The Peace Corps recently announced that they are pulling out of Kazakhstan. Needless to say, I'm very sad to hear that all of the wonderful work that volunteers were doing in Kazakhstan won't continue. I for one had many wonderful experiences in Kazakhstan and miss my friends and "family" there terribly. The Peace Corps hasn't explained why they are pulling their programs from Kazakhstan; they've only announced that all volunteers are leaving the country with no view at the present time to go back in the future. If you're interested in the "why" of it all, another volunteer's blog explains her theories thoroughly, and I generally agree with her (coming from the north of Kazakhstan, where there are a lot more "old guards" who are suspicious of any foreigners, I'm more inclined to blame the pullout on certain hostile elements in the government rather than safety issues.)

Here's an interesting news article you can read, featuring yours truly in a picture I'm not sure where they found.

A yurt in the middle of Astana, in front of one of the many modernist buildings that fill the capital city.

Beshbarmak, the national dish of Kazakhstan. The sheep's head to served to particularly honored guests.

At the New Year's celebration, dancing the Kazakhstani national dance, the "Kara Zhorga," which I will gladly perform for anyone when I get back, provided that you also stand up and make a fool of yourself with me.

At the Victory Day parade, my 6th grade students show off how they can march like soldiers in the Great Patriotic War.

Summer camp at my school. The teachers sit around and eat sunflower seeds while the children climb to the top of a 20-foot metal play structure and slide down the pole.

How to paint the ceiling: first, put two desks next to each other. Then, place a giant wooden sawhorse on top of them. Run a ladder between the top of the sawhorse and the railing at the top of the stairs, and put a board on top of the ladder to stand on. Pray you don't get vertigo.

This family has enough korpes (sleeping mats) for at least 20 guests, just in case.

How to employ your 5-year-old children: have them watch your sheep.

Who wouldn't be smiling if they were making a snowman in -30 degrees wearing only thin, wet mittens?

This was in my stairwell for 3 days.

Rolling lagman (like thick spaghetti) noodles by hand. It's just as hard as it sounds, and then some.

Lenin cares for the little children...and some very silly Peace Corps volunteers.

His balloon is taller than him!!

They're not French maid outfits, they're Kazakhstani school girl outfits. The jury's still out on whether they beat the American cap and gown.

Watch out, Millenium Falcon. Now you have to fight off not only the Empire, but also the entire Star Fleet as well!!

The giant six-story mall in Astana, the capital city. There's a beach on the sixth floor where you can go swimming.

Here's an anomaly: 4th graders smiling while dancing together. Don't they know anything about cooties?

It's a wild hedgehog!

My bedroom, after laundry day.

Coming home from the field.

I may be serving in Peace Corps Kazakhstan, but this summer I got to help at summer camps in Uzbekistan and Russia. Ok, maybe I didn't actually go to those countries, but I was within 10 miles of their respective borders. And I even got a text message from my phone company welcoming me to Uzbekistan!

As I was planning out my summer, it wasn’t my goal to go to the far south to help a volunteer with a summer camp, followed a week later by travel to the furthest north site in the entire Peace Corps. But the 35 hour train ride was totally worth it for the fascinating contrasts I was able to observe in the extreme ends of Kazakhstan.

Let's start with the obvious one: climate. Down south, we were boiling every day. A lethargic air overtook the entire village, and we all took naps in the middle of the afternoon. The landscape was scrubby steppe; even near the huge Syr Darya River there was only a mile or so of flooded swampland before the near-desert took over again.

Up in Siberia, however, everything was still green. The grass was knee high when it wasn't swallowed by birch forests. It even rained the first half of the week, and we woke up to 20 degrees F one morning. (Although by the end of the week the temperatures had soared to the low 80s.)

Language and ethnicity were also very different. On the Uzbek border, the people are mostly Kazakhs, with a fair number of Uzbeks mixed in. Uzbek plov, Kazakh beshbarbak, and Central Asian samsa dominate the menus. Despite being a desert, there are many villages built close together. And most of the people speak Kazakh all the time.

Up on the Russian border, however, there's a large mix of European nationalities: Russian, Ukrainian, Cossack, Armenian and German, in addition to the Kazakhs. In order to communicate with such a varied group of people, most people speak Russian with each other, although within their ethnic groups some people speak their native tongue. The food was Russian kotleti and gulash, although we did find some very bland plov. And despite being so apparently lush, the villages were built far apart. (I guess in the dead of winter it’s not quite so green.)

The main event of each week was, of course, the English camp that we were running for three hours a day. However, one other major event happened at each site that I think illustrates how different the cultures of the north and south are.

In the north, we attended a “Festival of Nationalities” where each of the different ethnic groups in the village did a short presentation about their culture. Groups danced, sang, put on a short play, showed off their national costumes, and brought out dishes of their national foods. (For some groups this included such interesting dishes as “boiled eggs” and “butter.”) The festival felt very Soviet to me. The Soviet policy, in my opinion, was to celebrate the superficial aspects of culture, such as music and costume, in order to give people a sense of individuality and prevent charges of cultural suppression, while at the same time subjugating all the deeper aspects of culture under the socialist agenda of equality and respect for authority. (And also a healthy dose of the superiority of Russian “high culture.”) The “Festival of Nationalities” followed the same agenda of unity together with superficial diversity as it celebrated each of the different “nationalities” of the people in the village. Talking to the German girls beforehand, it quickly became clear that they were much closer to a Russian/post-Soviet worldview than a German one. And I can only assume that the same applies to the other people there; the Soviet Union, at least the most “Russified” places in it, might have been an even better melting pot than America.

“Russification” hasn't got nearly as strong of a hold in southern Kazakhstan. Although there are certainly aspects of the Soviet culture there, Kazakhs in the south are much more traditional. This became clear one day when the volunteer who was hosting the camp got a phone call from her former host family. Her host sister, who was 16 years old, had been bridenapped. Bridenapping is one of the traditional ways that Kazakh men get themselves a wife. They grab the young girl they want to marry and take her to their home. Once the girl has spent the night at his house, whether anything happened between them or not, the two are considered married; at the very least, it would be incredibly shameful for the girl to leave and go back to her family, who will often refuse to take her back. To prevent the girl from running away before the night is over, often the grandmother will sleep in front of the door, since it is considered very terrible to step over an older person. Once the bridenapping is complete, the girl is considered a part of her new husband's family and she cannot leave.

Bridenapping is relatively common in south Kazakhstan (although 16 is younger than most bridenapped girls are.) Volunteers have been asked by their unmarried female students to walk them home because they are afraid of being stolen. However, in the north I have never heard of a bride being stolen. A volunteer from western Kazakhstan said that they sometimes have bridenappings, but usually the couple agrees beforehand because they can't afford the wedding; in this case, stealing a bride is more like a eloping.

Everyone at the camp felt terrible for the stolen girl, because, unless her new husband grants her special permission, she won't be able to attend college in the fall or do any of the other things she was planning for her life. There was nothing her family could do, however, because her mother was unmarried and therefore already in a tenuous social position in the community. The volunteer from that village has had people ask her if she is afraid of being bridenapped. She honestly replies, “no,” because she doesn't fear the social stigma of leaving and has no problem stepping over the grandmother in the doorway to do so. The fact that such ancient practices still exist in some parts of Kazakhstan, however, shows me just how different the traditional south is from the northern Kazakh village where I live.

Like many things I've experienced here in Kazakhstan, I didn’t even know it was happening until the last minute. One moment I was sitting in my room at seven in the evening, settling in to read The Hunger Games for the next three hours, and the next minute my host mother had stormed into my room announcing that we were going to see the camels in 10 minutes. I did the only reasonable thing I could do: I asked no questions, threw on a different pair of pants, grabbed my camera, and hurried into the living room to drink the obligatory cup of tea before we left.

That was when I got my explanation. Some distant friends in a nearby village own a herd of camels, and my host sister had run into the son at the store earlier that day. This had reminded my host mother that his family owes my family some favor from a long time ago, and she decided to cash in on that to give me and Michele, the other volunteer in my village, an interesting look at Kazakh culture. The bus left at 8pm, so I quickly called Michele, then trooped over to the bus stop with my sister, Aziza, and brother, Alisher.

A man was sitting in his car at the bus stop, which is at the top of a small hill, enjoying the view. Alisher chatted with him and asked if he didn't want to make some extra money and take us out to the village, but he declined. He did ask where we were from, motioning to Michele and I (even after two years I still stand out like a sore thumb!), and Alisher introduced us as relatives from America.

Eventually, another passenger came to the bus stop and told us that the bus had broken down and wouldn't be going today. So Alisher started bargaining with the man in the car in earnest. By “in earnest,” I don't mean that the process got any more heated or moved more quickly. Rather, it took a good 10 minutes for the two of them to come to a conclusion. First, Alisher asked the man how much money he wanted, and the man stated a ridiculous price. Alisher shook his head and then stood in silence for several minutes. Eventually, he offered to pay a little more than we would pay for the bus, but the man said he wasn't from around the area and just wanted to have a relaxing evening while on vacation. Several more minutes of silence ensued, all of us standing patiently around, then the man stated a price halfway in between. Alisher made one more plea for something slightly lower than the man's quote. After a minute or so of reflexion, he nodded and Alisher motioned us into the car.

The camels were totally worth the trip. The herd consisted of about five or seven full grown animals. The family who owned them was Kazakh, but they had lived in Uzbekistan for many years and brought their love of shubat, or fermented camel milk, back with them when they moved to northern Kazakhstan. The youngest babies are allowed to stay with their mothers, but after a certain age they are separated and put in a pen, from which they are only released three times a day when their mother is being milked. (This is an interesting contrast to horses, which have to be milked every two hours.) A person milks the camel from one side while the baby suckles on the other side, so it's important to milk a camel very fast so that you finish milking at the same time the baby finishes.

After watching a camel be milked, and petting the baby camels in the pen, we were invited inside to try some shubat. It's a thick, sour drink that is definitely an acquired taste, although I did manage to drink an entire cup. (Everyone else asked for seconds, though, even Michele, so I was still the “rude” guest.)

After the camels, our hosts took us on a tour of the nearby lake as the sun was setting. Finally, they fed us a full dinner before taking us home. I was in bed by midnight after another successful, completely unexpected Kazakhstani cultural experience.

Even though my family lives in a five-story apartment block in the middle of a mile-long stretch of identical five-story apartment blocks, we still have a family garden. Our patch of land is a good 15 minute walk from our home, and was assigned to our family when they were given their apartment by the government. Nearly everyone in Kazakhstan has some piece of ground where they can grow basic foodstuffs, and although not everyone bothers to tend to theirs, keeping a vegetable garden is very common. Fresh vegetables are expensive here, and growing your own is an economical solution. Also, the memory of empty store shelves during Perestroika prompts even well-to-do families to ensure a reliable source of food.

Most people use their gardens for the basics: mainly potatoes, with some onions, beets and carrots. People like my family, whose garden is far from their home, plant only potatoes because they need no watering or tending. In northern Kazakhstan, potatoes should be planted in mid-May. And so on one warm and sunny day my host mom, sister, and I headed out to the garden to prepare for next winter's stock of food. I called the new volunteer in my village, Michele, and invited her to come along for the “cultural” experience.

Luckily, we have some family friend with a rototiller, or something of the sort, and he had prepared the ground for us ahead of time. My host mom cut all the potatoes in half, and then began the long process of putting each of those in a hole in the ground. We planted the potatoes in rows, not mounds, and took break midway through for tea. This was definitely the best part of the afternoon. Kazakhs know how to make any work enjoyable. First, we sang songs while working, and told stories. Then, just as our backs were beginning to complain, my mom stopped us all and called us over for a picnic in the grass. She had brought along a samovar, a Russian contraption for boiling water. A samovar is a metal canister where you put water, and it has a pipe in the middle where burning twigs are put to heat up the water surrounding it. Once the water is hot, there's a little spout at the bottom of the samovar for you to fill up your tea cup. But “tea” never involves just tea; our picnic also included bread, sausage, cucumbers, cookies and candies.

After tea we finished planting our patch of potatoes. Unfortunately, I won't be around this fall to harvest them, although I did get to help last year. Last summer was especially dry, and so we only got a measly one and a half bags out of our entire garden. When you consider that we got 38 bags the year before, you realize why we didn't eat very many potatoes this last winter. This summer has already been quite wet, however, so we should have a large harvest this fall. Considering how much work planting those potatoes was, maybe I'm glad I won't be around to dig them out of the ground!

The last week of March another volunteer and I organized a teacher training in the city of Semey. Semey, formerly called Semeipalatinsk, is located in the northeastern corner of Kazakhstan. During the Soviet Union, a large area to the west of the city, known as the Polygon, was used as the center for the Soviet nuclear testing program. Some 460 nuclear bombs were exploded there from 1949 to 1989. As a result, the area has a high rate of genetic mutations, mental illness and cancer. Because there's still a lot of radiation in the area, no Peace Corps volunteers are stationed there.

However, there are still English teachers in Semey, and those English teachers still want to improve their English and their teaching skills. So Becky Johnson and I joined with the head of the local English Teachers' Association to organize a two-day training for teachers from the city. We invited two other volunteers, Denise Nyffeler and Roshan Devaraj, to join us. Together we hosted different sessions on the theme “New Methodologies in the English Lesson,” which was purposely vague so we could all teach whatever sessions we wanted to.

Nina Nikolaievna, on the far right, went all out to welcome us to her home and organize every logistical detail of the conference. She found a location to hold it, her school “Zhas Ulan Lyceum,” which is a bordering school for 5th-11th grade boys who are training to be future officers in the army. She got us an apartment to stay in, bought us lunch in a restaurant every day plus food for breakfast and dinner, and even arranged a driver to take us around the city. She also put together two excursions in the afternoons, and finally invited us over to her house for dinner on the last night. Needless to say, we all felt like we got the VIP treatment.

I gave sessions on “Fun and Easy Grammar Activities” and “Working with Ayapova.” Ayapova is our national abysmal textbook that needs all the help it can get. One 45-minute session doesn't even begin to correct all the problems that book has.

Roshan gave presentations on “Lesson Planning” and “Using Visual Aids in the Classroom.”

Denise's presentations were about “Setting High Expectations” and “Critical Thinking.”

Becky talked about “Teaching Vocabulary” and “Teaching Speaking.”

At the end of the training, the English Teachers' Association gave us beautiful books about Kazakh history. Like I said, VIP treatment!

Because of train schedules, we had to be in Semey for three days. Since the training was only two days, we spent the last day holding English clubs with the students from Nina's school. About 40 boys total came to two different sessions of two and a half hours each. Like I mentioned, these boys are training to be future officers. As a result, they have the coolest school uniforms I've ever seen.

Their uniforms for outside.

For the English clubs, we planned to play a lot of games, both to practice their English and their teamwork. As soon as we found out we would be working with teenage boys, we immediately tried to think of ways to tire them out so they couldn't cause as many problems. We did a big team competition, and one of the stations was how fast the team could do 30 pushups each. Standing there with my cellphone/stopwatch, I felt like an army captain, although I didn't yell as much.

Denise and Roshan demonstrate a teamwork game, where two people have to move three pop cans across the table to form a pyramid using only spaghetti and their mouths.

The boys race to complete the task.

For another game, the boys built a tower of cups and index cards. Then they had to pull out the index cards without touching the cups, but in such a way that the cups stacked neatly together.

Another station in the team competition: answering a crossword puzzle using Scrabble pieces.

Our standby game, and a guaranteed crowd pleaser: Uno! I can't begin to count how many times I've played Uno in this country.

Nina organized a couple of excursions around the city, and one of them was to the local art museum. It was a very nice museum, with several pieces from western Europe as well as a large collection of Russian and Kazakh artists. The local guide was excited to practice her English on us.

Our other excursion was to the Dostoevsky museum. Dostoevsky was exiled to Semey for 5 years. He met his first wife there, and they lived on the second story of this house during their first years of marriage, from 1857-1859. Now it's a museum.

Before the advent of Kazakh written literature in the mid-19th century, the Kazakh literary tradition was completely oral. Like the epics of Homer, which were told and retold at Greek parties for centuries before Homer committed them to paper, so also the epics of the Kazakhs were told for centuries sitting around the yurt. Although that oral cultural tradition is mostly gone, you can still catch glimpses of it in modern Kazakh culture.

For example, the Kazakhs love to recite poetry. At almost every event that students put on, groups of kids will come to the front and say poems from memory. Even at teachers' parties we have one man who, instead of singing a song as entertainment, will recite a long poem while a music track plays in the background. Kazakhs have a real ear for the lyricism of words, and when reciting poetry even the most shy students' voices will rise and fall with the rhythm of the lines.

Another bit of evidence about this oral past is the respect with which younger people listen to their elders as they lecture them about anything and everything. Often, the lecture will contain no new information, but will instead be a rehashing of some bit of Kazakh history or will explain a custom that all the listeners already know about. At first, I found these lectures rather annoying; why were these people wasting my time telling me something I already knew? But I think this is just part of the oral tradition. When you have no way of writing things down, you have to remember everything, and repetition is a great memory aid. By repeating information and stories many times, you ensure that you pass the communal knowledge on to your children.

When my host father lectures me about Kazakh traditions, beliefs or history, he doesn't expect me to interrupt with questions. And he definitely doesn't want me to share my opinion. (The liberal arts grad in me found this hard to stomach at first!) But I think most of his conversations are one-sided because we're not having a discussion about a new idea, but rather because he's passing on ancient knowledge to me. That knowledge needs to be kept intact for the next generation, not meddled with by my own individual whims.

When my parents came to visit, they got a taste of this lecturing. During a two-hour taxi ride into the city my host mom gave my real mom a full blown speech, talking for an hour and a half straight about everything from why the Kazakhs love President Nazarbaev and never speak ill or joke about him (because it's a Kazakh tradition to respect your elders) to why Kazakhs build their villages on rivers while Russians build theirs on lakes (because the rivers carry away the sewage.) My mom, not understanding that the expected response is to listen and nod, tried to insert her own observations as if she were having a discussion. But my host mom would have none of it, and just continued on telling my mother the things she needed to know.

Here's one more example of non-written culture. I was cooking a pumpkin pie for my host family for the third time and had the recipe out on the table. My host mom came in and told me that if I still needed a recipe after making a dish three times, then I would make a terrible housewife and no man would ever want to marry me. Well, at least I know how to scare away any potential suitors!

It seems like most major holidays have a special food associated with them: Thanksgiving and turkey, Christmas and cookies, Easter and eggs, Halloween and any form of candy. In Kazakhstan this trend continues, especially with the biggest holiday of the year, Nauryz. Nauryz is the Kazakh new year, and it celebrates the coming of spring. Nauryz has been traditionally celebrated all across Central Asia for millennium. In modern Kazakhstan, the official date of the new year is March 22.

Nauryz is celebrated like most holidays in Kazakhstan: people get together with families to eat giant feasts of food, concerts are put on in every city and town of any size, and there's a day or two off from work. Nauryz has several additional traditions. Usually, on top of staging a concert, every city and town will set up a yurt in the town square for people to look inside. The largest cities sometimes host a game of kokpar, the Kazakh national sport, which features two teams riding around on horseback and fighting over a headless goat carcass. And finally, there is the special food associated with Nauryz: Nauryz kozhe.

According to tradition, kozhe must be made from seven ingredients which symbolize the seven important attributes of man, such as strength, wisdom, and knowledge. These seven ingredients can vary, but typically include: airan (similar to buttermilk), kurt (a rock hard, very sharp cheese), meat, wheat, salt, rice, and raisins. The mixture turns into a rather soupy concoction which is halfway between a drink and something you need a spoon for. As a result, I've seen both methods of consumption. The first time I was served kozhe, mine was one of the last bowls dipped up, and so it was more on the “solid” side of the spectrum. What I got looked remarkably like mushy rice pudding, especially with the raisins mixed in. My first bite, though, quickly proved otherwise. As you can gather from the list of ingredients, kozhe has a very unique taste. But despite my aversion to the dish, most Kazakhs I talk to like it, so I guess you can acquire a taste for Nauryz kozhe.

Most of my encounters with kozhe happen at the Nauryz parties each class puts on at school during the week before Nauryz. At these parties, the kids dress up in traditional costume (or, often, throw a Kazakh hat on their head and call it good), sit around a low table covered with food, and watch their classmates perform songs and dances for about 45 minutes. Then, after the kids are done eating, any teachers and parents in the room descend on those tables and do a number on the leftovers. Although I mostly attend these parties to support my kids and get cute pictures of them in Kazakh hats, I don't mind the calorie-filled reward at the end.

