The Red-headed Steppe Child

Thanksgiving to Russian Orthodox Christmas.

2010-01-07T23:40:00.000-08:00

A thousand pardons for the delay in blog entries, but I am still alive. I could say I've been busy, but that would be a lie because for the past two weeks we have had a break for holidays (New Years and Russian Orthodox Christmas which was yesterday). A lot of stuff has happened since last I wrote which I believe was in November.

A lot of this is chronicled in both Jamie and the Huber's blog plugged at the right of this page I believe. So for a brief recap I'll go by months.

In November the Hubers were able to find a turkey for Thanksgiving and all the volunteers in the area and our local friends made dishes and we celebrated together. We had stuffing, salad, garlic mashed potatoes (which I made), broccoli and cauliflower casserole and some delicious deserts that Corinne made. There was a pumpkin muffin made out of pumpkin pie remains that was like the most delicious desert I have ever had and can never be created again since it was a salvage operation and exact ingredients have been lost to the twisted nether of culinary improvisation. Let's see, we also had MST which stands for Mid-Service training and it was pretty low key. We had conference during the day and all the vols were able to spend time with one another after. I ate at Pizza Hut in Almaty (it's really ritzy and clean and tastes just like America) and also at a halfway decent Chinese restaurant. So good food was a nice break from the relative monotony of Zhezkazgan's 100 cafes that all serve the same Kazakh dishes.

I also participated in NaNoWriMo which stands for National November Writing Month. It's basically a contest to try and write a 50,000 word novel in one month. I got 35,000 words before having to go to MST and now it sits unfinished. It's a horror story about traveling volunteers who are on a train and their fellow passengers begin to mysteriously disappear. It's not too bad and the plot is coherent, so I'll make it my New Year's goal to finish it before I get back to America.

December

I got back to site around Dec 6th and began finishing up the school quarter in anticipation of Christmas and New Years. Of course Christmas isn't celebrated here so I had to work on Christmas day. Luckily I had planned a Secret Santa exchange for my younger kids and I think they enjoyed it. None of them could keep a secret so they all knew who their Santa was, but I don't necessarily think American 12 year olds could really do a proper Secret Santa without telling anyone either.

Oh I almost forgot. When I got back to site my internet no longer worked and getting it back up again proved to be almost a month long comedy of errors. So the timeline was something like this.

Internet doesn't work, I spend a week and a half trying to get the KazTelecom people to reset my internet or come to my apartment to fix it.

Everyone ignores me until the director of my school writes (well has my counterpart write on his letterhead a tersely worded letter to the manager of the company)

The tech guys come the next day and after fawning over my American things and asking me if I play Warcraft tell me that my modem is broken.

The next day the power cord to my computer breaks

I borrow my friend Gulzhan's computer, which is a netbook that Robert sold to her.

I go that day to buy a modem and buy the cheapest modem I can find and don't buy a new power cord because I'm not sure it is compatible.

I get home and learn that I can't install the modem because it has an install disk and the netbook doesn't have a cd drive. My computer doesn't have power so I can't install it on that one either.

It is Christmas Eve. I go back to the store and test the new power cord and buy a better modem and try to return the old modem because I have a guarantee but they won't give me my money back because technically the modem works, just not with my computer.

I get my new netbook in the mail for Xmas (Thanks Mom and Dad) and the new modem works exclusively with it though this one is not wireless and is a bit slower than my old modem.

Sorry if that bored you, but the amount of frustration those few weeks caused me needed expression.

There's also something wrong with my electricity causing my power to cut off anytime I use something that uses more power than my computer power cable. As a result I haven't washed my clothes in about 2 months. Last night I dreamt that I found a cache of clean clothes in my apartment and was more excited than if I had found 100 dollars if that explains the increasing direness of the situation. Man Jamie often asks why I don't just hand wash like he does. My reply? "I don't understand the question and I won't respond to it."

So yeah Christmas was fun this year. We made pizza and drank a bit. I am becoming a marinade master and Man Jamie is becoming quite the accomplished pizza chef.

After Xmas but before New Years, I had a Teacher's party at the school. These should really just be called "Who's been Lusting after the American and Chooses to express it while Drunk Party." I had to dance which I really don't like to do and every dance one of the teachers kept grabbing me and parading me around to all the dance circles like I was some bauble. It wasn't so bad, I'm used to this kind of thing especially when forced to dance, but it was still weird. I did get a nice slow dance in with one of the cuter teachers though *a-wink. It is strange drinking in the school cafeteria and watch all the men go off to smoke cigarettes in the boy's bathroom. It's like some kind of perverse regression where the teachers let lose and act like juveniles. I hung out for about 3 hours and then excused myself.

I did absolutely nothing for New Years. Everyone was out of town or had plans already so I stayed home without even a TV to watch the countdown on. It was pretty sad from an outside perspective, but kind of nice to relax especially given how crazy last year's New Year's was with the host fam.

And speaking of host families, I went over last night for my first official guesting since I moved out. It was... just like old times. My host dad was a little tipsy from a visit with one of his friends earlier, but was really happy to see me. He embraced me and called me his little brother with a warmth I hadn't seen since a few months before I left. Not to say things left on a bad note between us, just that living with people (especially from different cultures) is stressful for all parties and I think we were both ready for me to leave last August. That said, he and I have always had a interesting friendship in that he is ebullient and can be a bit much to take (especially after some vodka). Last night I had a really interesting time with him though. My host mom, Olbulsyn, was a little mad at Mukhtar because he had been drinking and was talking a lot, but he was really excited to see me and had a lot to tell me.

After we ate some beshbarmak, Mukhtar and I went out to the stairwell and talked for an hour or so about the things that have been on his mind. He will always tell you what is on his mind, but last night he was strangely unguarded. He began telling me about how much he loves his family and how hard he tries to provide for them. This is becoming increasingly difficult since his work shifts have been cut in half since the crisis and he is not pulling in much money. Olbulsyn has taken a job at a cafe that she clearly hates, but they need the money. He described himself in a sea of credit as they have taken out loans with three different banks and owe a ton of money every month. Mukhtar told me that the kids ask for money every day and he usually gives it to them and keeps it secret from Olbulsyn. He also told me about his childhood and how he worked everyday to buy clothes for school and whatnot. He wants to disconnect the internet that Zhupar and Yernur use all the time because it is expensive and talked to me about this.

I obviously realize that these are more or less the same things that parents tell their children. Life will probably have always been more difficult for the previous generations than the next. I recognize that my father, like Mukhtar worked really hard to get where he is in life and fought for a higher education. I am proud of him for this and the character it obviously built within him.

However, when we are children we hear these stories from our parents and think of them as tirades (sorry Dad) akin to the "when I was your age I walked uphill in the snow both ways... etc;" but in that apartment somewhere in between Mukhtar and his children's generation gap, I gained a new perspective on the family unit. As a parent you want to give your child everything, but may slightly resent the fact that they have life much easier than you did. You don't want them to have to break their back for want of something, but also don't want them to be ungrateful. Is this the crux of parenting? Is this the inherent chasm that creates the generation gap? I don't know, but standing their I felt like both a child and an adult, seeing the validity of my host brother and sister's desire to have internet and Mukhtar's agonizing over the cost of the utility.

After an hour Olbulsyn peaked her head out of the door and told Mukhtar to stop talking my ear off. We went back inside for tea and I really felt like a part of the family. I realized that Mukhtar had really missed me. I think he enjoyed having a friend around who would indulge him and occasionally drink with him and talk about war and politics and things like that. Kazakhs really are masters of hospitality when they want to be and my old host family has given me a lot to think about as I gnaw on the slightly stale, oily, baursaki (fried bread) that they gave me to take home.

Now I have break until Monday and it's been a wonderful week and a half of doing nothing. I've been able to read and watch tv and just veg out. I hope you all had wonderful holidays. I am thankful that I will be home for the next round.

Yours Drewly

Commence Year Two in the Crazy KZ!

2009-09-29T02:46:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I need to start writing this. My trip to America, was to reiterate, amazing, but I don’t feel that I need to go into detail about what this was like because most of you live there and if not, you probably don’t want me to brag about my return to western opulence. I’m going to start instead (and I’m egregiously ripping off Girl Jamie’s post, but what can I say I was inspired) by documenting my return to Kazakhstan.

So the return plane to Almaty seemed a lot longer than the flight back to the states (even though I had a seven hour layover in Germany on the way to America and had less than 30 minutes total to make each of my planes coming back to Kaz). This was partially because I had seen all of the in flight movies and partially due to the fact that beer wasn’t free on the way back (American airlines have a lot to learn), but either way, 21 hours on a plane is just unavoidably grim. I met some great people on the plane ride back however, and talked to man living in Frankfurt who worked for the IRS and a Francophile Kazakhified Russian woman who was living in France and making large sums of money by playing the stock market (something to consider upon return home). I returned to Kazakhstan at 12 AM and had spent a great deal of time agonizing over my customs form since I had bought a ton of stuff in America. This form was never even checked upon exiting the plane. After I got off the plane I began filling out the customs/reason for travel/visa form after having asked a woman to borrow a pen. Halfway through the form, I realized I could bypass all these huddling SOB’s and could get right into line because I am one of I would say less than 200 Americans that have a multiple entry visa to the glorious nation of Kazakhstan. I popped into line and was out before you could say “beshbarmak” and went to reclaim my luggage.

I can’t tell you how, when travelling, what a liberating experience it was to be able to give my luggage to someone else and have them take care of it for you. After a year of dealing with the Kazakh “carry your luggage yourself and get the hell off the train quickly” mentality, I had forgotten how posh air transport actually is. That is, until I waited for an hour for my luggage that simply did not appear on the carousel. I went to the “I’m foreign and have a problem” desk and filed my luggage as missing. They were more helpful than I expected, and gave me a travel kit with toiletries and a white T-shirt. Because a T-shirt is what needs changing the most after almost a day in the air. I tried not to appear too peeved, and they said that my luggage would probably be on the plane that would come the next day (also at midnight). After giving my contact information, I went out into the throng of humanity that is the taxi drivers jockeying for a chance to extort foreigners. I don’t know how Girl Jamie got a taxi for 1500 tenge (ten dollars) because they tried to charge me 5000 tenge and I haggled it down to 3000 I think. I guess looking like Lenin just doesn’t hold the same sway over taxi drivers that being an American woman does.

After a 30 minute bus ride to the Peace Corp HQ, I was greeted by some volunteer friends and tried to explain what a trying trip it was. Little did I know I would have 3 days to spend at the PCHQ to get reacquainted with everyone. Basically, my luggage was floating in the International nether somewhere between America, Germany, and Kaz. When after the first day, I called the airlines again to locate my luggage they informed me that they actually did not know where it was, but they were (more-or-less) hoping for the best I yelled at them a bit and demanded a per diem (Almaty is expensive on a PC budget), but that concept is apparently not universal. Luckily I was staying for free at the HQ. So I sat and waited and jetlagged and checked train schedules and finally got my luggage. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the train back to Zhezkazgan until the day after I got my luggage, so I had to wait an additional night.

To give you your obligatory 2 minutes of Kazakhstani geography, let me tell you what the Almaty to Zhez train route is like. Twice a week a train leaves directly from Almaty (in the southeast of KZ) to Zhez (smackdab in the middle of KZ). Every day a train goes from Almaty to Karaganda which is north of Almaty and almost dead east of Zhez. Almaty – Karaganda = 20ish hours. Karaganda – Zhez = 14hrs. Since I was not leaving on the correct day for the direct trip (around 30hrs) I had to change trains in Karaganda. The ticket lady informed me that the train from Karaganda to Zhez was full and so I couldn’t by a ticket. I have met with this “problem” before and only once has it actually been true, so I hedged my bets and took a one-way to Karaganda. The annoying thing about this layover is that you get into Kgan at 7AM (way before anything is Kaz is open) and the train to Zhez leaves around 7:30PM.

So what did the intrepid young Boggsy do for those meantime-inbetween time hours? Well, first I sat on a bench in front of a sports complex for 2 hours. Then, I went to the mall because it was about to open and sat outside there for 30 minutes. When the mall opened I had planned to go see a movie/ sleep in the theater for as long as they would let me. I went to by a movie ticket and asked to see Inglorious Basterds (I had just seen it in American theatres, but fancied a go at the Russian version). They informed me that it wasn’t playing until noon (it was 10:30) so I told them that I would see any movie that was playing now and to just give me a ticket. They looked very confused until they told me that they would only have a screening if there were more than 4 people with tickets (I guess there’s not much of a demand for early matinees in KZ). I would have been tempted to pay for 4 tickets if I thought that even this seemingly logical compromise would have met with success, but luckily my friend Sally (a former Zhez volunteer that had gotten relocated to Kgan) answered my calls. She told me that she had to work, but I could tag along with her if I wanted to. Of course I accepted and spent the rest of the day learning exactly how unstructured OCAP work can be. Not to say Sally didn’t do much work, far from it; but the schedule was so less scripted than my average day of teaching. We had a really good time though, and I’m glad I got to know her better.

Yada yada, I got my train, woke up the next day in Zhez, walked to my host family’s house, went to school to tape a prewritten speech in Kazakh (I speak Russian remember) for some teacher’s conference, and then went back and started moving into… MY NEW APARTMENT!!!

And that’s my excuse for the lack of blog posts. After I moved in and relaxed for a couple of days, school started back up and things got real real, real fast. Last week clubs started back up and they seem a lot more organic than last year. So far Tuesdays are Film Club, Wednesdays are Teacher Club, and Thursdays are Kid’s Club. So the meat of my workday is in the middle of the week, nestled in between some nice free time... it's a "club sandwich" if you will. Hopefully in the next week or so, my Literature Club will start up and I am really excited about it.Other than that, I have class starting at 8AM every day except for Tuesdays when it starts at 8:45. So if any PC staff is reading this, rest assured I’m busy.

