Stantastic: December 2008

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!