Kokpar and Carnivores: A Kazakhstani Chronicle

February Travels

2010-02-14T08:22:00.003-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted anything. My excuse this time is my first vacation since I arrived in Kazakhstan in August 2008. It's been a great three weeks in Portugal, Spain, and Bulgaria, but all good things come to an end. I will shortly begin the epic odyssey back to Zhezkazgan, which is comprised of a four hour bus ride, a night in Sofia, 11 hours of flights that sandwich an eight hour stop in Amsterdam, a 32 hour train ride and enough layover time in Almaty to make it journey that spans five days -- from a Sunday evening departure in central Bulgaria to a Friday morning arrival in central Kazakhstan. To me, the most absurd thing about all this is how typical it feels.

I'll do my best to write more my once I get home, but Blogspot and other blogging services have recently had "connectivity issues" in Kazakhstan. We'll see.

Here's To Generic Toasts

2010-01-10T08:41:00.002-05:00

It is nearly impossible to drink even a little bit with a Russian or a Kazakh without embarking on a series of toasts. The saying of toasts is as embedded in the Russian tradition of alcohol as vodka itself. Before every shot, it is expected that somebody say a toast and this responsibility is passed around the table as the vodka (or cognac or beer or champagne...) continues to flow. Considering the omnipresence of vodka and general proliferation of toasts, one would expect to hear some interesting ones as part of a deep and rich tradition.

In the absence of any sort of drinking games, toasts plug a gap in the drinking culture, providing structure to those who desire it. Unfortunately, I have found that interesting toasts are not the norm. At weddings and other major gatherings, there are real gems representing an outpouring of the soul -- long monologues that come from the heart. On the other hand, the majority of toasts are rigidly formulaic and repeated so often that, for me at least, they have lost all meaning despite being couched in words that are friendly and kind.

In the Russian language, the "I wish you..." construction is very common in toasts and also as a ritual on holidays. On a holiday, one cannot go anywhere without being wished health, happiness, and love. I can't help but roll my eyes a little bit, even though I am aware that I am taking a bitter and surly attitude toward a harmless and well-intentioned tradition. I suppose it is most jarring because this style of toast represents to the polar opposite of the style to which I am accustomed: long, anecdotal, and on rare occasions. Quantity dilutes value and the Law of Diminishing Returns closed the book on Kazakhstani toasts long ago.

So, here's to Kazakhstan. I wish you health, love, and happiness in 2010 -- and a robust imagination when it comes to new toasts!

A Thanksgiving Tale

2009-11-28T05:20:00.003-05:00

Our first Thanksgiving in Zhezkazgan was not particularly noteworthy. We gathered at Robert's apartment and dined on a small chicken, mashed potatoes, and a common local salad consisting of diced potatoes, diced egg, cold peas, croutons, and mayonnaise. A decent evening, but it was a third-rate alternative to my favorite holiday.

This year we aimed a little higher, which naturally entails tracking down a turkey. A turkey is something of a mythical beast in this part of the world. Most people have heard of the bird, although not everybody. Many will say that you can find a turkey somewhere in Zhezkazgan or Satpaev, but nobody knows exactly where. Others will flatly state that turkey can't be found. In Zhezkazgan, we were teased a few times. For example, my Russian tutor told me that she saw a turkey in the weekly outdoor market; obviously, the seller hawking a turkey was never to be found again.

(A puny turkey is better than no turkey at all and hey -- we couldn't even finish it.)

Fortunately the volunteers in Satpaev had better luck and managed to find a 3.5 kilogram (~8 lbs) turkey and even managed to buy it after it had been cleaned. From there, everything came together. We planned a Friday Thanksgiving because it fortuitously coincided with the Muslim holiday of Kurban Ait, meaning we had a three-day weekend. Nick and Corinne slaved over the turkey and the gravy and everybody else chipped in with side dishes, which were all very good although they were trumped in the end by Corinne's pumpkin pie. For a slapdash Thanksgiving in the middle of the steppe, it was surprisingly legitimate and we were all very pleased with ourselves.

(Don't act like you're not impressed.)

(Whether in the US or in Kazakhstan, Thanksgiving is the same. Sometimes even the best and brightest fail to make it through the day.)

(Back when Drew was able to sit in an upright position.)

The Icy Winds of Winter?

2009-11-23T08:38:00.003-05:00

Some things in Kazakhstan never cease to amaze me. With the onset of the November chill and early winter snows, the current issue on my mind is the lack of tolerance the locals possess with regards to cold weather. I find this particularly remarkable for two reasons: first, because I would have thought that people would get used to it after a while and second, because back in the US, I had a reputation in my family for being cold all the time. When I was little, I would often be found buried under two blankets on the couch or snuggling under a veritable mountain of covers in bed. Perhaps years of training living in an old, drafty house eventually got me up to snuff. Whatever the reason, my ability to deal with wintry weather seems to be miles ahead of just about everybody here.

As my second winter in Kazakhstan begins, this point has been hammered in again almost immediately. For the last few weeks, the weather in Zhezkazgan has hovered around the freezing point with the highs rising to the mid-30s on occasion and the lows at night dropping to the low 20s. It's certainly time to break out the winter jacket (don't you fret, mom), but it's not yet necessary to call in the cavalry: long underwear, heavy duty gloves, etc. Just today, I was walking to work enjoying the freshness of a winter morning without a hat. However, I left work with a colleague and the sight of my uncovered head was so distressing that she simply couldn't bear to see me without a hat, saying that the mere sight made her colder. In Peace Corps, I need to pick my battles; this time, I acquiesced, shaking my head.

This issue runs across ethnic lines. My current theory is that both Russians and Kazakhs insulate themselves from the cold to such a great degree that it effectively ruins their ability to become somewhat comfortable with lower temperatures. I've seen Kazakh infants dressed up in jackets and hats.....in May. Locals do not skimp on heating in most buildings and trains. Drew's school is somewhat reminiscent of a blast furnace, although in fairness Zhezkazgan's school #1 could be the greatest offender that I have encountered thus far. In my host family, the heating was so strong that I kept my window open almost the entire winter. I expected to sweat my way through Peace Corps under a sultry sun on the banks of the Niger River; I did not imagine that I would be sweltering even during the brutal steppe winter!

