More Pictures

Camp is over. We all had a great time. Here are a few more pictures. Tomorrow (saturday the 14th) I'll take the train back to my site in the south, Aksukent. Next week I'll have my teacher training seminar... hopefully there will be teachers and training, we'll see.


Two of the school's dancers in traditional Kazakh dress.


Besh Barmak, which means five fingers, because it is traditionally eaten without utensils. It is the national dish of the Kazakhs, and they are very proud of it. (The Uzbek national dish is polow, which is similar to fried rice) Besh Barmak consists of long wide noodles, potatoes, onions, and lots of meat with a broth poured over it. It is very tasty, and anytime you are a guest at a Kazakh's house there's no need to even ask what's for dinner, it's always Besh Barmak.


Roman was our Kazakh language teacher during our training in Almaty. He is an English teacher here in Alga. He is playing the Dombra, which is Kazakhstan's national instrument. The Dombra is a two-stringed instrument that is smaller than a guitar.


My group at the camp. These are eighth grade students. We were team Great Britain; and our main achievement during the last few days of camp was not finishing in last place on the ten team scoreboard. But all of them are good kids.


Me, sitting around during the closing ceremony. I've taken four or five hundred pictures over the last two weeks. I think a couple of them are even good.

Summer Camp

Girls I’ve been playing basketball with here. They’re pretty good, I started teaching them the pick and roll yesterday.

Some of our students, these girls are in 5^th grade. The group I teach is in 8^th, but we all do sports together.

Some volunteers and locals after playing basketball. (America won, if you’re wondering :)

Me trying to get an expression out of my local counterpart teacher for the two weeks I’m up here. She’s a little, uh, stoic.

Hi everyone, it’s summer here and I’m up in the northeast of the country at a kids camp. I’m in the town of Alga, which is near the city of Aktobe. This area is actually as close to Moscow as it is to Almaty. The north shows a lot more Russian influence and none of the Uzbek influence that I have around Aksu. The weather is a lot cooler, too; which feels really good. In fact, all the guys from the south including me did not bring a jacket (or anything long sleeve) up here because down in our sites it’s so warm right now.

There are ten volunteers here (most of whom I learned Kazakh with in Almaty last Fall) and we’re running a summer camp for a hundred local school kids in grades 5 to 8. In the morning each of us team teaches an English class with a local teacher. In the afternoons we play games and sports with the kids. We do quite a bit of work, but it’s good to be around all my friends again. And the kids make friendship bracelets for us, never got one of those working at a college with older kids. And the school has a basketball gym with two functional hoops. One of them is bent enough that I can dunk on it, which really impresses the kids. It feels good to play basketball again, though I seem to pull a different muscle every day (calf yesterday, neck today… while trying to dunk). There is also a ton of donated sports equipment that volunteers’ parents have sent from home, including enough baseball equipment for a whole team. We are warming the kids up to baseball; this week we’re just doing kick ball.

We’re staying at a hotel-like place just down the street from the school we’re working at. A daily hot shower is an amazing thing, I feel a little too clean actually. Alga is a little smaller than Aksu, but it’s really nice. A lot of volunteers get placed either in mid-sized cities or in po-dunk villages; I’m really happy with my site, though it is nice to get away for a bit. The large village is the best of both worlds: small enough you can walk to work and always see people you know, but big enough to have a bank and markets and stuff. After two weeks here I’ll head back down to Aksu (27 hour train ride) for my one week teacher training seminar. I’ve got five other volunteers coming in to town for that. We’ll (hopefully) be teaching 10 school teachers and 15 of my students (future teachers) new methodologies and giving them English speaking practice. I’ve planned a bunch of stuff so hopefully it will go well. I’m really excited for my girls to be able to talk with Americans other than Mr. Eric.

After that I’ll go to another kids camp in the Northeast of Kazakhstan, near Ust Kamenogorsk (I’m getting the grand tour of the 9^th largest country in the world). Then I may take a trip to Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan with a couple other volunteers, we’ll see. Taking the larger perspective, I’ve made it through the first of two school years here and one winter. Ahead of me is a summer of various non-work activities, a full school year, next summer, and a few months of the 2009 school year before I go home in November 2009. There are always little things that bug you, but it generally gets a little easier as things become more familiar. And doing this with a bunch of other people in other sites around the country is definitely a life saver. We can commiserate together and it really puts things in perspective: there’s always someone who has it worse than you. Anyways, that’s what I’m up to this summer.

I’ve got a little extra time, so I want to talk about trains in Kazakhstan. This country is huge and we generally don’t get paid enough to fly places on the (very good) domestic airline, Air Astana. So we take trains. For days at a time. The train system is actually pretty good. If there’s one thing the Soviets could do well it was lay heavy infrastructure and industry. They put tons of factories in tons of places which made no economic sense, then built the train tracks to move that stuff around. Around my oblast (state) I can take buses. If the trip is 12 hours or less then the bus is a little cheaper and you can buy the ticket 5 minutes before the thing leaves. The train is for longer trips (which can be up to forty hours depending on where you’re going).

There are two classes: Plazcart (economy) and Kupe (cabin). As you walk through a Plazcart car, the aisle is on the right third of the width of the car. The car is divided into open sections. In each section there are two bunks horizontally abutting the aisle on the right side. To the left is a small table and open area with two sets of two bunks facing each other. These bunks are perpendicular to the direction the train is going. Hopefully that makes some sense. Anyways, Plazcart is a communal experience. You talk with lots of random people and share food and tea with them. This can be good or bad. If you’re in the mood to talk it’s a good way to pass time, but it can be a little overwhelming. This is especially true for girls. Kazakh men can be very overbearing and obnoxious towards any female, especially those who are decent looking. I don’t really have that problem, so I can chat and share my life story and practice Kazakh a bit more freely. Gender roles. Old Kazakh women are fascinated by random foreigners who speak Kazakh but not Russian and don’t really look American. (I have about the same conversation four or five times on one train trip)

The second option: Kupe. This is a separate cabin with a door that closes. Each cabin has two sets of two bunks facing each other. The beds are bigger than Plazcart and there’s a little more privacy. It works well if you’re with a group of people. Examples of prices: Aksu (my site) to Alga (where I am now) is a 27 hour train ride. Plazcart (which I rode) costs about $22. I heard Kupe costs about $30 or $35.

The trains can sometimes be overbearingly hot. At other times a flood of people will cram into one car, apparently because the conductor on that car is selling seats that don’t exist on the spot. I’ve ended up crammed shoulder to shoulder in a hot car with a hundred of my closest friends. On top of that, everyone’s drinking hot tea. This is the only beverage. People just don’t drink things cold here; a lot of times lukewarm is the best you can hope for.

That’s all I have time for now, included are a few pictures from the last week. Take care and have a great summer.

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