Kozhe always makes an appearance at some time during the festivities. Sometimes, it is served during a break in the concert to each of the adults watching the show. This is how I got caught with several cups of it last year. I politely took a couple sips of the kozhe and then passed the nearly-full cup to the person sitting next to me. (There are rarely enough dishes, so only “honored” guests receive a serving. Luckily, nobody minds sharing a cup, and I never had any problem giving away my extra kozhe.) I was ready for the “honor” of kozhe this year, though. When I saw the jar come out, I quickly busied myself with taking lots of extra pictures of the children stuffing their faces, and so managed to avoid notice.

At other Nauryz parties, though, the kozhe comes out later, when the adults are gathered around the tables eating. Sometimes, all I had to do was avoid eye contact, and since the supply was limited and the demand was great, I prevented anyone from even offering me a cup. At one party, though, the jar of kozhe was huge, and the number of teachers sitting around the table smaller than normal. I was trying to decide if the half inch of orange juice remaining in the bottom of my cup was enough of an excuse, when I saw another teacher quickly polish her juice off and offer up her cup enthusiastically. Then, by a stroke of luck, the man sitting next to me offered me some Fanta. Eagerly I held out my glass. I couldn't possibly down an entire glass of Fanta to make way for kozhe. Thank goodness for limited dishes. I don't think the man realized that he was my savior, but I harbored a lot of gratitude to him getting me out of a possible disaster.

Well, I'm sure I could have taken a few polite sips. But at this point, I consider it a real triumph to have sampled all the pleasures of the Nauryz holiday...except the kozhe.

My Regional Manager, plus our “Programing and Training Officer” (basically, the second-in-command in Peace Corps Kazakhstan), recently came to my site to visit my school and do some other Peace Corps business in the area. They observed my lessons, and the PTO had his camera out trying to capture some action shots.

My PTO's lens helped show what's really going on in my classroom. For example, in almost every shot there's a child looking at the camera. I'm going to soothe my ego by saying that 3rd graders are easily distracted, and not that my lesson was incredibly boring. (Although we did spent a lot of time repeating the phrase “The ball is in the bag.” Not exactly Hollywood blockbuster material.) Also, I apparently make some very strange faces at the children when I ask them questions. I think I'm trying to look encouraging, but mostly I just look confused or about to fall asleep.

That face is definitely not “encouraging.” Maybe I'm just concentrating really hard to try to hear some form of “The ball is in the bag” in this boy's attempts to speak English. The other teacher is my counterpart, Dinara Mironovna.

I love this picture only because I look so completely confused. Maybe I've also forgotten the English word for “машина,” just like most of my students have. Or because I can't figure out what compelled me to color my car picture pink.

I think this student must be worried that I can't find my ball and he's trying to help me out. Because I can't imagine why else you would be so excited to tell me where that ball is. I wish this was a video, because then you could see just how excited my students get to answer questions. They stand up in their seats and wave their hands rapidly back and forth (I call it the “karate chop”) as they call out “Anna Rodgers, Anna Rodgers, Anna Rodgers” so fast that my PTO couldn't even understand what they were saying.

The lesson continues and we branch away from balls and bags. When my students will ever need to say “The doll is next to the elephant,” I have no idea, but they're prepared, just in case.

Time for new vocabulary. This is the part of the class where we repeat “tiger, tiger, tiger” at least 150 times.

And now we combine the grammar we were reviewing with the new vocabulary. “Where is the monkey?” “The monkey is in the tiger.” Apparently I agree with the tiger that he was a very tasty snack.

One of my 3rd grade classes. Please observe Nursulu, aka Godzilla.

I've gotten used to being special. In Kazakhstan, I don't have to do anything out of the ordinary and I stand out. In fact, even if I try to be completely ordinary, I still attract attention. When I first got here, that attention was flattering. Then, it was annoying. And now, it's just the status quo. It's so normal, in fact, that I didn't notice how much I'd come to expect it until I wasn't special anymore.

In January, I took a trip to visit an American friend in Thailand. Walking down the streets in downtown Bangkok, I saw as many foreign faces as I did Thai ones. On the one hand, foreigners stand out in Thailand even more than they do in Kazakhstan. In Thailand, if your face is white, you are not from around there. At least in Kazakhstan you can buy a local fur coat and hat and boots and convince yourself, as you shuffle down the street, that you look Russian. In reality, just the way you walk often sets you apart as a foreigner, and something is always a little wrong with your wardrobe. But you can at least think you're fitting in. In Thailand, there's no way to change the way your face looks; you are not Thai.

But, despite this stark feeling of standing out, in reality westerners in Thailand blend into the tourist landscape almost effortlessly, at least in the touristy places that I visited. Unlike in Kazakhstan, where foreigners, even in the big cities, are rare, it seemed like every other face in downtown Bangkok wasn't local. My white face was nothing special. Not interesting, or different, or annoying because I couldn't speak the language. Thais were completely unaware of me, because they'd seen a hundred others just like me that very morning.

I didn't realize how much I'd come to expect that other people saw me as special. The shopkeepers in Thailand treated me the same as everybody else, never asking where I was from or striking up a conversation about whether I liked Barak Obama or was planning to marry a local man. The people selling food were unimpressed with my paltry Thai skills, and never once told me I spoke perfect Thai after only saying, “Hello, how are you?” And the other tourists completely ignored me. This was the hardest part for me. At first, every time I saw a white face I wanted to go up and introduce myself and ask where that person was from and what they were doing there. Of course, this would have meant talking to every other person on the street, so I contained myself. And anyone I talked to probably wouldn't have been too happy about it; they'd come to Thailand to get the “Thai experience,” not spend the whole time talking to Americans. They could do that at home. But for me, expats are an exciting oddity. Thailand was closer to America, at least in terms of the population I passed on the street, than anywhere I'd been for the last year and a half.

I realized, as I blended into the tourist crowd, that I liked being different. In Kazakhstan, I don't have to do anything extra to get people to know that I exist. Just walking down the street, people say hello to me, people that I'm sure I've never seen before. On the bus or in the store people will strike up a conversation with me. Sometimes, this can be annoying, but when else am I going to have people so interested in everything I have to say? When the teachers from different schools in our region held a volleyball tournament, I was asked to play for our team. Even after my teammates figured out that I'm terrible at volleyball, they kept asking me to play, although my allotted position on the court was always the far back corner. But they made sure I always shook the opposing team's hands.

I often get extra honor, even though I'm younger and not in a position of authority. If someone has set out tea and cookies in the cafeteria for some holiday, I'm always invited. When I give a toast at a party, people always listen, and often ask for a song afterward. I was asked to sing in a concert with my fellow English teachers, and then, even though we sang quite terribly, we were asked to sing again at the next concert. I'm sure this was solely because of my minor-celebrity status. At festivals, people always shove food on me, and when I visit other schools I get the full tour, plus a free lunch in the cafeteria.

I've started to expect these little honors. When I heard about a wedding for one of the teachers at my school that I thought I wasn't invited to, I felt a little slighted until I realized it was just the wedding announcement. The actual party will be this summer, and I can only assume that I will be invited to that. My ego was soothed. When I invited another volunteer to my school to help with a teacher training, I expected that the cafeteria would serve her (and me, as her companion) all their best dishes for free. They did; but for a moment, as I wondered whether they would, I contemplated what my reaction would be if there were no cookies on the table.

The Peace Corps warns you that one of the most difficult transitions back to America is the fact that you no longer stand out in the crowd. When, for the hundredth time, someone asks me if I'm going to marry a Kazakh man, I look forward to this anonymity. But mostly, I realize, I'm going to find it difficult to have to earn the right to be called special.

I think I'm finally getting the hang of the Kazakh party.

It always follows a set routine, similar to a Kazakh wedding: eating salads, then the main dish, and then dessert with tea. While you're eating, everyone is called on to give a toast to whoever is being honored. There's normally dancing, singing, and often a game or two. Everyone leaves stuffed and happy.

In the beginning, one of the most intimidating aspects of a party was the toasts. Everyone has to give one, and you'd better bet that everyone would notice if the American didn't. Thankfully, we were taught the basics of giving toasts during Kazakh language training when we first arrived in country. I didn't pay much attention during that lesson, thinking, like a typical American, that toasts were rarely necessary. But I quickly learned otherwise, and studied up. Now I've got my few pat phrases in Kazakh down cold: “Congratulations with the holiday. I wish you health and happiness.” Saying those words is completely natural at this point. I can even improvise a little. Mostly, this involves listening to what everyone else is saying and copying them. I challenge myself to say one different thing each time. For the last party I went to, I managed two. I started with “Dear Patriots of our Country” (it was Veterans' Day for everyone who had served in the Soviet army) and then I threw in “I wish safety for your family” at the end.

I was really proud of that second phrase. So proud, in fact, that I'm bragging about it here on my blog. “Safety,” or “aman” in Kazakh, has been my word of the month. I first learned in when I was bored in the teachers' room one day, so I and a fellow English teacher started translating the meaning of as many Kazakh names as we could think of into English. One name, Amangeldy, we translated as “safely arrived.” (This name is often used for a baby that the parents have been trying for for a long time, and they're so happy that he finally came.) After that, I started hearing the word “aman” everywhere. Every day as I leave the house, my host dad tells me “aman bar,” or “go safely.” I guess I'd just never bothered trying to figure out what he meant before. And then, when I heard several other teachers wish the veterans something involving the words “family” and “aman,” I quickly translated what they meant and was so excited that I kept repeating the phrase in my head until it was my turn to give a toast. I think I messed it up a little, because everyone chuckled when I was done, but they also clapped, and I even got a couple of “amins” as if I'd just said a prayer.

Other parts of a party in Kazakhstan are also becoming second nature to me. The dancing gets easier and easier with practice; I can now sway from side to side without running into anyone, and sometimes my hands even get in on the action. Everyone has learned that I'm a terrible dancer, and I've perfected the ability to not make eye contact, so my celebrity status as “the American” normally only earns me one turn in the middle of the circle. This dance in the center is usually my fault because I looked up at the wrong time and made eye contact with the overly zealous librarian, who is always more than happy to pull a man and a woman into the middle and insist that they dance together.

I'm also getting better at singing; even avoiding eye contact doesn't stop people from insisting that I sing a solo following my toast. But I have some go-to songs tucked in my back pocket that make this easy: one Kazakh folk song (I'm still trying to get down the words to a second one) and, when the crowd insists on an English song, the theme from “Titanic.” This latter song is not my choice; inevitably, if the crowd is chanting for an English song, they're calling for “Titanic” in the next breath. I still don't have all the lyrics down, but luckily, neither do they, so I mumble my way through the first verse and everyone's happy. Sometimes, though, people will throw a curve ball at me. At my most recent party, since it was “Veterans' Day,” the former soldiers called for an army song. I'd spent the time leading up to my toast running through the “Titanic” lyrics in my head, just in case, so I was caught completely off guard. I wracked my brains, but the only song I could come up with was the one that starts “From the hills of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.” Unfortunately, these were the only lyrics to that song that I knew, and I was pretty sure even the non-English speakers would notice if I kept saying the same thing over and over again. Everyone was staring at me, and my face getting redder by the second, so I knew I had to start singing right away. And so, out came the American national anthem, which, I realized as I was singing, is a very long song. I had to keep increasing the tempo as I went; good thing there was no metronome. The irony of my choice didn't fail to hit me either, as I belted out the American national anthem on a holiday dedicated to the soldiers of the Soviet Union.

Kazakh parties still have some surprises up their sleeves.

Earlier I wrote a blog about how much fun I have listening to Kazakhstani English. To be fair, though, I should follow that up with some examples of my own misadventures in speaking Kazakh or Russian.

Like the other day, when I confused my question words and, instead of asking the school cook what was inside the pie, I asked her who was inside the pie. I guess Sweeney Todd really got to me.

Or the time I confused the Kazakh words for holiday and country, and wished my host mother a “very merry country.”

Then there was one afternoon, when my host father, brother and I were drinking tea after we'd stopped waiting and given up hope that my host mom would come home before evening. We were munching on cookies in silence when my host brother said something in Kazakh that I thought sounded like, “I'll bet mom will walk through the door any minute now.” I replied, “That's what always happens.” I earned myself a strange look, and then my brother said something to my dad that sounded like, “I don't think she understood me. Please translate.” And so my host father explained in Russian, “He was just commenting on how, when nobody's talking, you can hear everyone chewing.” That's what always happens.

Another day, I was in the teachers' room and someone asked me if I taught the 11th graders. “No,” I replied, “I don't teach the old students.” But apparently in Kazakh they are “big” students, not “old,” because a fit of laughter ensued that lasted for at least 10 minutes as everyone repeated my phrase several times. As far as I could gather, my choice of words is most closely approximated in English as “old fart.”

And it turned out to be an even bigger joke than I thought, because that night at home my host mother, who wasn't even in the room to hear me, quoted me to my host father. Which means my “old fart” joke was apparently hilarious enough to be repeated later, to who knows how many people around the school.

More often than not, though, I have no idea that I've said anything strange. My only hint is when people stare at me strangely, which they do all the time. Then I wrack my brains to try to remember what I just said, but the problem is, I can only remember what I wanted to say, and the words that I used to get there are completely lost in the fog of my poor language skills.

The trouble is, as my Russian and Kazakh slowly improve, my English worsens in direct proportion. Often, I find myself unable to think of the word I need in English, but it pops right into my head in Kazakh or Russian. And so I use the foreign equivalent, which works just fine as long as the person I'm talking with also speaks that language. But sometimes this can be a little dangerous. Like the time I couldn't remember the word for “guest,” and so I used the Russian equivalent: “gost.” As in, “Oh, I'm just a gost here.”

Or another day, when I couldn't bring to mind the word “choir,” so I used the Russian “hor” and told my fellow English teachers, “I'm going to practice with my hor children now.” It was only as I was walking out of the room that I burst out laughing at the realization of what I'd just said. The other teachers, however, only chuckled politely, which let me understand that they didn't get the joke. I feel like there are only two natural responses to such a sentence: to laugh uproariously, like I did, or to chuckle awkwardly and with a disapproving glint in your eye, because, really, that is a terrible thing to say. I think it's probably best that they didn't understand, or that disapproving glint would definitely have judged my laughter.

Riding the train in Kazakhstan is a great cross-section of the local populace. You never know just who you’ll end up sharing your space with. I’ve had experiences ranging from the enjoyable (a 14-year-old who was finally able to help me understand the Russian card game “Durak”) to the annoying (grandmothers pushing their unmarried grandsons on me) to the painful (drunk men who just won’t leave you alone.)

This last trip found me spending 27 hours surrounded by three very different “babushkas,” or grandmothers. They politely asked me about what I was doing in Kazakhstan, if I like it here, if I was married, and how much money I make; basically, the same questions everyone always asks. Then, they delved into their own conversations, leaving me to read my book in the corner and surreptitiously make completely biased and probably incorrect assumptions about them.

I started with their tea. Since we spent the whole time on the train either sleeping or drinking tea, you can understand that there was a lot of tea drinking going on. I formed a theory that each particular type of tea reflected on each (completely biased and probably incorrect) personality that I had formed for each woman. The old Kazakh babushka across from me drank traditional Kazakh tea from a traditional Kazakh keshe, or handle-less tea cup. She took a handful of granular black tea and in a separate mug brewed a batch of very strong tea. Then, in her keshe, she poured a small amount of milk, a little of the strong black tea, and then filled the rest of the cup with boiled water. She must have downed at least 4 or 5 cups in each sitting. From this, I determined that she is a traditional woman who likes to maintain her Kazakh culture; she preferred to speak Kazakh rather than Russian, and kept her headscarf on the whole time.

The other babushka across from me was a Russian woman probably in her early 60s. She had an industrial metal mug that was probably from the mid-1960s. In it, she sprinkled loose green tea leaves. I connected this to her constant references to healthy eating and eastern medicine and decided that she was a health nut who loved to give other people advice about alternative medicine options.

The third babushka didn’t look more than 40, although she said she had several grandchildren. She was wearing a fashionable jacket under her fur coat. Her tea was also green, but she drank it from a brightly colored mug with two cubes of sugar. All day long, she only ate 2 cups of yogurt and a packet of instant oatmeal, plus at least 10 pieces of chocolate. Therefore, I judged her to be a fashionable fad-dieter who really needs to read a good nutrition handbook – or to listen to the too-readily offered advice of her fellow green tea drinking companion.

The food that was spread out during our meals was also a great excuse to make snap judgments that fit nicely into my stereotypes. “Kazakh Babushka” ate exactly what a traditional Kazakh matriarch should eat: chunks of boiled meat with the fat still clinging to it, boiled potatoes and bread. “Medical-Advice Babushka,” on the other hand, proved a bit hypocritical in her meal options. For breakfast, she had an entire half of a meat and onion pie. For lunch, she downed bread with caviar, potato salad and some sausage. And for dinner, she enjoyed fake crab straight out of the package. She offered me some, but I politely refused. (I did eat a piece of Kazakh Babushka’s potatoes, though, after she insisted that I eat some at least 5 times.)

Their topics of conversation, when I bothered to listen (they talked the entire train ride, except, of course, when they were sleeping, which was a significant portion of the day), were just as interesting as their food choices. They got into a lively debate about which region of Kazakhstan has the best tasting potatoes, decidedly concluding that it must be the north. They complained about the number of foreigners in Moscow, especially how many blacks there are. And they complained for at least an hour straight about how expensive medicines are, and how everything was so much better during the Soviet times because everything was free.

I wonder what completely biased and probably incorrect judgments they made about me? You can try, if you want: I drank rooibos tea and ate sausage with bread plus my grandmother’s dried apples that I got in my last package from home. (I also offered these to my train mates as a sign of solidarity, but they were all much more interested in the Ziploc bag than they were in my food.)

It's a New Year's tradition in Kazakhstan (and I believe all of the former Soviet Union) to build a “Snow City” in the center of town. For the first time in a long time, our school is also building one in front of our building. They started the work on a day when it was -30 Celsius and school was canceled; I'm not sure why they chose such a frost-bitten day to work outside for several hours, but due to a combination of curiosity and a desire to integrate, I joined in. The work continued all week. Luckily, it got warmer. (-19 Celcius by Friday afternoon!)

The Snow City is basically a collection of carved snow figures, similar to very intricate, painted snowmen. You start by building a rectangular base made of packed snow.

Because the snow is so dry here, you pour water on it to make it stick together better.

If you want to be really high tech, you can use a watering can to get better water distribution.

The base must be flat on top and on the sides. Make sure everything is perfectly straight by filling in the holes with snow. (Wearing only your thin wool mittens. In spite of my attempt at “integration,” I refused to touch anything that cold. I volunteered to cart buckets of water out from the bathroom in the school instead.)

Once the base layer is finished, you can start a second tier.

Another way to make that second layer – just pile it on. And keep sprinkling water to make it all stick together – this time, using a broom to spread it around.

Now we begin to carve the shapes. Mix snow and water together to create your “plaster.” Then grit your teeth, ignore the fact that it's -30 outside, and sculpt away.

Instead of building out of snow, you can also build out of ice blocks. This is better for the more intricately carved sections, especially heads.

We're ready to carve the head of our snake from a couple of stacked ice blocks!

To carve the ice blocks, you use an ax...very carefully.

After everything is carved, then you paint your creation.

Oops, I think I broke his nose!

A bull and a horse in various stages of completion.

When the Snow City was finished, we had to take senior pictures in front of every single animal. I'll spare you the details and just show the highlights. Because there are now 11 statues out in front of my school, of varying beauty and skill. This is my favorite statue of all. I think he could brighten the most dreary January day. I'll put this theory to the test next month.

Our finished snake! (I helped carry out two buckets of water to make the "plaster," so I consider myself a part of the snake-team.) I especially like his forked tongue.

Everyone loves to take senior pictures! Ainur, my fellow English teacher who could be a model if she wanted to, poses with her friend the snow leopard.

An annual tradition in Kazakhstani schools, and across the former Soviet Union, is the Yolka (Christmas Tree) party. The party is to celebrate the New Year, which is the big winter holiday that was created by the atheist communist party to replace the Christian Christmas. It brings together all the non-religious aspects of the western Christmas, adds some elements from Russian culture, and then, just for fun, has everyone dress up like it is Halloween.

