Calf Alert

So I helped my family with some yard work in the back today... and apparently we have a 2 day old calf. So I did the math, and apparently the calf was born without my knowledge while I was at home. But that's cool, I didn't have any great desire to see all that birth fluid and other stuff anyways. So we have a 2 day old calf stumbling around the back trying to walk. That goes with the two other cows and three sheep we have. My little sister was running around yelling "teddy bear" in russian at the calf... close enough I guess.

More Concert Pictures

Here are two more pictures from the concert.

Concert pictures

Hi everyone,
Here are a couple pictures from a concert my school had last week. The top picture is of a group of Uzbek girls and the bottom one is of a group of Kazakh girls. Those are the traditional dresses that both of them wear. The Kazakhs dance more upright and gracefully, I guess. The
Uzbeks dance faster and with more of a beat. I also sang a song: Sublime's "What I Got"... I did not provide a translation :) Hope everyone's doing well. Love, Eric

It Feels Like California... minus some stuff

Since the last time I wrote, a decent amount has happened, at least by Kazakhstan’s standards. First off, the weather here has gotten really nice. Spring is here and flowers are blooming and birds are chirping. It actually feels a lot like Northern California for now. By June it’s supposed to be scorching, though, so I’ll enjoy the next couple months. My family’s garden is blooming, too. They definitely use every bit of available space. Uzbeks build their houses in a U-shape, with the house forming the fence and the garden in the middle with a courtyard and sitting areas. These houses are built for really hot weather; if you look at a map southern Kazakhstan (where I live) is the farthest north the Uzbeks live in large populations. Most live in Uzbekistan (duh, I know) where it gets even hotter, summer highs around 110 with no air conditioning. So Uzbek culture is built around really hot weather; they basically live outside in the summertime and take it easy in the afternoon. The only beverage they drink, though, is hot tea… we’ll see how that works in 100-degree heat.

The pictures above are of my family, when my friends came to visit (more later). I’m sitting with Baba (grandpa) and Mama (grandma) outside. They live with us because my father is the youngest son. This means that he keeps the house that his father built and his parents live with him. In this way, a son is basically a pension… which might be why I have five host sisters and no host brothers. Speaking of that, the other picture is with my youngest host sister Medina, who is two years old. She is very smart and not very disciplined. We read a few kids books in English, including Winnie the Pooh, Dora (I think that might be lost, though), and others. Among other things she can count to ten; knows hand, finger, nose, mouth, etc; and sings along with “incy, wincy spider.” I try to talk to her in complete English sentences, as opposed to the broken Kazakh I speak to everyone else. Anyways, in the picture she’s staring at the view screen of my friend’s camera. And I got a haircut this week, so I’m not quite as shaggy now.

Which leads me to my spring break of sorts. Naruz is a big holiday here celebrating the beginning of spring. It’s a holiday that goes back to pre-Islamic times in Iran and is widely celebrated all over the region. By this time the south of the country is just blooming while the north is still frozen. So many Peace Corps volunteers come from all over the country to Shymkent, which is the city thirty minutes from my town. There are probably about 130 or so volunteers in the entire country and almost 80 of them came for the festivities. Shymkent has a large hippodrome (track and field kinda thing) on the outskirts of the city. There’s a huge festival with lots of games and displays. The main event is Kokpar, which is basically polo (on horseback) but with a goat carcass instead of a ball. The head and legs are chopped off and the whole thing is sewn up like a big rugby ball. The riders have to lean over and grab the thing. It was interesting, not sure I’m gonna join the local Kokpar club though. There’s also horse racing and two other games: one where a boy on horseback chases a girl on horseback, he gets a kiss if he catches her and the other where a girl on horseback chases a boy on horseback and tries to whip him. Draw your own conclusions about gender roles here, bride-napping still happens here every now and then. Anyways, I know these festivities sound awesome, but I almost missed them because two other guys and I were distracted by the huge vats of free polow (fried rice) near the entrance. Polow is by far my favorite food here, my family cooks it every Thursday, and that heaping plateful of rice was probably better than the goat carcass games. During the days preceding and following Naruz we hung out in Shymkent, caught up with friends from training, and contributed to the economic well-being of Kazakhstan’s alcohol manufacturers. We also played basketball on an outdoor court. Along with being on the losing end of every game I played in (five or six), I also was winded afterwards, and I don’t have smoking as an excuse like some of the other guys here.

