Introduction

Hi everyone! The following is a summary of my Peace Corps experience over the past two years. I decided to synthesize my blog posts into a longer summary for a few reasons. One, it helped me to better organize and reflect on my last two years as a whole. Two, I feel that there were many experiences that I wrote about in my blog posts that I can better capture after some time to think about them. Finally, due to restricted blog and internet access, it was much more difficult to consistently update my blog than I thought it would be. I feel that one succinct post encapsulates my two years in a more efficient and interesting way. Feel free to skip to certain sections that might be of more interest to you.

Peace Corps Decision and Application Process

I guess there is no better place to start than from the beginning. I decided to apply for the Peace Corps sometime during the spring semester of my junior year. I was in the midst of studying for the LSAT and was trying to figure out which path I wanted to embark upon after my senior year. My decision to ultimately settle on Peace Corps centered on a number of things, including not wanting to go straight to grad school, wanting to travel and live outside of the United States for an extended period of time and the typical reason that everyone that joins the Peace Corps says – wanting to make a difference in the world. I sent in my application in July 2008 before my senior year, and by that time, even though I would halfheartedly search for other jobs throughout my senior year, I was pretty sure that Peace Corps was for me. Many people complain about how long and tedious the Peace Corps application process is, but everything went smoothly for me. I had my interview with my recruiter in August, and she nominated me about a week later for the Central Asia education program leaving in July 2009. I was one of the few from our eventual Kaz-21 group that actually chose to come to Central Asia. I turned in the medical part of my application, had no problems, and then played the waiting game. In late February I finally received my official invitation to Kazakhstan leaving in August 2009. I quickly accepted, laid back, and enjoyed my senior spring semester. After graduation, I spent most of the summer in Chapel Hill outside of a little traveling to DC, nervously anticipating the next two years. Finally, in mid-August, I headed to DC for a two day orientation.

Training

Before leaving for Kazakhstan, the Kaz-21 group had a short orientation in Washington DC covering logistics. More importantly though, we met the 60+ other volunteers that we would be spending the next two years with in Kazakhstan. We had one last meal in DC, and the next morning headed for the airport and then onto Kazakhstan. We arrived in Almaty about 24 hours later, but it was 1:00 AM there, and we were all pretty disoriented and exhausted. The next couple of days consisted of another orientation in Kok-Tobe sanatorium (our home for all future conferences in Almaty). In this orientation we met all of the Peace Corps Kazakhstan staff, including our language and technical trainers. We were also placed in our training villages and language groups, and I was placed in Issyk, the largest training site. I also was placed in a Russian language group with four other volunteers. Finally, after two days, we were put on buses and dropped off at our training sites.

The training schedule did not allow us to have much free time. Before school started on September 1st, we had eight hours of Russian each day, which was useful but exhausting. Some days, we would have technical or cultural trainings instead in the morning. Once a week, we would have hub days, which was when all the training sites would gather together. On those days we would usually have medical, safety, or administrative sessions. However, our schedule changed when school started, and we started to teach classes. Our amount of Russian was reduced so that we could teach, and my main class was a 5th grade class. For the rest of the training our schedule remained the same, except for the major events of site selection, our community project, our language test, and counterpart conference.

Starting with Russian lessons, I will go ahead and say that I have never really enjoyed learning anything as much in my life as I have enjoyed learning Russian these past two years. Maybe I enjoy it so much because I actually go out every day and use it, but I legitimately looked forward to Russian lessons during training, although I will admit that on those eight hour days I was a little tired. Another reason I enjoyed Russian language lessons was that I had an awesome language group and an awesome teacher. After two years, I have actually grown to like the Russian language more than English and hope that I can continue speaking it the rest of my life.

Outside of learning Russian, most of our training was spent in technical sessions on teaching methodology, and then actually teaching in the classroom. I will start out by saying that I had no experience teaching English coming into Peace Corps. I had taught mathematics, but in all honestly, that actually might have been more detrimental than helpful in teaching English in Kazakhstan. So I went in to technical sessions with open ears and tried to take in everything, and then started teaching a fifth grade class. It took me some time to get adjusted to being in front of a classroom; I think that during training I was more concerned with showing the right methodology than actually being natural in front of the classroom, and it took me even a month or so after getting to my site until I felt fully comfortable in front of the classroom. That being said, I had great technical trainers and great volunteer leaders as well.

Then came site announcement, about eight weeks into our training. Throughout training, regional managers and our trainers had observed us and made notes about where we would best fit in Kazakhstan. We were also asked ourselves to make preferences about where we wanted to be placed. On this sheet, I made the preference to be put up in the north, preferably close to a city, and in a site where Russian was the main language. I ended up being placed in a remote Kazakh town in the south while everyone in my language group was placed in the north. My site was also a pioneer site, which meant that my site mate and I were the first volunteers there (most volunteers replace another volunteer). At the time I was really disappointed, but two years later, I can't imagine being placed anywhere but Zhanatas; it will always be my second home. There is a longer section on Zhanatas next.

Overall, training was a great and useful experience. Issyk was a beautiful town and the group of volunteers there were great; we got the opportunity to play some soccer and basketball, as well as do some hiking on the side. On October 31, 2009, the Kaz-21 group was officially sworn-in as Peace Corps volunteers (we had technically been trainees up to that point). The next day, we were sent to the sites where we would spend the next two years!

Gorgeous view from my behind my host home in Issyk.

My awesome language group - Nick, Holly, Myles, me, and Trenton.

Waterfall in Turgen.

Myles, Patrick, Mark, Dawn, and I hiking in Issyk.

Community soccer game.

Scott manning the goal on a PK.

Some after-school basketball.

Katya enjoying taco night.

Zhanatas

I have the privilege of hindsight in this section, as I feel I have described Zhanatas in so many different ways to people in the past two years. I shall use this section to finally do the town justice. Zhanatas has a population of just under 20,000 people when you count the private houses on the outskirts of the town. Zhanatas is situated in the Zhambyl Oblast (an oblast is similar to a state) and in the Sarysu Region (a region is similar to a county). Zhambyl Oblast is situated in the south, but Zhanatas is in the north of the oblast, which puts it more in south-central Kazakhstan.

Zhanatas has a fascinating history. The city was founded in 1969 almost entirely in conjunction with the opening of a phosphorous plant and mine on the edge of town. This plant was and remains the primary industry in Zhanatas. The Soviet Union provided Zhanatas with enough money to build a respectable town, and Zhanatas grew rather quickly. As with most plants in the Soviet Union, the government provided the people with everything they would need, and did not allow any small businesses or free enterprise to get in the way. After only five years, word spread throughout the Soviet Union that Zhanatas was a great place to work, and many different ethnicities came, especially Germans and Ukrainians. Zhanatas by the early 1980s had become a modern city with a highly successful phosphorous mine. However, perestroika and democracy began to seep into the Soviet Union, and mining cities throughout the country began to suffer as it became clear that the government was not as focused on maintaining these plants and mines. New technology was coming in, and the future of Zhanatas began to come into question.

The year before the Soviet Union fell, the population of Zhanatas was around 53,000 people. Then the USSR collapsed, and almost immediately the Germans, Ukrainians, and other ethnicities began to leave. At this point the plant and mine had not closed in Zhanatas, but they correctly foresaw its closure. When the plant finally did close a couple of years later and Kazakhstan became an independent nation, the Russians followed suit and fled to either Russia or northern Kazakhstan. The population had fallen to 25,000 by 1991, and the residents that remained in Zhanatas were angry and traveled to Almaty to protest the closing of the plant. Their efforts were fruitless however because the Kazakhstani government had no money and enough other pressing matters. The situation peaked when rioters from Zhanatas seized control of a railroad near Taraz, causing the railways and the country to lose money. Police had no choice but to suppress the rioters with violence.

Zhanatas had hit rock bottom, and the following years would prove to be the worst in the town's history. In the early 1990s, there was no electricity, no water, no jobs, and no work. My host mom told me that the government would give out lottery tickets so that residents could buy food – some shops were instructed to not even take money. Residents of Zhanatas were at first skeptical of the new Kazakhstan because although the Soviet Union allowed no freedom, you woke up every day knowing that you had a job and enough to eat. What residents began to do was ransack the empty buildings that were vacated and tear them apart for copper and any other material that could be sold. These buildings remain collapsed today and many look like they have been hit by bombs.

The state of Zhanatas today depends on who you ask. Most of Zhanatas is still empty buildings or destroyed buildings, as you could imagine with over half of the population having left. Several volunteers that have visited our town have described Zhanatas as a war zone that seems like it should be in Afghanistan rather than Kazakhstan. However, the plant reopened, and even in the two years that I have lived here, there have been a lot of improvements to the city. The population continues to decline, but in some ways I see a future for this city. It has most of the major necessities, almost everyone has electricity 24 hours a day, and we have water for about two hours a day. The best thing that can happen to this city is for the plant to open at a greater capacity, as many men in this town remain unemployed.

Zhanatas has nine microregions (similar to an apartment complex), but only five of them have occupants, and one of those barely has any occupants. The remaining four microregions are either empty or destroyed. Most people in Zhanatas live in these microregions, which all have five floors. However, some of the wealthier people live on the outskirts of the town in dachas, or private homes. I live in the second microregion, which is relatively small and compact compared to the larger and more spread out first and third microregions. The second microregion also has a higher percentage of non-Kazakhs compared with the other microregions. Beyond the outskirts of Zhanatas, there are several villages. One of these villages is entirely Kurdish, the origins of which lie from when Stalin exiled many of the ethnic groups during the days of the Soviet Union. Another is Baikadam, which is where my host mother's mother lives.

Zhanatas also has five schools. The smallest school is Abai, which is located in the completely abandoned ninth microregion. Abai only has a few hundred students and will probably only be open for another few years. Seyfullen is located on the outskirts of town and has a little less than one thousand students. Ablihan (which is where my site mate worked) is located in the sixth microregion and similarly has less than one thousand students. Awaysov is the largest school, around 1,200 students, and is located in the middle of the third microregion, which is the largest microregion. Awaysov is a gymnasium school in which half of the classes are advanced. Finally, there is my school, which is Shokhan Ualihanova. My school is located in the middle of the second microregion and is also a gymnasium. It is also the only mixed school in Zhanatas, meaning half of the classes are taught in Russian and half are taught in Kazakh. The other schools are only taught in Kazakh.

Zhanatas has most of the necessities: a hairdresser, a post office, a fairly nice bazaar, a culture house (similar to a community center), a sports school, a music school, a bus and train station, a hospital, a nice park with a lake, multiple shops, a World War II monument, an internet cafe, a few small dance clubs, several cafes, a meat bazaar, an education department, an akimat (similar to a mayor's office), a bank, and a mosque. That being said, many people go to Taraz or Shymkent to do their major shopping because of a much larger selection and cheaper prices. The park in Zhanatas is particularly interesting. It has a nice lake and a lot of interesting Soviet playground equipment.

Overall, I am happy that I got the experience to live in Zhanatas. How many people can say they spent two years living in a Soviet mining town?

My school.

World War II memorial in Zhanatas.

View from my apartment.

Zhanatas Lake.

The 9th Microregion - completely abandoned.

Strange old Soviet playground decorations.

More strange Soviet playground decorations.

First Two Months in Zhanatas (Outside of School)

After training, all of the volunteers in southern Kazakhstan got on a train and we were off to our sites. All of the volunteers in Zhambyl Oblast got off in Taraz, the oblast center. My director and counterpart met us at 1 AM and then it was off to Zhanatas. Peace Corps had told us that it was about two hours from Taraz to Zhanatas, but that didn't turn out to be entirely accurate, as we didn't get to Zhanatas until about 6 AM. I was supposed to have three host family options, but because I was a boy, two families couldn't take me because there were young Kazakh wives and their husbands obviously wouldn't allow it. Therefore, I was taken to my only option directly. Her name was Sholpan, she was in her early 50s, and she lived alone. Of course, there was beshbarmak, fruit, and all sorts of salads, even at 6 AM. I briefly introduced myself in my elementary Russian that was probably rendered more elementary by the fact I virtually hadn't slept in 48 hours.

My host mom Sholpan, her granddaughter Aizeray, and me.

The first two weeks I was there, the students were on break, so it gave me time to meet various important people, get an address through the post office, and explore the town. Zhanatas wasn't quite like any other town I had ever seen – every turn revealed more empty apartments and more destroyed buildings. However, in some ways Zhanatas had a certain beauty to it that I would grow to appreciate more over time. Finally it was time to make my first appearance at school, and being at a pioneer site, that meant a parade and a concert put on in my honor. I made a speech in Russian to my teachers about myself, in which I included that I liked basketball. After the speech, the PE teacher at our school came and put me on the school basketball team (comprised of teachers).

As it turned, there was a regional tournament that next week. We trained for that week and then the day came. There were 24 teams and games started at 9 AM and the tournament didn’t end until 5 PM. Now I must say, that basketball in Zhanatas is not like American basketball, it is pretty much a mix between rugby and basketball. Nevertheless, our team, which had never advanced past the second round, wound up in the finals against the perennial champions. Unfortunately we got spanked but second place was not bad. I would continue to play basketball pretty regularly over the next two years, which proved to be a great escape from lesson planning.

The traditional pre-game ritual.

Shooting free throws.

Our team - Aibek, Abai, Ravili, Acil, Jenya, and me.

Another major thing that would consume almost all of my nights the first few months was “gosti” as most Peace Corps volunteers call it, which is the Russian word for being a guest at someone's house. I was almost daily whisked away to another house of drinking, beshbarmak, and often a 16-19 year old Kazakh daughter that I was supposed to marry. Along the same train of thought as gosti-ing, I also went to two Kazakh weddings in the first two months. Kazakh weddings are usually pretty large, around 300-500 people, and usually last until 4 or 5 AM. I went with my host mom, her brother, his wife, and their daughter to Taraz for my first wedding. Other than those people, I didn't know anybody there. There was a lot of dancing, and there were a lot of toasts. The toasts are perhaps the most unusual thing about a Kazakh wedding; everybody in the audience gives one, which is why weddings take so long. The second wedding was of one of the English teachers at my school, so there were more people that I had met in my short time in Zhanatas. This wedding was smaller, but there was more dancing on my part, and I had to give a toast in Russian. At the end of my toast, I simply said one word in Kazakh, Рахмет (thank you), and everyone went nuts. This was my first clue at how important the Kazakh language was in Zhanatas. This wedding took place in Baikadam, which is where my host mother's mother lives.

Second wedding in Baikadam.

Then there was the next task of getting my first haircut in Zhanatas. Now I had successfully gotten a haircut in Issyk back during PST which I really liked, so I didn’t think that it would be too huge of a problem. Normally I like to get my haircut fairly infrequently, meaning I usually let it grow out and then get it cut pretty short. I got to the haircut place and showed the lady a photo of what I wanted. She took one look at it, shook her head and said, “No-no, I will make you handsome.” This concerned me, so I called my counterpart and asked her to explain to the hairdresser what I wanted. My counterpart replied, “No-no, if you get your hair cut short, you will look like a hedgehog, and no girls will want to marry you.” I sighed, and basically told the hairdresser to do whatever she wanted to my head.

Finally, we had another basketball tournament in mid-December on Kazakhstan's Independence Day. The tournament went much like the last one, but the most interesting part of the day was at about 2:00, when our team was not playing. We were watching two teams play when the ref called a traveling violation on one of the players on the team that was losing by quite a bit. Clearly frustrated, he got up and took a swing that knocked out the referee. It was not unusual in Kazakhstan for punches to be thrown, I had a bruised jaw from when someone took a swing at me after I stole the ball from him, but apparently this punch struck a chord with the entire gym. Everybody on both teams and in the stands emptied onto the floor, and a full out brawl began that made the Pistons-Pacers brawl a few years ago look like children’s play time. It lasted for about eight minutes before dying down. Blood was wiped up, and play resumed. And since this complex did not have locker rooms, everybody just stripped down naked in the middle of the gym after the tournament to change clothes. Apparently this was OK, even though it was more than likely below zero in the gym, and even though there were women in the crowd. In the middle of this, bread was distributed to everybody, and we all started eating. Then, the vodka came out…apparently it is appealing to quench your thirst with vodka after a hard fought tournament. I asked if they had any water, and someone answered, “Why would you want water when you have vodka?” This was one of those moments, as I looked onto a court of male teachers munching on bread and vodka in sub-zero temperatures, many of them still naked, and many of them talking happily with people three hours earlier they had been trying to beat down during the brawl, where I thought to myself, yes, I am in Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstani Education System

Before I talk about my personal experience teaching English in Kazakhstan, I will touch on the education system in this country overall, because it is quite different than in the US. First, each school is designated as either a Russian, Kazakh, or mixed school (mine was mixed). This determines what language classes are taught in. At my school, if the classes ended in A or Ә they were Kazakh classes, and if they ended in V, B, or G, they were Russian classes. Second, most schools are either regular schools or gymnasiums, which means that it is advanced. My school was actually both, it had gymnasium and regular classes, although I only taught gymnasium classes. Each school has first through eleventh form; there are no separate elementary, middle, and high schools. As I just mentioned, students graduate after eleventh form, not twelfth. School always starts on September 1st with a big ceremony, and always ends on May 25th with the graduation of the 11th form and last bell. The schedule is split into four quarters with about ten days between each quarter. Each school day lasts from 8:30-6:30, but it is split into two parts. At my school, 1st, 2nd, 5th, 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th forms have class from 8:30-1:30, and the rest have class from 2:00-6:30. Finally, grading is done by numbers, not letters, with a 5 being the equivalent of an A, a 4 a B, and so on. At my school, the lowest grade a student could earn was a 3 because the teacher would be blamed if the student received a 2, which was failing, and therefore no teachers gave out 2s.

One large difference between schools in the US and schools in Kazakhstan are that students in Kazakhstan are placed into a class in 1st form and then have every class for eleven years with that same group of students. This creates an interesting atmosphere; the classes are definitely more close-knit and each class has it's own personality and attitude. Another big difference is that students have opportunity to leave school after 9th form and attend college. College in Kazakhstan is not the same as college in the US, it is simply another option if the students don't want to finish 11th form. Students who attend college often get a job straight after they graduate from college and don't attend university. In general, better students choose to finish 11th form and attend university, but there are exceptions, the main one being if a family doesn't have enough money to send their child to university. In that case, parents assume that a college education is better than finishing 11th form and not being able to send their child to university.

Concerning standardized testing, there are two big tests that a student will take in the course of their education. The first is the ПГК, which occurs in 9th form. This is a language test, so students take a Russian, Kazakh, and English variant. This test, to be polite, is amusing for the native English speaker. It is riddled with mistakes, and even the questions that are grammatically correct don't accurately reflect the level of the student. Worst of all, there are always at least three or so questions that are on English history or geography. For many of these questions, test makers obviously just pick up an English textbook and choose a sentence to copy onto the test, which leads to incredibly difficult detailed questions that students couldn't possibly know.

The second test is the ЕНТ, which is the English equivalent of the SAT. This is the test each student must pass in order to attend university in Kazakhstan. There are five parts: Russian, Kazakh, mathematics, Kazakhstani history, and a fifth subject which the student chooses. That subject should relate to the field they want to study in university. Now, if you think students in the US stress about the SAT, then you should come to Kazakhstan. This test means everything, and I do mean everything, in getting into university; a student can do nothing in school for eleven years, but if they do well on the ЕНТ, they can go wherever they like. This puts extreme pressure on students and teachers, and they often spend more than a year preparing for this exam.

In addition to the standardized tests above, there is also an Olympiad in each subject. An Olympiad is at first a regional contest, and if a student does well, they move onto the oblast competition. A school's results on an Olympiad are extremely important, and teachers will stop at nothing to make sure their student does well on these Olympiads. The Olympiad is just one example of a myriad of competitions that a school competes in each year, some academic, and some not academic. The results of these competitions grow to define a school, and therefore usually take precedent over actual lessons themselves

In general, students take most of the same subjects as students in the US, excluding languages of course. There are a few small differences though. Concerning literature (which is a separate subject from grammar and language), students only read Russian and Kazakh literature. This is mainly due to the fact that they can only read in their native languages, however another reason is that is simply a continuation from Soviet times when no literature from the western world was read. History is also very Soviet-centered and often contains a lot of propaganda, although we can honestly say that the US education system sometimes provides similar ethnocentric viewpoints. Mathematics and science subjects are pretty much the same, and PE is taken every year (which I like). Then there are languages. Most schools teach only Russian, Kazakh, and English, but there are some rural schools that still teach German instead of English. My school actually taught German until the year that I arrived. There are also some advanced schools in big cities that teach other international languages, mainly Chinese, Turkish, and Arabic. In my school, Russian classes have Russian every day, Kazakh four days a week, and English two days a week, while Kazakh classes have Kazakh every day, Russian four days a week, and English two days a week. Students in larger cities have English more often, sometimes even every day.

Open lessons. The two words every volunteer dreads hearing, whether or not he or she is involved in them or not. Open lessons are lessons in which teachers from around the school (or in some cases around the region or oblast) come and observe a “regular” lesson. But there is nothing regular about these lessons at all. Teachers spend weeks preparing for these lessons, preparing all sorts of crazy visuals and technology that they have never used before. Usually, teachers also coach students on the lesson ahead of time so that they get all the answers right, thus making the teacher look good. Then, after the lesson is over, all the the observing teachers sit down and critique the teacher's methodology. Open lessons in English have the additional problem that none of the teachers actually understand English. In my opinion, that makes it difficult for them to critique an English lesson, but instead what they do is critique the methodology and if students “seem” to understand the lesson. That means that English teachers simply need to either give all the students the answers ahead of time or just say every answer is correct, even if it is not. But the main reason that I don't like open lessons is that they interrupt everything. Teachers miss other lessons to plan their open lessons, students worry about what other teachers think about them and are afraid to answer questions, and it just generally is an unnecessary stress on everyone.

The last thing that should be mentioned is the enormous amount of pressure that is placed on teachers and directors in Kazakhstan. Although teachers in the US also face pressure, in my opinion it can't compare to Kazakhstan. In the US, if a student does poorly on a test, in general it is accepted that the student did not study and the blame should be placed on him or her. If an entire class fails a standardized class that may be a different story, but in general students are responsible for their own education. In Zhanatas that was not the case. Teachers were held accountable for their grades, and if they didn't give the appropriate amount of good grades, they were yelled at in front of the entire school. This leads to the importance of how grades look being higher than the importance of their accuracy. For example, if a student gets all 5s and 4s and only has one 3, that 3 will almost always be changed to a 4. Otherwise, the teacher giving the 3 will be yelled at for not teaching correctly. Grade inflation was a huge problem at my school for the reason mentioned above. All of this leads to the students not having responsibility for their own education because there are no consequences for failing a course.

First Two Months in Zhanatas (Teaching)

In the classroom, looking back in retrospect, the first two months were really mostly about getting to know my students and teachers, and just learning to navigate the school. My first school year, through June, I would teach six classes (6V, 7A, 9A, 9V, 10A, and 10B) two times a week. I spent most of the first two months learning the students' names, getting accustomed to teaching with my counterparts, and meeting all of the important people in my school. I started out with two counterparts, Aisulu and Bahytgul. Aisulu was my main counterpart for both years, 53 years old, and had taught English for over 15 years. Her knowledge of English grammar was excellent, and her speaking improved a lot over the two years I worked with her. My second counterpart, Bahytgul, I would unfortunately only know for two months because she had a baby in January after I arrived. She was supposed to come back my second year, but her baby was sick and she had to stay home. Bahytgul was younger and her English was also very good, it was a shame that I couldn't work with her for two years.

I loved all of my students the first two months. They were eager to work with me, participated in all of my games, and were a lot of fun to be around. Their level of English was understandably not as advanced as the students in Issyk because they had English far less often, but most of them participated and I couldn't have been happier about my students.

One of the first activities that I did in the first two months was a fairy tale competition put on by our education department. For this competition, we chose the best students from one class (my class was 6V) and had them compete in a contest that included a song and a short play. The song I chose to teach them was “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” They enjoyed this song and did a great job at the competition. The fairy tale was one out of a textbook. I worked with Bahytgul on this, and she took care of all of the costumes and props. I would soon learn that in Kazakhstan, costumes and props were more important to winning the competition than the English level of the students. I assumed that I would just sit back and enjoy the competition, but the night before the education department called me and said that I would be the MC. I would have to get used to being told important things like this right before an event over the next two years. Anyway, the competition was a lot of fun, and I got to meet some students and teachers from other schools. My students ended up getting second place, although the first place school only won because they had great costumes and were cute little kids.

Awkwardly MCing the event.

Do your ears hang low?

Sayora, Uliana, Lev, Nazerke, Vika, and Nastya from my then 6V class.

One of my next projects was that I decided to have my students write letters to my friends and family. I chose my 6th and 7th grade classes, and they had a lot of fun writing the letters and drawing pictures. Mailing the letters off was a challenge (more on the awesome post offices in Kazakhstan later), and it took much longer than expected for the letters to get to the US and back. Unfortunately, as expected, a few letters either didn't get to the US or didn't get back to Kazakhstan. A huge thank you though to everyone that participated and wrote letters! For those letters I didn't get back, I ended up writing them myself, so no worries. The kids really enjoyed it – one girl even framed hers when she went to Almaty.

Cultural Norms of Kazakhstan

Some of the first things you have to learn as a volunteer are the cultural rules of Kazakhstan. This was particularly true for me, being in a traditional rural Kazakh town in the south. Kazakh people, particularly the elders, take their traditions and customs very seriously. Here are some of the more important ones that I could remember off the top of my head.

1) Men have to shake hands with other men when they enter a room.

2) It is bad luck to shake hands with someone if you are on one side of the door and they are on the other.

3) You must take off your shoes while inside the house.

4) It is bad luck for a woman to sit at the corner of a table; it means she will not get married.

5) If you sit on the floor, you will become sterile.

6) You should always bring a gift when you are a guest at someone's house, no matter how small the occasion.

7) Students always stand when a teacher or administrator enters the room.

8) You should never point at anything; if you are teaching, always point with a pen or other object.

9) Never whistle while indoors.

10) Congratulations are of utmost importance when anything new is bought or done, including cars, home repairs, and sometimes even new clothes.

11) Kazakhs always eat with their hands, except for soup.

In addition to cultural rules, there are four things about Kazakhstan that I have grown to love that I wish would happen in the US, or that did happen in the US that I wish we could bring back.

1) The majority of the time that kids aren't in school, they are outside playing. It is such a joy to walk around and see virtually the entire town outside enjoying themselves in the summer every day.

2) Teenagers and young adults likewise take walks all of the time with their friends; it is the thing to do in Zhanatas and most of Kazakhstan.

3) Young kids here aren't obsessed with popularity like they are in the US. Whenever there are new students, everyone grabs them and they are immediately included in everything.

4) I love the cultural diversity here, as well as the fact that people aren't ashamed to ask about it. In the US there is a hesitancy to ask people about their ethnicties and cultures, but here the question is as common as your name.

