I got bed bugs in Bukhara. I think that’s what they were, anyway, but after a quick online image search brought up pictures of people whose faces had been gnawed off, I was too squeamish to find out exactly what had left patches of itchy bites all over my body. Nobody in Kazakhstan had warned [...]

Depending on your age, you might think 25 is young, but by Kazakhstani standards, I’m a crusty old raisin. I went to a surprisingly un-CCCP “training seminar” the other day in which, after being taught disco dance moves by the jelly-shaking hostess, we were told to write 20 things we have done and 20 things [...]

If you live in a village in Kazakhstan, spending a week in Seoul is the perfect vacation. East Asia meets West Asia, and the similarities between them make the differences stand out all the more. Remember the scene in Cinderella where a filament of fairy godmother sparkles turns mice into horses, a pumpkin into a [...]

He was hiding in a 13-inch-wide crack between two giant slabs of mottled rock. The rock slabs were stuck into the hillside like tortilla chips in guacamole. Pass between those two rocks, right shoulder first, and you have proven yourself sinless (or, at least, free from the sin of eating too many Little Debbies). It [...]

If you want a good laugh, look at the World Economic Report’s recent report on the level of gender equity in Kazakhstan. [Look!] Our beloved Respublika leapt to 41st place (out of 134), beating France, Russia, and Italy. So what makes this obscure conservative patch of steppe a better place to be a woman than [...]

I’ve sat down to write this end-of-summer-start-of-year-two blog post several times now, but I haven’t been able to hit the right tone. One day my writing was too whiny, one day too flippant or frivolous: weathering my moods lately has been like standing on top of Mount Monadnock. But I’ll spare you the drama, since [...]

Summer! I’ve left site for a month and a half, after hosting a summer camp at a local Uzbek school. It was nuts… a great change from my usual professor-y job. Here’s the YouTube video my friend Jon made: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVpdwUhjRvM Now, Taldykorgan, Balkhash, Zhezkazgan, Italy, Jangatas. Wait, did someone say Italy? It’s  going to be [...]

Now that I have lived here for nearly a year, certain images elicit different responses from me than they do for you. Let me give you some examples: ~ Image: Unaccompanied children under the age of three wandering in the street You: These children have lost their mother and she must be found Me: Hey, [...]

I’m really sorry that I haven’t posted (any, at all, ever) photos so far. I’ve never been patient enough to deal with the slow and fickle internet. I guess after nine months, my patience has reached superhuman levels. I’ve just put up an assortment of photos taken since August. Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=179272&id=647796540&l=9994fd842c

I’m really sorry that I haven’t posted (any, at all, ever) photos so far. I’ve never been patient enough to deal with the slow and fickle internet. I guess after nine months, my patience has reached superhuman levels. I’ve just put up an assortment of photos taken since August. Enjoy! http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=179272&id=647796540&l=9994fd842c

Last weekend my friend Johnny Napoli came to visit me, and no, he is not a comic book superhero, despite his name. On Sunday we found the most beautiful place in my town. Driven from my relatives’ house by overload of little girl-ness, we meant to walk to a nearby school to play frisbee on [...]

So after that last entry of bubbling enthusiasm, I had a really hard time re-adjusting to site. Much harder, actually, than the initial adjustment. I basked in a week of can-do American spirit and then cannonballed back into a pool of chilling indifference. Rough. But I snapped out of it eventually. One group of students [...]

At the spring Equinox, volunteers came to Shimkent to celebrate the Persian New Year (Nauruz), and then all the Kaz-21s went to Almaty for our In-Service Training. Most of us hadn’t seen one another since we left for site on Halloween. It was a pretty great reunion. Ain’t nothing like delayed gratification. We’d been warned that [...]

Somewhere in all the preparatory literature the Peace Corps gave me, there’s a section about the serious challenges a new volunteer faces. Among them is loneliness. Loneliness! Does loneliness have an antonym? Because that’s the state I’m in. Over-socialization, maybe. Interpersonal saturation. I’ve never been so un-lonely in my life. I have an hour to myself [...]

I used to live in Northampton, Mass., where every weekend I would walk to the farmer’s market and buy leafy greens that had been grown within a twenty mile radius of my house. It felt good. Satisfying. I felt in some small way I had contributed to an important cause. Now, I’ve learned the truth: the [...]

As if the gods knew how much I miss Anna’s Taqueria, burritos surround me everywhere I go. Burritos, as tall as teenagers and twice as wide, walk beside me on the street, sit with me on the bus, and shop next to me in the bazaar. They move slowly but regally, with the sure bearing [...]

"The government blocks are off and on, but mostly on. So I'm moving my

blog to www.echopie.wordpress.com which for some reason isn't

blocked."

After the Kazakhstani government starting blocking Google platform blogs, I moved mine to a new site. These are all the posts in reverse chronological order from that site. Tuesday, February 9, 2010 Nothing I do is so physically strenuous as to warrant the exhaustion I feel at the end of the day. Morning exercises, Frisbee games at [...]

First of all, I'm sorry about the punny title. That's just inexcusably bloggy of me. It seems like the gov't has backed off on the website blocking, which is good, although it made me feel kind of cool to think I was part of some kind of peripherally subversive behavior.

Also, I have a new address (only the street has changed, and the lack of number is no mistake!). It's on my Facebook profile. If you don't have Facebook, email me and I'll give it to you. I'm not allowed to post it here.

Nothing I do is so physically strenuous as to warrant the exhaustion I feel at the end of the day. Morning exercises, Frisbee games at college, throwing my baby sister up in the air – I’m not exactly training for a triathlon (although the baby is growing like kudzu). But the mental strain in my daily life taps my physical strength, so much so that sometimes when I’m walking home I have to lean forward to propel myself, like a drunken teenager stumbling out of a nightclub.