"Children join hands and dance around the New Years tree while a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle croons a Kazakh pop song"

New Years still features a decorated evergreen tree. It also has a legendary man in a large coat and white beard who brings presents to children, although “Ayaz Ata” (in Kazakh, “Ded Moroz” in Russian, “Grandfather Frost” in English) has to walk everywhere using his giant staff – no reindeer to help him! He does have a human helper, though, straight out of Russian folklore: “Aksha Kar,” (in Kazakh, “Snegorechka” in Russian, “Snow Maiden” in English.) Aksha Kar was originally the heroine of a Russian fairy tale. An old, childless couple desperately wished for a little girl of their own, and one day they woke to find a snowgirl come alive. Things were wonderful until spring brought warm weather and the macabre end of the old couple's happiness. Somehow, this vivified snowgirl underwent a Pinocchio-like transformation and became Ayaz Ata's helper as he delivers gifts every New Year's Eve. (Or to Yolka parties scheduled the last week of school.)

"Why is it that Ayaz Ata has three times as much food in front of him as Snegorechka? Then again, considering that he pulled down his beard and ate at least 10 pieces of candy, while Snegorechka didn't open her mouth once, I guess it makes sense."

Our school hosts Yolka parties for every grade, in groups of two; that is, first and second graders celebrate together, then third and fourth graders, etc. The parties rotate through the decorated gym, two a day for several hours all week long. These parties are sacrosanct; even though temperatures on Monday were -30 degrees, which means that classes up through 9th grade should be canceled, the 5th-6th grade and 7th-8th grade Yolkas still went forward. Considering how much work those girls put into hairspraying and glittering their hair for their costumes, it really would be cruel to postpone.

Every Yolka party is attended by Ayaz Ata and Aksha Kar, usually played by older students. Inevitably, in the 9th-11th grade Yolka, Aksha Kar is played by a boy, which never fails to draw a giant laugh from the audience. The students have to summon Ayaz Ata by chanting his name loudly over and over. In he sweeps, his shoulder bag loaded with candy which he throws to the children in greeting. Throughout the party, whenever anyone wins a game or does a performance, they are rewarded with a handful of candy from Ayaz Ata.

Other characters can also make an appearance at the Yolka. Because each party is organized by the classroom teachers of the grades that are participating, there are differences in the program. But at different times throughout the week I met a tiger (because, according the Chinese calendar, 2010 was the year of the tiger), a rabbit (for 2011), and Baba Yaga, the evil witch character from Russian fairy tales. For one party my host mom played a very convincing Baba Yaga, making me slightly concerned about accepting any candy from her that night at dinner. Did she want to roast and eat me?

"The evil Russian witch, Baba Yaga"

And of course, all the children are dressed up too. Halloween is fun in the States, but there's something about seeing batman, ninjas, musketeers and tigers dancing around a Christmas tree that makes for a very entertaining spectacle. I discovered, though, that there is a certain age line (between 5th and 6th grade) where children stop wearing adorable costumes and start wearing party dresses covered in tinsel (for the girls) or regular clothes with a mask on top of their head (for the boys.)

Tinsel plays an integral role in the Yolka. After crossing the age line, it become absolutely essential that you wear a garland of tinsel around your neck. The resulting shininess-factor in the room tends to overload the pleasure sensors in the brain and dull the senses, therefore ensuring an enjoyable holiday party no matter what the reality. At least, that's my theory.

The Yolka party, aside from enjoying the spectacle of your classmates dressed up as tinsel-bedecked pirates, basically consists of song and dance performances alongside silly games organized by the teachers. The performances are remarkably similar: an “Eastern” dance performed by girls in belly-baring costumes, a Kazakh dance in glitter-covered costumes, and some form of boys cross-dressing, be it a ballet dance, a fashion show, or a song. There are always multiple songs sung to blaring pop soundtracks and a handful of poems which you know the students only recited for the handful of candy Ayaz Ata will give them. Also popular are “American” style hip hop dances. These were rather sloppily costumed until I came along and set the record straight. At the beginning of the year, some of my students came up to me and asked me what kind of traditional clothes Americans wear. What do you say to that question? It’s like the question, “What’s America’s national dish?” Hamburgers? Hot dogs? Pizza? As far as our “national costume” goes, I told the girls we wear jeans and t-shirts. The message must have sunk in, because since that day every American hip hop dance that has been performed featured the girls wearing jeans and white t-shirts. I’m glad I get to leave a legacy to my school.

At the end of the Yolka, for the younger children, it's traditional to join hands and circle the tree in the middle of the room while singing a song. The party ends with Ayaz Ata delivering his presents to the children. These are usually bags of candy and a small stuffed animal, although a couple of seventh grade classes were given mugs. Mugs? I came away with a handful of candy thrown at me by a very generous Ayaz Ata.

"Ayaz Ata works hard to get rid of all the candy in his bag"

The English textbook that my school uses is so terrible that I spend a great deal of my time just trying to figure out exactly what I'm supposed to be teaching on any given day. The themes repeat every year (“Having Fun,” then “Healthy Living,” then “How Many or How Much,” and finally some variation of “Animals.”) The grammar is confusing. The vocabulary is useless. The exercises are boring and rarely helpful. And I'm pretty sure that the editors spent a grand total of 17 minutes proofreading each book, but only 14 minutes on the 6th grade book, which is particularly full of typos.

Recently in the 7th grade we had the topic “The Green World.” For this, the students had to learn useful vocabulary like “spine” and “giant,” and then read a text about saguaro cacti (which informed them that saguaros grow to over 50 feet in height.) After the reading, they had to answer a series of questions, which included what is quite possibly the best question you could ever ask at a cocktail party: “Have you ever read a poem about a saguaro cactus?” How do you fill one and a half hours with a lesson like this?

That was when I came up with a very daring idea. I decided to take a chance, teach the kids the names of some trees (including “saguaro cactus,” which is apparently an honorary member of the tree family), and then have them write poems about those trees, presumably so that, if any one ever asks them if they've read a poem about a birch tree, they can answer “yes” with confidence. The prospect of asking my students to write poems was daunting, considering that most of them can barely string two sentences together about what they like to do. Therefore, I was amazed when they got very excited about the assignment and churned out some surprisingly fluent poems – although I'm not nominating any of them for a Pulitzer. Below are a few of my favorites, unedited and in their original “poetic” forms.

“Saguaro Cactus” by 7b class

The biggest saguaro cactus

The evergreen cactus

Saguaro cactus – king of plants

It grows in Arizona

Now you have a definitive answer when someone asks you whether you've ever read a poem about a saguaro cactus.

“Apple Tree” by Asel

Very spicy apple tree

Very beautiful apple tree

When there is autumn

it falls down

I believe she's referring to the apples and not the tree itself, although there is a little confusion regarding her use of pronouns.

“Birch” (a riddle) by Dilyara

Color is white, green

and little black.

It grows in forest.

It's not a crab.

This rhymes quite nicely if you read it with a Kazakh accent.

“Christmas Tree” by Rizat and Kumustamshi

Christmas tree, Christmas tree

Evergreen, beautiful tree

It is very wonderful.

It makes us cheerful.

“Christmas Tree” by Aktoty

The holiday Christmas tree

It's light and big.

We are decorate it

and it will be beautiful tree.

“Oak” by Dana

Oak, oak, oak

You very big tree

Oak, oak, oak

You me love tree

“Apple Tree” by Aigul

The green apple tree

The sweet apple tree

The beautiful flower it is

I love you red apple

A True Story

(Sung to the tune of “Hush, Little Baby, Don't Say a Word.”)

Going to work one Saturday morning

I go to catch the boarding school bus

If that boarding school bus don't come

I'll wait and catch the city bus

And if that city bus don't arrive

I'll call a taxi and tell them to hurry

And if that taxi breaks down on the way

I'll have to call another taxi

I'm thankful that taxi paid for regular maintenance

so I don't have to walk an hour in the mud

Or, The Fall BallA yearly tradition at Kazakhstani schools is the Fall Ball. Although the name seems to imply a dance similar in importance to the American Homecoming tradition, in actuality the event bears almost no resemblance to anything American students participate in. Rather than a school dance, the Fall Ball is a competition, either between different classes (I guess in that way it remotely resembles Homecoming Week) or between girls from different classes. My school followed the latter pattern, and each class sent a representative to compete for the honor of receiving a special certificate of a different color than the ones they gave everybody else.

My school hosted two separate Fall Balls: one for the fifth through seventh graders, and another for the eighth through eleventh graders. I was asked to serve on the jury for both events. The jury is a highly respected institution in a Kazakhstani school. Its function is approximately equivalent to that of the panel of judges on American Idol, except that the jury in Kazakhstan has all the power and the audience doesn't get to call in to vote. There are juries for just about every special event at our school, from the New Year's celebration to classroom competitions. Usually, the jury is composed of whatever three teachers are standing in the teachers' room 15 minutes before the competition, and who are unable to think of an excuse about why they shouldn't have to sit through the whole two hour competition and actually pay attention. At least, that's how I ended up on the Fall Ball jury.

The Fall Balls for both the younger and older students were run in almost the same way, so I'll just describe them as one event. It started with the competing girls from each class parading out on stage wearing ball gowns whose elegance (not to mention amount of glitter) would put any prom dress to shame. I should note that, when I refer to a class, I don't mean the entire grade, but rather each group of students within the grade that take all of their lessons together. At my school, there are between two and three classes per grade; for example, in 7th grade we have three classes: 7a, 7b, and 7v, named after the Russian alphabet. Therefore, at the younger students' Fall Ball there were seven girls competing, while the older students had eight girls vying to be the winner. (I'd like to call the winner the Queen of the Fall Ball, but I don't think they use that term here.)

Once the girls were seated in a row onstage, the competition began. There were various tasks that they had to do, and for each task they received a score between one and five. My job, as a member of the jury, was to award these scores, which would be combined with my fellow jury members' evaluations and totaled to determine the winner. It didn't take long to convince me that I was probably not the best choice for a fair and honest jury member. The very first task for the girls was to recite a poem they had written introducing themselves. Since I hardly understood a word of their Kazakh, I was reduced to judging the competition based solely on facial expression and, most of all, copying the scores that the other judges gave them.

The range of tasks was varied. In addition to the poem, the girls had to solve riddles (I based my score on the reaction of the MCs as to whether they were correct or not) and perform a talent, ala the Miss America pageant. (Actually, a beauty pageant is probably the closest equivalent I can think of to this competition, except there was no bathing suit segment.) Most of the girls sang a song or danced for their talent, although one girl recited some poetry. There were also several tasks based around the theme of “autumn”: the girls had to see how many onions they could throw into a garbage can, and also who could peel and chop two potatoes and one onion the fastest. That last task was definitely the easiest for me to judge; a race to peel vegetables, despite any cultural objections to the implications about what girls are best at, still has a clear winner: the girl who puts her knife down first.

In the end, it didn't matter that I used unreliable and arbitrary methods to assign scores. When it came time to add everything up, one of my fellow jury members took her pen and crossed out each girl's total, saying that we should just ignore the numbers. She then proceeded to circle the names of her favorite students, and she and the other jury member debated the relative merits of each based on I-know-not-what criteria. I nodded along, relieved that my lack of language ability and cultural understanding had not affected the judging in any way, since my opinion was completely ignored. Thankfully, every girl up on that stage was a model student and deserving of the different colored certificate, so it didn't matter to me who received it. They all got a pretty certificate anyway. And even though I didn't get a certificate, I still have the self-satisfaction that I have served my civic duty on a jury.

Actually, this is take four of my Kazakh wedding guest appearances, making the number of weddings I've attended in Kazakhstan in one year equal to the total number of weddings I attended in the US in 24 years. Do people get married more over here? No, they just have huge weddings where they invite every member of the family, however distant. This particular wedding was for my host father's sister's son. At first, I was misinformed and believed it was for my host father's sister's aunt's son – and really, that's not that unbelievable.

Rethinking my former statement, though, I think people actually do get married more over here. Not only is it completely unacceptable to live together without being married, you are also expected to get married the instant you find out the girl is pregnant (though this only applied to one of the weddings I've been to.) And most importantly, every Kazakh couple must have two weddings: one thrown by the bride's family, and one by the groom's family. So I suppose, considering this, there are more than two times as many weddings in Kazakhstan as there are in America. That still doesn't account for my 1:24 ratio, though.

Only my host sister, Aziza, and I went to this wedding as representatives of our family. We had to take the only bus per day to the small village where the event was held, and I was a little worried that when we arrived an hour late the salads would all be gone. The salads are, for me, the highlight of any party, both because I never understand what people are saying, so I can't enjoy the conversation, and because I don't get vegetables at home, so the vitamins and green color are, for me, far more desirable than chocolate, which I often have for breakfast. But I needn't have worried about missing the salads. Like every other wedding I've been to here, this one didn't start until two hours after the scheduled time. So Aziza and I hung out for a while with the bride, groom and wedding party at someone's house (no moratorium here on seeing the bride in her wedding dress before the wedding), then went to the cafeteria, where the dancing had already started, presumably to help pass the time until we got to eat the salads.

For a more detailed description of the stages of a Kazakh wedding, you can refer back to my earlier blog entry on the subject. Basically, the wedding goes like this: the bride and groom enter and stand on a white cloth while the MC sings a song and people put money on a plate on the ground (to pay the MC, not the newlyweds). Then, the groom lifts the bride's veil from her face, and the official ceremony is over. Everyone retires to eat salads, followed by beshfarmak, followed (much later in the evening) by tea and dessert. While everyone is eating, groups of people are called up to the microphone to give toasts and, often, sing a short song. In between toasts, the MC sings while people often get up to dance. Between the beshbarmak and the tea, everyone, of all ages, dances for an hour or two in a very spirited manner.

Although I have begun to lose some of my American-novelty in my home town, I was still a pretty exciting party trick for the hosts in this small village to show off to their relatives. Luckily, I've perfected my toasts since the first wedding I went to, and was able to wish the bride and groom “health, happiness, and love” quite fluently and without turning bright red. I even remembered their names! And, of course, after the toast I had to sing a song. I fell back on my old standby, the only Kazakh song I can remember all of the words to, “Kozimning Karasi.” I've managed to memorize the second verse, making me feel a bit more deserving of the praise people are always heaping on me for “speaking fluent Kazakh.” I'm going to have to work up a new song soon, though, as “Kozimning” has already made the rounds of parties and weddings multiple times, and I'm afraid people may be starting to notice that I'm a one-trick pony. I was well received there, though, and was given a strand of shiny Mardi Gras beads for the effort.

Every party in Kazakhstan, from weddings to teachers' gatherings to birthday parties, features a lengthy discoteca. I've discovered a pattern that I always follow while dancing, a inadvertent schedule of sorts. I spend the first 30 minutes or so warming up, letting go of my inhibitions and getting in the mood of the music. Then I have a really fun time dancing for about 20 minutes. The final 10 minutes I spend wondering when tea will finally be served and I can escape from this madness.

As an interesting side note, I discovered that if you stay at the party long enough, this pattern repeats itself, but on fast forward. I've always left after tea, normally at about 1 am. However, this wedding started later than usual, so tea wasn't until 2:30am, and then, because Aziza and I were spending the night with relatives in the village, we stayed until the very end of the party. The disco continued until 4:30 for the the benefit of the 15 or 20 hearty souls who stuck around to the very end. I warmed up for 15 minutes, then only enjoyed about 10 minutes of it before having hallucinations about my bed.

My main source of dance moves during these discos is observation and imitation of those around me. My favorite dancer of the night to watch was an older gentleman who danced exactly as I picture Wayne Brady dancing: tight on the top and loose on the bottom. Try as I might, though, I can't imagine myself ever mastering this technique; I'm currently working on swaying in time to the music while moving my arms at the same time. This is really all that's expected for the majority of bouncy pop songs that the MC/DJ spins. I got to enjoy a new song selection that I hadn't heard before: The Rasputin Song. I really enjoyed the informative history lesson that it provided for its listeners:

“Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine.”

The Rasputin Song, along with Wayne Brady and the Mardi Gras beads, managed to eclipse even the venerable salads as the highlights of the evening. When I was composing this entry in my head during tea, I had included on that list of highlights “lack of creepy drunk men.” There were, of course, plenty of drunk men, but none of them could really be defined as “disturbingly creepy,” so I felt that that was a major triumph for this wedding. I should have knocked on some wood, though, because after tea, as the older, non-creepy drunks were leaving, I was forced to join the young people's circle, and my list of highlights lost a bullet point.

At the wedding there was a group of six young, unmarried men who were all friends of the groom. There were also a few young single women, but they had a tendency to disappear for several songs on end, leaving Aziza and I alone on the dance floor with a bunch of very enthusiastic partners. At some point during the evening, I acquired a self-appointed protector, Galim. (Pronounced just like Tolkien's Gollum, even down to the hard G at the beginning that comes from the back of the throat like a cough.) I and Samwise probably had similar feelings about our “helpers.” Galim was just as drunk as the men he claimed to be protecting me from, and had the same tendency to stand too close while asking for my phone number. In his role as protector, he asked several times throughout the evening whether I was being bothered by his friends, and offered to “take care of it” for me. Since I didn't really want to find out how drunk Kazakh men take care of things, I declined his offers and said I was fine.

The party at the cafeteria eventually broke up at 5am, but that didn't spell the end of the partying. Still drunk, the friends of the newlyweds headed back to a relative's house to continue drinking. Unfortunately, this was also the house where Aziza and I were spending the night before catching our bus home at 9am. I lay on the floor, tucked a pillow under my head, and pretended to sleep while the toasts continued behind me. When I got up at 7:30, I required Galim's services again, as the very tired but still enthusiastic bachelors gathered around me, kissed my hand more times than I can count, and asked numerous questions, many of them numerous times, about what I was doing in Kazakhstan.

I do have to admit, though, that even as I pretended to sleep in a room full drunk, raucous men (and some women too), or gave my hand to someone to be kissed for the umpteenth time, I never felt particularly unsafe. A bit annoyed, yes, and more than a little uncomfortable and unsure of how to respond. But I never worried that someone would do something wrong (other than make complete idiots of themselves, of course.) No one ever touched or grabbed me inappropriately, and I felt that their intentions, even muddled by 12 straight hours of vodka shots, were innocent. That didn't earn them a spot on the highlights list, but it did keep the wedding from being a total disaster.

In fact, the most unsafe I felt during the whole getaway was not with those drunk men, but when I went to the “toilet.” I don't even feel right using that word, because this bathroom didn't even feature a hole in the ground; rather, you went in an empty shed, did your business on the floor, and then threw your paper on a pile of bird feathers and rubbish in the corner. But keeping in mind my ardent suitors, I felt just as unsafe following Aziza's suggestion to just pee in the yard and leave my paper for someone to clean up later. At least the shed had a door. I used a colossal dose of hand sanitizer after my trip there, in an attempt to ward off the numerous diseases my tired mind could picture multiplying in that shed. On my Kazakhstan highlights list: the indoor toilet at my host family's house.

My host brother Alisher speaks very good English. This is even more remarkable when you consider that he is completely self taught. He told me he started learning English because he loved The Beatles and wanted to understand their lyrics. Now he has moved on to Nirvana and dreams of a pilgrimage to Seattle, but in the meantime he has continued to study English to the point where he speaks better than some of the English teachers I've met. He likes to use big words especially, such as “notwithstanding,” which he pulled out of the blue once and made me stop the conversation to figure out exactly what that word means. One day I complimented him on how many English words he knew, and asked him if it was easy for him to memorize new words.

“When I'm in a good mood, yes,” he replied. “But it is much harder when I am stoned.”

We soon figured out that he actually meant “sad,” but he didn't want to use such a simple word. (Once he knew what the word “stoned” meant, he didn't want to use that word either.) We came up with “down,” “blue,” and “depressed” as better alternatives.

My host Dad Oral has significantly less English ability than Alisher. He studied German in school, so basically he can read the letters, and he constantly makes guesses about how to say things in English based on the word in German. (He's close a surprisingly large number of times.)

Sometimes he likes to practice his reading skills by reading the English brand names on the tv ads. The other day, he was throwing around the word “kotex.”

“What does 'kotex' mean?” he asked me in Russian.

“Umm, that's probably not a word you need to worry about knowing,” I replied, smothering a laugh.

“Is it a combination of the words 'ko' and 'tex'?” he persisted.

I couldn't smother it anymore, and a giggle broke through. “Definitely not a word you need to worry about.”

He spent the next day, though, watching the tv intently for more kotex ads so he could try to figure out the mystery of what the word meant. I must admit, I was quite unhelpful, since I did not really want to describe the meaning to him, especially since I don't know a lot of those vocabulary words and would have to use charades. Not something I wanted to pantomime for my host dad and brother.

My 3rd grade students know about as much English as my host dad. We were playing a game in class one day where I threw a ball to different students and they all had to say an English word they knew. They had already covered “grandmother” and “brother,” “dog” and “cat,” “teacher” and “pupil,” and they were beginning to run out of ideas. I threw the ball to little Shon and he said the first English word that popped into his head: “Anna Rodgers!”

