Sorry for the long delay in posting, but a lack of posts usually means I'm keeping busy. This has certainly been a busy summer. First, in June I helped out with a summer camp in the northwest near the city of Aktobe. Two weeks, ten volunteers, and a hundred kids. Then my family came to visit me in Kazakhstan, then I went with them on vacation. Our itinerary included Uzbekistan, the Baltics, and Sweden. Rather than narrate the whole thing straight, I'll caption each picture to try to tell the story. I hope everyone's having a great summer, see you all pretty soon.
In the mornings each volunteer taught English to a group of ten kids with the help of a local partner teacher, then in the afternoons we did activities. These are fifth grade girls from my group playing bingo with colors.
The local dignitaries were late for the opening ceremony (rule to live by here: if there is no ceremony, then nothing really happened) so this is me, Soviet director-style.
Chris, Rob, and me. The Best and the Brightest (that were available and unemployed at the time)
In addition to the ten volunteers, we had ten helper students. These were students from the upper grades with good English who helped us to organize things. These girls were the helpers for the Arts and Crafts activity and are making example puppets.
My activity was photography. During the second week, we had a bunch of digital cameras (thanks, Dad) for the kids to use themselves, but for the first week the package was held up in customs. So we did stuff like this with my camera, then showed the kids on a projector.
The local counterpart teachers. They taught with us in the morning, then made visual aids and classroom materials while we did activities.
Every camp has to have a sports day with relay races. The whiffle ball bats come in handy (Also, baseball was an awesome activity this year. Chris and Rob did a great job teaching the kids.)
Wheelbarrow races. Some of the teams didn't quite figure out at first that the kids using their hands should be stronger. Led to some faceplants.
My photography kids with their cameras. Here they are taking pictures of the other activity groups. The baseball kids are in the background.
Photo kids. They had to write up a plan for a story to act out through photos.
My fifth grade group playing "bazaar" with fake money.
Photo scavenger hunt. I gave them a list of opposites that they had to get in the same picture (old/young, tall/short, natural/unnatural, etc)
One of the 10th grade baseball helpers. The baseball guys downloaded a two minute clip of a baseball game and showed all the kids. That's the only real baseball she's ever seen, but her windup is better than me and Hideo Nomo put together.
My group of fifth graders with their certificates for completing the camp. My partner teacher is to my left. My group was made up of kids from surrounding villages, so for most of them I was the first American that they'd really ever seen in person.
One of the other activity groups was Theater. We had two volunteers with theater experience and they did an amazing job putting together a play for the closing ceremony. The play ran for forty five minutes or so and all the lines were memorized. Above is one of my students, who had one of the lead roles.
Another of my students, playing a non-talking, monster-like thing. I think.
Curtain call
My 10th grade photography helpers, Akbope and Zere.
Picnic in the evening with other volunteers. Klarissa, my sitemate, is on the left.
All the volunteers and all the 10th grade helpers. We've worked with most of these girls for two summers in a row, so it was a little sad to say goodbye to them.
Me trying to act like a pitcher.
The following five pictures were taken by my photography kids (they took hundreds of pictures... then deleted about a quarter of them while trying to look at them). Slow progress in the fight against Soviet style photography (where everyone tries to imitate the facial expression of a statue of Lenin).