On Wednesday morning I woke up at 6:30 and ran through my usual regime: I ate breakfast, did yoga, got dressed, packed my bag, and walked to the college with my friend Farouk. At work, all the teachers greeted one another and busied ourselves giving lessons or making idle conversation and filling out forms in the office. And then, at 10:30, something sparked the sudden and bizarre realization that I had forgotten to put on a bra. In disbelief, I ran to the bathroom and checked – yep, no bra. I had been flying my hippie flag for hours without noticing, surrounded by Russified (and therefore strictly fashion-conscious) colleagues wearing heels and makeup. That is the extent of my exhaustion. I’ve always been absentminded (thanks, Dad!) but never to the point of forgetting crucial items of clothing. I have now lived out the plotline of that universal anxiety dream in which you forget to put on pants for a job interview or leave your child in another country by accident.

My life is exhausting because I’m in a trilingual city in a foreign country, a place where children have mastered three of the world’s most difficult languages and I, a college graduate with highest honors, am left clutching my flashcards in bewilderment. On Friday, our weekly faculty meeting consisted of three parts: a 45-minute lecture given by a Kazakh professor and pedagogue, an hour-long methodology presentation by his Uzbek colleague, and the usual long-winded berating by our director, who prefers to speak in Russian. Sometimes just the thought of how much I’ll have to pound into my brain in the next two years is exhausting.

I get tired easily, too, by feeling like a representative of my country. I’m constantly aware that any good impression I make can have positive implications for relations between the West and this country, which due to its geographic placement is inundated with different ideologies battling for supremacy. It’s equally present in my mind that a negative feeling I inspire could become a stereotype that casts my entire country in a bad light. I’m not overestimating myself; people often tell me this, in so many words.

So I make a point of being as chipper and outgoing as I can, making small talk at any free moment and peppering my conversation with self-deprecation and flattery. I don’t feel insincere, more that I’m just pressing heavily on the happy-go-lucky pedal. The water-cooler conversation might not start with “Weather really sucks today, huh?” but rather “Yesterday we played Frisbee outside wearing t-shirts. That was fun!” I guess you could call it…. spin.

In any case it’s tiring as hell, especially for me, a girl whose favorite job to date has been copyediting. But this kind of tiring is also rewarding, as I know it’s the result of having worked hard and learned a lot every day, despite the lack of support (haha I made a bra joke, get it?).

The people of this country clean and polish their boots every day. They do this when they leave the house, when they arrive at their workplace, and during the day at work. For this purpose, most everyone is armed with a cotton handkerchief and a small shoe-oil sponge. Their devotion to the task is remarkable. Once, my friend stopped to wipe the mud off her boots while walking with me in the middle of a rainstorm.

I try to keep my boots clean, but sometimes the repetitiveness and futility of the task overwhelms my desire to be culturally sensitive (the Peace Corps’ favorite phrase). What’s the point of wiping mud off my boots when it will quickly be replaced the next time I step outside? I grumble daily about the state of the streets, which are always dirty in a way that makes them harbingers of the changing seasons. The warm part of the year is dusty dirt road season, then come a few months of muddy trenches, and then after the treacherous ice glaze thaws, there’s a reprise of the mud.

Often my harried internal monologue runs like this: Hey! Instead of cleaning your boots numerous times a day, why not pave the roads well and build some proper sidewalks?

But that’s really the crux of the matter, isn’t it? Because this is the East; this is the collectivist-society half of the world, where every citizen will stoop to clean his feet – the iconic sign of submission – rather than demand a change in the streets.

America is a street-cleaning culture. This is a boot-cleaning culture.

It’s easy enough to congratulate myself on being from the street-cleaning culture, where Yes We Can is enough to get someone elected, and every institution is subject to constant scrutiny and revision. We all like to take up the onus of improving the system in which we live, all in the name of better order, health, and happiness.

But if it’s truly happiness we seek, maybe boot-cleaning is the way to go. If your problem is the mud on your boot, once it’s wiped off, your problem is no more. On the other hand, if your problem is the shoddy paving, the mud on your boot is merely an irksome reminder of the enormous task awaiting you.

People complain here just as much as anywhere, but only about the cold classroom, the angry boss, the late paycheck. An existential woe almost never surfaces. The cold classrooms are the problem, not the fact that Daddy said I must work here and gave me no alternative. Ask anyone about the dictatorship-in-sheep’s-clothing and you’ll elicit only indifference, in pointed contrast to the serious emotional distress that George W. Bush caused for many people. The general attitude seems to be: systemic problems aren’t my problem.

As a result, people seem remarkably happy with their lives here, not plagued by the self-doubt and urgency to constantly improve on everything that drive so much of America to take anti-anxiety medication. It reminds me of Italy, where the economy and government are in shambles, but people report very high levels of satisfaction with life. In America, people swap news articles about the latest crisis, shaking their heads and clucking in despair over their fair-trade coffee and organic kale.

I don’t mean to put down the drive to push for real systematic change; I’m very proud of my country for what it symbolizes and embodies. But I think often people dwell so much on the dirty streets that they forget the dirt on their boots. One former acquaintance of mine perfectly captures that flawed approach: he used to argue that biking to work (for environmental purposes) was a waste of time, and that one should instead spend that time working to enact legislation that would help counteract global warming. That argument makes logical sense, but there’s a chilling inhumanity to it.

Ideally, of course, both the boots and the roads would be clean. But surely we should take care of the boots first, because after all, they’re the only thing we can really control. Not every job can be inspiring and diverting from 9-5, no boyfriend will ever be Stephen Hawking in Brad Pitt’s body – so why do we demand those things for ourselves? Sure, they’re good things to strive for, but in the meantime, are your boots clean? That is, do you spend time with your family? Do you cook yourself good food and eat it with people you like? Do you ever read books anymore, just for pleasure?

