The stifling heat of August was long ago swept away by the chilly rains and cold nights of autumn. Snow is present throughout the entire year in the high peaks of the Zailiysky Alatau branch of the Tian Shan mountains, but lately it has crept down into the foothills above town, which receive a dusting every time it rains in Issyk. It feels like we are on the verge of deep winter despite it only being October and in the south. It's amazing to think that the sweaty days when we first arrived were only two months ago.
As time passes, some things change and some things don't. One thing that has remained a constant in Issyk is the very same thing that was the consensus most shocking thing to our group of trainees upon our arrival -- the state of the dogs. Everywhere in town is rife with strays, which are most frequently seen digging through the trash heaps for food. Many of the dogs exhibit the dichotomy of hostility and cowering fear that's found among animals that haven't been treated well. I have started to notice dogs running around in packs of up to eight in the mornings when I walk to class, as if they have started to shed their domestication and are rediscovering their natural instincts. And we've all seen dead dogs lying on the side of the road at times -- not every day, but more often than anyone would like to think. I don't know who takes them away, but they do disappear fairly quickly.
I'm neither a dog person nor a cat person. I've never had a pet so I am not as attached to animals or the concept of animals as others are, but it's still sad to see. This isn't to say that there aren't many well-cared-for dogs here, but there's clearly a higher number of strays here than anywhere else I've seen. It's just a small anecdote about cultural attitude differences.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Five Days in the Steppe
To be honest, there's a lot of doom and gloom about Zhezkazgan among volunteer circles. They say a lot of things. It's the most isolated site in the country, which makes traveling in-country difficult. It's small and there isn't a ton to do. It's a provincial city with provincially-minded people. It's expensive relative to it's place on PC-Kaz's five-tier scale. The city shuts down in the winter. OCAP (non-teacher) volunteers sometime lack the quantity of work they were expecting.
And to be honest, I had a pretty good time. Admittedly, it's a long road and I'll have plenty of time to change my mind -- but it seems to be a Peace Corps tradition to have a love-hate relationship with one's site. I'll make that decision for myself. Site visit certainly does not provide the most realistic view of what daily life will hold because it's a whirlwhind of meeting people and touring local sites. My novelty factor was at its peak. Still, I have a number of reasons to be optimistic. My two organizations are very small, consisting of only two people each. I did not have a chance to talk with my health organization much at all, but the environmental organization seems to be staffed by people who are very interested and proactive, albeit a little bit directionless. That's not a problem -- if people care, that's all that matters.
I will greatly benefit from the networks in Zhezkazgan established by previous volunteers. There are two great tutors and a very good translator who are well known to PCVs. The education volunteers run a large English club that may be a source of participation and volunteerism for any of my eco or health related projects. I'll have three sitemates in the city and two in a town a short while away.
My counterpart, Bulat, who is also the head of the Damu-Ulytau ecological NGO is very active in the community. On Wednesday I arrived at the office expecting to speak with him with a translator. To my surprise, the translator was there for what was essentially a community press conference, with about 12 locals from schools and NGOs as well as a reporter from the Zhezkazganskaya Gazeta. And yes, the older men suspected that I am secretly a CIA agent. Zhezkazgan is a global hotspot, after all.
The trip home was only 30 hours instead of 39, but it felt longer because it lacked the stopover in Karaganda. Karaganda is the only city in weekend-visit range from Zhezkazgan, but at least it's one of Kazakhstan's larger hubs and is home to several volunteers. I won't be completely isolated -- especially because I've learned there are frequent 10-hour buses that make a weekend trip possible.
For now, we are riding out the rest of PST. Having had a taste of our permanent sites, staying focused is difficult. Fortunately, I feel like I am really breaking through with my Russian, which is a big help mentally. It's getting cold and we have two and a half weeks. We're eager to get going, but I know we'll all look back at PST fondly. Especially during our first months at site in the dark cold of the Kazakhstani winter.