No matter where you are in the world, eventually your life takes on a feeling of routine and normality, if only to save your brain from the constant stress of having to think about every detail of your daily life. They told us that this was part of the reason that we were so tired during our first few months in Kazakhstan; our brains had to spend lots of energy thinking about actions that previously took almost no thought at all, like figuring out how to brush your teeth without running water or how to buy an apple from the store. But your brain adapts and you find a sense of normalcy and, eventually, even boredom in life abroad.

It is during this boredom, extenuated by isolation from friends and the outside world, that I have begun to latch onto the small things to add interest to my life. This can be as simple as getting excited about the fact that we have cabbage soup rather than potato soup for dinner (cabbage has more vitamins, right?) or being able to carry on a five minute conversation with my fellow teachers about how the bus was actually on time today. It also means that I am currently very excited about a blister I got while washing clothes. (Obviously inordinately excited, since I'm writing a blog about it for the whole world to read. But I see my blister as a type of battle scar, worth bragging about.) It's on the top of my palm on my left hand, right where I have to ring everything out after each of three rinses before hanging the clothes up to dry. This blister has prevented me from washing my black tights, therefore reducing me to wearing nylons instead, which leaves me in deathly fear of getting a run in them so I walk extra slowly across any patches of gravel and rocks, almost making me miss the bus this morning. But I don't mind, because I'm very excited about my blister!

I'm also overly excited about my new haircut. Most of the styles sported around my school are varying degrees of the fem-mullet, so I put off getting my hair cut for much too long because of my deathly fear of emerging from the barber's with my own mullet nightmare. Finally, I gathered up my courage, practiced the motions I would make to the hairdresser showing her how I didn't want a mullet countless times in front of the mirror, and then went to one of the most expensive beauty salons in the nearby city. (I'm nowhere near brave enough to face my village's barbers yet.) Considering the year's worth of buildup to this moment, it's no surprise that I emerged from the salon completely ecstatic about my new bob. Granted, it was a little lopsided, and I had trim it up myself, but I don't have a mullet, so I'm satisfied.

And you can just imagine the excitement I felt when I actually understood what they were saying on the news. Russian newscasters speak even faster than their American counterparts, and use all sorts of educated vocabulary, so I usually rely on the pictures to tell me what's going on in the world. These pictures are invariably of a giant flood somewhere in the world or a row of shiny John Deere combines cutting swaths of golden wheat. So, understandably, my knowledge of world events is slightly skewed. It's reached the point where I often don't even listen anymore, because, after straining to understand the rapidly spoken Russian, it turns out that they're just talking about the newest shipment of tractors from America. But recently, there's been a lot of news coverage about the education system in Kazakhstan. And since anything about schools deals directly with my life, I decided to listen closely. And, how exciting, I understood what they were talking about! In the report they interviewed the Minister of Education and Learning, and he was talking about how Kazakhstan has the best school system in the world. He also mentioned how they were going to increase the prestige of teachers by raising their salaries by 25%, although the government has been promising to do this since last year and it hasn't happened yet. I hope the funds come through this year.

So it's these little things that I've been turning to lately for entertainment and a sense of accomplishment. I wonder what it says about a person if they feel proud about a blister or a non-mullet hair cut?

Before the Russians came to Kazakhstan, Kazakhs didn't have family names or patronymics. They had only their first name and the name of their tribe. In order to identify their tribe, people usually gave the name of a famous person who came from their tribe. Kazakhs only adopted last names and patronymics when the Russians made them. Therefore, most Kazakhs have Russian-sounding last names, or else, like my host family (Setkasim), the first name of some great-grandfather turned into a last name. A patronymic, by the way, is a way to identify a person's father. Russians and Kazakhs don't have middle names, just patronymics. For example, if I were Russian, I would take my father's name (Jerry) and add “ovna” because I'm a girl: Anna Jerryovna Rodgers. (It sounds even more hilarious to Kazakhs, since they've never heard the name Jerry before.) My brother, on the other hand, would add “ovich” since he's a boy: Chris Jerryovich Rodgers. People here think it's really neat that I get to have two names, my first and middle name, but they don't really understand the point. Not that I do, either, so I can't really explain it to them. The lack of last names never stopped Kazakhs from keeping track of intricate genealogies. In fact, all Kazakhs should memorize the names of their ancestors back 7 generations. My host father made my host brother memorize this when he was little. My host father also claims that he can recite his ancestors back 20 generations, and he takes great pride in this boast. Of course, this lineage only follows the male line. So when a woman marries, she must memorize the genealogy of her husband's family so that she can teach it to her children. My host sister, who is very artistic, recently drew a family tree. She traced her family back through the male line, including all brothers and their children, to create a beautiful graphic of all the people that are considered her relatives. As you can see from the picture, that's a lot of people! And down at the roots of the tree are written the three ancient peoples that Kazakhs claim to be descended from: the Sakans, Sythians, and Huns.

I wrote a blog earlier about my “adaptation” to Kazakh customs. I got a rare opportunity to further my observations on this subject when I spent a week this summer with 14 other Americans running an English camp in a Kazakh village. You'd think that when you put 15 Americans alone in an apartment together, we would act like Americans. But I guess almost a year in Kazakhstan can change you, even when you're not trying to “fit in.”

For example, this apartment we were in was very small: a kitchen, a bathroom, and one main living room. (We did have another one room apartment, though, where half of us were able to spend the night.) However, other than a slight bit of concern about the ability to fit that many bodies in a prone position on the floor at night (we weren't sure we would have the other apartment until the day before everybody showed up), nobody was phased by the “crowding.” In fact, it was rather cozy.

Even the one bathroom was no big problem. When several of us arrived a day early, the hostess, Laura, told us with excitement that we could take a shower (and by shower, I mean bucket bath) right then because the water was on. (The water only came on for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening.) But even after our hot and sweaty taxi ride, we shrugged her off. “Nah, we took a bath yesterday morning. We feel pretty clean, so we won't bother today.” And then we wore the same outfit the next day, and the day after that, and considered wearing it again the day after that, but admitted that four days in 100 degree weather was pushing it.

The one bathroom presented other issues. Of course, we knew the right questions to ask about these issues. It didn't even cross anyone's mind to query whether you could flush the toilet paper; of course that's what the trash can is for. But someone did remember to ask Laura if we could flush the toilet at all. The answer, by the way, was “yes,” using a bucket of water taken from the tub that we filled with water each morning.

And when the bathroom door didn't lock, no big deal. Of course, that didn't mean that we actually knocked before opening it. It just meant that when we opened the door and someone was in there, it was no big deal, you just closed the door again and waited your turn, no blushing or embarrassment required.

By the middle of the week, some of us did start to feel a little grimy. And someone had an amazing solution for this problem: banya! You'd think that a bunch of self-conscious Americans wouldn't be comfortable hanging out in a sauna naked together, but you'd be wrong. The excitement about the banya trip was palatable, and there was no awkwardness or hesitation as we stripped in the changing room. Someone even proposed a break for hot tea and cookies, but there wasn't enough time because we all wanted to sit in the steam room for so long.

Food was another area where we sometimes acted more like Kazakhs than Americans. Many of us wanted hot tea after every meal, even when it was 100 degrees outside. Laura didn't have enough dishes for everyone to have their own plate, so we all just ate out of the dish in the middle and drank out of the same bottle. We didn't even ask if we could, we just grabbed the bottle and chugged. And when it came time to do dishes, rinsing them off with cold water while running your hand over them was completely sufficient.

Gender rolls were firmly established in the Kazakh tradition; even the most ardent feminists in the room said nothing. When a heavy table needed to be carried up several flights of stairs, all the boys were asked to help. But when it was time to sweep and dust the house, the girls were the ones who stood up.

We spent long hours sitting around and talking. No one had a watch, and often we had somewhere to be, but no one was overly concerned. If we were a little late (which we were most of the time), the people we were meeting would probably be late too (which they usually were.)

Even the phrases of “Kazakhstani English” that we used sounded normal to us. I remember when we first arrived in country and some older volunteers asked us if you could say some phrase in English. We wondered, how could they forget their own language? But at this point, “tasty” comes out much more easily than “delicious,” and I cannot for the life of me think of another way to say “the nature.” In fact, when we were playing Catchphrase, someone gave the clue “the nature,” and the only guess we could think of was “trees.” (The answer, by the way, was “environment.”)

But here's one very American thing we did do: we made this list of all the Kazakh things we did.

I spent 10 days this summer in the woods at

“Lager Chaika,” or Camp Seagull. It was an overnight camp for kids from ages 8-16, on the shores of a lake in a National Recreation Area. They still call it Pioneersky Lager after the Pioneers, the Soviet youth organization (similar to the Boy and Girl Scouts) who used to run the camps. Before I went, I was a little nervous because all I knew was the day that I was supposed to show up, the name of the camp, and the name of the camp director. Luckily, somebody had told them I was coming, and I got to stay there for free while helping out however I could. At first, they weren't sure quite what to do with me, and I would have one main daily task such as to lead one 10 minute game or to make sure the 11-12 year old girls didn't make too much noise during the afternoon nap. But by the end I was filling in for counselors when they were sick or needed to run errands. People there, both staff and campers, were really friendly and I had a great time.

The cabin where I stayed. There was a little room to the left of the main door that I had to myself. My neighbors were the 13-14 year old boys. I played thumb wars and uno with them, and answered all their questions about what kinds of cars they drive in America and whether I'd seen any movie stars, so we got along well.

Inside the boys' cabin. There were about 20 beds in each cabin, and 11 cabins, although none were completely full. There were about 150 kids total at the camp, divided into five “otradi,” or groups, by age. Each otrad had about 15 boys and 15 girls, and one boy counselor and one girl counselor.

The main path between the cabins.

Neat “portable” teeter totter that the kids could play on.

Every morning after breakfast the kids had an hour to clean up their cabin and pick up trash around the camp.

Kibutsu Emblem The first day one of the activities was to make an emblem on the main square to represent your otrad. The emblems were made out of pinecones, moss, rocks and sand. This is the emblem for my neighbors, the 13-14 year old. Their otrad was named “Kibutsu,” which I think was supposed to be Chinese. Each otrad also had a “devis,” or chant, that extolled the virtues of the otrad and that they chanted while marching around the camp or at the morning meeting. For example, there was an otrad called “MTS” after a Russian cell phone service provider. Their devis was: We are mobile children from the MTS team. MTS is a higher class. There's no one better than us in the world. (Only, of course, the devis is in meter and rhymes in the Russian.)

Campers gathered outside the dining hall, waiting to eat one of their five meals of the day: breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, and second dinner. We ate a lot of kasha (porridge.) Even for lunch. And a lot of kutleti, or meatballs.

The 4th otrad eating lunch.

On the shore of our lake, with the “Two Brothers” mountains/hills in the background. Everyday the kids got to go swimming in the lake, except for when it was too cold. But they went swimming in a very regimented fashion. Each otrad had a certain time they could go swimming. They would come at that time and line up one the beach for inspection by the sports director/lifeguard. He would blow his whistle, and all the kids would run into the water. They had about 10 minutes for swimming, and they would all have to get out again, dry off in the sun, and then march back to their cabin as a group to change.

One of our first days at camp, everyone climbed to the top of a nearby hill, one of the “Three Sisters,” to get a better view of the Two Brothers and the surrounding forest. There was a legend associated with these names that the camp director told the kids before the hike, but I didn't understand it well enough to repeat it back to you. Everything at the camp was in Russian, which was great for improving my language skills but not great for my knowing what was going on most of the time.

At the top of most mountains, or at the end of just about every hike here in Kazakhstan, there is a wishing tree. You tie a piece of cloth on the tree and make a wish. Unfortunately, the kids didn't have any pieces of cloth with them, so they took the plastic labels off their water bottles and tied those on instead.

A few days later we climbed to the top of one of the Two Brothers. The ascent approached rock climbing at certain points. Thankfully, we took a less treacherous route back down.

View from one of the brothers to the other, with the valley floor below.

At the top of the mountain with two of the counselors, Sveta and Dias.

Counselor Roma made friends with this little lizard, called a Yaisheritsa. He was trying to release it into the forest, but it liked him too much to say goodbye. If you can see, the end of its tail is a different color. That's because it can lose the end of it's tail to escape a predator.

My last day at camp we went into the woods to pick berries. The only berries ripe were these tiny little strawberries called “zemliniki.” They were delicious, but tiny. I decided they were too miniscule to merit the effort of collecting them, so I just ate everything I picked immediately. Yum!

As part of the Soviet legacy, Kazakhstan is significantly more

centralized than the US. This means both politically and in their

collective thinking. For example, the nightly news on the non-cable

tv channels is always about all of Kazakhstan. I think about prime

time news at home, where channels devote most of their time to local

stories, with national news coming on later in the evening. But

watching the news with my host family the other night, I noted reports

about a new school opening in Kostanai, northern Kazakhstan, a

conference in Almaty, southern Kazakhstan, and a kymyz tasting

festival in Semei, eastern Kazakhstan.When people talk to me about American politics over here, they

normally bring up one of three things. Sometimes they mention how

much they like Obama. Sometimes they talk about how much they

disliked Bush. And sometimes they ask me if we really have different

laws in each of our states. This must be standard school curriculum

here, because a number of people have asked me about this, and it's

always a fascinating subject to them. Here, each "oblast," like a

state, is basically in charge of carrying out the laws of the central

government in Astana, not making its own rules. They can't imagine

how a country can hold together when each state can make its own laws.On a completely unrelated note, my new nickname is "Obama."

Apparently we strongly resemble each other in some way that I was

hitherto unaware of, because as I was riding the train with a friend

the conductor kept calling me, and only me, "Obama." And he

introduced me to other passengers as "Obama." Unfortunately, the

other passengers didn't believe him. Maybe the resemblance isn't so

strong after all.And on another completely unrelated note, my parents are coming to

visit soon (yay!) so I won't be able to update my blog for awhile.

Stay tuned for summer news in the fall.

Why is it that Americans always have to know why?

A while ago, every volunteer had to travel to their nearest city to meet the Peace Corps Medical Assistant and get a shot. For just one shot, we had to miss an entire day of school. We were upset, but understanding. A few days before we had to convene, though, we all got a call from one of the two PC doctors, telling us that the shot probably wouldn't happen in the afternoon as planned, but later in the evening, forcing those of us from the villages to have to find lodgings for the night. Then she hung up to call the next person.

To a man, we volunteers were angry. Now, we had to miss two days of work, plus either pay for a hotel room (very expensive!) or cram 10 or so village volunteers into one older volunteer's tiny city apartment. “Why?” we asked each other in a furious round of text messaging.

The next evening, we received another call from the other PC doctor. It was a bit repetitive and unnecessary; he simply wanted to reiterate what we'd already heard, that we might not be able to get our shots until late evening. But then he went on to explain: the Medical Assistant was coming down from a city in the north that same day, and she might not be able to get a bus, and so they'd purchased a train ticket for her, but the train didn't get in until 10 pm.

It was funny what that little explanation did. It didn't change any of the facts of the case. We were still inconvenienced in our schedules and our sleeping arrangements. Nothing was materially better. But suddenly, everyone was pacified. There was a perfectly good reason for having to get the shot later, we recognized it, and the angry text messages stopped. We just wanted to know why.

Kazakhstanis are not like Americans in this regard. They do not have a need to know why; if something is, it just is. I have asked my counterpart on numerous occasions, after receiving an edict from the director or zavuch of our school, “why do we have to do that?” She looks at me funny, and sometimes tries to offer an explanation, but more often than not just shrugs her shoulders. And so I shrug my shoulders too, and concede that if the zavuch says so, we'd better do it, and my counterpart breathes a sigh of relief that her crazy, questioning American is learning to just let things be.

Anna's side note: Asking “Why?” is, I think, one of the main reasons why America has less corruption in their government than Kazakhstan does. When you have to explain why you needed something, you're less likely to just take it or build it or spend your time on it.

I sometimes get to wondering how much I've been able to assimilate and integrate into the Kazakhstani culture. I know I'll always stand out like a sore thumb, the “foreigner” (people usually assume I'm German) who draws surreptitious stares wherever she goes. This isn't for lack of trying to blend in. I've tried to adapt my facial expression on the street, hiding my American smile behind a bland, uninterested look as I wait for the bus. I've also tried to wear the appropriate clothes, although I know on this front I fail miserably, because I refuse to wear high heals or see-through lace shirts (with a leopard print bra!) or so many rhinestones I look like a disco ball. Nonetheless, I find Kazakhstani fashion a lot less shocking than I did when I first came here. Some of the dresses and sweaters that I probably would have joked about before I now think are pretty cute. Not that I'd wear them, but they aren't hideous anymore. Does that equal a step toward adaptation?

I also find myself making small steps toward cultural assimilation. For example, as I talked about in an earlier blog entry, here it's considered rude to set your cup down on the table too loudly. When I was out at a cafe recently for a Kazakh friend's birthday, I felt my nerves jar a little when one girl set her glass abruptly down on the table. “How ru...,” I thought, then caught myself and smiled a little at the cultural thinking I'd just unconsciously been engaging in.

Another time, I was standing in my director's office for a meeting with several other teachers. The room was not crowded, but nonetheless one of the other teachers was pressed up against my arm as if we were sardined on a bus. For a full five minutes, I didn't feel as if my personal space was being invaded, and I had no inclination to step away, because frankly I didn't even notice anything strange. (Kazakhs have a much smaller personal bubble than Americans do.) It was only after the director had kept droning on about something I didn't understand, and I began looking around to entertain myself, that I noticed a full five feet of space on the other side of the teacher and began to wonder why she didn't move over to occupy the free space. But since the room wasn't hot and I didn't want to seem rude, I stayed where I was and was less uncomfortable than I was curious about my own belated observation.

Food is becoming less of an issue as well. I'm beginning to wonder how you could possibly be hospitable to guests if you don't have tea in front of them within five minutes of them entering your house. And who ever thought that cookies for breakfast was strange?

And then there's mental assimilation. I noticed how this was happening to me when I was looking through some pictures of a friend from America having fun with her boyfriend. I felt a strange disconnection from my friend, who's 24 and the same age as me, as the two of them made silly faces at the camera and documented their trip to the bowling alley. Such behavior is abnormal in Kazakhstan, and as I looked at the photos I thought it just a little abnormal too. Over here, when a couple goes on a date, they might walk in the park or sit on a bench, but they always know that people are watching and making assumptions, so they don't do anything too crazy. The dating period is fun, certainly, but there's a definite end in sight: marriage. My friend, at 24, is pushing the boundary of being an old maid, which is definitely a bad thing. She should be working to secure her man as soon as possible so she can start her family. “What is life without children?” my host dad has told me rhetorically. “Children are everything.” People marry at 18 or 20 and start having babies soon after. At 24, my friend should be thinking about baby pictures, not silly pictures. And for a moment, I thought the same thing.

I'm the most curious about anything I may have assimilated into so completely that I don't even notice it. (Because, of course, just the fact that I noticed the previous incidents means that they are still somewhat foreign to me.) What additional habits or ways of thinking will I acquire over here that, on my return to the states, might make me seem like a foreigner to my own family? But will I ever even get close to fitting in over here?

One of the biggest holidays in Kazakhstan is the 9th of May, or Victory Day. It celebrates the day when the Soviet troops marched into Berlin and defeated the Nazi troops to end World War II. Or, as they say here, the day the Soviets defeated the Fascists to end the Great Patriotic War. And this year was the 65th anniversary, so it was an even bigger deal than normal.

The TV showed a short historical segment everyday about the “Road to Berlin,” detailing the Soviet army's movements in the days leading up to the Fascist surrender. Commercials for a concert of patriotic war songs began playing in early April. Signs and billboards went up all over town in preparation for the big celebration.

My host father Oral used to be a history teacher, and he gave me several lectures about how the Soviets won the war. He conceded that the Americans helped by giving them arms and money (but they never gave enough.) And the Soviet army played the most important part in defeating the Fascists. Historically, this is probably more accurate than giving the most credit to the Americans, at least in regard to the Nazis. The Soviets definitely took the highest toll and paid the highest price in the war. And many historians argue that the battle for Stalingrad was the turning point of the war. Oral went on to point out that Kazakhstan also played an important roll in the war. Many of the factories and even government agencies (including the forerunner to the KGB) were relocated to Kazakhstan when the Nazis got too close to Moscow. And there was an all-Kazakhstani division, called Panfilov's division, that won an important battle, only to be overwhelmed by enemy forces following a huge tactical error by Moscow. Afterward, Moscow covered up their mistake for many years before finally admitting wrong. Now, there are monuments all over Kazakhstan in honor of Panfilov's brave soldiers.