All that said, though, the streets here still exasperate me daily. But then, Scandinavia is famously full of impeccable streets, and has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Maybe I should take the mucky streets and the happy people as two sides of the same coin.

A side note:

Last night I stayed over at the house of a good friend of mine. Her sister and I are close, too. As I was leaving this morning, they noticed that my boots were muddy. Wash them! They said. I protested that I was just going home, but finally gave in and wiped off the most visible parts. My friend’s sister then knelt down and thoroughly washed both my boots with her bare hands. Maybe it sounds dramatic, but... I almost started crying. It seemed like the nicest thing that anyone has ever done for me.

The following is a few essays that I wrote recently. The first two are about two people here. One is about a person I really really like, and one is about someone I really really don’t. Then the last one is about walnuts. Pictures will be posted soon. HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

The Most Perfect Eyebrow

The best word I can think of to describe her is “reverent”. First she showed me a picture of the baitirik, the famous statue in the capital city that looks like a giant fork spearing a ball of butter. It’s the requisite symbol of an emerging world power: not particularly majestic, but, like the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower, impressive only for its size. “This is the baitirik,” she said, with the serene enthusiasm of a kindergarten teacher. “I love the baitirik. I think it is beautiful.” She continued to eschew the use of pronouns in her description, as if the word itself was just as worthy of admiration.

The next time, we were standing in line to withdraw money from the ATM. She had introduced me to everyone in line, including a stout police officer who had sullenly grunted his assent when she asked if we could go ahead of him. “She is a visitor from America. We are going to the post office to send a package!” she had explained, as if the officer would surely find that an adequate reason to waste five more minutes in line. Indeed he had.

Before, while we were waiting, she had opened the door to the building whose external wall housed the ATM. “This is a furniture store.” She pointed, not with one finger but with her whole hand, at the crappy particle-board beds and sideboards that already looked ripe for the curb. “First they make the furniture in the back of the store, and then they bring it to the front and they sell it. Would you like to look around?” I made a point of solemnly scanning the whole display room before politely declining, wearing the same expression I assume in boring museums whose art I know I’m supposed to appreciate.

At the holiday party two weeks later, all the staff and teachers surprised and delighted one another with new clothes and hairdos. For a while everyone made the rounds of the room complimenting one another and eagerly touching curly hair that was usually straight, straight hair that was usually curly, multi-colored manicures, and new bangles. She and I were sitting together when our Azerbaijani colleague walked toward us, sporting a belted green snakeskin blouse. “That blouse really suits your figure,” I said, feeling trapped in the language of the fifties with my limited vocabulary. Meanwhile, her eyes were focused elsewhere. Just as the colleague was about to respond to my compliment, she pronounced, “You have the most beautiful, the most perfect eyebrow.” I bit my tongue hard so as not to laugh, and looked up from the green snakeskin.

I was struck by the thought that she must judge everything only from within its own category. Compared to the duomo of Siena, the baitirik is an ugly piece of shit. But within the collection of buildings that are ostentatious political symbols, it’s surely one of the more elegant. The furniture store, while it may appear to me a collection of worthless Chinese-import refuse housed in a monotonous Soviet cement-block construction, is likely one of the top three such furniture purveyors in our town. And the eyebrow, surely, had suffered in my esteem from comparisons to Western supermodels and their depilating entourages. No, it wouldn’t beat Brooke Shields’ pair in a beauty contest, but relative to the other unibrows that I saw every day, it was quite graceful. The arcs were robust and black, connected in the center by a slightly thinner patch in the curved “v” shape of a stylized bird in flight. Nowhere was it unruly or asymmetrical. How could I not have seen it before? It was, truly, the most perfect eyebrow.

Dodging Bullets

The way a person reacts to a foreigner is an interesting measure of personality. Some ask silly and endearing questions that even their fellow countrymen chuckle at. Some speak slowly and enunciate – bless them – while engaging you in conversation about the different cultures you each represent. Some dismiss you as irrelevant and seem bored while others crowd around you. And some, unable to conceive of a world in which different cultures coexist (or, more pointedly, of a world where any other culture exists outside of their own), take your elementary conversational skill as an indicator of similarly elementary thought processes – and, inexplicably, also deafness – and treat you accordingly.

The only saving grace of such people is their universality. While being humiliated by such a person, it is a comfort to think of the countless and undocumented times in America that anyone with an accent has been humiliated in the same manner, having their restaurant-going experience tainted by “HELLO. MAY. I. TAKE. YOUR. ORDER,” for example. These are the same people who butchered the names of our ancestors on Ellis Island, mistaking a name for a silly, weightless inconvenience. These are the sportscasters who insist that Brett Favre is Brett Farve, even though the frats they must have belonged to in college were certainly not farts.

A woman of my acquaintance belongs, decidedly, to this category of people. Her undue excitement on seeing me is the same kind that sweaty relatives with bad breath bestow on children that, really, by now, are too old to have their cheeks pinched. It’s underlain with expectation, a seedy desire for a performance of some kind which she will use to draw attention to herself. “Oh looook! She said a sentence! Oh say it again!”

The imperative form comes out of her mouth like bullets. Sit sit sit, eat eat eat eat, dance dance, drink drink Echoooo drink drink drink! Ratatatatatat: machine gun fire. And then, ignoring my verbal acknowledgement and without waiting for my body to demonstrate my obedience, she swivels my hips to the proper position and presses my shoulders until I sit. Holding out the teacup in offering is not enough; she squeezes the bones of my elbow roughly and jerks my receiving hand forward.

