Holiday Update

4th course students with the puppets they made of teachers

The meat was chicken instead of turkey, but it was a pretty good Thanksgiving table

My puppet and its artist

Saltanat is one of my best students, she's just vertically challenged. She couldn't reach over the screen without a bench.

"Backstage"

Our Native Americans greeting the Pilgrims. Thought about including the death of 90% of the Natives from smallpox, decided against it.

My enthusiastic 2nd course (they basically started studying English this year). First questions when I walk into class: "Mr. Eric, you see dream?" "Mr. Eric, you see me in dream?" or something like that

The Mayflower

I wrote this post weeks ago, but just got around to putting it up. For Christmas, I did a White Elephant gift exchange with my students. I wrote the rules on the board; rule #1 in bold was “no crying”. (I teach teenage girls) We avoided tears… barely. There were three very hotly contested gifts, but I think everyone had a good time. Happy holidays!!

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Winter came late this year, but it did finally come. We didn’t actually get snow here until about a week ago, which is like a month late. The highs are still in the 20’s Fahrenheit, which is fine with me. The school semester is winding down; no one really does that much work in January and part of February (took me the first year to figure things like that out). And knock on wood, I haven’t slipped and fallen on an icy road yet. For Christmas I will be… working. It’s a normal work day here. The Russian Orthodox Church is on the old calendar, so Russians around here celebrate Christmas the first week in January. But for everyone here, Christian and Muslim, New Year’s is the big holiday. Most people have taken the secular gift-giving traditions from the Christmas season without all the religious stuff. On New Year’s I’ll go visit a couple of my friends in a different city for a few days.
The latest news: I’ve gotten pretty good at small holiday event planning for our English students. After the success of the Halloween play, I followed it up with a series of puppet plays for Thanksgiving. This worked well because even students who can’t speak much English were able to participate because I taped the script to the screen in front of them. Each class did a different play or two, including ones on the Pilgrims, turkeys, children from America and Kazakhstan, and a surprise play featuring puppet versions of all of our teachers. The teacher puppet play was the crowd favorite. And afterwards we all had a Kazakhstani version of a Thanksgiving feast (chicken, not turkey, though).
The Saturday after Thanksgiving, all the volunteers in the oblast had dinner together at a volunteer’s apartment in Shymkent. There were ten of us plus a few local friends. We had turkey, potatoes, stuffing, pie, ice cream, etc. The support that you get from other volunteers is a big help during Peace Corps service. Because it’s a two year (actually 27 month) program, as soon as you’ve been in country for a year, the old volunteers leave and you are suddenly the veteran who has to help the new volunteers out. It’s a good learning cycle. (They, in turn, can teach us about all the pop culture we missed in the past year… new movies, music, OJ’s in jail, Britney’s out of rehab, the Titans are apparently good, etc.)
December 16th in Kazakhstan’s Independence Day. It’s not the best time of year for big celebrations, but this year winter was late, so it rained instead of snowing. One of my sisters dances with a group of girls from her school. When they have concerts here, every dance is connected to an ethnicity (“nationality” here). So there are Kazakh dances, Korean dances, Georgian dances, etc. (Most of these ethnicities ended up so far away from their homelands because of Stalin-era population movements for security reasons.) My sister is Uzbek, but she dances a Kurdish dance. A couple of the girls in the group are Kurdish and one of their mothers teaches them. So I went with them to Shymkent, where they danced in an Independence Day concert. The concert had all the requisite nationalities, I’m putting up any of the dances of which I happened to get a good picture.
I hope you all have a great holiday season, I’ll be home before you know it!

My sister Umida and me

Kurdish dance

Another dance team; I think Korean

German

Turkish

Uzbek

I've seen a lot of Uzbek dancing here, but never horns that big

Kazakh

Not sure, maybe Korean, or Uighur, or something else, but a very pretty dance

All of the various dancers, lined up in perfect peace, harmony, (and boredom)

Sisters Madina and Malika, plus a cousin

Three sisters plus cousins. The little New Year's Tree in the middle is about two feet tall

Family and relatives around the dinner table

Halloween

The Jack-O-Lantern. My students did it themselves, with a little direction from me :) Pumpkin is a regular part of the diet around here, many people (including my family) grow them in their gardens. A milk based pumpkin soup they make is probably one of the foods I'll miss when I'm gone.

