Hi Everyone,

I hope you’re all doing well. It’s warming up here, most of the snow has melted, it rained a couple times last week, and the highs are in the forties and fifties. Work at the college is going well. In some ways I’m in a very good situation compared to a lot of other volunteers. My college is really small and the director limits me to teaching the English faculty’s students. This is really good, because some other volunteers are spread around and have to teach ten different classes of students only once a week. So I have one class of second years, one of third years, and one of fourth years. After the fourth year (when students are about 18, 19, or 20) students will either become teachers at village schools or (the best ones) go to universities in Shymkent. I’ve got to say, though, that my favorite group of students is the second years, then the thirds, then the fourths. There are a few reasons for this, number one though is that a lot of the fourth year students are a little too cool to study hard, or be interested at all. There are some good students who I can have a decent conversation with in English, but there are quite a few who aren’t interested and can’t say anything past “good morning teacher”. The second and third course students are a lot more enthusiastic and always ask me tons of questions. I seem to be a master of the two language conversation, which is where I understand the question in Kazakh or Russian and answer in English. This is not good for my language learning, but it gets the point across.

And my younger students never get tired of looking through the same pictures of my extended family on my laptop (when they’re not singing along with songs: Jim Brickman/Martina McBride’s Valentine and Faith Hill’s Mississippi Girl are their favorites). “Nationalities” (“ethnicities” to us) are a big deal here, so they are constantly confused by my descriptions of all of my cousins (full Chinese, half Chinese half Philipina, half Chinese half White, half Swedish, etc). And they are constantly shocked by how young all of our womenfolk in America look. (This includes all Moms, Aunts, Cousins, etc) Women work really, really hard around here, so they look a little ragged when they hit forty.

One thing I want to mention is the emphasis on memorization in education here. This isn’t exactly better or worse, but it means students know different things than their counterparts in the US. Bottom line is that here the best students are those who can memorize and recite the most material while in the US the best students are often those who can analyze information the best. For example: My host Mom here asks me when the Statue of Liberty was built. I have no clue, though I can tell you a lot about the French-American relationship (apparently the darn thing was built in 1886). Mom: “What! You’re a history major and you don’t know when the Statue of Liberty was built?” Yes, that’s correct, because no one cares when it was built; you can’t even go to the top now until we finish the War on Terror. And yesterday a kid asked me who the 17^th President of the United States was. Me to 9^th grade student: “If you tell me who was the 16^th I might be able to figure it out.” Apparently Andrew Johnson, I think. I told the kid that between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt no one cares who the President was. On the other side of this memorization coin: I ask my students: “Who colonized America?” Blank looks. “What language does the United States speak?” Answer: “English” “So who colonized America?” Blank looks. Me: “Okay, it was the English. So what language do they speak in Mexico?” Blankness. Me: “They speak Spanish, so who colonized them?” Utter blankness. Me: “It starts with S and ends in “ish” By the time we got to Brazil and Portuguese they got the hang of it, but it’s really hard to get them to connect the dots without doing it for them. I guess one reason for this is that in almost all classes a student gets called on and has one shot to answer correctly. If they don’t the teacher either tells them the answer and has them repeat it or calls on the smartest student in class to give the correct answer. So students don’t get a chance to figure things out. I think my students actually get a little frustrated because I won’t give an answer away.

Everything here is cool, in sum. I almost always get a shower/bucket bath once a week. I’ve heard in the summer (when it’s like 110 here with no ac) that we get a shower every day… oh boy. And my two year old sister can count to eight in English and say the words “tummy,” “okay,” “push-up,” and “nose”. And she participates in Incey Wincy Spider, though she seems most interested in the “wash the spider away” hand movement. Last week I got a huge box of English books from the charity Darian Book Aid in Connecticut. My students went crazy over them. If you’ve got some extra cash you’re looking to donate look them up on the web because they ship books for free to volunteers around the world. Also the Naruz holiday is coming up, which marks the beginning of spring. Shymkent is the center of festivities, so forty or fifty volunteers from around the country will come down to take it all in. Afterwards my training class has a week long training session in Almaty. So I’ve got a week and a half of vacation to look forward to at the end of March. I’m coming up on seven months in country (as a mental exercise I’ve told myself I will not start counting down my days left until I’m halfway through… which will be on 10/3/08 or so :), so far so good. Take care everyone, Love, Eric