And to be honest, I had a pretty good time. Admittedly, it's a long road and I'll have plenty of time to change my mind -- but it seems to be a Peace Corps tradition to have a love-hate relationship with one's site. I'll make that decision for myself. Site visit certainly does not provide the most realistic view of what daily life will hold because it's a whirlwhind of meeting people and touring local sites. My novelty factor was at its peak. Still, I have a number of reasons to be optimistic. My two organizations are very small, consisting of only two people each. I did not have a chance to talk with my health organization much at all, but the environmental organization seems to be staffed by people who are very interested and proactive, albeit a little bit directionless. That's not a problem -- if people care, that's all that matters.
I will greatly benefit from the networks in Zhezkazgan established by previous volunteers. There are two great tutors and a very good translator who are well known to PCVs. The education volunteers run a large English club that may be a source of participation and volunteerism for any of my eco or health related projects. I'll have three sitemates in the city and two in a town a short while away.
My counterpart, Bulat, who is also the head of the Damu-Ulytau ecological NGO is very active in the community. On Wednesday I arrived at the office expecting to speak with him with a translator. To my surprise, the translator was there for what was essentially a community press conference, with about 12 locals from schools and NGOs as well as a reporter from the Zhezkazganskaya Gazeta. And yes, the older men suspected that I am secretly a CIA agent. Zhezkazgan is a global hotspot, after all.
The trip home was only 30 hours instead of 39, but it felt longer because it lacked the stopover in Karaganda. Karaganda is the only city in weekend-visit range from Zhezkazgan, but at least it's one of Kazakhstan's larger hubs and is home to several volunteers. I won't be completely isolated -- especially because I've learned there are frequent 10-hour buses that make a weekend trip possible.
For now, we are riding out the rest of PST. Having had a taste of our permanent sites, staying focused is difficult. Fortunately, I feel like I am really breaking through with my Russian, which is a big help mentally. It's getting cold and we have two and a half weeks. We're eager to get going, but I know we'll all look back at PST fondly. Especially during our first months at site in the dark cold of the Kazakhstani winter.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
The Long and Winding Road
The route to Zhezkazgan is long and winding in a very literal sense. I've been on two night trains in Europe before but I've never done back-to-back nights so I wasn't sure what to expect or how hellish it was going to be. In truth, the odyssey went by much faster and more pleasantly than I expected. My counterpart Bulat and I had a five hour layover in Karaganda after spending all night and all morning on the train. His friend lived very close to the train station so we were able to shower and stay out of the wind and cold there. The woman who lived there spoke perfect English (she's a translator). Her son was wearing a "Life is Good" T-shirt and she brought out Smuckers chocolate sauce that her daughter had brought back from a work-study summer program near Denver. Her family has spent a summer in Boston and Orleans in Cape Cod. Was this Karaganda or was this someone from Nantucket? Sometimes, you just never know.
The train to Zhezkazgan departed after dark so I fell asleep pretty quickly. I awoke to the steppe. The steppe from Almaty to Karaganda was what I imagine North Dakota's badlands to look like: treeless and vast, but there were still rises and uplands that occasionally arose to block the view. The railway to Zhezkazgan was different; flat with only very slow rises and nothing but endless grass. Occasionally the train would putter through a tiny village of a few dilapidated buildings, but in general it was a very definition of solitude.
At around 9am Zhezkazgan rose out of the steppe, its presence heralded by the smokestacks flanking the railway on the outskirts of town. Zhezkagan is surrounded by the empty steppe with nothing in sight for miles, but inside the city limits the streets are surprisingly leafy. It's a small city and while it lacks the type of culture and options that are found in big cities, it definitely as a lot more than a typical Kazakhstani town. The shashlyk I have had in cafes has been excellent. More importantly than anything else, this week has been encouraging on the culinary front; eating meals at more and more families' dwellings has been eye-opening. I think I'll never be a fan of some of the true die-hard extremes of Kazakh food, but I'm starting to believe that the quality of the cooking is the major contributor to my problems.
The train to Zhezkazgan departed after dark so I fell asleep pretty quickly. I awoke to the steppe. The steppe from Almaty to Karaganda was what I imagine North Dakota's badlands to look like: treeless and vast, but there were still rises and uplands that occasionally arose to block the view. The railway to Zhezkazgan was different; flat with only very slow rises and nothing but endless grass. Occasionally the train would putter through a tiny village of a few dilapidated buildings, but in general it was a very definition of solitude.