The orders, physical and verbal, are bad enough, but it’s the unnecessary expediting of tasks I’m about to complete that makes me want to tear her limb from limb. I walk across the room to set my jacket on a chair back; she rushes over, grabs the jacket, and sets it firmly on the chair back. I decide to join the group of people dancing; midway towards them she’s gripped my wrist and is dragging me as though I’m a naughty child. An attempted escape from the room she’s in backfires when her hands materialize on the small of my back, urging me on.

At the holiday party she danced an Uzbek dance with five other women our age. The others, all mutual friends of ours, had agreed to dance only because the Director insisted on everyone’s involvement in the talent show. Before the party started they had been laughing as they hastily rehearsed the moves nobody knew well. The performance was terrible, as five out of six of the dancers were more out of sync than if they’d been improvising. The five of them laughed openly and seemed to be enjoying themselves anyway. But she was serious, perfectly on cue, every move measured and well executed, though lacking any beauty or allure. Her eyes were fixed on the audience, purposefully ignoring her floundering companions, and on her mouth a delighted smile that displayed reddened and painful-looking gingivitis. She probably didn’t understand later why nobody complimented her performance.

Walnuts

On Christmas one of my students brought me a giant bag of walnuts, a belated gift from when, as a guest at her house, I’d exclaimed in delight at the waist-height pile of walnuts harvested from their seven trees. I love nuts in any country, but here, oh how my heart leaps at alternate sources of protein! Shall I compare thee to a leg of mutton?

The day after, I decided to devote my afternoon to the walnuts. Problem one: there was no nutcracker. Problem two: you can’t break open nuts with a hammer on the kitchen floor. Problem three: the light was quickly fading outside. And so a frenzied nut-smashing ensued on the front walkway, my little sisters helping at first by shelling the cracked nuts and then, when that became boring, by eating many of the shelled ones.

It got dark and cold quickly, so we packed up shop and moved inside. My fingertips had started to go numb from the intense vibration of holding nuts while smashing them, but it was just as well because they then started to bleed from battle with the viciously hard walnut shells.

Did you know that walnuts are good for the brain? It’s because they look like brains. So says my colleague, and if you don’t follow her sound logic, you clearly haven’t been eating enough walnuts.

After I separated all the shells and crunchy bits from the flesh, Feruza cranked the tabletop grinder until it had pressed all the nuts into oily crumbs. I heated up some honey on the stove top where it blew itself into enormous wobbly bubbles (try it sometime, it’s hilarious!) and when it was liquid, poured the walnut crumbles into it. Now my sisters were interested again. Can I stir? Can I stir, Echopie? Can I? Pajaaal!!

The result was a freakin amazingly delicious paste, which we all consumed within hours. It had taken me the whole afternoon and evening to make it. My fingers were tender and cut. The end result of hours of smashing, breaking, splintering, leveraging and crushing was a small bowl of fleeting sweetness. Everything is like that here. I’m going to be hellishly stubborn when I come back to the States.

I had a sad Christmas eve. I excused myself from the habitual evening with my family and shut myself in my room, where I ate the American candy that the wonderful Barber-Hochbergs sent me and watched that horrible movie Love Actually.

I thought about my family, celebrating together in Florida. I closed my eyes and conjured the memory of feeling completely at ease with my surroundings, and I felt wearied by the prospect of two years without that.

And then, I thought about how I must appear to people here. I had to teach two courses on Christmas morning. Of course, everyone would understand if I seemed a little sad and said that I missed home. But then, knowing that they could do nothing to comfort me, they would likely retreat and leave me to my own devices. Wouldn't you, if confronted by a foreigner in your town who missed their home?

So I decided, in order to elicit the Christmasy affection I wanted, I'd have to do the opposite of what seemed natural when working on a Christmas morning half the earth away from my loved ones. I went nuts.

Keeping in mind that this is a very conservative country where people show little emotion, don't talk on public transportation, and wear uninventive clothing, try to picture my outfit on Christmas morning: bright red high-heeled cowboy boots with fringe (thank you mom!), green and gold striped tights (mom again), a bright red knee-length dress, a sparkly green turtleneck, and red thick-rimmed Ray-Ban sunglasses (thanks again, mom). Then I raided the Christmas tree for a red tinsel-puff which I clipped into my bun, and a long green tinsel chain which I wrapped around my shoulders and tied at my back.

I left the house early, walked to the bazaar, and blew 500 tenge on a giant bag of red, green and gold candies. I was like, well, a kid in a candy store. It was a delicious luxury, coolly asking the storekeeper for another handful of those and a few more of those, and ooh, those are pretty too! He smiled widely and exhorted me to come back often.

Then, arriving late to college, I rushed into my classroom and gave each of my students three polite Uzbek kisses on the cheeks and a big ol' American hug. Then I announced we were going caroling. I explained what it meant and taught them "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," and then we gleefully interrupted every lesson to sing and throw candy at the bewildered students. Some of the teachers who didn't have lessons started following us around to witness the spectacle. Having knocked on every door, pissed off many a teacher, probably bruised lots of students with enthusiastically-flung candy (and made ourselves utterly giddy), we went back to the classrooom. Whew, one of my students said, good thing we didn't get caught by VeVe! Valentina Vladimirovna, that is, the ancient Russian scheduling maven and terrifying spectre to everyone who depends on her good graces (everyone, that is, except me). And then, the woman herself opened our classroom door. What, she asked, do you think you're doing? There should be order in the classroom. There should be.... but then, we all burst out into song again, pressed candy into her hands, and hooted with punch-drunk happiness... and VeVe smiled widely, threw some candy into the air, wished us a happy new year and closed the door. Charles Dickens, you got nothing!

And then we watched Elf for the rest of class. Delightfully unproductive.