The liberation that has accompanied moving out on my own is unparalleled. I feel so much less harried and stressed out and feel much more rested than I did on a given day last year. Part of this is due to the fact that I can eat when I want, sleep when I want, and I’m 15 minutes closer to my school. I’m learning how to cook and after 3 sliced fingers, multiple oil burns, and a couple of overwhelming bazaar runs, I think I can safely say I’m getting the hang of it. That is, I can cook things that I would not be ashamed of someone else eating. I even made pizza sauce for my 6^th graders’ home ec class that got pretty solid reviews.

To summarize, life’s good. At least until winter drops.

Pictures of the new place will follow soon.

As always, thanks for reading.

Drew

Road Weary

2009-09-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

I haven't forgotten about the old blog, the summer was just extremely busy. I traveled all over K-stan and went to the States to spend a little over two weeks with family and friends. It was absolutely amazing and deserving of more words than these, but I don't really know what to say so I'm going to leave it it at that for the time being.

When I returned I moved into a new apartment by myself so learning to cook and be independent again has consumed most of my time. School has also started back up so I've been readjusting to teaching and being a responsible human being in general. Expect a longer entry in the near future. Consider this a trailer.

Fun with Drew's Friends (Not Man Jamie's)

2009-06-20T03:09:00.000-07:00

Alright, since life has restored to a certain normalcy I figure I should blog about the past couple of weeks. After school ended I enjoyed a period of relative relaxation in which I was mainly just planning my summer camp and preparing to go to another volunteer's camp in a small town called Shortandy.

I was a little nervous about my trip to Shortandy because it was my first train voyage alone. I have run into about every permutation of Kazakh train interaction thus far so I was pretty sure I could handle anything that came up. I was also excited because I was going to be travelling through Astana (the capital) for the first time and venturing north (having only travelled in south and central Kazakhstan). My train ride from Zhez to Karaganda was the normal 14 hour night ride that I have grown accustomed to. I was actually in a platzcart area with a student from my school and a guy who wanted to practice his English so it was somewhat entertaining. I had a 6 hour layover in Karaganda that started at 8AM so I walked around the city trying to find a place to eat and chill out at for a few hours. After walking about 2 miles with my book bag and messenger bag and not finding any place that was open, I went to a Turkish place I had been to before to have some coffee and food. The menu was really limited at 9AM so all I could order was samsa (kinda like a meat and onion hot pocket). I dug into my samsa and the meat was really pink. I'm not talking rare here... more like still breathing.

Not wanting to give myself some kind of horrible stomach problem for the last leg of my train ride, I scooped the meat out and ate the pastry and had a few cups of instant coffee before waiting out the rest of my layover at the train station. I was uber-alert at the station because I didn't want to miss my train (supposedly a Karaganda to Pavlodar train) but the train wasn't showing up on any of the alert boards so I stepped out onto the platform about 20 minutes before the train was scheduled to leave and asked one of the train ladies where the hell my train was. She pointed to a train that was a few tracks over and it turns out it was the Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) to Archangelisk (Russia) train that I had actually been on when I went down to Merke a month or so ago. I'm glad I asked though, I never would have realized that was my train otherwise.

So I had a 7 hour train ride to Shortandy and met Jess at the station. We walked to her new apartment and the air was rife with the smell of cow patties. We spent a couple of days "preparing" for her cultural camp and went swimming in her river (later I learned said river was a popular dumping site for the local hospital and even the kids won't swim in it) so Yay Biohazards! Her camp came and went with two other volunteers showing up to help. I did my old tried and true Ireland presentation and ate vegetarian food for a week since Jess is a vegetarian. It wasn't bad, but I was craving meat by the end of the camp.

Jess and Girl Jamie were going to travel from Shortandy to Zhezkazgan to do a version of the same camp in my city, but we got to spend a few hours in Astana before the train left. I got to see some of the city, my friend Kairat who moved to Astana from Zhez, and we also got to eat at a TGI Fridays! Now I'm not sure how a TGI Fridays wound up in Astana. I don't know who makes the decisions about what kind of culture America get to export, but after one bite of a bacon cheeseburger I stopped asking questions. When the server asked what temperature I wanted my burger I actually laughed at her. Not only does no one ever ask about meal preferences, I had actually forgotten how I like my burger. I got medium, but it was a little rarer than that (no complaints). We even got an honest-to-God appetizer sampler complete with potato skins, friend mozzarella, and hot wings. The meal was ridiculously expensive by Peace Corps standards (like 30 dollars a person) but worth every tenge.

We made it to the train and got to Karaganda, but there were no tickets left to Zhezkazgan so we had to buy bus tickets. I went to the ticket window and people were milling about forcing their way to the front. There are no lines in Kazakhstan, just people in a disorganized mass forcing their way to the front. I have no idea how a society can function without the order that lines provide, but I've learned to just accept it and adapt. So I snuck up along the side of the group and forced/elbowed my way to the front. Some people yelled at me, but that's par for the course and I got my tickets in about 10 minutes. Now 8 months ago I probably would have been standing there until the window closed, but this is the new pugnacious, scrappy Drew. No longer am I restricted by things like an unwillingness to cut in line or elbow and elderly woman in the face. Your shouts will not daunt me and your attempts to edge in front of me will be met with due vigilance and recourse.

The bus ride to Zhez suuuuuuuuuucked. I had taken a bus from Zhez to Karaganda once that was bad but only 8 hours. This one was for some reason 12 hours. I saw the sun set and rise over the steppe that day. We got to Zhez at about 5AM and promptly went to Man Jamie's new apartment and crashed. Eventually Leah showed up too and we had a fun week of good food, bowling (Girl Jamie kicked ass), and culture camp/ultimate frisbee camp (local kids love Ultimate). It was a blast, but I'm glad it's all over and I have a few days to relax until the real travel begins.

Also my sitemate Robert got the training position in Almaty for the new trainees. This is sad because he will be leaving in Aug now instead of Nov, but good because it means I will (hopefully) be moving into his apartment once I return from the States. Prepare yourself for weekly updates on culinary disasters and adventures in domesticity once I return from America.

Tonight promises bowling and drinks at our favorite hangout, Kros. I'll get back to you on that one.

Yerke Merke Merke My

2009-05-24T01:24:00.000-07:00

So May’s been kind of a whirlwind what with a cultural camp, my birthday, and the end of school. I’ve had some unforgivably long entries without this much time to make up for so I will try to spare you the banal minutia of my days and skip to the exciting parts.

In early May I went to a volunteer named Jamie’s cultural camp in Merke. Merke is right on the Kyrgyzstan border and as such the train ride there was fraught with skepticism and document checks as to our purpose in the town. It was a long expensive train ride with the Hubers (the married couple in Satpaev who are awesome and also have a great blog you should check out in my sidebar), but we made it there after a day-long layover in Karaganda complete with tacos (thanks to Corinne and Blake).

Merke was surprisingly beautiful. I trash the steppe for being the most boring landscape in the world, but I should do a better job explaining that the steppe does not cover all of Kazakhstan (it only feels like it does). Merke was lush with green flora and is located at the foot of some amazing mountains. Tired, but reinvigorated by the scenery, the Hubers and I took an overexpensive taxi to Jamie’s new house and were greeted by a score of volunteers and beer.

Jamie had been having trouble locating a place to stay in her town, but had finally succeeded in securing a house (albeit one up for sale that can be purchased any day). Her house was a lot more like what I imagined Peace Corps would be when I first joined. It came complete with a water pump, an outhouse, a banya, a garden, and a friendly dog named Norbert. For the next week volunteers came and went and we lived and tended to the homestead in a commune-type way. It was awesome. It was so much fun sharing the responsibilities with other volunteers and doing chores around the “farm.” We even termed our group “the farm friends” and have semi-matching bracelets that we made (though I am the only one who actually wears mine).

We went to Merke for a cultural camp which basically consisted of volunteers picking a country or region of the world and teaching about it and then having students present dances/skits from their areas. My country was Ireland and I taught my students an Irish jig to “Flogging Molly” which was pretty hilarious. We also had Olympic games in which we pitted all the groups against one another and Ireland won the Olympics. Our motto was “Orange, Green, and White, the Irish will fight”. The colors refer to the colors of the Irish flag and I’m pretty sure we won because our motto struck fear into the hearts of the other teams.

I happened to be in Merke during Cinco de Mayo and my birthday and it was great being able to celebrate with other volunteers. Michael Hotard even got a bottle of tequila for Cinco and we had a blast. Plus some volunteers made AMAZING food like Indian food and enchiladas and tacos and pizza that provided the best food I have eaten since I have been here. No hyperbole here… it was delicious.

I hurt my knee playing freeze tag with the kids at Jamie’s school. There’s not really any way to make that statement less embarrassing. I guess a bum knee comes with turning 23.Because of this I couldn’t go hiking into the mountains with the other volunteers. It wasn’t too bad because the vol’s had some problems with the overzealous Merke police (you can read about it in Nick’s blog). The knee’s been giving me problems off and on, but I think it’s getting better. All in all it was really a perfect trip and I’ll be having a culture camp like it in June so hopefully it will be as much fun.

Let’s see, after I got back we had a teacher’s seminar that went really well which was good because our regional manager was in town and got to see some of the work we are doing. I taught about games in the classroom and taught teacher’s some fun English activities that can be done to get their students excited about learning. We also went bowling with our RM and I got my best Kazakh bowling score of 135. Good times.

After this I had about a week left of school and now I’m finished. Yesterday I went t o a small mountain range called Ulatao (about 3 hours from Zhezkazgan) with Robert, Jamie, some teachers, and about 15 college students. It was a lot of fun. We climbed some mountains, ate some really good food, and saw a part of Kaz I had never been to. It was kind of an end of year celebration for the college students. Somehow I managed to get a sunburn on my head in rainy, overcast weather… my pale skin never ceases to amaze me.

Tomorrow is the final bell ceremony at my school and then summer officially begins. I feel good because I have been making friends with some locals and will have an interesting summer full of travelling, camps, and hanging out with friends. I also now have tickets to America, so I will be in Georgia from Aug 5 to Aug 21. I am really excited of course. I can’t wait to see everyone and eat some delicious food.

Sauna Drama

2009-04-26T02:55:00.000-07:00

Well let’s see. Life has been a little strange lately as Spring is more or less settling in. The teachers and students are brimming with excitement in anticipation of the summer holiday. I am no exception. My trip back to America is drawing closer and I am looking forward to the company of my loved ones, delicious varied food, and my Motherland. Say what you will about America and its positive and negative aspects, I miss my patria. There is nothing like being away from home for an extended period of time to change your perspective on just about everything.

Last Tuesday I was told that the family was planning a trip to the sauna. I was really excited about this because I only get to bathe about twice a month (I know, but I’m still remarkably unstinky) and the sauna is a real pore-cleanser. So on Tuesday afternoon the family was bustling around getting ready and I asked where the sauna was. In Zhezkazgan? In Satpaev? There are only a couple of options seeing as how our cities are isolated on the steppe. I was simply told that the sauna was “far.” When it was time to leave I went outside and there was a guy with a stripped out van. Marshrutkas they are called. We loaded all of our things into the van and picked up a few friends along the way.

After everyone was loaded up we went to the store and my family and friends went shopping. They came back to the van with six loaves of bread, a case of beer, a bottle of vodka, and a kilo of rice. I knew right then that it was going to be a long night. Having the necessities, we loaded up the van and started driving… into the steppe. I had experienced off-roading like this on my infamous trip to Kyzlorda, but luckily we didn’t drive nearly as far. After about twenty minutes we pulled up to a nice wooden cabin by the river (they call it a river, but I’m almost positive it is a lake). It was actually a really beautiful setup. There was a big house with a large table, a nice-ish view of the steppe across the river, and a volleyball net. All in all there were about 20 people and we ate a lot and drank and ended up playing volleyball.

I made friends with this guy who was a family friend who apparently works for some ministry (like Ministry of Defense, not church). We talked for awhile in Russian and joked a lot, it was good to just feel normal and not on display for once. I think our volleyball team won, but no one was keeping score so it was pretty light-hearted. Eventually the women went to the sauna and the guys went back inside to drink while waiting for our turn. Drinking is one of the biggest cultural iffy zones here. I hesitate to make blanket statements about either American or Kazakh drinking culture, but I would say on the whole most Americans can drink to a comfortable level and stop well before getting drunk. This is what I always try to practice when I choose to drink here because as much as I stand out, a drunk Drew would stand out even more. I have learned the proper techniques to prevent getting sloshed at guestings and it’s not too hard to refuse drinks if you are persistent enough and act like you mean business. Basically Kazakh culture is really insistent. When it comes to food and drinking you are always being implored to take more. As Jamie put it, the appearance of being hospitable is more important than being comfortable. Being disgustingly full is better than being delightfully sated and being drunk is better than having a buzz on. Can’t fault anyone, it’s just the way things are.

So I drank a couple beers and called it quits (it was Tuesday after all) but my companions proceeded to get pretty hammered all around. We went into the sauna and had a good ol’ sweaty, naked time. After the sauna we hung out in the antechamber and chatted. Then I ate some horse and shashlik and started feeling a little sleepy so I went to one of the rooms and napped for about an hour. I was woken up and everyone was clamoring about and hurrying to get everything on the bus. I was slightly disoriented and so I grabbed my flip flops I had worn in the sauna and was assured that all my other things had already been loaded into the bag. I got in the van, crowded with 15 drunk Kazakhs and people were at various stages of revelry. One woman wouldn’t stop singing, one man wouldn’t stop shouting, and one women… well she wouldn’t stop crying. I looked over at one of our family friends at one point and realized he was wearing my spare set of boxers. Those are now his.

We dropped everybody off and eventually went home. Getting out the van I slipped and sprained my ankle a little and lumbered into the apartment around midnight. Somewhere in the chaos I lost my Puma’s. The steppe is just not kind to those shoes. Luckily I have another pair (albeit not nearly as comfortable) to last me until I can buy new ones in the States. All in all it was one of the more crazy nights of my life. Kazakhstan never ceases to amaze.

On another note my birthday is in a couple of weeks and I am traveling to help out another volunteer with a cultural camp thing for her village. A bunch of great people will be there and it will be good to celebrate my birthday with friends I don’t get to see too often. Also it will be Cinco de Mayo and I have been promised tacos.

