Friday ("LPI & TAP day")

So our entire 9+ weeks of training - hard to believe we've been gone that long - basically boils down to a couple of interviews. We get "assessed" on our ability to cope in Mongolian culture and specifically within our job sectors. This interview is called the TAP. 20 minutes of hearing about how you were good at one thing, could work on another, and if necessary given feedback about how you need to "change". But the TAP interview would be categorized as the easy one...

The more challenging of the two is the LPI, or Language Proficiency Interview. This is 20-25 minutes of "conversation" with an internationally certified language tester. We are given basic questions asking about who we are, what we like, and what we did yesterday or today or will do for the next two years (i.e. Minii neriig Mark gedeg. Bi enk taivni corpisiin sain doriin ajiltan. Irek hoyer jild mongold jijig dond biznesd ajillan - also known as "My name is Mark, I am a Peace Corps Volunteer...for the next 2 years I'll be working in small & medium businesses"). That's just the first 20 seconds of the interview.

Really it's a crapshoot as to what sort of questions you'll be asked. The conversation is largely guided by us, as the questions are tailored to our ability to understand. Some of us were given scenarios and asked to describe how they'd handle them. Maybe you're wanting to rent an apartment room - ask how much that's going to cost and when you can move in. Or someone might be asked to guide someone around the town who has never been here before, showing them all of the "attractions". Of course this is just in conversation so the visual aids were lacking. The difficult part of the entire interview is knowing that no matter how much Mongolian language you know the testers are going to push you until you don't understand. This is the only way they can assess your limitations. So basically everyone comes out of the interview feeling like they didn't understand...

So I speak of all of these "stresses" because I am proud to say that Kara and I have just completed our interviews!! Yeah for us! We find out our scores tomorrow...along with a bunch of other rather interesting information pertaining to our next 2 years here. We will post about what we learn as soon as we can. Thanks for keeping us in your prayers...