Halloween Comes To Kazakhstan

2009-11-14T10:39:00.000-05:00

Our weekly English clubs have a habit of acquiring a tinge of monotony as time passes. Fortunately, there are many ways to spice things up and take a break from the usual routine of typical English-y games and activities. One method is to take full advantage of American holidays and there might not be a better holiday for this sort of thing than Halloween.

The preceding English club, we told everybody that we would organize a Halloween event and we encouraged everybody to dress up for the occasion. Despite these efforts, we questioned whether the kids would actually go through with it. Drew and I really did not know what to expect. Young people in Zhezkazgan are quite familiar with Halloween, but we were unsure whether they would get into it or not.

It seems as though the prospect of dressing up scared away some of the kids, but the 20 students who did show up, it's fair to say, went nuts. The whole event started up about ten minutes late because everybody was still in the hallway perfecting the makeup for their costumes. Most of the guys went down the "horror" route and riffed off of zombies, Frankenstein, Joker, et al. The girls had a more diverse array of outfits. Regardless, almost everyone would have been above-average by American standards.

(These guys didn't mess around.)

(Rarely do Kazakhs get the chance to take to the high seas, but at least they can make a fair impression of a pirate!)

We tried to pull out all the old Halloween classics. We brought a bucketload of toilet paper and challenged the kids to create the best old-fashioned mummy. We went for the candlelit scary story, but our group was a little too old to get sucked in. There was an attempt at trick-or-treating, but it was really just a massive candy exchange since the logistics for something more authentic would have been difficult to engineer. The evening concluded with bobbing for apples Kazakhstan-style (meaning bobbing for apples in Jamie's laundry bucket). The water was too shallow and it was a little too easy to pin the apple on the bottom, but hey -- it was better than nothing.

(The woman gave Drew a strange look after he bought six rolls of TP would have given him an even stranger look if she knew what we planned to do with it.)

(The mummies line up. In a moment of immense controversy, a winner was never selected.)

(For some reason, students felt the need to give their friends a little extra push down into the water. Settle down kids -- this isn't Guantanamo Bay.)

The Ties That Bind Us

2009-10-14T01:11:00.003-04:00

I dedicate this post to all you black-fleece-haters out there.

Last night I met with a man from the US embassy at a restaurant for dinner. It was not a particularly formal affair; the embassy apparently sends staffers on regional trips to conduct local business and check in on volunteers and perhaps other Americans. In the case of Zhezkazgan, it is obviously just volunteers. Anyway, in the course of our conversation, he stopped mid-sentence when he noticed a small MRG logo on my fleece. Apparently, he had lived in Vermont only a few towns away several years before and frequently skiied there.

It's a small world.

Kazakhstan: Life and Times

2009-10-08T10:42:00.002-04:00

After English club today, Drew and I went to a Uyghur cafe for lagman and beer. Of course, the cafe was out of beer and instead the waitress directed us to the neighboring convenience store. Not a problem -- beer is cheaper that way. About 30 minutes into the meal, a friendly drunk guy came up to us, enthralled by the sound of a foreign language. We told him that we were Australians, a response that is extremely effective because it explains our English but stifles follow-up questions since nobody knows much about Australia here. Again, not a problem since there wasn't even a whiff of hostility around this guy. Not long after, we asked for the bill and waited for our change of 250 tenge. The cafe was busy tonight and apparently they were out of change, so we received a 200 tenge bill and about half a pack of gum. They didn't just give us a pack of gum for the trouble, they pro-rated the gum. The waitress brought a 3/4 full pack and gave us about two-thirds of what was left. This wasn't really a problem since 50 tenge is worth about 30 cents, which is cheaper than the price of the story, at least in my estimation. This incident wasn't even the first time I have seen volunteers receive gum in lieu of money at a cafe. So really, not a problem.

Sometimes, I remember that I am living in a strange country. The strangest thing of all is that this series of events barely seems remarkable to me any more.

The Quest for a Bancomat

2009-10-07T07:55:00.003-04:00

In Kazakhstan, pay day never slips by quietly. It seems to me that a great many people live from month to month, paycheck to paycheck. Some do this by necessity, others by "choice" -- in other words, a complete lack of financial planning. In America, we can be more "sophisticated" about our budgetary recklessness by burying ourselves in debt, but the interest rates on personal loans in Kazakhstan sometimes give the impression that local banks are institutionalized loan sharks. Therefore, the Kazakhstani spendthrift lacks the option of elaborately lying to himself and is left with little recourse but to simply spend the monthly wages as they come in. Tongue-in-cheek commentary aside, life is difficult for many people here, so I don't actually begrudge people buying a little happiness by blowing their money on a lavish dinner party. However, my unscientific opinion is that the savings rate must be very low.

So on pay day, which is usually around the end of the first week of the month, there is a full-blown assault on all the ATMs ("bancomats") in the city. There are quite a few, but not enough to avoid lengthy lines and chronic shortages of actual cash. I have been meaning to go to the bazaar for the last two days, but every time I try to withdraw a little money, I am faced with an insurmountable phalanx of chattering grandmothers, who somehow either take out cash $10 at a time or have 16 different bank accounts. In truth I don't have any idea what goes on with them, but the level of incompetence with an ATM is at times infuriating. Around pay day, the promise of an open ATM is always fool's gold -- it means that the cash allotment for the day had dried up long ago.

One strange thing about ATM etiquette in Kazakhstan is that there is no privacy. If you step up to an ATM, people behind you in line -- and by in line, I mean trying to outflank each other to force their way to the front -- will crowd up on either side and examine every button you press in rapture. There is no thought to the idea that one might like a little space while dealing with their finances, but this is unsurprising in the greater context of local culture. People often ask what my salary is, how much I pay for my apartment, and so on. There just isn't any stigma about questions related to money here.

Today, I was once again unsuccessful in finding a working ATM. Since my refrigerator was looking awfully empty, I was left with no choice but to go bargain-hunting in the bazaar. Avoiding meat and cheese, which are more expensive, I walked into the fresh produce area, foolishly concerned about the fact that I had only a few small bills. I walked out with a kilogram of tomatoes, a half a kilo of bell peppers, and five small spicy peppers, which cost a grand total of 140 tenge, or about 90 cents. I don't know what I was worried about.