Huraniza, the teacher who always gets stuck doing all the paperwork and documents for our faculty, and students blowing up balloons. I believe she is saying something like, "Eric don't you take that pict..." Also, the purple balloon the girl in the background is blowing up reads "I love Yuba City" ...World famous.

I don't actually have any artistic skills, so it's a good thing my students do. And they're all pretty familiar with Halloween, too.

The play had four girls sitting in a graveyard on a dare, when ghosts came up and surrounded them. Everyone did a great job; they memorized every line.



It’s been a while since I posted an update because I’ve been busy with work, which is a good thing. Among other things, I now have a site mate so I’ve been helping her when I’m not busy with my own work. She teaches at a Russian school which is very close to my college. I am not at all an expert at things around here, but I can help with things like mailing a letter, taking the bus to the city, or buying something from the bazaar. Those are the kind of things I had to figure out for myself last year because there was no previous volunteer at my site.

I’m including pictures from the Halloween play my students did. We decorated the room, carved a Jack-o-Lantern, had the 4th course perform the play and sing “This Land is Your Land”, and the 2nd course sang “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. Also, together with one of my best students, I read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” while another student acted it out.

The American election was also big news here. I had my Dad call me during class (my time) on election night to tell me the results. I’ve tried to teach as much as I can about our elections to anyone who will listen. There are quite a few teachers around (and some students) who are very interested. Competitive elections aren’t a familiar thing around here. So Obama’s election is a good chance to talk about diversity in America. Many people have told me, “I didn’t think they’d let the black guy win”, or something like that. Conspiracy theories are popular around here. So now, in typical local fashion, people have commenced memorizing useless dates (Local: “Was Obama born on August 4, 1961?” Eric: “I’ll get back to you on that”) Also, those locals who follow politics and the news are usually very close in thinking to the Russians. John McCain has a reputation as a hard-liner against the Russians, so most people around here seem happy he didn’t win. And this seems obvious, but it’s a real novelty in many parts of the world to not know who will win an election.

Future plans: On Saturday (the 29th), all 12 of the volunteers in our oblast (state) plus a few local friends will get together in Shymkent for Thanksgiving. Then, for the second week in December I get to go to Almaty for another training, so I’ll get to see all my friends again. I’m not sure what I’ll do for New Year’s, but I’ll probably try to visit someone somewhere around here. That’s about as far ahead as I’m thinking right now.

One more thing: Two local teachers from my rayon (county) just got back from a trip to America. Both of them are very good teachers with very good English who have been counterparts to Peace Corps Volunteers in the past. There is an international exchange program paid for by the State Department and run by an organization called IREX that is called TEA. I don’t even know what the acronyms stand for, but the point is that teachers from across the former Soviet Union and a few other places (India, Bangladesh, Kenya) get to study and practice teaching in America for two months or so. In total, 60 teachers went this year, seven from Kazakhstan. Twenty each went to George Mason University in Virginia near DC, University of Alabama-Huntsville, and University of Nebraska. They stay in dorms, learn at the universities, practice teaching at local schools, and take various cultural trips. One of the teachers from our rayon was in Alabama and one was in Virginia. Both said they had a great time. Among other things, they said the people were really friendly and they liked American high school students. And everyone stays in their lanes on the highways. (I saw pictures: someone was very smart and had these teachers practice at brand new high schools with really nice facilities) The teacher in Alabama visited Montgomery, Chattanooga, and monuments associated with Martin Luther King Jr and Helen Keller. The teacher in Virginia visited the Smithsonian museums and other things around Washington DC. Both of their volunteers (who have returned to the States) came to visit them also. So in sum, support cultural exchange programs like this, because long after the Peace Corps packs up and leaves Kazakhstan, teachers like these ones will be the local experts on America; and they have a pretty good impression of our country right now.