At around 9am Zhezkazgan rose out of the steppe, its presence heralded by the smokestacks flanking the railway on the outskirts of town. Zhezkagan is surrounded by the empty steppe with nothing in sight for miles, but inside the city limits the streets are surprisingly leafy. It's a small city and while it lacks the type of culture and options that are found in big cities, it definitely as a lot more than a typical Kazakhstani town. The shashlyk I have had in cafes has been excellent. More importantly than anything else, this week has been encouraging on the culinary front; eating meals at more and more families' dwellings has been eye-opening. I think I'll never be a fan of some of the true die-hard extremes of Kazakh food, but I'm starting to believe that the quality of the cooking is the major contributor to my problems.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Welcome to Boiledbeefistan
I used to think that I was a very flexible eater, but then I came to Kazakhstan.
The core issue for me is that the most fundamental cornerstone of Kazakh haute-cuisine is lamb and cow fat. Kazakhstanis enjoy their fat in two ways. Sometimes, the fat is attached to a remarkably flavorless piece of boiled Grade C/D meat that it usually about half the size of its blubbery companion. At other times, Kazakhs bypass the high-maintenance hassle of boiling meat and simply dice the fat into cubes.
This is a problem, but in many cases it could be evaded by simply picking around the offensive parts of the meal. Kazakh cuisine has deftly blocked that strategy from working to any success by refusing to use any sort of spice at all. In a pasta dish, pasta tastes like boiled lamb and lamb fat. In borscht, cabbage tastes like...boiled lamb and lamb fat. Kazakhstani cuisine's definition of dangerously spicy begins with oregano. Some volunteers more enterprising than I am now go to war three times a day with a bottle of cure-all Tabasco sauce. It's great because all the locals view Tabasco sauce with intense fear and loathing, so it lasts a long time because you can't find anyone with whom to share, and it wipes away the residual fat taste.
To be fair, I believe my experience has been worse than most volunteers here. Some have host mothers who are excellent cooks, but others have been paired with a little less imagination. My personal lowlight was about a week ago when I returned home to find a sizable pot of sheep fat melting on the stove. Immediately suspicious, my worst fears were realized when it became the bulk of the stock for the soup served at dinner. It was not my favorite dinner. Today's lunch presented a more perplexing scenario, consisting of a ladleful of borscht in a jar topped with two fried eggs and then another ladleful of borscht. Why together?!? It smelled like scallops. It didn't taste like scallops.
If nothing else, I've lost a bit of weight here given the amount of walking we do combined with my efforts to eat as little as possible at the dinner table. My diet is mainly comprised of multivitamin pills, bread, Snickers bars, and apples. As bad as that sounds, it's actually a decent combination of vitamins, carbs, protein and the calories I need to get through the day. On the positive side, I only have three more weeks in Issyk considering I'll be out of town for nine days on site visit. Apparently Zhezkazgan doesn't have any fresh fruit or vegetables in the winter, but eating potatoes and cabbage every day beats the hell out of dining on soft, jiggly animal fat.
The core issue for me is that the most fundamental cornerstone of Kazakh haute-cuisine is lamb and cow fat. Kazakhstanis enjoy their fat in two ways. Sometimes, the fat is attached to a remarkably flavorless piece of boiled Grade C/D meat that it usually about half the size of its blubbery companion. At other times, Kazakhs bypass the high-maintenance hassle of boiling meat and simply dice the fat into cubes.
This is a problem, but in many cases it could be evaded by simply picking around the offensive parts of the meal. Kazakh cuisine has deftly blocked that strategy from working to any success by refusing to use any sort of spice at all. In a pasta dish, pasta tastes like boiled lamb and lamb fat. In borscht, cabbage tastes like...boiled lamb and lamb fat. Kazakhstani cuisine's definition of dangerously spicy begins with oregano. Some volunteers more enterprising than I am now go to war three times a day with a bottle of cure-all Tabasco sauce. It's great because all the locals view Tabasco sauce with intense fear and loathing, so it lasts a long time because you can't find anyone with whom to share, and it wipes away the residual fat taste.