The Rest of My First Year

So finally, January came. I had survived the first two months of chaos, weddings, basketball tournaments, and figuring out how everything in Zhanatas worked. Even better, I knew how to navigate school and was ready to start making changes and start my extra-curricular activities. I had come to Kazakhstan with some ideas of what I wanted to do, but in the end it was my evaluation of my town in the first two months that decided for me what I wanted to accomplish, both inside and outside the classroom. The following are the ideas I put into effect starting in January:

Introducing an American grading system: Over the next two years, this would turn into the best decision I made as far as motivating my students. This first involved changing the numbers to letters (students would receive As, Bs, Cs, and Ds). Each test or homework assignment was given a number of points, and their score on these assignments was recorded in my Excel document. I would post updates on my wall every two weeks (it was anonymous because each student was assigned a number) so each student could see where they stood and what they needed to do if they wanted to improve their grades. The idea of transparent grading was completely foreign to them, and the students loved it, flocking to the wall every two weeks to see what their marks were. Furthermore, I introduced an honor roll where the top 20 students (I would expand that to 35 my second year because I added more students) received certificates. That served as an extra motivation for the best students. All of these marks were then translated back to Kazakh grades for their official records. Of all of my ideas, this took by far the most work. It involved not missing any classes over the next two years (not as difficult to do considering how far away I was from a city) and being consistent with these grades, even when other teachers complained they weren't the correct way to do it.Adding a third lesson for my regular classes: I quickly observed in my first two months that two English lessons a week in a society where students never hear English outside the classroom would not be enough. Students would learn the material well during class and then forget it in the five days until their next lesson. Therefore, I added a third lesson after school (or before school for those who studied in the afternoon). For the most part, only my motivated students came to these lessons, so they were a great opportunity to either review what they had learned that week, introduce a new and interesting theme, or review something that they should have known already but did not. These lessons almost always focused on speaking.English Clubs for students I did not teach: I conducted English clubs in a different manner than most volunteers did. Instead of choosing a time each week and publicizing it to the whole school, my teachers and students preferred that I hold an individual club for each class that I didn't teach, or at least the ones who wanted one. So I added one for 5A, 6A, 7V, 8A, 8V, 9V, and 10B (if a class has more than 24 students, they are divided into two groups for languages, which means I taught half of 9V and 10B but not the other half). Usually about 8-10 kids would come, except for 5A, where the entire class came. They were also the more motivated students and I enjoyed virtually all of the clubs.Community English Club/Teachers' English Club: Immediately after I got there, almost four or five people a day would come to me asking for English lessons. Therefore, I started a community English club for non-English speakers. Originally I had about 15 people coming per lesson (I gave two lessons a week), but by the end of my first year there were only three regulars. Likewise, many teachers at my school that did not speak English asked to learn, so I obliged, and also had about 15 people at the beginning. But also like my community club, by the end of the first year there were three regulars, so I decided to combine these two clubs for my second year. All of my regulars came almost every lesson for two years, except one girl who moved to Almaty. The best part is that I just found out that one of the teachers who came to my club is actually moving to the US, so her work will be put to good use.Spanish Classes: All of my students begged me to teach them Spanish from the minute I got to Zhanatas, so despite the fact that I hadn't planned on teaching Spanish, I gave lessons twice a week to older students and twice a week to younger students. These lessons were mostly vocabulary based and we played a lot of games. One boy said he prefers Spanish to English and always greets me as Señor Chris.Sports Club: The sports club was a big hit from start to finish, although unfortunately we couldn't do it from mid-November through mid-March because it was too cold outside. Most of my participants were from my younger classes, and we usually played either frisbee, rugby, basketball or kickball. When I say rugby, I actually mean a hybrid American football/rugby that I invented so that my students could understand. My Sunday afternoons when I held the clubs were definitely one of the highlights of my week.Office Hours: I also decided to introduce the concept of office hours, where students could come in and ask questions if they didn't understand something they had learned that week. Or at least that was my intention. What office hours really turned into was students coming in and expecting me to prepare a lesson for them. I eventually obliged and ended up adding a fourth lesson for my 6V class because so many of them came, and did the same the next year for my 11A class.

Because I was in a remote site and didn't have the opportunity to go to they city on weekends because I worked Saturdays, I decided to take on more hours both years than Peace Corps suggested. Two years later, I am happy with that decision because my students really were the reason why I came. I maintained this schedule for the rest of the first year and had a great time.

In early January, I went to Baikadam again to meet my host mother's extended family for the first time, and it finally happened. I was given my first sheep’s head to carve and eat in Kazakhstan. From what I have heard, this now means I am Kazakh. The sheep head is given to the honored guests in traditional Kazakh households…and I was proud to get it. The way it works (or at least the way it worked for me) is that you are presented the sheep’s head at the head of the table, and supposed to carve out pieces of the head for everybody. I'm not sure that this is always true, but it was mandatory that the eldest male got the tongue. I was then told that I should eat the eyeballs before everyone began. I ate one (which was not tasty), and graciously offered the other one to my host mother. Unfortunately I did not get to take part in the preparation of the sheep head, which is apparently burned then boiled, but I didn't lose any sleep over it.

The first February would turn out to be the coldest month in my two years in Kazakhstan. Zhanatas is located in south-central Kazakhstan, but because of the hills that created a windy and bowl-like effect, the temperature was usually much colder. We had several days of school cancelled and several delayed. It actually didn't snow an incredible amount, which meant that the ground was ice covered from about December-March. Kazakh and Russian people must have something in their genes that allows them to walk on ice. I was particularly impressed with the girls who did it in high heels, until I realized that high heels actually help them walk (they dig their heels into the ice to keep their balance). I also had several snow ball fights with my students, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Winter Wonderland.

The difficulties of doing laundry in the winter.

Our computer technician Jenya and I.

Two of my students walking their brother on a day off.

Some cold sheep.

My then 9V class after a snowball fight.

My then 6V class after a snowball fight.

In March, after we celebrated Nauryz (I'm going to cover all of the Kazakh holidays in the next section), I took my first trip to Turkistan with all of the volunteers that had gathered in Shymkent. Turkistan is the burial place of Khoja Ahmad Yasavi, the Sufi Shaikh of Turkistan, who lived here during the 11th century CE. Because of his influence and in his memory the city became an important center of spirituality and Islamic learning for the peoples of the Kazakh steppe. In the 1390s Timur (Tamerlane) erected a magnificent domed Mazar or tomb over his grave, which remains the most significant architectural monument in Kazakhstan, pictured on the back of the banknotes of the national currency. The city attracts thousands of pilgrims. According to a regional tradition, three pilgrimages to Turkistan are equivalent to one hajj to Mecca. Turkistan was about two hours north of Shymkent.

After Turkistan, all of the Kaz-21 volunteers gathered in Almaty for IST, or In-Service Training. The training was fine, but the best story came from me trying to get there. My plan was to leave Zhanatas around 3 PM, arrive in Taraz around 7:30 PM, wait about three hours for the last bus to Almaty, and arrive in Almaty at about 9 AM. But then disaster seemingly struck about 2 hours into the bus ride to Almaty when the bus broke down right in the middle of the steppe. Great. But the situation quickly turned into one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. Several men on the bus tried for about an hour to fix whatever was wrong with the bus, but they eventually gave up. Soon after, they started unloading a vehicle that had about twenty to thirty goats in it that was following us to Almaty. The men got together and made a thirty minute shift schedule for when each of us would watch over the goats. So from 2:00-2:30 that morning, in the middle of the steppe in the dark, I got my first goat-herding experience, something that I had wanted to try since I had arrived in Kazakhstan. I think I did alright. Two men at some point that night took the vehicle and drove back about 30 minutes to the closest village. I assumed they were getting something to fix the bus. Nope. They came back with six bottles of vodka and nothing else. Welcome to Kazakhstan. It was below freezing so I guess they wanted to try and stay warm. Anyway, we spent a total of about six hours on the side of the road and didn’t leave until about 6:30 when another bus came to pick us up. About 20 minutes before we left, the sun rose over the steppe and I got to see my first real sunrise over the steppe in Kazakhstan (my training site and current site are both hilly). It was the most gorgeous sunrise I had ever seen, with a herd of goats and a few donkeys in the foreground. At that moment the feeling of being on the other side of the world hit me hard, and I knew that what started as a broken down bus turned into an experience I would remember for the rest of my life.

I came back from IST with a ton of ideas for the last couple of months...until I realized that nothing happens in the last quarter in Kazakhstan. One reason is субботник, which is based off суббота, the Russian word for Saturday. Every Saturday, every student and teacher is required by the akimat to spend a few hours cleaning up the town, which is an awesome idea in theory, even one that I think the United States should adopt. The problem though is that although this day is supposed to always be on Saturday, the akimat decided that they would spread it out during the week. And yes, this meant that on two occasions I showed up to teach a lesson and my students were cleaning outside. I asked why the akimat would tell the students to clean when they should be in school, and nobody had an answer. Then there are the endless amount of holidays, particularly in May. Not only does this mean that we don't have school on those days, it also means that students have to miss a lot of lessons preparing for dance competitions and other things of that nature. Finally, as in the US, students and teachers aren't very interested in doing any work the last month, which made accomplishing anything very challenging. I was able to get out a study guide for what we had learned that year and give a proper final exam, both of which were revolutionary. It is rare that I am complimented by other teachers and parents on something I do in the classroom, but my study guide was a big hit. My students actually used it and my teachers have said that they want to continue to use this idea when I leave. I finished the year by announcing the final honor roll for all my classes, and then there was graduation (I'll talk more about graduation in my second year). And thus ended my first school year in Kazakhstan!

Kazakh, Russian, and American Holidays

As you have probably noticed, I haven't mentioned any holidays yet because I wanted to save them all for one section. Life revolves around holidays and parties in Kazakhstan, and I'll provide a summary of each one below, starting with how I spent American holidays, and then moving onto the Kazakh and Russian holidays.

День святого Валентина — Russian for St. Valentine's Day: Valentine's Day is fairly similar to the US. I got a lot of cards and candy from my students the first year, and the second year I got cards for all of the girls and gave candy to all of my students. Valentine's Day was really cute, it was a lot of fun to have little first grade girls that I didn't know running up to my pant leg and tugging on it to give me a valentine. It was also a lot of fun to try and translate all of the poems and cards I got from my

Hi everyone! I am still here (despite the long periods between my blog posts), and my final full school year ended about two weeks ago. The last quarter of school was about the same as year, none of the teachers and students wanted to work, but I came to accept it. Like last year, I taught a lot of the classes the past quarter without my counterpart due to illness or other activities. April rolled along, I gave my final exam early because I remembered that once May hits, it is holiday and celebration central. A summary of my classes is below, in general, I absolutely loved 5 of my classes (6A, 7V, 10A, 10B, and 11A), and enjoyed another 6 despite some of them being hooligans (5G, 8A, 8V, 9A, 9V, 11B).

5G (Russian class): By far my craziest class, always bouncing off the walls, and many of the boys didn't pay attention, but they were really enthusiastic and loved being in class. This was also by far my most culturally diverse class, with at least nine different ethnicities by my count. I only taught one group in the fall and then taught them together in the spring. Favorite student – Rashida (#25 below on my honor roll), a really cute Kurdish girl and maybe my most enthusiastic student, who liked to walk my home for lunch and her mom gave me discounts at her shop.

6A (Kazakh class): My favorite class by a hair, enthusiastic and silly while at the same time knowing when to settle down and work. There was a group of about ten of them that came to everything I had, whether it was Spanish, sports clubs, or extra English clubs. This class always brightened my day no matter how bad of a mood I was in. Favorite students – all of them seriously, but everyone smile when Gulim walks in the room (pictured below).

7V (Russian class): They got a little lazier this year compared to last year, but still an awesome class that also came to everything I organized. I would also say that of the classes I taught last year, this class and 11A improved the most, I rarely have to speak in Russian to this class. Favorite student – Gulsanie (#3 on the honor roll), naturally smart, pretty, and has improved probably as much as any student I have taught over the past two years.

8A (Kazakh class): My teachers warned me that 8th grade is often a lost year, and I saw that this year with 8A. One of my favorite classes last year, they definitely got a lot lazier, and had an obsession with finding boyfriends and girlfriends. But they still had good personalities and their level of English is still really high. Favorite student – Janar (#17 on the honor roll), such a hard worker and also has improved immensely since I got here.

8V (Russian class): I was close to dropping this class at the beginning of the year, but their behavior improved a lot over the year. This class I should divide into boys and girls, the girls were amazing and the boys unfortunately weren't, with a few exceptions. Favorite student – Enlik (#7 on the honor roll), wants to study English in college, great personality and great student.

9A (Kazakh class): Both of my 9th grade classes had the lowest English levels of any of my classes this year for some reason, and my 9A class didn't seem to show enthusiasm toward English. That being said, they were probably my most well-behaved and polite class. Favorite student – Talgat (#22 on the honor roll), probably my favorite male student, very polite and hard-working.

9V (Russian class): Also not a high level class, and not as polite, but at least they were filled with class clowns that made me laugh. Most of the people in this class had great personalities. Favorite student – Lera (#15 on the honor roll), half Russian – half German, and a great student and hard-worker. Also probably the most popular girl at our school, pretty much every guy wanted to date her.

10A (Kazakh class): My most challenging class to teach this year because half of the students came from a non-advanced class that studied German and had never studied English before. This class had some of my best students, and then had some that had never studied it before and unfortunately were lost from the beginning. I worked with them once a week though after class and they improved a bit. But overall, this was a smart, well-behaved class. Favorite students – Gulzhaina and Jibek (#1 and 10 on the honor roll), could not choose between the two, Gulzhaina was my best student from Day 1 in Zhanatas, and Jibek worked tirelessly to improve over the two years I was there.

10B (Russian class): Actually my best class if you look at the average grade for each class, not because many students are great, but because all but two students do B or better work. A fun class to teach, everyone is friendly with each other. The boys actually all speak great English but are a little lazy, while the girls have a slightly lower level, but work really hard. Favorite student – Janat (on the right below), great smile, enthusiastic student.

11B (Russian class): 11B was probably the class I least looked forward to teaching on a weekly basis, but I'll chalk some of that up to them graduating. Other than a handful of students, most others did no work, missed class, and showed no desire to be in school. On top of that, the boys in the class were pretty arrogant. I liked almost all of them individually when we talked after school or between classes, but not as a teacher. Favorite student – Hafiza (on the left below), one of the few in this class who was enthusiatic about being in school.

11A (Kazakh class): I said that 6A was my favorite class by a hair, and 11A would be that close second, the only reason I didn't cry when they graduated was because they wanted a few more final lessons this summer before they left. 11A was everything that 11B wasn't, kind, modest, enthusiastic, and they improved to the point where I don't think I used a word of Russian after January. Favorite students – Janerke, Gulnaz, and Bota (#6, 16, and 26 on the honor roll), when all of the eleventh graders stopped coming to English to focus on the ЕНТ (SAT equivalent), these three continued to come to English. Janerke has already gotten into an English program in Almaty and wants to study in London eventually.

Other events this spring included Victory Day, which was about the same as last year. Every school gathered to put flowers on the World War II memorial, and then we marched down as students waved balloons. Then, a group of students marched as part of a competition. Photo below is that group.

This spring, I also got the opportunity to take care of my sitemate's dog, which involved cleaning a lot of poop, but also involved me meeting a lot of Russian kids which I now visit two or three times a week to play frisbee and talk with.

Then there was graduation, which was a lot more special for me this year because I actually taught 11th grade this year. On May 24th, all the younger classes received end of year awards and the 11th graders danced their last waltz to “Последний звонок (Last Bell).“ Then, on the 25th, the eleventh graders had their last awards and thanked their teachers. Gulnaz from my 11A class gave a nice speech in English and I got some flowers. Then they passed the keys to the tenth form classes and after about an hour of photo taking we were done. Some photos are below.

Last week was our COS conference. As I mentioned before, most of the volunteers from our group will leave in August, so this was the last time that we would all be together. Our Kaz-21 group was great, and there are a lot of people I will really miss. After COS, we went hiking near Almaty toward the Kyrgyzstan border. Our goal was to see the “Big Almaty Lake” and an old Soviet Observatory, that was the highest in elevation in the entire Old Soviet Union. I would write about our experience, but I think my friend Mark who went with us captured it better than I could. Here is his story, with photos afterward:

It started as story.  Some young and adventurous British bucks came through Taraz about one year ago.  They told the story of this amazing journey they made, trekking into the great unknown mountains to a hidden observatory where a mad astronomer lives and studies the sky with his dilapidated soviet equipment.  They painted such a rosy picture of the trip though, how could we deny it.  So during our conference in Almaty we resolved to make the journey, little did we know, we were heading towards possible doom.  The weather forecast predicted some rain, but also some sun and we knew the trip was only about 13 kilometers, not much to worry about, right?  Unfortunately our foolishness and the shotty directions were almost our undoing.  So bright and early Saturday morning we made our way to the roundabout where we could catch bus number 28.  It would take us up into the foothills; from there we were on our own.  It took us up and we were on our way.  No signs, no real directions except for what the bus driver told us, “туда туда,” “to there, to there.”  He was pointing up a road, and as we began it seemed as if we were the only ones ascending, while others were making their way down, in some cases on bikes, and even running, perhaps in order to escape the perils of what laid ahead of us.  The only other directions we had were nebulous and cryptically written reports of the few others who had made the journey.  Walk 8 km to a water pipe, then follow the pipe to the lake, a kilometer from the lake go up and find the compound.  So we trudged on with the menacing clouds threatening torrents of rain, or worse.  We walked and walked, and walked and walked and then walked some more, all uphill until finally reaching our next waypoint.  The pipe.  At first we couldn’t believe it, that we needed to actually follow this pipe, but this is what travelers before us had written in their vague explanation on how to reach this place.  We were incredulous because it wasn't a gentle slope or even a slight one, not even a bit of a slight slope evening out, but a nearly vertical climb up into the heavens and clouds.  Along the side we believed we could make out stairs so steep and decrepit that they might be part of some ancient Tibetan temple crumbling from the ages.  We investigated the road, but discovered it went into a harrowing and very long switchback, therefore we resolved to take the pipe.  This meant skirting around a very creepy looking construction site, with seedy construction workers and security guys sitting walking around.  A man also passed us telling us to go no further, that snow was in the mountains, an ominous omen.  Soon though we were at the pipe, and finally as the rain started to break for the second time, we began to ascend the stairs, which were not stone, but like some mad sculpture of iron pipes haphazardly welded together.  We ascended though moving onwards and upwards, eventually having to use iron ropes in order to traverse the steepest parts as the ground below us became worse and worse.  As we reached the top of the first hill, our spirits rose but were quickly dashed when we saw what lay beyond.  More hill, more pipe, more up, and more rain.  By this point our shoes were soaked, along with our socks and feet.  Our trash bags and light raincoats also began to fail as the torrents continued; we were ill prepared for such a journey.  Moving onward we battled on until finally reaching the last stretch, upon a windswept hill, drenched with rain and the foreboding gray light from the clouds was a small watch house which overlooked the lake, our second navigation marker.  At this point the group split, two of us continued along the pipe, while the other two decided to continue up the road, we feared we would never see them again as in these sorts of stories you should never separate.  We feared this until we saw them about every five minutes because it was a switchback that went up the hill and crossed over the pipe we were following every hundred yards or so.  But still, it was tense there for a minute.  Finally making the crest of the hill we stumbled weakly towards the wall, the promise of Big Almaty lake over a low wall, but as we reached it we were disappointed to find…a pond.  What was Big almaty Lake was sadly dying, a shadow of its former self.  We were given the gift of sun as a reward for our work though, and for five minutes enjoyed the warm rays bathing us.  This would not last though, and now we had to press on the last bit in order to reach shelter.  As we began to move up the road that was cut into the side of the hill, a dark shadow began to overtake us, the clouds were descending upon us.  Visibility became nothing as we hugged the edge of the road.  Undaunted but exhausted we pressed, with every slogging step until finally coming upon our shelter, our safety, our home for the night.  Or so we thought.  Around us were white capped mountains, this hilltop itself sitting on a mountain thrusting into the sky, the first thing we saw was the dish, moving slowly and quietly staring deep into every patch of grey sky.  According to others as you walk into the compound, people usually come out to greet you, but as we wandered there was nothing but the disturbing sound of the wind and patter of rain.  Wandering we came upon an old man, perhaps a shaman, perhaps just middle aged and perfectly normal, we were rather cold by that point.  He told us that the mad astronomers had all left because of the weather but there was someone who might help a keeper of that forbidden place.  He said he would come and that he must depart soon.  As we waited we began to freeze as the temperature continued to drop and we were not drying off, we began our plans for contingencies.  Foremost among them was picking an abandoned building and building a fire, huddling through the night for warmth, but then finally the keeper came.  We negotiated a price and he gave us two rooms.

Overall, it was a pretty awesome trip, definitely one of my more interesting memories so far. As far as this summer goes, I have a couple of camps in June (including the second annual camp in Zhanatas the last week of June), and then I am off to Europe for most of July. Prague, Germany, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and London are on my list. I hope everyone is well in the US!

Hi everyone,

Happy Nauryz! March 22 is Nauryz, or the Kazakh New Year, which is the biggest holiday in Kazakhstan. After going to Symkent last year, I decided to stay in the Zhambyl Oblast this year (I hadn't been to Taraz since Thanksgiving). After classes ended on Saturday, I headed down to Taraz to meet our new country director. He and is wife were traveling around and meeting all of the new volunteers. They were very nice, and their son actually lives in Chapel Hill – small world. I ate two delicious plates of fried lagman -best meal I have had in four months. The next day, I headed to Aca for a couple of days to celebrate Nauryz. The day before Nauryz, I saw a few yurts being built (or at least part of the process), then I went and played baseball with some Kazakh boys. The next day, we walked down to the stadium where there were many yurts, lots of Nauryz Kozhe (a soupy dish served on Nauryz), plov, salads, and breads. There was also a concert, and it was good to see other volunteers.

But anyway, I'll back up a bit because I know that it has been a while since my last post. One major change in Peace Corps Kazakhstan starting this year is that education volunteers will come in March instead of August, train during the spring, go to summer camps in the summer, finish up their training in August and then permanently head to their sites before the school year starts. This affects our group because there would have been a three month overlap with the new group and our group, but instead Peace Corps elected to move our COS date up from November to August. However, there was also the option to stay until your original COS date if you wanted, or extend for another year. I am in the group that decided to stay until the original COS date, so I will still be leaving in November. One reason that I can do this is that my school actually will not get a replacement (neither will Zhanatas in general). My regional manager liked my school and I was disappointed that we won't get a replacement for my students and my counterpart, but I understand the other complications with Zhanatas (not worth getting into here).

This winter, as a whole, was actually pretty mild. The coldest part of the winter was not nearly as cold as last year. The coldest few weeks were actually the end of February. On top of that, we got a lot more snow this year, so it was a pretty good winter in terms of weather. March was a lot colder than last year, even now in late March most people are still wearing their heavy winter fur coats, so I guess winter just lasted longer to make up for not being as cold. Here are a couple of photos of this winter, first just outside my apartment, second at the park, and third is the lake.

Some other highlights from the last few months, March 8 was Women's Day. On this holiday it is vital for a man to wish every woman in his life Happy Holidays. My 11B class threw a concert for the ladies and teachers at my school, it was pretty entertaining. Valentine's Day and my birthday were more of the same, getting presents, etc. For Valentine's Day, I gave each of my students a candy cane and a little heart candy, and I gave my female students actual valentines with English. They liked that, and of course, everybody translated the cards in order to decide which student I liked best, despite the fact that I randomly wrote their names on the pre-printed cards.

School in general is pretty solid, there are good days and bad, but overall things are going pretty well. The quarter ended with the ПГК test, which is the national test in English, Kazakh, and Russian that all 4th and 9th graders have to take. This test, from an English standpoint, is a debacle, from how teachers help students cheat, how proctors accept bribes and go sit in the cafeteria to drink tea, how the people who check whether the answers are correct don't actually know English, and probably most important, that this test is supposed to be an accurate measure of their English knowledge when in fact the test is about as terrible a test as possible. It includes questions such as “How many people live in Birmingham” (because your ability to speak English hinges on this knowledge) and “What is the best city in Great Britain” (clearly an objective question). Even the English related questions usually have either two possible answers or no possible answers. Despite all this, a school's and teacher's reputation depend on tests like these, which is incredibly sad.

After being in Kazakhstan for more than a year and half now, I personally think that most of the problems with English education can be summed up with these three problems:

1) Two 45 minute lessons a week is too few lessons to learn English well, especially since students don't study at home.

2) A student's grade in a class is worthless. Someone can sit in the back of class and listen to music every lesson all year and still move on to the next grade with a passing grade. Students who do well in other classes automatically do well in English because it reflects poorly on the teacher if they have one “bad” grade.

3) Most importantly, many of the teachers and especially the education department are simply not qualified to do their jobs and don't care about their jobs. Too many examples of this to mention here.

I have stated many times that cheating is the biggest problem, but I am starting to see that this is more of an effect from the above problems.

Looking forward to the next few months, finishing up the school year, having a final exam, having a final big competition between the Kazakh and Russian classes of each school. There will also be a summer camp again this year. The last quarter is filled with holidays, competitions, and other distractions, so I don't have many goals in class other than reviewing. This summer will start with my close of service conference, then soon hopefully some other camps, including mine. In July I am planning to go Europe, including meeting my family in Paris.

Finally, I should mention that Kazakhstan is having a presidential election on April 3. This election was just announced in late January, many believe as an appeasement to democratic powers due to the events in the Middle East and North Africa. Overall, this election will be a formality, everyone knows Nazarbayev will win, but there some opposition powers that do have some support in cities. My friend even found and took a photo of a Communist yurt in Taraz on Nauryz. As volunteers we are not allowed to comment on or obviously support any of the candidates. My school is a polling site, so I might go and check out ow the election goes. Elections are always on Sundays, apparently, in Kazakhstan.

That's it for now. I'll end with one funny story, one of my students read an English essay at a school event recently entitled, “Cooking with my Mother.” The essay was well read and practiced, the only problem was that there was a typo on the Power Point and programs, it instead read, “Cooking my Mother.” I was the only one who seemed to notice this minor mistake, so I let it slide. Here are a few photos of some of my students.

Hello everyone,

Happy New Year and a Happy Belated Holiday season to everyone. I am especially missing home now, my grandpa passed away this week, and my heart and my prayers are with my family now back home. My grandpa wrote me a long letter recently with his life advice, and I plan on translating a few sentences of that note so my students can read it. Grandad, I will miss you but I know you are smiling on us from above now.

The end of the school term went well. On Christmas I went out to a cafe with the English teachers at my school. My 6A class also threw me a surprise party with songs and candy, it was a nice uneventful day. New Year's, as always in Kazakhstan, has been a week long extravaganza of parties, the Kazakhs sure know how to celebrate. On New Year's Eve, my host mom and I went to another house to celebrate, but lost track of time. It is bad luck apparently not to be in your house as the New Year comes, so we ran home, popped open the champagne, and got there just in time. I then watched fireworks and enjoyed the kids playing outside.

The new term starts up soon, and I will have an update then. Hope everyone is well, and here is a photo from my 6A girls and I wishing you a Merry Christmas.

Hi everyone,

Sorry about the delay in writing, I hope that everyone is well. It is the beginning of December, kind of hard to believe that this semester has only about one month left. Things are going OK for the most part, some of my students' motivation has dwindled in this second year, but I still have enough students who are enthusiastic. This year, I particularly like my two new younger classes, 5G and 6A. 5G is crazy loud, but in a good way, and I'll take that over uninterested quiet any day of the week. Last post I had some photos of 6A, here are some of 5G.

Honestly, one of the reasons for the delay in writing is that nothing incredibly new is happening. I celebrated Eid again, which is one of my favorite Muslim holidays here. Basically, all you do is go around and eat food with Russians, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Kurds, Turkmens, Tartars, Koreans, and Uyghurs. Other semi-interesting things that happened over the past month include teaching my students to dance, celebrating Halloween with my students and Thanksgiving in Taraz with other volunteers, and going to Almaty for my flu shot and seeing some friends there. Clubs and classes are still going as usual. Below are a couple of photos of my classroom, and us kicking field goals at our sports club.

Other than that, things are moving along. I think my Russian has gotten about as good as it is going to get in Zhanatas (at this point when I try to learn a more complicated grammar structure and use it, many Kazakhs here don't speak Russian well enough to understand what I am saying), so I am starting to focus more on Kazakh. Happy Holidays in advance – here are a couple of photos of early winter from Almaty and from my school in Zhanatas.

Well, maybe not exactly. I’ll start this blog with what I have been working on the past three weeks, a singing competition among nine of my eleven classes that happened on Friday. Each class worked really hard, learned their song’s lyrics by heart, and did really well. My 8A class ended up getting first place, my 9A class second place, and my 9V class third place. Below are the songs they sang (I chose all but 11B, I had never heard of that song before), and below that are their photos singing in order. It was a fun time. As a side note, if you forgot, all the classes that end in A are my Kazakh classes, and B,V, and G are Russian classes.

