Pictures from Eastern Kazakhstan

I just finished a kids camp in the town of Georgievka, which is a couple hours south of the city of Ust Kamenogorsk in Northeastern Kazakhstan. It's really pretty up there right now; there are lots of trees, everything is green, and the temperatures are nice and cool. The trade off is that it's basically southern Siberia and the winters there get down to 40 below. We taught english and played sports with groups of 5th and 8th graders. The most interesting pictures are from playing baseball, which the kids really liked. Tomorrow I'm going to Tajikistan for a couple weeks with a couple other volunteers. After that I'll return to my site and resume my boring life. Or at least not quite as exciting as summer is. I hope everyone's doing well.

Volunteers Chris, Emiko, McKenzie, a student, Kimi, and Robert. This isn't the greatest picture in the world, but I didn't have any other group ones. We all stayed in one room the whole week in that house over Chris' shoulder. Also, this is kind of Kazakhstan's equivilant of "Big Sky" country, lots of clouds and open space.

Baseball with wiffle balls and plastic bats (sent from America). Chris played in college so he was the coach for the week.

I play basketball, McKenzie's into fencing. So our baseball coaching consisted of yelling "run that way!!" over and over. Everyone had fun though.

This girl did not want to stop playing. We were all ready to stop for the day and she kept wanting to hit again.

In the classroom we made arts and crafts, braclets, origami, collages, and other cool stuff along with teaching english.

Origami. Notice that none of the guy volunteers are giving instructions. I've excluded the pictures of us (guys) later asking the students for help.

Baseball

Coach Eric: "Make a fist like this. Now hit the fist in the glove like this. Now yell 'Hey batter!"