The best part of Naruz, though, was taking my friends out to my town, Aksukent. Aksu (which means white water) is the rayon center (county seat, I guess) and has about 40,000 people. It feels a lot smaller than that, but there is a nice square and a couple bazaars in the center of town. It is also two-thirds Uzbek. The Uzbeks in this area have lived here forever, the Soviets drew the borders here in the ‘20’s and they just ended up in Kazakhstan. In other parts of the country, many Uzbeks from Uzbekistan are poor migrant laborers, often in Kazakhstan illegally. So it was nice to introduce my friends to a little Uzbek culture. Five of the six people I trained with plus one other guy made a day trip to my town. We visited my college (class had ended but they met a few of my better students) and sat and had tea with my dad at our house. They were really envious of my situation, especially things that I never notice, like green things growing. (That doesn’t happen in a lot of places.) And spring is the nicest season here, the people who came from the north got on the train in a snowstorm and got off in 70 degree sunshine. So anyways, I can no longer complain to my friends about anything because they like my town. (And most of them live in apartments, while we have a nice house and a big garden, probably more like the stereotypical Peace Corps experience everyone imagines.) Overall, I had a really good extended weekend, especially catching up with my friends from training (we studied Kazakh together while most of the other volunteers learned Russian, so we’re all pretty close).

After Naruz, we took a 12 hour overnight bus (that’s really short by Kazakhstan’s standards, people can be on the train for 40 hours getting places) to Almaty. There our training class (all the volunteers of Kaz-19, those who are here from ’07 to ’09) had an in-service training. This was basically a week of meetings and trainings and discussions. It was probably also to make sure we haven’t gone crazy by ourselves at site (that is one thing I should mention: the huge amounts of time you have to think/daydream as a volunteer at site). And they gave us more shots, I think I’m done now but I’ve had more shots in the past seven months than I had in the previous ten years. Anyways, we stayed at a “sanatorium” (hotel with meals provided, basically) and had meetings for a week. The food was good, in a sign that I’m integrating here, when I got back to my town three different people told me my face looked fat and I took it as the compliment it was intended as. Really, I’ve stopped losing weight. I think I’m in the mid to upper 150’s, which is off my low of 148-150 pounds that I was at the end of training (I don’t know how the hell that happened, I didn’t even get deathly ill or anything). In the evenings we did things like eat Chinese food or go ice skating at the gorgeous outdoor Olympic skating rink (Medeo) in the hills above Almaty. The city looked a lot better than it did when we left training, living in a village or town for a while will do that. And I spent tons of my meager Peace Corps salary, I was really worried that I was saving too much living in the village anyways (there are five tiers to Peace Corps Kazakhstan’s pay scale, depending on the costs of each volunteer’s site. I’m tier 5, which is the lowest (my base pay is about $250 a month), but none of my friends in higher tiers were jumping to buy me beers. (Honestly, I save more by living in the village, people in tier 3 and 4 get squeezed; they need a raise.)

After a week of relaxing and sort of paying attention to whatever they were telling us, we all had to return to our sites. This led to one of the more depressing weeks I’ve had here, for no good reason other than being back at site with no one to talk to anymore. The funny thing about Peace Corps, though, is that over a hundred other people are simultaneously going through the same thing all around the country, which is reassuring, I guess. And I’m doing better now; in June and July some of my friends will host summer camps at their sites for their students. Other volunteers will come up, sleep on the host volunteer’s floor, be counselors at the camp, and avoid using vacation days because it’s work related travel. So hopefully I can spend most of June and July in the North, where the summers are a little cooler.

That’s all I have for now, everything’s cool in Kazakhstan. I hope you’re all doing well, drop me an e-mail if you have time (yceric32@gmail.com), I’m usually able to check it at least once a week. Take care, love, Eric

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

merry christmas and happy new year!

Hi everyone,

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I don’t really get internet access very often, so my updates will be few and far between, but everything’s going well. I’m in the far southern part of the country, so my weather is nothing to complain about compared to the rest of the country. But it is snowing, the temperatures now are only in the high 20’s Fahrenheit. By January it’ll probably get down closer to 0 Fahrenheit, but the rest of the country is already there. In the North the highs are at 5 or 10 degrees right now (and the sun doesn’t stay up very long up there). In the South it gets really hot in the summers, though.

