Summer Update

Hey everyone,
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).

Update Coming Soon

Hi Everyone,
Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I just finished three weeks in the Northwest of Kazakhstan (Aktobe) helping with a summer camp. There were ten volunteers and a hundred kids from grades 5 to 7. I have a ton of pictures that I'll post eventually, but I won't have time to do that for a bit. I'm in Almaty right now; my family is flying in tomorrow. We'll travel around together for a month or so. After that (late July), I should have plenty of time to post pictures and update you on my comings and goings. In the mean time, I hope you're all having a great start to the summer.

What's Up? Camel...

Yep, it's a camel. Yep, it stinks.

Nauryz is a big holiday around here. It's the holiday of the Spring new year, and it goes back to ancient, pre-Islamic times. It's a big holiday in many countries in the region.
It's also a big holiday for Peace Corps volunteers in Kazakhstan. They all flock to Shymkent (near me) in the south for the holiday weekend. We've already thawed out down here, while there's still some snow left up north. Among other things, we took a trip down the road to a couple historic sites and also went to the local hippodrome to watch traditional horseback games.

The ruins of Otrar, which was an ancient silk road city. It ended up looking like this because some wise guy (must have been a neo-con) thought it was a good idea to execute two emissaries from Ghengiz Khan.

There are only 15 or so million people in this country for a reason. When you go west from Shymkent, this is what the landscape looks like. Sheep, crooked trees, and rusty road signs. The white stuff in the foreground is salt. At a mosque near Otrar, they had a well whose water supposedly has healing properties. Took a sip, tasted like the Dead Sea.

Turkestan. This is a mosque and mausoleum to Ahmed Yasawi, who was a famous philosopher. It was first built by Amir Temir (Tamerlane) with the help of artisans captured during wars. It's a UNESCO heritage site and a local place of pilgrimmage. If you go three times, it's supposed to be equivilant to making the Hajj to Mecca. Guess who's been three times?

The camels are there for the tourists, though on the way there you do see herds of them grazing out in the open.


Hippodrome
Saturday was the Turkestan trip and Sunday was the trip out to the hippodrome to watch every game you could think of involving a horse. These include horse races, wrestling while on horseback, a boy chases girl race (if he catches her he gets a kiss), a girl chases boy race (if she catches him she gets a voucher for one day free from house work (really she just whips him)), and the finale: Kokpar.

Wrestling while on horseback. In my humble opinion, it would be a helluva lot faster if they got off the horses and then wrestled. But after five minutes of tugging and the horses being dizzy from spinning in circles, someone (usually) wins.

More wrestling

The Kokpar horses, happy to be waiting in the rain.

The Kokpar players, happy to be waiting in the rain.

Horse races

Kokpar

So kokpar is played between two teams on horseback. The object is to get a goat carcass into a goal on the other team's end of the field. The lucky goat has its head chopped off, then the carcass is sewn up and dipped in some stuff which maybe keeps it from tearing apart. This sport is played around Central Asia under different names. In Afghanistan, I think it's called Buz Kashi, or something like that. Maybe this is what the Kaz synchronized swimming team was emulating during the Olympics.

The guy with the carcass puts his whip in his teeth and his leg over the goat with one hand holding it.

This is the goal at one end of the field. It's basically a big mud bowl. The two guys in the middle are each pulling on a leg. The guy in red is an official. I'm not sure what rules there are to enforce, but they give him a whistle.

It was raining and this horse slipped in the mud, but the rider held onto the goat until the horse got up.

The highlight was this Slam Dunk. The guy in white had a fast break, jumped his horse up onto the goal, dropped the goat in, and jumped off. Unsuccessfully tried to get his autograph. Couldn't get through the mob of screaming cheerleaders. Maybe next year.

Books

This is a picture of me with my fourth course students. The books they are holding are "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes" and "In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson" courtesy of my third grade teacher Mrs. Etcheverry and April Lane School in Yuba City. They changed the curriculum there and the books were just gathering dust. This is a really big help. The students all have their own grammar books, from which they do exerecises. But prior to this, in their classes titled "foreign literature", the teacher would have them memorize and recite the biographies of various authors. No actual reading took place. And I didn't realize until last week that most of the students have only ever read one full book in English, a simplified copy of the Wizard of Oz that they were assigned last year. We will read both books this semester. Every week I'll give them homework comprehension questions, discuss the previous week's reading, and give them some silent reading time. I appreciate the multi-cultural aspect as well; I've known this group of students since I got here and I'm still explaining "Americaness" to them again and again. So thanks for the help!