Catching Up

2009-10-05T09:00:00.002-04:00

Yes, I have neglected Kokpar and Carnivores for the past month or so, but I plan on resuscitating these pages with a few updates over the next week. My sincerest apologies go out to the four people who read this blog.

One Year

2009-08-24T07:42:00.003-04:00

This past Friday was a landmark for Kaz-20: on August 21, 2008, we belated arrived at the Almaty airport after a lengthy delay in Frankfurt. While the end of the summer signifies the passing of one year, we still have another month or two until the halfway point of the 27 months spent in country.

Like with every experience I have in life, I look back on my first year in Peace Corps with two perspectives. On the surface, it feels as though one year has sped by and it is hard to believe that we have lived here for so long when it feels like I arrived yesterday. On the other hand, when I focus on a specific event from training or even when I first came to Zhezkazgan, it feels like it happened centuries ago.

One of the things that happens to volunteers around months 6-12 is a reclamation of a feeling of normalcy. During this period it is finally possible to find comfort in a daily routine, to familiarize oneself with one's organization and city or village, and to progress in language enough to free oneself from the shackles of being able to communicate only on a rudimentary level.

Considering how much progress we have all made in integrating into the community, getting to know locals, and speaking Russian, I am excited to see what the next year holds. Now that I better understand how everything works in society and in my organization, I am hoping that the progress in year two will be exponential.

On Showers

2009-08-23T05:17:00.000-04:00

Coming from the cozy land of Western plenty, living in the developing world often provides sharp perspective on what is really necessary in daily life. Many of the creature comforts and technological marvels that have become indispensable to American life begin to slip out of one's consciousness. If I feel this way in Kazakhstan, I can't imagine what is going on in the head of the typical Peace Corps Niger volunteer.

For example: vegetable peelers. My mother sent me a peeler in the mail when I moved into my apartment. The gesture was, of course, appreciated, but the truth is that I rarely use it. (Sorry, Mom!) Everybody in Kazakhstan uses knives and while our worldviews don't always see eye to eye, I have really come around on this particular topic. Anything but a knife seems altogether unnatural now. From volunteer anecdotes, the vegetable peeler is a popular gift sent from a volunteer's family back home to his or her host family in Kazakhstan. I have never once heard of an instance where a host family actually used the peeler. Why? Well, people everywhere often stubbornly cling to what they are accustomed to, but in this case a knife is simply more efficient. Vegetable peelers: slightly less pointless than Febreze.

The dryer is an appliance that I have come to see as utterly superfluous. It is an awfully expensive alternative to a piece of string, which accomplishes the same task albeit a little more slowly. On the other hand, the purchase of a washing machine must add about three or four years to a person's lifespan. Hand-washing is back-breaking work and almost never results in a truly clean article of clothing. Jeans are the worst -- an absolute nightmare that require at least 10 minutes per pair. Coincidentally, my jeans happen to be a little dirty at the moment.

I first began to dwell on this theme about a month ago, which was about the last time I have had hot water although I have lost track of time since it disappeared. The lack of hot water is a mild inconvenience and not one that is worthy of a serious complaint. Many volunteers, even in a relatively rich country like Kazakhstan, have no hot water -- and many in the villages have no running water at all. Often, people in the villages clean themselves only in the banya (the Russian variant of a sauna), which is often only once a week. Volunteers can drag the ol' bucket out to the banya house whenever they want in the summer, but when it's -30 degrees outside it's not conducive to even a bucket bath.

Anyway, my district in Zhezkazgan seems to have fallen victim to a massive water main leak. This summer has seen a number of minor public works projects all over the city, which is good to see: repaving roads, beautifying parks, etc. Unfortunately, about two weeks after they repaved the little "streets" that snake through the haphazardly-arranged apartment blocks of my district, they promptly dug up about half of them in an effort to root out this water main issue. As the weeks have gone on, the digging has created a trench about half the length of the Maginot Line and it shows no signs of abating so it is safe to say that my poor apartment will be bereft of water for quite some time.

The lack of hot water posed a big threat to my daily routine, which includes a morning shower because like any good American I am completely and totally obsessed and addicted to showering daily. Faced with the prospect of a cold shower or the old-fashioned bucket bath, the choice was clear. My new routine is to put water on the stove to boil in a teapot when I wake up. I then pour the boiling water into my laundry bucket and mix it with cold water from the tub. With the bucket in the center of the tub, I squat nearby and I scoop water onto myself with my head over the bucket to catch most of the water so that I don't burn through it too fast. Shampoo, a little soap, and it is not even a hassle. As somebody who was prone to taking overly long showers in the US, it is amazing to me how little water is required to take a perfectly effective "shower". To be fair, it is easier for a guy with short hair, but all I need is about three or four liters of water. Since I have been forced to run with the "bucket shower" method, I would estimate that I have used about as much water in one month as I did in a one day's regular shower. That's pretty crazy, huh?

(Who knew that a green and purple bucket with festive drawings on the bottom could be a source of contemplation?)

Escaping the Steppe

2009-08-12T11:48:00.000-04:00

During the summer months, OCAP (NGO) volunteers and TEFL (teacher) volunteers have very divergent schedules. Sadly, NGOs do not have summer vacations, so we toil away at work while the TEFLs craft nomadic itineraries that take them from summer camp to summer camp across the country. I am a bit jealous of it all because it is a fantastic opportunity to tour the country and to spend time with other volunteers. That said, it is hard to begrudge my teaching counterparts anything because their daily schedule during the school year is a lot more grueling than life in most NGO offices.

Fortunately, it is not totally impossible to leave my island in the steppe. Recently, I traveled to a small town in northern Kazakhstan called Schuchinsk, where a number of volunteers assembled for five-day Russian language camp. The atmosphere around Schuchinsk was very, very different from what I have becomed used to in Zhezkazgan. Like most northern locales, Schuchinsk is much more Russian than the southern part of Kazakhstan. In truth, the biggest difference had nothing to do with the people; instead, it was the environment that really stood out. An hour or two south of the town by train, the steppe more or less ended and gave way to forested land. While there are trees in Zhezkazgan, it hardly feels forested, so walking under a canopy of greenery was a strange experience after living in the center of the steppe for so long.