The Victory Day celebration in my village began at 10am on a slightly-chilly Sunday morning. First, the local veterans walked into the town square, accompanied by their wives and bedecked in their many medals and ribbons awarded during the war. There were not many of them; in fact, people were constantly telling me, with a mixture of pride and sadness, that there are exactly 32 WWII veterans still alive in our region.

Next, there were speeches by the akim (mayor) and other important dignitaries honoring the veterans. Then people filed forward to lay baskets filled with flowers at the base of our town's Great Patriotic War monument and eternal flame (which wasn't burning in the winter, so I only realized a couple of weeks ago that we have an eternal flame.)

After the ceremony, the parade began. It was nothing like a small-town America parade, with kids riding streamer-bedecked bikes and local charity groups throwing hard candy at the spectators. The parade started with a review of the local schools. Each school sent a delegation of boys and another of girls, and they (literally) marched past the spectators in rank and file.

Earlier that week, our school had held our own Victory Day celebration, and all of the classes from 5th through 10th grades marched around the school yard. It was quite interesting to watch my 11-year-old students marching in not-quite-perfect rhythm, chanting loudly “bir, bir, bir eki oosh!” (which means “one, one, one two three.”) Each class made two passes around the field, the second time singing a military song, and they were graded each time, with certificates and ranks awarded to everybody at the end.

And so, having seen the marching earlier that week, I was not surprised to see it now, although the older students were much better at staying together as they marched. After the review, the parade began. It was a “theatrical parade,” as the announcers said, and so every group had a story to tell. The hospital filled the back of an old truck with wounded soldiers wrapped in bloody bandages, while nurses in white robes ministered to their wounds. Another group had a full-blown tank with soldiers sitting on top, heading off to war. Our school had an entire skit put together portraying families saying goodbye to their husbands, sons and fathers and they went off to war.

During the parade rehearsal a few days earlier, I had not been aware that we had planned such a complicated presentation. I'd come to the center of town with the rest of the teachers after school had let out early for the day, ready to participate and help wherever I was needed. As the teachers lined up at the staging ground, I cautiously asked my counterpart if they were going to march like the students, because I wasn't quite ready to do something they'd obviously had much more practice with. But when she said no, I impetuously joined the other teachers, looking around for handfuls of candy to throw. (It was just rehearsal, so when I didn't see any, I was unfazed.)

Then I noticed all the teachers grabbing the hands of one of the small children who were standing around. Ready to fit in, I looked around and noticed little Ruslan from my 4a class standing on the edge of the road. “Ruslan!” I called and waved him over to me. He gave me a confused look, but Ruslan often looks confused, so my confidence didn't sink as he approached, I took his hand, and we began walking.

I was soon to find out, however, that there was never going to be any candy involved in this parade, and also why Ruslan had given me such a confused look. Our group stopped walking in front of the town square, and a complicated script that had been prerecorded began blasting over the loudspeaker. First we had to gather together and cry as we said goodbye to our soldiers. I pulled Ruslan into a hug, and even though we didn't have any soldier to say goodbye to (apparently I was a single mother), we cried just as hard as the rest of them. Then we all squatted and prayed for something in Kazakh before the men jumped into a waiting lorry and the children ran behind it, waving, as it drove away. (Ruslan seemed remarkably happy to run after that truck and away from me.)

Needless to say, when the parade practice finished, I was feeling a bit confused and incredibly hopeful that nobody was watching our performance (that is to say, my lack of performance) too closely. Soon, though, my host mom told me there would be at least two more run-throughs that day but I might as well go home because, on the day of the parade, I should be watching it and enjoying my first Victory Day. I had no objections, and I did enjoy watching the parade on May 9.

Several times people have asked me if we have a similar holiday in America. I replied that we don't, and my answer got me thinking about why. You could argue that it's because America has two victory days, one over the Nazis and one over the Japanese, so logistics don't work. You could also argue that America is not a military state, like the Soviet Union was, and so had no need to manufacture military spectacles as propaganda to bolster citizens' national pride. But, I think maybe a large reason is because, difficult as the war was for Americans, we suffered nowhere near the hardships that the Soviet Union experienced. The war was on their land. Not only their soldiers, but their civilians too, died in battles such as the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad. Millions upon millions of their people died protecting their homeland from invaders at their backdoor. The stakes for them were much higher, the battles won with more difficulty, and therefore the victory sweeter.

We all judge other people based on the values we hold and our beliefs about the best way to do things. This becomes glaringly clear when you travel to another culture, and everyone around you has different values and beliefs. When you interact with people who do things completely differently from you, you can chose to accept that, or you can think the worst of them for it. When you're dealing with heavy issues like freedom and equality and the like, you have to face the fact that maybe, what you've always thought was a basic human desire and right might actually just be a cultural construct.

But not every cross-cultural conflict you face has deep meaning and weighty consequences. Sometimes, the things that we use to judge other people are completely meaningless, and yet they're the things that create rifts or prejudices that harm our respect for others.

I'm thinking in particular about the issue of manners. Manners are completely subjective and culturally based. For example, in America, it's rude to eat meat off the bone with your fingers (as my mother is constantly reminding me.) In Kazakhstan, however, it's completely fine to eat with your fingers, and even expected that you will eat beshfarmak with your hands. In America, it's invasive to walk into someone's room without knocking; in Kazakhstan, if you need something in the room, or need to talk to the person, why would you bother waiting until they're done changing? My host sister in Almaty walked into my room on my birthday to give me my present. I was standing in my bra, searching for a shirt, but she was completely unfazed. Nonplussed, I took the proffered present and set it on the bed, then grabbed the nearest shirt and slipped it over my head. I was bright red with embarrassment, but she saw nothing awkward in the situation.

At that point, I could have chosen to think her rather rude. If someone did that in America, I would wonder what was wrong with them. But it would be unfair and baseless for me to make the same judgment about her. No one ever told her it was rude to walk into someone's room without knocking, even if they are changing. She has no cultural reason to not walk in.

I found myself in an even more superficial situation recently. I began to notice just how much people here slurp their soup. And the more I noticed, the more the sound annoyed me. Soon, though, I stepped back and thought about the judgment I was making. To put it in perspective, I thought about the week before, when my host mom had told me that I always set my mug down too loudly on the table. In a similar situation to mine, the more she noticed, the more the sound annoyed her. She responded by telling me that only people who have not been well brought up set their dishes down heavily on the table. Then she showed me how to gently set my dishes down so they didn't make any noise. She wondered aloud, hadn't my mother taught me anything?

Of course, my mother taught me lots of things, like not to eat with my hands and to knock when I enter a room and not to slurp my soup. She taught me lots of inconsequential, meaningless things that nonetheless tell everyone in my culture whether or not I am “well-brought up.” It's only when I cross cultural boundaries and am faced with a completely different set of inconsequential, meaningless things that people judge you by that I have to face the fact that they are inconsequential and meaningless. And yet people still judge you by them. The burden is on me, of course, to adapt, since if I don't, everyone here will wonder just what my mother was thinking. But it makes me reevaluate the lines we draw based on shallow things like clothes styles or grammar or manners. Who are we to judge people based on our own set of cultural values, when they might not even be aware that that set of values exists?

People in Kazakhstan are still very closely connected to their land. In America, it may be hip and progressive to have a vegetable garden in the back yard, but it's not the norm. Here, everyone has a vegetable garden. In fact, people don't have back yards with grass and landscaping; they have gardens. If you don't have your own land, like my family who lives in an apartment block, then you find another patch of ground to grow food in. Ours in through the forest on the edge of town. For big city dwellers, they have a dacha. Dacha literally refers to a patch of ground in the country, though most dachas include a basic dwelling. The houses are nothing special, though; they often don't have running water or even electricity. Dachas are not summer vacation homes, like people in the US have. Instead, they're a vegetable garden with a place to sleep.

Even my school has a garden. Every teacher is required to water and weed the garden for a week during the summer. The potatoes and other foods grown there will be used in the school cafeteria during the winter.

People are always coming to the school to sell fresh milk and eggs straight from the farm. I know the milk is straight from the farm, because it comes in old Coca Cola bottles with a layer of froth and fat on top. The people pull up into our parking lot, and the teachers who don't have class right then all hurry outside to buy plastic bags of 20 or 30 eggs, or plastic bags of salted butter. Another time, a teacher from our school put up a sign up sheet in the teachers' room. She was killing her cow, and wanted to know how many kilos people wanted to buy from her. My host mom signed up for five kilos. What with the 40 eggs in our fridge, it looks like my protein input should be increasing exponentially.

You can only sing “The Hokey Pokey” and “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” so many times before you begin to wonder how camp counselors and kindergarten teachers keep their sanity. I teach six hours of English clubs per week, three of which are with younger children up to sixth grade, and after countless repetitions of the aforementioned songs, I decided we needed a goal other than “make Miss Anna completely exhausted.”

And so, I decided to write and direct a short play, where the kids could continue to sing and dance but I would get to watch. Not being particularly creative in the script-writing department, I decided to adapt a traditional fairy tale: the kids learn about American culture, and I don't have to worry about plot development! The final choice was “Cinderella” because it has lots of parts, both large and small, as well as many “extras.” This turned out to be a fortunate choice, because they have the same story over here, only her name is “Zolushka” instead of Cinderella. So even though the entire play is in English, which most of the audience won't understand, they should get the general gist of the story. And, to keep it interesting, I added several musical numbers and dance sequences, as well as some self-composed poetry:

To open the play:

A girl, Cinderella by name,

will quickly attain lasting fame

when her sisters two

can't put on the shoe.

I tell you, this story's not lame.

The fairy godmother says:

Right now you have not got a dress.

I'll do what you never would guess.

I'll wave my small wand.

Your rags are all gone!

You're beautiful, like a princess.

I thought that “like a princess” was a nice bit of foreshadowing. I must confess, however, that this literary device was inspired not so much by my poetical prowess as by my lack of a rhyming dictionary. Likewise, my writing poetry in the first place was not brought on by my overflowing creative genius, but rather by my lack of access to any other poems. (Curse that once-weekly internet!)

A lot of things in this play (one could say everything) are driven by my lack of resources. For example, my special effects budget is approximately 0 tenge. Therefore, we haven't got the capability to turn a pumpkin into a carriage, or, for that matter, even a large piece of orange paper into a larger piece of carriage-shaped paper. And so, the only thing keeping Cinderella from the ball is her lack of beautiful dress. This may seem a minor and rather vain problem, but it is insurmountable to Cinderella, who weeps over her lack of beautiful dress in a very touching scene.

I'm afraid my play in general might be teaching some less than noteworthy values. Or maybe, in its extreme simplicity, it reveals the shallow values that have been driving the story of Cinderella from the very beginning. For example, the story tells young girls that if they dress up in a beautiful dress, a prince will fall in love with them. My play helps drive this point home when the prince laments Cinderella's disappearance (in a poem I also wrote/adapted.)

Oh where, oh where has that pretty girl gone?

Oh where, oh where can she be?

With her beautiful eyes and her beautiful dress,

Oh where, oh where can she be?

Are her beautiful eyes and her beautiful dress the only things that the prince can remember about Cinderella? The shortness of their acquaintance, not to mention the rhythm of the poem, dictate this.

I did take a bit of artistic license when I adapted the story. There's one scene I added where the king tells his son that he must get married. (We needed more male parts, and there was a big scuffle over who got to be the prince and wear a cape. So now the king gets to wear a cape too.) The king's line is: “Son, I want you to get married.” The trouble is, the king is always getting mixed up, and keeps saying, “Son, I want to you get married.” I'm not sure, legally, how this would work. The son's reply is even more disturbing: “Father, I do not love a girl.” Every time he says this, I keep thinking, “Well then, who do you love?” Sadly, I did not spot this unfortunate turn of phrase until it was too late to change it because the prince had already spent countless hours memorizing his line. I think, when I wrote this, I was trying to teach the vocab term “girl.” Or else my time in Kazakhstan has hindered my ability to speak English.

I also took artistic license with the opening scene. In order to squeeze another musical number into the production, not to mention another female character, I started the story with the death of Cinderella's first mother. She has one line to say, “I love you, Cinderella,” before she kicks the bucket. This makes her the perfect role for one of my shyer students to play, and also allows me to write a moving funeral scene where the chorus sings, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” The chorus is my most inspired idea yet. The attendance at my club is constantly fluctuating, and if I were to be always reassigning parts I'd probably give myself a headache. The chorus and dance group, therefore, gives every hyperactive child who shows up to club something to do, without leaving a glaring hole when they never come back. (Probably scared away by my dance choreography.)

Lack of resources also drove me to choreograph all of the dances. The trouble is, I have very little dance experience. I danced a couple of times in the Bollywood dance at my college's International Fair, and also joined the hula one time for the Hawai'i Club's Lu'au. And I took one semester of ballroom dancing for a PE credit. But there was a reason I was always put in the back row during our performances.

I started dredging my memory for any fragments of dance moves that I remember. It was a pretty poor haul. I started with a short dance another volunteer, Noelle, created during Pre-Service Training. She performed this dance with her host sister during a school concert. It's a variation on the electric slide, keeping the foot movement while adding some arm movements. But it wasn't very long, and if I was going to drag out the play, I'd need some more steps. And so, without any respect for the cultural nuances of these dances, I mercilessly stole, cut, combined, and otherwise butchered the few dance moves I knew, putting together the strangest conglomeration of Bollywood meets Hula meets where-on-earth-did-that-come-from. And we dance it to the song “Jai Ho!” from “Slumdog Millionaire.” The good news is, the kids love it (at least, the girls do) and are constantly begging to dance it. I wouldn't be surprised if Broadway came knocking, looking for the next up-and-coming choreographer.

Next, I added some songs; people here love singing, and will sing karaoke at the drop of a hat. My lack of resources, however, continued to plague me. The only songs I had to work with were any folk songs I could remember the words to and the songs already on my iTunes. I really wanted to stay artistically honest, so even though my audience won't understand the lyrics, I still wanted them to have some bearing on the context. This led to an eclectic mix that rivaled my dance choreography. When the stepmother and stepsisters are getting ready for the prince's ball, they sing Carly Simon's “You're So Vain.” Then, after they leave Cinderella at home in her rags, she sings Switchfoot's “Only Hope.” (Only I had to change the word “pray” to “say” to prevent any religious conflicts.) Finally, when the fairy godmother arrives to help Cinderella, she sings The Beatles' “From Me To You.” (The first verse of this song is perfect, but the bridge, where the godmother tells Cinderella “I've got arms that long to hold you...I've got lips that long to kiss you,” is a little disturbing.) The final scene of the play features the chorus again, singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” as Cinderella gets married to the prince (and is carried into his home – see the connection? Yeah, me neither.)

We're planning a big performance of our production this Monday, with many of the teachers in attendance. I'm looking forward to showcasing all our hard work, and also being done with rehearsals, since the kids are starting to be bored of the songs. But I worried: what on earth am I going to do now? I guess it's back to the “Hokey Pokey!”

Over the past several months I have added enough new items to my wardrobe that, when I dress to go outside, the only things visible are from Kazakhstan. Not that this helps me fit in any more; I'm still “the American” wherever I go. But at least I'm warm.

First I bought a “fur coat.” This was back in October, right after I found out that I was going to Northern Kazakhstan. (Which, by the way, is the northernmost region in all of the Peace Corps.) All along I had planned to buy a winter coat over here, but somehow the prospect of -40 degrees gave the search a new urgency. I asked every Kazakh person I knew for their advice, and got mixed reports. My host family told me I needed to buy a “shuba,” or what we think of as a fur coat. But since these run about 80,000 tenge, and I was given a total of 25,000 tenge for all of my “settling in” allowance, this wasn't feasible. So instead, I took my Kazakh teacher's advice and searched for a coat with rabbit fur lining – much cheaper (20,000 tenge), if not as fashionable. As I walked through the bazaar, reaching inside every coat I passed to see if it had the desired fur inside, I felt a bit like a traitor to my liberal, Pacific Northwest upbringing – images of the protestors that always gathered around the fur coat store in downtown Portland flashed through my head – but the expediency of affordable warmth won in the end.

Upon arrival in the north, I quickly found my gloves wanting and bought a new pair. And the constant critiques of my plain, navy blue hat (“It looks like a man's hat,” “It's too square.”) led me to buy a rhinestone-bedazzled Kazakh wool cap. Now all that was left showing from America was my boots.

Despite the fact that I'd searched long and hard in the States to find warm yet fashionable winter boots (no small feat in rainy Oregon in August), and despite the fact that the reviews raved that my purchase would be “the warmest boots you've ever worn,” and despite the fact the I took to wearing 2-3 pars of socks every time I went outside, my toes would still get cold if I stood on the street for more than 15 minutes. (And, considering how often the bus is late, or just decides not to come at all, this is pretty regularly.) So, I finally broke down and bought myself a pair of Valenki, or, as the Kazakhs call them, Pima.

Fashionable they are not. But pima are so warm!!!

Pima were clearly invented by someone who shared my problem of cold toes and didn't care how incredibly unfashionable they had to be to solve this problem. Pima could best be described as “felted wool boots,” and maybe I should just refer you to the picture I've posted. They're quite funny looking, really, and considering how many women here totter around on impossibly high stiletto heels for most of the year, it's surprising how popular they are. The main wearers are babushki (old ladies), who share my love of comfort over fashion. But a fair number of younger women, and even men, also wear pima. They even make adorable children's pima for the concerned parent.

My quest started when I told my host mother that I wanted to buy some pima. She was thrilled. (She, along with everyone else at my school, seems to think that I am in distinct danger of shriveling up and dying from the cold, and therefore is constantly asking if I'm cold, and telling me to put on more clothes.) She said she would ask around and find out where to buy them. (Apparently, they aren't sold in the bazaar downtown, but in private houses.) Soon, the whole school knew that I wanted to buy some pima. “Did you buy your pima yet?,” the teachers asked me. “What color are you going to buy?”

One helpful math teacher pointed us to a place that sold pima just behind our school. My host mother and I trekked through the snow and entered the rundown-looking, unmarked building, me cautiously, her without the least feeling that anything was out of the ordinary. Inside, there was an entry way strewn with old tires and three men smoking. They politely pointed to a door with “entrance” written on it. Pushing through the door, it was immediately evident that they made the pima here as well as sold them. We'd come straight to the factory, as it were. The whole place smelled very strongly of sheep due to the large piles of wool lying in many of the corners. An open stove kept the place warm while ancient machines that looked as if they were from the dawn of the industrial revolution clanked in other corners. A lady ushered us into the “office” and set about finding me a pair of pima.

When I'd searched for dress shoes in the bazaar in Almaty, I'd discovered that, apparently, no women in Kazakhstan have feet larger than a size 39, or 8, and therefore no one sells shoes in larger sizes. I'd always thought of my size 9 feet as average, but I'm a Sasquatch here. When the lady brought out the largest pair of pima they had on hand, my toes were smashed in the front. And so I had to special order my pima in a larger size. Luckily, we were at the factory, so I only had to wait four days. When they were ready, the son of one of the workers, an eighth grader at our school, cautiously peered into the teachers' room and gave me the message, and I trekked through the snow to pick them up.

Pima are popular at any age.

My new pima were the talk of the school for at least a week. Everyone wanted to look at them and to complement me on how Kazakh I'd become. Even my Regional Manager from the Peace Corps, when she came for “site visit,” exclaimed over my pima and had me roll up my pants so she could take a picture. My pima even earned me an invitation to tea. News of my pima must have spread beyond the walls of the school, because the conductor on the bus (the lady who collects bus fares) wanted to know how I was liking my new pima. The lady sitting next to me was slightly confused by this question, until the conductor explained that I was from America. The lady immediately complimented me on my pima and began a five minute discussion of their merits as winter footwear. Then she told me she had lots of jam, and I should come over to her house and eat some of it. A few weeks later, I called her up to accept her invitation. It was a very nice visit; I got to eat pork for the first time in three months (even though my family doesn't practice Islam, they still buy halal sausage and don't eat pork) and watched rugby on tv. Unfortunately, she forgot about the jam.

My host father loves to tell a story about a famous cosmonaut from the USSR. This cosmonaut said, “The two greatest inventions of mankind are the space ship and pima.”

My warm and happy toes wholeheartedly agree.