I got a package from my parents which had an E-book reader and an amazing Coheed and Cambria concert set package. Coheed is basically the best music group ever so if you don’t know about them you might want to educate yourself. The ebook reader has also changed my life. Welcome to the future. Thanks Mom and Dad!

This entry is officially dunzo.

Yours Drewly

Spring Break '09 or Drew Goes Crazy with Parenthetical Asides or Don't Mess with Texas

2009-04-04T00:11:00.000-07:00

Well last Tuesday I got back from Spring Break Kazakhstan ’09 and I have to say it exceeded my expectations. The plan was to go to Shymkent for Naurys (Kazakh New Year) and hang out with some volunteers for a few days before moving on to Almaty for a Peace Corps conference. I was really excited about this if for no other reason than I was going south and was promised warmer climes. The night before we left I gleefully packed T-shirts, a hoodie, my Pumas and everything I needed for two weeks into one backpack. I was trying to simplify and not have to worry about a ton of bags while travelling all over south Kaz, in retrospect this was a mistake.

Nota Bene: There are two ways to get to Shymkent from my town of Zhezkazgan.
1: You can take a 40ish hour train ride from Zhez to Karaganda to Almaty or Shymkent.
2: You can take an 8-14 hour bus ride from Zhez south to Kyzlorda and then an 8-10 hour bus/train to Shymkent.

I’ll let you guess which one I decided to take.

If you guessed option 2, you just won a year’s supply of kumis.

Now, I’ve grown accustomed to certain liberal smattering of hyperbole in my conversations with locals around my town, so when I was told on numerous occasions that the road from Zhez to Kyz was “the worst road in Kazakhstan” I took it to mean that I would be mildly inconvenienced during the trip. I knew it wasn’t going to be the cushiest means of transport, but Jamie and I were feeling adventurous and are fans of taking the quickest route possible.
So we arrived at the bus station at 7AM to jockey for tickets (can’t buy tickets in advance for private minibuses evidently) with my host dad Mukhtar to make sure we were able to get on the bus/van/marshrutka. As we waited for the bus to leave, the final snow of the season began to fall and I was anxious to get out of town and see the first signs of nascent spring. When the bus left the station we spent about 4 minutes on actual road and then immediately went “off-roading” on the long stretch of steppenroad to Kyzlorda. The best description of this “highway” was given by one of my English club students who said “it’s not a road, it’s a direction” and this is more than apt. For about 4 hours we bumped and sloshed through a mud slush mixture that wracked the 10 or so passengers back and forth through the bus. You really couldn’t even look at the road ahead without being filled with a pervasive sense of dread. After those four hours, the unimaginable happened… our bus slid off the side of the road into a steep ice ditch that nearly flipped us over. Now I invite you to remember that I brought zero winter clothes and am wearing my cloth Pumas.

At this point dear reader I would like to paint you a picture of the steppe. I’ve been in the southwestern Badlands of America. I’ve been through Texas (which in my opinion is one of the most boring states in our contiguous 48). I’ve seen some grim shit, but nothing, nothing compares to the sheer desolation and stark lifelessness of the steppe (I hope I’m not steppen on any toes here). Imagine being able to see for miles in every direction yet finding nothing worth looking at. There are no towns on the steppe, there are no casual passersby, there are no animals or plants save shrub brush. So when I was presented with the situation of being stranded in the middle of the steppe (still winter here) with no food or water and completely unequipped to handle the elements for any length of time, I immediately began to ponder my own mortality and wondered how Jamie would taste cooked over a shrub fire (I still think it was a reasonable assumption that they would have killed and eaten the Americans first and since I have slightly less meat on my bones, Jamie would have been the obvious first choice). Luckily the menfolk were able to push the bus out of ice and mud (nearly destroying my shoes in the process) and we lost about 30 minutes on the trip. I still lay awake some nights wondering what would have happened had the bus actually flipped and stranded us in that land God forgot.
I realize I’m being verbose, but I really want to instill that initial panic in you. I’ll nutshell some things from this point on. Jamie got some pictures that are worth thousands of my words so I’ll either link his blog or steal them from him and let you see what I am talking about (After writing I realized Jamie has posted about this already so if you want pictures go to the list of other blogs on the right and check out Kokpar and Carnivores).

Let’s see, after our near death experience we made it to a halfway café that was really someone’s house that they just fed travelers at. This place was ridiculous, they had goats that seemed to provide their only form of sustenance and I ate one of them in a soup they made. We made friends with this guy who drank an entire GLASS of vodka in one gulp and then ordered another (editor’s note: It was really good vodka). This guy proved to be a valuable friend as he somehow procured sold-out train tickets for us from Kyz to Shymkent. I got a decent night’s sleep in coupe on the way to Shym and we arrived in the morning battle worn and shell-shocked.
We got into Shymkent on a Thursday morning and hung out with the volunteers that were already there and spent the next couple of days watching others trickle in. Before I got to Shymkent my friends and host fam put the fear of God in me that Shymkent was “the Texas of Kazakhstan” and that I shouldn’t even speak Russian because I would get beat up, so I was expecting a crappier version of Texas (Texas already being pretty crappy in my estimation). Turns out it is my new favorite Kazakh city. It’s actually pretty and has some amazing and cheap restaurants. I ate pizza, I ate hamburgers, I ate nothing even resembling the 10 requisite Kazakh dishes that I have been eating for the past 7 months. It was wonderful. One day we went to this awesome café and I ate a chocolate lava cake that actually made me start crying. It tasted like America and culinary ingenuity. I had my first banya since I’ve been in Zhez too and it was great to sweat myself clean and be beaten with birch branches again. The night after the banya we went to a night club and danced a lot. There were 2 fights among the local guys, but no Americans were harmed in the making of this Naurys. The coup de gras however was Naurys day when we went to the stadium to watch Kokpar.

I’ve probably described Kokpar, but it’s the national game where two teams are on horseback and fight over a decapitated goat carcass, trying to throw said carcass into their stone goal. It’s definitely not PETA approved. There are also some pregames where a guy and girl race on horse down a track and the guy tries to kiss the girl before she reaches the finish line and if he doesn’t, she gets to chase him back and whip him. There was also some good ol’ fashioned horseback wrasslin’ Tayhaw style Yee-Haw! It would have been perfect had it not started raining so I was all cold and wet and had to leave before the end of the Kokpar match. Really if you watch 5 minutes of the game you’ve seen it all anyway.
Basically Shymkent was awesome and it was a great break.

Afterwards, most of us took a bus to Almaty and got ready for the conference. I took a side trip to my training village Kaskelen to visit my first host family. As I walked into my old house I kept thinking of that quote “you can never go home again” and thought how different everything looked after living in Kaz for 4 more months. My host mom was at work so I spent some time with Tima and Saniya and watched the Russian dubbed version of “Bruce Almighty” before paka-ing (paka means “bye” or “later”).

I went to my host mom’s café and we sat down and talked for about 30 minutes. This doesn’t sound that impressive, but when I left Kask, I had never had a real conversation with my host mom. Saniya was always a dutiful translator and my Russian was really awful so the two of us never talked much without an intermediary. How under these conditions we both grew to love each other so much, I am still questioning. We talked about our lives, now separate and she cried a bit and I fought some off myself.

When I first got here I wrote about how one of the hardest things to deal with is the knowledge that no one loves me in this country. It was a sad but true fact of the time. Somehow, in the strangest way, I have made a familial connection with my host mom and it’s just a beautiful and surprising outcome of my Peace Corps experience. I am happy to say now that someone in Kazakhstan does indeed love me and that small fact makes everything I am doing here worth it.

On a sadder note, I found out my cat, Mike, had died/ran away. He was a good cat. R.I.P Poor Mike.

Okay this entry is just getting unmanageable, I congratulate you if you have made it this far and I’ll reward you with brevity.

Had a 5 day conference in Almaty. It was good and really renewing. I got my last Hepatitis shot (which I swear I got in America and now think I’m so immune that I actually cure people of Hep when they walk by me). I also had a language test and probably went up a level. I also learned some great Russian slang like “superpooper” (just roll the R’s) which means like fancy-schmancy or something. I also got some good ideas for secondary projects like a grant for getting better books and maybe starting a health week that will teach about HIV/AIDS and germ theory (a noted point of contention between me and Kazakh society). I also made friends with some vols I didn’t know as well and now we are all deepest bros.

On Sun I left and took the 36 hour train ride back to Zhez and got home feeling pretty good. Things got even better though, because I went to the post office and found I had 3 PACKAGES waiting for me. It was better than Christmas! Here’s where I stop to thank the Coradazzi’s and my parents and the Tribe. Thanks for the SI swimsuit edition, food, music, and the camera. I am currently eating Cheeze-its and Jellybeans, does it get more American than that? Seriously though, I couldn’t have asked for better friends and family. I can’t thank you all enough.
It’s also Spring here now. The snow as I left Zhez proved the be the last labor pain of winter birthing spring and now everything is dusty and dry and will hopefully start turning green soon.

It’s amazing how much more I appreciate the changing of the seasons now, but that, my friends, is a story for another entry. Until our next meeting.

Drew

Have a laugh at my expense

2009-03-10T21:51:00.000-07:00

Wow, I just realized that my sitemate Jamie posted the video of us dancing at the Christmas party. If you want to see what may easily be the most embarassing thing I have done in the past year, please watch. Here is the link http://stepbysteppe.blogspot.com/2009/01/very-kazakh-christmas.html . Enjoy.

Strange Company

2009-03-06T00:24:00.000-08:00

Well, just when you think Spring is about to come, you get a heavy dump of snow that undoes all the work that Mother Nature has been doing in melting the ice. I really thought we were done with this whole foot of melting ice business.
Anyway, In Kazakhstan seasons start on the first of the month so Spring began on the first of March. I’ll believe it when I see it. Tues brought about the first day above freezing since November and I was almost moved to tears. It’s been a long, hard battle but I now have reason to suspect that this winter won’t last forever.
It has been an interesting week. On Monday I helped a volunteer from Karaganda with a seminar directed at English teachers, students, and librarians. I was a little concerned as I was to lecture to the librarians who spoke no English, but I had my friend/Russian tutor Gulzhan on standby for translation and talked about Literature in the modern age and techniques for getting kids to read for about 2 hours. It was actually pretty rewarding, as I was able to give my first real class in the field I love, but on the whole I’m not exactly sure why we had the seminar in the first place. I just don’t know what we were supposed to accomplish. Still it got Robert and I a spot on the evening news so I’m pretty much famous now. After the seminar the library presented a small lunch for us that consisted of butter and sausage sandwiches (like Grandma used to make) and some finger foods. It was pretty tasty but after about an hour I was starting to wonder why I was still there. Turns out the reason for that was that the director made us put our coats in her room and then promptly left the library with the only key and locked her door. So we waited for about 2 hours for our coats to be liberated. If this was GA I would have said “Who cares?” and gotten my coat at a later date, but in these climes there is really no way to step outside without several layers on. Hell, I just got to the point where I don’t have to wear 2 layers of thermals to walk to school.
So after the seminar, Robert and I went to pay our phone/internet bills and happened upon an interesting situation. Let me preface this by saying that the phone company has automatic teller machines that most people pay their bills on, but there are several disadvantages to these machines especially if you happen to have lived in a society where you want… let’s say proof that you paid your bills. Basically if you pay on an ATM an amount pops up when you type in your phone number and you put a bill in the machine to pay. However you don’t get change for the amount you put in, you only get a “credit” on next month’s bill and you never get a receipt. Sound sketchy enough yet? So naturally we prefer to talk to a person and get a receipt printed out of the bill, but this process is heavily discouraged as the person who works there actually has to do (God forbid) work. So long story short I give the teller my phone number to get a receipt and she puts it in one number off. Unfortunately, the phone number she enters in happens to belong to a family that has almost the exact same name as my host family and lives in the EXACT same building number and apartment number on a different street. Since she is rushing to get us out of there I agree to the name and apt/building number she reads me to confirm it is my residence and end up paying the bill of another family. Luckily, this bill is only about 6 dollars and fifty cents, as opposed to the nearly 100 dollars I needed to pay for my family, but the phone clerk informs me that there is absolutely no way to rectify to the misbilling and payment of the other bill. How a country can operate when there is no way for an employee to fix a mistake is beyond me.
The clerk attempted to fix the situation by calling the family and explaining the situation (or rather we complained so much that they had to do something to get us to leave), and while the family agreed to pay the bill on the phone if we came over to get the money, they proceeded to dodge us for a few days before answering our phone call and explaining that they wouldn’t pay based on the principle of the matter. You would think they would be happy to pay since basically we saved them a trip to the phone company, but instead they decided to remain 6 dollars richer. I’m glad it was only six dollars and not say, sixty, but I’m still a little angry about the whole system of incompetence that got me to this point. Anyway I learned a valuable lesson about the difference between the names Sargenbaev and Sargentaev.
Sunday is Women’s Day so apparently I have to buy a present for every Kazakh woman in my life, when I’m trying to save money for my travelling at the end of the month, but I digress. We are having a party at the school tomorrow and have Monday off so that’s pretty cool. I can’t wait for the end of the month when I get to see all the other volunteers for the first time since Nov. 9. Hope you are well.
Drew

I want a cheeseburger

2009-02-23T22:33:00.000-08:00

Well, I finally have the internet. I would have blogged sooner, but really life has kind of run stagnant around these parts. This is the first time I have been able to post directly after writing and not had a three day layover between writing and posting. The best thing about having the internet is finally being able to skype. It was amazing seeing my parents and some of my friends for the first time in 6 months. Technology never ceases to amaze me.

I have basically been awaiting the end of winter and the beginning of some PC festivities in late March. It's been a long wait. I thought the worst of winter had passed after some cool days in early Feb, but it came back full force a couple of weeks ago. My definition of "the coldest I have ever been" has been constantly redefined since I've been here, but I think last Tuesday will hold that honor forever now. I was walking home from movie club and was in pain for the entire mile and a half walk. It's not even the normal temperature that is so cold, it's this steppenwind that pierces everything. I am ready to see some green plants and look forward to venturing out into the steppe and measuring its true vastness.