I spent the rest of the day being congratulated on my wacky costume and obliging requests to sing Jingle Bells. One of my students presented me with a huge bag of walnuts from her family's farm. I practiced singing my Kazakh song for the New Year party, my voice amplified by huge speakers and projected over the whole courtyard. With some friends, I tried on incredible shiny ball gowns that the design students had sewn. I taught my Kazakh tutor the Titanic song, which we'll be singing together. Then one of my students invited me to her house, where her round-faced grandmother prepared dark Samarkand polow. She taught me to play the dombra and together we sang a haunting song about leaving and coming back to your native town. She played for my brother and mother, too, when they called from Florida.

Then we lit sparklers in the house, burned a hole in the living-room carpet, danced around with her little brother, and stayed up late drinking green tea and talking. We rolled out mats on the floor and I dreamt about meeting my family on a large ship.

So, though it's been said many times, many ways, Merry Christmas.

My host babies call me "Echo Apai" which literally means "sister Echo" but is also a term of respect. At the college, teachers are "Rosa Apai" or "Sevara Apai" or just "Apai", and "Echo Apai" is "Echo Apai". At home, though, when an eight-year-old desperately wants me to look at something, Echo Apai becomes Echopie echopie echopie echopie echopiiiieeeee!

I live in a world of contradictions. Material ones, like the fact that every room

in my house is decorated with floor-length shimmery lace curtains... but the toilet's in the front yard... and ideological ones, like the common hypochondriacal practice of wearing a surgical mask in class for fear of getting a cold, and then -- in bizarre contrast -- taking a bath only once a week.

For my part, I am both old and young here. By cultural standards, I am an old maid. At 24, girlhood is pretty much expired. The few unmarried women my age are talked about in hushed voices, with lots of tsk-tsking and what-a-shame-ing. On the other hand, I look and act younger than many of my students, many of whom at 17 or 18 are married and spend every day slaving for their family-in-law. How can I punish a student for not doing her grammar homework when she gets up at 6 on a Sunday to do laundry for seven people?

My lovely and brilliant Kazakh tutor is being pursued by a boy one year her junior who keeps interrupting our lessons with his passionate pleas for her hand in marriage. Watching a 19-year-old punk beg a woman to marry him is quite a sight. Echo, he entreats, tell her to marry me! Why? I ask. Because I love her! I can't live without her! I will die! What do you love about her? I ask. I don't know - I just love her. Even with my limited language skills, I could list plenty of reasons to love her (she's my favorite person in this country) but I suspect that his main reason is the lack of female presence in his house (he probably does his own laundry. The horror, the horror!). The other day she and I and another friend were walking down the street and creepy suitor # 2 pulled his car over to try and convince her to

marry him. We were terrified he would kidnap her, as he'd been threatening to do.

I'm getting used to being a second-class citizen by reminding myself that this is not my permanent world, and that no matter how integrated I feel myself to be here, I will always be from a culture where women are treated fairly. Most of the time it's just funny, like living in a bad informational short from the 50s about workplace sexual harrassment. Yesterday the music teacher told me he was in love with me and then he pinched my cheek. Seriously?! I wonder sometimes what would happen if instead of laughing it off I turned to XYZ teacher who asks me to marry him/kiss him/go out with him and said "Yes, I will! I can't resist your eloquent and heartfelt advances

anymore. I'm in love with you, too. Let's run away together!" I'll have to ask my tutor how to say that...

It's very different here, but I'm rarely shocked by anything. I would never so much as intimate that the treatment of women here is just, but it's a different culture, and (a phrase people use a lot here) it's not my problem. If my 17-year-old student wants to marry someone she barely knows and doom herself to being worked like a slave by her mother-in-law, so be it. I simply can't allow myself to feel upset about pervasive cultural differences. That being said, I'm starting to develop some friendships for whom I couldn't staunch my feelings. If my tutor marries one of those skeezy guys that's pursuing her, it WILL break my heart!

Anyway, enough about me... just kidding... but geez, it feels strange to write about my life in such a journalistic manner because nothing seems particularly out of the ordinary. I'm getting into the swing of things and enjoying myself a lot. The biggest shock for me is still language, because none of the three has yet emerged as the most important to learn. I'm applying for more funds to be able to pay a Russian tutor as well as a Kazakh one. I love Uzbek, though, and it's not just a coincidence that it

sounds so much like Persian... apparently nearly half the words are related to Persian, and both languages have beautiful yawning vowel sounds. My family is planning to take me to Uzbekistan this summer! I'm also learning an Uzbek dance which I'm supposed to perform for the New Years' staff party (after which we four English teachers are going to sing a Spice Girls song. Talk about cultural exchange).

At home we've decided to set a language schedule. Each day alternates between Russian and Uzbek, except for Sunday which is "kasha" day... a mix of everything. Thursday is always Uzbek day, though, because it's the night we cook the national dish, polow. So far it's been really useful, especially since Damir (host dad) is super into it. He yells at the kids if they use the wrong language, and he told me that on Russian day (jokingly of course) if I came home and said "yakshimisiz" ("how are you" in Uzbek) he would [punch-in-the-nose gesture] me.

Although my Russian really sucks, it's funny that it's less difficult for me than for them to pick one language. In general discourse they weave effortlessly in and out of each of three languages like cars switching lanes on the New York freeway. I'm so jealous! To be born trilingual is such an amazing and interesting asset. Think of all the literature and cultural heritage that's immediately accessible.... dang.

The family's great. The baby's the joy of my existence. She does laps of my room making baby monkey noises and she loves to dance. Yesterday she was rolling around on the floor like a mini break dancer. I've been learning the national anthem by heart, and little sis number two has been helping me practice. The baby loves it, and whenever I start singing it she freaks out and starts dancing like a maniac... spinning around, waving her hands. Once she almost knocked herself out of her high chair because she was bobbing back and forth so hard. That's some good nascent patriotism!