Sometimes, I feel like I didn't really join the Peace Corps. I have a

cell phone, hot running water, and weekly access to the internet. I

certainly don't feel very hardcore. Other countries have nicknamed

Eastern Europe and Central Asia the "Posh Corps." Many volunteers in

Kazakhstan claim disappointment over the widespread availability of

modern conveniences here, and a few even ET (Early Terminate, or quit

and go home) because of it. I think the official name for this is

"African Hut Syndrome." We join the Peace Corps with the romantic

notion of living in an African hut, washing our clothes in the river

and walking along a dirt path to work. Then we get here, and we're

faced with a Soviet block apartment building, an

old-but-still-functioning washing machine, and a bus to get to work.All this leaves you feeling like everything isn't as hard as you

thought, and maybe even hoped, it would be. If I don't have to cart

water from the well, am I really entitled to call myself a Peace Corps

volunteer? If I can go to the bathroom in a flush toilet, is my life

being transformed by my experiences here? I joined the PC to be

challenged, but I have a gas stove in the kitchen and running water in

the sink. Where's the challenge in that? Of course, I know that my

work will still be hard, and that learning the language and culture

will still stretch me way beyond my comfort zone, but somehow those

don't carry the same bragging rights as going outside to the squat

toilet when it's 40 below.I had a choice, when I moved to my permanent site, between living in a

house without indoor conveniences or in an apartment with them. I

chose the apartment, because I really liked the family who lived

there. But it was a very difficult choice. The house fit all my

romantic notions about Kazakhstan: an outdoor kitchen for the

summertime, a rundown banya building, and a woodburning stove inside.

It had cute gingerbread trim and a view of the lake. It would be much

more "Peace Corps" to live there. In the back of my mind, I

remembered what I learned during pre-service training: that, after the

first time, washing clothes by hand isn't romantic, it's

time-consuming and boring. Squat toilets aren't worth bragging about,

they're just smelly and cold. If you don't have running water, just

taking a spit bath involves hauling the water, heating it on the

stove, taking it out to the freezing cold banya building, and then

cleaning it all up afterward. Doing any basic chore takes 10 times as

long as it does in America. I remembered how hard it all was, and yet

I still wanted it. Why? The bragging rights? The feeling of having

accomplished something really hard? The cultural understanding? Some

indefinable desire that, somehow, all of this hardship would make me a

stronger person?Not everyone here struggles with this. Some of the volunteers

complain about the lack of conveniences, that you have to bucket bathe

or that the internet is really slow. And I start to wonder where this

dissatisfaction comes from. Part of me thinks to myself, "What's your

problem? You did join the Peace Corps after all." I start to sound

like a babushka, lamenting the entitlement that my generation feels.

Maybe it's the fact that these things are available to some people, so

that when we don't have them we feel their lack. Maybe it would be

better if the internet wasn't in Kazakhstan at all, if no one had a

cell phone, if everyone had to haul water from a well. But then

again, maybe my generation is so used to these things, that we simply

can't live without them. It's not like in the old days, when the

Peace Corps simply dropped volunteers off at the end of the road with

a map, a name of a contact, and a donkey. Now we're babied through

pre-service training, where they try to meet our every need and answer

our every question, and when they don't we complain about it. Because

even those of us who are lamenting our lack of an African hut are also

disappointed when the power goes out and we can't get on the internet

this week.I have to conclude, for the sake of my personal sense of growth and

accomplishment, that the Peace Corps isn't about going back in time to

the bronze age. It's about meeting another culture where it is right

now. And right now, Kazakhstan has cell phones and half-automatic

washing machines and unreliable electricity. This is how Kazakhstanis

live. And since I came here to learn about Kazakhstanis, not some

people group I'd imagined but that doesn't exist, then my life also

includes a cell phone and a half-automatic washing machine and

electricity that goes out when you try to get on the internet. And,

according to my earlier musings, that faulty electricity should be

making me a stronger person.

I have a confession to make: I'm a terrible teacher. I don't know

most of my students' names. I've come up with plenty of

justifications: I have at least 200 students, some of them only once a

week for 45 minutes; I'm also supposed to learn the names of about 50

teachers at our school; plus, all of these names are Kazakh, meaning

they're completely foreign to my American ears. And I have been

trying. I have a list of all the teachers at our school, and I spent

a day with one of our English teachers, surreptitiously asking her the

name of everyone who walked into the teachers' room and making notes

on my list about hair cut, tone of voice, and number of gold teeth in

hopes that I would remember who's who later on. In the meantime, I've

become the master of pretending like I know who people are. This is

especially valuable on the street or while waiting for the bus; as the

only American in town, everyone knows who I am, and if I even once

said "Salametciz be" (hello) to someone, I think they expect me to

remember them as well. At school, though, I actually do recognize

everybody's face, I just don't know their name.Kazakh names are very beautiful and unique. Most of them mean

something; for example, Aigul means moon flower because 'ai' means

moon and 'gul' means flower. Altinshash means golden hair, because

'altin' means gold and 'shash' means hair. Akbota means white (ak)

baby camel (bota.) Assel means honey, Kumbat means dear one, Bakut

means happy and Marzhan means pearl. I have to think about the

meanings of the names, because the sound of them is strange to my

American ears. For example, when I first heard that my counterpart's

name was Nazgul, all I could think about were those evil, black,

hooded creatures in The Lord of the Rings. But once I learned that

Nazgul means beloved flower (and once I started using it everyday so I

didn't think about it as much), I liked her name much more.Some common female names are Aisulu, Nurgul, Asemgul, Zhanar, Guldanu,

Gulzhanat, Bibigul, Ainash, and Aida. Some common male names are

Bogenbai, Erkibolan, Talgat, Kuanish, Amangeldy, Serik, Kozhabek, and

Temirhan.I do know some of my students' names, and when I do I like to use them

as much as possible, as if I'm atoning for the lack of turkey at

Thanksgiving dinner by putting extra mashed potatoes on the table.

Sometimes, though, I accidentally mix up even those few names I know.

One day, a third grade boy from my 3a class came to my English club,

and I was absolutely certain it was Sanjar. I was so proud of myself

for knowing his name, that I made a point of calling him "Sanjar"

every time I talked to him. At first, he looked at me a little funny,

but he didn't say anything, so I pressed on in my triumph of finally

knowing someone's name. It was only after we'd been at club for over

an hour that one of the girls leaned over to me and quietly said,

"That's not Sanjar, that's Nursultan." Poor kid! He'd been taught

not to question teachers, so he'd probably spent the last hour

completely confused and not a little affronted.I tried an experiment in my two 7th grade classes. I remember back in

middle school Spanish class, when we had to pick Spanish names and use

those in class. I was Mariana, and I loved it. So I made up a list

of common boys and girls names in America and let them chose what they

wanted to be called. I hoped this would make it easier to remember,

since at least the names would be familiar to me. The plan backfired,

though. They were very excited to chose a name, but unfortunately

they all wanted to chose the same name. All the girls wanted to be

Jessica or Ashley, and the boys David or Tom. Of course, I made

everyone take a different name, and so both classes chose them like

clockwork. The first girl to be called on chose Jessica, the second

Ashley, then Angela, Mary, Emma, and Emily. (The boys were a bit more

variable.) So now, I was faced with two of everybody, and their names

all started with a vowel. And then, on top of that, they can't always

remember each others' American names, so we still have to use their

Kazakh names sometimes, meaning that now I have twice the number of

names to memorize.Back in January, one of my (very enthusiastic) 6th grade boys gave me

an invitation to his birthday party on April 15th. That prompted

everyone in the room to tell me when their birthday was, and invite me

to their party as well. Mercifully, most of them were in the summer

or next fall, so I have time to figure out whether I want to attend a

birthday party for every 6th grade boy in the school, and maybe give

them time to forget that they invited me. However, one kid's birthday

was February 28, and he wasn't forgetting. Every time he saw me, he

reminded me that I said I would come to his party. I asked my host

mom if it was appropriate for a teacher to go to a student's birthday

party, and she said it was fine, although she warned me to buy a

modest gift because if I went to one I'd have to go to them all. (Was

she hiding in the room when I was mobbed by my enthusiastic students?)

"Whose birthday is it?" she innocuously asked. "Umm, I can't

remember his name!," I admitted, embarrassed. "Then how will you know

how to get to his house?" she wondered. I described how another

student, who had walked me home from the bus a couple of times and

lived in the same apartment building as us, was going to meet me out

front at 12:20 and we would walk together. "What's his name?"

"Umm..." I described how he lived next door, in the first entrance.

"Oh, that must be Adilet," she replied. "Yeah, Adilet," I said,

thinking, "I don't know! I hope that's his name!" Then she asked if I

had any idea where the birthday boy lived. I hazily remembered a

conversation on a crowded bus, five 6th grade boys pressed around me,

excitedly talking in Russian about cartoons and summer and the

Terminator. It was one of many occasions when I'd been reminded that

I'd said I would go to this birthday party. And he'd told me where he

lived. "It's somewhere in the next group of apartment buildings,

across the field," I said, waving my hand to indicate the direction.

"There's two 6th grade boys who live in the same building, one in the

apartment right above the other." "Is the birthday in the apartment

on the top or the bottom?" my host mom asked. "The bottom, I think."

"Then it's Mediet," she said with authority.My embarrassment was complete. I couldn't even remember his name

after he'd invited me multiple times to his house, and my host mom

knew exactly who I was talking about from a vague description and a

wave of the hand. But now, at least, I knew what name to write on the

birthday card.

The bride and groom, plus "best man" and "maid of honor," sitting at their special table at the head of the room. Apparently, the balloon arch cost 20,000 tenge, more than the fur coat I bought here.

My very first Kazakh wedding started two hours late. Apparently this is common, because my host mom didn't even plan to leave the house until an hour after it was supposed to start, and then when we were running late she wasn't in the least bit worried. And with good reason. When we showed up at 5:45, the room was only a third full. As if by magic, though, by 6:00 the room was packed and the ceremony began.

The actual marriage had happened the month before, and this was one of two receptions that were being held. Both the family of the bride and the family of the groom must hold a reception. The actual marriage is simply the boring and official business of going to the wedding registry office (ZAGS) and filling out the paper work. No one goes alone for this tedious task except the groom and bride. The real party is at the receptions.

This particular reception was thrown by the groom's side, and, like most celebrations thrown by anyone who can afford it, it was held in a restaurant. (Restaurants here aren't for casually going out to eat, but for big parties. Cafes are for informal occasions.) At 6:00, the bride and groom entered the room and stood on a cloth spread on the floor in the middle of the room. An empty plate was in front of them. The musicians began to sing a song, calling out certain people's names at the end of each line, and those people paraded up to put some money on the plate in front of the bride and groom. As I found out later, this money is for the singer, not the couple. At the end, the groom lifted his bride's veil in an ancient custom, and the ceremony was over. I was glad it was quick, because all the guests were standing, crammed together in an attempt to have a good view of the bride and groom.

The bride and groom, with the plate for collecting tips for the musicians.

Following the lifting of the veil, it was time for food. Tables at the other side of the room were already spread with a vast array of salads and a large selection of drinks. I sat at a table with many teachers from my school. Since the groom's mother is our school psychologist, many of us were invited.

There were so many salads, there was no more space on the table.

While we ate salads, the musicians performed a variety of pop songs. Sometimes, people would get up to dance to them. Sometimes, everyone would get up to dance, including the old grandmothers and the respectable housewives and the stoic old men. After my first refusal, I decided that I'd better be culturally polite and got up to join them. Little did I know, this was only the beginning of the discoteca.

In between songs, groups of people were called to the front of the room to make toasts. Every time people were talking the bride and groom had to stand; I don't know how they managed to eat anything all evening, because people here are very long winded when it comes to toasts. After the toasts, one of the group would normally sing a short song while others went around clinking their glass with everyone at the various tables.

I should have given up any hope of anonymity long ago, but somehow I convinced myself that I would escape the toast-giving. No such luck. In fact, I wasn't even called up in a group, but all by myself, the special guest from America. While I walked up to the front of the room, cheeks burning, my host mom scuttled beside me, whispering the words to a simple toast and giving me the names of the bride and groom, which I promptly forgot.

Because so many toasts eventually get repetitive, most of the time people just keep right on eating and chatting while the well-wisher speaks into the microphone. But I am still a curiosity, and so all 150 guests put down their forks and turned toward me. I got even redder. I managed to say, in barely passable Kazakh, “My name is Anna Rodgers. I'm from America. This wedding is very good and beautiful. I wish you happiness.” I was supposed to wish the bride and groom happiness, but I forgot their names, so I just wished happiness to everyone in the room.

Then I had to sing a song, so I sang the only Kazakh song I know, “Kozimning Karasi.” I only know the words to the first verse, and normally this serves me just fine, because once you start singing everyone joins in and you can just mumble your way through the rest. But when you're singing into a microphone, this foolproof method doesn't work any more, so I only sang the first verse. But I was rewarded for my efforts. In addition to receiving presents, the bride and groom give presents to their guests, normally little trinkets like a scarf or a pack of tissues. I got a mirror and comb, which somewhat offset the embarrassment of what I'd just done.

After an hour and a half of munching on salads, the main dish came out. It was, of course, the Kazakh national dish, beshfarmak. This beshfarmak had special, expensive meat for the occasion: horse. Actually, horse meat is quite tasty, much better than mutton. One of the men at our table began cutting up the large chunks and distributing the meat to our individual plates. Almost immediately after the food was served, a lady came around with a roll of plastic bags and gave everyone one. They were for taking home the leftovers. I started to eat the meat off my plate, but my host mom stopped me. “Eat the meat from the central, shared dish,” she admonished, as she quickly bagged up my portion and tucked it in her purse. Despite the occasion, we still ate with our hands. Later, the mother of the groom came over and showed me particular respect by giving me an extra bag of horse meat, containing one of the finer cuts.

Beshfarmak!!

Cutting up the horse meat so we can eat it with our hands.

The remains of our beshbarmak.

It was only after the meat was nearly gone that the disco began in earnest. For the next 1 ½ hours, everyone went a cleared portion of the floor and had a great time dancing. Although I was not the most awkward dancer in the room, I was close to it. Thankfully, I was the only American, and that forgives a multitude of faults. I even got asked to dance several of the slow dances, though after a while I think the men figured out that getting their toes stepped on while I tried to keep time, stiff as a board with sweaty palms, was not worth even the honor of dancing with an American, and they stopped asking. The fast dances were much more fun, though. I saw a lot of traditional Kazakh dance moves combined with more modern styles, several congo lines were started, and only a few people were ever sitting out at one time. Mostly, people stood in a circle (there were several circles at one time, because of the large number of guests), dancing around the edges while two or four of the better dancers would take turns in the middle doing more complex moves. I was called out to the middle at least twice, and out of politeness couldn't refuse. I tried to copy the moves of my partner as best I could, and hoped that they attributed my red face to exertion rather than embarrassment.

Finally, at midnight, tea was served. There was a huge spread of cakes, cookies and chocolates, but most of these also went into bags to go home. It was late, and although the discoteca seemed to be starting up again, we had school the next day, so most of the teachers slipped out after filling their bags. The whole evening was very enjoyable, but now I know to work on my dancing and toast-giving skills.

Aziza in front of our Yolka, all decked out for the holidays.

Christmas hasn't happened yet in Kazakhstan, and December 25th is a regular working day. (Russian Orthodox Christmas, for those religious enough to attend church, is on January 7th.) I requested Dec. 25th off, though, and I think my school felt sorry enough for men (every other question I'm asked is either, “Do you miss home?” or “Are you cold?”) that they let me have Saturday off too. I went in to the nearby city of Kokshetau, where several of my Peace Corps friends live. My friend Molly lives with a Catholic family, and so they were also celebrating the 25th by having a small get together at their apartment. They kindly invited me to join them, and I was happy for the short get away.

I was incredibly blessed to find a protestant church in Kokshetau. It's a small little Presbyterian gathering, and although I haven't been able to make it in on Sunday for regular services yet, I was able to go on Christmas evening for the special holiday service with another PCV in Kokshetau, Hannah. It was all in Russian, but because of the holiday most of the service was musical numbers and a Christmas skit, so I got the gist of it. The skit showed the many prophecies about the coming Messiah throughout history, and it was very fun to watch how Kazakhstani low-budget church plays compared to American ones. I think the church was too small to have enough kids for a children's Christmas play, so everyone was involved. First came Adam and Eve, and I didn't have to understand the loud argument that ensued in Russian to know what they were angry about. Then Abraham and Sarah came out, in traditional Kazakh costume, from the man's scull cap to the brocaded vest. I never knew the Ur was actually located in Kazakhstan. The rest of the characters, including King David and Isaiah, could have been from an American production, sheets draped over their heads and tied on with strips of cloth.

Dinner at Molly's house that evening was a lovely, typically Kazakhstani “gosti” experience. (See my earlier blog post about going “v gosti.” There was way too much food, served in three courses (salads, meat, and dessert) over the course of as many hours. For entertainment, we gave toasts and sang songs. Hannah and I sang several Christmas carols, and Molly's mom played the guitar very well.

The big holiday in Kazakhstan is New Years, and it comes complete with a decorated tree and an old, bearded man in a red suit. (Only the tree is called a “yolka” and the old man is “Ayaz Ata.”) Our school was decked out in “Zhanga Zhilmen” (Happy New Year) signs, our very own decorated yolka, and a plethora of shiny tinsel. And just before school let out for the break, each of the classes had their own New Year's parties, called “Yolka.”

These yolka are a big deal, lasting several hours each. Over the course of three days, each grade of students rotated through the gym for their own party. I was invited to all of them, and made it to the 5th grade, 6th grade, and high school (9-11th grades) parties.

For starters, everyone dresses up for New Years, kind of like Halloween in America. (And, like Halloween in America, the ratio of children to adults who dress up, and the number of adults who think putting on a funny wig is “dressing up,” is about the same.) The 5th grade yolka had the theme “gypsies,” and all the girls were decked out in flowery skirts, scarves, and an abundance of lipstick. The boys, on the other had, seemed to think that “gypsy=pirate,” and so wore earrings and painted on mustaches. There were a few, though, that either didn't get the memo, or couldn't resist wearing their favorite costume, because I saw at least one skeleton, and other boy who was wearing his dracula cape in addition to his skull-and-crossbones headscarf. And, in addition to these costumes, everyone was wearing at least one tinsel garland. I think the tinsel garland is a required accessory at New Years time, because everyone wears them. The sixth grade yolka was a much more conventional mix of princesses, ninjas, Aladdin, and one very nice bird. (All with requisite tinsel, of course.)

Several gypsies perform a musical number at the fifth grade yolka.

The yolka party itself is a mix of games and performances. Many of the students prepared songs or dances or recited poetry for their classmates. The variety show idea is very popular in Kazakhstan, and pretty much every organized gathering must have at least two or three performances. Sometimes these are quite well done, but usually they end up being basically karaoke, with over-loud pop music blaring behind a slightly off key singer, while everyone claps along. The only variation for the yolka was that after every performance, Ayaz Ata and his helper, Snegorichka, gave the performers some chocolate. These two characters were played by a couple of 10th grade students from our school, and they looked pretty tired of it after eight yolkas. Other dressed up characters also made appearances. These included Baba Yaga, the evil witch from Russian fairy tales, and an ox and a tiger, to say goodbye to 2009, the year of the ox by the Chinese Zodiac, and welcome 2010, the year of the tiger. The mix of cultures here is always interesting.

Ayaz Ata, Snegorichka, and a tiger welcome the new year.

The high school yolka ended with a discoteca, which is basically a school dance. For the first few songs, all the teachers joined in. One huge difference between America and Kazakhstan is that everybody dances here. And I mean everybody. Although there are a few people who just stand up and sway back and forth to the beat, most everyone else really gets into it. I'll talk more about dancing in Kazakhstan when I write about the wedding I went to (which was fabulous), but I mention it now because of how strange it was to see teachers and students dancing together. Even the director (school principal) was out on the floor, breaking it down in a very awkward dance step that wasn't quite in time with the music.

The day after the high school discoteca, the teachers had their own New Year's party, complete with 3-hour 3-course meal, karaoke performances, lots of toasts, and a discoteca of their own. And, of course, the DJ (the music teacher) had to play a slow song right when I was standing next to the director, who politely asked me to dance. Slow dancing with your boss, especially when he has no sense of rhythm and you don't know how to follow, is rather awkward. And, to top it off, we talked about the weather (“Are you cold here?”) and politics (“How do you like our president, Nazabayev?”) I really need to learn some more dance moves if this pattern is going to continue.