My work is going fine. I teach English at a small college located in a run down Soviet era building. The college has a bunch of different majors; I only teach to those studying English. The students range from 16 to 20 years old and are almost all girls (82 out of 85 students). This is because all of my students will probably be English teachers in primary and secondary schools (even the ones who can’t speak any English) and teaching is a female job here. Many of the other volunteers around the country are teaching at secondary schools (6^th to 11^th grades) which brings different challenges than the ones I have. At the college, I teach classes in their 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th year of college. Each class has very good students and many who are not so good. (But discipline isn’t really a problem at this level like it would be with younger kids.) At the same time, out of secondary school the best students go to universities in the cities. A few of the better students at the college will too, but for the most part they’ll all stay in the village for most of their lives. In the 2^nd year course, you can’t tell that some of the students have ever studied English, but a couple are better than some in the 4^th course. The 3^rd course is generally decent. I only teach spoken English to the 2^nd and 3^rd courses, but I have to teach a bunch of different subjects to the 4^th course because they’re supposed to understand English at that point. These include phonetics (Mr. Eric: “Yeah, that sounds right. No, that doesn’t… and I don’t know why.”), history of the English language (directly from a book, never really read about the lexicology of Old English in my free time), foreign literature (simplified Sherlock Holmes stories, etc), and a class on America (We did political parties this week so I wrote a political opinion survey and assigned it for homework. I have a feeling they’re all gonna come back raging conservatives. Don’t think they do abortion around here.). The best five or six students (including one of my sisters) understand most of what I say and write on the board and they’ll translate to the rest of the students (even if you tell them not to). No student ever fails a class here, so there are quite a few students who don’t know anything, but it’s not something I’m stressing over. There are four other English teachers at the college. My counterpart is a guy who speaks really good English. He could be teaching at a university in the city but he wants to stay closer to home for now and gives private lessons on the side to compensate for the pay cut. The three other teachers are all women younger than me. Their English is good enough to teach from the book in class, hopefully it will get better as we talk more out of class. Two of them are married; one of them is pregnant and the other will be soon (she just got married). Oh, and a bunch of my students are married, too. I have successfully convinced them (I think) that Americans are weird and don’t get married until they’re 30. For a guy here that’s not unheard of, but if you’re a woman you’re spoiled meat if you’re 25 and single.

My host family is great. I have a grandma, a grandpa, mom, dad, and five host sisters. Grandparents always move in with their youngest son when they retire. Daughters leave the family and join their husband’s family. This is why it’s a bit of a crisis if you don’t have a son; it’s like a retirement. Maybe my parents can come back to the States with me. (My mom already introduces me to everyone literally: “This is my son who came from America”) I kind of look like the locals, too. Still working on the speaking part. The second oldest daughter is pretty good at English, she can explain anything I need help with. The third and fourth daughters are in 7^th and 8^th grade. They just started learning English; every other night or so we’ll sing songs off my laptop together. (Including Garth Brooks, the Dixie Chicks, Allison Krauss, and the Kingston Trio) The other week I heard one of them singing one of the Dixie Chicks songs to herself and I texted (with cellphone, that’s how we keep in touch) another volunteer here and said “chalk another one up for America”.

As for language learning, my family (and two-thirds of the village) is Uzbek. They all know Kazakh but speak Uzbek at home. The two are pretty close but there are definite differences. Once I learn a little bit more Kazakh I may switch over to Uzbek so I can actually understand more of what they’re saying. Because Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union and there is still a large Russian population here (especially in the North), everyone speaks Russian here. All Kazakhs and Uzbeks speak Kazakh (and the government’s trying to push it more), and only Uzbeks speak Uzbek. Hopefully that’s not too confusing; it makes sense when you’re here.

Last tidbit: the issue of national food. The Kazakh national food is Besh Barmak. It’s wide flat noodles on a large tray with chunks of meat on top with some soup broth poured over the whole thing. It’s pretty good, too. The Uzbek national food is Polow, which is basically fried rice. By far Polow is my favorite food here (we eat it every Friday). One of the first questions people ask about America is “What is your national food?”. You can either explain that we have many national foods because we’re all mixed, or you can just say “hamburgers!” I do some of both. So far the only thing I think I miss is Mexican food, but a leafy green salad may be next after a winter of preserved vegetables. And the only beverage I drink here is tea (black, though there is some green around too). I probably drink two or three pots per day; we’re talking every meal and anytime I sit down. This is an issue on weekends: I can’t sleep in past 9am because I have to get up to pee. (And the outhouse is way outback, you have to actually wake up to get out there.)

Also, I am the first Peace Corps volunteer at my college and I did not replace another volunteer in my village. This is good because I don’t get compared to anyone else or told how much my language sucks compared to someone who was here for two years. But there was a volunteer at a secondary school in town a couple years ago. He worked with a lot of the teachers in the surrounding region, many of whom I’ve met. This is really good because they’re all familiar with Peace Corps volunteers and what we can (and can’t) do.

In sum, I’m doing fine and I’m still in good spirits. It doesn’t really feel like Christmas here because there’s nothing around to remind you of it. Everyone has a celebration for new years, too. I miss you all and hopefully you’re all doing well. Family pictures are important here; I show everyone all of the extended family pictures I brought. Everyone seems to like all of the Chan/Jan cousins, especially (the numbers of cousins is about equal to any Uzbek or Kazakh family). Keep in touch, either through e-mails or letters. Even if I don’t respond it’s always great to get stuff. With that said, the rural postal system is questionable at best; for now I would say don’t send anything more valuable than a letter until I actually get the letter my parents sent a month ago. Take care, Love, Eric

pictures of my house in Shamalgan (in sunnier times)