A couple of days ago I was invited to my student's house overnight. Her family came from Uzbekistan a few years ago, and they are very conservative, both in Uzbek and muslim traditions. We ate delicious polow with chick peas, made almond cake (paklava) and trekked through the pitch-black barn holding a candle to find the store of grapes. We talked for hours about our lives and our imagined futures. At night all the women rolled mats out together in one big room, and I fell asleep to the sound of grandma sucking in her breath and then letting it out with an "oi Allah" which came

out more like "ooooyallAH". I was struck by how much more sighable "oh Allah" is than "oh god". Since then I've started sighing to Allah, too.

Teaching plucky teenagers six days a week while learning three foreign languages is utterly exhausting. A good-quality sigh is a real necessity.

Check it out- I'm in the news! After training ended we had our swearing-in ceremony in Almaty, and my friend Sidd and I sang 'Carolina on my mind'. I have no idea what this article says, but there's a photo! http://news.nur.kz/136152.html

I've been at site in Aksukent for more than a week now. I'm sitting in my room, ostensibly preparing lessons, but distracted by adorable baby Azilya standing next to me making baby squeaks. “Meh!” she says, “meh!” (which means “here!”) and she holds out a moist piece of bread, a dirty sock, a piece of apple – baby treasures. She's the youngest of three girls in my new host family. Elzura, who's 9, and Elvina, 6, are both off at their grandparents' house to be spoiled for a few days since it's school vacation week. (Here's Azilya again bringing me a wet DVD. Meh! Meh! Tonight my host mom Feruza and I were cracking up because she kept dumping out the bowl of candy and handing each piece back to us, and she was so excited she kept falling over in her crazy baby-frenzy.) I visited three families and chose this one on a gut feeling. Thank goodness for gut feelings. This was certainly the right decision. Feruza is 28 and her husband Damir is 36, so I'm more of a third parent than anything else. I come home and play with the kids, and then after dinner I sit and have long conversations (and endless cups of tea) with Feruza and Damir. Bless them, they speak to me in full sentences – paragraphs even – though I can barely formulate a correct sentence in response. It's been a real blow to my communication skills coming to Aksukent, where most of the population is Uzbek. There are Kazakhs, Turks, Kurds, Azerbaijanis, Afghanis, Persians, and Eastern Europeans, but among people of different native tongues, most use the Russian language. All that Kazakh I studied is useful, but only insofar as it sometimes sounds like the Uzbek spoken at home. I'll not deny I'm occasionally jealous of my friends who were sent to exclusively Kazakh-speaking places, because I'm overwhelmed by the task in front of me. I have no idea which of the three languages to focus the most on, so I just use a weird mix of all three. Really, whatever one might say about the poverty of Kazakhstan (material, monetary, ideological, geographical, etc), the linguistic wealth is astounding. It's not uncommon here to speak five or six languages fluently.

Tonight I went to my first Uzbek wedding. My student Gulnaza invited me. It was at her family's huge compound, where they had set up endless tables and eating platforms laden with big round loaves of bread, fruit bowls, piles of cookies, candies and nuts, heaping platters of meat and salad, and of course tea. We ate ourselves silly and then after the bride and groom paraded around the courtyard we made congratulatory speeches (mine in English) and danced Uzbek dances (lots of elegant wrist curling and coy shoulder bobbing). We were preceded by legions of wizened Uzbek grandmas and aunties wearing mumus and headscarves, and I felt like a complete foreigner in my corduroys and hoop earrings. But hell, it was fun! I'm joining the dance club at college. Uzbek dancing is so beautiful, very angular and punchy but still elegant. There's screaming and headshaking and footstamping involved. Love it!

I'm so happy I'm surrounded by Uzbek culture. It's warm and exuberant, and its ethnic diversity makes me feel at ease. The Uzbek home is by far the best part so far, though. First off, the food is great. Mutton, oil, bland bread and wet noodles have been replaced by crusty round Uzbek bread, spiced rice, tender meat and lots of veggies. Thursday night is polow night... I think it's the Uzbek national dish, but in any case, it's certainly sacred... Damir always says a long prayer before we eat. Feruza makes a heaping platter of delicious dark rice with carrots and onions in it and meat on top, and we eat it with spicy tomato salad. Ohhh so good. But more amazing than the food here is the beauty and serenity of the Uzbek compound design. In my training site near Almaty, everyone lived in cement-block houses with junk in the yard and a menacing gate at the roadside. Here, the classic compound consists of a large square house with an inner courtyard. The houses form contiguous walls which flank the roads, making them quite cozy. Inside the compound is striking in its simple serenity. I remember reading somewhere that 'paradise' comes from the Persian word for walled garden. My host grandparents' particular paradise has apricot, walnut, and apple trees, as well as a large grape arbor over the summertime eating platform. Somehow, a tree whose fruits will be seen and eaten only by you is alluring in a way that a public tree is not. When eating giant juicy grapes off the arbor I felt strangely guilty for how luxurious it was... the kind of delicious guilt you feel when house-sitting for a rich neighbor who pays you to sit on their expensive leather sofa and watch movies with the house all to yourself.

Work is good, too. I definitely lucked out. I teach only three groups of students, all of whose level of English is higher than even the most advanced secondary school kids. They know words like 'beatboxing' and for the most part they actually want to be in class (they pay fees to the college so they should, anyway), so I'm looking forward to planning lots of interesting lessons on history, literature, music, and everything else I can think of. The one big thing that's missing, though, is course materials. For a school lesson, on a grammatical concept for example, it's easy enough to plan without much help from a book, but I'm supposed to teach year-long courses called "Country Studies" and "Theoretical Phonetics" with little or no material at all! I wish I had more access to the internet. If any of you know of any places I can course plans and materials (for about a middle school English level), please please let me know!