There was one more yolka waiting for me, the one held by our town on New Year's Eve. It started at 8pm and lasted to 10pm, and the whole thing was outside in the town square. I wore three pairs of socks under my boots, three pairs of long johns under my pants, and three sweaters under my coat, and stayed reasonably warm the whole time, although I had to keep jumping up and down most of the time. The town had set up a giant yolka tree in the square, and also built a “snow village.” Our village was most carvings made from ice blocks, done by various offices around town like the mayor's office, the hospital, and each of the schools. (The men teachers from our school carved two very nice penguins and a polar bear.) In addition to the animals, there were several ice slides that kids were sliding down. Despite how incredibly slippery they were, most of the older kids were riding down standing up, although a few took spills on the way down. The less brave would do the “Asian squat,” heals on the ground as well as toes. I, being neither brave enough to stand up, nor flexible enough to do the Asian squat (although I have been practicing), sat down on my behind like only those under 7 years were doing, and enjoyed myself so much I went two more times. Aset spent the whole 2 hours sliding, and never even came over the the yolka gathering.

Me in front of a giant ice squirrel, in Kokshetau's Snow Village.

The actual yolka involved the required karaoke songs, and visits from Ayaz Ata, Snegorichka, and a tiger for the new year. The akim, or mayor, of our region came and gave a speech. There was also an impressive fireworks display, which I enjoyed despite the snowflakes falling on my glasses and clouding my vision. When you're used to watched fireworks from a lawn chair set up by a dusty gravel road on a hot summer's evening, snowflakes falling on your face is a new experience.

After the yolka finished, we had to walk 45 minutes to get home, since the buses stop at 7:30pm. At home, warm bisfarmak, cold salads, hot tea, and a variety show on televisions waited for us. Ten minutes before midnight, President Nazarbayev came on tv to wish the country all the best for the next year, and then it was 2010, and time for bed.

The Kazakhstani school system is quite different from the America system. For starters, students only study for 11 years, rather than 13; they start in first form and go through 11th. Kindergarten here is more like our preschool. It's not mandatory, and parents have to pay to send their children to it. Also, students study six days a week, including Saturday. However, they don't study for as long each day. The younger students are only at school for about four hours, although the 10th and 11th formers stay for about six hours. They can't study for longer because there are two shifts of students studying in the school, one group before lunch and and the other after lunch. There's not enough classroom space for everyone to study at the same time, so classrooms are used by two different groups of students. This means that teachers must often be at school from 8:30 in the morning until 6:00 at night. All of the students study in the same building; there's no separate buildings for elementary, middle, and high school.

Classes are divided very differently than in the States. Students are put into a class group, and they will stay with that same group of 20 or 25 students throughout their entire schooling career. The groups are divided based on a test the kids take when they first enter school at six or seven years old. The “smartest” students, who do the best on the test, are put into the “A” group, the next best into the “B” group, then “C,” “D,” etc. (Although, of course, the names are Cyrillic letters, not Roman.) For the rest of their schooling lives, the students will be identified by their class group, and everyone knows that the A's are the “smartest” and the D's aren't very smart at all. However, this is all based on one test when the children are very young, so it doesn't divide them up very well and there are still slower students in the A group and quicker students in the lower groups. Luckily, my school is quite small, so most of the grades only have 2 classes and the division is not as obvious. In fact, some of the B groups at my school are much better students than their A counterparts.

In addition to studying with the same students throughout their school career, classes also study with the same teacher. There is only one division, between primary (1st-4th forms) and secondary, so primary teachers start with 1a or 1b, and teach those students until they become 4a or 4b, then cycle back down to first form. After that, if a teacher is assigned to 5a for Kazakh history, then they will continue to teach those same students Kazakh history until they graduate. Therefore, you might find some teachers working with both fifth formers and 11th formers. And since English starts in third form at my school, I have both third formers and 11th formers. If I were to stay in Saumolkol for long enough, I could keep teaching my third formers until they graduate from school.

Some of the teachers from my school. The only man in the picture is our "director," or principal, and the lady with the flowers is one of our "zavuchs," or vice principals.

Because classes always study together, they stay in their classroom, and teachers move around. There are no substitute teachers, so if a teacher is sick the school can do one of two things. First, they can make another teacher teach the absent teacher's classes. This is what my school likes to do, and I've found myself standing in front of several different groups of students, without a textbook or any idea about what they're studying, and 45 minutes to fill. Right now, my counterpart is gone for one month to attend a session about methodology, and during that time another English teacher (who already has a full teaching load of 20 hours) is expected to also cover my counterpart's 22 hours. The other option for the school is to rearrange the schedule. If the history teacher is absent, then the periods she taught are dropped from the schedule and all of the other periods move up one hour so that the students get out early. This is what the school I worked at during Pre-Service Training liked to do. As a result, you never knew when in the day you were teaching, and a fifth period class might move up to third, with no reliable way to let you know about the change except a piece of paper hung in the teachers' room.

Grades here are not letters, but numbers from 1-5, with 1 being like an F and 5 being like an A. However, because you have to stay with your group, no one ever receives a 1. And even a 2 is very rare. You might receive a 2 for your daily grade, but never your quarter grade. Students are given a grade every day, in every class, and this is recorded in a giant class journal. The students also have a “kundelnik,” where teachers write their daily grades and they take them home weekly for their parents to sign. The grades are not normally based on tests or homework, but instead are very subjective, depending if the student was well behaved, participated in class, or did whatever a particular teacher wanted. There is no transparency, so teachers never have to defend why they gave a particular grade. At the end of each quarter, students are given a quarterly grade. These can be improved with a few thousand tenge given to the right teacher. Also, if your father happens to be the director or the mayor or someone else important, you're more likely to get a better grade.

A lot of the bribery is because teachers are paid so abysmally poorly. A starting teacher might make the equivalent of $100 or $200 a month. In a country where things are not cheap, this puts them below the poverty line. Teachers are paid based on the number of hours they teach, so everyone is angling to teach the limited available hours. Also, pay checks almost never come through on time. Last month, the teachers at my school didn't receive their salaries until the 20th of the month. This month, everyone was shocked when their money was already in the bank by the 4th.

There's the look of discipline and respect in the classroom here, with students standing when teachers enter the room and also standing up to answer questions. But discipline is normally quite terrible. There's no detention or vice-principal to send misbehaving students to; in fact, they can't even be sent out of the classroom because they are required to receive an education. The general discipline method here seems to be ignore the problem, until there's too much noise and side-conversations, and then yell at the students for several minutes. Immediately afterward, the students are talking again. But sometimes, I can hardly blame them. Most lessons are quite boring. There are no visual aids, just a blackboard. Most of the classes I've observed involved one student at the blackboard working out exercises, either grammar work or math problems, while everyone else copied them in their notebooks (or goofed off with their friends.) In English class, the focus is almost entirely on grammar, and students can barely speak, much less form a sentence. Whenever they are asked to speak, it's normally repetition after the teacher. If they have to come up with an answer on their own, they normally flounder and the teacher harshly corrects them, whereupon they repeat after the teacher and learn nothing but to fear speaking up in class. Everything is translated into Kazakh, so students hardly pay attention to English instructions because they know they'll be translated immediately afterward.

All teaching is geared to the two huge tests that all students must take, the PGK during their 9th year, and the ENT during their 11th year. Students can leave school after 9th form to go to college, which is four years long and either trains them in a trade or makes it easier to get into a university. The most motivated students stay through 11th form, when they take the very difficult ENT in hopes that they do well enough to go to university. The English section of the ENT is almost entirely obscure grammar questions, thus explaining why the teachers teach what they do.

Teachers from our school performing a traditional Kazakh song during a concert for Kazakhstan's Independence Day.

My host family. My Dad, Oral, is unable to move anything but his right hand and his head; he got some sort of kidney disease about 15 years ago. He's still really positive and happy, though. My Mom, Zubairash, teaches Russian at my school. My sister, Aziza, is in 10th grade. My cousin, Aset, is in 9th grade. He's from Shymkent in the south, but is living with us now. I also have a 23 year old sister, Dana, who works at a hotel in Astana, and an 18 year old brother, Alisher, who studies engineering at a university in Kostanai.

In front of my apartment building.

Waiting for the bus with Aziza - it's really cold here!

The dombra is the Kazakh national instrument. Aziza, my host sister, plays it really well, but she was really nervous when I was videoing her so this is the best of 5 takes.

Several weeks ago, wandering through our little village, my friend Sarah and I stumbled onto a tiny Russian Orthodox church. It was perfect timing, because the service was just beginning. We donned headscarves from a box by the door and stood, enthralled, as a priest walked around the room, waving a censer of incense in front of the four elderly women in attendance and chanting in old Russian. We continued standing as he went behind a curtain and kept chanting. From an unseen balcony above our heads a woman would chant in reply, her voice drifting down almost like angels from heaven. It was all very beautiful, and the nearest equivalent I can give to the sounds would be Gregorian chants. We stayed for about 30 minutes, but not knowing how long the service would last, we slipped out early and spent the next 15 minutes talking about how fortunate we were to find that little church.

A few weeks later, a different friend, Denise, and I were also wandering around the village. Denise asked if we could go to the church, because I'd been raving about how beautiful it was. We made our way to the edge of town, where this time the service was just ending. Wanting to peek inside at the icons hanging on the walls, we edged toward the door. The same four old ladies shuffled past us, and last of all the priest came out. He was wearing a long, black robe, and had a beard that reached to his waist and a ponytail just as long hanging down his back.

As we stood in front of the church, he approached us, a welcoming smile on his face. Then, he asked if we were spies. At first, we didn't understand, but when he said “CIA” it became clear. “No, no, no!” we exclaimed. “We're certainly not spies. We have nothing to do with the CIA or even the embassy.” Then we tried to explain what we were doing in Kazakhstan, but when someone suspects you of being a spy, all of a sudden you're very nervous about what you say, and everything begins to sound suspicious. At first, I thought something like, “I'm here to learn about your culture,” but no, that sounds like I'm gathering intel. Then I thought, “I'm here with the Peace Corps,” but then he would be bound to ask what that is, and I would have to admit that it's with the US government. And all of this, of course, in broken Russian. Eventually, we ended up saying we were English teachers and then started talking about how Denise doesn't like the mountains because she's from Nebraska. It seemed the safest course of action at the time.

After we had established that we were not spies (although I wonder if he was convinced), he asked us if we knew why there was an economic crisis. “If we knew, we wouldn't be in one!” Denise exclaimed. So he offered to tell us. Below, I've given the best transcription of his speech that I can. It was very interesting, to say the least. I should note that this whole speech was given in a very nice and mild-mannered way, never accusatory or confrontational, so in person it seemed a lot less polemic than it does on a computer screen. That's probably why we didn't realize at first that he was accusing us of being spies. And why we stuck around even after we figured out that he was.

Before I begin though, I should say this: These are the words of one village priest, and do not necessarily represent the stance of the Russian Orthodox church as a whole. They also do not represent the Peace Corps (as none of my blog does) and they don't represent me. I hope that I've recorded them as accurately as possible, but something may have been lost in translation.

We are in an economic crisis because God told us not to lend money for interest, but we did. We have factories and farms built on nothing but promises to banks. How can we ever expect to build something out of nothing? We even lend to our own families, and expect them to pay us back with interest. We are only interested in earning dollars or rubles (the Russian currency; he never referred to the Kazakhstani currency, tenge). That is why we are in this crisis; God is punishing us for not obeying him.

Do you know the history of Carthage? It was a great empire. It had many great kings, such as Hannibal, who attacked the Greeks. But Carthage worshiped Mammon (money). They were very greedy, and they put Mammon before God. Mammon is the same thing as the devil, and because they worshiped him and not God they were destroyed and are not around anymore.

We are just as evil as Carthage, and that is why we're in the end times. The earth and human society is sinking into hell. Only a few people are hanging on with the tips of their fingers, fighting the descent. But most of the world is evil and soon we will all be destroyed.

That is, unless Russia saves us all. It is only Russia that can save the world, because it is a holy country. It's wonderful that we're learning Russian, because there are Russians everywhere, throughout the whole world. And Russia is a holy country, because it is led by a holy man. President Putin (this is how the priest referred to him) said that he was given two gifts by God. (I wish I'd asked him what these two gifts were, but I didn't.) Who would ever say that they were given gifts by God if this weren't true? And since Putin was given gifts by God, this shows that the government of Russia is sacred. Conversely, no American president has ever said that he was given gifts by God.

How can America expect to run well as a country if we're constantly changing presidents every four years? It's like driving a car and changing drivers every four hours, or running a factory and changing managers every four months; it just doesn't work. Besides, the president is just a puppet of the Anglo-Saxon and Jewish establishment anyway, and he doesn't have any real power.

America is a weak country now, because they don't work to produce anything. Thirty years ago, 30% of Americans worked in the production sector, but now only 10% do. And because we don't make anything with our hands, but import everything (and therefore have a huge trade deficit) we have become weak and fat. Both Americans as individual people, and America the country, is weak and fat. We just move money around and lend at interest, and that is why we are in an economic crisis now.

But we should come back and speak to him once we speak better Russian, and we can have many more interesting talks.

Bayan, my 17-year-old host sister, wanted to say something to you all, but I made her write it in English, so this is what she says.

Hello!

My name is Bayan.Im from in Kazahstan.Im 17 years,11 th class.I have a father,a mather,a brother and his wife,a sister and her husband.My hobby is listen to music and dansing.I like ice-cream,juise. My dream is tu graduate university.I want car.

Baursak is one of the national dishes of Kazakhstan. Basically, it is deep-fat-fried triangles of dough. One day, the staff in our village got us all together and taught us how to make it.

Sasha chops the wood to start the fire.

Once the fire is started under the giant kettle, Aigul pours two bottles of oil into the pot.

Meanwhile, Denise and Sarah cut up the dough. (Johnny and Marissa "supervise.")

Laura fries the baursak. Yum, yum!

Mix hot and cold water, add lots of soap, and then scrub, scrub, scrub. When you think you've scrubbed enough, you're about halfway done.

Wring out the clothes very well.

Hang them up to dry on the line, and hope it doesn't rain. 24 hours later, voila! Clean clothes that still smell strongly of the soap you clearly didn't rinse out well enough.

In which my host sister has garlic stuck-up her nose, my brother plays fetch with our neighbor boy, and Barak Obama sings a Kazakh pop song

This particular evening starts when I come home to find my sister Marzhan with something stuck up her nose. At first I think it's a piece of tissue because she had a bloody nose or something, but on closer inspection I find out that it's garlic. (By “closer inspection,” I mean surreptitious glances out of the corner of my eye as we drink chai. I still haven't figured out the cultural norms for asking about ailments.) I'm still not sure why she had garlic stuck up her nose, but at least she took it out before she went to the store.

I'm getting used to strange medical practices around this house. Last week, my brother was complaining about an earache, so my mom got out a bottle and a hypodermic needle. She loaded up the needle with the medicine from the bottle and gave him a shot in the buttocks. Even if I have had to get 12 shots so far from the Peace Corps doctor, it still made me cringe.

But this particular evening, the illnesses aren't over yet. In addition to garlic up the nose, my other sister Gulya is wearing a SARS-style face mask. She says it's because she has a cold. I think, “How thoughtful of her, to think of the rest of us and not spread her germs,” until she takes off the mask to cough. And she still double dips in the apricot jam at dinner, so I eat the rest of my slice of bread plain.

Dinner is a real treat: pizza! I made pizza once before for my family, and I guessed they liked it enough to have it again. Or maybe they feel like they aren't feeding me well enough because I keep bringing home the congealed fat and slimy noodles that I get for lunch. This morning my mama insisted that, in addition to my fat and carbs, I take three handfuls worth of candy that she shoved in my lunch bag. And now we're eating pizza. I hope I haven't implied that I don't like their food; I just don't like it cold.

Luckily, I get in on the process of cooking dinner. I say luckily, because they keep asking if they can replace the cheese on the pizza with mayonnaise. And even though I keep saying no, they keep asking, so I'm glad to be in the kitchen, making sure that no mayonnaise ends up on my pizza.

Pizza is super easy to make over here. They already have a flat bread with a raised edge that works perfect for the crust. Then you just cut up and boil down some tomatoes to make the sauce, grate the cheese (tonight it was gouda), and cover it all with onions, peppers, and bologna, which was the only kind of meat we had in the house. Pizza is much more of a success than my other cooking attempt, Shepherd's Pie. One day, about eleven o'clock, my dad asked me if I wanted to make lunch. With nothing else to do, I said yes. He replied, “Great, so what will you need? You'll need meat, and what else?” Vegetarian is definitely not an option. Because of the time constraints, though, I ended up making a very interesting version of Shepherd's Pie. Basically, it was a little meat and a lot of onions with some Italian seasoning, and mashed potatoes on top. Although my dad said it was delicious, I haven’t been asked to make that again. I think pizza was a much bigger hit.

In the middle of our meal, a small boy walks into our house. He seems to be about one year old, since he's walking but not yet talking. There is no adult in sight. He's very cute, and comes right up to the table and grabs a handful of walnuts, still in the shell. We play with him; my brother throws walnuts across the room for him to go get and bring back, like playing fetch with a dog. At first, I think we might be babysitting him. But then he starts to get fussy and asks for his mom, so Bayan picks him up and takes him home. I think he might be our neighbor. I really hope he's our neighbor, and didn't just wander over here on his own.

After dinner, the whole family gathers in the living room to watch TV. Our favorite show is on, a kind of variety show with a lot of singing, some comedy acts and the odd juggler and fire blower. Tonight, for the last act, the guest star is “Barak Obama.” He's portrayed by a Kazakh guy in an afro wig, torn jeans and a t-shirt that reads “Roots Rock.” Is this really how Kazakhstanis see our president? I try to ask about the jeans, but my family is so into whatever he's saying in Kazakh (I hear “Hilary Clinton” several times) that they don't answer me. Then Obama breaks out into a Kazakh pop song, complete with back-up singers. I never knew he had such talent.

Next a show comes on called “Two Stars.” It's the Kazakhstani version of American Idol, complete with background stories and a panel of judges. Alas, there is no Kazakhstani Simon Cowell, because the singers are awful and need to be told so. I can actually understand their comments, because they almost all involve the words “zhaksi (good)” or “tamasha (excellent).” Unfortunately, not one of the singers or zhaksi or tamasha. Where are all the good singers in this country? I know they're out there, because I just listened to Barak Obama sing.

At this point my siblings start laying out their “beds” (mats laid on the floor) in the living room, and I know it's time to head for bed.

I really love living with a family, because it adds such an interesting dimension to my cross cultural experience and insight into daily life here. I mean, how else would I know that very small children are allowed to wander around at will, and this is a culturally acceptable child-rearing practice? Or that garlic stuck up your nose is a cure for…something? But in addition to that, I just love my family in general because they're such great people. There's a bit of a rivalry going on between the trainees in my village about who has the best host family, but I can say with (slightly biased) confidence that mine is by far the best.

The Peace Corps' favorite metaphor definitely involves fish. For example, we are like fish out of water over here in Kazakhstan. We are also fish who have left their familiar waters of America. One day during cultural training, we wrote our greatest cultural problem on one side of a paper fish, then had to find something positive about that experience, ie “flip that fish.”

And probably the most true, even if it's the most cliché: We're living in a fish bowl over here.

I didn't notice the fish bowl at first, but that's probably because I don't speak the language, so I can't understand what people are talking about. For example, I'm pretty sure my family talks about me all the time, but since my name is the same as the word for “mother,” I can't be sure. The other night I was ironing my clothes on a cloth spread out on the living room floor, my family sitting around me and watching tv. At first, I was a little suspicious that they might be discussing my ironing abilities. (Considering that I probably ironed a grand total of five things before coming here, I'm sure my technique is not quite correct.) They were saying “ana” a lot, and as I ironed a button up shirt I definitely heard the word for “suit.” Then, the truth came out; they directly asked me how much a shirt had cost. My suspicions were confirmed! I wonder how many other times they've talked about me while I blithely ate my bread and sipped my tea, or attempted to watch Turkish soap operas on tv?

There are other subtle clues that people around town are also taking notice of the Americans. I often feel eyes staring at me as I'm walking down the road. Every child in school has the burning desire to showcase their knowledge of the English language to us, shouting, “Hello! Hello!” (Sometimes they also know “How are you?”) The people at the bazaar automatically know to use their limited English to tell us the price of those tomatoes. But, although we've been warned that everybody in the town is talking about what we're wearing, I've never heard anything about my lack of high heels. (Which we now refer to as “respectable teacher heels.” I might cave someday, but I haven't yet.)

