After several months of checking my email first thing every morning, after expecting it to come by the time I finished school, then by the time I had my going-away party, then by the time I left Texas, I checked my email this morning and found this message from Peace Corps:
Peace Corps has updated your Application Status account. Log in to http://www.peacecorps.gov/mytoolkit to see the latest information.
This means that my invitation (exactly where and when I will be going) is in the mail. The mailman here is going to become shortly acquainted with me as I wait for him daily at the mailbox. What happens is I get the invite in the mail, and see what it says, and then respond within 10 days to either accept or decline the invitation. Should I decline, I would have to wait longer for another assignment to come up. This would annoy my PO because she'd have to do more work, and it'd annoy Kristofer and Ashley, since I would have to live here longer than expected.
Here is what I am predicting based on my internet research: Turkmenistan, departing for staging September 29th, returning to the States January 2010.
(this paragraph is mostly for Ben)
So. Turkmenistan. The large majority of the population speaks Turkmen, while a minority speak Balochi (Western) and Kurmanji. I am betting that I will not have to learn the minority languages. Turkmen is an Altaic > Turkic language, meaning it has strong vowel harmony, restricted voicing between vcd/vcl with few minimal pairs even intervocalically, short/long vowel opposition, and simple syllable structure (CVCC at the most complex). It might be agglutinative, I'm not sure. All nouns decline the same way; all verbs conjugate the same way. There are no classes. It has number and case, with a basic set of case markings (NOM/ACC/GEN/LOC/DAT/ABL). Its word order is strictly verb-final.
Thank you to Kerry, who was able to quickly get his recommendation stuff in before my PO went on vacation. I most likely would not have received this today if he didn't complete his shit on time. I finally get to update the timeline in the sidebar.