5G: Hello/Goodbye – The Beatles

8A: All You Wanted – Michelle Branch

8V: Ever the Same – Rob Thomas

9A: Breakaway – Kelly Clarkson

9V: Brown-Eyed Girl – Van Morrison

10A: Wait for You – Elliott Yamin

10B: In Love with a Girl – Gavin DeGraw

11A: Better in Time – Leona Lewis

11B: Apologize – Timbaland

I’ll back up to the beginning of the school year…this year I am teaching 11 classes total three times a week, the nine classes above plus 6A and 7V, which couldn’t take part in the concert because they study in the afternoon, which is when the concert took place. My new classes are 5G, 6A, 8V, 9A, and 9V, and with the exception of 5G, I chose to add the other classes because I had them for clubs last year and liked them so much. 5G I added on at the last minute to teach with a new English teacher we have at our school. I now have three counterparts, so in addition to my counterpart from last year, I am working with two other younger English teachers. I also have lots of new students in my 10A and 11B classes because they combined groups (if there are more than 25 students in a class, they split them into two groups for languages). So far, other than my 8V boys being a little lazy and my 5G students bouncing off the walls for most of the lesson (but normally in a good way), I love all my classes. Below is a photo of half of my 6A class, it is pretty hard to not be in a good mood around them.

I still am doing all the other activities I did last year, Spanish clubs, sports clubs, other English clubs, and office hours, but those actually just started last week because the schedule changes like crazy the first month of the year. For the first four weeks, I showed up at school not knowing which classes I was going to teach that day, so I couldn’t schedule anything. We also had the added thing to our schedule that new volunteers that came in August were going to visit our sites and see what it was like to live as a volunteer. We had two groups, a group of Kazakh speakers and a group of Russian speakers, and I could tell that the group of Russian speakers looked at my site and were kind of thinking, “This is worst case scenario for a Russian speaker.” But I told them that it was alright, if you like your students and host family, you will have a good time.

Most of the holidays in the month of September I went through last year in Issyk, so they weren’t that new this year. Constitution Day had a parade, and the First Day of School had new students. However, Teacher’s Day was a little different this time around. Each teacher that had joined the school in the past year had to do an embarrassing thing in front of the school. So myself and four other young teachers all got up for one round, and apparently we had to dance blindfolded in front of the entire school. Awesome. Four times, the music stopped for 10 seconds for some reason, until finally they took my blindfold off and found myself alone. Apparently, each of those times, somebody was voted off, and I “won” apparently, although it probably had more to do with them wanted to see the American dance ridiculously than me actually having any talent. Then, I sang a song with my 11A class. Thankfully, I have no photos of these occurrences. The 11th grade Kazakh class always organizes the event, there is a photo of them below.

I’ll end with my most interesting cultural experience of the past few months, I went with one of my neighbors, who is Kurdish, to a village about 35 minutes outside of Zhanatas. As I got there, I was shocked that the entire village was Kurdish, nobody else. This is the largest Kurdish village in Kazakhstan apparently because this is where Stalin exiled them back during the 1950s and 1960s. They were dropped off in Almaty after being exiled (most of them were from the Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Geoergia regions) and had to walk ALL THE WAY from Almaty to Zhanatas, what would be a 15 hour train ride. Every family I talked to had lost a family member during the journey, it was a worse version of the Trail of Tears. What is more interesting is that they were still there (partially because the Kurds still don’t have a country of their own), and many refugees from northern Iraq actually came to this village seeking help during Saddam’s regime. It was one of the most interesting cultural experiences that I have had here and one of the best living history lessons I have ever received.

More updates will come soon, hope everyone is well!

Hello everyone,

This blog post is going to be a little shorter than usual because honestly nothing extremely new has happened over the past month. School started on September 1st, and I am pretty excited about my classes and clubs this year. My schedule changed a little and I am teaching a 5th grade Russian class, which will be an interesting experience, I haven't taught a class that young since PST. I also have two new counterparts, which will be a fun and interesting experience. My schedule isn't exactly set yet, it is pretty typical in Kazakhstan for your schedule not to be set until a month after school starts, so I will go into more detail later.

August was a pretty boring month for me honestly, you have to spend at least a month at your site during the summer, and that month was August for me, and I was pretty glad I did the bare minimum because I actually got so bored I called up students and asked if they wanted to have extra lessons because I had nothing else to do. I was pretty glad when school started again and I am now back to being busy.

This past month has been Ramadan, which I did not participate in (meaning I ate during the day), but the end of Ramadan is Eid. My host mom was actually out of town for Eid. The first night (Thursday), a random Kazakh girl talked her way into my apartment with the intention of seducing me, which I politely declined. The next two nights I was a guest at Tartars' homes, which meant they are Russians who practice Islam, which means that you mix the practices of Islam with vodka. Very interesting way to celebrate an Islamic holiday. The last night, my host mom returned and it turned out she had bought a car. Now I live in a pretty poor town/village, meaning if you can afford to buy a car, you are a pretty important figure. Throughout the day, everybody dropped by our house to congratulate my host mom on buying a car, and every time somebody came by, I had to pop out from doing lesson planning to take a shot of vodka. Clearly my productivity waned throughout the day.

The good from America: glad football season has started again. The bad: the crazy pastor in Florida who wanted to burn Qur'ans on September 11th. Pretty much every major new network in the Middle East and Central Asia led off every night with this story, and every other person in my town asked me what was up with this guy - and are all Americans like him. I think these people need to critically think about how their actions are portrayed abroad and how they affect people who are living abroad in countries with Muslim populations.

Next blog post will go into more detail - hope all is well back in the US!

Всем Привет!

Sorry it has been so long since I have written, but I added a few summer camps to my schedule last minute and really didn’t get back to my site until a couple of weeks ago. So this summer…where to begin? Shortly after my last post, I went to Almaty for my physical and then it was off to Malaysia for a couple weeks. I avoided disaster when I misread my departure time as 11:30 PM from 21:30 PM, which is actually 9:30 PM. But thankfully I got there early enough where I just caught the plane. As usual, the plane ride over was interesting. I sat next to a Kazakh girl from Ust-Kamenogorsk who was 17 years old, had just finished 11th grade, and was on her way to Malaysia to study English. There was however a slight problem…she did not know any English beyond the basics. She was really nice and hospitable, as most Kazakh girls are, we talked (in Russian) for almost the entire eight hour flight. It was good language practice for me. Then, when we landed, she looked at me and asked, “What do I do now?” It shocked me that her parents would allow her to get on a plane, go to a country where she did not know the language, without any plan for when she gets there. She had money though, so I helped her get her baggage, change her money, and buy a Malaysian sim card. Thankfully, as I was trying to find a taxi for her to her college, she saw a man with her name on a sign, so she had a ride. I hope she is doing well now.

One of the biggest differences between Kuala Lumpur and Almaty is that everyone spoke English, especially the people who commonly dealt with tourists. Because Russian is the second language to Kazakh in Almaty, and because Kazakhstan gets almost zero tourists, nobody speaks English there. So it was nice to be able to get around with my English. Kuala Lumpur was an interesting city, not very pedestrian friendly, but the food was great and the sights were interesting. After spending a while in Kuala Lumpur, I went out to Penang, and island in the north. Penang was a little quieter, a little more pedestrian friendly, and the food was great. Overall it was a great trip, mainly because of the food, I ate great Malaysian, Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian food. It was tough to go back to Kazakhstan. Most importantly, it was great to see old friends, thanks to JJ and Rachel for being great hosts! Photos are below.

Shortly after I got back, my parents and sister came to Almaty for a week, which was a lot of fun. We went to the bazaar, the zoo, the parks, and went hiking up a canal near the mountains one day. We also had a nice blend of local and non-Kazakh foods. Because it was Almaty, the food was amazing, I had to explain that unfortunately in my village it does not usually have that much spice or that many vegetables on it. Finally, we had solid living arrangements, I got a cheap apartment near downtown with a shower, a fridge, a toilet, and air-conditioning.

After my family left, I went almost straight to Shaulder for my first summer camp in Kazakhstan. Shaulder is a small village between Turkistan and Shymkent, only about three hours from my site as the bird flies, but it took eight hours to get there through Shymkent. The camp was an English camp for fifth and sixth graders, and it was well organized. This village is even more Kazakh and smaller than mine, so it was definitely an interesting perspective. Some photos are below.

Next, I headed to Aca, which is very close to Taraz, for a baseball camp. The best part of this camp was that we got to sleep in a yurt, which was awesome. The camp itself was a lot of fun, baseball is not the easiest sport to explain, especially in Russian/Kazakh, but the kids eventually got the hang of it. For the smaller kids, they did other activities, including an awesome wet-sponge dodgeball game. However, this camp was only in the morning, so we had free time to do other things in the afternoon and evening. I mentioned before that we stayed in a yurt but didn’t tell the whole story – this yurt actually had electricity and a television. The World Cup final happened to fall on the first night we were there, so we got to watch the second half of the final in a yurt (after eating at someone’s house and watching the first half there). Definitely another one of the highlights of Kazakhstan so far. Later that week, we had a nice picnic outside where we got to pick raspberries. Photos of the camp are below.

As a side not before I get to our summer camp, I feel like I had the best World Cup watching experience possible, besides actually going to South Africa. I watched the first US-England match with Rachel in Malaysia at a bar at 2 AM. When the match ended (we were pretty happy to have a tie), we were walking to our hostel at 4:30 AM, and it might as well have been 3 PM, there were businesses open, kids playing, etc. I got the feeling that was pretty normal. The second match I watched at a bus station in Almaty with a bunch of Russian guys. When they found out that I was American, that was it, the vodka came out and we had a good time. The third game I watched in Zhanatas with a bunch of Kazakh and Uzbek guys at my host family’s house. When the US scored the dramatic goal at the end, I think they made me take like four straight shots of vodka. All of this, in addition to watching the Final in a yurt, made a really memorable World Cup watching experience, because who knows if I will ever be abroad again when the World Cup happens.

Anyway, back to summer camps, my traveling and summer camp tour ended in Zhanatas with the summer camp that my sitemate and myself organized. What can I say, in a word it was awesome, we played basketball, Frisbee, kickball, and rugby, and we taught them American dances, made ridiculous creatures, had water balloon fights, jello eating contests, cooked hamburgers, did egg drops, had hula hoop races, and much more. The kids loved every second of it and were a joy to have. My sitemate did most of the content planning of the camp, and her parents sent a lot of the materials, so big thanks to them! My role was more paperwork and behind the scenes stuff, which I am still working on, but is more my cup of tea anyway. Photos of our camp are below.

That is pretty much it from this summer! Overall, I am happy with where I went and how I spent my time – I wish I would have gotten to northern Kazakhstan, but I think that will be my trip next summer, along with (hopefully) Omsk, Ekaterinburg, Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia. But I am getting ahead of myself. I am pumped for my second year of teaching, and have already started making my schedule, writing lesson plans, and teaching some of my students. My next update should come sometime in September after school starts. I hope everybody is well!

PS: I made an awesome video of our summer camp, which unfortunately I can’t download to blogger because I don’t have access (I am still emailing these posts to my parents) and can’t email because the file is too big. I did however put it on facebook, so if you are on facebook, feel free to check it out.

Hello everyone,

A few days ago, May 25th, marked the end of my first school year in Kazakhstan. The past few months have been a whirlwind of emotions, and I have taken the past couple of days to reflect over my nine months in Kazakhstan, and especially my seven months at site. But before that, let me wrap up the school year.

First, back in April, we had something called a PDM conference. This conference is designed to help Peace Corps volunteers in planning their community projects, and each volunteer brings their counterpart. This was a great opportunity to plan our summer camp with my counterpart, my site mate, and her counterpart. The conference was in Shymkent, and it was nice to see other volunteers as well. Coming out of this conference, we applied for a SPA Grant for our summer camp for about $1400 and it was approved, so we are all set to have and inaugural summer camp in Zhanatas from July 19-24! We invited 60 students (the best students, supposedly), 6 local English teachers, and 10 other Peace Corps volunteers. 15 students are coming from my school, and they are all pretty pumped. I’m not sure if Zhanatas is ready to have 10 Peace Corps volunteers invade, it will definitely be interesting. I’m also sure that there will be some bumps along the road (there already have been some bumps), but it will be a fun experience.

Also back in April, something that I didn’t mention before was the annual Olympics of our region. Before the PDM Conference, the young teachers at all the schools participated in a day long sports competition including basketball, track, weight-lifting, soccer, table tennis, and volleyball. Of course, school was cancelled that day because a day long sports competition is obviously more important than having lessons. I have talked about other basketball competitions, but this day was huge, there were schools from as far away as Turkistan and Shymkent there. About 28 teams were there in all, and the first day our basketball team went 6-0 and advanced to the Final Four. Unfortunately the Final Four games were played the next weekend when I was in Shymkent for PDM, but we ended up getting third place and our school was pretty happy. Speaking of sports, I started an American sports club that was supposed to be a one time thing but turned into a weekly club. The first time we played football, Frisbee, and had various races, but the students like Frisbee the best so now each week we play that. Most of the students who come are from my 6V class (now my 7V class, they are growing up!). Below are some photos of 1) Arai, Tamila, and Vika all going after the frisbee (one of my favorite photos from Kazakhstan so far), and 2) some of our group all together from our first week.

Now back to school. With all the craziness of the month of May, I did find time to give my final exam, probably the first legitimate final exam they have ever taken, 100 points, eight different variants per class, no cell phones, no teachers feeding them the answers. Overall, the students who studied did well, I made the test pretty difficult because I wanted to challenge my top students. Students did well on most parts, grammar, reading, speaking, and vocabulary, and didn’t do as well on the writing and critical thinking sections. I’ll know what to focus more on next year. Lazzat from my 9A class got the highest mark, a 96…which is amazing! Shortly after my final exam, I posted both final grades and my honor roll, which consisted of 23 students from all of my classes. Almost every student in the school gathered to look, even students that were not mine. As usual, there was cheering and crying, one girl sobbed her eyes out because I gave her a C and begged me to change it. The 23 students who made the honor roll were obviously pretty pleased. I decided to give each of them a certificate, but they weren’t ready by the last day of classes. So one of my favorite days so far was a few days ago, I went to all of their houses and hand-delivered their certificates. This, in fact, took the entire day. I called each of them the day before to make sure they were home – they then had time to make sure that the house was spotless and tea, cookies, and in some cases beshbarmak were available. Several of them even invited extended family over to meet me, it was really cool to meet my best students’ families and see them at home. Below is my final honor roll (based on every test they took from January until May), in order by how many points they received on their test, with photos. I have 125 students overall, so these are the best of the best. I posted the same thing on my wall at school, with their photos, and the students got a huge kick out of it.

1. Ghulzhaina – 9A

2. Alisher – 7A

3. Tolganai – 9A

4. Lazzat – 9A

5. Janerke – 10A

6. Kanat – 10B

7. Leila – 7A

8. Sayora – 6V

9. Makhabat – 7A

10. Berek – 9A

11. Kamerdeen – 6V

12. Bota – 10A

13. Indira – 7A

14. Ghulzhan – 10A

15. Gulsaneye – 6V

16. Niyel – 9V

17. Jibek – 9A

18. Dana – 10B

19. Arai – 9A

20. Janar – 7A

21. Margulan – 9A

22. Aidana – 9A

23. Akbota – 7A

So anyway, I was feeling pretty good about the fact that I hadn’t had a situation where I had to sing or dance on the spot in a while, and then our 11th graders graduation happened. My understanding was that I could just sit and enjoy the show – although I know many of the 11th graders well, I didn’t actually teach any of them other than one girl who wants to be an English translator. The ceremony was a two day event – the first day focused more on giving awards to the younger classes, but as it turned out there was a final dance for the 11th grade classes. I watched them all dance and thought it was over. But then, the girl who I think won the equivalent of the homecoming queen in the US, and they made a speech in Kazakh. Then, at the end of the speech, I heard my name and suddenly a path opened in front of me through the crowd. Apparently, her reward was that she got to have her last dance with me. Awesome, I don’t know how to ballroom dance. So I wandered up, the music started, everyone was taking photos and videos, and it was quite embarrassing. But after nine months in Kazakhstan, I guess my skin is a bit thicker. Anyway, the next day was the actual ceremony, where their parents came and the director and zavuches made speeches. The Zhambyl akim, which is our oblast akim, actually came to our ceremony, which was a pretty big deal. Anyway, I was again put on the spot when they asked me to make a speech that I didn’t know I would have to make until 10 seconds beforehand. I stumbled up, said some basic congratulations in Russian, wished them success, love, and friendship, and then uttered two words in Kazakh at the end to congratulate them. As usual, the crowd was pretty silent until I uttered two basic words in Kazakh, and then everyone went nuts. The graduation ceremony was pretty emotional, the girls were sobbing, the parents were sobbing, etc. Below are photos of 1) two of my sixth graders, Sholpan and Tamila, entertaining the crowd through song, 2) the 11th graders during their last dance, and 3) some 11th graders singing последний звонок, which translates to last bell. Apparently this is the song they sing right before the school rings the bell one last time and they are free forever.

However, the 11th graders were not the only students who left, as I said before one of the differences in the education system in the US and here is that after 9th grade, students have the option of going to college. I think each school is different in who goes and who stays, but in general at my school, the best students will stay because more people go to university after finishing 11th form, and staying in school prepares you for the ENT, the entrance exam for university. There are exceptions though, if parents want their students to go or stay, for whatever reason. So in general, most of my best students stayed, although two of my favorite students, Lazzat and Aidana, have to go to college because their parents do not have the money to send them to university. But, they are actually going to college in Zhanatas for geology, so I have invited them to come to my third lessons if they can. Also, although my 9V class was not my smartest class, they were really enthusiastic and I will definitely miss them all a lot.

That is all for wrapping up my school year, just about. Summer will definitely be a different schedule but an exciting time. After I wrap up helping my eleventh grade student study for the ENT, I am heading to Almaty on June 2 for my annual physical. Then, I am heading to Malaysia on June 5 for about nine days for my first trip outside of Kazakhstan, and am really pumped to see some old friends, and to eat some food that doesn’t consist of potatoes, beets, carrots, or meat. After that, I will head back to Zhanatas for a week before heading back to Almaty to meet my family – definitely will be the highlight of my summer! Of course, I have explained to them that spending a week in Almaty is about as different from my site as spending a week in New York, but it will be a fun week. Then I am heading back to Zhanatas to put the final preparations on our summer camp before heading to Taraz for a week-long baseball camp. Then, back to Zhanatas for our summer camp, and for the most part I will be in Zhanatas for the rest of the summer because my director wants me to start teaching again on July 25. I’m a little bummed that I won’t be able to travel any in August, but the good thing is that my students will be ready hopefully to pick up where we left off last year, and not have to review everything for a month or so.

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Reflections

So that ended that part of my blog post, and for my second part I wanted to just reflect overall on my first school year and overall first nine months in Kazakhstan and seven months at my site. It has been an absolute blast, and I will start with my biggest positives. My host mom is the most awesome person I have met in Kazakhstan. Most of the time when people say that, they kind of mean that there have been ups and downs but it is overall good, but I can’t honestly think of a single time that I have ever had a problem at home. I have enough food always, a flush toilet, the perfect amount of privacy, and most importantly, she always speaks Russian with me. It has also been a great experience to have a one year old around the house for about two months off and on, I have taught her some English, and things like high-fives and peek-a-boo. After six months at site, volunteers have the option of moving into their own apartment and many take advantage of that, but unless something changes, I have every intention of staying with my host family for two years.

My school and counterpart too have been a major plus. First, and I think I speak for a lot of PCVs when I say this, but my students are the reason that I get up in the morning. Part of this has to do with being at a pioneer site, but even after nine months (not counting the month of May, everyone had pretty much checked out by then) they were still super motivated in class. This is of course a generalization, not EVERY student is like this, but you learn to ignore the distractions and focus on the students who want to be there. However, I think this motivation was the reason that I feel like I had a pretty successful first year, most of the things I tried in the classroom worked. Being able to implement my own grading system was probably one of the most instrumental things in my success: 1) I hated the grading system in Kazakhstan, 2) it gave me a lot of respect since the grades I gave were the ones actually entered in the book, and 3) it just motivated them a lot to strive for an honor roll and to strive to get an A. Student motivation has also made my job a little different than most PCVs, for example, most of my clubs have told me that they don’t want to play just games, that they want lessons like I teach my regular classes. Obviously I am more than happy to oblige. But all of those successes really had less to do with me and more with my students’ willingness to embrace what I was trying.

My counterpart has also been absolutely amazing. The first thing is that she is already a great teacher in comparison to other teachers in Kazakhstan because of her experience, but more importantly she was always there for me when I needed help. There were a lot of times that she was not able to be in class because she had other things to attend to, but I think that is something universal, although the older the teacher, the more it happens. And my overall school has been great too, I have a group of friends I play basketball with (although the last couple of months were pretty busy) and the students are great. Resource wise and logistically, there are a few disadvantages to my school – I have no access to a computer or active board, my class sizes are fairly large compared to many volunteers I have talked to (which sometimes limits the activities you can do), and having to change classrooms for many lessons with an ever-changing schedule means that many of my lessons are spent searching frantically for a classroom anywhere in the school I can use. But overall I have adjusted to most of those problems and have no serious complaints about my school.

Most of the frustrating parts of school are commentary on the Kazakhstani education system as a whole. Cheating is the first thing that really hits you in the face as soon as you arrive – it is rampant and exists at every level: students, teachers, school administration, the education department, and higher. On a micro level, I have been pretty successful in cutting cheating in my own classes, but it is a small dent. Bribes are given to test proctors to turn the other way and let the teachers give the children the answers a lot. And the thing about all of this is that it is as routine as turning off and on a light – it is the system that they live in. Besides the cheating, the other main problem with the school system will sound strange, but lessons here just aren’t as important as in the US, on pretty much every level. Teachers don’t prepare for them, students don’t get much out of them, and pretty much anything is an excuse to miss or cancel a lesson: holidays, marching lessons, other teachers needing help…anything. I think these two problems are part of the big picture in Kazakhstan – that appearance is everything and that the ends will always justify the means. If cheating is the easiest way for everybody involved to attain high test scores for the school, then that is what will happen, even if it comes at the expense of the students learning. It is also frustrating to see some teachers put more time into their open lessons (lessons they give maybe two or three times a year where everybody comes to observe) than they do all their other lessons that year combined. Overall, as many of the teachers have told me here that are also critical of the system, it is the heart of the Soviet idea, and it is probably one of the most challenging parts of being a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan. While it is frustrating, the value I am getting from operating in this system for two years will give me skills in flexibility in patience that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

Besides the Soviet educational system, the other big frustrating thing about being a volunteer in Kazakhstan is gender issues. Most things that bothered me here gradually got more tolerable as I went on, but really the opposite was true for the way women are treated and the way that most men behave here. The more I saw the full effects of all this behavior, the more it bothered me. Let me start out by saying that there obviously exceptions to everything; I know some men that really make an effort to reverse these stereotypes, and they should be commended for that because it is much harder, in my opinion, to make that effort on this country than in a western country. But for the most part, the cultural standard for men is to drink and not work. This becomes truer the more rural you get, and in my case, I am about as rural as it gets in Kazakhstan. More than anything, it makes it difficult to relate to men in this country. But the lack of a future for the girls in this country is what really is the most disheartening thing in Kazakhstan, particularly in a village, where many of these girls will never leave and get married at the age of seventeen. This especially hit me hard at the graduation, where all the girls were crying, because for many of them school was the last thing and place in their life where they had freedom and opportunity. Toward the end of the year I did more activities in class based on what they wanted to do after school, and many of them talked about traveling and studying in Astana or Almaty, but the reality is that for many of them that will never happen. And this leads to the most amazing thing about all of this – my female students, in spite of the bad education system and despite the bleak future, come to school every day motivated and eager to learn. It continues to be one of the most inspiring things about my job here.

But yeah, that’s a pretty decent summary of everything so far. It has been a great first school year, and I have been pretty happy with my site. I actually am glad that I was put in a rural village and a pioneer site now that I have been here for over seven months, the lack of city luxuries like running water has given me a truer Peace Corps and Kazakhstan experience. It has also given me an opportunity to focus a lot of my energy on school since there is nothing else to do and I can’t travel. Here are a few words of advice I would have if I was starting over:

1. Drink only ¾ of the shot of vodka. Most people do it, and it will make your night a lot easier.

2. Get ready to change your conception of hygiene, on about every level imaginable.

3. Don’t be afraid to sound like an idiot in speaking the language early, it is good to practice, and your hilarious mistakes make great conversation and stories.

4. You are going to have problems – focus on the things that are going great and put the things that are not going so great out of your mind.

5. And finally, when you first get to site, sacrifice something or donate an organ to the post office. Seriously. Anything to help maybe negate some of the incompetence and frustrations that are bound to follow in the next two years.

Thanks to everyone (and at this point this might only be 2 or 3 people) that continue to read my blog, I appreciate it! My next post will probably come in early July after most of my summer traveling is over, and that should include some photos from Malaysia. I'll finish this post up by re-posting what is probably my favorite photo from Kazakhstan so far, a soccer field in my training site of Issyk with the Tien Shan Mountains in the background. I hope everyone is well, and Happy Summer!

As I have found out over the past week, the month of May is a month of perpetual holidays – and I mean that in a lot of different ways. First, the month of May actually does contain an inordinate amount of holidays. As of May 9th, there have already been three holidays. The first holiday was May 1st, and that was the equivalent of Labor Day. We had a day off school that day and all of the schools gathered at the akimat for food, dancing, and celebration. It was the first time I had seen the majority of Zhanatas turn out for an event. Each school took turns marching in front of the akim and he announced the best male and female student in each school, among other things. Then everybody bought crafts, shashlik, drinks, and just hung out and watched dancing. Below are photos of 1) some of my eighth graders dancing for everyone, 2) some delicious shashlik being grilled up, 3) the scene of all of Zhanatas gathering along our main road, 4) some of my 9A class, and 5) my counterpart, another English teacher, and myself.

Next, on May 7, was International Men’s Day, or something like that. Apparently it is supposed to be for men who were in the military, but then essentially everyone has been in the military at some point, so it is by default extended to all men. Overall it was a minor holiday, we still had school, but a lot of people didn’t show up (more on that later). Two days later was the big holiday, Victory Day, celebrating the win over Germany during World War II. I was asked the question about 200 times of why we don’t celebrate this holiday in the US, and I didn’t have an answer. Anyway, we all gathered at the World War II memorial in town (every town in Kazakhstan, no matter how small, has a World War II memorial) at 9 AM, and heard some speeches and whatnot. Then each school marched up to the memorial and laid flowers and balloons at the foot of the statue, and proceeded to walk through town as a parade. Now, my students had won some contest earlier and were allowed to line the streets and shout “Happy Holidays” in Kazakh and Russian. I marched with our 11th form classes (who I do not teach, but I know many of them well) and waved and smiled. At the akimat, there was a marching competition, and I believe that our school came in first place. It was a fun day. Below are photos of 1) my 10A class, which was chosen to march, 2) a few students in the 11A class, and 3) veterans riding by the akim and waving to the crowd.

Now much of that sounds all well and good, except for the fact that when I say May is the month of holidays, it also means that nobody does anything, ever. Both students and teachers don’t come to school, claiming they are sick, but really just want to stay at home and wait for summer. I have told my counterpart and other teachers that to some extent students get lazier as summer approaches in the US, but I also explained that final exams and other final grades were very important. Here they are just not very important. I will know now in the future to not try and accomplish tasks and other things during the month of May. I think this month has kind of summed up some of the values that I have learned from Kazakh people. In some regards, Kazakh people enjoy life in a different way and on a different level than we do in the US, and living in this culture has definitely changed my life for the better. A lot of the drama of high school and lack of respect for education does not exist here, everyone wants to learn and has tremendous respect for teachers. However, the two traits that continually prove themselves to be insignificant in Kazakh culture are work ethic and honesty, at least for the most part. People want to be successful and are motivated, but while honest hard work is the way to that goal in the US, it is not here. The end always justifies the means, which leads to rampant cheating and a lack of desire to work hard. This is why at some times, I feel that my biggest contributions as a Peace Corps volunteer in this country are not English-related, but value related. I have had several conversations with students about why it is important to not cheat but to learn and practice your work yourself. Many of my best students have started to take what I say to heart. I gave out study guides for the final exam that I am giving next week (another revolutionary idea in Kazakhstan, given the fact that students rarely study outside of class), and many of my students are actually using them and starting to understand what it means to properly prepare for a test so that you can do well without cheating. In two years if I instill that idea in enough students, I won’t care how much English they learned.