I have been a little sick for the past two days and am convinced that here the sickness isn't the worst part, its people guessing what you did that made you sick. You are held personally accountable for your illness and the reasons for malady including but are not at all limited to:
forgetting to wear a hat, forgetting to wear a scarf, drinking cold beer (beer is fine but cold beer is an affront to god), leaving a window open for too long, sitting next to an open window in a vehicle, failing to eat raw onions or garlic on a biweekly basis, or (my favorite) not drinking vodka because it is a "prophyllactic."

Of course real reasons for illness like say, the germ theory are completely thrown out the window (though they must be thrown quickly as keeping the window open will cause a draft that may make you sick). I will not get sick from having 20 kids that i teach cough in my face, living in a house with sick people or eating from the same plate as 10 people as we chow down on some horse n' dumplings. Why is this you may ask... well I have been told numerous times that the frost kills all viruses and there is really no reason why you should be sick in the dead cold of winter. I try to refute with science... but my family apparently didn't get the memo.

Clubs and everything have been going well, and I am probably going to be starting a Literature/poetry club for some advanced students soon. I am really excited about this because it will be my first chance being able to teach in my favorite field and this is presumably what I want to do with my life. We will see how it goes.

Also I have been asked to co-facillitate a seminar for the rest of the education volunteers when we have our In Service Training, so I guess that means I am not too terrible at teaching. I am also supposed to be doing some seminar for librarians and teachers this Saturday, but I haven't really been filled in on any of the details... at all. Should be interesting.

The other day at a Russian lesson I unfortunately stared into the abyss at the true horror of Russian verbs... now I can never go back and the task of learning more is daunting. I think I'll just stay in my current state of broken grammar where as the linguist Mr. McWhorter states "makes 6 year old Russian speakers sound like Churchill" for a couple more weeks. If anybody wants to check out a great book on the English language check out his "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue." It's pretty entertaining and attempts to explain why our language is the way it is and why it is comparatively easy.

Let's see any exciting news? I shaved my head and am waiting to see how that goes over at school. I miss pizza, hamburgers, Italian food, and steak most of all, and I have decided you are not a real man or woman until you have eaten horse meat off its own femur or shoudler blade... and what a femur it is (horses have such long legs)! I have become much more conscious of the anatomy of meat since being here and can spot liver a mile away (stop trying to sneak it in my food please!). I generally see what I will be eating on the floor or on the balcony a few days before I eat it and have a pretty good eye for the cuts of meat on goats, horses, and cows. Still I'd kill for some bacon.

It's looking pretty certain that I'll be back in the States in early August and should be spending a few weeks there. I guess I'd like to spend my travel days on going someplace exotic, but I miss my motherland too much. Plus after so much travelling around this country, I just want to relax. I'll have enough time to make another vacation next year.... This is me justifying my decision to come home for a few weeks. Umm that's about it. I am little more updated on news, though movies completely escaped my knowledge for 6 months and can't believe a Friday the 13th remake made number 1 in the box office. You leave America for 6 months and things go to pot. I hope to have these posts out with more frequency now that oo mynah Internet yest (Internet exists for me), but I also need things to post about. I'll leave you with the best Valentine I've ever gotten that was given to me by one of my students. I guess I'm not such a good teacher.

"You be valentine
you be sweetie chocolait
you be cat?!
Be my valentine"

Yours Drewly

1-18

2009-01-24T11:45:00.000-08:00

Well this entry has been procrastinated heavily, and now that so much has happened, even starting it seems daunting. The holidays came and went and to be honest I’m glad they are over. Spending Christmas and New Years sans family and friends was difficult to say the least. For New Years I celebrated with the host family which was interesting and we went to my host grandparents’ house. I was warned in advance that while the grandma was very nice, grandpa could be a little ornery. Armed with this knowledge I did what I do I most situations here, I hoped for the best and prepared for the borscht. After an awkward introduction and being the odd man out and surrounded by various family members that I had never met, I kept pretty quiet at first. Once we started eating however, grandpa took a real shine to me and after a couple of toasts we were regular buddies. He told me I look like Lenin (a statement that is usually accompanied with either extreme scorn or extreme amusement) and we ended up having a good time. Sometimes you assume a situation will be awful and it turns out great … sometimes vice versa as you will find out if you continue reading.

After New Year my site mate Jamie and I went to Karaganda. We took the bus at 10PM and having been warned by everyone that this mode of transportation is horrible, I was slightly nervous. As I was standing in line to get on the bus, I held out my ticket and the unforgiving Steppenwind blew it right out of my fingers. I tried to locate my white ticket on the even whiter snow, asking the people around me to move their feet in panicked Russian, but it was lost. I went to the ticket counter and explained what had happened, conveniently forgetting the words for “wind” and “lost” and ended up saying something like “The night took my ticket.” I got my point across though, and the ticketess ushered me onto the bus and explained to the driver what had happened and everyone had a good laugh at my expense.

The bus ride was 8 hours long and the seats were so small that they were painful. We drove through the steppe with snow swirling around and at times the road was not even visible. I did see some really cool snow rabbits running across the road though. The bus would stop every hour or two and let people off to pee on the side of a building or buy some vodka, but it was so cold that you couldn’t really stand it for more than 5 minutes. We got into Karaganda at about 6:30AM and went to the apartment that some volunteers had rented. We stayed there for 3 days and had a really great time. It was good to see all my friends I hadn’t seen since we went to our respective cities and we had a lot of catching up to do. Some of them are struggling in their sites and it made me feel better about the relatively easy life I have in Zhez. Karaganda is a pretty decently sized city and is the capital of my oblast (an oblast is kind of like a really big county) and my friend Sagar and I went looking for a Nintendo DS charger for these Kazakh outlets. After looking in about 4 electronics stores, we finally found what we wanted and brought it to the store clerk to find out the price. She took it out of our hands and went away for about 15 minutes and then came back to tell us she couldn’t sell it to us. We asked why, but couldn’t really understand the reason though it sounded like she was telling us someone else had reserved it. I didn’t really buy this because I have never heard of anyone reserving anything here and was pretty disappointed that she wouldn’t sell it to us. After waiting for her again for 15 minutes I offered to pay her more for the item, but she either didn’t understand or ignored me. To add insult to injury, as Sagar and I were leaving the security guards accused us of stealing something and took us to the office to wand us down with metal detectors. The wanded me down first and then went to Sagar and gave him a much more thorough search. The patted him down and wanded him twice after he had already emptied his pockets. I asked them if they wanted to check me more and they declined. We then realized what had really happened. Sagar is Indian and he got racially profiled. It really gets me in a country that is relatively diverse; foreigners are treated with so much suspicion and disrespect.

It was a disheartening event, but it didn’t spoil the trip. There were about 10 of us and we hung out for a few days and got some of our problems off our chest. Jamie and I decided to take the train back home since we would be able to sleep on it, and we bought the plascart tickets. Plascart is pretty interesting and it was the first time I had deigned to ride anything other than coupe. It is hard to describe, but it’s kind of like a barracks where everyone has cots out in the open and the space above your bed is too small to sit up in. The problem with these trains is how insanely hot they are. They blast the heat nonstop and you can’t open up a window to make it cooler. Jamie and I didn’t buy any food or drink for the ride because it was only 14 hours and at night so we knew we would be sleeping most of the time. This proved to be a huge mistake because I woke up at 11PM and was sweating profusely and really dehydrated. I decided I had to take off the two pairs of thermals I was wearing underneath my pants, which was a harrowing feat considering there is no place to undress. Also there’s not exactly any room in the bed so I had wiggle out of them like a straightjacket underneath my covers. I got up and waited for a stop to see if anyone would be selling water like they sometimes do, but after two stops there were no salesladies outside the train. I went back to my aisle to assess my situation and after about a minute of despair one of the compartment mates must have seen how pathetic I looked and offered me some soda. I told her I wanted to buy some but couldn’t and she gave me another cup. I could have kissed her. I talked with her for a bit and she lives in Zhez and had heard about me teaching at school 1, so that was cool. I went back to bed feeling much better.

In the morning we had to put our bedding away and I helped an old lady fold out the table and jammed the hell out of my finger. It’s been hurting off and on for the past couple of weeks and sometimes screams in the cold. I got back to Zhez safely and have been slowly readjusting to the new school schedule. All was relatively quiet until this last week.

Last Tuesday I was walking to English club with Robert and Jamie at about 6PM and a guy that Robert knew passed us and said hello. His friend was looking a little soused, but I barely had time to make that inference when I suddenly felt a hand on my chest and a foot behind my legs and was pushed backwards. I fell into the snow and got up quickly to see the drunk guy standing a couple of feet away and reeling. I shouted a few expletives at him and was deciding whether or not to hit him when Jamie and Robert told me to leave him. The only thing that was hurt was my pride and it was good that the situation didn’t escalate, but it really shook me. Such complete random aggression. Turns out that was nothing.

On Thursday Jamie and Robert and I were walking home from another English club when a guy coming toward us runs straight between Robert and I to hit our shoulder. Guys here love to test you for a fight by refusing to move out of your way and shouldering you as hard as they can. I dodged the shouldering because of my new heightened sense of awareness brought on by Tuesday’s incident, but Robert got knocked a little. We just walked on down the street, when the guy started talking to Robert telling him to “invite” me to a back alley. We obviously declined, but the guy was really trying to get my attention so we started walking quickly away. His friend caught up with him and the two of them started walking with us down the street (this is the main street of the city at 8PM mind you). Not happy that we were ignoring them they started grabbing our clothes and jackets and trying to get us to slow down. We knew that the situation was escalating so repeatedly broke their grips and started walking into the street to stop some traffic and get them to leave us alone. Unfortunately they flanked Jamie and got him away from us and before I knew it one of the guys had punched Jamie in the face. I grabbed Jamie and we walked away into the road, and the guys left presumably because we wouldn’t fight them. We did everything we should have done Peace Corps-wise, it just was so frustrating and a little scary. I never really thought I would have to worry about stuff here, and now I am paranoid when I’m walking the street. Having two altercations in a week really disheartened me. I mean we’re here trying to help out this city and this is how we are repaid. It really makes you want to wash your hands of the whole thing. After having a few days to stew in my misplaced anger though, I feel better and chalk it up to the cold or the full moon or stupidity or whatever. It’s a good reminder to be more cautious anyway. On Friday Jamie and I went to bowling with some locals and had a pretty good time. It let us blow off some steam. I got a 140 on my second game… not too bad.

Now for the good news. I will tentatively be getting the internet in the house in a week or two so I should be able to talk to you all more frequently. Skype will be possible and I miss your voices so we will have to talk. Having some internet should help mitigate the boredom here sometimes, and it will be nice to be able to keep track to the news and stuff again. Anyway, I’m just getting into the groove of teaching now and trying to weather the weather. Hope this finds you well.

Drew

More Pictahs

2008-12-30T04:38:00.000-08:00

Pictures of me with at the director's house in my ceremonial garb. Pic of me on the top of my apartment's roof. And picture of an awesome post-Soviet apartments building.

from 12/8

2008-12-20T01:40:00.000-08:00

Well I’ve been here for about a quarter of a year now, and the time has both gone quickly and run stagnant. Some days (mostly during training) seemed like they would never end, but now that my life has fallen into a loose routine it is more of a game of reconciling the fact that I will be here for years. One has to set up goal dates in order not to focus on the elusive endpoint. For instance, On January 1st I will go to Karaganda to meet up with a bunch of volunteers that I haven’t seen in awhile. Then I have March to look forward to because it is IST (assuming it doesn’t get cut due to financial issues) which is a conference discussing changes and goals of PC now that we know what we are doing. March gives way to May which is my birthday, which begets the Spring/Summer where I will be able to explore the steppe, which precedes August when I will hopefully be able to make a trip back to America to see all you lovelies. It’s this kind of forward-thinking that keeps me from going crazy on these holiday afternoons.
Not to say I’m not enjoying myself, my sitemate and friend Robert (Bobby Light) just explained it thusly: “There is a fine line between having no free time and having too much free time.” Currently we are nearing the end of this school term and just like in America, we have a lot of free days. I had a day off for Kurban Ait (still not sure exactly what it is) about a week ago and am currently basking in the last day of a two day holiday for Independence Day. It’s great having a day off, especially since I had very few during training, but there is only so much you can do. Usually I end up going gosting with the family, which is just visiting a friend’s house for a huge meal. The food is usually pretty good, but it’s always awkward not being able to fully communicate and just listening to a conversation going on around you and being unable to participate. When this happens I usually start daydreaming, and most families really don’t like it when you start staring into their wallpaper and your eyes get that glassy, faraway look. I usually get reprimanded in Kazakh and try to pretend like I was paying attention, but talk about a rude awakening. It’s weird though, most people have no idea how to talk to non-native speaker. I chalk it up to the lack of foreigners in Kaz, but you would think if someone says “Ya gavaroo parusski choot choot, vi gavaritye medleneye pajalsta” (I speak a little Russian, please speak slowly) you wouldn’t rattle off as if you were talking to a native speaker. At the very least you would think they would dumb down the vocabulary. It’s like they try to speak so fast you can’t even distinguish a question from a statement. You have to give me at least 10 seconds for my brain to change languages before you start talking to me.
Evidently some news source or tabloid has been poisoning the well here by purporting that Nostradamus predicted that the last president of America would be black. So people keep telling me that Obama is going to destroy America. First off, I have seen enough Discovery Channel programs on Nostradamus to know that this is probably a fabrication, secondly who cares anyway… it’s has no actual relevance on anything.
The other day I went gosting with the other two volunteers and my counterpart to my director’s house. It was a pretty sweet apartment and he had a couple of son’s or nephews (your cousins are called your brothers and sisters here) that spoke English pretty well. The event was pretty fun and at the end my director gave me a ceremonial Khan suit. It is dark green and gold and is pretty awesome. Evidently the suit costs about a hundred bucks so I must be in my director’s good graces. Though I have no idea when I will wear the thing here, I can think of a couple of instances in America when I will be able to don it (can you say Halloween costume for the rest of my life?). Since I am also learning the dombra, I think eventually I will be embraced as a Kazak rather than be leered at everywhere I go. I just need to make a shirt that says “I play the dombra and have the Ablaikhan garb… stop staring at me!” in Kazak and Russian. It is so weird being a minority here. I know part of the attention is probably because of my red beard, but I just can’t give the thing up. Plus Robert and Jamie have no facial hair and they still get about as much unwanted attention.
Probably should have talked about this initially, but it finally snowed here! It has been snowing off and on all week and we have about six inches. It’s pretty awesome actually seeing snow, especially because I will have a white Christmas. I have been really enjoying it, but man it’s cold. I think it has gotten to about -15 degrees Celsius and people are still saying it is warm. I’ve gotten remarkably acclimated to the cold for a Georgia boy, but I still can’t imagine it getting colder. It is also completely dark by about 6 and in the summer it will stay light until 9 or 10. The short days are kind of hard to get used to, but I am not as nervous about being out at dark as in Kaskelen.
I can’t believe Christmas is this week. I think I have built it up enough for my students to get them excited and we are having a big Christmas festival on Christmas eve where we will be singing traditional Christmas carols like “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” and of course the “The Hokey-Pokey.” I really didn’t want to put the Hokey Pokey in there, but the kids and teachers went crazy for it. Another interesting item on the agenda will be Jamie and I doing a traditional Kazak dance. I thought this would be easy, but I frankly suck at it. I will have a whip though and be pretending to ride around on a horse… basically making an ass of myself. I also wrote a short play that some of the younger kids will be performing and I am going to dress up as close to Santa as I possibly can. It should be an interesting night. I have also convinced my host family to wake up early before work and class to open presents (provided my Christmas package gets here on time). On Christmas night we are having a party with the English Club (after work… sigh) and we will listen to Christmas carols. The day after Christmas my host mom is making roast chicken and the volunteers will get together at my house for a party.
After the 29th of December I will have a 2 week long vacation, but this unfortunately does not count as free days. I would love to travel and visit some friends, but I can only spare a 4 or 5 day vacation to Karaganda to meet up with everyone. I have no idea what I will do for a week or so here. So that’s my life. I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas, you are sincerely missed by your Kazakstan correspondent. Oh and I haven’t heard from some of you in awhile so feel free to send an email or something to let me know you are alive. You know who you are. Merry Christmas.
Drew

