Live from Kazakhstan

Hello! I am in the process of settling in to our training site. It is a town of, I’m told, approximately 50,000 people a little to the east of Almaty, lying in the shadows of snow-capped mountains to the south. It’s big enough to have shed the ambiance of a small town or village, but it doesn’t feel like a large town in a lot of ways. There is a huge bazaar in one section, but beyond that it feels very decentralized with various commercial establishments randomly placed in residential sections. I am still learning the layout of the town; I’m pretty sure no map exists (which obviously bothers me) and there are more unofficial roads than real roads. For example, my address begins with “Microregion” instead of a road because our apartment complex is in the middle of an ad hoc road network. There are many microregions to which scattershot groups of apartment buildings and houses are assigned. The town itself is just a town. It seems that everybody has electricity and running water. Some have hot showers and a washing machine (like my family). The architecture is pretty ramshackle – lots of corrugated iron, but not in a slum/refugee camp sort of way. I have never seen so many stray cats and dogs. The worst part of the town is the trash; anybody who is reasonably Green would have a heart attack. Hopefully I will post some pictures, but our internet connection is way too slow for that right now.

So far the Kaz-20 group has lost five people. One guy never made it to staging in Philadelphia, one girl left halfway through and three girls have already gone back home after a brief stay in Kazakhstan. Out of a group of 64, I imagine this is pretty typical. The 20 of us left in the OCAP group in this town are doing well, however, and it feels like we have known each other for much longer than a week and a half. In addition to technical training, we have Russian six mornings a week for four hours so we’ll be spending plenty of time together.

The host family experience has been interesting for all of us. Since we arrived completely non-functional in Russian, it has been a challenge to communicate although we are slowly improving our speech. Nonetheless, the families are very hospitable and many of them have hosted Peace Corps Trainees before, so the cultural quirks that Americans bring into their homes are not a surprise. The host families comprise of Russians, Kazakhs, Turks, Chechens, and possibly a few other ethnicities, which served as a quick validation of the assertion that Kazakhstan is a fairly diverse country. Thanks, Stalin! And Khrushchev, too, for that matter.

My host family is Kazakh and consists of a mother, daughter and son. They do know a few English phrases, but their command of the language trumped even my command of Russian in its inadequacy. Kazakh cuisine and culture dictates that they try to feed me as much food as possible, which is daunting at times. Most of their food is meat-based and green vegetables are lacking. They do frequently have sliced tomatoes and cucumbers which would be good news if they were not smothered in mayonnaise. And I mean drenched – it’s nasty stuff. The mayo fetish aside, the food is generally good and the family friendly. Lastly, I have consumed more hot tea in the last five days than the rest of my life combined. Due to the jet lag and caffeine that comes with drinking about 12 cups of chai a day, my sleep schedule has been awful. I have been exhausted by 9pm and my four mornings here, I have awoken at 3am, 4am, 4am and 5:30am respectively. Sounds like several people I know…

Arrival Musings

I wrote this on 8/21 -- the night of our first day -- but this is the first time I've had any sort of internet access.

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I’m so tired that it’s a mircle I can even muster the energy to type this.

Our plane from JFK was an hour late, but we gained back the whole hour in the air(!). This fact was rendered painfully irrelevant when we learned our flight to Almaty was five hours late and later extended to 7.5 hours late. Instead of arriving in Kazakhstan at 11:40pm on Wednesday, we arrived at about 7:30am on Thursday. All told, it was a 32 hour trip from Philadelphia to Almaty. We were driven to the hotel, we dropped our baggage in our rooms and neither passed go nor collected $200; we went right to training. Needless to say, it has been a difficult day, but it could have been a lot worse considering that PC-Kaz has done a great job keeping the schedule as entertaining as possible. Logistics, heaps of paperwork, and medical business has filled our day. There was an optional language session that I used to keep me awake before my medical interview. It turned out to be quite useful and bizarrely similar to Dartmouth’s “drill” system. Of course, the guy who designed drill – John Rassias – was a Peace Corps guy.

We have also had our first taste of Kazakhstani cuisine. Breakfast at the hotel consisted of several pieces of some soft cheese, tea, and porridge with white sugar and jam accompanied by a hard boiled egg served on a small plate with a small mound of salt. Lunch was comprised of some sort of innocuous soup, a small meat-and-rice dish and a very uninspiring salad. The really exciting stuff is dinner material, I think.

Now that our schedule is done for the day, most people are sleeping. It has been a struggle to stay awake for many people and I can sense that some here are very stressed out. We have an early wakeup tomorrow and a lot of tasks to complete before meeting our host families in the afternoon. Really, we are jumping straight into the fire considering how little language ability we have at this time, but we will be too busy over the next week to stop and reflect on it.

There And Gone Again

The first part of our epic 24 hour journey to Almaty is underway. The bus left Philadelphia at 1pm and left us with a five hour wait for our 9:35pm flight from JFK to Frankfurt. From there, we have a 90 minute layover, followed by an eight hour flight to Almaty. Arrival time: 11:40pm local time -- or 1:40pm EDT on Wednesday. It's going to be a rough transition, especially because I am guaranteed to completely botch sleeping at the opportune time on the plane.

