is one of only a handful of people to speak English. Luckily there is another volunteer about 10 miles away in the larger town that I can meet up with and talk with in English if I start to feel like I am isolated.

Lastly, I do not know what my internet situation will be when I get to Scumpia so it might be a while until my next post.

PE CURAND!

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