Some Dreams Are Small

Yesterday was Maslenitsa. It's a Russian holiday that involves scaring away the winter spirits, welcoming spring, and burning a scarecrow. Or something like that. My sister was one of the spring spirits who scare away the winter ones.

Everyone writes their wishes for the next year on little scraps of paper, which they stuff into the clothing of the scarecrow. I insisted on writing my wish in bad Russian, for fear that the spirits don't speak English.

Kids dance around in a circle while the thing goes up in flames.



Some Dreams Are Small

My town isn’t too far out in the boondocks. There are a decent amount of people who have met another foreigner. Or at least been to Almaty or Tashkent, the biggest cities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan respectively. But still, as a volunteer here, I basically am America to most of the people I meet. That means that no matter how much I try to blend in and adapt to the local culture, I am inherently interesting just because of where I come from. This gives me all kinds of unfair advantages compared to my colleagues. The administrators at the college who routinely yell at every other teacher just love me (this may have something to do with them not understanding me, don’t know). When my students practice teaching at local schools for a month, if I visit their classes and answer questions in Kazakh or Uzbek from their kids for ten minutes, it doubles the standing of my student with the other, older school teachers who oversee them. I routinely turn down offers to visit various schools in the area. Many offer to send a taxi and English teacher escort, to arrive when I say, and to bring me home whenever I need (this part often doesn’t pan out). Many times, the taxi shows up even if I turned down the invitation. I try very hard to do as many small favors as possible for other teachers, for my students, for my sisters. A lot of the local people have to hustle really hard to make a living, so I’m not too concerned that other people put money above all else. (Most teachers give private lessons because their salary isn’t enough, for example) Since Peace Corps gives me a decent salary, it’s my job to help people for free. Having said that, it often gets tiring dealing with the same people who keep asking for more and more until I have to say no. There are many times when I feel like I’m the only one around who’s doing things because it’s the right thing to do. Not because I want money or because someone ordered me to do it.

Keep all that in mind. I work at a college in an old factory office building on the third of four floors. It’s nice and Soviet and concrete, everything echoes, there’s not a heck of a lot of character to the place. I get a lot of visitors here. It’s almost become a place of pilgrimage. Local English teachers, university students from the city, school students, brothers of my students, children of other teachers, friends of my counterpart, or some dude who heard about me from his sister. At least someone from one of these categories shows up every other day while I’m at work. Some want private English tutoring (I don’t do that, not my job), some want help with lessons or other teaching stuff (I try to help, within reason), and some just want to talk (I try to do that, time permitting). But in the end I get pretty good at giving excuses or putting things off.

So keep that in mind too. Last week as I was walking in to teach a class, a local school teacher with student in tow showed up. As I said, this happens all the time. I told them I had a class, and if they would like to wait for an hour and twenty minutes, I could talk with them when my class finished. So I taught my class, forgot about them, walked out of the class, remembered them, and sat down in the next room to see what they wanted. I’m always a little wary of offering to do too much, mostly because it’s physically not possible to help everyone with everything. I recognized the teacher, though I didn’t (and still don’t) know her name. She comes to most of our teacher training seminars that we have every month. She’s probably in her forties, a little quiet, but obviously interested in improving her English. She brought with her a girl who was obviously her best student. The girl was in the 9th grade, had freckles, thick bottle cap-like glasses, and the posture that shy bookworms around the world have. The girl (who I hadn’t met before) was obviously terrified of me, but that’s just because she’d never met me. This may surprise you, but I’m not that intimidating once you start talking to me. The girl had prepared a list of questions for me in her notebook, from which she read, being to nervous not to look at the paper. As this progressed, I realized that the teacher had brought her best student here just to talk with me, not to ask me to do anything. (Don’t laugh, that doesn’t happen very often.) I answered all the questions and asked the girl a bunch of my own about her, cutting off the teacher when she tried to put words in the girl’s mouth. (I’m notorious around here for that. Teachers here are judged by the quality of their students; a bad student means a bad teacher. So whenever I visit schools, the teachers go to absurd lengths to plant answers in their student’s mouths. When I ask a student a question, I give the teacher a few warnings, then snap at them when they open their mouths. The student needs to force out their own answer.) I probably talked to the student and the teacher for a total of fifteen minutes. They seemed beyond satisfied, not at all caring that they had to wait an hour and a half for me, plus the journey to and from their home village (probably 30 minutes each way) just to talk for 15 minutes.

