These are three of my five sisters. From left to right, Umida (9th grade), Guzel (finished college last year, is now a teacher and part time university student), Malika (8th grade)
Guzel with some of her students
Walnuts from our trees. Last weekend my Dad was up in the tree knocking them down with a stick and my sisters and I ran around with buckets picking them up.
Medina, sister number five. I was trying to take pictures of the walnuts, but she was quite adament that her picture be taken.
Malika, Medina, and bear that has seen better days.
Hi everyone,
Happy early Halloween! I’m in Almaty now at the Peace Corps office, waiting to catch an overnight bus to go back to my site. I came here for four days or so to give a presentation at the Counterpart Conference for the new volunteers. Every year, new Peace Corps Volunteers come to Kazakhstan in late August. They are split into groups of ten or so and sent to villages around Almaty to study language and culture. In early October their sites in Kazakhstan are announced, with great fanfare followed by frantic searching on a map and maybe some help with pronunciation of said site. This may be followed by a sprint to the wall size map in the Peace Corps office that has mug shots of every volunteer in country. Anyways, this is followed by Counterpart Conference, which is this week. Each volunteer has a counterpart (local) teacher. In most cases they team teach together and the counterpart is the one to guide the volunteer through the intricacies of Kazakh bureaucracy (What they say: “does it have the Director’s stamp on it?” What they mean: “Before Muhammad ascended to Heaven, or Moses received the Ten Commandments, or Jesus walked on water, all three had approved documents in triplicate with their Director’s stamp on it”). This is a really nerve wracking time, when you meet your counterpart you don’t know what they’re going to be like, or even if they will know any English. Then the counterpart and the volunteer (still a trainee at this point, actually) visit their site together for one week. That’s this coming week. They choose a host family, get to know the area, and do administrative stuff. Then the volunteers go back to Almaty for a couple weeks to take tests and be sworn in, before returning to their sites for good in mid-November. That’s what I did last year.
So this year a whole new group is going through the same thing. It’s definitely a stressful time, once you get settled in at your site and make it through your first winter, everything seems a little calmer. So I gave a presentation and talked with all of the new trainees/volunteers. (They’re not actually volunteers until they’re sworn in on November 10, but it’s a little high school-ish to run around calling people the same age as you trainees, or at least I think so) The Kazakh language group was in the village of Shamelgan again this year, so I talked with those volunteers a lot about their experiences. I’m also getting one of those volunteers, i.e. a site-mate. I wasn’t really isolated or anything, but now I’ll have regular contact with another American. I talked with her a bunch and she’s really nice, so I’ll try to help out and explain things that last year I had no one to help me with. And I will try not to seem too weird either; it’s not me, it’s the circumstances, I swear. So in sum, the new volunteers all seem really cool and I hope they’ll all do well here.
One quick story that happened to me the other week. I was at site, in Aksukent, and I wanted to buy a pair of pants and maybe a shirt. The more stuff you buy locally, the more you look like a local. People here actually dress very nicely, I’m usually the shabbiest dressed at any occasion and my goal is to change that this year. So anyways, I go to this small, store-like place near the center of town, because their clothes are usually better quality than the stuff at the bazaar. I try on and pick out a pair of suit pants and a long sleeve shirt and buy them. They were both good quality, so together they cost $25 or $30. As I check out, they give me a coupon for some raffle they’re doing at the door. So I go over and pick one envelope from a bunch on a table. The guy opens it and says “whoa!” and shows it to a bunch of people. Apparently, I drew a good number. He walks over to a pile of prizes and comes back with a convection oven. It was nice, too, European made. So that was followed of course by the requisite 10 minute conversation “you’re not from around here are you… America! No way! Hey Johnny come over here, he’s from America!” Anyways, I walked out of there with new clothes and a cooking device. As I walked over to the bazaar to get my pants hemmed by the old Uzbek lady who knows me (she operates a foot pedal sewing machine and hems the pants in ten minutes in front of me, asking about my family in Kazakhstan and America the whole time) I was trying to think of what to do with the thing. I couldn’t use it and my family wasn’t going to need it; they only cook things traditionally (in big pots). The oven (normal or convection) doesn’t really figure in their cooking. So took it straight over to the neighbors, whose internet I use. They’re a little more modernized, so they reheat stuff and could probably use it. So I walked in, related the whole story, and said, “This is for you”. They freaked out like it was Christmas or something. Seriously. “A toaster! A toaster! Oh, it’s so wonderful!” Yes, toast is good. Maybe if we sent the North Koreans fifty of these things they might come clean. Or maybe they’d just take them apart and use them for centrifuges.
Love,
Eric