One of my better students (in trick-or-treater costume for the play) explains how to make a Jack-O-Lantern

Singing "This Land Is Your Land"

4th course students (who will graduate in June) and teachers

Flags, Jack-O-Lantern, and Students

New Pictures plus a life update

These are three of my five sisters. From left to right, Umida (9th grade), Guzel (finished college last year, is now a teacher and part time university student), Malika (8th grade)

Guzel with some of her students

Walnuts from our trees. Last weekend my Dad was up in the tree knocking them down with a stick and my sisters and I ran around with buckets picking them up.

Medina, sister number five. I was trying to take pictures of the walnuts, but she was quite adament that her picture be taken.

Malika, Medina, and bear that has seen better days.

Hi everyone,
Happy early Halloween! I’m in Almaty now at the Peace Corps office, waiting to catch an overnight bus to go back to my site. I came here for four days or so to give a presentation at the Counterpart Conference for the new volunteers. Every year, new Peace Corps Volunteers come to Kazakhstan in late August. They are split into groups of ten or so and sent to villages around Almaty to study language and culture. In early October their sites in Kazakhstan are announced, with great fanfare followed by frantic searching on a map and maybe some help with pronunciation of said site. This may be followed by a sprint to the wall size map in the Peace Corps office that has mug shots of every volunteer in country. Anyways, this is followed by Counterpart Conference, which is this week. Each volunteer has a counterpart (local) teacher. In most cases they team teach together and the counterpart is the one to guide the volunteer through the intricacies of Kazakh bureaucracy (What they say: “does it have the Director’s stamp on it?” What they mean: “Before Muhammad ascended to Heaven, or Moses received the Ten Commandments, or Jesus walked on water, all three had approved documents in triplicate with their Director’s stamp on it”). This is a really nerve wracking time, when you meet your counterpart you don’t know what they’re going to be like, or even if they will know any English. Then the counterpart and the volunteer (still a trainee at this point, actually) visit their site together for one week. That’s this coming week. They choose a host family, get to know the area, and do administrative stuff. Then the volunteers go back to Almaty for a couple weeks to take tests and be sworn in, before returning to their sites for good in mid-November. That’s what I did last year.
So this year a whole new group is going through the same thing. It’s definitely a stressful time, once you get settled in at your site and make it through your first winter, everything seems a little calmer. So I gave a presentation and talked with all of the new trainees/volunteers. (They’re not actually volunteers until they’re sworn in on November 10, but it’s a little high school-ish to run around calling people the same age as you trainees, or at least I think so) The Kazakh language group was in the village of Shamelgan again this year, so I talked with those volunteers a lot about their experiences. I’m also getting one of those volunteers, i.e. a site-mate. I wasn’t really isolated or anything, but now I’ll have regular contact with another American. I talked with her a bunch and she’s really nice, so I’ll try to help out and explain things that last year I had no one to help me with. And I will try not to seem too weird either; it’s not me, it’s the circumstances, I swear. So in sum, the new volunteers all seem really cool and I hope they’ll all do well here.

One quick story that happened to me the other week. I was at site, in Aksukent, and I wanted to buy a pair of pants and maybe a shirt. The more stuff you buy locally, the more you look like a local. People here actually dress very nicely, I’m usually the shabbiest dressed at any occasion and my goal is to change that this year. So anyways, I go to this small, store-like place near the center of town, because their clothes are usually better quality than the stuff at the bazaar. I try on and pick out a pair of suit pants and a long sleeve shirt and buy them. They were both good quality, so together they cost $25 or $30. As I check out, they give me a coupon for some raffle they’re doing at the door. So I go over and pick one envelope from a bunch on a table. The guy opens it and says “whoa!” and shows it to a bunch of people. Apparently, I drew a good number. He walks over to a pile of prizes and comes back with a convection oven. It was nice, too, European made. So that was followed of course by the requisite 10 minute conversation “you’re not from around here are you… America! No way! Hey Johnny come over here, he’s from America!” Anyways, I walked out of there with new clothes and a cooking device. As I walked over to the bazaar to get my pants hemmed by the old Uzbek lady who knows me (she operates a foot pedal sewing machine and hems the pants in ten minutes in front of me, asking about my family in Kazakhstan and America the whole time) I was trying to think of what to do with the thing. I couldn’t use it and my family wasn’t going to need it; they only cook things traditionally (in big pots). The oven (normal or convection) doesn’t really figure in their cooking. So took it straight over to the neighbors, whose internet I use. They’re a little more modernized, so they reheat stuff and could probably use it. So I walked in, related the whole story, and said, “This is for you”. They freaked out like it was Christmas or something. Seriously. “A toaster! A toaster! Oh, it’s so wonderful!” Yes, toast is good. Maybe if we sent the North Koreans fifty of these things they might come clean. Or maybe they’d just take them apart and use them for centrifuges.