(The road to the local volunteer's house was delightfully tree-lined by national standards)

(Locals clamber into boats at one of Borovoe's lakes. In the back left is Borovoe's signature rock formation that is fairly famous in Kazakhstan. It's basically the Old Man On The Mountain, except in a lake. You might have to click on the picture and expand it to see it well.)

It should be noted that the "green line" in Kazakhstan does not extend uniformly east or west. In the Kokshetau region (containing Schuchinsk) and around Petropavlovsk a little further north, the countryside is apparently forested. However, I've heard that Pavlodar and Kostanai -- located to the northeast and northwest of Schuchinsk respectively -- are classic steppe towns. This green island in Kazakhstan is well-known locally. Schuchinsk is the gateway to a small region of lakes and hills known as Borovoe. Locals will describe this area as "The Switzerland of Kazakhstan". It is certainly a pleasant area that is a welcome change from the endless monotony of the brown steppe, but this is a grotesque exaggeration. In terms of the dramatic beauty of nature, Borovoe is more along the lines of a typical lake in New England. The comparisons to the sweeping majesty of the Alps are...lacking, to be charitable.

(A Borovoe nature view)

(If you lived in the steppe, you'd call these hills mountains too)

Not What The Doctor Ordered

2009-07-24T10:00:00.002-04:00

All Kaz-20 volunteers were required to make the trek to Almaty during July for a standard checkup with the doctor and a trip to a local dentist. For some volunteers, this entails a one-hour taxi ride. In my case, it was a 70 hour round-trip odyssey on three different trains, all for 16 hours in the city. At least I ran into a few other volunteers who were in town for an English teachers' conference.

As ridiculous as that may sound, though, you simply become accustomed to long train rides. They aren't nearly as unbearable as they may seem. For one thing, trains are timed to maximize sleeping time; the Zhezkazgan-Almaty train leaves at 11:30pm and arrives at 5:50am two days later for a total journey of around 30 hours, the majority of which I slept through. To cope with the ponderously slow speed of Kazakhstan's trains, locals have developed a great train culture and more often than not I find myself in interesting conversations with kind people. In this country, people aren't always overly friendly in the public sphere, but on the train this is very rarely the case. Life on the train is worthy of much more than a paragraph, however. When I finally get around to taking pictures on the train, there is a tour de force of a post waiting to be ridden about The Train.

Globalization

2009-07-18T03:40:00.002-04:00

A few moments ago in the Шаруа bazaar in Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, I bought a Granny Smith apple with a little grown-in-Chile sticker on the side. The distance between Santiago, Chile and Almaty, Kazakhstan is about 10,530 miles.

Chez Jamie

2009-07-08T06:19:00.004-04:00

I know that America is dying to know what my apartment in Zhezkazgan looks like. Fortunately, today is the day that I will put our long national nightmare to rest and finally show off my Kazakhstani flat in all its local glory.

Zhezkazgan is a small city and has two hubs of commercial activity. My apartment is located just behind the most active street in town and is only a one minute walk away from the main bazaar. That's nice in the summer and it is going to be even more useful when the icy winds of winter come howling from the steppe four months from now. Despite its central location, it is usually quiet at night other than the odd drunken conversation. The convenience is well worth a little noise, however. So without further ado, the pictures:

(A view of my apartment building from across the "yard". I live at the left end of the building in the center, behind a tree. The sign threatens passersby with a 50,000 tenge fine ($333) for throwing away trash from the bazaar, failing to throw trash in the proper containers, or lighting the trash on fire. All of these rules are broken with regularity, but somehow I don't think anybody has paid up.)

(The stairwell. This picture does not do it justice for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it has been recently swept, although in fairness they do sweep consistently -- after all, the bloody tampon in the corner and the condom wrapper on the second floor aren't going to throw themselves out! Unfortunately, this picture cannot convey the exotic aroma of urine, boiled lamb, and cigarette smoke that usually hangs in the air.)

(Big wooden doors: keeping PC-Kazakhstan volunteers safe since 1993. Sadly, the peephole was seemingly designed for a local woman, i.e. somebody around 5'2".)

(9 out 10 Iron Chef participants recommend this Soviet-era stove. Actually, it has broken down once, but it was completely re-wired. Now all I need is the (missing) third knob, so I can use the oven. For now, my kitchen is where dreams of eggplant parmesan go to die.)

(The shelves and cabinets all throughout my apartment are barely holding together. At least I do have a ton of space; too bad most of them simply don't close all the way. Nonetheless, my kitchen is not at all a bad setup for my purposes, and I am lucky to have a big and relatively cold refridgerator.)

(The bathroom. As per usual, the toilet is in an adjacent room. Bathroom sinks can be found in Kazakhstan, but they are not at all considered a necessity. The tub is viewed as a suitable alternative as a dual-purpose tub/sink. I (usually) have hot water, which turns taking a shower into a game of cat-and-mouse between me and the hot water knob. Even the most insignificant of twists can instantaneously transform the stream from feeling like an Arctic swimming hole to a jet of hot magma. When the hot water isn't working, I break out the tea kettle and mix boiled water with cold water and take a bucket shower. It's amazing how much water we waste when you can take a perfectively effective shower with just a few liters.)

(My living room. I like having an ugly carpet; it hides the stains. The far windows are papered over for privacy because the next building is situated perpendicularly to mine and about twenty apartment windows stare across the alley at mine.)

(See? A normal bedroom.)

(The built-in working space in my living room is great and, I think, unusual. I'm happy to take it and the abundance of closet space it provides.)

(The view from the balcony. Unfortunately, balconies here are rarely a social space. They are usually too narrow to sit in and are used as storage space. My balcony is closed off, so I found it stuffed with chairs stacked on each other. When I lived with my host family, the balcony was exposed and it was used as a freezer for the enormous amounts of horsemeat they bought.)

Journey To The Center Of The Earth

2009-06-30T11:20:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago, the Zhezkazgan volunteers were invited to go on a picnic day trip with the teachers and graduating students of a local college. The prospect of a day outside of the Zhezkazgan city limits is always a welcome proposition, so we gladly accepted. The destination was a village called Ulytau, located about three hours north of the city. Ulytau is not just any Kazakh village; it is as historic as a village in Kazakhstan can possibly get. While this is quite possibly damning with faint praise, it is true that Ulytau is the traditional home of Kazakh culture. It is said that the Kazakhs are split among three ancient tribes, although I personally have never heard anyone discuss this except when specifically referencing Ulytau. Nonetheless, Ulytau is recognized as the hallowed meeting point of these tribes. The village, which today consists of maybe 5,000 people, is located truly in the center of the steppe, miles from any other human settlement. What makes Ulytau interesting is that it lies in the shadow of a mountain that is remarkably large given the surrounding steppe.