That is it for now. School ends on May 25, and afterwards I am planning on doing a lengthy post on how my school year wrapped up, some reflections on my first year as a whole, some other events that have happened the past couple months, and my plans for the summer. Happy Victory Day!

PS: Blogs, after being back up periodically for a while, appear to be permanently blocked again.

Hello everyone,

Happy spring and April, I hope things are still going well. Just because a few people have asked, I have obviously heard about all of the events going on in Kyrgyzstan, but in all likelihood they will have zero effect on me. Thanks for your concern though. It will be interesting to continue to follow that situation and see what unfolds.

Two weeks ago was our In-Service Training Conference, which overall was a great experience. It was nice to eat some good food in Almaty and share ideas with other volunteers. It got me excited to get back to site and get going again, although we only have about seven weeks left before summer. Crazy how time flies by.

However, I think the highlight of my Peace Corps experience so far happened on the way to Almaty to the conference. My plan was to leave Zhanatas around 3 PM, arrive in Taraz around 7:30 PM, wait about three hours for the last bus to Almaty, and arrive in Almaty at about 9 AM. This was going to be the first long distance I travelled by myself in Kazakhstan. Things went well at first, and I was even invited by a few nice Russian girls to a café in Taraz during my three hour wait before the bus. But then disaster seemingly struck about 2 hours into the bus ride to Almaty when the bus broke down, right in the middle of the steppe. Great. But, the situation quickly turned into one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. Several men on the bus tried for about an hour to fix whatever was wrong with the bus, but they eventually gave up. Soon after, they started unloading a vehicle that had about twenty-thirty goats in it that was following us to Almaty. The men got together and made a thirty minute shift schedule for when each of us would watch over the sheep. So from 2:00-2:30 that morning, in the middle of the steppe in the dark, I got my first goat-herding experience, something that I had wanted to try since I had arrived in Kazakhstan. I think I did alright. Two men at some point that night took the vehicle and drove back about 30 minutes to the closest village. I assumed they were getting something to fix the bus. Nope. They came back with six bottles of vodka and nothing else. Welcome to Kazakhstan. It was below freezing so I guess they wanted to try and stay warm. Anyway, we spent a total of about six hours on the side of the road and didn’t leave until about 6:30 when another bus came to pick us up. About 20 minutes before we left, the sun rose over the steppe and I got to see my first real sunrise over the steppe in Kazakhstan (my training site and current site are both hilly). It was the most gorgeous sunrise I have ever seen, with a herd of sheep and a few donkeys in the foreground. Someone once told me that wanderlust is something that can never really be quenched, but at that moment the feeling of being on the other side of the world hit me hard, and I knew that what started as a broken down bus turned into an experience I would remember for the rest of my life. As I reflected on all of this on the rest of the trip to Almaty, I realized that this was really what Peace Corps was all about, turning problems into great stories and positive experiences.

Anyway, back at site, one really interesting thing that happens in the spring and summer throughout Kazakhstan is something called субботник, which is based off суббота, Russian for Saturday. Every Saturday, every student and teacher is required by the akimat to spend a few hours cleaning up the city, which is an awesome idea in theory, even one that I think the United States should adopt. The problem though is that although this day is supposed to always be on Saturday, the akimat has decided that they will spread it out during the week. And yes, this has meant that on two occasions I have showed up to teach a lesson and my students are cleaning up outside. I asked why the akimat would tell the students to clean why they should be in school, and nobody had an answer.

The last thing that happened this week that reminded me that I am in Kazakhstan was the fact that I am apparently not allowed to call young females on their home phones. I was supposed to call a few young English teachers to an event, but when I asked my school about this, they told me that I should never do such a thing. If the woman was married, then her husband would “come after me.” I already have enough problems with some of the young men in Zhanatas saying girls don’t pay attention to them anymore. If the girl happens to not be married, apparently me calling their house, even if it is work related, is a first step toward marriage in the eyes of her parents. Such is life in a Kazakh village, although I feel like my school might be exaggerating a little bit. Hopefully.

Things will be busy the next couple of weeks, I am off to Shymkent again next week for a mini-conference, and I am in the midst of planning my summer schedule, which is exciting but draining at the same time. Happy April again, I still miss everyone!

Oh, and running water during the day is gone until November 1. We have cold running water for two hours a day, 7-8 AM and 7-8 PM.

Hi everyone,

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of finishing the school quarter and traveling throughout southern Kazakhstan. So far, despite how much I love teaching, it has been really nice to have a break to see other volunteers, do some traveling, and relax a little. The weather has been great, although we still have random days where it will just start snowing.

The school quarter ended pretty well. I initially gave an end of quarter grammar test to all of my classes, and everyone did pretty poorly, so I decided to give a retest and they did much better. I announced that I would be posting everyone’s final marks on March 18 at noon, and when I arrived to post them, there was a mob of about 200 students waiting, many of which weren’t even my students. As I stated before, I am a pretty tough grader, so there were several students who were unhappy, but for the most part students felt they got what they deserved. Normally, grading is really subjective here, so if a student would ask a teacher why they got a certain grade, they wouldn’t have an answer or proof. But I made an Excel Document where I had their test scores, homework scores, and class participation so that I could show them why they received the grade they did, and where they can improve for next time. These are things that they have never seen before…simply introducing an objective grading system has been one of the more successful things I have done. I also posted a list of my top fifteen students based on test scores, so now EVERY student is determined to study hard so they can be on that list. Here are some photos of my 9V class and my 8A club.

As a treat for all of my students who got an A, I invited them to watch a movie (The Mighty Ducks) with me on the last day of the semester. They got really into the movie and cheered at the exciting parts and cried at the sad parts. Because they were my better students, they understood a lot of it and enjoyed hearing some slang words as well. Also in the last few days of school, the seventh graders at my school held a massive competition for all subjects, including English. One of my seventh grade students, Leila, wanted to use me as part of a dialogue/skit. Most of the other classes complained that it was not fair…”не честно!” was shouted over and over. We ended up winning much to the disappointment of everyone else.

My birthday also fell on the Wednesday before school ended, and I knew that my students were aware it was my birthday, but I didn’t know quite what to expect. I was then left speechless by the amount of gifts and cards that I received, particularly from my younger classes. My host mom, in conjunction with a few students, gave me access to a copier which will now make my life infinitely easier. I got two replica ships, an alarm clock made of a glass horse, and a handmade bracelet with my name on it from one of my 10A students. Several Russian girls that I don’t even teach drew me some pictures also. However, my favorite present was a photo album that my 7A class put together with all the photos they had taken with me over the past six months…it was decorated and everything. After school, I had a pretty quiet dinner with my host mom, her daughter, and host niece. It was a pretty solid 23rd birthday. Some photos are below.

Then…after all of the school stuff was over, I finally made my way south for Nauryz in Shymkent. Overall, the first day I was in Shymkent was actually a little bit of culture shock, it was strange to see supermarkets, restaurants, and just in general a large city. I ate pizza and sushi and fulfilled my non-Kazakh food quota for the year. Shymkent is supposedly now the second largest city in Kazakhstan after Almaty. I actually like Shymkent more than Almaty, it has almost everything that Almaty has but has more of a Kazakh character. Almaty could be just another Western city. I did miss the personal touch of a village though; none of the children ran up to you to say hello and people passed by each other without a word or a hand shake. It was wonderful to see all the other volunteers and hear the highs and lows…just in general a great few days. The downside was that on the Nauryz holiday itself, all of the games were cancelled because they were renovating the field, so no kokpar or any other horse games. But we did get a lot of free food, and got to eat in a yurt. There was dancing and rides…and even ice cream! It was a really fun day. Photos are below.

The day after Nauryz most of the volunteers hopped on a bus and took a three hour trip to Turkistan, which I had been looking forward to for a long time. The site itself wasn’t very overwhelming, but Turkistan is often called a second Mecca and is considered by some the second most holy site in the Islamic world. Three trips to Turkistan equal one trip to Mecca as the legend goes. Turkistan dates back to the 4th century, which easily makes it the oldest city in Kazakhstan. Timurlane built a mausoleum to Khodja Akhmed Yassau, a famous Sufi poet and mystic, back in the 14th century. We got to explore the grounds of the Mausoleum, including the underground chamber where Yassau spent the final years of his life. There is also a smaller mausoleum for Timurlane’s granddaughter on the grounds. One of the things I liked about the city was that it was one of the few cities that doesn’t seem Soviet, it has beautiful old architecture that the USSR thankfully didn’t destroy.

After travelling for a while longer, I came back to Zhanatas for a quick teacher seminar that went really well, a few other volunteers even came up for the seminar. I am headed to Almaty tomorrow for a week-long conference with all of the Kaz-21 volunteers, it will be good to catch up with a few friends I made in Almaty. I hope all is well in the US…go Baylor tonight!

Привет!

March is upon us, and that means March Madness time, which I will be missing out on for the first time ever. Sadly, UNC will also be missing out on the NCAA tournament as well. It will definitely still not be the same hearing about the games and not watching them. I did wait for about 12 minutes just now to have a video load to watch Evan Turner’s buzzer beater over Michigan, so at least I saw one exciting play. I am going to try and write out a bracket to hang onto my wall in the classroom and explain the NCAA tournament to my students. There are some things that they just need to know.

Also, blogger has worked now in Kazakhstan two of the past three times I have tried to get on it, so hopefully this is a trend toward regaining full access.

The last couple of weeks have been interesting…a few more downs than usual, and I am definitely ready for a break. March is a busy month in Kazakhstan, March 8th is Women’s Day (more on that later), and March 22nd is the Kazakh New Year, arguably their biggest holiday of the year. The name is this holiday is Naruyz. Also, the third school quarter ends on March 20th, so I have a “quasi” spring break until early April. I am headed to Shymkent for Naruyz, which I am really excited about because a) I get to see Shymkent and Turkistan for the first time and b) more importantly, I get to see friends that I haven’t seen since October. I am pretty excited. After Naruyz, I will come back to Zhanatas for a quick teacher’s seminar before heading to IST (In-Service Training), a week-long conference in Almaty. I am ready to get away from the everyday pressures of being a Peace Corps volunteer for a little bit later this month.

So, as I stated, March 8th was Women’s Day, which is apparently a very important holiday in Kazakhstan (and around former Soviet countries). All of the girls got dressed up and in the morning before classes that day, the men all lined up and clapped and danced as they celebrated the women walking through the line. It was pretty cool to see, unfortunately I didn’t have my camera. I got flowers for my counterpart, director, and my host mom. For my female students, I ended up giving them Valentine’s Heart Candy that I didn’t use on Valentine’s Day. They were pretty thrilled about it, and asked me to translate all the love notes written on the candy. Most of them actually didn’t even eat the candy, they wanted to keep it and show all their friends and family.

As I mentioned in the last post, spring is definitely coming and it definitely gets warmer every day. I must say though that after living in Kazakhstan for a winter, I have no concept of what the temperature is anymore. One day I thought to myself, it has to be at least 50 degrees, it is so warm outside, and right as I finished that thought, it started snowing, which meant it was below freezing still. Oh well. I do need to buy some boots that don’t have animal fur lined inside of them though, because my winter clothes are a little too warm for comfort now.

Most of the lows that happened in the last few weeks occurred at school…and I won’t get into them too much here. I will talk about one thing that has been the root of many of the problems I have had, and that is that my students increasingly see me more as a friend than as a teacher. Discipline has started to become more of an issue, and there have been several incidents where I have had to explain sternly to my students that I am in fact a teacher and not just entertainment for them three times a week. The silver lining is that often motivation goes down with discipline, and that hasn’t been the case – many of the discipline problems have actually come from my students being too enthusiastic in class and it gets out of hand. Overall, nothing too serious though. Below is a photo of my fifth grade club drawing what they do every day in order to practice the present simple tense. Students get pretty into drawing here, as you can see below, they didn’t even look up for the photo!

The last thing I want to talk about is that our Country Director came out to our site two days ago, and it was a pretty good day. Overall he just wanted to see our school and host family and the city, but what was most interesting is that he compared Zhanatas to other sites and villages, which is something that I can’t do and was very curious about. Here are a few things he said:

1) He said Zhanatas was and felt like one of the most isolated sites in Kazakhstan, right in the middle of nowhere and one of the farthest sites from a major city.

2) He questioned even why there was a need for a village like this so far away from everything and in the middle of nowhere. Where are the jobs and how does this village bring in any income?

3) He was very impressed that almost every other building was either an empty apartment building or a pile of rubble, untouched from back from when the Soviet Union fell and the Russians ransacked the town.

Given the facts above, in addition to it being a pioneer site, he kind of implied that Zhanatas was one of the tougher sites in Kazakhstan, which was an interesting perspective to hear. That being said, my counter to that is that I could not imagine a better host mom or better students, so in that sense I am lucky. The other thing that is a plus is that there is no point where I have ever thought that I was not needed. It is a poor Soviet mining village in the middle of nowhere, and I have always felt that I should be here. Other PCVs have sometimes said differently, and feeling that what I am doing is making a difference is a major plus. I applaud my country director for making the trek out to Zhanatas too.

Anyway, enjoy basketball everyone, and Happy March!

Hello everyone,

First of all, I have started to receive a few letters back, after a three month process, and they look great! Thanks again to everyone who received and replied; I plan to give the first batch to my students tomorrow and have them read it to the class. I think they will be pretty excited to get them.

I think that I can finally say that the end of winter is in sight, it is generally significantly warmer these past couple of weeks, and although there are still cold days, each day I take layers of clothes off. The only disappointment is that despite the cold, the winter was beautiful, and the snow is being replaced with mud and slush. Hopefully when the trees start blooming, things will be nice again.

School is still going great; this quarter ends in a few weeks, so I am preparing my students for another grammar test that I will give on the last class of the term. I still am struggling with the fact that I only see my classes for a total of just over two hours a week, so they forget everything they learn rather quickly. I am hoping that over the next two weeks that I can have them dominate present simple, present continuous, past simple, present perfect, and future simple. I am starting to slow down my speed at which I am teaching and spend a lot more time reviewing because I realize that the vast majority of the class forgets everything I teach them within two weeks.

That being said, I definitely have finally figured out most of my students and their levels at this point, and I do have a group of students that are awesome. I said in my last post that I handed out grades for the first time last week, and the reaction was really interesting. Those that were happy were jumping up and down, and several students cried…which made me feel really bad, but I guess that is how it goes with being a teacher. However…the effect of giving a midterm report did exactly what I wanted it to do. The next test that I gave showed vast improvements…everybody wants stickers and good grades from the American I guess. I also finally had my first perfect test, where everything was correct, from one of the girls in my 9A class, Lazzat. I bought her a chocolate bar and praised her in front of the entire class, something I don’t normally do.

Also, last week at school I made s’mores with all of my clubs (unfortunately I didn’t have enough materials to do it with all my classes and clubs, so I just chose my clubs). They were pretty excited about it…they loved the marshmallows and graham crackers (neither of which are in Kazakhstan), and loved trying their first “American snack.” Photos of my 7V and 8V clubs are below.

Outside of school, home life is still great. My one year old host niece is staying with us for a month, so things have been more interesting at home. After a few days of just staring at me, she finally warmed up and began to play. I taught her how to high five and gave her some pudding, which she immensely enjoyed. Also, my ten year old neighbor babysits often so she is around the house more, making things a lot busier, but the change of pace has been nice.

Honestly besides that, nothing really interesting to report, I haven’t been to any weddings or parties recently, but March has several holidays, so I’m sure that will change shortly. I do occasionally see coverage of the Olympics on TV and saw that Kazakhstan has one at least one medal…way to go! I hope that everyone is still well around the world, and Happy March!

It finally happened. Actually, this finally happened more than a

month ago, but for some reason I forgot to write about it on my last

blog entry. I was given my first sheep’s head to carve and eat in

Kazakhstan. From what I have heard, this now means I am Kazakh. This

occurred a few days after New Year’s at my host grandmother’s house.

The sheep head is given to the honored guests in traditional Kazakh

households…and I was proud to get it. The way it works (or at least

the way it worked for me) is that you are presented the sheep’s head

at the head of the table, and supposed to carve out pieces of the head

for everybody. The eldest male gets the tongue. I was then told that

I should eat the eyeballs before everyone began. I ate one (which was

not tasty), and graciously offered the other one to my host mother.

Unfortunately I did not get to take part in the preparation of the

sheep head, which is apparently burned then boiled, but there is

always next time. I had always heard of this tradition from other

volunteers in Kazakh villages and had kind of been disappointed I

hadn’t experienced it; so I was ready when the time came.

But onto other things…school is definitely in session. By that I mean

21 hours of teaching, 9 hours of English clubs (it had been 10, but I

just combined two of them), 7 office hours, 2 teacher lessons, 4

Spanish clubs, 4 hours of basketball, and 4 hours of chess every week

has kept things extremely busy. Let’s just say my New Year’s

Resolutions to study Kazakh and Russian for 10 hours a week haven’t

really happened. This isn’t to say that I am complaining…I love every

second of it and my students are always amazing. The only thing that

makes things difficult is that people do not understand that this

means I pretty much can’t do anything else. The people I play

basketball with wonder why I can’t play basketball eight hours a week,

and everybody wonders why I can’t privately tutor them every day. I

am definitely getting better at saying no, something I wasn’t great at

in college. I’m not excellent though…the reason that I have nine

English clubs is because that every class 5th grade and above that I

do not teach was so upset that I didn’t teach them that they wanted

their own club specifically for their own class, which I said OK to,

and legitimately almost every student from each of those classes shows

up to the club. Things still happen almost every day that are

frustrating (the classroom I normally use being closed for three days,

meaning before every class I have to search the school for an empty

classroom trying to find a place to teach was the most recent thing

that was slightly frustrating this week), but honestly, there isn’t

any use mentioning it; this is what I signed up for and there is

nothing I can do to change it. The best thing to do is laugh and move

on.

The thing that is most interesting (that at first was frustrating and

taxing, but now I just find it amusing), is that if I am ever at

school and not doing a class or a club, I am normally pulled into

another classroom to teach. I have taught not only other English

classes, but algebra, geometry, geography, and history. What this

means is that now I normally show up to school at 8:30 every morning,

and generally teach or do clubs non-stop until 6:05 when school lets

out, and then play basketball until about 7:30 PM. The thing is

though…I love every second of it. I have stopped worrying about

asking why, and start laughing at the fact I just tried to teach

algebra concepts in Russian. Math is actually the easiest subject to

teach given the language barrier because worst case scenario, I can

just turn around, do a problem, and point and say, see…that is how you

do it. Normally though it is other English classes that I am asked to

teach, and so I normally just grab a few games and head out and do it.

All this being said, the most successful new things I have introduced

this semester have been my Spanish clubs and my office hours. My

original intent was to have one Spanish club and two office hours per

week, but that has now magnified into four Spanish clubs and seven

office hours every week given the high demand. Students LOVE to learn

Spanish (of course all my male students want to know curse words and

all my female students want to know how to say “I love you” in every

possible way), but it is the only club that I give that seems to

double in size every week. The only problems so far have been a) I am

beginning to speak in Spanish by accident in trying to speak Russian

again, and b) my students prefer speaking in Spanish during English

class to the point where they all shouted Buenos Días at the beginning

of one lesson and the other teachers there were really confused.

Office hours have also been a huge hit, students love coming in to ask

questions about a grammar concept they didn’t understand, or even just

to practice speaking and reading.

This leads to my next point…something that I have thought a number of

times since I have been in Zhanatas. I wish that every student in the

United States could sit down and watch a video of my classes, just one

class, and see how enthusiastic they are day after day. Despite all

the flaws in the education system here, they got something right given

the fact that students stand on top of their desks out of eagerness to

answer a question and students walk to school three hours early

through the dark and cold Siberian temperatures to come ask a question

about grammar. They don’t seem to remember what I teach them for a

very long period of time (though that has more to do with the fact

they only have English lessons twice a week), but their enthusiasm

really makes everything all worth it.

In the classroom, writing music lyrics is by far the students’

favorite activity. This is where I write out the lyrics to the song

but put in a few blanks. Then the students listen to the song and try

to fill in the blanks. They probably like the activity more because

they get to listen to American music, and normally within five hours

of me playing a song, somebody has run to a computer, downloaded that

song, and every phone in the school is playing it out loud. It’s

pretty cool. The last song that I played even had some Spanish it,

they definitely loved that.

I gave a major grammar test last week (in which I actually wrote a

different test for every one of my students because cheating off of

each other is still a huge problem and so institutionalized here, and

this was one of the main reasons I couldn’t update my blog last week,

it took about 20 hours to write all of them) and will be giving all of

my students their first grades of the semester this week. This is

what I have decided about grading: first, I am not going to announce

everybody’s grades in the front of class and am not going to give them

a grade for every class like is normally done. It was really

stressful and subjective just randomly assign grades at the end of

every class based on whether they did their homework, came to class,

raised their hands, etc. I talked to my counterpart and we decided I

could grade them as if they were in America. I am going to give them

As, Bs, Cs, and Ds (which translate to 5s, 4s, 3s, and 2s), but I am

also going to give them pluses and minuses. This allows me to

separate students more than just three numbers. If a student would

like to know how they are doing, they can come to office hours and

talk about it, but otherwise I don’t announce it out loud. I also

gave them a rubric for how they would be graded, 40% effort (coming to

class, doing homework, participation), 40% performance on tests and

homework, 10% not cheating off other students, and 10% improvement

(meaning that even if you are at a low level, if I have seen a steady

improvement over the semester I will normally bump you up a few

notches). It has worked pretty well so far. I only gave 5 students

an A+, so I’m sure they will be excited.

Outside of class, things have settled down a bit since I really don’t

have the time to go do crazy things, and the endless holiday season

finally came to a close after lasting from about December 25-January

25. I have started to play chess with these two Kurdish men on Monday

and Thursday nights, and I am proud to say that until last week I was

undefeated, which surprised me because I have never been very good at

chess. It is a lot of fun though, and they have started to invite a

few other friends, and this Russian guy beat the socks off of me last

week, he is pretty good. It is stimulating but relaxing at the same

time.

All of this reminds me of something that I have wanted to talk about

for some time now, and that is the difference between being in a

village and being in a city. I knew going to my site that being four

hours away from a city was going to be a different experience, but it

is literally night and day. Every time I go to Taraz (which has only

been three times given the distance), it is like I am transported into

another universe, there are restaurants, things to do at night, people

who speak Russian, and you can buy almost anything you need in the

stores in town. People back home often ask me to describe my Peace

Corps experience, especially those who are considering doing it

themselves, but not only is each country different, each placement is

different in a country. This isn’t to say that there aren’t

advantages to being in a village, despite a few negatives and

hardships of being in a pioneer site in a village, I have actually

really enjoyed being the first American that my school has ever met.

Back to basketball for a second…playing basketball at night very

quickly got very cold at site, and normally results in me walking home

at about 7:30 or 8:00 at night. I always bring a change of clothes to

play in, and then change back into my long underwear, wool socks, etc.

etc. for the walk back home. One night the other week though I

happened to forget athletic socks and ended up playing in my wool

socks. This wasn’t a problem until my wool socks got sweaty and then

I had to go home. I probably made the dumbest decision I have made so

far in Peace Corps and decided to walk home anyway, with sweaty socks,

and -28 or so degree weather. Not a good decision…when I got home my

toes were beginning to turn blue and I had to put them in cool, and

then warm water to soak for about an hour. Things were fine, but I

will definitely not be walking outside anymore with sweaty socks on.

Anyway, onto happier events that happened just recently…Valentine’s

Day. Up until about a week before Valentine’s Day I had assumed that

they didn’t celebrate it here, but then I started getting many

requests to take a walk on Sunday, the 14th. I then realized that

this was Valentine’s Day, and figured they must celebrate it here

after all. On Saturday the 13th, I arrived at school and was

subsequently bombarded with about 90 Valentines, from my 10th grade

students who wrote me love poems in Russian and Kazakh to little 1st

graders who I don’t even teach pulling on my pant leg and handing me a

little heart. It was definitely one of the highlights of the past

month. It also coincided with Chinese New Year, so there were more

tiger presents given to me as well. It was a good day for sure. I

put some photos up of some of my Valentine’s Cards in Russian…just to

give you a cultural experience. The best card though by far was from

one of my sixth graders, who was determined to find something in

English to give me. The only problem though was that the only thing

in English she could find was a postcard that had poisonous fish on

the front. She exclaimed, С Днем Валентина! (Happy Valentine’s Day),

and handed me a postcard of toxic fish. Definitely one of my top five

Valentine’s Day memories to date, no future Valentine’s Day will be

complete without a postcard of toxic fish.

I saved one story to close out this post (except for the important

points below) because it is by far the single most memorable moment so

far of my Peace Corps experience. One of my ninth graders,

Ghulzhaina, who is also one of the five students I gave an A+ to, had

been planning for most of her life to go to college after ninth grade.

If you remember from my post about the education system here (I’m not

holding it against you if you don’t), students have the option of

going to college after ninth grade or staying and finishing 11th form.

Neither option is better or worse, college tends to be a little more

specialized and people with a clear career goal may find that option

more attractive, while finishing 11th form gives you a more rounded

education. But two weeks ago, Ghulzhaina told me that she had told

her parents that she was going to stay in 11th form because she was

learning so much in English class. Not only did this floor me, but I

certainly need no more motivation to stay up during those late nights

and finish my lesson plans, that moment will drive me for two years.

I included a photo of a select part of my 9A class out in the snow

after they won the competition for smartest class that I held.

Ghulzhaina is in front in the red cap. Also, as you can probably tell

in the photo, every time I take a photo with girls at my school (which

is down to about maybe three or four times a day), they fight about

who gets to be my “girlfriend for the photo,” and therefore can

interlock arms with me. Lazzat won this time.

A few important notes to close out this post:

1) I mentioned in my last post that one of the volunteers in my

oblast, Jamie, was involved in a major car accident. Just a short

update, she did make it back to her home state of California and is

with her family. She is doing well, but has still not fully woken up

yet. She is responsive though and as I can tell through the email

updates, she is getting better every day. Thanks for keeping her in

your prayers!

2) I finally received word from a majority of you that you received

the letters from my students…six weeks later! I’m really excited;

email me if you have any questions.

3) Finally, I have decided that I am going to probably move my blog

updates to once every two weeks. This has to do with a combination of

the fact that a) things have really picked up from a work standpoint

and b) blogs are still blocked here and it is a bit more of a process

to get a post up, emailing photos takes about 30 minutes because my

connection is so slow. Other volunteers have mentioned using proxy

servers, but the computer I use is too slow to run them and they have

yet to work. Thanks everyone for reading them, it always feels good

to know that someone is getting something out of the blog. Take care,

and enjoy the apparent mountains of snow that are falling in the US!

PS: I’m not mentioning UNC Basketball for a reason. I don’t want to

talk about it.

PPS: For fun, I included photos of where my sixth and seventh grade

classes thought various parts of the human body were right before I

taught them that lesson. I thought they was pretty humorous.

Hi everyone,

Sorry about the delay between posts, the beginning of the school quarter has been quite hectic. A couple of important points before I get into the past few weeks:

1) The first point is a sad one…one of the other volunteers in my oblast, Jamie, was involved in a major car accident last Sunday in route to Taraz. I haven’t heard this for sure yet, but I assume the winter conditions had to play a big part. The other two people in the car with her were killed. Jamie was rushed to the emergency room in Taraz, and then rushed to the closest large hospital, which is in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. She was then transferred to Afghanistan, before finally being flown back to the US to be with her family. It appears that she will be OK, but she has yet to regain consciousness. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

2) The second point is that the Kazakhstani government has blocked access to blogs in Kazakhstan, which is why I haven’t been able to access it the past week or so. This is unfortunately a common practice among governments in Central Asia and also in China in an attempt to limit free speech. My solution for right now is to email my posts and photos to my parents to post, but unfortunately that means that other volunteers here won’t be able to read them (blogs are the main way we keep up with each other). I’ll keep you updated.