I've realized, though, that information does travel. My host sister, Bayan, can tell me who every single American lives with, and her connection to them. She greeted me after school one day with the question, “Why was So-and-so crying in class today?” One of the girl's host mothers was concerned that she wasn't eating enough, and she scolded her, “Noelle (another PC trainee) eats everything she's given. Why don't you eat as well as Noelle?”

On August 30th was Noelle's birthday. We decided to have a birthday party, just a low key affair where the trainees in our town would get together at one of the staff's apartments and hang out. However, Noelle's family planned a trip to the hot springs (ie, warm swimming pool) for the day, and didn't want to come home early. We decided, since everyone had already cleared their schedule, we'd just have the birthday party anyway. And since most of us had already spent an hour trying to explain with charades that we wanted to go to Noelle's birthday party on Saturday, we decided that it would just be easier if we didn't bother telling our families that Noelle wasn't going to be at her own birthday party. We went, we had a great time, and when I returned home Bayan asked, “Why wasn't Noelle at her own birthday party?” “How did you know?” I asked, baffled. But she's not telling; she says it's a secret. The networks here are creepy.

This whole “fishbowl effect” is a little frightening. In America, I was relatively anonymous. Now, if I were to go outside in shorts (something that only children do, apparently), there's a very good chance that I would be the talk around many different dinner tables that evening.

Maybe I'm being too dramatic. But there's no doubt that I stand out as an American. I'll probably never realize exactly what I'm doing wrong. I try not to smile, wear dark shoes, and not swing my arms too much when I walk. But, judging from the stares, I'm still “one of the Americans.” There are advantages, of course. Just today, walking home from a friend's house, a little boy rode up next to me on his skateboard. “I heard you're one of the Americans,” he stated. “Yes, I am,” I replied, and then we had a very nice conversation about how he went to my school, that he was in sixth grade, and how he hoped he would have one of the Americans teach his English class. I'd never have had the conversation if I wasn't so obviously “not from around here.” But it does make you watch your actions a little more. We're the most exciting thing that's happened in this village since, well, the last trainees were here two years ago. I wonder if they still talk about how So-and-so wore jeans to school once?

The view of the Tian Shan mountains from my village, complete with cow. There are many cows (and many more cow droppings) on the roads. Many families own a cow and walk it out to the edge of town to eat weeds during the day, then walk it home at night to milk it.

Papa Kozhabek, Mama Mubarek, and my sister-in-law Marzhan.

The spread for my birthday dinner. My birthday was also the last day of Ramadan, so although my family said it was all for my birthday party, I think at least some of this must have been their excitement at finally being able to eat during the day. As a side note, these are just the "appetizers." The beshfarmak is yet to come. (Notice the lack of personal plates; we all just dig in to the serving dishes with our forks.)

In our classroom. You can't really see it, but these are military posters, including different types of grenades and the parts of a Kalishnakov. We have other posters showing all the variaties of nuclear bombs. And in the front of the classroom is a photo of President Nazabayev in full military regalia. Military classes are required in public schools for boys and girls in 10th and 11th grades.

Going “v gosti” (in Kazakh, “konakka baradi;” in English, “visiting”) is an art here in Kazakhstan. You need only set foot inside someone's gate to be invited to “chai,” and then you're busy for the next half hour at least. Chai is the Russian word for tea, but we use it to refer to both the tea and the multitude of cookies, fruit, nuts, etc that is inevitably served with it. It is impossible to go v gosti without chai. And it is impossible to just drink one cup of tea and nip out after 10 minutes. Stopping by someone's house is, at minimum, a 30 minute and 500 calorie affair.

Only my second day in village I got my first chance to go v gosti. Although our village isn't that big, we still have to walk everywhere, so it often takes 15-30 minutes to get where you're going. When the PC staff came around to check how everything was going with our host families after our first night, they showed us where our nearest neighbors lived so we wouldn't feel too isolated. My nearest neighbor is Sidd, now known by his Russian name of “Sasha,” who lives only three minutes away. I was invited over to see where he lives, which (judging from American customs) I thought meant a quick stroll over to his front gate so I'd know how to get there. I quickly learned otherwise.

Sasha lives with an elderly Russian couple and their single 38-year-old son, Vasiliy. He has just started studying Russian, and so it's very difficult for him to communicate anything with his family. Because I speak some Russian, I got to be the translator of sorts. When I first entered their house, all three members of his family started talking at once, telling long stories that I didn't understand a word of. At first, I thought this was just their excitement at having someone around who could “understand.” I quickly learned, however, that they are like this all the time, and Sasha is constantly confused.

First things first: Sasha's mom served me tea, cookies, borsh, and salad. After we were stuffed full, she ushered us into the living room. Sasha is an incredible musician, and he was smart enough to bring his mandolin with him to Kazakhstan. He played and sang several songs for us, and though his family might be unable to understand a word that he was saying, the music was truly transcendent. Watching Sasha's host mom's face as he played made me wish I could play something more portable than a piano. She was completely happy and proud of her “American son.”

After listening to our mini-concert, Vasiliy offered to take Sasha and I on a tour of the village. Excited to see our new home, we agreed. We headed for the edge of town (5 minutes away) and then took a stroll through the countryside. At first we walked past a wheat field that had already been harvested, then crossed a river (very dirty drainage ditch/creek). We walked along the creek, through an area that Vasiliy said was a common space, so there were no crops growing there, just grass and some weeds. Some people had staked their donkeys and cows closer to town, but the further we went the more alone we became. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the majestic Tian Shan mountains rose up behind the village. Vasiliy kept us entertained with an unending stream of stories and information, ranging from the frequency of earthquakes around Almaty, to leeches in the lake we passed, to the problem of slavery in modern Kazakhstan. (I really wish I could have understood what he said about this, but since my vocabulary is so limited, I don't want to misquote him.) It was very relaxing and beautiful.

I've had the chance to visit several other PCTs (Peace Corps Trainees) as well. At every single house, I have to have tea. Even when I went over to my friend Sarah's house to do homework together, her mom covered the whole table in cookies and fruit. They don't need any warning; for example, once my friend Denise and I walked another friend, Gambrill, home from an outing. Since Denise lives in a small apartment with a Russian family, she wanted to see how a Kazakh family lives. Gambrill brought us into the house briefly, just to show Denise the house. Gambrill's mom and sister welcomed us happily, had us sit on the couch, and promised us tea. Within 15 minutes they had brought out the table, covered it in melon and cookies, and had the water hot and ready. Then there was nothing we could do but partake.

It was on this same visit to Gambrill's house that I got to see my first goat's head. Her host dad and sister were in the back yard with the head speared on a stick, roasting it over a fire. They also had the goat's four legs speared on the four tongs of a pitchfork and were roasting those as well. Watching them char the head, I didn't mind that I was only staying to chai, not dinner. Only one of us so far has had the privilege of eating goat's head. Andrew, who's studying Kazakh with me, went to a big party on his first weekend in the village. A goat's head was served in honor of the occasion (it's a huge delicacy here, and a must for any big party). Luckily for Andrew, there were many elders at the party, so they received the more honorary parts, such as the eyes and brain. He was only served half the nose. I didn't get a chance to find out what it tasted like.

So far the food here hasn't been too bad. It's very meat and carb based, but since it's fall there's plenty of fresh fruit and veggies available as well. (Not that they make their way onto our dinner table.) I've eaten plenty of lamb, and plenty of chunks of fat that I mistook for potatoes. I've tried many different Central Asian dishes, including plov (lamb and rice), lagman (lamb and thin noodles) and the national dish of Kazakhstan, bisfarmak (lamb and wide noodles.) This is traditionally served on a big plate in the middle of the table, and everyone reaches in with their hands. Everything is served communally here; there is no such thing as a personal plate. Different dishes are put out on the table and then you stick your fork in and take a bite. Bread is sacred and is served at every meal. There's always a big basket on the table, and you rip off a piece and just set it on the table in front of you.

Ramadan just ended September 20th, so devout Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset for a month. My host mom and elder host sister, Marzhan, both practiced Ramadan, so although they sat at the table when the rest of the family ate their “afternoon snack,” we didn't have our big meal until 8pm, after the sun went down. But they still sat at the table even when they weren't eating; everyone in the family sits at the table when it's time to eat, and they stay at the table until everyone is done eating and drinking chai.

It's customary to have at least three cups of tea whenever you sit down, and quite possibly more. Serving tea is a complicated process, normally performed by the eldest daughter in the house. First she pours milk into the bowls that Kazakhs use instead of cups with handles. Then she pours strong tea from a small teapot, followed by hot water from a larger pot. Whenever you need a refill, just hand your bowl to her. She pours out the little bit that may be left in the bottom (cold tea is bad) and fills your bowl again. A full cup is a sign that she wants you to leave, because by the time you get to the bottom of your bowl it will be cold. Half filled or less is the most hospitable cup of tea. And I’ve drunk plenty of those!

So much has happened these last few days, I hardly know where to start. Our flight went well, and we first set foot on Kazakhstansky soil, very sleepy, at 1:15am Friday morning. The airport at Almaty was impressively clean and airy, with high ceilings and no visible mold or crumbly tile (as compared to Pulkovo, St. Petersburg!) We had two days of orientation at “Sanitorium Kok Tobe,” in the city, most of which I spent recovering from the flight while trying to absorb the gobs of information that Peace Corps was sharing with us. I did learn this though: I must state in this blog that everything I write is my own personal opinion and not an official statement from the Peace Corps.

Then came the most exciting and fear-inducing part of the trip so far: we divided into training groups and set off for the villages where we will spend the next two months learning the language and culture while living with a host family. I will be living in a small town of about 5,000-10,000 only 30 km outside of Almaty. There are two groups of six Americans each living in my village, a Russian language group and my group, who's learning Kazakh.

Because I'm learning Kazakh, I'm living with a Kazakh family. I have a papa, Kozhabek, a mama, Mubarak, and a 17-year-old sister, Bayan. Bayan is very helpful and nice, and kindly shows me how to do things and where to find everything. Living at the house is also one other son/brother, Sirek, and his wife, Marzhan, because in Kazakh culture one son always stays home and lives with his parents so he can take care of them when they are old. It doesn't matter, however, if it is the oldest or youngest brother, although it's never a daughter. Kozhabek and Mubarak have several other children, but they don't live at home. They do come “v gosti” (visiting) quite often, completely unannounced. It seems that everyone here goes “v gosti” unannounced, just walking in without knocking, and immediately food is put out on the table and chai (tea) is served.

We live in a big house with 2 bedrooms, a small kitchen, a living room, a dining room, and another less formal dining room. I have one bedroom and the parents the other. Bayan sleeps in the living room on the couch, and Sirek and Mazhan sleep on a blanket in the dining room. There is not much furniture in the house; I think my room is the most thoroughly furnished, with a bed, wardrobe, vanity, and table. When guests spend the night (which they do regularly) they just lay out some more blankets on the floor.

We live in a compound of sorts. There are two houses, plus many outbuildings including the outhouse, banya (bathhouse), and garage, all surrounded by a tall fence. All of the houses here are surrounded by fences. In the other house in our compound lives another family who, as far as I can tell, is not related to mine. Bayan told me they are just renting the house from her family. Still, they share many things, and often drop in without knocking or sit on our back porch and eat pears from our tree together. There is no concept of knocking or privacy here. When the Peace Corps held orientation for our host families, they shared certain American customs with them, including the American love of privacy. Therefore, my family rarely comes into my room. (Although, right now, they are in my room, Bayan reading this over my shoulder to practice her English. I'm not sure if she understands what I've written, though, and I know Mubarak doesn't, because the only time she makes excited noises is when Bayan reads her name. I did leave the door to my room open, though, so that's clearly an open invitation.) Still, so far I've had enough space, and I was wondering if Peace Corps had exaggerated the lack of privacy until some of Mubarak's friends came over for dinner. They spent the night and in the morning, after eating breakfast, I went back into my room to get my toothbrush and found one of the friends sitting at my vanity, doing her makeup. I let that one slide; I think I left my door open that time too.

Because my family is Kazakh, at first I thought they didn't speak any Russian, which was both a good thing (my Kazakh won't improve as quickly if I can use Russian as a crutch) and a bad thing (it's very difficult to get to know your family when the only things you can say are “Hello,” “How are you?,” “I'm from America” and “Goodbye.”) I discovered about 2 hours later, however, that they actually do speak Russian, which, for the exact same reasons, is both a good and a bad thing. We've been able to have several interesting conversations, though, especially when I showed my pictures from home. (They think “Julie” is a very funny sounding name.) We also talked about money at dinner last night; Kozhabek wanted to know how much money my father makes, how much a house costs in America, how much bread and milk cost there, etc. Good practice with numbers.

The home is very comfortable, but it definitely doesn't have many of the comforts that many Americans consider essential. We do have electricity, though it often goes out, as it did on my first night here (but only for ½ hour.) We have a sink, but the water rarely works in the summer. Instead, we always test the faucet just in case, then go to the giant pot of water in the kitchen that they've carted in with buckets and scoop what we need out of there. There is a faucet in the backyard that always works, and apparently in the winter the faucet in the house works much more regularly.

Because we don't have running water in the house, we also don't have a toilet inside. (Although, oftentimes, even with running water there might not be a toilet.) Instead we have an outhouse out back, and it's of the “squatty potty” variety. I'm going to have very strong thigh muscles before this is all done! The method (we learned the proper way to squat in language class) will take some getting used to, and I don't really like to get up and go outside in the middle of the night, but overall it's not too bad. Still, in addition to the dangers you can foresee (missing the hole, or, much worse, hitting your pants) there are some unforeseen difficulties. The other night, stumbling around in the dark as I went out before going to bed, I unknowingly slipped on the pair of “tapachki” (plastic sandals that you wear around the yard instead of shoes) that will not stay on my feet. Normally, it's only a little annoying when the shoe goes flying across the yard when I step forward, and I have to hop to catch up to it. That night, though, there was the very distinct threat that I would fling the tapachka down the toilet hole. Considering that they don't even throw toilet paper down there (but instead but it in a bucket next to the hole), a plastic sandal would have been bad news indeed. And I definitely didn't want to have to explain why one tapachka was missing! Thankfully, I survived, and now I'm more careful about my choice of footwear.

It's amazing how many things take running water! We don't have a shower in the house, but only a banya out back. Oh, the banya is wonderful! (As anyone with whom I've shared my experience in Russia will know.) This banya is, of course, a small family affair, and any more than three people inside would be crowded. You undress (all the way) in the small outer room, then go into the steam room. There's a large metal canister filled with the hot water, which the men started a fire under earlier that day. (Saturday is always banya day.) There's also a large tub of cold water, and you mix the two in your own personal smaller tub until you get the temperature you want. Then you splash some on yourself, scrub all over with soap, and splash some more to get the soap off. Next you dump out the water, get some more, and scrub your hair. A third bucket gets the rest of the shampoo out, and you're done. Apparently the banya building is used for all sorts of washing, because when I came back from a walk with dusty feet and asked where I could wash them, they directed me to the banya building. And later in the week, when I wanted to wash my hair, I heated water up on the stove, carted several buckets of cold water from the hose in the backyard, and mixed the two in the same plastic tubs in the banya building. A very cold endeavor in the winter, but luckily the weather is nice and warm right now.

I also got to learn how to do laundry by hand on my second day with the family. Apparently they have a half automatic machine somewhere, but for some reason (they explained why, but I didn't understand the Russian) I didn't get to use it this time. Instead, I filled up two plastic tubs with water, half from the hose and half from a large kettle of hot water that was over a fire in the backyard. I scrubbed, my hands in the soapy water, but it was clearly not right, because my sister and several of the neighbor ladies were all sitting on the porch, watching me and laughing. Finally my sister came over and gave me a lesson in how to scrub clothes. It involved about 5 times as much elbow grease and 10 times as much soap. And I'm still not sure if I got them clean.

The contrast here between the ancient ways and modern technology is amazing. We might have an outdoor outhouse and wash our clothes by hand, but everyone (including both of my parents) has a cell phone. And when my host sisters came over to check out what I was doing on my computer, and asked if they could see what I had on it, it was clear as they easily clicked around that they were familiar with how to use Microsoft Word. They even got out their flash drive and asked if they could look at pictures that their sister had given them. (Their computer is broken right now.)

Well, since this post is already much too long, I will write more later. Stay tuned for news about several different goat head incidents (all in the first week!), going “v gosti,” and eating with my hands.

The anticipation, the frantic planning, the checking and double checking to make sure that I have everything that I will probably find out I don't need, but right now feels essential: it's all coming to an end. Well, maybe the anticipation isn't ending, and I'm pretty sure “frantic” won't be over anytime soon. But I'm stuck with what I packed, all 67 pounds of it, so at least I can check one thing off my list. I've arrived in DC and survived the first (and only) day of pre-service staging before climbing onto a plane tomorrow and heading off to Kazakhstan. I've met a small portion of the 68 people that will be going to Kazakhstan with me. I've sat through multiple hours of information and discussion about the Peace Corps' mission, safety, and the logistics of getting 68 people onto one plane, and then off of it and onto another, all without losing anyone along the way. But at least it's all been in English.

We spent a good amount of time at staging talking about people's “anxieties and anticipations.” Speaking Russian seems to be high on the list of worries. So is eating horse. And, of course, the weather. How will we survive somewhere where it's over 40 Celsius in the summer and 40 below in the winter? I'm not as worried about that, however, as I am about fitting into my village, making friends, developing deep relationships with those that I'll be living with the next two years. I'll have to wait a little longer to find out the answer to that question, though, because I'll be doing pre-service training for the next 10 ½ weeks. Our big group will be split into six or so smaller ones and we'll be sent to different villages around the Almaty area. There we'll spend the next two months learning Russian, how to teach English, and how to fit in to the local culture. We'll be living with host families during that time, too, and I'm really looking forward to meeting mine.

The staging event feels like this strange netherworld between the America we're leaving behind, and the foreign world we're entering. We're standing on the banks of the river Styx, waiting for Charon the Boatman to come pick us up. (Ok, maybe not the best metaphor; I don't feel like Kazakhstan is going to be Hades or anything, though probably certain points will feel like it.) And Charon is taking a long time to come back across after dropping off his last passengers, so we're waiting here, awkwardly crossing and uncrossing our arms and trying to make light conversation, not willing to go back but unable to go forward. So tonight, I'm sitting in my hotel room, writing this and trying to keep the butterflies at bay. Despite then nervous flutters, though, I'm so excited to finally be off!

There's much, much more to Kazakhstan than Borat. Thank goodness.

For starters, Kazakhstan in the 9th largest country in the world, right after Argentina and before Sudan. It's also the country that's the furthest from an ocean of any country in the world, meaning it has a very continental climate (not to mention an appalling lack of beach-resort developments.) So it's incredibly hot in the summer and incredibly cold in the winter, with not much time in between for my favorite season (autumn.) Packing will be a challenge.

Traditionally, Kazakh culture was nomadic. Turks, Mongols, and other empires had control at various times throughout history. In the early 19th century the Russians first started colonizing Kazakhstan and the rest of Central Asia. Cossaks, Tartars, Ukrainians, and Russians began to immigrate to the region and plow up the steppe, building roads and towns where none had been before. Kazakhstan became part of the Soviet Union, and when it declared independence in 1991, the head of the Kazakh Communist Party, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was elected president. He is still in power.

Nonetheless, the government is relatively liberal by regional standards. The parliamentary democracy has a secular, pro-Western approach, despite its authoritarian leader, similar to the government in Turkey. Working from its crumbling Soviet infrastructure base, Kazakhstan is attempting reform its economy, educational system and social services. Considering that it has about 60% of all of the former Soviet Union's mineral resource, including oil and natural gas, development is much more feasible than in the much poorer neighboring countries like Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan.

Kazakhstan is a very diverse country. Nearly two centuries of immigration means that only about 53% of the people who live in Kazakhstan are ethnically Kazakh. Another 30% are Russian, and the rest are a mix of Ukrainians, Uzbeks, Greeks, Germans, Tartars, Koreans, Poles, and many others. (Soon to include one more American!) This also means that there is a fair amount of religious diversity. About 47% of Kazakhs are Muslim, while 44% are Russian Orthodox. Another 2% are Protestant.

Both Kazakh and Russian are the official state languages, although Russian is much more widely spoken. Kazakh is a Turkish language, but is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

One of the most popular sports in Kazakhstan is called kokpar. In kokpar, men on horseback ride around fighting over a headless goat carcass, trying to carry it across their team's goal line. I sincerely hope I will get to watch a match. I also sincerely hope I'm never asked to participate in one.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8LjXOmZCU4

For more information about my soon-to-be home.http://www.lonelyplanet.com/kazakhstan http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/5487.htm