We set out from Zhezkazgan early in the morning on a rickety, crowded bus. Fortunately, the road north of the city has been recently repaved, which allowed for smooth sailing all the way to Ulytau, unlike the road south. Beyond Ulytau, however, the road (European highway E123 - hah!) is from all accounts completely impassable even to the most intrepid vehicles. The only person I have met who braved the full length of the northern road was a Swedish cyclist passing through; the only cars he reported seeing were those rusting away on the side of the road, having been abandoned long ago.

(It's nearly impossible to capture the vastness of the steppe in a photograph. I don't have anything that can do it justice. Really, it is something that needs to be experienced over distance and time rather than something that one can comprehend with a snapshot.)

Our bus quickly passed through the smaller city of Satpaev, which lies only 15 minutes north and then proceeded through a maze of mines. I had always envisioned the Satpaev mines to be deep under the ground, but apparently they have their share of strip mines as well. Past this industrial section, the surroundings acquired a surprising beauty. I had previously held a rather low opinion of the asthetic value of the steppe, but my opinion had been heavily influenced by the brown months of fall and winter. In the early summer, at least, the grass took a strangely compelling shade of green. As we continued north, the landscape ceased to be as flat as the southern steppe and became a series of rolling hills. A bit later, real hills appeared on the horizon, shrouded in the purple mist of distance. The endless expanse of green grass (the "naked steppe", as they say in Russian), the bright blue sky dotted with cloudbursts, the purple hills, and the exposed mounds of reddish dirt created a palette the likes of which I had nearly forgotten existed during a Kazakhstan winter. It was refreshing.

(Rush hour on the road to Ulytau.)

We passed through a small village called Zhezdi one hour into the trip, where another road branched off to even more godforsaken locales to the west. After Zhezdi, the road was two hours of emptiness, although there were isolated houses strewn here and there and an attentive observer could spot the odd shepherd. As the hills in the steppe became more numerous, our 360 degree view became about as obstructed as is possible in Karaganda Oblast. After rounding one little flat-top, Ulytau came into view underneath a series of rugged-looking hills.

(A monument to the meeting place of the Kazakh tribes, a few kilometers from Ulytau.)

(Ulytau springs into view after we pass over a hump.)

We passed through the town, which seemed rather tidy by Kazakh village standards. I even saw an ATM! It should be noted that Ulytau is the capital of its region (think county), although that's not saying much considering the Ulytauskiy Rayon is home to only about 13,000 residents despite being the size of a small state. We passed through the center of the town and drove on towards the foothills. The bus managed to quite literally ford a stream, which fortunately was running low and eventually we found our way to a clearing where we set up shop.

(This is just the tip of the iceberg.)

The bus came to a stop and out came all the blankets, food containers, big pots, and shashlyk apparatus. We set out the dastarkhan (array of food -- it's an institution here) and "snacked" on some "light" food. After this relatively quick affair, the group split in different ways as we explored nature. Drew, Robert, and I separated ourselves from the pack since our mountaintop of choice was deemed to be too ambitious by the rest. I love a good aerial view and it was a great change of pace from the flatness of everyday life. Unfortunately, our ascent up the ridgeline was ultimately cut short by threatening weather. We retreated down the side of the ridge to the valley and eventually back to the campsite, where it was time for the shashlyk.

(Ulytau from above)

Shashlyk is a major Central Asian dish, although as far as I know, it is originally from the Caucausus region. It's basically a meat shish kebab and it is the closest thing that Kazakhs have to barbeque, although the meat -- lamb, chicken, beef, or less often, pork -- is much less tender than what you would find in an American patio. The existence of shashlyk is irritating in one sense because it proves that the local cuisine can marinade meat, yet they insist on boiling it in every other instance. (Note to my mother: if I see boiled lamb in my first month back in America, I am leaving for another two years).

(Shashlyk in action. It's always cooked this way -- a wood fire is made in the far end and the hot embers are slid down the chute to cook the meat.)

Despite the rain, we managed to light a good fire and successfully cooked everything. Ultimately, the rain shower was welcome because it drove away a Vietnam-like number of bugs that must have recently hatched. Free from the pestering of insects, we demolished round two of this Kazakh picnic as the rain subsided. Following the food, the teachers beckoned to us to follow them into the woods, which is how I ended up drinking vodka while standing in a distant forest in the rain with a bunch of middle-aged Kazakh schoolteachers. If that's not Peace Corps in a nutshell, I don't know what is.

(Raw, wet, late spring weather followed us home.)

Soon after, we began the epic task of cleanup and eventually boarded the bus once again. The ride back to Zhezkazgan was a sleepy one for everybody, especially because the trip lasted 13 hours in total. Seeing Ulytau was a fascinating experience for me. While I did not get the chance to wander around the town, it was by far the most isolated human place I have ever been in my life (yet we got great cell phone service, welcome to the 21st century). It was life at its simplest, far away from the bustle and worries of the larger world. Of course, it is easy to romanticize village life. Those volunteers who live there day in and day out and who eat beshbarmak every day might have a slightly different take.

Казахская Свадьба! (Not Just Any Wedding)

2009-06-13T06:49:00.001-04:00

It has been a long time since I have written a blog post, but I am finally settled in my apartment which is never a simple process. C'est la vie in Kazakhstan.

(Proud parents await the official ceremony)

As I wrote earlier, about a month and a half ago, my host sister Sania got married. Coming into the wedding, I had no idea what to expect. The routine, the traditions, the ceremonies, and the general atmosphere were all a complete mystery to me. I could have dug deeper when asking my host family about the proceedings, but the family stress level was palpable. Some things in Kazakhstan are best experienced without any prior knowledge of what is supposed to happen, anyway.

(The couple during the civil ceremony. I'm not sure exactly what was said, because it was all in Kazakh.)