11/26

2008-11-26T02:37:00.000-08:00

Another day, another tenge. The subzero temperatures seem to be freezing time as well as everything else. Employment has given me a schedule, but the schedule changes weekly if not daily. As the holidays descend, I find myself missing You more than ever. Three months is apparently how long it takes for homesickness to set in. Every day is definitely an adventure, and I meet many people that are interested in me and my time. I got my first sickness last weekend, but it was mercifully short. I ended up getting a wicked sore throat, but found it affirming that I could buy lozenges at the pharmacy with my language level, and by Monday morning I was better. My inability to speak Kazakh is really starting to wear on me. Though my Russian is halfway decent at this point, I feel like I am looked upon with thinly veiled disdain because I cannot speak the national language. My host family would rather not speak Russian at home, but they must to communicate with me, and the teachers sometimes get upset when I ask the students to translate into Russian in the classroom (even though at least half of the class is already taught in Russian and all the students are fluent in both languages). I understand nationalism and all that, obviously many Americans get very upset when they encounter someone who cannot speak English; I just wish they would cut me some slack. Learning two languages at once is hard as hell and everyone understands Russian anyway, whereas most Russian Kazakhs don’t speak Kazakh.
This is not to give you the impression that I feel sad or depressed, just directionless. I feel like a trinket or a bright piece of tinsel that is paraded around… a show pony I guess. I learned that there was a woman who had been trying to find me and talk to me about something apparently extremely important. She tracked me down yesterday after I went to the geological museum (which was amazing) and awkwardly engaged me in a 15 minute conversation that culminated in her asking me for an exorbitant amount of money. Because I’m the rich American who is here to solve everyone’s monetary problems amidst the world financial crisis, right? Update: In the two hours it took me to get this to a computer, said girl was waiting for me at school. I had to tell my superiors and they confronted her and then called the police. I now possess my first ever restraining order. The police and school administrators were really helpful though. They are afraid of losing me and really let the girl have it. Mad Kazakh sounds much cooler than calm Kazakh.
On a different note, girls act very strange around me here, and I am terrified of every activity I agree to lest I lead someone to the conclusion that I am interested in them. The relationship paradigm here is much different and since I don’t want to get married I feel as though I can’t even pursue anyone I might be interested in because relationships that don’t lead to marriage are not as common.
To switch to some positive reflection, my students are pretty great and it is fun to teach them. My 5th grade class is especially enjoyable. I have started my English Clubs and have also been helping out Robert with his clubs. So I go to/teach about 4 clubs a week and it usually keeps me pretty busy during the middle of the week. I also have my weekends back, so it gives me time to relax and not feel as over-burdened as I did during PST. Today I have a dombra lesson. The dombra is the national instrument of Kaz and it is like a two stringed banjo. I am also teaching my English club Christmas songs. We learned “Jingle Bells” last week and are moving up to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” today. It is pretty surreal conducting a Kazakh class on Christmas carols, but it will make me feel better come Christmas time. Also, my parents sent me a package that had mustard, Tabasco, and barbeque sauce in it. I put some BBQ sauce on some horse and it was delicious (as I knew it would be) and burnt my host sisters face off by getting her to try Tabasco. Amanda also gave me the new Of Montreal cd and it is amazing. Can someone tell me what the name of the cd is for labeling purposes? I may be getting the internet beginning early December, so hopefully that would lend itself to skyping or at least AIM. Well, I should head back to school and upload this bad boy. Oh, I learned a great Russian adage the other day, really sums up a lot of things I end up doing at school. Here it is:
If you don’t know how, we will teach you. If you don’t want to, we will make you.
Keep that in your pocket.
Drew “I’ll turn your tears into diamonds, your diamonds into stars” Boggs

Pictahs!

2008-11-12T02:52:00.000-08:00

1: Church near Panfilov park (made without nails)

2: Me with my 8th grade students in Kaskelen during training

3: Me with the English teachers at my school in Zhezkazgan

4: Me with my best PC friends Sagar and AC

5: Me and my first host mom and brother from Kask at swear in ceremony

6: Guess the meat!

From 11-9

2008-11-09T20:58:00.000-08:00

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

From 10/26

2008-10-29T07:38:00.000-07:00

Well I just got back from counterpart conference and my site visit, which have had me travelling all over the place for the past couple of weeks. First of all, I am finally done with my teaching in my training site so now all I have left to complete are language classes and a teacher training seminar until I go off to my site for the next two years. I was so relieved to be done with teaching/training and our community project, so now it feels like most of the nagging obligations have been lifted and I can relax to some extent. Two Thursdays ago we went to the city to meet with our counterparts (the teacher with whom we team-teach and serves as our go-to gal/guy for problems at site). After a couple days of introductions/more redundant training/a slew of scheduling problems that made me incredibly frustrated with PC, I headed out to my site, Zhezkazgan, with my counterpart. She is really nice and motivated and basically provided all the information I needed regarding riding on trains, the city, and the school I’ll be teaching at.
We left on Friday night for a 37 hour train ride on which I learned the true meaning of discomfort. The rooms are incredibly small and are shared by 4 people and the trains are insanely grungy post-Soviet leftovers. Consequently I broke the nasty childhood habit of biting my fingernails (after the things I’ve seen and touched I can no longer bring my hands anywhere near my faces without cringing). On Sunday morning we arrived in Zhez which is a city of about 100 thousand people that is a known for its copper mining. I actually really like it. It puts my training site to shame with its theatres, bowling alley, ice-skating rink, and night-clubs. I think I will really like it there. I am also teaching secondary school and not college due to a typo on my site information form (thanks Peace Corps, not like I need to know what job I’ll be doing for the next two years). I teach at a secondary Kazakh school which means that while most everyone speaks Russian, the classes are taught in Kazakh, so the fact that I have been trained in Russian makes me looks a little culturally insensitive (thanks again PC). Looking on the bright side, as I am wont to do, this also means I will have more training in Kaz and Russian so I might have a pretty decent grasp on both languages by the time I’m done. Also, (and I don’t want to stereotype, but everyone agrees this is the case) students at Kaz schools are more well-behaved than at mixed Russian-Kaz schools. Judging by the 17 classes I taught this week after coming from a mixed school, I would say this is definitely the case. These kids were angels.
Also, the school treats me very well. They are proud to have me and vice-versa and the director of the school (who looks oddly enough like a Kazakh Barry Manilow) drove me around to my prospective host families where we had three different feasts of my favorite Kazakh foods. All three families were amazing and it was incredibly hard to decide who to move in with. I put off the decision until the very last minute due to indecision and chose a family with a boy of 12 and girl of 14 and a very nice apartment. They were so nice to me and said “I had a good energy” so I couldn’t turn them down. The father also offered to take me ice-fishing so that sweetened the deal as well. I don’t know if they will be as amazing as my current host family, but I am thinking how much I will miss this household now and it is probably skewing my judgment. I also met the current volunteers in Zhez and they are really cool and we all get along. They invited me over for tacos on Wed night and it was delicious.
So much else happened over the past two week that I’m just going to nutshell it: I bought an insanely warm fur-lined coat for less than 60 bucks, I got a new wallet (I got pick-pocketed a couple of weeks ago), I got slippers for the train ride (disgusting floors made this a necessity) , I saw a building with a hammer and sickle painted on it, I taught a ton of classes grades 5-11 with little to no preparation, I fell in love with Bon Iver even further, I spent a total of 3 days on a train, I taught American card games to two Russian hockey refs, I felt like a celebrity, I felt like a child, I made friends with a 2 year-old Kaz boy named Nuras, I became an honorary “brother” of Nuras’s father and the captain of police in Zhez after drinking some cognac with them, I learned how flat the steppe is, I saw two wild camels, I saw a café called Burger King that sells “sandwishes,” I ate my body weight in horse, I got told I look like Lenin so my counterpart made me shave off the stache, I finished King’s Bag of Bones (not his best in my opinion) and I watched Failure to Launch at our city’s English movie night (that matt mcconahey is a dreamboat). Hopefully the next couple of weeks will be semi-relaxing before I go back on the crazy train and begin the final two year countdown. Love you all.

Burgers N' Borscht

2008-10-07T06:58:00.000-07:00

Sorry it has been awhile since my last entry. If you had guessed that my workload has increased considerably since last I talked to you, you would be correct. The good news, however, is that the end to PST is in sight. Though I won’t get sworn in until early November, the next few weeks are full of activities that will bounce me across the country and buoy my spirits. First things first, I got my site announcement! I am going to be teaching college or secondary school at a school in the middle of the country. When I say middle of the country, I mean you can actually find a map of Kazakhstan and put your finger on what you would consider the most central location, and I will be there. It is a city called Zhezkazgan and has about 100,000 people. I am currently living in a city of about 50,000 and it seems relatively large, so I am excited about being placed in an even bigger city (read: fast internet connection). I am also excited about the idea of possibly teaching college. If there is one thing I have learned from my brief stint teaching here, it is that I am most comfortable teaching older students. Unfortunately, all of my close friends that I have made here are mostly on the borders of the country and I am a very long train ride from all of them. From where I am now, it will take about 34 hours to reach Zhez by train (You read correctly, thirty-four hours). Luckily I will have some site mates, including a guy from OCRAP that I like talking to.
Speaking of which, I am currently finishing my last week of teaching in my PST town and I couldn’t be happier with my class of eight graders that I am now teaching exclusively. I teach every day this week, and these kids are so bright and attentive… plus they actually seem to like/respect me. I now know what teachers mean when they talk about classes that are a joy to teach. I am excited to go to class each day and I actually feel like a teacher now. Plus this Saturday we will be done with this godforsaken community project that has been hanging over all of our heads for about a month now. For all intents and purposes, teacher training in my town is done this week and the real fun begins.
Next week I meet my counterpart that I will be teaching with for the next two years. After we have a conference in the city for 3 days I will be going to Zhez for a week to interview some host families and introduce myself to the classes I will be teaching. So next week will be exciting and tumultuous and by the time I get back it will practically be time to go back to my permanent site. Also, we are having elections for what is basically the PC equivalent of student council on Monday, and I am thinking about running. Basically they pick 2 people from the EDU group to be recipients of all the complaints and suggestions from volunteers and we meet a few times a year in Almaty to present these concerns to the higher ups in the Corps. I think I am at least friendly enough/ loud enough so that most of the trainees know me pretty well so, we will see. My platform shall be “I am great at complaining… let me complain for you.” It will be less of a campaign and more of a complain.
Let’s see if I can give a brief recap of the past couple of weeks to satisfy anyone unnerved by my lack of blogging. Two weeks ago for the weekend I went to Almaty on both Sat and Sun. Saturday I went with some friends to get a burger at this American bar and grill that looked way to much like an Applebee’s and found out the burgers were about 14 dollars. Since this would have been more than a tenth of my monthly budget, we decided against it and went back to town feeling defeated. Sunday we went to Almaty to catch a bus to this place called Medeo, which is the amazing mountain range that has a huge ice-skating rink nestled in a valley. It is evidently where the Soviets went to train for the Olympics back in the day. There is also a staircase up one of the mountains where you can get a tremendous view… if you can climb the 816 stairs to get to the top. Interestingly enough, we went there on the day of a big festival and there were competitions to see who could race to the top of the mountain. I went with about 10 people and we all got numbers to compete, but after waiting an hour most of us just went up on our own to get to the top without the wait. If someone presents you with a mountain with a staircase to the top, it is ridiculously hard not to just go up. It was actually too bad we didn’t wait, because the three people who waited got to be interviewed for the Kaz news and meet this guy who holds 14 Guinness world records for distance traveled in a human sized hamster wheel (no joke). It is so strange sometimes how just being an American here makes you the center of attention and thus turns you into a celebrity. In short, 816 stairs doesn’t sound nearly as horrible as it turned out to be. By the time I got down my legs were shaking from exhaustion. The view was amazing though. One day there will be pictures, I promise. After Medeo we got back into the city and found a stand that sold hamburgers for 2 dollars, so we ate our fill and felt accomplished.
Thursday we found out our site in a big ceremony and then celebrated at a café. Saturday I went to Almaty to an apartment some OCRAP’s had rented for the night and we hung out in the city and slept there. We met these Brits that were really nice and are basically doing the same job we are doing, and they invited us to this bar called Guns n’ Roses that was way too expensive, but they bought us a beer and there was dancing and a band playing Maroon 5 covers. The best part was that there was buffet with… are you ready? A MOUNTAIN OF HAMBURGERS!!!! I made out with 3 hamburgers and a beer having spent absolutely no money. Plus the Brits were really cool and invited us to hang out at their house the next time we are in town. Sunday I relaxed and read the most amazing graphic novel I have ever read in my life. Jeff if you are reading you must get a copy of Watchmen immediately, if you haven’t already read it. Anyone who is interested really has to check it out before the movie comes out and bastardizes the whole thing. It is one of the top 10 best things I have ever read… and it is a comic book. Also, reading it in a former soviet republic really adds to the excitement… all I have to say is Burgers n’ Borscht.
Oh also on Sunday I had my first banya. This is the steam room where it gets really hot and you beat other naked guys with branches in case you forgot. I didn’t know I could sweat that much, but it is amazing how clean I felt afterwards. It’s kind of like taking a shower in your own sweat. I went with my friend from PC , and his family invited me back this Sunday… I am excited, it’s pretty awesome.
That’s about all I’ve got for tonight. Hope it is satisfactory. I miss you all… please keep me posted on the debates and prez stats. I hear latest polls give Obama the nod. From what I hear through the grapevine you guys need some change you can believe in. Be well.
Yours Drewly.