Anyway, back to the past few weeks, and first about the weather. I must say that part of my original disappointment about going to southern Kazakhstan (other than the language switch) was that I could not say that I had lived in Siberia during the winter, only several hours south of it. And while for the most part we have not gotten the extreme cold here that northern Kazakhstan gets, good news, for at least one day we did hit -41 degrees! Granted it was only two days it was really cold, and then the next day it was back to normal (around a sultry -17 degrees or so), but still exciting. School was shortened, and the small children were told not to come at all. People do still go outside occasionally when it is that cold, actually, one Russian family sent their seven year old daughter, Dasha, out that day to the store for bread, and as she was walking home, she apparently got too cold and sat in the snow (sitting down, she was shorter than the snow). I was walking home from school, saw her, and took her hand to lead her home. She gave me an apple at school two days for my troubles. Overall, it was a lot of fun. The next day I had a few snowball fights, one with my 6V class and one with my 9V class. Photos are below.

Two weeks ago, my first week back to classes, my regional manager (who is pretty much my boss) came to my site to observe my lessons and meet my host family. My host mom and counterpart were all worried because, I guess this being a pioneer site, they didn’t understand the concept of a site visit and thought that she might take me away from them, so everything had to be perfect, and everything did end up going great! The next week was open lessons for the English teachers at my school, which also meant that my counterpart was stressing out, because any teacher in the school could come observe our lessons. My first lesson I did myself, 32 teachers came to observe, it was insanely crowded. I had a lot of fun though, and everything went great. We even had an opening ceremony for the week. Photos are below.

I mentioned in an earlier post that there is no routine in Kazakhstan, and there has not been a time that has rang more true than these past few weeks. Normally at the beginning of a new quarter the schedule changes a lot anyway here, but when you add the fact that my regional manager came, there were shortened days due to the cold, and open lessons, I honestly felt that when I showed up to a class or a club, there was a greater likelihood of it being cancelled or moved rather than me having it. On several occasions last week, I poked my head into a classroom only to see a bunch of students there with no teacher just goofing off, and then they begged me to come teach them, and so I ended up teaching about six more classes than I was supposed to. On the shortened days, many of the students didn’t know when the classes would be, so one time I had my 9th grade club, my 7A class, and my 6V class all show up at the same time expecting to be taught. I think that one of the other volunteers said it best – at the beginning this used to bother me, but now I just almost expect it, and show up at school every day knowing things are going to be crazy.

I did go to Taraz two weekends ago to get my flu shot and finally got a chance to walk around and take some photos. It was amazing…especially the bazaar. The best part was that they actually speak Russian in Taraz! I walked around the bazaar loving the fact that I could actually understand what people were saying. I bought one DVD of 12 Tom Cruise movies (it was the only one I recognized as being American) dubbed into Russian, only $1 for all 12. I thought it was a pretty solid deal. I thought it was humorous that the Russian word for Mission Impossible is also the same word for homework. Some photos of Taraz are below.

I will have a few more updates next week. Thanks for reading!

Hello everyone!

I thought I would start out this post with a few New Year’s Resolutions that I wrote for myself going into the new year and decade in Kazakhstan:

1. Study Russian for at least one hour each day. After two months at site, I am not extremely impressed with my progress in Russian. Of course part of this is beyond my control, given the fact that I am in a Kazakh village and hear Russian very little, but with a strategic approach, hopefully I can improve (at the very least I can improve grammar, reading, and writing, even if I won’t be able to speak it very well).

2. Study Kazakh for at least three hours each week. After some serious thought, I decided that I could not be the best volunteer possible at my site without putting in some time learning Kazakh. My goal in learning is not to read it or write it, but just be able to speak it well enough so that people can’t talk about me in front of my face without me understanding a word they are saying. Plus, whenever I say even one word in Kazakh, people usually go nuts and go out of their way for me!

3. Email at least three friends from home each week that I have not talked to in a while. There are many people back home that I have not heard from while I have been in Kazakhstan…and I miss all of you and want to stay connected! This actually also includes other PCVs that I got to know so well during PST, yet have talked to so little since getting to site.

4. Exercise more. OK, so this is everybody’s resolution, but given the fact that my diet now consists of solely meat, potatoes, and bread, and also the given fact that I no longer have an hour plus round trip walk to and from school like during PST, and also given the fact I am not playing as much basketball as I did my first month at site, this needs to happen. The only problem is what to do? Running outside in the winter in Kazakhstan isn’t happening, so I am kind of confined to my room. I guess I will figure it out.

5. Be more firm with my students. No more Mr. Nice Guy in the classroom, if they talk, they are going to get a low grade for that day. It is probably the thing I need to work on the most as a teacher.

6. Travel the world! Obviously living in a foreign country accomplishes that goal fairly decently, but I hope to add three or four more countries to my list over this year, and to see the rest of Kazakhstan this summer.

7. Drink less vodka, or at least try to. Self-explanatory.

8. Continue reading awesome books. I say continue because this was a goal coming into Peace Corps, and is one that has not been hard to accomplish. I have read some great books so far (I can’t believe that I had never been introduced to Dostoevsky until the past two months…highly recommended). Also recommended if anyone is interested in reading one of the few travel books about Kazakhstan is Apples are from Kazakhstan by Christopher Robbins, a book I got this summer but actually just read in November. The next books on my list include:

The Book of Basketball – Bill Simmons (I’ve been looking forward to this for two years)

War and Peace – Tolstoy

Crime and Punishment – Dostoevsky

A Home on the Field – Cuadros (last year’s UNC summer reading that I never picked up)

Plus about five more on my shelf that are unread

Anyway, resolutions aside, this week when the semester starts will in a lot of ways mark a new beginning in my teaching. Even though I have been here for two months in Zhanatas, the first two months were more about getting to know the town, students, and teachers (especially in a pioneer site), and now I have a better idea of what I can do in the community and at school. I will still be teaching 18 hours with the same students, which is great, for the most part, things will be the same. In addition to that, I will have eight total English clubs at my school each week, which sounds impossible, but for some of them I will probably use the same materials and plan, so hopefully it will be doable. Six of the clubs will be for grades 6-11, encompassing students in the classes that I do not teach. Two of the clubs will be small groups of who I have deemed my better students, one for 6th and 7th grades, and one for 9th and 10th. Another challenge that I have had in the classroom is that it is often hard to not teach to the lower level students, if half the class doesn’t get something, I feel like I can’t move on, which means the students who do understand are bored. So I asked to have an hour each week with my best students so that I can have extra time with them. Also, and I stole this idea from our PCVTA, I am going to try and hold office hours to work individually with students who want help. Over the holiday I have gotten the chance to work individually with students taking the Olympiad in January, and have really enjoyed working one on one with students. Not only that, they really enjoyed it too and I could see pretty drastic improvement even in just two weeks (granted these are the best students who take the Olympiad). Hopefully the idea will work out.

That being the school aspect, I am also starting a few community projects in January. I must say that the process of choosing a community project was much more about what the community wanted rather than what I was good at, but I guess in the end that is better. I had thoughts of doing things involving technology, computers, mathematics, or sports, but there honestly wasn’t a huge need for any of that. The one thing that EVERYBODY said is that they wanted to learn Spanish, so starting next week I am going to start a community Spanish club as well. My Spanish is probably even worse than my Russian at this point, so now I will get the chance to have four languages going in and out of my head on a weekly basis. I also am hoping to start a debate club at the local college (I’m anxious to work with some more advanced English speakers) and continue monthly teacher trainings for local English teachers. My Russian lessons twice a week and my lessons with directors and zavuches twice a week will round out my schedule. It is going to be an exciting and busy year.

Last week was largely much of the same as the last post, continued New Year’s celebrations and gosti-ing. January 7 was the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which wasn’t celebrated that much in Zhanatas due to it being a Kazakh town. But it was a national holiday, and I actually got a chance to watch some of the Christmas services from Moscow and St. Petersburg. The services were absolutely gorgeous, I couldn’t understand much of it because it was in Old Russian, but the churches were beautiful and the services were elegant and traditional. It made me excited to visit some of the churches hopefully when I go to Russia summer 2011!

That’s about it…I am going to Taraz this weekend to get my required swine flu shot and am hoping to get some photos and explore the city. Congrats to Alabama on winning the National Championship, and a bigger congrats to the Buckeyes on winning the Rose Bowl. Давай!

С Новым годом!

I hope that everyone had a great New Years and enjoyed the holiday season. The holidays in Kazakhstan were fun and interesting times for sure. First of all, thanks so much to everybody who sent letters or packages, they meant a great deal, and I think I am set on food and candy for the winter. Thanks especially to those of you who sent books and other gifts I can use at school, both the students and teachers will love them.

Side note number one before I actually start this post…I did successfully send off all the letters to everyone, although the post office guessed that it would probably take a month for them to get there, meaning it will now probably be mid to late January before they get there. The process was also a lot more expensive than I thought it would be, it actually ended up being almost a fourth of my salary for the month, but considering I never go anywhere and never buy anything, it was OK for a one-time thing and will definitely be worth it.

Side note number two, sports update, it appears that my excitement for McGrady being back with the Rockets was a bit premature because now he is out again and will most likely be traded. In more exciting news, the Texans actually are going into the last game of the season with a chance at making the playoffs! It is a long-shot, but will still be exciting to hear about. I must say I will be kind of disappointed if the Texans finally make the playoffs for the first time, and I am in Kazakhstan.

Anyway, back to more relevant matters. One gift I received was speakers so that I could do listening activities in the classroom, particularly with music. I brought the speakers to a class I guest taught (meaning the teacher didn’t show up, so the director told me to go talk to them about America, it has happened quite a bit in the first couple of months here). This particular class was apparently the best in the school, and 11th grade Russian class, and I was pretty impressed with their level of English. However, what impressed me even more was that when I mentioned names like Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I wasn’t given returned blank stares…they had actually heard of these groups. I played them some classic rock for them, and they all got up and danced in the middle of class, it was a pretty good time. Next quarter I am going to write out the lyrics, with a few words left out that I think they could know, and see if they can listen to the songs and write the correct word.

Anyway, before I begin talking about the holiday season here, let me start with what is probably the most important lesson I have learned about the Kazakhs so far…their lives revolve around holidays and parties. You probably could have picked up on this based on my previous posts. It is obviously the holiday season now, but it seems that literally every week there is some excuse to sit down, drink some vodka, eat some cake, and say some toasts. People go all out preparing food, dressing up, etc. This would all be well and good except for the fact that it often stops anything from getting done at the school. For example, our school had our holiday party a few days ago, and in typical Kazakh fashion, the time was changed a zillion times in the days leading up to it. First it was to be Tuesday at 7 PM, then Wednesday at 7 PM, then Thursday at 7PM, and then finally back to Wednesday at 1 PM. Well, during all of this confusion, I had told one of my students taking the Olympiad in January (more on that later) that I would meet her Wednesday at 2 PM. When the teachers finally decided on the final time, I told them that I could come for an hour but would have to leave to meet this student for a lesson. I was met with, “No, no, just stay for the party, you can meet with her anytime.” But I held firm (I am getting better at doing that) and said that it was important to me to follow through with this commitment. They finally agreed. Sometimes I feel like that I need to reinforce the fact that while I enjoy the parties and the fact that my friends need to parade me around the town during holidays and weddings and what not, the reason I am in Zhanatas is to teach.

What makes that decision easier is how amazing my students are. I honestly wasn’t expecting Christmas to even be mentioned at all, and through the first part of the 24th it was not. The previous day I had given all of my students individual cards that I had made (that took a while) that said Happy Holidays and had each of their names on it. When I returned to school after lunch, all of my students started singing Merry Christmas songs that they had practiced in English, and many of them gave me presents as well. Many of them tried to write things in English, photos are below of some of my presents and cards. If you are wondering why there are so many tigers, it is because 2010 is the year of the tiger (the animal, not the golfer). It was a great start to the holidays.

The weather in Zhanatas was quite interesting Christmas week, the day before Christmas was arguably the warmest day since I have been here, including November. This sounds like a good thing, but it really isn’t. It got warm enough that some of the top layer of snow melted, and then refroze again that night. When I woke up Christmas day, Zhanatas had literally turned into a giant ice rink. During the walk to school, I actually at times sat on the ground and slid myself to school, as many of my students were doing, it was that bad. The next day, the 26th, was arguably the coldest day it has been since I have been to Kazakhstan, only two days after being maybe the warmest since October. Crazy.

The day after though was a busy one because first I was going to chaperone the 9th grade dance at our school (all of the grades had dances but the 9th grade one was the only one that occurred when I was not teaching), and then I was going to head to Taraz to celebrate Christmas with other volunteers. Well, the day didn’t exactly go as planned. The dance was a lot of fun, it was interesting to see my students not in the classroom. Below are photos of my 9A and 9B classes. After the dance, I taught two more classes and then was going to hop in a taxi to Taraz. As I slid myself to where the taxis were, I had the thought in the back of my mind that the roads might be dangerous and maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, and it turns out that decision was made for me. Where there are usually at least three or four taxis ready to take folks to surrounding towns, there were zero cars and one man standing there. I asked him if anybody was going to Taraz and he said no, the main road was closed. He did call his friend and he told me that there was another way to get there if I absolutely had to, but it would take about seven hours and cost me more tenge than I had in my pocket. So Taraz unfortunately didn’t happen.

The next day, a few of the younger female teachers at my school asked me to go to a dance club that night with them…which I agreed to. When we first all met up, the six of them immediately started arguing on which club to go, where to eat first, and how the night was going to go. The argument escalated (it was partly in Russian) to the point where one girl said she wanted to eat at a place that had plov, and the another girl said something like, “You don’t need plov, look how fat you are.” (For the record, there aren’t actually very many overweight young people in Kazakhstan) One of the teachers walked over to me and said she was so ashamed of her friends, but I laughed and said, “Actually, this is just like being in America, the girls are exactly the same.” She felt a lot better after that. Eventually we ate and went to a club and started dancing – but the problem was I could not see a thing. Every girl in Kazakhstan apparently feels the need to put an inordinate amount of sparkles and glitter on themselves when they go out, and when you combine that with strobe lights, I was blinded for the entire night. It was still a lot of fun though.

Then there was New Years a few days after that. I was actually a little frightened of New Year’s going into it because some of my friends joked, “You think you have drunk a lot of vodka before…wait until the 31st…” Well, there was a lot of vodka, as I assumed, but it was spread throughout the day so it didn’t end up being too bad. New Years in Kazakhstan is celebrated all day New Year’s Eve, which meant all day gosti-ing. The food was great, and I had a lot of fun. I was again reminded though that I am apparently not allowed and not capable of serving myself anything – at each place there were one or two girls assigned to wait on me hand and foot. One time my glass of juice got two low, and the mom yelled at her daughter, telling her that she would not make a good wife. That evening, there was a concert at the akimat in our village, I only went for about five minutes to take the photo below, people seemed to be having a good time. Then my host mom and I went home and watched the New Year’s celebrations from Moscow. Actually, everyone dropped what they were doing in the hour before the New Year started and went inside to spend it with their family, which is kind of cool. Right before the New Year, President Nazarbayev came on and gave what was kind of like a short State of the Union speech, wished us a Happy New Year, and then we could open the champagne. Right when the New Year started, kids outside started blowing up small fireworks, so I went outside and watched for a while, there were booms all over town. Overall, it was a great way to bring in 2010!

As a side note also, the music at the concert in Moscow was great. Some of them were traditional Russian songs, but many were translated from English songs, which were quite humorous. They included, “It’s Raining Men” and “I’ve got the Power.” They also sang “I want to Break Free” in English, which was quite cool. The best song though was right before midnight, and it was a Russian rap remix of “Poker Face.” I laughed pretty loudly at that one.

I am on winter break from school, which started on December 29 and goes through January 8, just after the Russian Orthodox Christmas on January 7. Despite the fact it is a holiday though, the only thing I am not doing is teaching classes, I still am teaching a seminar to the teachers at my school twice a week, even over holidays, I am still having my Russian lessons (thankfully, I need them), and I am helping the three students that are taking the Olympiad test on January 9 study. Still a lot going on.

That’s it for now…I feel like I rambled a lot on this post, sorry if it dragged on. I write these at various points throughout the week, so my transitions between events are probably lacking. Happy New Year! Here is a photo of me and my 7A class, all Kazakh, they demanded that I take a photo with them to show my friends “the best class in the school.”

Привет! С Праздником!

First things first, glad to see that Tracy McGrady is back in the Rockets lineup, even if he is only playing eight minutes a game.

The last two weeks have, as always, been interesting, but I have definitely felt some frustrations as well in dealing with what should be the simplest tasks. The most frustrating thing so far has been sending off the letters which my students wrote. My initial plan last Monday was to go buy the envelopes, come home and write out the addresses, and then go to the post office and mail them off. But that would be too easy. First, I was told by everybody at my school that the bazaar sells envelopes, but when I went there, they did not in fact sell envelopes, I was told that I would have to go to the post office. The next day, I went to the post office at 12:15 between two of my classes, and was told that it was closed for lunch. Fair enough. The next day I returned to the post office at around 2:30, and was again told that they were closed for lunch. I asked when exactly lunch was, and the guy suddenly pretended that he did not know Russian and ignored me. Then I returned the next day at 9:30 AM after my first class, and was told it was closed for the morning because it was the birthday of someone who works there. Now I was getting pretty irritated. I asked some teachers at my school if this was normal, and they said no. The next two days were holidays (more on that later), so I returned the day after to find that it was pension day. One day each month all of the retired population gets their checks from the government, meaning this is the one day a month you should not go to the post office. There were about 200 people there. Still, I was determined to at least buy the envelopes that day, so I waited in one line for about 45 minutes (my counterpart had told me earlier that all the lines are the same), and when I finally got to the front, I was told that I needed to go to the last line to buy envelopes. Fine. I waited for about another hour (sidenote: when I say I waited in line, I actually mean that I stood in a huge mob of people pushing their way up to the front desk). This time when I got to the front, I asked to buy envelopes, the two women talked amongst themselves, and said that they did not sell envelopes, and I would have to go to Taraz (4 hours away by bus) to buy them. I had to teach and had no choice but to leave. As I walked by the first line I saw a stack of envelopes that I needed sitting right by the first guy that had told me that I needed to go to another line. I almost said to myself right then and there that maybe I should just take a photo of the letters my students wrote and email it to my friends and family, but my students were so excited that I figured the next day I would give it one more shot. The next day was Sunday, and normally the post office is closed on Sundays, but it was open today because it had been closed two days for the holiday. I walked in and immediately the guy who handles packages in the back saw me and told me I had just gotten a package. Now this guy I like…he gets really excited whenever I get a package from another country because in working in the Zhanatas post office for 12 years, he had never gotten another package outside of Kazakhstan except from Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. I signed for the package and asked him (I realize now that I should have found him earlier) how on earth I could get some envelopes. In 20 seconds he ran to the front desk, reached in a drawer, grabbed the 25 envelopes I needed, and handed them to me. I almost hugged him. He told me to find him tomorrow and he would help me mail them off, because I anticipate mailing 25 letters to about 8 different countries being a first for the Zhanatas post office. Long story short, for those of you receiving letters, it may be early January before they get there.

Then there was the next task, which occurred last week, of getting my first haircut in Zhanatas. Now I had successfully gotten a haircut in Issyk back during PST which I really liked, so I didn’t think that it would be too huge of a problem. Normally I like to get my haircut fairly infrequently, meaning I usually let it grow out and then get it cut pretty short. So I got to the haircut place (actually, I should say I returned to the haircut place, because of course the first time I went they were closed for lunch) and showed the lady a photo of what I wanted. She took one look at it, shook her head and said, “No-no, I will make you handsome.” This concerned me, so I called my counterpart and asked her to explain to the hairdresser what I wanted. My counterpart replied, “No-no, if you get your hair cut short, you will look like a hedgehog, and no girls will want to marry you.” I sighed, and basically told the hairdresser to do whatever she wanted to my head. All in all, my haircut is fine, other than the fact she barely cut it all and I will have to come back once every 20 days or so. At least a haircut in Zhanatas is only 200 tenge, which is a little over a dollar. In fact, apparently everybody gets their haircut every 20 days because no matter what you do, it is most important in life to look fashionable. I could get up in front of class and stand there silently for 45 minutes, but as long as my shoes were shined, my tie was on straight, and my hair was sufficiently long enough to not be considered a hedgehog, then I was golden. Actually, my ninth and tenth grade girls usually insist on straightening my tie for me before every class, although I’m pretty sure my tie is usually straight and they just use it as an excuse to come up and touch me.

From a teaching standpoint, the last two weeks have been pretty overwhelming. First, my secondary counterpart has been in the hospital with the flu for about two weeks now. Then, my primary counterpart also went to the hospital for a cold the past four days, meaning I have been teaching most of their classes. For the most part it has been great; the students have certainly enjoyed having me instead of the regular teachers. I am beginning to have some problems with a couple of my classes paying attention, particularly my 10th grade classes. My biggest weakness as a teacher is probably that I am not a very good disciplinarian, and that comes up the most during tests that I give. Tests have definitely been the most frustrating time, as no matter what I do, kids cheat, shout out the answers, and help their friends. Part of the reason for this is that this is the culture they grew up in, but part of it, as I think I mentioned in a previous post, is that it just takes convincing for some of my smarter students that you can in fact try hard and succeed over your classmates. The communist attitude from the Soviet days still exists in the minds of these students.

Also, our school hired a new English teacher to replace Dinara, the girl who got married the second week I was here. I actually didn’t know until recently that Dinara wasn’t coming back, her husband lives in Taraz and that is where she will move. I asked if the husband had ever thought of moving here, and everyone laughed, saying, “He is the man, isn’t he?” One of these days I will devote a post to gender norms here, but in at least three letters written to some of you, when asked about their parents’ occupations, they wrote that their mother was a mistress. Anyway, if I had to guess, I would say that the new English teacher probably has a lower level of English than some of my better 9th and 10th grade students. Granted, she only teaches primary level so I don’t think I will work with her. She is also really shy and has only said three words to me the entire week. She is from Turkistan though, so I want to befriend her in hopes that she can tell me all the cool places to see and maybe even take me there herself.

I am beginning to adjust to some of the habits I need to do to make sure the cold here doesn’t ruin my life. Lesson one: don’t leave your good markers next to the window in the school. The ink will freeze, and I no longer have three of my good markers. Lesson 2: don’t tell your students it is OK if they throw snowballs at you while you walk to school. I had to explain that I will now give them a symbol when it is OK for them to throw snowballs at me, and thankfully, they have followed that rule so far. Finally, I had still struggled to figure out how drying my clothes could not be a seven day process that involved them freezing. But then, I was reading a book a friend had given me that included primary accounts from Gulag survivors, and one of them talked about how he dried his clothes. I decided to try it. It basically involved wearing the clothes when they froze immediately and letting your body temperature thaw it, and then somehow (don’t ask me to explain how), when it thaws it is dry. It ended up working (granted only when I wear the clothes around the house, I wouldn’t walk outside with frozen socks on). I also have started hanging some of my clothes in our washroom instead of outside, which does the trick as well.

So as I mentioned earlier, last Wednesday was Kazakhstan’s Independence Day, so Wednesday and Thursday were national holidays. At first I had visions of relaxing, getting ahead on some of my lesson planning, or even maybe going to see Shymkent for the first time. Of course none of that happened. I was told a week before that there would be another basketball tournament that day. So we again trained for about two hours a day until that day arrived, and then I woke up at 7 AM to head to the sports complex. The court was the nicest I had seen so far in Kazakhstan, so I was pretty excited, except for two things. First, the gym was not heated. Everyone in the stands looked like they were at a Steelers game in January, bundled in blankets and what not. Two, there were more teams here than last time, I lost count, but this would mean that I wouldn’t get home until about 6 PM, 11 hours of a basketball tournament. As much as I love basketball, I knew I was going to be exhausted at the end of the day. Here are some differences in rules in basketball in Kazakhstan and the US, besides what I mentioned earlier in them not calling fouls. One, they do not understand what a backcourt violation is. Basically, when a team crosses half court, if the ball goes back across the line it is a violation, even if the defensive team tips the ball. Two, whether or not you shoot free throws on a foul is apparently up to the referee. One time I was tripped in the backcourt on the first possession of the game, and got two free throws. Then later I was going up for a lay-up, fouled hard, and had to take the ball out on the side. Apparently word had gotten out that I was a pretty decent player, and the other teams and the refs came at me hard this time. I was punched, kicked, tripped, and beaten for about four hours and the refs never blew their whistle on anything. Despite this, my school still got to the semis, where unfortunately we lost on this ridiculous half-court shot by the other team.

Despite all this, the most interesting part of the day was at about 2:00, when our team was not playing. We were watching two teams play, when the ref called a travel on one of the players on the team that was losing by quite a bit. Clearly frustrated, he got up and took a swing that knocked out the referee. It was not unusual in Kazakhstan for punches to be thrown, I had a bruised jaw from when someone took a swing at me after I stole the ball from him, but apparently this punch struck a chord with the entire gym. Everybody on both teams and in the stands emptied onto the floor, and a full out brawl began that made the Pistons-Pacers brawl a few years ago look like children’s play time. It lasted for about eight minutes before dying down, in which there was a lot of blood, and even a few people lying on the ground not moving. Blood was wiped up, and play resumed. And since this complex did not have locker rooms, everybody just stripped down naked in the middle of the gym after the tournament to change clothes. Apparently this was OK, even though it was more than likely below zero in the gym, and even though there were women in the crowd. In the middle of this, bread was distributed to everybody, and we all started eating. Then, the vodka came out…apparently it is appealing to quench your thirst with vodka after a hard fought tournament. I asked if they had any water, and someone answered, “Why would you want water when you have vodka?” This was again one of those moments, as I looked onto a court of male teachers munching on bread and vodka in sub-zero temperatures, many of them still naked, and many of them talking happily with people three hours earlier they had been trying to beat down during the brawl, where I thought to myself, yes, I am in Kazakhstan.

The next day, still a holiday, I woke up thinking OK, I am going to relax and get ahead on my lesson planning. Wrong again. Apparently, there is an English tutor that lives about two minutes away from me that I did not know about, and she had invited me over because all of her students had been practicing to put on a play for me. Several of her students were my students, as she tutored anybody that could afford to pay her (which is why 90% of her students are Russian students). They performed Little Red Riding Hood and other short plays, and had a mock spelling bee. It was actually a lot of fun. Afterward, Miss Elizabeth invited me and two of my students, Niyel in my 9th grade class, and Nastya in my 6th grade class, to join her for tea. She then proceeded to tell me her life story, which was pretty amazing. Her father had been a Russian Orthodox priest, but he fled the Soviet Union when many of the priests were being murdered, and they moved into what is now Tibet, where she was born. She eventually moved to Beijing when she was old enough to go to school. Because of this, she speaks English, Russian, and Chinese fluently. She eventually got married and moved back to Kazakhstan, where she has been an English tutor ever since (she is now close to 80 years old). Well, after this story, she decided to bring out some wine, which was a Russian wine from the 1950s, it was actually pretty good (although I can count on one hand the number of times I have had wine in my life). She then offered it to Niyel (who is 15) and Nastya (who is 11), thankfully they declined. Then this 80 year old woman drank two glasses of wine, got drunk, and started singing in Armenian to us. We all kind of sat there awkwardly until she told us to go home.

Speaking of this, a number of my students are beginning to ask me over for dinner with their parents and family, which is nice but kind of strange at the same time. They always ask how their student is doing, and I always say he/she is doing great, regardless of whether that is true or not. It is interesting twist seeing my students outside of class, especially for the girls, since their job whenever I go over to their house is almost always to wait on me hand and foot. If I take one sip of juice, they immediately refill it. If there is one square inch of my plate that doesn’t have some sort of food on it, it is immediately filled. The Kazakh people, despite many of their strange questions and customs, are definitely the most hospitable people I have ever met.

Finally, I ended up switching my Russian tutor this past week because my first tutor and I had a lot of miscommunications, and honestly she came to class almost completely unprepared every single time, and basically either went over material I already knew or had me translate sentences. I have only had one session with my new tutor but I like her a lot, she is younger and actually came to the session with something prepared. She also gave me a book that had vocabulary in English, Russian, Kazakh, German, and French, pretty cool.

Hi everyone!

Due to one of the other teachers in the school having the flu, I am teaching eight extra classes this week, so this post will be short. There wasn't anything incredibly eventful that happened this week anyway, other than my sixth and seventh grade classes writing their letters. They loved it, thanks again everyone for receiving them! Here are the four most interesting questions I got this week:

1) Will you kidnap my daughter and take her back to America with you?