The classic image of an American wedding is that of the bride gliding down the aisle to the altar. This defining moment is not shared by Kazakh weddings. At around 3:30pm on a Saturday, we proceeded directly to a government office located about five minutes from our apartment. We waited in the hallway, collecting more family members, as another wedding was being performed in the main room. When it was our turn, we entered a modest room with a large desk and a huge sky-blue flag of Kazakhstan on the wall. This was the civil ceremony and was attended by a small group of about 30 family members. The best man and the maid of honor attended Sania and Kuanysh as papers were signed and the marriage was official.

That was quick.

(A quick dance.)

The Kazakhs clearly prefer to get the paperwork out of the way in order to clear the rest of the day for celebrations. In this case, the ceremony took about 20 minutes, although in reality it was simply the prelude for what ultimately became a 13 hour journey.

After the marriage ceremony, we went outside and waited in the blustery spring weather for the newlyweds to emerge. Kuanysh came out carrying Sania and swept her into the backseat of the first of seven waiting cars, all adorned with flowers and balloons. The best man and the maid of honor joined them in the first car while the rest of the wedding party filed down the street to the other cars. (Note: I don't know exactly what the 'best man' and 'maid of honor' are called here, but their roles are a little different. There were no extra groomsmen or bridesmaids).

As the celebrations continued through the day and into the night, the initial ceremony felt more and more like mere paperwork that had to be dispensed with. Our procession of cars left the government building and sped down the street, horns blaring and streamers flapping in the wind. When we reached the widest boulevard in Zhezkazgan, the cars began weaving between each other. My car would occasionally sidle up to another with windows rolled down and the guys in the back seat would clink their shot glasses together. Seeing that the vodka was already flowing at 4pm of what I knew would be a marathon of a day, I did my best to avoid doing a shot a minute. However, when it comes to drinking, locals are not accustomed to taking no for an answer.

(A quick candle-lighting ceremony at the local museum. What does the fire symbolize? Eternal love? I don't know -- your guess is as good as mine.)

As per Zhezkazgan tradition, the entire afternoon and early evening was spent traveling to a number of different local spots to take pictures and drink vodka. The first destination was the local history museum, where we took pictures and wandered around for a short while. After 15 minutes, everybody piled back into their cars and we drove to the neighboring town of Satpaev. While Zhezkazgan has a mosque of its own, it is rather dingy compared to the one in Satpaev. There was a minor catastrophe when, upon arrival, we realized that we had lost the car that was transporting the parents of the bride. Somehow, there had been a miscommunication and they had driven to the Zhezkazgan mosque! While missing the religious ceremony of their daughter's wedding might seem traumatic, the parents seemed to be only slightly bothered by this. I suppose that gallivanting around in cars while soaked in vodka is a young person's game -- we were only a party of 30 or so people, whereas dinner would be the true climax of the wedding.

(The mosque, which is located right across from the Russian Orthodox Church. Apparently they made sure that the minaret was slightly taller than the steeple.)

Following the trip to the mosque, we sped out of Satpaev and proceeded to skirt around Zhezkazgan to the airport, located a few miles outside of town. The airport is apparently the anchor of the "Zhezkazgan wedding tour". There are only daily flights to Astana and Almaty, a fact which lent the Zhezkazgan airport an air of importance about on par with the airport in West Lebanon, NH. Nonetheless, I had never seen the airport. Naturally, more pictures were taken although the strong wind and the cool spring air drove many back into their cars. The rest, of course, tossed down a few shots and champagne.

(The gang poses for a picture before running back to the cars as soon as it was taken. No, Kazakhs still have not gotten used to the wind around here.)

On the way back from the airport we stopped at a massive "ZHEZKAZGAN" sign overlooking the city. The standard pictures were taken and the newly-minted husband performed a tradition of tossing a champagne bottle in the air. Whether the bottle shatters on the ground determines the gender of the couple's first child. Of course, the bottle broke, but since it was never made clear to me which outcome meant girl and which outcome meant boy, I'm still holding my breath.

(Boy or girl?)

The final stop on the grand tour was in the main square in town. We took another round of pictures, but most people were too cold to stick around for more than a few token moments. We quickly retreated to the cars and finally drove to a restaurant.

(Satpaev Square in Zhezkazgan. Satpaev, by the way, was a Kazakh scientist who discovered most of the copper in this region.)

Restaurants in Zhezkazgan seem to thrive on wedding parties and the like. There is not a terribly strong culture of dining out, but families spend what I can only assume to be a ridiculous amount of money on big occasions such as these. A head count was impossible, but there were easily 200 people spread out among long tables. Like with most formal Kazakh functions, the routine was very standard. A hired emcee ran an agenda that included the formulaic games, music, and occasional dancing. All through the night food was brought to the tables and many people stood up to give toasts. And of course, there were pictures.

(The Scene as we entered)

(The table of leading dignitaries...and I want to stress that those are only the appetizers.)

(The four sitting at the main table would always stand as they listened to each and every toast throughout the night. Toasts play a much bigger role in Kazakh and Russian culture than they do in American culture. A regular dinner party will have many. A wedding... well, there were plenty.)

(Lord knows it wouldn't be a wedding without beshbarmak.)

(A better view of the whole room)

(The cake, which pretty much nobody ate because it was late and you can only be at a Kazakh dinner party for so long.)

(Yes, that is a Yulia Tymoshenko bobblehead on the vodka bottle. Tymoshenko is the Ukrainian prime minister and Princess Leia lookalike. Seriously she's got the hair. I want my George W. Bush bobblehead tequila bottle!)

The scene at the restaurant dissipated at around midnight. A long day of fluctuating between various levels of inebriation is the sort of thing that kills me and I was very ready for bed. This naive optimism was quickly dashed when it was announced that "молодёжь" -- the young people -- would all be heading to a night club. This was fun for a while, but I was a complete zombie by 4am. Thankfully, we left around 4:30 and I fell asleep before my head hit the pillow.

The wedding was an interesting experience. At its core, it was not drastically different than an American wedding, although it was hardy the same thing. In truth, the wedding seemed to follow the exact same format that every large formal party follows, but with a pre-party and a post-party. I suppose it simply would not be a Kazakh event if it did not involve the дастархан, the enormous arrangement of food that leaves almost no empty space on the table. It was a fascinating experience, but not one I would want to do every weekend!