To be fair, I believe my experience has been worse than most volunteers here. Some have host mothers who are excellent cooks, but others have been paired with a little less imagination. My personal lowlight was about a week ago when I returned home to find a sizable pot of sheep fat melting on the stove. Immediately suspicious, my worst fears were realized when it became the bulk of the stock for the soup served at dinner. It was not my favorite dinner. Today's lunch presented a more perplexing scenario, consisting of a ladleful of borscht in a jar topped with two fried eggs and then another ladleful of borscht. Why together?!? It smelled like scallops. It didn't taste like scallops.
If nothing else, I've lost a bit of weight here given the amount of walking we do combined with my efforts to eat as little as possible at the dinner table. My diet is mainly comprised of multivitamin pills, bread, Snickers bars, and apples. As bad as that sounds, it's actually a decent combination of vitamins, carbs, protein and the calories I need to get through the day. On the positive side, I only have three more weeks in Issyk considering I'll be out of town for nine days on site visit. Apparently Zhezkazgan doesn't have any fresh fruit or vegetables in the winter, but eating potatoes and cabbage every day beats the hell out of dining on soft, jiggly animal fat.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Zhezkazgan By The Numbers
This week is full of meetings in Almaty, which is a very welcome departure from the monotony of the standard PST schedule. Today the OCAP group beat our way through an hour of Almaty traffic to assemble at the Peace Corps office. It was a slow day of logistics, seminars, and flu shots, but at least we received our travel information at long last. It's a pretty diverse array of public transportation ranging from Melanie's 42 hour direct train to Aktobe to Jacob's 30 minute cab ride to the next town.
Zhezkazgan isn't nearly as far as Aktobe as the crow flies, but due to layout of the rail network here, it can be tough to reach. I had heard a million different answers to the question "How long does it take to get to Zhez?", so it was nice to find the truth at long last. The full trip checks in at 37.5 hours. I'm taking a Saturday evening train from Almaty-1 (the harder-to-reach train station, unfortunately) which arrives in Karaganda 19 hours later. At that point, I will have what will surely be a riveting five hours to spend in the train station there, which will be followed by another evening departure and a 9:15am arrival in Zhezkazgan on Monday. The timing of my return is such that there is a direct train back to Almaty-2, which is a mere 30 hours. However, I don't think I will mind the layover too much because it will give me a chance to stretch my legs and restock on food.
I think we are all excited and nervous to meet our counterparts tomorrow. Our counterparts are employees at our organizations, so they play an important role in what we do. From what I've heard from current PCVs, volunteers have quite a range of experiences with counterparts, so we all are hoping for the best. If it works out well, they will be a great resource to help you get started at our NGOs and just as importantly, help us integrate into the community. I still have little information on my environmental organization and even less on the health, so I am anxious to find out the details.
Zhezkazgan isn't nearly as far as Aktobe as the crow flies, but due to layout of the rail network here, it can be tough to reach. I had heard a million different answers to the question "How long does it take to get to Zhez?", so it was nice to find the truth at long last. The full trip checks in at 37.5 hours. I'm taking a Saturday evening train from Almaty-1 (the harder-to-reach train station, unfortunately) which arrives in Karaganda 19 hours later. At that point, I will have what will surely be a riveting five hours to spend in the train station there, which will be followed by another evening departure and a 9:15am arrival in Zhezkazgan on Monday. The timing of my return is such that there is a direct train back to Almaty-2, which is a mere 30 hours. However, I don't think I will mind the layover too much because it will give me a chance to stretch my legs and restock on food.
I think we are all excited and nervous to meet our counterparts tomorrow. Our counterparts are employees at our organizations, so they play an important role in what we do. From what I've heard from current PCVs, volunteers have quite a range of experiences with counterparts, so we all are hoping for the best. If it works out well, they will be a great resource to help you get started at our NGOs and just as importantly, help us integrate into the community. I still have little information on my environmental organization and even less on the health, so I am anxious to find out the details.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Жезказган
Site announcement has come and gone. We sat in two rows facing a map of Kazakhstan lying flat on a table with little yurts marking the 20 assignments that the OCAPs were receiving. One by one we went up and located out site, discovering where we'll live and work for the next two years.