From 9/26

2008-09-28T04:55:00.000-07:00

Whew, I barely made it through this week. Every week it is a struggle to get all my work done, and when I finally finish it all, they tell me that the next week even more work is due. I could complain once again about how much stuff we have to do for training, but I don’t want to bore you with my whining. Anyway, I finished my teaching for the week today. I taught my 6th grade class twice and had my first lesson with an 8th grade class that went really well. I have learned that even if nothing goes as planned in your class, as long as you keep your cool and act like it was part of the plan, no one really notices. Today I literally put a blank poster up on the board and before I had explained what the activity was, kids were raising their hands to write on it. I let them just direct the activity and they basically did exactly what I would have had them done anyway (write questions and answer them). I’m not sure if this means that I am telepathic or if kids are just insanely intuitive, but I’ll give us both some credit.
Teaching is actually kind of a struggle for me. I thought that it would just come naturally, but I actually get intimidated in front of a group of 15 twelve year olds. Every class I learn a lot about how to teach though, and since we have very little resources with which to plan lessons, I am becoming very thrifty and resourceful. After two years of this craziness I will be prepared for anything I will ever face in the education field. I never really thought about my teachers in school as having lesson plans, I guess I thought they just improvised everything, but after spending hours creating visual aids and lesson plans I have so much more respect for all my teachers. Teachers in Kaz also get paid even less and work 6 days a week. I just don’t understand how education can be recognized as such a vital cornerstone of any society (American or otherwise) and yet teachers are so taken for granted. Teachers should get paid a ton of money if only for the fact that they are half babysitter for most of the year. I digress.
After a rough start to the week, I went to visit some friends Wednesday after school and was a bit nervous because I had to take a marshuka (taxi bus) back to my town at night and couldn’t see the stops. I pretty much had to intuit when to get off at my stop, but I chose perfectly and made it home safe and sound. When I got home my host sister had a friend over who was really cute. I think she kind of liked me, and though I am sure I will never see her again, it was nice to have a least one Kazakh girl not look at me like a weirdo beard-o. It was her birthday so host Mom busted out the cognac and Champagne, and I had some much needed R and R. Thursday was payday (also much needed) and I was really hoping to get a package my parents had sent me two weeks ago. I walked in and saw a package on the table and got really excited, but it turned out to be a package for someone else. I was a pretty bummed, mostly because the mail from HQ probably won’t come again until next Thursday, but I’m sure I will appreciate it even more next week because I will be even more swamped with work.
Tomorrow after class I am going into the city with some friends to eat at a hamburger place. We were supposed to do it last weekend, but we were all mostly out of money and busy so we didn’t. I am really excited; I have never wanted a burger so bad. Supposedly they cost like 10 bucks, but I’d say it’s worth it at this point. I just want you all to know I am spending your tax money on some Americana. I have no real plans for Sunday, but there is loose talk of going to the mountains. I hope we do. It is getting really freaking cold and this will probably be the last weekend it is possible. It is usually around 40-50 degrees Fahrenheit in the mornings. I have already started using thermal unnawares. I am going to die in a month or two… can anyone say Boggsicle?

It's been a month...

2008-09-21T07:57:00.000-07:00

Man, it’s been quite a week. After Hub day on Tuesday, I spent most of my time in class and preparing for my class on Fri. Around Wednesday some of my friends in my town got invited to a mansion to have a huge feast to celebrate breaking Ramadan . I was briefly upset that I didn’t get to go (it was a family affair), until I learned that they all had to eat sheep brains. Evidently one of my friends almost puked on the table when he found a piece of skull in his mouthful. Wish I could have seen it.
After a week of class, I was all prepared to deliver my 45 minute lesson to my class of sixth graders. I had made a lesson plan, including games and everything, when my teacher tells me (two minutes before class) that she had not gotten as far as planned and asked me to teach past tense to the class to my class who couldn’t understand anything I was saying. I pretty much freaked out and almost left class, but I got through it in what seemed like the longest 45 minutes of my life. I have never been so intimidated by a group of kids half my age. Luckily my technical training coordinator realized that I had gotten screwed over and didn’t hold it against me too much. That day was also a friend’s birthday so we took him out for a beer afterwards and I got to let off steam. It seems like everyone in PC has had a birthday this week and I thought why and realized it meant they were probably all conceived on Valentine’s Day (real original guys), but I can’t complain because it has been an excuse to have parties and eat a lot of cake. Saturday we celebrated another PC person’s birthday by going to his house and having jambalaya and it was amazing. It was the first spicy food I have had since being here and it pretty much burnt his host family’s tongues off. At his semi-party I got to try kumis which is fermented horse milk. It was carbonated from fermentation and tasted like bile. I almost puked in my cup (a-wink Athens folk). Kumis is the worst thing I’ve tasted since I’ve been here.
Today was my day off and I slept in until 9:30 and went to a nearby city to hang out with some friends for another birthday party (I wasn’t joking about the birthdays). It was so much fun. About 10 of us went to a café and hung out and I came home to a delicious assortment of fried food that my host mom had made. I’m talking the Russian equivalent of hash browns and doughnuts. There was also some amazing baursak and French toast-like stuff. Think salty French toast. Right as I was finishing dinner, my parents called and told me UGA had won. So it was the perfect day and will get me through the next week when I will teach Tues and Fri and will be visiting two colleges tomorrow to be an English guest. So, busy week, but I will hopefully get a package at some point with American goodies. Hope everything is well in America. I am listening to Why? and thinking of you.

From 9/16

2008-09-17T05:03:00.000-07:00

Wow, I guess it really has been four days or so since I wrote my last blog. I have been so busy lately, but no excuses. Just to put things in perspective, I am one of only two people able to keep a consistent blog based on site and internet availability. So we should all consider ourselves lucky I am even able to do this. I am spoiled here and in turn I am able to spoil you with blog entries. This will probably dwindle to one a week in a month and a half, and I may have found out some information about site… but I can’t bury the lead just yet.
Quick update on the weekend. Saturday about 20 of us went to the city to see a philharmonic orchestra and it was amazing. There was a cello soloist who was incredible and made me nostalgic for the day I played that sexy instrument. Before the show some of us walked around the main street and I bought a Goosebumps book in Russian (The Cuckoo Clock of Doom in case you were wondering which one) and my goal is to be able to read it by the end of PST. They bombard us with acronyms in case you haven’t noticed and PST means Pre-Service Training. Sadly I am only a trainee at this point, and won’t be a full-blown volunteer until early Nov. providing I survive all this work. After I bought the book I went to the American coffee shop again and got real coffee (people mostly drink instant here) and it was worth it even if it cost an entire day’s allowance (about three dollars).
I was so excited for Sunday because I got to sleep in until 9am and then woke up to talk to my friends online. I talked to Oli, Jeff, Kara, and Amanda for about 10-15 minutes before there was a power outage. I was so bummed, but I would have been even more bummed if I had known then that the power would remain off for 36 hours. It was wonderful to talk to everyone though, and maybe we can do it again sometime soon. I waited in the dark for about 4 hours until my friends from the neighboring city came up and we grabbed a couple of drinks. All in all the day was pretty resplendent, and these Sundays need to be to make the work of the week bearable. Monday I had little bit of a breakdown. I had a tough day in class and came home to no power and had to write a lesson plan for my class. I am still new at writing these things and it is hard to think of ways to teach/entertain kids for 45 minutes, especially when it is technically another teacher’s class and she is watching and judging all the time. There is usually a day a week where the loneliness/homesickness/workload seems overwhelming and I fantasize about calling up the director and catching a plane back home. It’s always just thinking it though, I am really too stubborn to call it quits and admit that a situation can get the best of me, it usually just helps to visualize coming home. However, it didn’t help that I cleaned my room to de-stress and found a nice turd pile that our cat Mike had left on my medical bag. His leg is completely fine now, and I guess he celebrated by adding a nice “accent” to my cluttered room. But it’s all over now, and I learned that these weeks I am going through “initial culture shock” in which I will be irritable and frustrated at times. Luckily I am on my way upward to “Initial adjustment” where I will feel accomplished and sort of at home. They love to give us terms too.
Today we had hub day and I got to see the PCT’s from the Organizational and Community Advancement Projects (OCAP for short, but I redubbed them O’CRAP… we all get a laugh out of that one, especially since it’s harder to nickname us TEFL kids). We never get to see those guys because they are far, far away and we have different training sessions. It was from 9-5:30 but it really flew by because I was around so many people. I have learned that you really just need to put me in a room with 20+ people and I will be so busy trying to crack jokes and talk to everyone that it won’t matter what you make me to do, I will be happy. I also had my interview for site and it is looking like I will be up north and may even be near my best friend here, AC.
This is all tentative of course, and not exactly top secret information, but it would basically be the best scenario I could think of for the next two years. AC’s family is from GA and he went to school in Cali, pre-med and we have become fast friends. I am assuming we will both be placed up north, so I am mentally preparing for the “Dirty Negative Thirty” as I have affectionately named it. I won’t get my hopes up until it is all official, but my fingers are indeed crossed.
That’s about all I’ve got for tonight, I want to thank whomever introduced me to Albert Hammond Jr.’s music and Alanis Morissette for getting pissed off again and releasing a great latest cd Flavors of Entanglement. Oh and on a humorous note, the Kazakh words for “sugar” and “grapes” and the Russian word for “sewing” are all dirty words in English. It makes conversation fun.
Drew

9/12

2008-09-12T07:42:00.001-07:00

So tired… must write about first day of teaching…. Anyway, today after four hours of language class we had to give 15 minute English presentations to 4 classes. I was pretty nervous, having never really taught anything to a class or anything, but it went relatively smoothly. I did GA music as I mentioned previously, and the kids enjoyed it. I am officially Mr. Drew. After class we had English club (because our day just wasn’t long enough) and that went even better than my presentation. A friend and I did America slang so now instead of being greeted by lines of kids screaming “hello” and trying to shake our hands, they hopefully learned that “What’s up?” will suffice. I’m really exhausted though, and if you are thinking “don’t worry Drew, tomorrow is Saturday,” I must politely scoff. I have to wake up at 6:45 to get ready to go a school that is even farther away for Kazakh language class at 8. Luckily we get off at 11 and a ton of us trainees are going into the city (Almaty) tomorrow to go see the philharmonic orchestra perform some Debussy. I don’t really know how the logistics will work, but worst case scenario we just get into the city and hang out all afternoon. Then Sunday some friends are coming into my city again which will be a lot of fun. I found out we actually get to sorta recommend a couple of people we would like to be placed within an hour of when we get to site. This makes going off on my own a lot less scary. I can’t believe that in less than two months I will be sworn in (hopefully) and actually teaching in an even smaller town.
Unfortunately, it will only be getting busier until then. Oh, someone in the PC brought us Newsweek magazines so I have been devouring them lately. I read a long article on McCain’s running mate and some other interesting articles make me feel slightly less amputated from current events. Can anyone tell me who UGA is playing tomorrow? I am going to try to get online Sunday morning at like 10AM which will be midnight GA time so if anyone wants to be on facebook chat at midnight we could hopefully negotiate some live communication. Just throwing it out there for the Feelings mostly. Love you all.
Yours Drewly.