Moving!

2009-05-12T00:12:00.002-04:00

The last few weeks have been hectic. After spending my first six months in Zhezkazgan with a host family, it was time to move out on my own. That's a daunting task for a foreigner with language issues and no knowledge of how one finds apartments in Kazakhstani cities. Fortunately, a local friend helped me out and found a number of available apartments. I moved a few weeks ago and ever since I have been struggling to track down random kitchenware, sanitary supplies, random spices, and everything else. Fortunately, my friend supplied me with a small collection of plates, forks, spoons, and of course a teapot -- absolutely no knives, however, because a Kazakh under no circumstances can give a knife as a gift. To give somebody a knife is apparently a very antagonizing gesture; I have also heard that it is acceptable to steal knives from the homes of others. I have not seen that in practice, nor do I hope to see it first-hand.

The move to my own apartment has temporarily cut off my internet access -- Kazaktelecom moves at its own uniquely glacial pace -- which is why I have been remiss in updating this blog lately. However, I plan to write about my host sister's epic wedding and a few other topics as soon as I can!

Kokpar and Carnivores

2009-04-17T05:26:00.000-04:00

Shymkent has a longer history than any other major Kazakhstani city, nearly all of which grew out of 18th and 19th century Russian forts. Since the city is located in the far south, it had more historical connections to the Silk Road khanates and emirates based around cities like Bukhara, Samarkand, and Kokand, whereas nomadic regions in the rest of Kazakhstan urbanized much later. This distinction is made clear by the architecture of Shymkent. While not spectacular, it clearly lacks the level of Soviet influence that can be found in 20th century concrete creations like Karaganda.

Shymkent is fairly infamous in Kazakhstan and is frequently referred to by its nickname, "Texas". It is located in the heart of the most conservative and tradition Kazakh region in the country. The city has a reputation for violence and machismo, although in my brief experience all the locals were quite friendly. Deserved or not, its notoriety is such that my host sister refuses to travel there for fear of being bridenapped. In any case, Kazakh guys are rather territorial about their women, so keeping your distance from Kazakh girls would probably eliminate about 80% of potential problems in Shymkent.

(The Shymkent Hippodrome)

From a mental standpoint, Shymkent was a huge breath of fresh air. The city was in full bloom, which was a welcome sight after the frozen bleakness of winter in Zhezkazgan. The bustle of people out and about, the green grass growing in parks, and the leaves that had appeared on trees were practically a novelty to those of us who came from more northerly climes. For most, the main draw of Nauryz weekend in Shymkent was the rare pleasure of socializing with real, live Americans. That was hardly the only appeal to the trip, however -- on Nauryz itself was the fascinating display of traditional Kazakh sports.

(Some guy spending his holiday getting a good whipping while on horseback)

On Sunday we awoke to a dreary sky and the threat of rain. Nonetheless, by late morning we made our way towards the outskirts of the city and the local hippodrome. While there was indeed a large horse-racing track, the stadium itself consisted of bench seating built into the side of a hill. Above the seating was an endless row of food. Plov, doner kebabs, shashlyk, and well...not much else, but there was plenty of those three. On the field there was a series of competitions. First, was a traditional two-horse race between a male jockey and a female jockey equipped with a whip -- both in traditional dress. Essentially, the guy had to ride as fast as he could to avoid the girl's whip. In many cases the guy got away relatively unscathed due to the speed of his horse or the pity of the girl, but one poor sap got absolutely pummeled.

(Kazakhs would almost love tailgating, but the lack of table would be a total dealbreaker. It's too bad, because they do love their grilled meat -- although they don't deviate from shashlyk)

This activity gave way to a strange wrestling-on-horseback competition. Two men on horses circled each other and attempted to drag the other out of the saddle with their barehands. It sounds strange, but imagine a human thumb war on horseback. These guys were pretty tough and most of them acquitted themselves well (by my standards, at least) by managing to balance on a horse despite nearly impossible angles.

(Two Kazakhs grapple for the upper hand in a horseback wrestling match)

Finally, the horseback-wrestling crowd dissipated and gave way to the main event -- kokpar. This is a traditional Kazakh (and Central Asian) team game played on horseback. Instead of playing with mallets and a ball like in polo, they play with a dead goat carcass. Naturally. Teams would work together to toss the carcass into a round goal that seemed to be about 50 yards apart. Faceoffs are conducted by placing the carcass on the ground and guys have to swoop down and grab it without falling out of the saddle. Most of the game featured a scrum in the middle with about 10 horses running into each other as each team fought for the goat. Since the field was very large, it was tough to get a insightful view into how scrappy those scrums really were, but considering they were fighting over a dead goat, we can imagine that it would really bring the blood fever out amongst the players.

(One of many rain-drenched scrums)

The rain eventually dispersed the crowd when the skies really opened up. I hate to admit it, but I proved to be a fair-weather kokpar fan and abandoned the game after about 30 minutes. Truth be told, after the absurd novelty of kokpar, it became a little repetitive. Nonetheless, I have no regrets about spending most of the afternoon at the stadium.

(If you look closely, you'll see a man in yellow leaning down to grab the goat carcass in this faceoff)

The Pre-Wedding Wedding

2009-04-07T12:34:00.002-04:00

In Kazakh culture, one wedding isn't enough. My host sister's wedding will take place on Saturday, but according to local tradition, the celebration begins a week early. This event is roughly transliterated as a toi and it is largely like any other Kazakh party: many tables and way too much food. We sit down and eat and then we get up to dance, and possibly play a silly game. This is followed by more sitting down and eating and more dancing. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Kazakh parties are very structured and while they are interesting for cultural reasons, there is always a clash that stems from my discomfort at sitting down all the time, and Kazakhs discomfort at the fact that I might be standing.

The overarching theme of the toi seemed to be a sending-off party hosted by the bride's family. While members of the groom's family were present, relatives and friends of my host family came from Zhezkazgan, Satpaev, Karaganda, Astana, Almaty, and Balkhash. As the night drew to a close, tears were shed, and my host sister walked off with her future husband and his family. While they won't be officially married until Saturday, she is gone from our house for good. It is apparently tradition for the bride to live with her future in-laws for a week before moving out with her husband after tying the not. Living with in-laws for a week before a marriage is not the typical American's idea of a great time, but this tradition seems to be entrenched and unquestioned in Kazakhstan.