When my turn came, I circled the table until I found myself in the heart of the steppe -- Жезказган (Zhezkazgan), an old copper mining town of 90,000 people. I will be primarily working with an environmental organization, but in an unusual situation, I'll also be working with a health association. As far as I am concerned, this is great news. I am excited to work in those fields and I'm happy to be in a place of Zhezkazgan's size, which by Kazakhstani standards is a small city. I'll have three sitemates in the city and two more in a village 20 minutes outside of town, so while I will be thoroughly geographically isolated, there will be several Americans around.
Zhezkazgan is truly in the middle of nowhere. There is a direct train from Almaty that is supposedly around 34 hours, but it only runs once or twice a week. During my site visit in two weeks, I will have to take a train to Karaganda and then backtrack to the Zhezkazgan spur which apparently tacks on an extra 10 hours. Kazakhstan is big, but it's not that big. To create travel times that long, the trains must be both very slow and stop at every podunk station across the steppe.
And Mom -- now it's time to buy a monstrosity of a winter coat. It's going to be cold and there aren't any trees to block the wind.
When my turn came, I circled the table until I found myself in the heart of the steppe -- Жезказган (Zhezkazgan), an old copper mining town of 90,000 people. I will be primarily working with an environmental organization, but in an unusual situation, I'll also be working with a health association. As far as I am concerned, this is great news. I am excited to work in those fields and I'm happy to be in a place of Zhezkazgan's size, which by Kazakhstani standards is a small city. I'll have three sitemates in the city and two more in a village 20 minutes outside of town, so while I will be thoroughly geographically isolated, there will be several Americans around.
Zhezkazgan is truly in the middle of nowhere. There is a direct train from Almaty that is supposedly around 34 hours, but it only runs once or twice a week. During my site visit in two weeks, I will have to take a train to Karaganda and then backtrack to the Zhezkazgan spur which apparently tacks on an extra 10 hours. Kazakhstan is big, but it's not that big. To create travel times that long, the trains must be both very slow and stop at every podunk station across the steppe.
And Mom -- now it's time to buy a monstrosity of a winter coat. It's going to be cold and there aren't any trees to block the wind.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Doomsday Beckons
Tomorrow morning at approximately 11am local time, the next two years of our lives will be revealed to us. If that sounds a little melodramatic, it is, but Site Announcement is still a momentous occasion that has been marked on our calendars for a long time. We have had the opportunity to express our preferences, desires, wishes and concerns and soon enough we'll know what the staff's deliberation has in store for us.
I've spent so much time contemplating the vastness of Kazakhstan and the incredible difference between the north and the south and village and city that I only recently considered how site placement would work in other Peace Corps countries. A PCV friend of mine is currently in Bulgaria, a nation that is positively dwarfed by the endless expanse of the Central Asian steppe. His entire training group will be no more than a few hours from each other at all times. Meanwhile, an OCAP will likely be faced with a trip to Aktobe, PC-Kaz's farthest-flung outpost which lies a mere ~45 hours by train from Almaty.
I can't say I am too nervous right now, simply because I understand that what I think I want right now may not be what I actually want. Since we still can't fully comprehend what village life or city life will be, it's hard to be confident in my preferences. What all this means is that if I have an existentialist crisis, it probably happen months down the road and not tomorrow. I think we're all too excited anyway.
I've spent so much time contemplating the vastness of Kazakhstan and the incredible difference between the north and the south and village and city that I only recently considered how site placement would work in other Peace Corps countries. A PCV friend of mine is currently in Bulgaria, a nation that is positively dwarfed by the endless expanse of the Central Asian steppe. His entire training group will be no more than a few hours from each other at all times. Meanwhile, an OCAP will likely be faced with a trip to Aktobe, PC-Kaz's farthest-flung outpost which lies a mere ~45 hours by train from Almaty.
I can't say I am too nervous right now, simply because I understand that what I think I want right now may not be what I actually want. Since we still can't fully comprehend what village life or city life will be, it's hard to be confident in my preferences. What all this means is that if I have an existentialist crisis, it probably happen months down the road and not tomorrow. I think we're all too excited anyway.
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