Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Concert pictures


Hi everyone,
Here are a couple pictures from a concert my school had last week. The top picture is of a group of Uzbek girls and the bottom one is of a group of Kazakh girls. Those are the traditional dresses that both of them wear. The Kazakhs dance more upright and gracefully, I guess. The
Uzbeks dance faster and with more of a beat. I also sang a song: Sublime's "What I Got"... I did not provide a translation :) Hope everyone's doing well. Love, Eric

Thursday, April 10, 2008

It Feels Like California... minus some stuff



Since the last time I wrote, a decent amount has happened, at least by Kazakhstan’s standards. First off, the weather here has gotten really nice. Spring is here and flowers are blooming and birds are chirping. It actually feels a lot like Northern California for now. By June it’s supposed to be scorching, though, so I’ll enjoy the next couple months. My family’s garden is blooming, too. They definitely use every bit of available space. Uzbeks build their houses in a U-shape, with the house forming the fence and the garden in the middle with a courtyard and sitting areas. These houses are built for really hot weather; if you look at a map southern Kazakhstan (where I live) is the farthest north the Uzbeks live in large populations. Most live in Uzbekistan (duh, I know) where it gets even hotter, summer highs around 110 with no air conditioning. So Uzbek culture is built around really hot weather; they basically live outside in the summertime and take it easy in the afternoon. The only beverage they drink, though, is hot tea… we’ll see how that works in 100-degree heat.

The pictures above are of my family, when my friends came to visit (more later). I’m sitting with Baba (grandpa) and Mama (grandma) outside. They live with us because my father is the youngest son. This means that he keeps the house that his father built and his parents live with him. In this way, a son is basically a pension… which might be why I have five host sisters and no host brothers. Speaking of that, the other picture is with my youngest host sister Medina, who is two years old. She is very smart and not very disciplined. We read a few kids books in English, including Winnie the Pooh, Dora (I think that might be lost, though), and others. Among other things she can count to ten; knows hand, finger, nose, mouth, etc; and sings along with “incy, wincy spider.” I try to talk to her in complete English sentences, as opposed to the broken Kazakh I speak to everyone else. Anyways, in the picture she’s staring at the view screen of my friend’s camera. And I got a haircut this week, so I’m not quite as shaggy now.

Which leads me to my spring break of sorts. Naruz is a big holiday here celebrating the beginning of spring. It’s a holiday that goes back to pre-Islamic times in Iran and is widely celebrated all over the region. By this time the south of the country is just blooming while the north is still frozen. So many Peace Corps volunteers come from all over the country to Shymkent, which is the city thirty minutes from my town. There are probably about 130 or so volunteers in the entire country and almost 80 of them came for the festivities. Shymkent has a large hippodrome (track and field kinda thing) on the outskirts of the city. There’s a huge festival with lots of games and displays. The main event is Kokpar, which is basically polo (on horseback) but with a goat carcass instead of a ball. The head and legs are chopped off and the whole thing is sewn up like a big rugby ball. The riders have to lean over and grab the thing. It was interesting, not sure I’m gonna join the local Kokpar club though. There’s also horse racing and two other games: one where a boy on horseback chases a girl on horseback, he gets a kiss if he catches her and the other where a girl on horseback chases a boy on horseback and tries to whip him. Draw your own conclusions about gender roles here, bride-napping still happens here every now and then. Anyways, I know these festivities sound awesome, but I almost missed them because two other guys and I were distracted by the huge vats of free polow (fried rice) near the entrance. Polow is by far my favorite food here, my family cooks it every Thursday, and that heaping plateful of rice was probably better than the goat carcass games. During the days preceding and following Naruz we hung out in Shymkent, caught up with friends from training, and contributed to the economic well-being of Kazakhstan’s alcohol manufacturers. We also played basketball on an outdoor court. Along with being on the losing end of every game I played in (five or six), I also was winded afterwards, and I don’t have smoking as an excuse like some of the other guys here.

The best part of Naruz, though, was taking my friends out to my town, Aksukent. Aksu (which means white water) is the rayon center (county seat, I guess) and has about 40,000 people. It feels a lot smaller than that, but there is a nice square and a couple bazaars in the center of town. It is also two-thirds Uzbek. The Uzbeks in this area have lived here forever, the Soviets drew the borders here in the ‘20’s and they just ended up in Kazakhstan. In other parts of the country, many Uzbeks from Uzbekistan are poor migrant laborers, often in Kazakhstan illegally. So it was nice to introduce my friends to a little Uzbek culture. Five of the six people I trained with plus one other guy made a day trip to my town. We visited my college (class had ended but they met a few of my better students) and sat and had tea with my dad at our house. They were really envious of my situation, especially things that I never notice, like green things growing. (That doesn’t happen in a lot of places.) And spring is the nicest season here, the people who came from the north got on the train in a snowstorm and got off in 70 degree sunshine. So anyways, I can no longer complain to my friends about anything because they like my town. (And most of them live in apartments, while we have a nice house and a big garden, probably more like the stereotypical Peace Corps experience everyone imagines.) Overall, I had a really good extended weekend, especially catching up with my friends from training (we studied Kazakh together while most of the other volunteers learned Russian, so we’re all pretty close).

After Naruz, we took a 12 hour overnight bus (that’s really short by Kazakhstan’s standards, people can be on the train for 40 hours getting places) to Almaty. There our training class (all the volunteers of Kaz-19, those who are here from ’07 to ’09) had an in-service training. This was basically a week of meetings and trainings and discussions. It was probably also to make sure we haven’t gone crazy by ourselves at site (that is one thing I should mention: the huge amounts of time you have to think/daydream as a volunteer at site). And they gave us more shots, I think I’m done now but I’ve had more shots in the past seven months than I had in the previous ten years. Anyways, we stayed at a “sanatorium” (hotel with meals provided, basically) and had meetings for a week. The food was good, in a sign that I’m integrating here, when I got back to my town three different people told me my face looked fat and I took it as the compliment it was intended as. Really, I’ve stopped losing weight. I think I’m in the mid to upper 150’s, which is off my low of 148-150 pounds that I was at the end of training (I don’t know how the hell that happened, I didn’t even get deathly ill or anything). In the evenings we did things like eat Chinese food or go ice skating at the gorgeous outdoor Olympic skating rink (Medeo) in the hills above Almaty. The city looked a lot better than it did when we left training, living in a village or town for a while will do that. And I spent tons of my meager Peace Corps salary, I was really worried that I was saving too much living in the village anyways (there are five tiers to Peace Corps Kazakhstan’s pay scale, depending on the costs of each volunteer’s site. I’m tier 5, which is the lowest (my base pay is about $250 a month), but none of my friends in higher tiers were jumping to buy me beers. (Honestly, I save more by living in the village, people in tier 3 and 4 get squeezed; they need a raise.)

After a week of relaxing and sort of paying attention to whatever they were telling us, we all had to return to our sites. This led to one of the more depressing weeks I’ve had here, for no good reason other than being back at site with no one to talk to anymore. The funny thing about Peace Corps, though, is that over a hundred other people are simultaneously going through the same thing all around the country, which is reassuring, I guess. And I’m doing better now; in June and July some of my friends will host summer camps at their sites for their students. Other volunteers will come up, sleep on the host volunteer’s floor, be counselors at the camp, and avoid using vacation days because it’s work related travel. So hopefully I can spend most of June and July in the North, where the summers are a little cooler.

That’s all I have for now, everything’s cool in Kazakhstan. I hope you’re all doing well, drop me an e-mail if you have time (yceric32@gmail.com), I’m usually able to check it at least once a week. Take care, love, Eric