Love,
Eric

This Old House

Hi Everyone,

   So this is a tour of my house.  Some of these pictures are old and some are new.  I tried to pick some from various seasons to show how things change.  I live with a grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, aunt (sometimes), and five sisters ages 2 to 20.  But the house is pretty big so there's enough room for everyone.  It is laid out in the traditional Uzbek fashion.  You can basically walk by the front of most houses here and tell if the family is Uzbek, Kazakh, or Russian.  The construction layouts are that different.

This is the front corner of our house.  This picture is from a few weeks ago.  We're at the intersection of two small streets.  The streets are paved, just not very well.  The front corner of the house is the mini-market my family runs out of their house.  My dad was a mechanical engineer at the Soviet farm equipment factory in town.  After independence, he started the market and also sells timing belts and other car parts he buys wholesale in the city (and he grows a ton of food in the yard).  My Mom's a teacher at a school.

The same corner in winter.  This is the warmest part of Kazakhstan; no complaining here :)

Our front gate, which off to the right in the previous pictures.  Houses here are compounds; there is no concept of "curb appeal".

Inside the market on the corner of the house.  That's Malika, sister #4, and a neighbor kid playing Uno.  I taught them how to play last winter and now I can't beat any of my sisters at it.  They sell ice cream, cigarettes, bread, soda, etc. (no alcohol)

As you walk through the gate, the actual house is in an "L" shape (which forms the wall of the compound) and you're at the very end of the leg of the "L".  You walk through the car port, where my dad has his car, an early 90's Audi, turn a bit to the left, and this is the view.  This is the courtyard, the front door is ahead, the garden is out to the right.  This picture is from late fall.

This is almost the same view, a few weeks ago.  It is probably an ethnic requirement that all upstanding Uzbek houses have a trellis over the courtyard with grapevines growing.  One of the other volunteers came here and said, "dude, you live in the garden of Eden"

If you walk out to the right, this is the view facing the garden.  At the back of the lot is a sheltered area for their three cows and four sheep, plus random storage.  The outhouse is off to the right.

Almost the same view in early spring. 

The same view in summer.  There are roses, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, parsley, carrots, pumpkin, apples, walnuts, and apricots.  Oh, and grapes. :)

Closer view.  It's hard to show everything in a picture.

From the previous views, if you turn around 180 degrees, there is this sitting area.  It's covered, but open on one side.  We eat dinner here in the summer and watch tv.  You don't really wanna go in the house when it's really hot; it's cooler outside.  Also, three or so of my sisters sleep out here in the summer.  And the table, no matter inside or outside, is about knee height.  You sit on the cushions.

The view from the sitting area out to the garden

Our roses, in full bloom.  Early summer, I think.

My dad took like ten minutes taking this picture.  He ended up squatting in the middle of the bushes.  Medina (2) is sister #5.  She is very good at sprinting into my room, grabbing something, then sprinting out.  

My mom and oldest sister chopping up cabbage and carrots to preserve for the winter (taken last fall).  They stuff it in jars, squeeze out as much juice as possible, then put them in the cellar. 

The calf

One more picture.  This is not from our yard.  It's from Tajikistan.  These little groundhog things, called Hamyeks, were about the only wildlife out in the mountains.  They make this warning sound like a bird call and then run into there burrows when you approach.  

That's it for now.  So now you see how I live, and why I don't complain too much, the house is a lot nicer than what many other volunteers live in.  It's dinner time, I've gotta go :)

Take care,  

Eric