9/10

2008-09-12T07:41:00.000-07:00

Well I’ll start this bad boy off by thanking all of you, my friends and family for maintaining interest and spurring me along with positive comments. It’s not always easy to come home after a long day of class and work and write one of these things up, but it is easy to do it for you. You provide the motivation to continue, which is good because I am sure I will want to have a record of all this one day. My one caveat would be that the PC probably reads this too, so as much as I make every effort not to say anything too disparaging against the organization or the country, I would ask you to do the same. So far so good though, keep reading and keep writing, please… it warms my heart. Some days are harder than others, some days it is infinitely better than I thought it would be. Usually it all balances out and other than the shear loneliness of missing all of you, I am satisfied with the decision.
Last night I had a dream that I was in the mall of GA and I kept running into everyone I know (and even people I don’t know like Andrew Zimmern from Bizarre Foods). I dream in America. Every time I fall asleep I am there and not here, but last night my dream-self finally concluded that I am in KZ and there is no way I could be in America. Once I realized this, I went to all of you and told you that I knew I was dreaming, and that the only way I could be seeing you was in a dream. We agreed that we would meet from now on in dream world and that that would have to do for now. If any of you have had a similar dream recently, let me know… I always love proof that the hive-mind still works. I awoke with tears in my eyes. I also had a dream that Dad bought an old corvette and took me for a ride in it. I don’t really pay much attention to cars, but for some reason I only dream about corvettes. Needless to say, my dreams have been ridiculously vivid in KZ, each one bewilders and interests me.
Let me briefly recap the days since Saturday in Almaty. Though a day in the city was great, I had even more fun on Sunday when my two friends from a nearby city came and visited me. I showed them the city and we just had a great time. I will go to their town this Sunday, it really gives me something to look forward to on the particularly stressful days. Since Monday I have been going to class and preparing for Friday on which I will make my first presentation to 3 classes (in English, not Russian) and then co-run an English club on American slang after classes. It should be insanely stressful, but hopefully pretty fun also. The kids see us around school every day, but have as of yet have had little interaction with us, and they are getting anxious to see what we are actually doing in their town. My presentation is going to be about music from Georgia (REM, Gnarls Barkley, Ludacris, The Allman Bros, and Of Montreal) and I am excited to bring a taste of home to KZ.
Last night we got to eat dinner at a PC employee’s home, and he and his wife were extremely hospitable. I got to eat chips and salsa and salmon (I don’t even really like fish that much, but we are in the largest landlocked country in the world so I relished it). Tonight (Wed) a few of us were planning on going to the city to see Kaz play Ukraine in soccer in a World Cup qualifier. I have never been to a soccer game, let alone a sort of important one so I was excited, but it doesn’t start until 10 PM K Z time and none of us wanted to be out too late in the city (it gets REALLY dark here at night) because we have a long day of class tomorrow. On the bright side I got a lot of work done for the week and even have time left over to write this. I might even start a short story I have been thinking about lately… we’ll see.
This afternoon one of my classmates came over and we worked on our English club presentation and I got a haircut with the clippers he bought before our supermarket burnt down. Now I don’t have to worry about these encroaching curls detracting from my authority in front of a class. I am also re-growing my stache and goatee… I don’t know why I shaved it off in the first place. Now I am in the awesome Dartangan (Three Musketeers) stage. Kaz will probably think that Americans don’t shave after our group… nearly every one of us has some facial hair. Plus, the temperature has started to drop and it will hopefully provide a buffer from the clime.
Also today, my host mom let me help carry cement for a walkway to the backyard, sent me to the store to get bread and a coke, and let me take some dishes from the table. This may not sound like much, but after the way I have been babied, it feels like full-blown integration. I know I have said before how wonderful she is, but it deserves to be said again. Without such a wonderful host family, I would have been gone a week ago. Language classes are also going better. I can sort of butcher my way through a sentence or two if I bring my brain to the brink of aneurysm, and we are actually learning useful things each day now.
On a sad kitty note, I think Mike might have a broken or sprained leg. He looks so sad. Anyone have any ideas for low-resource kitty medicine? I hope all is well with you and yours.
Drew

From 9/7

2008-09-08T01:03:00.001-07:00

As stressful and annoying as the previous week had been, yesterday (Saturday) made up for it. We had our first field trip to Almaty, the busiest city in Kaz. Almaty was where we first landed in country and where we stayed for two nights for cultural entry. However, due to a lack of sleep and stress I didn’t get an accurate portrait of the city. It is by far the busiest and most populated city in Kaz and is not too much different than New York City in activity. Almaty actually even means “apple” in Kazakh, but this appellation is even more deserving than our “Big Apple” as the region used to be known for the delicious apples it was famous for producing. Years of pollution and a shift in focus from agriculture to commerce has diminished the importance of apple production in and around the city. I can’t imagine that the apples from old Almaty could be even more delicious than the amazing apples that I have had everywhere else here, but the locals assure me that they were the best apples in the world.
Anyway, we had our first Kazakh language class on Saturday morning. The town has been buzzing for two days because on Friday, the big 4 story market in our town caught on fire and from what I heard two people died. It is actually pretty spooky because my friend Sagar and I had gone to the market the day before so that he could buy a pair of hair clippers so we could get haircuts without having to speak Russian. Good thing he got the clippers the day before, because I don’t know when the store will reopen… talk about a fire sale. After a couple of hours of Kazakh language we left to go to Almaty where we had to take a crazy bus taxi and then an autobus or two in the city to arrive at the PC headquarters. I probably can’t describe the headquarters in much detail, but it is basically a slice of America in the midst of everything exotic. There was high speed internet and most importantly a volunteer-run LIBRARY!!!!!! So I was able to replace the four books I have finished with “Even Cowgirls get the Blues,” “The Sound and the Fury,” “Tortilla Flat,” (Oh sweet and glorious Steinbeck!) and Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground/The Double.” The library was much better than I expected and it will be used to the utmost.
Also, I got to see about every person that I had been really missing since staging and our separation to other cities. More specifically I saw AC and Jenn with whom I had gotten really close in the airport in Frankfurt and beyond. The two of them were placed in the same city and I was really bummed to be separated from them, but they hadn’t forgotten about me. They said that they had been thinking about me and talked about me often and were also bummed that I was not in their town. They got cell phones in Almaty and if all goes well we are scheduled to meet in my town today and hang out. Now that we are able to communicate and are allowed to leave our cities, we are going to try to see each other on Sundays. It really raised my spirits to see them and to know they were thinking about me. We were split up pretty quickly after our reunion, but we are at least able to get in touch now.
Shortly after their group left, another group arrived at HQ and I got to complete the reunion with my other friends I had been missing. Almaty reentry was really the most necessary activity that has been planned, and I think it renewed all of our spirits. Our group left after the second brief reunion and we went to the mosque (which was beautiful… I don’t think I’ve actually been to a mosque) which was built in 1999 on orders from the president Nazerbayev and has a huge two tone crystal chandelier that he gave as a present. It must have cost millions of dollars. I took pictures, but I don’t really have enough a computer fast enough to upload them, so I will have to figure something out. After the mosque I ate at a traditional Kaz restaurant where I had plov. It was good, but not nearly as delicious as the kind my host mom makes. They also had manti there. Manti is a steamed meat dumpling that is a traditional Kazakh dish. It is also a close race between it and plov as my favorite Kaz dish. When my host mom made it the other night she secretly put hot peppers in about 3/50 manti dumplings. I was lucky enough to not get the peppers, but when Tima and Saniya bit into one and started screaming, mom sweetly says “Surprise!” I laughed harder than I have laughed in the past month. Evidently this is common practice in the manti ritual and I heard that sometimes they are filled with sugar and even a lump of charcoal sometimes. I wish we did more things like this in America. Sans peppers I can eat about 10-12 of those dumplings in a sitting. They are so tasty.
After the mosque we went to the green bazaar which is huge a crowded. We walked around there for awhile and I saw this sweet soviet jumpsuit that had the hammer and sickle on the front and CCCP (which is SSSR in Cyrillic) on the back, but it was about 80 bucks and I don’t really know when or where I would be able to wear it without fearing for my safety. It looked cool though. After the bazaar we went to a Russian Orth church which was beautiful as well, and had this amazing Soviet war memorial in the park next to it. The statues we amazing and they commemorated the defense of Moscow from the Germans. The design is much different from American statues (which can really be said about all Soviet design) and it was really incredible to look at. A lot of people go there after they get married to take pictures and so we saw a lot of brides and grooms. It was pretty surreal and was the first breathtaking manmade display I have seen in Kaz. The mountains near the house are a constant wonder, but there are not many incredible constructed sites in my city other than an interesting statue of a bear. The trip back home from Almaty was a sleep blur, but it was weird getting in at night. I realized I have never been out at night because I am afraid of getting mugged or something. Once I am home I am usually home for the night, but it was nice to see the lights and nightlife of the town. Luckily my language teacher’s husband drove me home so I didn’t have to walk to the two miles or so back to my place. All in all it was an amazing day that was much needed as I am sure next week will take it all out of me again. But I have to cut this one short as I got word my friends are indeed coming into town soon and I have to get ready. Commence another good day.
Yours Drewly.

From 9/5

2008-09-08T01:01:00.000-07:00

Well I’m afraid this won’t be a glowing entry about everything exciting and exotic in the KZ. In fact, my teachers assigned us an article to read after class today that actually explained that after week two the “honeymoon” is over and you start to actually get frustrated. It actually frustrates me even more that they can almost pinpoint the day my frustration started. I don’t want to go into too much detail about what is not so awesome about the PC, because I don’t want to paint a bad picture of the whole organization because of a few tough days; but I will say that I feel that they expect a little too much out of a group of that can barely communicate with anyone in the country. I know training is supposed to be an intense period, but I don’t even feel like I have the end of training to look forward to because after we are sworn in, we basically get sent to our site by ourselves and will thus lose the only support group we have. The only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that I have class with two guys that I am growing to be really good friends with. We sort of pretend like it is not an option to back out, so we are just kind of playing chicken with each other until training is over and things are less structured. Less structure, but also less comfort. As it stands, I see 5 other Americans every day, 4 Americans on top of that every other day, and about 10-15 more twice a week when we all meet for larger training sessions. As horrible as training is, once it is over I could be as much three hours from the nearest volunteer.
I don’t know what I will do when I am sent on my own. I am kind of the class clown and just try to keep my spirits up by joking around and making puns, but jokes aren’t exactly funny without people to laugh at them. Hopefully I’ll find some nice host country nationals (HCN’s) to keep me from going crazy. It’s funny, but the thing I want most right now is a hug. Before I left, I talked to my friend Wendy who had recently done some extensive travelling around Europe and she said that one of the hardest things about it was that when you first arrive in a new place alone, you think “no one loves me here, and I don’t love anyone either.” Like right now, with the exception of maybe my host mom, I couldn’t get a hug to save my life. If there we some situation where I would get a million dollars if only I could get someone to genuinely hug me, I would lose the chance at a million dollars… there are simply no options for hugs in KZ. It’s kind of sad, but I am trying to remain positive.
Most of the frustration lies in the fact that the past two days have been the most exhausting days of training thus far. Yesterday we began at 8AM with a lecture from our medical officer about STD’s. To let you know how boring the rest of the day was, the STD lecture was the best part of my day. Which is horrible to think about, because there were graphic pictures and I saw things I would not wish on Hitler. However, the lecture did conclude with my buddy Sagar having to put a condom on a big black dildo so it wasn’t all bad. After that it was all downhill with teacher training and language training and a crappy meal in the school cafeteria. I get so tired of the language by the time I get done with class that I simply crave English. I go home and everyone seems to be screaming at each other in Russian and kids down the street are crying in Russian and the tv is in Russian. I seriously want to scream sometimes… in English of course. Not that it’s a bad language; it’s just about the toughest situation I’ve ever been placed in. But that’s what I signed up for. So then, when I come home and force myself to stay awake for a few hours after dinner, I immerse myself in American music and books, but I am devouring it all. I go through books in like 4 days if I’m lucky. I finished “No one belongs here more than you” (Miranda July), “Life after God” (Douglas Coupland), and finished “The Coma” (Alex Garland) about 20 minutes ago. Unfortunately all these books are extremely depressing and I really should have put a more uplifting book in between them. But then I wonder if there are that many books that are consistently uplifting. I mean, the main themes in literature deal with the human condition and trying to understand it, and we don’t really question the wonderful things. We only wonder why when we can’t explain why things are a certain way. No one writes books about why exactly it is that good things have happened to them, they just accept it as something they more or less deserve. People write books because something is so frustrating or so inexplicable that it has to be pondered in length and considered part of the human condition. The moral of the story is never “my life has been wonderful thus far, I am in love, and I own things that make me happy.” Maybe we feel that if we did write about something like that then we would jinx it. I didn’t mean to wax philosophical, I just can’t think of the last book I read that didn’t hurt my heart a little bit. It’s an invited pain and a human pain, but pain nonetheless. If you guys can prove me wrong with some good recommendations, my Mom is putting together a book list to send me soon.
That was the Lit major in me talking, back to the pertinent information. Today was another day of mind-numbing language class followed by sitting in on 4 classes at the school. I sat in on 4th grade Nature Study, 2nd grade Reading, 6th grade math, and 7th grade PE. Think of how painful it would be to go back to elementary/middle school again. Now think of how bad it would be if you didn’t even understand as much Russian as the 2nd graders. The result was the 6 of us volunteers fighting off sleep like we were in “Nightmare on Elm Street.” It wasn’t that boring, we had all just been in class since 8AM and there’s only so much that barely-out-of-college-kids-who-are-used-to-sleeping-in-until-11-or-noon can take. I never really had jetlag so I can’t even blame anything on that. Kaz classes are much different than American classes too; the kids are ALL well-behaved and answer all the questions. Also you can’t fail anyone and for discipline they rely on public chastising in front of peers to embarrass the kids into good behavior. Plus with the school uniform the girls all dress like Britney Spears a la’ “Hit Me Baby one More Time.” I might have said that before, but it is so ridiculous it warrants a second mention.
And to end on a positive not so you guys don’t think I’m totally depressed or something, I will say that tomorrow should be much better. We are going to Almaty for the first time since we first got here and I should see some friends I haven’t seen in awhile. We are going to see some cool sites and it should be fun. I’ll write about it later. The temperature is finally starting to drop a little so I will try to pick up a reasonably priced fur coat and hat. I talked to my advisors about this and they said I should wait until I know if I’ll be going to the south or the north and I try to explain that I am from GA and haven’t been in temps below 0 F so I will need a huge coat anywhere I go. They don’t seem to get that I weigh like a buck 20 and there is not a lb of insulation on me. Crazy KZ’s. Well my spirits are lifted after writing this, so don’t worry about me. I still have the cutest kitten on the continent to keep me from feeling too low. I wish I could be home for just a day though, just to watch some American news and see my wonderful family and friends and eat at the Olive Garden or something. I miss you is all.

