Presentation at American Corner

This past week, I was in Aktobe, a city in the northwest of Kazakhstan to help with our pre-election monitoring, and I was asked to give a presentation at the American Corner there.

The American Corner is a small library (usually part of a larger library in the host city) that contains a lot books, movies, and other materials in English for anyone who is interested to learn or improve their English. When I was in Peace Corps, other volunteers often gave presentations on a variety of topics at the American Corners in Macedonia.

I was encouraged (strongly) to give some kind of presentation while I was in Aktobe, and had just a short time to prepare. The request came on Friday, and I was to give the presentation on Tuesday. In addition to the pre-election monitoring, I was also in Aktobe to speak with local entrepreneurs, business consultants, and government officials about an entrepreneurship program USAID conducted last year. Given that, I decided to talk about preparing a business plan, and I thought I had a pretty good presentation. However, the 8 high school kids that showed up weren't so interested. Fortunately, there was also a college student who will be attending a graduate program in the US soon who had some questions, so I could feel like I did something useful.