2) Are you Chris Brown?

3) How many cows does Barack Obama allow each family to have in America?

4) Can I write a letter to Michael Jackson?

I hope everyone is well and warm.

Hi everyone!

I hope everyone is well! I hear that certain parts of the US are getting snow earlier than expected…hopefully it will continue. Things are still great in Zhanatas…and not too cold either, it has been a relatively warm week, although it is snowing again, thankfully to cover all the mud. Major props to the PCVs more north than I am, they have probably already seen the last non-snow covered ground until May.

It has been a busy week, but I will start with the highlight, which was the singing, dancing, and theater competition last Thursday. Eight schools competed, and I was the MC. I showed up knowing nothing at all about what was going on or what I was going to be doing, but my part ended up going OK, I basically just introduced the teams, tried to say some jokes that nobody understood, and tried to make sure everyone had a microphone and music when they needed it. I’m not expecting my invite to host the Emmys anytime soon. Anyway, each group had to perform a song, a dance, and a play. I worked with my sixth grade class for about two weeks. Our song was, “Do Your Ears Hang Low,” and I made up a dance to go along with it. They did awesome during the presentation…I was definitely proud of them. The play was titled, “Why Rabbits Have Short Tails,” and was definitely an interesting play. I was working with one of the other English teachers, and she and the children spent a lot of time working on the costumes, I think they were pretty solid. Our narrator was really dismayed that we had told her that she did not have a costume and could just wear her regular clothes, so on the day of the competition she decided to show up dressed as a princess. I laughed. The play went pretty well, they forgot some lines, but they had fun. After all the schools had gone, the judges went into a room to decide, and music started playing, and all of these 5-8 graders broke into an impromptu dance party. It was quite humorous to watch. Our school ended up getting second place, which is what I thought we deserved, although the school that should have gotten first didn’t, and the school that did get first definitely should not have gotten first…but oh well. I was happy, but the English teacher I was with told the students how disappointed she was that they didn’t get first. After she left, I slipped them all some candy and told them I was proud of them. Photos are below of 1) my awkward MC debut, 2) my sixth graders singing do you ears hang low, 3) dressed up and ready to put on a play and 4) Sayora and Vika celebrating our second place finish!

One thing I will say about all these events that I have attended in my first month here is that they seem to be WAY more important than the actual lessons that I teach. Thursday is actually my busiest teaching day, but I had to miss all my classes to host this event, and everyone was insistent that this was more important. Meanwhile, my school did not bother to find a substitute for the 9th and 10th grade classes that I missed, so they just wandered around outside. The same holds true for weddings and other events, it does not seem to be a problem that kids can just miss class to go to these events. And if there is a wedding the night before classes…it doesn’t matter that you aren’t getting back home until sometimes 3 or 4 in the morning. On occasion, like the competition for example, I can understand the kids doing something different, but it seems that every week something is going on. There is no routine in Kazakhstan.

The day after the competition I held a seminar for English teachers in the region at the local education department. Overall, besides the fact that it started an hour after I was told it would (which is entirely normal here), I think it went well and it is something that we are going to have every month. However, what did not go well was that afterwards, almost every teacher was insistent that I come to their schools and open clubs, teach some classes, and work with their students. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind possibly doing it at a couple of schools, but in the end, I had just had to have a hard rule that I would only work in my school. A lot of people will be disappointed, but it is what it is. Honestly, looking back on the first month, I am glad that I was pretty much thrown into the fire right away…basketball tournaments where we trained for three hours a day for a week, this last competition where we practiced for two hours every day for two weeks, and then all the weddings and birthday parties. I’d rather be too busy than feel bored. But it would be nice to also start a routine as well.

However, despite all of the fun experiences I have had, I think the thing that has shocked me so far is how much I have enjoyed teaching; it is my favorite part of the day, even if I am playing basketball later that day. Students in Kazakhstan are different than in the US, many of them are genuinely excited about learning and come to class every day enthusiastic and ready to learn and ready to participate. Granted, it is still early and this might change, and also granted there are still the few in every class who don’t do their homework. But even those who don’t do their homework participate in class, mainly because I design activities that force them to. But they seem to enjoy it. So far, I would say my most successful class has been my class on landmarks and famous places around the world. I got permission to use the projector for the first time, and prepared my first PowerPoint on famous places. The room was completely silent of huge big brown eyes staring at Machu Picchu, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Taj Mahal, and other places around the world. They were in awe. I had them write about the place they wanted to visit the most for homework, but it was awesome to see their reaction to many places they had never seen before.

My kids have also more recently started to show their humorous side. One day a few cobwebs fell from the ceiling in class, and one of the people in the back jumped up, caught it, and said, “Да, я Spiiiiderrrman,” and everybody laughed. I also laugh every time we are doing a reading exercise, and somebody pronounces OK as one succinct sound, like aak. Also, I was doing acrostics with my seventh grade class, and one kid meant to write bear, but accidently wrote beer, so his last sentence was “I like beer.” I translated it into Russian for him, and everybody laughed. Class is definitely a good time.

I hope everyone is well! Because I am doing my letter writing project and have had to gather addresses, my counterpart is letting me use the school computer more often, so I feel more connected now than ever, especially with sports, normally I just check UNC Basketball and Rockets scores. Dismayed to see that the Texans were once 5-3 and are now 5-7. Also dismayed that Greg Oden is out for the year again with a broken leg, and that the Lakers are in first place. I hope it is snowing wherever people are!

Привет!

Happy almost December, and a Happy Belated Thanksgiving! I hope everyone had a great holiday season. Ironically, this last week has actually gotten warmer and all of the snow is completely gone for the first time since I have been here, although I must say, Zhanatas minus the snow is a large pile of mud, so I am looking forward to when the ground is covered in snow again. I have been told this will probably happen later this week.

Monday through Thursday of this past week was probably the first normal period of time I would say that I have had since I have been to Zhanatas…no weddings, no birthday parties, just teaching and lesson planning. I love my students more and more with each passing day…they are still excited, and now as I get to know them better their personalities are beginning to show, and I am beginning to get to know their names a little better. To learn their names, I took a picture of each of them and matched it to their name. Harder than it sounds, many Kazakh names are not short and difficult to pronounce, but I posted some of the photos below.

There are definitely a few tidbits that we were given by other volunteers during training that have proved true so far about students and teachers here in Kazakhstan. I have now assigned students to draw a picture and write a few sentences about it. When the students come to class the next day, there are always at least four or five students that have pictures that took them minimum three hours to draw (and in a couple of cases, paint). The only problem is that there is not as much time put into sentences…which is the main point of the assignment. It is amazing what the students get excited about in class…after a lifetime of translation and Soviet style learning, pretty much everything I have done in the classroom has worked, which was definitely not true during PST. Ironically, the students’ favorite game is mixed sentences, where I create three of four teams in a class, give each team a sentence broken up into little pieces, and they have to reform the sentence. I don’t know why…but they love that game, even more than vocabuball. They even enjoy sentence correction, which is awesome because that probably improves their grammar the most of any practice exercise I do because I can pick out the mistakes I hear them making over and over.

I gave my first test last week to my 9th grade classes, and the average grade was in the 30s, which was kind of unfortunate, but I had them retake it next class and the average improved dramatically. Tests were not something we talked about giving during PST, but I’m definitely going to start using them more and more, especially oral exams so I can hear them speak the language. One girl in my 9th grade class got the highest grade in the class, a 90, so I put a smiley face at the end of her test and said excellent. After class I heard shrieking in the hallway, and thinking someone was in trouble, rushed outside. However, it turns out that girl was just showing all her friends that the American had put a smiley face in her grade book.

Currently, I am working with my sixth grade class because they are representing our school at a region wide singing competition. Originally I was supposed to be a judge for the competition (which is this coming Thursday), but then I was told that I would not be any longer, so I thought I was off the hook. Then I got a call five minutes later that actually, I was going to be MCing the event…surprise! I am still unclear which language I am going to be doing this in, but I guess I will just role with whatever happens. I’ll let you know how our group does. I taught them the song “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” and made up a dance to go along with it. My counterpart picked who she thought were the six cleverest pupils in my sixth grade class, so there are only six participants.

Things with my host family are still going great, honestly, I feel bad talking to so many other volunteers that are having problems, because I couldn’t imagine a better situation. She is a great cook, she gives me the appropriate amount of independence, speaks to me in Russian, has introduced me to all of her family and brings me to all of her parties and events. One thing that we always talked about during PST was that because we did not know Russian at all in Almaty, we couldn’t really let out personalities show to our host families there. Now that my Russian is slightly better, I can actually make jokes and talk about myself more, and show people who I really am. The constant source of amusement is me telling about all the mistakes I have made in Russian (the list is quite expansive and embarrassing). Anytime there is a guest over that normally takes up about the first 15 minutes of the conversation. Thankfully in Zhanatas, I have only had one really embarrassing moment. I have gotten to the point where I can pretty much have the intro conversation (name, age, where you are from, are you married, etc.) without thinking about it too much. But the other day I was tired, and instead of asking a girl my age, Сколько тебе лет (How old are you), I instead asked Сколько стоит, which is How much does it cost? As my luck would have it, there were about 10 people there, and they all started laughing. Oh well…it could have been worse.

Anyway though, last Friday marked the beginning of Eid, a Muslim holiday which in Kazakhstan lasts three days (it varies depending on where you are). Basically what people do during Eid is just go over to other people’s houses and eat, although a special prayer is said before you start and when you end. I definitely met a different population during that day, as most of the people who hosted the larger meals were the more devout religiously. I also met a few different ethnicities that I hadn’t met to date, including Tatars and Turkmens. The ethnic diversity here remains one of the coolest parts of Kazakhstan. The Turkmen couple were by far the most conservative and religious couple I had met to date in Kazakhstan so far, after our dinner he recited, from memory, a part of the Qu’ran in Arabic that lasted about 12 minutes. It was a cool experience because honestly, it is really the first time I had taken part in anything religious in Kazakhstan, my host family in Issyk didn’t celebrate Ramadan.

The day after Eid began, all of the volunteers in the Zhambyl Oblast (8 of us) gathered in Taraz to celebrate Thanksgiving a couple days late. I hadn’t met a few of them yet (mainly the Kaz 20s that had already been there a year), so it was a lot of fun to get to know everyone, share crazy stories, and speak English for a night. The day I got back…I already felt like I had lost some Russian, it is crazy how quickly it goes away.

Anyway, that is it for now…I hope everything is well! One thing that I mentioned last week…my theme for December for my 6th and 7th grade classes is writing letters, and I was hoping that they could send some of them to the United States (or to other Americans around the world). If you are interested, email me your address and maybe you will get a card from one of my students!

Thanks everyone! До встpечи! (See you later in Russian)

Sidenote: Everyone in Zhanatas says Давай when they say goodbye, which literally means, “give it to me.” Nobody said that in Almaty that I heard…still trying to figure out if it is common among everyone or just a Zhanatas thing.

Hello everyone!

As I always start, I hope that everyone is doing well back home. It has been a fun-filled and busy week here in Zhanatas as I have started teaching; it is definitely nice to finally get started after months of training and two weeks of paperwork and meeting people at site. I am finally starting to feel like I have settled into a routine, or at least as much of a routine as I am going to have over the next two years.

Before my first class, I sat in on the quarterly meetings at my school that they have before the start of each new term. I wasn’t really sure what was going to be discussed at this meeting – I assumed it would be just announcements and relevant information about the coming term, but instead, they posted every student’s grade in the school on this big board for everyone to stare at and make comments. Both praise and criticism here, as I mentioned in a prior post, is very public. In the classroom all grading is done out loud, and in this particular meeting, after looking at the grades, we sat for about 4 hours while we went through each student who got a three (or a two, but pupils rarely if at all get twos…this is on a scale from one to five), and the teacher had to explain why the pupil received a poor mark in that class. It was really interesting that the teachers almost had to defend themselves for giving bad marks. It was quite exhausting.

Anyway, overall, after a week of teaching, I am pretty excited about teaching, the students, and what I can do in two years here. I like both of my counterparts a lot, and although it is the first week, I am impressed that they both seem to want to take the time to sit with me and plan lessons, something the Peace Corps warned might not happen. However, getting into the classroom is a different story. My very first class, my teacher was supposed to present a grammar concept for ten minutes before I started, but she got a phone call and left the room for the entire class. So I improvised with the materials I had and managed to get through it pretty well, but it was definitely an interesting start. Overall, it is pretty easy so far to captivate the kids at this school with my lessons and activities because they have never heard a native English speaker before, and furthermore have never had the opportunity to get up and play games in class. The first time I brought out a ball in class, they went nuts. I would also say that my best Russian lessons often come when my counterpart is teaching her English class, because I would guess about 50% of it is in either Russian or Kazakh. My goal is to have my teachers translate less and let me try to explain it in English so that the kids can learn not to rely on their Kazakh or Russian.

Speaking of the kids, they are actually pretty solid academically. I am teaching two 10th grade classes, two 9th grade classes, a 7th grade class, and a 6th grade class. In each class, there are usually about 5-7 people that always speak because the teacher never calls on anyone else because she just assumes they did not do their homework or do not know the answer. Most of the time they do not know the answer because more than likely they have received this same treatment their entire academic life and have no motivation. This is why in planning my activities, one thing that I always try to do is involve the whole class, and I am going to try and instill in every kid early that I expect that they come prepared and do their homework on a daily basis. The thing though that is coolest about teaching these kids is that even though I am in Kazakhstan, when I am standing in front of a class, it is almost like I am back in the US. I listen to some kid talk and think to myself, “Yeah, there was a kid just like you at my high school,” and I see the group of girls giggling in the back of the classroom and think to myself, ‘Yeah, there were definitely girls just like you at my high school.” It not only helps me to get to know them, it lets me know how I should approach them to try and get the most out of them in the classroom.

Outside of class continues to be an adventure, and this week the adventure led me to two weddings. The first wedding was in Taraz last week, and unfortunately I did not know a single person there other than my host mother at the beginning, although I did meet my host mom’s brother, his daughter, and then another brother of my host mom. There was a ton of food and it had a lot of traditional Kazakh dances and customs that were very interesting to see. However, it was very long. The wedding started at 7 PM and did not end until 2 AM (this includes the reception, which is kind of done at the same time as the wedding here). The reason that it is so long though is that EVERY person has to give a toast in the audience, and there were about 400 people there. Thankfully, because I did not know anybody, I was exempt this time. One thing that was cool though was that because most people were from Taraz, apparently they had met Americans before, so after the reaction of, “Oh cool, you are American,” I was actually for the first time in two weeks able to kind of blend in, sit in the background, and watch the festivities without people constantly staring and walking up to me. It was quite nice.

However, my host niece, who is four years old, had different plans for me that evening. After some initial shyness, she sat next to me and basically held my hand the whole time. If my plate was beginning to become empty, she would pick out the next dish I was to eat to make sure I was constantly eating well. Then, when her favorite song came on (and to this point I had actually successfully avoided dancing), she did not take no for an answer and dragged me onto the dance floor. It was actually a lot of fun. Later, she set her eye on a five year old Russian boy across the room, and after repeated rejections, finally dragged him onto the dance floor during the last song (I was pretty impressed she made it until 1:30), and then when it ended gave him a huge kiss in the middle of the room. Definitely a Kazakh girl in training. The last thing I will say about Taraz is that although it is only about three hours away, it felt about 30 degrees warmer. Zhanatas is an oasis of coldness in the south.

Then there was the next wedding, which was in Baykgdam (very close to Zhanatas). Quite different, I actually knew the bride this time, Dinara, one of the teachers at my school, so the wedding actually meant something to me. It wasn’t as fancy (the food was as fancy), but there were less people and it only lasted until 12:00. However, if possible, the amount of attention I received was even more pronounced than in Zhanatas. Baykgdam is a small agricultural town of no more than 3,000 people, and I don’t think they even could understand the concept of meeting someone from another country. I went with all of the teachers at my school, and after about an hour, I noticed a line of about 20 Kazakh girls forming about 10 feet from our table. Out of curiosity, I asked my counterpart what they were doing, and she answered, “They are lining up to dance with you of course!” And she was serious, so for the next two hours, there I was, probably doubling the amount of time I have danced in my entire life.

Then came time for me to toast. I was actually pretty nervous, I thought about trying to memorize something in Kazakh, but instead stuck with Russian, and kept it short. They pretty much stared at me in silence while I gave it, which made me feel more and more uncomfortable, but then at the end I simply stated Рахмет, which is thank you in Kazakh. The place went wild, simply because I stated one word in Kazakh…it is crazy how nuts they go when you speak even a little Kazakh here. At that point I was ready to just sit down and relax after dancing for two hours and sweating through a Russian toast. But then, just when I thought things couldn’t get more awkward, they did. After my toast everyone around me started speaking excitedly in Kazakh, and I did what I normally do during those situations, stood there and looked at my shoes. Then, the lights went out, a spotlight blinded me, someone handed me a microphone, and the music started. Apparently I was going to sing. That week, I had told my host mother (which I now painfully regretted) that I had learned the song Мой Казахстан in Almaty. So I did my best, and actually did much better than I thought I would. It is a pop song so people danced and sang along, and afterwards people went nuts…had I actually done all the vodka shots that asked me to do in the next 20 minutes for singing and toasting I probably wouldn’t be here right now.

So yeah…so far so good in Kazakhstan! I titled my post flexibility because I am definitely doing some things here that I would never have dreamed of doing in the US, and I am definitely stretching my comfort zone. Overall though, I feel pretty lucky so far, I have talked to some other PCVs that have had run-ins with police, serious counterpart or host family issues, and other problems, and I have had none of that so far. Still a little dismayed that I am not hearing Russian a lot and will probably be nowhere close to where I wanted to be in two years had I been up north, but hopefully I can try and study a lot and make up for it.

I hear that basketball season has started…definitely makes me miss home! Keep me updated on your lives! Final thing…I was thinking about having one of my classes write cards for the winter holidays that I maybe wanted to mail to some of you. If you are interested, send me your address, and think of it as kind of a holiday card/postcard (because they don’t really have postcards in Kazakhstan).

First image is my host mom, her family in Taraz (including my host niece), and I at first wedding.

These are teachers at my school at the second wedding. The woman to the right of me is my counterpart, Aisulu.

The lovely bride Dinara...originally this was supposed to be just me and her, but then 15 other girls wanted in the picture, so I just cropped them out. This explains my awkward squished look and the blurred photo.

My other host niece, who lives in Almaty with her mother. They came to visit. She likes to dance. I also had a photo of Kobe Bryant lying on the table, and she hit him with a spoon. I like her.

Photo of our basketball team...sorry it is blurred.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cyeNWUGx0c

Link to the youtube video of the song I sang at the wedding (video of the song...not me actually singing it, thank goodness). Kind of catchy.

Hello everyone,

I finally have found internet…I hope that everything is still well. I have been at site for about two weeks now, and it has definitely been an interesting two weeks. It has been snowing pretty much non-stop since I have gotten here, not too much, but still pretty cool to see (and pretty cold as well). Before I get to my site though, let me bounce back to the last week of PST.

After our language class, community project, English clubs, and teaching were finished, we held a two day teacher training for local English teachers where we taught them methodology and American culture. The culture were definitely the most fun to present, my two sessions were on regional differences and American music. It was nice to introduce Kazakhstan to Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin as a change of pace from Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake.

Then, on October 31, we had our swearing in ceremony, which was a bigger deal than I thought it was going to be. The ambassador was there, as was a representative of the Kazakhstani Ministry of Education. We had to take a very presidential sounding oath that all U.S. government employees have to take, and we were in – officially Peace Corps Volunteers. After some emotional goodbyes, I hopped straight on the train to Zhanatas. The train ride was not nearly as bad as people had made it out to be – carrying all of our luggage however proved for some people an impossible task. Normally we would have gotten a site visit two weeks prior where we could have taken half of our stuff, but due to budget cuts, that was nixed this year. Thankfully I had packed relatively light, so I could manage. The train ride took about 10 hours meaning I got into Taraz at about 1 AM, where my counterpart and director met me and we took a 4 hour taxi ride to Zhanatas.

Getting in at 5 AM, I assumed that I would just stay with my counterpart and would meet my host family the next day. Oh no. My host mother was up waiting for me and had prepared a gigantic feast, including my first taste of beshbarmak, Kazakhstan’s national dish. I introduced myself and ate from about 5-5:30 AM (I also discovered that my Russian language skills are not very good at 5 AM after travelling for 14 hours and waking up at 6 AM the prior morning). Then I fell asleep.

Thus my first two weeks at site began. Peace Corps designed our arrival at site to coincide with fall exams and fall break (meaning I don’t actually start teaching until next Monday) so that we would have two weeks to get situated and do all of the things on our to-do list. The following Monday after I got to site, the first thing on my checklist was to go to the school and meet all the teachers and students. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I might as well have been Barack Obama. There was a huge performance, just for me, including singing and dancing and everything. I had to give an impromptu speech in Russian. This would basically be my life over the next two weeks…as I met the Education Department officials, the akim (which is kind of like the mayor), and the immigration police. Being the first American any of these people have ever met is pretty intimidating, and quite exhausting.

Zhanatas is a really interesting town – not quite what I was expecting. It is extremely Soviet, and does not really feel like southern Kazakhstan. My counterpart explained to me that because of the way Zhanatas is situated, both in the hills and with multiple lakes within 25 kilometers, it is one of the windiest cities in Kazakhstan and thus has a temperature of the equivalent of about 7-8 hours north of here (which is right on the Siberian border!). The city is honestly pretty run down; I would guess that about 30% of the buildings are abandoned apartment buildings. Another 20% of the buildings look like bombs had hit them. After hearing numerous versions of what happened, the one that seems most common is that when the Soviet Union fell and it was becoming clear that Kazakhstan was going to become an independent country, the Russians and Ukrainians basically ransacked the town, blew up all the buildings, and left Zhanatas in ruins. The buildings don’t look like they have been touched since this happened from 1989-1991.

The ethnic makeup of the town is really interesting also. There are more Russians here than the Peace Corps thought there were, as well as a pretty heavy German, Ukrainian, and Kurdish populations. I have made a Kurdish friend whose family is from Iraq; they moved here shortly after the US invasion. There is not a heavy Uzbek influence, which is more common in other cities in the south. From a language standpoint, people here still speak predominantly Kazakh, which is what I was expecting, but it is a little better than I thought. My host mom always speaks Russian to me, and everyone at school speaks Russian. The only thing is though that they always speak Kazakh to each other, so if I am not actually engaged in the conversation, they will be speaking Kazakh and I can’t follow it or learn anything from it. I have already had three Russian lessons though, and my goal for the next few months is to forget grammar and just work on upping my vocabulary base.

Speaking of my host mother, she is awesome, and her house is awesome. It is a small apartment that has a flush toilet, bathtub, television, and microwave. I watch the news from Moscow every night, although the anchor looks exactly like Kevin James, which makes it quite amusing. The food is amazing as well – I have already had two other really popular dishes in Kazakhstan. One of them is manti, which is actually Russian, and basically meat, carrots, and onions in a dumpling. Plov is an Uzbek dish that is basically rice, carrots, and some sort of meat. I mentioned beshbarmak earlier, which is the most popular dish in Kazakhstan. It is made from handmade large noodles (which are delicious), onions, and some kind of meat. I am eating well. As you can tell, green vegetables don’t really exist in Kazakhstan though, so thank goodness for multivitamins. The only two minor disadvantages is that washing clothes is an interesting process in the winter. We don’t have a washing machine so I wash my clothes by hand (water is only on from 7-10 in the morning and 7-10 at night), but the first time I put the clothes outside to dry they froze. My host mom told me this was normal and I just have to bring them in to unfreeze in a couple of days and they will be ready to go. The other thing is that I will say that the apartment has “heat” in quotation marks because I would say that the apartment is probably in the 50s and at night drops into the 40s. Better than outside, but I am wearing my long underwear and wool socks and probably won’t take them off until April.

I tried to save the four most interesting things for last. The first subject is the girls of Zhanatas…oh my. Most of the male PCVs got a little of this in Issyk – where everyone wants to date and eventually marry the Americans, but being the first American that these girls have ever met, it is downright ridiculous, even worse than I thought it was going to be. The first few days they were too shy, I could just see them hiding behind buildings giggling, but then they just started following me around. Whenever I meet a girl, I get, “Hi my name is blank, I am blank years old, and I am not married!” I was invited to two birthday parties in the past two weeks, and I am pretty sure the only reason I was invited was because there were single Kazakh girls there – I didn’t know anybody and had no other reason to be there. Furthermore, for most of the gosti experiences I have had (gosti is Russian term for when you are a guest at someone else’s house), the underlying purpose behind me going over was that there was an unmarried girl there. One situation was particularly interesting – we had been eating for about ten minutes, with the unmarried Kazakh girl just sitting there, not eating, and staring at me longingly. Then the host mother just flat out asked me if I would marry her daughter. Usually they are a little more discreet than that. I explained that in the US, even if you like someone, normally you don’t marry someone after only knowing them for ten minutes. She nodded, and then literally ten minutes later when we had finished, asked, “What about now?” I am hopeful that all of this will die down eventually, because it will get distracting.

The second thing is about the drinking culture here. This is something that we definitely heard about, but didn’t really experience much in Issyk. That has been made up for big time in Zhanatas. At both of the birthday parties, I was blown away by how much the men drank here. At the second birthday party, literally every man at the table put away between 23-27 shots of vodka over the course of the evening, it was insane, and I was expected and at times coerced to keep up. I clearly did not make it that high, but I did reach double digits, which I didn’t even think I was capable of. Thankfully there was a lot of food and I tried to space them out, but I explained to the woman pretty firmly afterward that if I was coming to any more of these parties, when I say no I mean no. Still though, there are a handful of times where I think to myself, “Yeah, I am in Kazakhstan,” and after about 12 shots of vodka, observing ridiculous Kazakh dancing and countless marriage proposals in a rundown Soviet cafe, that party was definitely one of those times.

The third thing is what I think is definitely been the coolest part of my two weeks so far, without question. So the first day when I introduced myself in Russian to the school, I mentioned that I like to play basketball. The PE teacher came up to me afterward and said excitedly that there was a region wide basketball tournament for all of the schools (male teachers make up the teams) that Friday, and I was now on the school team. We trained for that week and then the day came. There were 24 teams and games started at 9 AM and the tournament didn’t end until 5 PM. Now I must say, that Kazakh basketball is not like American basketball, it is pretty much a mix between rugby and basketball, you have to pretty much kill someone to get a foul called. Nevertheless, our team, which had never advanced past the second round, wound up in the Finals against the perennial champions. Unfortunately we got spanked because they had Zydrunas Ilgauskas’ twin brother as their center, but second place was not bad. Photos are below, we took a team photo that I will try and get my hands on at some point.

Then there was the game of horse that we played…oh my again. So if you have never played horse (they spell a different word here obviously, which I can’t repeat on this blog), basically it is a shooting competition in basketball where you have to make the shot the person before you made, or you get a letter. If you spell horse (or miss five shots), you are out, and the last person standing wins. The game is played the same here, but with a twist. When a person is eliminated, they put the ball down and line up in front of the eliminated person, and get a free punch at his stomach. I appalled when I first saw this…it is pretty barbaric. We played with seven people and played three games, and I felt so sorry for the one guy because he was the first person eliminated every single game, and therefore got eighteen punches. The next person eliminated only got punches from the people still in the game, so if you were runner-up, you only got one punch, and the winner got no punches. Thankfully, I won two of the three games, and the one I lost I was runner-up, so only got punched one time. Definitely an incentive to win though.

Perhaps the best part of the basketball experience though is that I now have a group of local friends that I talk to and can ask questions and hang out with. The best part of this is that they insist on escorting me everywhere, they don’t think it is safe for me to walk alone at night. All I do is call one of them up and they are basically my entourage. They are a pretty tough group too, two of them are missing ears from knife fights, so I feel really safe around them and am glad that they have taken it upon themselves to protect me.

The final story is about my computer…which did not start when I opened it up when I got to site. I was pretty disappointed about that. However, one of the people on the basketball team (his name is Jenya, he is German) is the computer technician at the school, and he is brilliant. He took my computer from me one day and said, I will get this to you tomorrow, it will work again. I was a little skeptical at first, but decided to trust him. Big pay-off – I got my computer back, installed with an awesome movie and music program, Windows 7, Microsoft Office 2010, and best of all – a flawless Russian-English translation program. All for free (and probably all illegal copies), but I won’t complain. The only downside is that it is all in Russian, but I guess it is good practice. I am pretty pumped now, and Windows 7 is working pretty great so far.

