From 11-9

Alright, I’m chilling out in my new room in Zhez after two days on the train. To give you a little idea of what train life is like, I would first ask if you have played Goldeneye for Nintendo 64. If you have and you remember the little rooms the bad guys pop out of in the train level, you have a perfect mental image of Soviet-era transportation. If you haven’t I will elaborate. There are three price tiers for train accommodations ranging from terrible to Godawful. Luckily Peace Corps springs for the highest level which is called Coupe. Coupe is a small room filled with four cots (two on top two on bottom), a small table, and a little bit of storage space for your luggage. If you are wondering how small, I would ask you to picture the smallest bathroom in your house and halve it. Now I would like you imagine four people in that half-sized bathroom (of which at least two will probably be strangers unless you have the luxury of travelling with 3 other friends) and crank up the heat to about 90 degrees. It doesn’t matter that winter comes early in Kazakhstan… it will be 90 degrees invariably and will only get hotter over the next 14-30 hours. You might think that window with a handle situated mockingly in the middle of the coupe room will open and allow you to adjust the temperature, but you would be wrong… it is welded shut and only serves as a portal to the bleak snowy steppe. Hope everyone brought deodorant.
The next tier is called plascart which is like the coupe room with no doors and cots stacked everywhere possible. I hope you weren’t planning on having any privacy or using the restroom… everyone can see every piece of luggage you have. I’m sure you can hold it for two days, or at least until the middle of the night when you will no doubt be awakened by someone’s snoring and/or a baby crying.
I don’t even know what the next area is called because I try to maintain a healthy psychological distance from that part of the train. I will lovingly call this area “The Land that God Forgot.” This would be your standard subway/American public transportation seats that lack a hard cot for you to sleep on. Travelling in these seats for a couple of hours would be fine… for a couple of days I cannot even fathom the backache. If you find yourself in “The Land that God Forgot” I would implore you to take a heavy sedative or somehow retreat into the innermost recesses of your psyche to avoid the inevitable contemplation of how you, in the year 2008 have come to find yourself in this abyss masquerading as transportation.
So back to coupe. I was lucky enough to get a room with the three other volunteers going to my city, so we avoided the awkward conversations with strangers who are convinced you are a spy. However, this meant that we had to fit a total of 14 pieces of luggage into the small room, which warranted the attention of the conductors who began hassling us and tried to make us pay for heavy luggage. My friends were beginning to get angry after the first couple of visits from irritated conductors, but I was able to speak enough Russian to explain that we were moving to Zhezkazgan and are volunteers and therefore needed the luggage to live. Amazingly, this satisfied them and they left us alone with my newly inflated Russian-speaking ego. I could write for hours about the trains (I haven’t even touched the bathrooms), but more pressing matters persist.
The last two weeks were a whirlwind of teacher-training, language tests, and Obama-rama. My host mother threw a party for me and a couple of my friends here and we all got teary-eyed as we said our final toasts. I was surprised and overwhelmed when my host mom pulled me aside after the party and gave me a nice wool sweater and a journal. However, she was not done with the surprises. Two days after the party, we had our swearing in ceremony and we were able to invite our host family. The new ambassador from Kazakhstan was there and swore us in and gave us these neat pins with the Kazakhstan and American flag and the PC logo. They look pretty cool and official. I noticed on the program that my host mom was scheduled to speak on behalf of the host families sponsoring volunteers, and she had not told me that she was going to do so. She spoke for a few minutes and brought me to tears with the outpouring of love she gave in her speech. She spoke of how her family did not eat meals together until I joined their table, and how when she heard us (my brother Tima, Saniya, and I) laughing in the living room she thought “these are all brothers and sisters who have just been separated for a long time and have finally found each other again.” What moved me the most though was how she said she treasured the hug I gave her every day when she got home from work because that is not much of a Kazakh gesture. After the ceremony we had a reception and my host family and I had a sad goodbye and I was blown away with how close you can become with complete strangers separated by a language after only three months. That family will always hold a special place in my heart and I look forward to seeing them again next year when I will be able to communicate even more with them.
Things have taken another sad toll as my best friend in this country now has to go back to America because of some problems with his family. AC has been a constant friend and we really relied on each other to make it through training. We were lamenting being placed so far apart in the country, but now I won’t see him again for a long time. He will probably be back in the States this week, and I feel so bad because he really wants to stay here. He will be able to go almost immediately into Med School at NYU, so he doesn’t have to worry about lack of direction back home, but it definitely makes Kazakhstan even lonelier. I have other good friends here, and I was already prepared to go months without seeing any of them, I just feel so bad for him. It makes me realize what a fluke it is that I found so many amazing friends in GA and we were able to consolidate ourselves into The Tribe. However, semi-isolation was one of the reasons I needed to come here, and it is good for me. I am growing as a person.
Despite emotional setbacks and this new city (which I will write more on soon, I didn’t mean to spend so much time talking about the train), I find myself feeling pretty optimistic. Call it finally having a sense of direction working at my school, call it the exhilaration of having a president I believe in, or just call it the fumes getting to me after a two day train ride. I am happy to be here and ready to begin the two year countdown. Oh by the way, it started snowing yesterday and it is cold as Georgia in January. It looks beautiful and pictures are coming soon. I promise this time. Love you all. Be safe.
Yours Drewly