In my year and a half here, I’ve found that when local people speak English, their small vocabularies often limit the way they can express something. Every day, I hear a hundred different sentences that mean one thing, though if the speaker had the proper vocabulary, they would say it in a different way. Sometimes this can be hilarious (“Eric, you are a well-bred boy” / “Mr. Eric, I feel myself bad”) sometimes I don’t know what the hell the person’s trying to say. This was definitely not one of those times. The teacher wasn’t the best at English, but if she had known every word in Webster’s, she still would have said the same thing. As they got up to leave, she looked me in the eye, put her hand on my skinny arm and said,

“Thank you Eric. This was her dream.”

Goodbye snow

My sisters have gotten good enough at using my camera to get me in the middle of the picture. Trust me, this is a great success. (They're actually getting very artistic now.)

This is the "snatch Eric's camera when he's not looking" attempt. Not quick enough, yet.

Four things greater than all things are,
women and horses and power and war.

- Rudyard Kipling, "The Ballad of the King's Jest"

I'm reading "Charlie Wilson's War" right now. I've already seen the movie, but the book is much better. You gotta love in these kind of non-fiction books when they describe a person thusly: "He was stuck in a rut, in a dead end posting with no hope of doing anything meaningful. And then... there was a revolution in the country he was posted in! Hooray! Now people were trying to kill him, he was doing real work, and it just made the hell out of his career." Not sure I really want to have my career made in that sort of way. Though I'd rather read a book written by a Peace Corps volunteer from 2007-09 in Georgia than one in Kazakhstan.

Nothing is really new around here. I'm trying to organize a Valentine's play this week that includes Cupid wounding a boy with an arrow, we'll see how that works out. Almost all the snow has melted. It's a muddy mess right now, but it will be really pretty in a couple weeks. Hope everyone's doing well.

Statistics

After the last batch of pictures I put up, someone noted that my sisters and students don't look like they're all that poor. I am definitely not living in an African dirt hut. Kazakhstan was a part of the Soviet Union. Besides being totalitarian and inefficient, there were some things that the Soviet system did very well. Education was one of these, especially in technical fields. The current system has decayed a bit, but people who graduated under the Soviet system got a very good education. Also, Kazakhstan is a huge producer of wheat, minerals, and natural gas. The prices for all of those have been sky high recently, so a lot of money is (or was) flowing through the economy. Here are some international development statistics that might give you a better idea of where Kazakhstan stands compared to other countries.

Gross Domestic Product (PPP) Per Capita:

This is the dollar value of everything the country produces, divided by its population. Keep in mind that this does not tell you about inequality; oil and gas producing countries (like Kazakhstan) score very well on this measure while still having many poor people.

(These are IMF statistics from 2007, there are 179 countries in the list, and these numbers are adjusted for purchasing power parity, which tries to eliminate differences due to exchange rates)

#1 Qatar: $85,000 (oil and gas, doesn't mean everyone there is rich)

#6 United States: $45,700

#69 Kazakhstan: $10,830

#179 Zimbabwe: $188

To give you an idea, the ten countries ahead of Kazakhstan on the list include Turkey, Venezuela, Bulgaria, and Lebanon. The ten countries behind Kazakhstan include Iran, Costa Rica, Serbia, South Africa, and Brazil. Also, remember that in most of the middle income countries, wealth is concentrated in the big cities. For example, China is #100 ($5,300), but that would be hard to believe if you only hung out in Shanghai.


The UN uses a measure called a Human Development Indicator, which looks past the dollar values. It's a combination of GDP per capita, life expectancy, education levels, etc.

In HDI, Kazakhstan scores about the same, #71 in the world.


Hopefully that gives you an idea of where Kazakhstan is in the grand scheme of things. Also, don't worry about me being cold, cross fingers. This has been a really warm winter, there's barely any snow around. It's colder on the east coast in the U.S. than it is here.