Sorry this was so long…as I get more into a routine these will get to be a lot shorter because new and exciting things won’t be happening all the time, but my time in Zhanatas has been awesome so far. I kind of like the way Peace Corps eases you in, lets you get to know the community and people, and then get to work. One of things I don’t want to be is that outsider who waltzes in, thinking I know best, and starting all these projects and clubs without actually getting to know my community as friends and then talk to them about what they want and what I can offer them.

Finally, here is my address, both in English and Russian (the second to last line in the English version are Cyrillic letters). It might be easiest to just print this out and paste it on an envelope or package. If you send me something I will definitely write back!

Kazakhstan

Zhambyl Oblast

Sarysu Region

Zhanatas

2 мкр. д. 18 кв. 17

Belhorn, Chris

Казахстан

Жамбылская Обл.

Сарысуский Р/Н

Г. Жанатас

2 мкр. д. 18 кв. 17

Белхорн, Крис

Let me know how you are all doing…I miss all of you!

Ассалам Уалейкум!

This greeting is the Kazakh greeting for when a male greets another male. When greeted, the other male responds back Уалейкум Ассалам. This greeting is not just Kazakh, it is actually the most respected greeting among males all across the Muslim world. Anyway, I am going to try to make up for the shortness of my past few posts by wrapping up my thoughts on the end of training and my thoughts on the upcoming two years at my site.

First, as I said in my last post, training essentially ended last week as we taught our last class, had our last English club, took our language exam, and finished our community projects. My thoughts on these are below.

The last week of teaching culminated in each volunteer teaching a unit plan, all one subject, to all one grade. My unit plan was English to the fifth grade, and overall, it went really well. I think of all the things I have improved upon the most throughout PST, teaching is definitely number one. I had never really stood in front of a classroom before this fall and taught a class, but after six weeks, I think I am ready to go to site. I think that the toughest part for everyone was simply explaining instructions, you had to always do it in the most basic form of English and give lots of examples. By the end of my Peace Corps experience I will have zero capability of speaking English for sure. For each lesson, we had to write out a lesson plan and have it approved by the school, and for each unit we had to again write out a summary of what we would do in each class. Each of these plans had to follow a specific format, otherwise they would be rejected. Then, on top of that, we had to make our visuals for each class, and for almost any writing exercise, we would have to write our own example otherwise the students would normally be lost. Each lesson probably took around an hour and a half to plan. I got quicker at doing lesson plans and will probably continue to get quicker over two years, but on top of Russian studying it there were some busy nights.

Anyway, my unit plan was on the customs of Russia, Kazakhstan, Great Britain, and the United States. I would say that the one thing that I would maybe consider my biggest accomplishment of PST was during the last class that I taught, Nastya, who had never participated or done her homework the entire year to date, raised her hand and gave a correct answer. One thing that is difficult about the education system in Kazakhstan is that teachers are trained to focus on the brightest students, so if you fall behind early in your educational career, you are almost guaranteed to fail. My biggest goal going into the next two years is to try and focus on making the classroom comfortable for all of the students, not just the best ones. At the end of my last class, one of my favorite students, Nina, gave me a flower, which was a really nice end to my teaching in Issyk. I’ll talk more later about my school in Zhanatas.

The day of our last lesson was also the day of our Russian language exam…and I was really pleased with my result. I got intermediate mid, which is a five on a ten point scale, although that is a little misleading because it gets harder to move up a level the higher the score you get. However, I was pleased to discover that many international relations grad schools and government programs use this test, and the threshold for actually applying saying you speak the language is intermediate mid, so technically, I guess I can write on my resume that I speak Russian, although I’m not quite sure I feel comfortable enough to say that yet. Regardless, the Peace Corps provides each volunteer with a language tutor throughout his/her service, so I look forward to continuing to improve.

The final component of our training consisted of holding our community project, which evolved over the few weeks into a community soccer game. We had a great turnout and had a lot of fun, we ended up doing a Kazakhstan versus US match, and they ended up winning 4-3 (although I will say they had about 15 people on their team and we had about 9). We had planned to do a few different things for our community project, but one thing that our group talked about when we presented this project was the need to have types of interaction like soccer games and social activities before trying to really improve the town through appropriate community projects. That is what I kind of like about the Peace Corps, because we learn their language and live in their conditions, and after a while they start to trust us and tell us about their problems. One example of the opposite tactic is that many people from other international development areas apparently come to Kazakhstan and focus on the water situation as one in dire need (the water is turned off in Issyk about half of the time). But when we actually talk with most of our host families, it doesn’t bother them, this is how they have lived their entire lives and they are completely fine with it. They instead tell us how bad the roads are, and that our park needs this and our town needs that. This is why we are told not to just go into our sites and do the first thing that we feel the town needs…our plan is to give it a few months, get to know the community, talk to them about what THEY perceive their problems to be, and try and pick something that fits each volunteer’s skill set.

So after all of this ended last Saturday, we had a day off and then headed to Almaty for a four day conference to meet our teaching counterpart for the next two years. This was especially exciting for those of us in pioneer sites because most people got letters from the PCV they were replacing that described the town, the school, and everything else – but since I was the first volunteer the town had ever had I didn’t get all of that information. My counterpart seems really awesome, she is 45 years old and her name is Aisulu (she is Kazakh). She has three children and likes to read, and does speak Russian very well. I spent about two hours talking with her about Zhanatas, my school, and my potential host families, and this is what I found out – much of which was a little different than what I had originally been told.

Zhanatas is a town of about 20-25,000 people, which means I am a tier 5 PCV, so I will make about $3200 a year before taxes. This town used to be a very important phosphorous and coal mining town back in the days of the Soviet Union, and when the Soviet Union fell, so too did Zhanatas apparently. The town at one point apparently used to be majority Russian, but when the Soviet Union fell, many of them moved back to Russia. Apparently now half of the town is abandoned mines and buildings. However, what was interesting was when I asked Aisulu how many Russians were currently in the town, it was a much different answer than what the Peace Corps told me. The Peace Corps initially told me that the town was about 97% Kazakh (which was a concern to me given that I had studied Russian), but Aisulu told me the number was around 35% Russian? Those statistics are obviously extremely different, so now I really have no idea what to expect concerning the ethnic makeup, it is possible that Aisulu didn’t exactly understand my question. I do think though that I will probably speak enough Russian to my liking given my host family situation (more on that below) and that I will teach Russian classes. The town has an internet cafe and cell phone capabilities (which I was relieved to hear), and there is a decent sized bazaar and a park. I guess I will find out more when I get there, but I am pretty excited about the town now.

The name of my school is Ualihanova. It is extremely close to where I will be living, which is nice I guess for the winter, although I have enjoyed the walk to school in Issyk. Aisulu and I sat down and tried to make my teaching schedule last week, but she needed to check the schedule, so I think I will probably save most of the specifics until later. What I know for sure is that I will teach 18 hours a week, probably about three classes a day, and it will be Monday-Saturday. I also will most likely be teaching grades 6-11, but that could change. It sounds like a small amount of hours, but there are a lot of meetings involved, and most PCVs say that they are at school around six hours a day, six days a week, so it adds up to a regular work week almost. And of course, this doesn’t include community projects and extra-curricular activities.

My host family situation was interesting…each PCV is supposed to have three options, but I am down to one. I was originally given two, but one said that they would only accept a female volunteer (which makes sense, my host mom would have been 22 years old, and she already had a three year old daughter). So it appears that unless something changes, I already know who my host family will be, and it will be a 48 year old woman named Sholpan who is Kazakh. I was kind of hoping that I would have the option of living with a family that had children, but there are some perks to having just one person in the household. And most importantly, I have been told that she speaks Russian, which was definitely the first thing I was looking for. I have also been told that there is a flush toilet and I think also running water (and who knows what else). There will be more info once I get there.

Some interesting Peace Corps policies regarding my site…I have to remain in my oblast (which is basically the state equivalent in Kazakhstan) for the first three months. I also have to stay with my host family for at least six months before moving out if I would choose, but as of now, I actually want to stay with my host family assuming I like them as long as possible to keep practicing my Russian. I also can’t leave the country for the first six months, although the only time that I can actually leave the country anyway is during the summer. My summer starts May 25 and ends September 1, so that will be all of my free time. PCVs are required to spend at least 1 month at their site during the summer. Normally during the other months, about five weeks are spent travelling around Kazakhstan visiting other volunteers, participating in summer camps (and potentially hosting visitors from home…). The other two to three weeks are spent travelling abroad. The second summer is usually flip-flopped, often volunteers will spend a good month abroad travelling somewhere, assuming they have saved the money.

Finally, I wanted to offer a few thoughts on PST as a whole:

1) Our group has been praised because to date, only three volunteers have Early Terminated and gone home early. Apparently last year, 10 people had left within one week, so as a group, we are doing pretty well. Undoubtedly, more people will leave for different reasons over the next two years, but we are still going strong.

2) Overall, I am leaving my host grandmother looking at it as a really positive experience. There were definitely challenges, the amount of food at times was a little concerning, and it was definitely challenging essentially being without electricity at night, but I think overall it was clear that my grandmother cared about me. When I came home from my conference, she definitely said that she missed me, and she often refers to me as сынок, which is an affectionate term for a son. Even though I wasn’t supposed to, I basically bought her groceries for her (she only eats milk and bread, and occasionally an apple, so it wasn’t that hard).

3) My overall impressions of Issyk were that I met a lot of great people here, but overall I am kind of ready to leave. It is a beautiful city, but the air pollution and safety concerns were getting a little tiresome toward the end. Many older PCVs that visited Issyk said that most cities have a welcoming spirit about them, and Issyk really lacked that sensation.

4) Finally, and probably most importantly, what made PST a really great experience were my language group, my language teacher, and my technical (teaching) trainers. I have no doubts that the reason I did so well in Russian over the past two months was because my Russian teacher worked really hard and was absolutely amazing. It also really helped that she was around our age, so our group obviously treated her with respect, but also looked at her as a friend…it made Russian class a lot of fun. My teaching trainers were equally amazing (one of them was a UNC grad) and always had really good feedback when they observed our classes. Most of all though, a huge shout-out to my language group…I like almost everybody here, but it would not been the same having another group. It is a bummer that they are all headed north and I will be south, but I guess that is what emails and blogs are for.

Speaking of which, over the next few days I will try and add a few blogs of some of my friends here in Kazakhstan to the links section on the right.

In closing, I just want to thank everyone for all of the emails, phone calls, texts and comments on my blog, they all definitely make me smile and miss home. Keep sending along updates and random accomplishments that y’all have. Once I get to my site, I will finally have a real mailing address, so I will post it as soon as I know it, and I would love to maybe send and receive some letters (maybe in Russian?). Some of y’all have also asked about sending things to me, it is kind of expensive so I don’t want anyone to go crazy, but of course any package would be so greatly appreciated and would maybe result in a small package back with some Kazakh candies. I will post a list of things next time that I might want. Thanks again, and like in August when I first got to Issyk, it may take me a couple of weeks to get situated in Zhanatas. But the next time you hear from me, I will be at my site hunkered down for the next two years. Happy fall and impending winter!

Hi everyone,

So this is going to be another short post...for all intensive purposes I am done with training! I taught my last class this morning, and we had our language test and community project last week. More on those in my next post, and I will try and wrap up with some lasting impressions of PST and some photos in a longer post. This coming week I will be in Almaty meeting my contact at the school I will working at in Zhanatas, so I will hopefully have more to say about my site. I hope everyone is still well, and because priorities are priorities, here are my NBA Predictions for this coming season:

Western Conference

1. LA Lakers

2. San Antonio

3. Portland

4. Denver

5. Dallas

6. New Orleans

7. Utah

8. Houston

9. Phoenix

10. Oklahoma City

11. LA Clippers

12. Golden State

13. Minnesota

14. Memphis

15. Sacramento

Eastern Conference

1. Boston

2. Orlando

3. Cleveland

4. Atlanta

5. Toronto

6. Washington

7. Miami

8. Chicago

9. Detroit

10. Philadelphia

11. Indiana

12. Milwaukee

13. New York

14. Charlotte

15. New Jersey

Finals: Lakers over Celtics

MVP: Dwight Howard

Defensive POY: Ron Artest

Rookie of the Year: Blake Griffin

Sixth Man: Ben Gordon

Most Improved: Michael Beasley

Coach of the Year: Flip Saunders

Hi everyone,

This post is going to be pretty short because I am in the midst of unit plan week, but I did want to let everyone know about my site. Honestly, I was a little disappointed when I learned about my site (of the six preferences I put down, I got zero of them), but I guess I had to remind myself that I am not here for myself. I am going to a village in the south called Zhanatas (Жанатас in Russian), which is about two hours northwest of Taraz. Overall, the only thing that I was really disappointed about was that I am definitely going to sacrifice a lot of Russian speaking because people here almost exclusively speak Kazakh. I am just going to have to be a lot more strategic in learning Russian and am going to have to work a lot harder at studying on my own. It is also a little disappointing because a) most of my friends are headed north and b) a lot of people did get exactly what they wanted. Three days later though, after having some time to digest, I am now pretty pumped to be going there, the history of my region is fascinating (Zhanatas was a stop on the Silk Road), more explanation below.

Zhanatas is actually one of the larger villages that education people are sent to, about 23,000 people. Many of the things I said in my last post about the south still apply, it is a little cheaper and I probably will have a few more vegetables. I am not technically in Siberia, but it is only about nine hours north supposedly, so I can pretend, and I am definitely planning on headed north to visit friends and see some sites. I am also starting to plan my summers now that I know where I will be, more updates on that later, and I would obviously be really pumped to either meet people in other countries or have visitors, Almaty is only about a 12 hour train ride away. One of my friends is a 45 hour train ride from Almaty, so it could be worse. I am about 5 hours away from Kyrgyzstan and 7 hours away from Uzbekistan (or so I have been told), so my options are open. I am also the closest volunteer to Turkistan, which is one of the most important cities in Islamic culture. Along with Taraz being a crucial stop on the Silk Road, I am in a very cool area historically. Feel free to look up info on Turkistan and Taraz, it is really interesting.

I don’t really know much about what my site looks like; I know that it used to be a coal mining town and has a lot of abandoned warehouses and unfinished things. There is also almost certainly a larger Islamic influence, which actually is pretty cool; it is almost certainly more traditional too. I will definitely have more of a Kazakh experience than I would have had in the north. I have heard that there is a river running through my town as well, but much of the stuff I will see when I get there. I meet my teaching counterpart next week, so I will definitely have some questions for her. I do teach at a Russian school (schools are designated as either Kazakh or Russian), so at least I will speak Russian there. My host family’s ability to speak Russian will be the key though. The last thing is that this is a pioneer site, meaning I am the first American ever to go there, and I will most likely be the first non-Kazakhstani that the people in this village ever meet. I guess it makes me feel good because they send the people they feel are the strongest volunteers to pioneer sites, so the Peace Corps has a lot of faith in me, but there are definitely some challenges associated with that.

The only other thing I will write about in this post happened the day after site announcement. At about 10:00 in the morning on a school day, four men came into my school and kidnapped a girl between classes. I witnessed this from outside with another volunteer, and honestly, it happened so quickly that it was over before we could even figure out what was going on. Part of me wishes that I would have figured out what was going on earlier so we could have tried to stop it, but Peace Corps staff has assured us that probably would have been a bad idea, it would have been two on four, and at least one of the men was armed, in fact, he cut the director of the school. They already got the girl back thankfully, but there were a few sleepless nights after that.

Sorry for the short post, and I hope all is well back in the United States!

Здравствуй!

I hope that everything is still going well in the States! Sorry about missing one week, that has to do with a combination of a) the internet café went down for about a week, b) we have been completely overwhelmed with teaching, languages, and community projects and c) I am in the middle of a cold right now, which isn’t fun without tissues, orange juice, and cough drops. But all is well. This is probably the biggest week of PST because we find out where we are going to be living for the next two years, which is the cause of much stress and sleepless nights wondering where I am going to be. What makes it even tougher is that Kazakhstan is huge, and we have no idea how they are evaluating us and how they are choosing where we are placed.

For all intensive purposes, in dividing Kazakhstan into the north and south, it is almost like sending us to two different countries. Everything above Karaganda and Astana is basically Russia, while going to the deep south is like going to Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan. Each place has its advantages and disadvantages. The north is probably safer overall, while there is a lot more drinking, there is a heightened terrorist threat the closer you get to Uzbekistan and the crime rates are a little worse in the cities. The north obviously gets colder, but to me that is almost an advantage, since we have to wear dress clothes to school every day, it gets pretty hot in the deep south. The north also supposedly in some areas has less intensive Kazakh customs, such as wearing a suit to school every day. Also, there would just be something cool about saying that I served in the Peace Corps in Siberia, which extends about 1/3 of the way down into Kazakhstan. There are some advantages to the south though. It is generally cheaper to live in the south, and fresh vegetables and fruits are available in larger and cheaper quantities. Also, all of the Peace Corps buildings are in Almaty, and we would be much closer in the south, particularly in the East. If you are placed in the Northwest, some train rides can be over 50 hours to get to your site, which means the only time you are coming to Almaty is when the Peace Corps makes you for Mid Service Training.

If I had my choice, I would lean slightly towards wanting to be in the north. If I really had my choice, I would particularly love to be placed in the vicinity of either Pavlodar or Petropavlovsk. I know someone from Petropavlovsk and she absolutely loved it there. I say in the vicinity of these cities because the likelihood of education people being placed in a city or town is very small, so when I had my interview, for site placement, even above saying I wanted to be in the north, I said I want to be near a city. There are still several volunteers, particularly in Central and Western Kazakhstan, that are essentially cut off from the world and can only communicate via snail mail. The other good thing about being in Eastern Kazakhstan is that is where all of the mountains are located. Most of Kazakhstan is steppe, which after a while gets a little boring to look at, I have really enjoyed being in Issyk and staring at the mountains on my walk to school in the mornings. My closing statement on site placement is that what I want really doesn’t matter, and through the Peace Corps rumor mill, I hear that I may be going south, so we will see on Friday.

Anyway, as I said earlier, things are busy as ever for the next two weeks of PST. It is actually kind of unfortunate because you can’t focus on one thing, as soon as you feel like you are caught up on lesson planning, there is Russian studying to be done, and the Community Projects, and finally trying to spend time with other volunteers given that come November 1, we very well may be shipped off to a town where we don’t have that support network. My Community Group project is a cleanup of the soccer field and track in Issyk, which was an obvious choice given how much trash there is there. Russian is actually going really well, I enjoy learning it and am getting better. I even had about a 30 minute conversation in Russian about the differences between law schools in the US and Kazakhstan. That was by far the longest conversation I have had in Russian, and was by far the most complicated subject I had spoken about. What is really interesting is that she is studying law in Kazakhstan with aspirations of practicing in Russia, I think it is pretty cool that you can do that.

But back to teaching…teaching is hard. I am sure anyone reading this who is in TFA/teaching in other programs right now can understand this, but having not taught before, I am struggling a little more than I thought I would at getting concepts across to some of my kids. What makes it even harder here is that a) I have no materials to work with and b) these kids don’t speak English, and trying to explain anything is a tremendous hassle because I either have to explain it in such basic terms that they really aren’t learning the concept at all, or I try and explain it in Russian. We are supposed to only use English in the classroom, with a few exceptions, but it is tempting sometimes to say things in Russian, especially when I know how to say it. Another interesting point is that many of the English teachers here don’t actually speak English. As strange as that sounds, many times in class they just teach kids English grammar structures in Russian, they write it down, take a multiple choice test, and can get through six years of English without actually speaking one word of it in the classroom. This is the most extreme circumstance, but examples that approach this magnitude aren’t uncommon.

One of my other problems with the classes is that much of the information is useless. For example, I am currently teaching a British Politics class (why I am teaching a British Politics class, given that I have never been to Britain nor have I ever taken a British politics class before, is beyond me). All of the information that they learn goes in one ear and out the other because it in no way applies to anything in their lives, and much of the information that they are learning, they couldn’t even tell you about relating it to Kazakhstani politics. The other major problem is that the only textbook I can get my hands on was printed in Moscow in 1978. Besides the fact that is old, here is an excerpt of the first reading exercise I had to do:

The Conservative, Liberal, and Social-Democratic Parties are bourgeois parties and the leaders have not done very much to change the conditions of the working people. At the same time the Communist Party of Great Britain is very active outside Parliament. Its members organize workers in factories, they carry out political work; they fight for socialism, for peace, for friendship between the British and Soviet people.

I chose this because it was one of the milder paragraphs in the reading, but my guess is that about half of the textbook is basically like this. Also, interspersed among the pages are fliers and pamphlets asking children to come to Communist clubs and meetings. I have started to, even without my supervising teacher’s permission, write my own readings that actually have useful and current information about not only Britain, but the US, Russia, and Kazakhstan as well. I figured that Washington wouldn’t be too happy with me, a US government employee, spreading the values of Communism in a former Soviet Republic, even in 2009.

And back to Russian, I put a few phrases below that I thought were pretty interesting:

Так: Basically the Russian equivalent for umm.., I like it a lot better, and actually have started to subconsciously say it myself sometimes

Ой: Russian equivalent of oops (pronounced oy), I also like this a lot better.

она Так сказала: That’s what she said, I don’t use this, but for those of you do…our training site enjoyed learning this thoroughly

Солнышко: One of the more common affectionate terms for a girlfriend, it comes from the word for sunny, it basically means my little sunny one

I have also started to text in Russian, it takes me about five minutes to send something, and I usually spell a lot of things wrong, but it is a cool way to learn the language. As with English, many of the common words are abbreviated or have shortened versions, so it is almost like a whole other language. I also, unfortunately for those who listened, sang and danced a song called мой казахстан (My Kazakhstan) for our entire group. It is actually pretty catchy if you want to find it, I sure you can download it somewhere. I practiced for a pretty long time and was told that I did pretty well, so for someone who does not particularly like to dance or sing, I think I did OK. I guess while in Kazakhstan…

So the economic situation for my grandmother has gotten to the point that we can’t really have the lights on anymore, so thankfully another volunteer lent me her headlamp and I use it pretty much every night to read, study, and lesson plan. I am getting enough to eat, no worries there. The other night I went over to my friend’s apartment to eat dinner and watch a movie (we watched the Bourne Ultimatum, and I was pretty excited that I could understand all of the Russian, although they mistranslated the first subtitle). After dinner, I started doing the dishes to be nice, and my friend thought that it was so hilarious that a man was doing the dishes that she took out her camera and started taking pictures of me to send to her friends. I guess men doing the dishes doesn’t really happen in Kazakhstan that much.

Sorry for such a long blog post, and the next time I post, I will know where I will be living for the next two years! Most of my foreign words are going to be in Russian only now because apparently Google doesn’t recognize the seven letters that are in the Kazakh alphabet that aren’t in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Also, I am going to do my best to answer all emails as soon as I can, I actually just loaded them all onto my flash drive so hopefully within the next week I will get back to everybody. Even though I am not responding, I greatly appreciate all of them! До свидания!

Привет и Сәлеметсіз Бе!

I have now installed both Russian and Kazakh on my computer, so good news, I can include words and not have to sound them out phonetically anymore. As most of you probably know, the two phrases above are simply hello, in both Russian and Kazakh respectively.

Things are busy as ever in Есик (the preferred Russian spelling of Issyk) as we are in the thick of teaching, creating lesson plans, starting our English Clubs, and working on our community projects. This is in of course addition to continuing to learn Russian and Kazakh (our PST language exam is within a month) and getting lots of shots on a weekly basis (which is thankfully almost over we are told). Of course, this is all on top of the constant chatter of where we are going to be placed for the next two years, which we find out in about two and a half weeks. I will post my final thoughts on where I would like to be placed in Kazakhstan in my next post, because my preferences seem to vary by the day. At the end of it all though, our preferences have little to no effect on our eventual placement.

My food situation continues to evolve in interesting ways. I endured about a week more of bread, tomatoes, and tea until Sunday, when my original host mom came back into town from Almaty to visit with her husband. When I saw bags and bags of groceries, my hopes immediately rose and I was not disappointed. Her husband had been observing Ramadan, which ended Sunday, and they had a huge party. Interestingly, they sent the бабушка (Russian for grandmother) out of the house for the party. But anyway, there were potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, carrots, and fried bread, and I was in paradise. I arguably ate more that dinner than I had in the last three days combined. Afterwards, my family broke out the alcohol and I was finally introduced to the Kazakh drinking culture. The alcohol was actually pretty high quality, it was according to the husband the best whiskey, vodka, and beer that Kazakhstan had to offer. He also repeatedly explained to me that this was Kazakh alcohol, which was far superior to Russian alcohol. The next day though, everyone was gone and it was back to bread, although the mom did leave us with several large melons, which have been quite tasty.

The economic situation for my grandmother seems to deteriorate by each passing day. She has told me that I am no longer allowed to turn on the lights unless it was absolutely necessary. The water is also almost never on anymore, I often have to go down to the well down the street to get water for tea. Honestly though, this is probably a good experience for me because my permanent host family will almost certainly be more well off.

One reason that has contributed to the economic downturn of Kazakhstan as a country is a seemingly insurmountable debt crisis (sound familiar?). I’m not exactly sure when, but in the past few years, the tenge went from being 120 to 1 against the dollar to 150 to 1. When that happened, anybody in debt was essentially out of luck – there was no way they could make up that difference over time, and banks therefore collected less and less until they reached the point where they are today. I don’t know much about this, and the stuff above was explained to me in Russian by someone who had been drinking a considerable amount, so it is possible that I got some of it wrong. Speaking of news, my host mom did bring me a newspaper with a picture of Obama looking quite dejected. The article was about healthcare, and I have no media outlets, but from what I can tell, the reform is going quite well (hint the sarcasm).

Last Friday, we had the afternoon off, so a few volunteers took a bus to Turgen, which was definitely the best trip I have taken outside of Issyk to date. I posted photos below, but we hiked through a gorge until we found what one of the most beautiful spots in Kazakhstan. One thing that is kind of unfortunate is that it is very unlikely that any site I am placed at will be even close to as gorgeous as Issyk and surrounding areas, but I guess that just means that I need to take advantage of it while I am here.

Despite the busy schedule, I am finding some time to read and have thoroughly enjoyed all of the books that I have brought so far. I definitely have enough material, especially given my schedule, to last me through PST. That being said, I am already compiling a list of books that I would love to read this winter. I will share the list later, but I figure that being in a former Soviet country and potentially in Siberia, there wouldn’t be a better time to pick up War and Peace. Of course, I am also always taking suggestions.

Unrelated to the flow of this, but as I was typing this, I just got a text message from my friend saying that the UNC-ECU football game is being telecasted on channel 23 in Kazakhstan. How strange is that? I already know they won, so I didn’t tell him the outcome. Also, while I am thinking about it, just saw that the Texans bounced back with a solid 34-31 win in Tennessee (sorry Titans fans), and the Jets knocked off the Patriots. which makes our week one loss a lot better. Good week.

So back to teaching…if there is one thing that has been reaffirmed throughout my first few lessons, it is that I am not an artist. The kids usually get a pretty large laugh when I present vocabulary using pictures. That being said, when I get to my permanent site, I might also be requesting magazines from which I can cut pictures from and not embarrass myself. Overall though, teaching has gone pretty well. My biggest challenge so far is getting my timing down, it is just so hard to know how long it will take the students to understand some concepts versus others. Learning Russian is actually helping me in my English classes because for some of the things that I learn, I sit there and think to myself, “Oh, that is why they are having a hard time getting this in English.”

There are pros and cons to having younger versus older students, and this is what I have gathered so far. Younger students definitely respect you more, and are more responsive to your games and activities. Most of them are pretty excited and enthusiastic to be in class. However, a lot of times it just takes such a long time to introduce a topic, and I have so many ideas on how to practice and work with the topics, but so many of the activities are over their heads. Older students may have a few more discipline problems, but you can do a lot more with them and go into much more complicated subjects, which I personally like. I have enjoyed having a mix so far, but most of my English classes have been younger, particularly a fifth grade class.