That's it for now -- it's taken me until now to get my life under control, but I'm going to start catching up on my letter writing right away!

I finally have some actual news: I know where I'm going for the next two years!

We had site announcement on Friday. All of us gathered in a nearby town where the administration made us sit through 6 hours of painfully boring information sessions before the 4 o'clock announcement. Everyone's been able to talk about nothing else for days. Site announcement is the pin that pops our pre-service-training bubble. It means we have concrete details about the next two years. It means, sadly, that many of the lovely connections we've made since August are truly fleeting, though they have seemed otherwise until now.

So at four all 66 of us were shepherded to an auditorium, where we saw piles of Kazakhstan chocolate bars (delicious) and Aport apples (Almaty is famous for them - they're huge, round, ruby red, and the most delicious, tart, and crunchy apple I've ever eaten). I had been hoping that announcement would be semi-private, that they would hand us all envelopes and we'd have some time to digest the information before sharing it with everyone else ... but not so. They explained that they'd be announcing all the sites out loud, and that we had to stand up when our names were called.

Someone started the powerpoint presentation, which had an agonizingly long and stupid introduction with an animated camel and a spinning globe that loaded incredibly slowly. I'll just say it's funny in retrospect :)

In the weeks leading up to Friday, there had been rumors that some of the secondary school teachers would be bumped up to college level teaching positions ("college" here being more like junior college in the states). One of the regional managers, Alma (her name means Apple) had mentioned the prospect to me, so rumor had it that I might be one of those teachers. That was one of my secret hopes that I had tried, really really hard, not to get set on.

The other thing everyone had been talking about was region placement. Of the countries that Peace Corps works in, Kazakhstan covers the largest spread of land (there are volunteers in China, for example, but in a smaller sized area). The volunteer farthest west is about 50 hours' train ride from the one farthest east. That's no small fry, especially when it's your best friend who's in the west and you in the east. I was hoping not to be too isolated, but even more I was terrified of being placed in the north. The northern-most volunteer in Kazakhstan is basically in Siberia, speaks only Russian, sees nothing but steppe, and endures a winter that lasts half a year without seeing a green vegetable for most of it. That person also has the dubious distinction of being the northern-most Peace Corps volunteer in the world.

I'm studying (and loving) Kazakh. I'm much more interested in Turkic culture than in Russian culture. I love vegetables, I adore the mountains, and I have no desire to use an outhouse when it's consistently -40 for months. Hence, I was terrified. I was terrified, too, that they'd announce my future home in the far north in front of everyone and I'd shriek in horror.

As it turned out, they announced the names of those serving in the north first. Among them were a few of my current site-mates. It was such a weird feeling to hear my friends' names called. Suddenly everything became much more immediate. I was shaking in my seat, squeezing both my neighbors' hands. They went around the country clockwise, announcing north, then east, then center, and then south. Then they came to the middle south, the region Shimkent is in (the third largest city in Kazakhstan, and the most steeped in Kazakh culture -- another site placement I had tried not to hope for. Then Alma, the regional manager for the south, said, "In a suburb of Shimkent, teaching at the college level ... Echo Bergquist!" I jumped up out of my seat, my thoughts flickering between disbelief and hysterical happiness. If I could have chosen an ideal site and project, this would have been it!

It only got better from there. The people in my oblast and in the south in general are a group of solid individuals, among them some of the people I feel closest to here, one of whom is only 2 hours from me (which I can say with some certainty is due to being in the good graces of a certain wonderful higher-up).

After all the announcements were made, and the chocolate and apples doled out, we broke into region groups. I was handed an envelope with all the details about my site. There are a ton of great things about my site: the beautiful mountains, rivers, lakes, and nature reserves near Shimkent, the historical sites in the area, the plentiful orchards that mean year-round veggies. Teaching at college promises to be great - I get older, more motivated students (most of whom will be English teachers after graduation), fewer working hours but longer class periods, broad freedom in what I teach and how I teach it (the standard English textbooks here are shamefully bad), and status as a teacher in my own right rather than a co-teacher. The only problem is, I've been training for the last 7 weeks to be a secondary school teacher, so I'll have to do a quick gear-shift.

But here's my favorite part of my new site: I'm going to be the only volunteer learning Uzbek! Apparently, Shimkent is only part of Kazakhstan due to arbitarary political boundaries. My suburb (Aksukent) is 70% Uzbek and 25% Kazakh (the rest being Korean, Uighur, Russian, etc). My host family choices are both Uzbek, so I'll most likely have to learn Russian and Uzbek (and keep up my Kazakh) to be able to get around my site and country well. Learning two of the harder world languages at once is a daunting task. What the hell -- why not add a third?!

Friday was a great day. Everyone's sites are so drastically different, and it's refreshing that each of us is finally distinguished from the other volunteers in some way. It's overwhelming, though, to think that in three weeks we'll all be at site, and many of us won't see one another until we come back to Almaty for a conference in six months.

A completely unrelated note: I continue to love how they treat their babies here. In the west, especially in America (the land of attachment parenting), if a baby cries an adult will run to its aid, asking worriedly "why is baby-waby crying-wying?". My 2-month-old host baby-cousin was wailing about something, and my host sister looks up from across the room and yells, "Oi! Baby! Stop crying!". It's comical how people play harsh with their babies - as if the kid could understand my sister's words! Today my oldest host sister was visiting with her kids, and the 1 year old was sitting next to my host-dad at lunch. He has a menacing aspect and a heart of gold, which his grand-babies are particularly good at melting. He and Aru were playing like this: host-dad puts on a terrifying scowl and makes a fist about the size of Aru's head. He glares at her and (gently) punches her in the arm. Aru giggles, makes a fist about the size of her grandfather's thumb, and punches him back. It's unbearably cute.

sorry if this is a mess again --- so little time online!!