Sidenote: after I wrote this, I went into the living room and my host mom Cholpon looked at me and gave me a huge hug and a kiss… ahh moms.
Drew

From 9/1

2008-09-03T05:57:00.000-07:00

Hello all,
Well, it has been a surprisingly busy couple of days. Yesterday was my day off… I’m pretty sure I explained this in the last entry, but Sundays are the only day off over here. It really takes some getting used to, I try to tell people how ridiculous this is, and how in America we would stage a coup if someone infringed upon our Saturdays, but I guess it is a cultural thing. Seriously though, I’m pretty sure that working for 6 days straight qualifies as a crime against humanity. How do you convince millions of people that you only need one day to rest a week? Anyway, I am getting off topic.
On my day off yesterday, volunteers from the nearby towns met in my town because we have internet and a department store of sorts that sells cell phones. Basically, our town is the biggest and the best of all the places volunteers could be sent for training and everyone is jealous. I am also one of the only volunteers with working internet at home. I consider myself lucky, but the chances of me having similar amenities when I get to site are slim to none. So I will take advantage of the ability to blog with frequency and try to not let more than a day or two pass without update. So yesterday (Sunday) about 20-30 volunteers descended upon our town and we hit up the local hotspots which include the internet café, (which is a flashback to the days of yore when we all had dialup and it took 30 minutes to send an email) the supermarket, and the bazaar. The bazaar is one of my favorite places in town and to describe it in one word would be (can’t… pass… up… obvious… pun) “bizarre.” There are a lot of interesting booths selling crazy things which include a bright blue Kazakh Olympic jumpsuit that I must buy at some point. It was great seeing some volunteers I hadn’t seen since we left Pre-pre-training in Almaty, but we definitely formed a roving American street gang that must have seemed obnoxious to the locals. Americans are much louder than Kazakhstanis, and I am louder than most Americans, so I hope I wasn’t too annoying on our day off. After everyone had made their purchases and used some internet, we sat down at a restaurant near the bazaar and we all had a beer and relaxed together. It was so nice; it actually made waking up at 8 AM on my day off worth it. My little brother Tima joined us as well, and while it wasn’t the most thrilling thing for him, it was great to have a little translator to help out for purchasing cell phones. He’s such a good kid.
Today (Monday) has been quite interesting. It was the first day of school for Kaz kids and there is a huge ceremony where everyone gathers in the courtyard and watches people dance and sing and give speeches. The head of Kaz Peace Corps was there and he spoke to the kids and then I got chosen to pin a medal on the principal of the school. I was pretty nervous, it kind of felt like prom where you are hoping you don’t accidentally stab your date when you go to pin the corsage. I handled it like a pro though, and afterwards we were introduced as the new English teachers and introduced ourselves first in Kazakh (meinin autum Drew) then in Russian (Mnya zavoot Drew) and then in English (you can probably figure that one out for yourself). The best part of the ceremony is that groups of little girls danced to American pop songs including Christina Aguillera’s “Candyman.” This alone is proof that no one in this country is fluent in English because there is no way that anyone would let 10 year olds dance to that song if they understood the lyrics. It was hilarious. After the ceremony all the teachers receive bouquets of flowers which after two ceremonies (there are two sessions of school each day so there was one for each) I ended up with more flowers than I have received in my life total. Let me tell you how much fun it was walking the two miles back home in 100 degree weather in a suit and carrying three bouquets.
So I got home and hung out with the family and my host mom comes in and asks if I mind malinke meow meow. My Russian skills being what they are, I deduce that this means kitten and I give an emphatic fist pump. Long story short, we got the most adorable kitten ever that has to be no more than 2 or 3 weeks old. We named him Mike, based on a joke I made and now he is sleeping on my chest. It’s the little things that make this time of training and chaos bearable.
A couple of random side notes:
It is pretty much 100 degrees + every day here and there is no AC or ceiling fans for that matter. This is just in case you thought I would be living in the tundra by now. It won’t get really cold until I move to site in Nov.
Also, I had chicken and watermelon the other day and you can really taste how much better food is without preservatives and hormones. I might have to switch to organic when I get back. Assuming I learn how to cook while here.
I wake up every morning to the sound of roosters cock-a-doodle-dooing.
Oh, and I heard about all the new running mate news.

That’s all I got for tonight, one day at a time.

Drew

First Post In Country!!

2008-08-27T08:18:00.000-07:00

Well I have been here for almost a week and I would say I am well overdue for a blog entry. I’m sorry if I have to nutshell some things, but if anyone has any specific questions about life here, I will definitely respond. After two uncomfortable flights and an eight hour layover in Frankfurt due to “technical difficulties” (I will never complain about Hartsfield again) I arrived in Kazakhstan, or the crazy KZ as we like to call it… actually I am the only one who calls it that.
Since our flight arrived in the morning instead of the previous night and the Corps did not schedule time for a flight delay of that magnitude, we went from the plane to a bus (if you can call it that) to our pre-training activities without sleep. If you can imagine 60 plus people herded from one strange place to an even stranger place and then being served completely foreign food on no sleep, you can probably guess it wasn’t exactly the best introduction to the country. Luckily the PC had an amazing cultural introduction planned where they had professional Kazakh musicians and dancers performing traditional dances. After they danced, the band played the Kazakh national anthem (which you guys should look up, it is awesome) and then invited us to stand and sing the star-spangled banner. Though I have heard/sung it a million times, I have to say I got a little emotional standing with these people who in my opinion represent the best America has to offer. That was the moment it all really sunk in. I thought, “Holy Crap, I’m really in Kazakhstan,” and this place couldn’t be further from home. I have nothing much to say about the actual training which is good because I am probably legally obligated not to, but we did get to take a escorted walk around Almaty which is about the craziest city I have ever seen. Think NYC without as many skyscrapers, crazier drivers (they exist believe me) and lots of people that either look at you and scowl or purposefully avoid your gaze. Oh and I saw a woman wearing a pink bathrobe cut short and safety-pinned at the top so as not to show too much cleavage… in public!
During the day we trained and after it was all over, Michael (a fellow UGA grad) and I decided to be adventurous and go to a restaurant next to the hotel. It turned out to be a great decision. After we communicated in gestures with the waiter we got a beer and were hanging out when out of nowhere three Kazakh women dressed in traditional garb (kind of like belly dancers that got in a fight with a sequin machine) came out on to the main floor and started dancing. It was awesome. After their song three men came out and danced, and they alternated for a few songs. During the last song the women came around to each table and danced in hopes that people would put tenge (the Kazakh currency) in their unnawears. So I guess some things are cross cultural… namely paper money and G-strings. After the dancing, a Russian man came to our table and introduced himself in broken English and then invited us to sit with his Kazakh friend and the friend’s brother. These guys were characters and after a couple of glasses of chai (tea) they ordered vodka and chasers. In Kaz, people follow up vodka with pickled foods so there was a plate of pickles, pickled onions, pickled potatoes, and pickled fish. The first thing PC teaches you is how to say no to copious amounts of alcohol (namely vodka) so Michael and I had a shot or two and then called it quits. Though the Kazakh brothers spoke no English, the Russian translated sort of and we talked for hours. Since we were the only ones who ventured out that night, Michael and I declared ourselves the winners of our training group and went back to the hotel feeling accomplished. The next day we had more training.
Pre-training was what it was. They gave us the basics about what was going to be happening over the next few days, but I have come to realize that even when the PC tells you what you are going to be doing, you don’t really understand until you are doing it. For example, they told us that we would be moving in with a host family immediately after PST, but I personally could not conceive of the idea of meeting several people for the first time and then sharing their home without being able to speak their language until the bus pulled up at the school where the families were waiting. Needless to say, it was scary as hell. I lucked out though. Upon arrival, my family had a card with my name on it (дрю богс) in case you were wondering how my name is spelled in Russkie. And I met my wonderful new temporary family. My host mom’s name is Sholpan and she is 48. She has a daughter named Saniya who is 22 and a son who is 13 named Timur (Timka if you are feeling affectionate). Their place is a flat that has running water most of the time and electricity, but most importantly has a toilet and shower which are in two separate rooms (it is hard getting used to). They have a washing machine that is in the kitchen and Saniya and Tima sleep in the TV room/living room (I got to catch the last of the Olympics, YAY!) and I sleep in the computer room which I am guessing based on the pink curtains was Saniya’s room before I arrived. Saniya speaks English well even though she only took one or two classes for six months, and Tima knows the basics, but is learning. Mama only speaks Russian and some Kazakh, but she is so nice and welcoming that the idea of being able to speak to her and thank her provides my biggest incentive to learn the language. I can catch her gist about half the time currently.
I am sure you are all wondering about the food, and let me assure you I am not going hungry. Mama is an amazing cook and she gives me about half the meat in each dish. They don’t take kindly to skinny guests in these parts. I am in a town called Keskalen about 30 minutes outside Almaty, so it is kind of like the suburbs… speaking very loosely. I arrived here Friday, and Saturday we had a party to celebrate the 20th anniversary of my host family’s move into the neighborhood. This party was my first opportunity to try a lot of traditional Kazakh food like beshbarmek!!! One of my fellow volunteers said she didn’t know whether or not she had eaten horse in one of her meals and I told her she would know if she had eaten horse. I would describe horse sausage as a dark looking meat that is tough and sort of stringy. A circular piece of sausage is half meat half fat and tastes surprisingly delicious. It tastes like most meats with a certain zip that is nigh indescribable. Or should I say neigh indescribable? Sorry, couldn’t resist. Beshbarmek is a Kazakh word that is translated as “besh” five, and barmek “ which means fingers so if you guessed you eat it with your hands you would be correct. And would you really want to eat horse any other way? So it’s basically horse sausage on noodle like dumplings. We also eat a lot of salat which is like coleslaw except way better. All our vegetables are grown in the garden in the yard and I have had some of the best tomatoes and peppers I have ever tasted. At the party we also had baursak which is like a hot roll, but even more delicious. If I could eat it at every meal I would be happy forever. Also I had plov… which is pretty much my new favorite dish. I am going to learn how to make it so I can rock everyone’s world, but it is fried rice (you will need a wok) and beef with some spices. Sounds simple but it is simply amazing. It basically knocks the socks off of the best Chinese food you have ever had. I’m sure there are more great foods that I am forgetting, but I’ll stop here lest I write pages about the food. In short it is not nearly as bad as PC made it seem and the only thing that has made me sick was some stuffed peppers that were tasty, but evil. My immune system is holding up well actually, knock on wood, and while some volunteers have had a variety of ailments, I am rocking steady.
I also got a cell phone for about sixty bucks and it is pay as you go… though a much needed call to my parents used up all my credits in about 5 minutes. Luckily I have internet at home and an internet café near the school so I should be easily reachable for the next 3 months.
Speaking of school, let me tell you what my schedule is like right now. I wake up at 7 and get ready and then walk 15 minutes to school where I have language class from 8-1. I can’t adequately describe how difficult learning Russian is. If I were not constantly bombarded by people speaking it at me, I would have given up already. There are 33 weird characters and many of them change sounds when placed next to other letters. For example sometimes “o” is “o,” but sometimes it is “a.” How do you know which it is? Well you don’t unless you memorize the word. My teacher Golbashun whose English is questionable says “Russian grammar is deep forest,” I would call it a swamp. Still each day my Russian improves noticeably and that feels pretty good. I should be able to communicate by the end of the three months… unfortunately I start observing class on Monday and start teaching in two weeks. How will I be able to teach so soon without being able to say more than basic greetings?… I’ll have to get back to you on that one. I can say “Ya Americansk” which means “I am American” and that gets me a pass on most conversation, but most people can look at me and tell that. Even Russian guys who in my opinion look sort of like me (especially since I shaved the facial hair off) shout “hello” at me on the street letting me know that in no way do I pass as even a Russian Kazakh. It’s cool though, no one so far has been threatening or mean, just aloof sometimes. Did I mention that very few people speak any English and that this society is about as far removed from Western ideology as one can get? There are no McDonald’s in Kazakhstan, no Americans, and the closest thing I get to home is a corner store that has a big Jessica Alba poster outside. On the bright side, everything is fairly cheap and I get 350 tenge (about 3 dollars) a day which is more than enough considering all my meals are covered by my family and a coke costs 70 tenge, a Twix a whopping 100 tenge, and watermelons for sale everywhere for like 150. What is hard for me are the gender roles and the fact that women do everything for men here. Coming from America it is a hard adjustment, but I will write more on that later. For now I will end this because I am nearing my third page and I don’t have that much faith in some of your attention spans. I hope everything is well with all of you, Da svedanya comrades… Oh did you know many people here mourn the dissolution of the Soviet Union? I have seen grown men almost cry when speaking of the loss of their motherland. Who knew?

Drew

Staging

2008-08-17T19:35:00.000-07:00

Alright, I'm finally in Philly and went through the first day of staging. There are 63 of us and most are English teachers. Philly is great, a group of eight of us just got back from an amazing Indian restaurant called Indian Spice. Delicious. Everyone here is amazing and super-friendly. I'm even warming up to the idea of eating horse. I'll definitely be eating it often... I mean you can't look a gift horse in the mouth.

On a more emotional note, it was really difficult saying goodbye to everyone. First the Athens Crew, then the Atl Crew, then my family... I was beginning to think I wouldn't make it. If I heard "you know you don't have to do this if you don't want" one more time, I might have actually turned back home. Now that I'm at staging, everything is a lot easier and I don't have any regrets. I am not worried about my health or safety or anything (the PC gives basically the best health care I'll ever get in my life, think personal health care specialist that looks over a group of less than 100 people) it's very different than the "get you in, get you out" mentality of most of American doctors' offices. Tomorrow I have staging all day and then we leave for New York on Tues. I thought nine hours in JFK airport was excessive, but when I think about the logistics of checking 63 people into one of the world's busiest airports, I kind of understand... it won't make the wait any more bearable thoughs.

The hotel I'm at is beautiful, but the internet isn't comped.... I had to pay 10 bucks for 24 hours (thanks Dad), which I pretty much had to do, I was dying after not checking the internet for 3 days. I'm spoiled I know, but I don't know how much connection I'll have in KZ so I am getting it where I can. I love you all and will be making some calls in the NYC airport so you will hear my velveteen voice once more before I leave. Be safe, take luck. I love you all.

Still in the USA

2008-08-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

This is my blog that I will be keeping in Kazakhstan.... but I'm not there yet so this is all I'm writing.

Drew