Thanks (Спасибо) for reading! I hope everything is still going well at home. One note I would like to add, we have been informed that both the Russian and Kazakh governments are most likely monitoring all PCV blogs coming from Kazakhstan. Given that, I will probably keep most of my political commentary restricted to emails and phone conversations. Definitely feel free to email me with questions, I would love to answer them! I wasn't planning on writing about this, but apparently enough people read other blogs from KZ to know that a couple of volunteers were shot in Issyk last week, thankfully with rubber bullets, and everyone is OK. It was a misunderstanding, so no worries, things are relatively safe here.

Also, I want to apologize from here on out that my English seems to already be deteriorating with my lack of use over one month, so I apologize that my grammar is probably not that great. Goodbye, Сау Болыңыз, и Пока! (Goodbye in English, Kazakh, and Russian respectively)

Hello everyone,

I am approaching one month in Kazakhstan (one down, 26 to go) and things are still going pretty well. I taught my first class on my own yesterday and had a lot of fun. I am going to be focusing on 5th grade during training, which in some ways is good because they are a really enjoyable group to work with. But on the other hand, I will probably switch to older students once I get to my permanent site, so it will be an adjustment. I was the first Kaz 21 (name given to the group that came to Kazakhstan in August) to teach their own class, so the school gave me two markers as a present for doing so. They will definitely come in handy because materials are scarce here, and I have little money to buy them.

Most of the lessons I will be teaching will be English classes, and I must say that I am already not a fan of the textbook that we are using. It is from Britain and uses British grammar (I am having to learn some new vocabulary on my own, for example, the difference between a standardlamp and a lamp). But it also has lots of examples that really don’t pertain to life in Kazakhstan. They use random cities throughout England as their examples that I haven’t even heard of, and the lesson I teach on Wednesday is supposed to be on modern conveniences like air conditioning, central heating, and vacuum cleaners. Most of the kids here have no concept of what these are because they definitely don’t have these throughout most of the villages in the country.

I also got my first glimpse of the national English proficiency test that every secondary student has to pass to gain entrance to college, and it is pretty terrible. It is multiple choice and focuses 100% on grammar and a student can gain a perfect score without speaking, listening to, or even writing a word of English. Apparently there is some sort of international test standard that this test comes nowhere near passing, and it makes it really difficult for students who want to go abroad to English speaking countries to study. Worse, you can see the effects of this throughout the school. Students can recite the rules to English grammar better than I can, but can’t actually use it in their speech and construct a sentence. We learned that 70% of the students that study abroad through the country’s top scholarship program worked with a Peace Corps Volunteer, which is really cool to think about.

As I have transitioned to teaching more English, it is really interesting to see what grammar and pronunciation mistakes the students consistently make. The TH sound and Q sound are nearly impossible for Russian and Kazakh speakers to pronounce. The TH sound almost always reverts to a Z sound. I am finding more and more that I have no answer to why things are the way they are. Of course, Russian has similar questions and answers. I am also tempted to just start spelling my name Kris when I write it on the board, because when I write Chris, the most common pronunciation I get sounds more like “trees” than Chris. The other mistake that I pretty commonly see is that articles and prepositions are almost always left out. This is true even for older students that speak very well. Leaving out articles makes sense for Russian and Kazakh speakers because they don’t exist in the language, but prepositions doesn’t make as much sense. Even the English teachers will normally say, “Let me explain you…” when talking to a student instead of “Let me explain to you….”

Speaking of language, I have kind of hit a lull with Russian. I have a lot less time to study now that I have to lesson plan, and I am also juggling bits of the Kazakh language in my brain as well. A conversation I had with a man in the bazaar the other day highlights this pretty well. It started in Kazakh and reverted to Russian after about 20 or 30 seconds. When I am speaking kind of quickly in Russian and can’t think of a word, often I will accidently slip a Spanish word in there because my brain still automatically hits that language first when quickly trying to think of a non-English word. So after starting in Kazakh, switching to Russian and throwing in some accidental Spanish phrases and words, it ended in some awkward English. My brain hurts just thinking about it.

So after almost a month here, there are three things that volunteers generally complain the most about: the driving, the food, and gender roles. The driving was fun to laugh about for a while, but Kazakh drivers have no rules and show mercy. Several volunteers have had several close calls just walking to and from school. One of the reasons for this is that a Kazakh driver will see an American walking on the side of the road and play the game of getting as close as possible to hitting him or her without actually hitting the person.

Food also is a popular topic of discussion – and often for different reasons. My situation is a little unique in the village because it has been so sporadic, and I have discovered that the reason for this is that my host grandmother probably is on the lower end of the poverty spectrum in my village, she really has no money at all. She thought I was too skinny one week so she enlisted the help of neighbors to feed me a lot, but food in my household has gone back to being a little scarce. Generally my average day will be three cups of tea for breakfast, a piece of cheese, bread, and a tomato for lunch, and borscht or some other soup for dinner. I am not supposed to do this, but I buy a few groceries for my babushka every week to help her get through. It only costs me about two US dollars a week and helps her out a lot, she likes to put milk in her tea (side note, the milk in Kazakhstan comes in either 3.2% or 6%, so you don’t really drink it alone). Thankfully, some of the other volunteers have the exact opposite problem – they have too much food and they sneak me some of their lunches. Sorry to disappoint those who were excited about me eating a lot. And of course, everything will change November 1, so who knows what that will bring. I also am kind of glad that I don’t have the problems of other volunteers. Many have their food smothered in salt and mayonnaise – honestly, I’d rather be slightly hungry on occasion. I think the real thing that is bugging almost all of the volunteers is the lack of variety; the fruits and vegetables are disappearing as it gets colder.

I mentioned street kabobs in a prior post, and that is again a lifesaver. I usually treat myself to one or two a week, and have gotten to know the difference between some of the different kinds of vendors. My favorites are the Uzbek and Iranian kabobs because you can actually ask for it not smothered in dill and they don’t look at you like you are from another planet. On occasion, a Kazakh vendor will oblige, but definitely not a Turkish one, or at least the ones in Issyk. They all have their flags next to their stands and are proud that their kabobs are representing their countries.

Gender roles are the last common topic among volunteers. Honestly, none of us were terribly surprised about most of the instances we have encountered, but that doesn’t necessarily lessen the effect or shock value of some of the things that we have seen. Most males are forbidden from operating in the kitchen, although some of the volunteers have made some headway and a few actually even have cooked, which is impressive. I have a slightly different situation because my babushka needs help doing certain things around the house, but when it comes to actually cooking and cleaning in the kitchen, she is stubbornly firm in not allowing me to help.

The schools are a bit disappointing at times concerning gender roles. English classes are normally a little different because girls tend to do much better, but for example, in my math and geography classes that I sat in on, girls were often ignored in the classroom. My math class for example had two girls and fourteen boys, and the teacher put the girls on the far side of the classroom and never even glanced at them or called on them. I wandered over early in the class after noticing this, but the teacher came over and ushered me to a male student instead and actually told me not to bother with them. She left the room ten minutes later to talk to another teacher, so I again wandered over to the girls. One of them was excelling, she had gotten almost everything right and was probably doing better than every other male in the class. The other girl though had gotten stuck on the first problem and was too scared to open her mouth to ask a question. It was pretty sad to hear during our cultural trainings that this was not uncommon in Kazakhstan.

Perhaps the most interesting story that a volunteer has told so far was when her host sister was kidnapped in the middle of the night about a week ago. Now before you start worrying again, this isn’t what you think, she was kidnapped as part of an arranged marriage. It is a Kazakh custom for the family of a man to actually kidnap (often without a girl’s knowledge when it is going to happen) the bride from her house. Now in a lot of parts of Kazakhstan it is becoming more common that the bride and groom will know each other before this happens, but in this case, it was actually a more traditional family. Therefore, the sister had apparently never met the man and literally had no idea this was happening. This is pretty strictly Kazakh though, I asked my Russian friend who is my age if she ever worried about being kidnapped, and she says it normally doesn’t happen to Russians or other ethnicities in Kazakhstan.

Thanks for reading! And even in Kazakhstan, I can appreciate holding calls in the endzone. Go Heels!

Hi everyone,

I hope that everything is going well back in the US (and everywhere else in the world).

So last Sunday and Tuesday were Constitution Day and the first day of school, respectively. On Sunday almost every city in Kazakhstan had a parade with dancing and singing featuring people of all ages, it was a lot of fun. I watched the festivities for a while and then my host mom showed me the cultural center in Issyc. Everyone was in a pretty jolly mood that day. The next Tuesday was the first day of school, which is a huge deal in Kazakhstan. All of the students get extra-dressed up (they normally wear suits and ties to school anyway) and arrive for a large ceremony at the school. There are three schools in Issyc, the gymnasium (which is private), the terascova (which is public), and the college. All of the younger kids had their parents walk with them to school and had flowers to give to their teachers on the first day. I will be teaching at the gymnasium until November, so myself and the four other teachers arrived at the ceremony and introduced ourselves in Russian to all of the teachers and students. There was more dancing and singing by the students, and all of the seven year olds for whom it was the first day of school got up and sang a song.

We have our Russian classes at the school as well, so we get to interact with the kids on a more regular basis now. It is really interesting because they will usually run up to you and try and speak English, but especially for the younger ones, they can normally only say Hello, How are you?, What is your name?, and Goodbye. If they say anything else, they normally are just repeating something they have heard or read in a book and have no idea what they are actually saying. The older kids are obviously better, but it is pretty funny when kids run up to you and start shouting colors like purple and yellow, not knowing what they are saying.

The other things that kids can do, even if they can’t say where they are from or what their name is, is rap an entire Akon or Kanye West song. Akon and Kanye West are particularly popular over here, and are often featured on the covers of the notebooks the kids bring to school. One day we were walking home from school and this seven year old boy jumped out from an alley right in front of us and started waving his hands, rapping, and dancing. He went on for a about a minute, switching from Kanye to Akon and even throwing a little Eminem in there. It was quite entertaining.

We sat in on our first classes this past week (we observe for a while before we actually start teaching, which is good). I sat in on Algebra, which consisted of the teacher (and this was on the first day) walking in, writing problems on the board, and having the kids come up one by one and do them. There was no teaching of concepts, no interaction, just straight from the textbook problem solving. We have been told that this is the norm in Kazakhstan, so I am looking forward to introducing some games and group work to change it up a bit.

So my host family situation has changed slightly – it turns out that my host mom had been trying to explain to me the first day that she was just off for the summer and is actually still teaching in Almaty during the year. So on September 1 she essentially moved out and it is just me and my babushka now in Issyc. My host mom actually lives in Almaty with her husband normally and had just come up to help my babushka get me situated. My babushka is still awesome, although she barely speaks more Russian than I do, so it is kind of a bummer that I don’t get to practice at home very much because that was honestly probably helping me the most.

The food situation has also changed pretty drastically – I went from normally having slightly less food than I was accustomed to having way more food than I need. The other night my babushka took me over to somebody’s house and put me on a weight scale, and then her and the other lady started shaking their heads and shouting in Kazakh. I went to the school and came back for dinner. As I walked in and looked at the table I assumed that eight or nine people were coming over – but alas, it was all for me. Anytime I would slow down while eating my babushka would yell in my ear “kooshet kooshet kooshet,” which is phonetic Russian for “eat eat eat.” Thankfully the serving sizes have dwindled and are now actually perfect, so all is good.

The food still tastes pretty good, although we quickly learned that there is not much variety or spice to the food in Kazakhstan. I have had pretty much the same three dishes over and over, and most of them use the following: horse, chicken, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, beets, potatoes, and cucumbers. And Kazakhstan doesn’t really do spicy food, so I am already having some cravings for Mexican, Thai, and Indian food. However, I did recently have my first street kabob (well known throughout Central Asia), which was absolutely amazing. I also had my first sweet nan (also famous through Central Asia), which was equally amazing. More than anything, I think the food shows the influences of Russia from above and the rest of Central Asia below, which is really cool.

One of the coolest parts of Issyc is the bazaar, where you can buy essentially anything you want, from clothes to food to toiletries. Things are even cheaper at the bazaar than they are at stores. One of the things we have been told is that things in general are much cheaper in the south than they are in the north. I have been compiling a list of all of the positives and negatives of having my permanent site in the south versus the north, but cost of living is apparently a huge advantage of being in the south. One of the other cool things about the bazaar is the ability to haggle, which at first I was a little skeptical of, but now it has kind of turned into a game between volunteers. We see who can get laundry soap for the cheapest amount, cookies for the cheapest amount, etc. It is a great way to save a few tenge. Many of the vendors at the bazaar started their businesses from microfinance loans, which is also pretty cool. I will try and take some photos and post them on my next entry.

In addition to Russian, I am starting to pick up a little Kazakh as well. I am not focusing currently on trying to learn Kazakh because I don’t want it to detract from my Russian, but it may be something I try to learn after I am satisfied with where I am in Russian (which very well may be a year or so from now, if not longer). I am getting to the point where I can communicate pretty effectively in Russian (I think I put in more effort than most people did this summer to learn it), but I know that I am not using most of the cases correctly in my everyday speech. Once I get my vocabulary base up enough and am comfortable with most of the verb conjugations, I may try and work on that more. But it would be cool to become at least halfway decent at Kazakh because apparently you can travel through much of Central Asia and get understand just with Kazakh.

Last Saturday we took a trip into Almaty with our language group. This was the first time we had actually seen the city given that our short stay had been well south. From a smog standpoint, Almaty brought back memories of Houston, it was terrible. Several volunteers had problems walking around, and even though it was sunny you couldn’t see it. Almaty is pretty modern looking, although Kazakhstan is going through a pretty severe economic crisis and many businesses and buildings are abandoned. The highlight was probably the Russian Orthodox Church, which was beautiful both inside and out. I can still smell the incense on some of my clothes even a few days later. We also saw a World War II memorial that had been in place since Soviet days. Photos are below of some of the highlights.

On Sunday a few volunteers and I went hiking for the first time in the foothills of the mountains, which was awesome and tiring at the same time. There were no switchbacks in these hills; it was straight up, many times at about a 75 degree angle. The view was pretty amazing, one of the locals said that on a good day that you could see into both Kyrgyzstan and China from some of these hills. We probably didn’t go high enough for that to be the case for us, but still it was pretty cool to think about. Some pictures are below.

On the way back from visiting another volunteer that night, the sun was setting and I glanced over toward the mountains and probably looked at the most gorgeous sight I had ever seen in my life. The sunset had turned the foothills a golden brown, and snow from the night before had packed the peaks with mesmerizing pure white color. I sat and just stared for about 15 minutes until the sun disappeared over the horizon and a goat came up and nuzzled my knee telling me it was time to get home. It is getting quite chilly already and the snow creeps further and further down the mountains every day. Word is that we may get snow by the end of September, which is strange to think about.

Thanks everybody for reading! I do have a telephone number now that is listed in the top right, so if you ever have the inkling to call, I would love to hear from you. Don’t be offended if I don’t pick up, because I am in Russian class or teaching a lot of the day. Also don’t leave messages because voicemail hasn’t quite made it to Kazakhstan yet. The best time to call me is probably 10 AM to noon Eastern time, but let me know if there is some other time that you want to try. Hope everyone is well!

Hello all,

I hope that everything is going well in the US! This first post may be a little lengthy as much has happened in the first two weeks, sorry in advance. I didn’t write all of this in one sitting, I have kept a journal and added to it a few times over the past few days.

So I made it to Kazakhstan safely after a brief orientation in DC, and all of the volunteers seem really awesome and I have enjoyed getting to know them. A few of us went out to a Thai restaurant in Georgetown for our last meal in the US, it was great! After almost 35 hours of traveling door to door, going through customs, and getting our luggage, we arrived at our housing in Almaty at about 3:30 AM, and started training at 8 AM the next morning. Almaty (pronounced al-ma-TA in Russian) is based off the word for apple in Kazakh, and thus we were given apples during our welcome that morning.

There are a lot more Peace Corps staff in Kazakhstan than I would have imagined, and we met and talked with all of them over the day and a half of training before we were sent off to our host families. Our Medical Officer Viktor is especially interesting, he makes the medical presentations a lot of fun. He was a doctor in the Soviet Army back in the day, and he was telling everyone about the benefits of the Soviet Union and how he misses it a lot. We also got a chance to talk with some current volunteers in Kazakhstan, and they had some really useful information and advice (one of the current volunteers is a UNC grad).

Backing up a bit, I did find out that I am a) officially learning Russian and b) going to be teaching secondary students, which equates to grades 6-11. A few people that had signed up for Russian got switched to Kazakh because not enough people signed up for Kazakh, so I am glad that I was able to make use of my work this summer. Teaching secondary students also means that there is a strong likelihood that I will be placed in a smaller village or town. The few volunteers that were picked as university teachers all had pretty substantial teaching experience (most of them were older).

For the next 10 weeks, I am going to be in Issyk, which is about an hour and a half outside of Almaty, and is the largest of the training villages or towns, about 30,000 people. Apparently it is only about a three day hike to Kyrgyzstan, and although I won’t have time during training, it will probably be something I do in the next two years. Issyk is absolutely amazing, it may give Cape Town a run for its money as far as my favorite city is concerned (not including Chapel Hill of course).

My host family is awesome – I am with a 50 year old woman and her mother, who is around 80. The mother has a son who is 23 and studying business in Singapore, and has a sister that lives in South Korea. The grandmother actually doesn’t speak Russian, she only speaks Kazakh, but she still tells me jokes and I just smile and pretend to understand them. When she does this, my host mom just laughs, waves her hand, and says “Oh Babushka,” which is the phonetic Russian for grandmother. My host mother used to teach political history in Almaty, so she is very curious about what people from the States think of Kazakhstani politics, US politics, etc.

The best part though of my host family is that they are really health conscious, so all of the warnings about copious amounts of meat and vodka have not affected me – in fact, about half of my meals have been vegetarian. This has actually been true for a lot of volunteers. Every meal has fresh vegetables (tomatoes and cucumbers are present at every meal) and bread, among other things. We have borscht seemingly every other dinner, but it is always made slightly differently. The food has been amazingly good. We also have three cups of tea with every meal (that is the only beverage served in the house). This isn’t to say that I haven’t had a few interesting experiences. I did have fermented horse milk, which is the only thing I have had in Kazakhstan that has been really unpleasant to eat or drink. I can’t even describe the taste to you – try it for yourselves maybe?

My housing is on the second floor of a unit, and it has two rooms and a kitchen area. I do have a flushing toilet and a fridge, but no shower, washing machine, or anything else. The Peace Corps provides us with a water distiller because the water (despite what I had heard earlier) is not safe to drink. Also, the water is only on about half of the time, when it isn’t off we have to run to a local stream and get it.

The day after I met my host family, I went on two long walks with my host mother to explore the city, which is quite gorgeous. One of the things I like about meeting people is that the first thing you say after name introductions is what nationality/ethnicity you are. I say that I am Chris, and from the United States. For a lot of people though, that is not enough, they keep asking what I am. I finally figured out that they want to know where my family is from. In Kazakhstan everything is based off of the father’s side of the family, so I now say I am from the United States and am German. The most common people I have met so far have been Kazakh, Russian, Uzbek, Uighur, Tajik, and Turkic. It is a really fascinating region ethnically, and I look forward to when I can fully understand everything people say to me about their past and Kazakhstan. Even on their passports, it has their name and nationality.

Most of the people I have met are Muslim (especially since we are in the south), but only a few of them actually practice Islam on a daily basis, they are more culturally Muslim. This was interesting to me – we are actually in the middle of Ramadan but I have only talked to a few volunteers that have family members that are observing it. Apparently in the deeper south and out more west than Almaty, the practice of religion becomes more obvious and more conservative.

Also, something that a lot of volunteers have gotten confused about was the difference between Kazakh and Kazakhstani. Kazakh is an ethnic group, while Kazakhstani refers to everyone living in or from Kazakhstan. Actually, apparently the US ambassador to Kazakhstan is trying to switch people over to saying Kazakhstanian rather than Kazakhstani (they associate the ending N with prosperity, American, Canadian, German, etc.), but that hasn’t caught on yet.

The first day of class for me was interesting, we learned about the Kazakhstani education system, which is much different than the United States. Students enter Pre-Primary school at age 2 (which is essentially pre-school). Primary school is ages 6-10, and basic secondary school is ages 10-15. After the equivalent of 9th grade, students take the PKG exam which either places them into college or continued secondary school. Despite the fact that college sounds more advanced to us, it isn’t, although I am still figuring out all of the differences. If you go into college, you stay for four years and then enter university as a third year student and only have two years. Continued secondary students finish grades 10 and 11, and then go to four years of university.

The other big topic that we were briefed on is bribery and corruption in schools, which is a major problem. Students are graded on a 1-5 scale with 1 being failing and 5 being excellent, and apparently nobody gets less than a 3, even if they do zero work and never come to class. We were told never to fail a student in Kazakhstan. One of the main reasons for this corruption is that teachers are actually paid by their students’ grades, so you can imagine that a teacher has no incentive to give students a low grade. Furthermore, especially in college and university, it is fairly common for a student to buy his or her grade from the teacher. Another interesting thing about grades is that they are always announced in front of the class to everyone, which is definitely not done in the US. The idea of public reward and shame is huge in Kazakhstan.

Another interesting thing about the school system is that the students are all in the same group and same class from very early on, and throughout the year don’t change classes. Apparently when the “bell rings” to end class, the teachers are the ones who get up and move about to their next class. The school schedule starts on September 1 and consists of four grading periods, September 1-November 5, November 10-December 30, January 10-March 20, and April 1-May 25. This is uniform throughout Kazakhstan, and teachers are not allowed to take vacations anytime but May 25-September 1, which means I will not leave Kazakhstan until May 25 at least. But at least that means I will accumulate a lot of vacation days and can take a trip next summer. School is also Monday through Saturday, so our weekend now equates to Sunday.

The other day I got a chance to play soccer for the first time, which was amazing. Myself and a few other volunteers got together with some locals and introduced them to World Cup, which for those of you who don’t know is essentially a game where each player picks a country (I was South Africa), and tries to score a goal. It is every person for his/herself. As fun as it was though, it made us realize how high the elevation actually is here (about 9,000 feet), I was exhausted after about 40 minutes, as were the rest of the volunteers. We also introduced people to ultimate frisbee when a group of us got together and played a large game at the school. I went for a run the other day on the outskirts of town where I was basically staring at the hills and mountains for the entire trip, it was awesome. Those are probably the best experiences I have had so far. Some pictures are below. They do have basketball courts here, but they aren’t high quality and I haven’t actually seen them being used other than to sit around and drink vodka.

My Russian is improving dramatically; it is possible that I have gained more in the short time I have been here than I did the entire summer. I guess that is what happens when you speak it 24/7 with no English to fall back on. There have been some interesting language stories so far – apparently one volunteer had no idea what his host mom and her friend were saying to him and almost got married accidently the first day he was there.

For the most part, things are really cheap here - some things are shockingly cheap. A taxi from Almaty to Issyc (about an hour and a half) is only four dollars. Most food I have seen is less than half of the price in the US. I had to buy dress shoes because they aren’t allowed to have laces, and mine did, and they equated to about 13 dollars, and were one of the nicer brands they had. Actually, the brand was called Prado, which I assume was meant to be Prada but was translated incorrectly. All of the volunteers got a pretty big kick out of that. Until November we make the equivalent of 33 cents an hour, so it is good that things are cheap.

I had my first laundry experience yesterday, and it most definitely makes me appreciate washing machines. The entire process took a little over two hours (not including the couple days it will take to dry on the clothesline). You heat the water with this little hair-curler type thing, and basically add soap, scrub, and ring out . It is key to spend at least 20 seconds ringing each piece of clothing out, otherwise it will take about a week to dry. For pants, I probably sat there for two minutes ringing them out. My final product is below.

Overall though it has been a great first few weeks, and I already feel like I have changed quite a bit. I only drink warm beverages and am sleeping about nine hours a night because we are all so exhausted at the end of the day. I think I have already lost a few pounds because the quantity of food here is much less, although in other places in Kazakhstan the amount of food is probably a lot more.

I am going to try and keep a running list about interesting cultural norms and things of Kazakhstan, and here is what I have noticed so far.

-If a male walks around the house barefoot, he is apparently sterile for life, so everyone wears house slippers.

-Whistling inside the house brings shame upon the family and should be done under no circumstance.

-Cold drinks make people sick and not drinking them can prevent flu and the common cold. I have yet to have a drink that wasn’t warm or room temperature in Kazakhstan, including milk.

-There are stray dogs EVERYWHERE in Kazakhstan, and I heard in some places they can be dangerous and a real problem, but they haven’t been so far.

-There is also trash everywhere (Almaty is normally in the Top 5 dirtiest cities in the world), and the only way to get rid of it is burning it, so normally on any given street you will see two or three burning piles of garbage.

-You never point at anything, especially another person. When we are teaching and want to point at a student or the wall, we have to have a pen or something in our hands.

-When a baby gets sick in Kazakhstan, most families keep a jar of special brown dirt in their house to mark the baby’s forehead to let everyone know that she/he is sick.

I am still waiting on a cell phone number and will let you all know as soon as I get it, because I’d love to hear from y’all. Sorry for the long rambling post, and email me or call about all of your lives. I miss everyone!

Hi everyone, Welcome to my blog! My hope is that this blog will be my primary means of keeping everyone updated while I am in Kazakhstan the next two years and three months. What I know as of now is that I am leaving for Washington DC on August 18 for a 24 hour orientation, and then leave for Kazakhstan the following day. After a layover in Germany, I should arrive in Almaty, Kazakhstan on August 21. I will remain in Almaty until November 1, where I go through fairly intense language and teaching training. My focus area in Kazakhstan is education, and I will be teaching the equivalent of either high school or college level. Based on my performance throughout this training, I will be placed somewhere in Kazakhstan and serve there November 1, 2009 through November 1, 2011. Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country in the world, but much of the country is undeveloped and uninhabited. One of the largest challenges in preparing and packing for Kazakhstan is the difference in climate throughout the country. Northern Kazakhstan is considered to be part of Siberia and temperatures in the winter can average between -40 and -50 degrees Fahrenheit. However, many parts of the south can reach temperatures of over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. Most people in Kazakhstan practice either Islam or Russian Orthodoxy. Nursultan Nazarbayev has served as president since Kazakhstan declared independence in 1991 after the breakup of the Soviet Union, and elections have never quite met international democratic standards. Overall though, Kazakhstan is doing quite well. The two main languages spoken in Kazakhstan are Russian and Kazakh, and I have been learning Russian (actually, attempting to learn Russian is probably a more accurate statement) this summer to try and prepare myself for the language training and next few years. I’m not great at assessing my progress, but at least it has been a lot of fun to pick up another language. I look forward to improving my skills when I get to Kazakhstan. As I have described some cultural tidbits to friends and family this summer, one of the more popular sports in Kazakhstan has particularly drawn intrigue. The majority of Kazakhstani national sports are played on horseback. One popular game is called Kyz Kuu, or "Overtake the girl.” The young girl on the horse does her best to gallop from the young man given a five or ten second headstart, but as soon as the man tries to overtake her she can fend him off by lashing him with a whip. If before the finish line the man fails to overtake her she gets to whip him again. However, if the man catches the woman, he snatches a headscarf out of her teeth and earns a kiss. There are different variations on the rules depending on where you are in Kazakhstan, but nevertheless, I may have to work on my horse-riding skills. That pretty much sums up the basics, if you are interested in learning more about the country, feel free to check out the CIA World Fact Book or Embassy of Kazakhstan website. I am looking forward to documenting my adventures. I should also be able to answer personal emails, so please feel free to contact me. I will also have a cell phone which you will be able to call me from via Skype, and a mailing address to which you can write letters. I will post these on the blog as soon as I know them. My updates may be sparse during my training as it is not uncommon for my day to start around 5 or 6 AM and not end until around midnight, but I will do my best. The only thing that I am possibly more excited about than my upcoming trip is keeping in touch with everyone as y’all set out on your adventures over the next year and beyond. Best of luck to all of you, including those starting new jobs or grad school, looking for jobs, studying abroad, and finally probably the luckiest of you – those returning to Carolina. I look forward to keeping in touch!