Things I love:

My host family. I thought that after living with the Gariboldis

in Italy, whom I adore, no host family would ever come close.

I'm glad to say this family is also amazing!! My sister Janara

who's my age is a schoolteacher, and she's helped me teacher-up

my wardrobe. I now wear killer heels and dresses to teach, and

believe me, the kids pay attention. Then there's my little

sister Anar who I spend more time with -- she's home more -- and

she's a tomboy like me. I got her into frisbee -- we just went

to play with my friends and assorted local kids in the stadium.

One thing I was worried about was having to put my sense of

humor on hold for a while (until I learned the language well),

but that's not been the case, to my immense relief. My family

and I make each other laugh all the time, and not just over

things we don't understand. Then of course they make fun of me

all the time, but I like it. The public humiliation method --

it's the best way to learn a language. That's why my Italian

improved in Milan, thank you Luca and Jack!! I shoud really

patent that.

I also love the banya. I love steaming the week away, especially

when it's been a really long week like this one. All the shit

hit the fan this week -- the higher-ups were deciding where to

place us, and they've been observing our lessons and generally

cracking down on the people training us, who in turn take it out

on us. They tell us on Friday where we're spending the next 2

years. Oh boy... Anyway, the last time I banyaed it was with my

host mother, and she bought me a scrub glove. I scrubbed my

whole body and then we scrubbed one another's backs. I think I

lost about a pound (of dirt) and my skin was baby-butt soft for

days afterward. Amazing!

Glitter. I love glitter. It's a little known fact that among

Kazakhstan's many natural resources, one of the most abundant is

glitter. Saturday was teacher's day, and the kids gave their

teachers huge bouquets covered in glitter. We went to see the

national orchestra of Kazakhstan, and the conductor wore a

knee-length black jacket... covered in gold glitter. My pink

flowery bedroom wallpaper sparkles me awake every morning, and

in school I write in my Peace Corps-issue notebook with glittery

angels on it. All you glitterless westerners don't know what

you're missing.

Kazakh. It's a beautiful language, part of a beautiful culture.

In the last few days, I've realized I can actually make

conversation. It seems like it happened overnight. Funny things:

there's a phrase, roughly "oi buy", that's used all the time,

and to my ears it sounds almost exactly like "oy vey". It keeps

cracking me up to hear what to me sounds like continual Kazakh

kvetching! Then there are all sorts of hilarious linguistic

coincidences that are too rude to write here ;)

Things I miss:

Quality control. Most things here are made in China and are

really shoddy quality. The plastic electric kettle gets so hot

it almost melts if you leave it boiling for more than a minute.

Socket covers come off the wall when you pull out the plugs.

Towels shred if you rub too hard. And so on.

I miss aesthetic beauty. I miss paintings on the walls,

beautiful public spaces, cafes with nice moldings, impressive

architecture, sidewalks. Live music, free art shows, big

libraries, sprawling American lawns. People that express

themselves through weird clothing. Weird people in general!

We -- the volunteers -- have to complete a community project

while we're in training. We had to start with a community need

and do something that would be useful. The first thing everyone

thinks of is trash pick up, because there's no trash collection

here so litter is everywhere. (As a general method of trash

elimination, most people burn their trash in a pit in the back

yard.) The problem is that it's not sustainable -- we could pick

up a ton of trash, but that wouldn't change anything in the long

run.

Another problem, in my mind, is the lack of art in school. The

kids have all the serious classes, and nowhere to be creative.

So, my group decided to put on a talent show, and I've decided

that my part in it is going to be an art show!! But wait, the

art is made of -- you got it -- trash. Last week a friend and I

collected and washed a ton of plastic bottles (in the river),

and on Wednesday after school I taught a bunch of kids how to

make plastic bottle flowers and vines. I can't wait to be able

to post photos. The kids went nuts, and it was amazing. They

made a huge long vine of flowers, using only bottles, scissors,

glue and tape. They look beautiful. I'm so proud of them! I'll

openly admit I almost cried when they showed me their finished

product. Yep, I'm a sap. Anyway, we're going to have plastic

bottle art sessions a few more times and then display all of it

at the talent show! Environmentalism plus art. I love it. I will

do a lot of this when I get to my permanent site.

Hey all,

So I've decided against the whole mass-email thing and I'll be posting here instead. I'm not promising much in the way of regular posts, but check in occasionally and there might be something interesting waiting for you!

Here's the next few months of my life: on Tuesday morning I fly into DC for a brief what-not-to-do orientation, and then at 5pm on Wednesday the whole group (of 68) flies from DC to Frankfurt to Almaty, arriving on the 21st at 1am. Then, starting at 9 the next morning, training! Until Halloween, from 9am-6pm six days of the week we'll be learning Russian and Kazakh, getting our bearing in the local culture, eating lots of mysterious meats, and playing some dubious sports (google "Kokpar" and "Kiss the Girl").

Here is my mailing address for the first 3 months. Keep in mind that mail (esp. packages) can take a few weeks to arrive. It's best to label mail with both Cyrillic and Roman letters, as below. I'm planning on writing lots of letters and would love to receive some from you!

See you on the other side...

~Echo

Peace Corps Kazakhstan P.O. Box 257 Almaty 050022 Kazakhstan ATTN: Echo Bergquist

Корпус Мира Казахстан а/я 257 050022 Алматы Казахстан