Staging flew by. Fears were lessened, anxieties assuaged, jitters calmed, and butterflies minimized. I have an advantage over many of the people in my group because I have traveled fairly extensively abroad and more importantly, I have experience in a homestay from my Italian study abroad program. There is still the minor of issue of language and communication and the fact that we all know basically nothing, but it does sound like the Kazakhstani host families know what they are getting into.

We covered a lot of standard Peace Corps topics that every PCV has to learn whether they are going to Kazakhstan or Vanuatu or Cape Verde. Obviously, the more interesting part was getting to know the other 61 PCVs in my training group. It's a young group with nobody older than 29, so everybody is in a relatively similar stage of life, although we have come from many different places across the country. I think everybody has been encouraged and inspired by the friendliness and level of enthusiasm we have found in each other. It's the first time any of us have been completely surrounded by people who don't think we are crazy or who ask us why or what we are doing. Borat jokes have been extremely minimal.

By Saturday will we be living in host families outside Almaty. Our Kaz-20 group will be divided into training groups, each of which will train in their own village. I will be training with the entire OCAP group, which seems to be somewhere between a quarter and a third of the whole group. I've heard that the teaching groups will be much smaller, so I am looking forward to the opportunity to get to know a larger group of PCVs well during training. We have heard rumors of an epic feast that will occur when we arrive in the home of our host family. Let's hope it isn't as hard to convince Kazakhstanis that I am not, in fact, still hungry as it was to convince Antonietta Esposito, my Italian host mother, of the same idea. Let the clash of cultures begin!

Zero Hour

My bags are packed, my forms are notarized, my signatures guaranteed, my travel plans are in order. The amount of paperwork involved in the whole Peace Corps process -- the initial application, other information, medical clearance, granting power of attorney, drafting other legal documents, registration, insurance forms, and other crap -- is a testament (signed in quadruplicate) to our bureaucracy.


Unfortunately my sleep schedule is so out of whack that my 6:15am wakeup tomorrow will be a rude awakening. Or perhaps not, depending on whether or not I fall asleep.

Last Rites

The time left until the flight to Philadelphia has dwindled to one full day. It's pretty hard to believe. Only in the last few days has the fact that I am really, honestly leaving for a long time sunk in. It hasn't helped that everything that I do now gets billed as "the Last " both in my head and by the people around me. Nonetheless, I am busy enough with last minute errands and packing so that I am not dwelling on it.

Tomorrow is the final day of packing, but it shouldn't be too hard because everything is assembled. It will be stressful to go through everything sixty-five times to make sure that I haven't forgotten anything. I really hope that my decision not to buy a winter coat here proves to be a wise one. The advice we got from various volunteers and PC-Kazakhstan staff members ranged from a "BRILLIANT IDEA!!!" to "IT'S A TOTAL NIGHTMARE!!!!". We'll see -- about that and many other things, too.

Why Am I Here?

In nine days, I will be flying to Philadelphia to join the other fifty-odd members of my training group. Two days later we'll depart on the first leg of the 16 hour journey to Almaty, Kazakhstan. The last few weeks have been so jammed with traveling, shopping, packing, planning, and the Cyrillic alphabet (Я говорю по-русски? ...нет.) that I've found it easy to lose focus on the things that brought me to this place to begin with.

When I was five years old, my mom took me to the Met when we were visiting my aunt in New York. In the gift shop, there was a children's atlas that I decided really wanted, but she didn't have the cash for both the atlas and the subway fare home, and it was pouring rain. I decided to walk it anyway and I still have the dog-eared atlas. And I'm still fascinated with geography, foreign cultures, and obscure locales.

I started considering Peace Corps last summer, but I really can't pinpoint when I truly began to take it seriously. I was hoping for a sudden epiphany that would elucidate my thoughts, but instead I came to a very gradual realization that this is what I wanted to do. In truth, I find many aspects of Peace Corps to be very appealing. Over four years of college I took advantage of free time to travel and experience life abroad and as time went on, I wanted to explore off the beaten path more and more. PC then, is the motherlode: all I could ask for and more.

That isn't to say that adventure is the main reason why I am leaving, nor do I have fanciful expectations of what life will be like, but it was the first thing to catch my eye. What really drew me in was what I learned about myself when I contrasted the Peace Corps with the standard corporate recruiting fare. I don't want to end up in an office in New York or Boston for forty years and wonder if it could have been different. I'll probably make my way to that scene soon enough, but I'm 22. I'm young, I'm able, I'm willing, and I've decided that the best way to lay a solid foundation for my adult life is to serve abroad for 27 months, help people in whatever small ways I can, and when I return home, benefit from the experience in practical terms and in general life terms.

All of us in the Peace Corps are leaving a lot on the table, yet we've chosen this path nonetheless. I can't wait to get going.