Seven hours is a long time for any social function. The toasts regress from eloquent to brief as the vodka and cognac flow. To make a long story short, in the final hour various Kazakh men tried to:

Convince me to come to Balkhash, effective immediately
Marry their daughter
Convince me that rap was actually invented in Kazakhstan

I also got a nice wet kiss on the cheek from a portly guy who seemed overjoyed at the sight of everyone and everything. I'll post pictures after the wedding next weekend.

Shymkent, Turkestan, and a Glimpse of Green

2009-04-04T00:52:00.003-04:00

(Welcome to the south. Apparently they are one-humpers in Kazakhstan when it comes to their camels.)

When we awoke on the train to Shymkent, the view out the window seemed to be of an entirely different country. Fertile green fields, blooming trees, and the mountains in the distance served as a reminder that the icy slush of central steppe was a world away. Clearly, South Kazakhstan Oblast was a far cry from the snowy, blustery weather we had encountered in Zhezkazgan only a day before.

(A view once shared by a bloodthirsty Genghis Khan. If Otrar was ever impressive-looking, Genghis certainly did a number on that.)

After spending two days relaxing and catching up with volunteers from all over the country, many of us journeyed to Turkestan, a small city located a few hours northwest of Shymkent. Our first stop was ruins of the ancient city of Otrar. Otrar emerged as a trading hub about 1000 years ago, but was decimated by Genghis Khan in 1219 and in the fashion of the Mongol invasion, the population was killed or enslaved. It nonetheless was rebuilt some years later and re-emerged as commercial center and continued its association with violent Central Asian leaders when Tamerlane died of a cold on a visit in 1405. Eventually, the city died out as the Silk Road lost importance and the irrigation system broke down. Today, all that remains is a low-rising dusty hill that has been partially excavated in a UNESCO project.

(The mausoleum of Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi in Turkestan)

After wandering through the grounds of Otrar, we once again boarded the bus and headed to the city of Turkestan. The ride through this section of the country was just as flat as anywhere else, but this region seemed to be slightly arable, unlike the arid central steppe. Turkestan was a sleepy town outside of the bustle around its main attraction, the mausoleum of Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi. Yasavi was an important figure in the spread of Sufism in Central Asia and one of the earliest known poets in a Turkic dialect in the 12 century. His mausoleum was built by Tamerlane at the end of the 14th century.

(Attractive architecture in Kazakhstan? Who knew?)

Turkestan is really the only place in Kazakhstan with much religious history. In fact, the nomadism of the steppe combined with the regions proclivity for earthquakes has left little visible history at all. I was glad to see the city while I had the chance. The Turkestan trip, however, was merely a prelude for Nauryz festivities in Shymkent.

Striking South

2009-04-01T08:43:00.003-04:00

During the last two weeks, Drew and I logged over 60 hours of travel time on trains and buses in a big loop through southern Kazakhstan. The occasion was a confluence of two events. Nauryz, a major Kazakh holiday, was immediately followed by a Peace Corps conference in Almaty. For years, volunteers in Kazakhstan have taken advantage of this and organized big gatherings in Shymkent, the hub of southern green belt. Shymkent, Kazakhstan's third city, is considered to be the most Kazakh city in the country. Since it lacks both the cosmopolitan nature of Almaty and Astana and the Soviet feel of places like Karaganda, I am apt to agree.

Unsurprisingly, the journey itself was just as interesting as the destination. In order to save time, we decided to take the vaunted Zhezkazgan-Kyzylorda bus. If you look at a detailed map of Kazakhstan, you will see a road spanning the 450 km between these two cities. To be clear, this is a "road" and not a road. In addition to the horrified warnings issued by locals about this bus, I had plenty of other evidence to know what awaited us. The ride itself didn't disappoint.

(The guys on the bus while the girls were using the "bathroom". By that I mean they were going behind the bus for privacy and peeing on the road. Sometimes, it's good to be a guy.)

As we left at 8am on a Wednesday morning, a light snow was falling in Zhezkazgan. Since I chose not to bring my heavy coat to the sunny south despite the desperate pleas of my host family, this was a little unpleasant, although the bus itself was warm enough. This bus was not a regular charter bus, but a 70s-era Soviet claptrap that looked more or less like a miniature grey schoolbus that was held together with duct tape, string, and prayers. We were very concerned by the fact that we could only buy tickets on the day of departure, but fortunately this was not a problem as there were only 12 passengers out of a possible 16-18.

(The view was pretty consistent the whole way)

There is nothing between Zhezkazgan and Kyzylorda. For about 450km, there are no cities, no towns, and no villages. There are only a handful of what can only be described as homesteads. It must be a bleak existence, so far from anything; these dwellings must be among the most isolated in the world. There is little traffic on the road and by my judgment we passed only about 10 vehicles going in the other direction. However, that's not to say that the few residents in the area can't create a commercial opportunity from the road. About three hours before we arrived in Kyzylorda, we stopped at "the cafe". It's a hell of a place -- five or six outbuildings with goats wandering here, there, and everywhere.

(The "cafe". It's a lot nicer inside than it looks, seriously. I also highly recommend their goat lagman soup; additionally, the vodka that they served was honestly the smoothest I have ever tasted. Go figure.)

For almost the entire 10 hours we were on the bus, we were bouncing around like pingpong balls. For the first few hours the bumpiness was curbed by the fact that the road was frozen solid, but as we progressed south, the ice gave way to mud and the conditions worsened. For a few hours the driver was literally weaving back and forth across the road, avoiding lumps of mud, in what had essentially become an obstacle course of dangerous ruts. Right about halfway through the trip, we had a small problem:

(An unfortunate situation when you are about 200 miles from the nearest town)

The bus got stuck in a rut and went over the embankment into the snow. Fortunately, the ditch wasn't deep enough for us to flip, which would have made the story significantly less funny. In all, it took us about 30 minutes to get the bus back on the road. The process involved shoveling snow out from under the bus, ripping up shrub brush to use as traction under the tires, and then pushing. We pushed the bus away from the road to flatter ground, where it could slowly turn around and pick up enough speed to get over the embankment. Thankfully, it was simpler than we initially anticipated -- the guys on the bus worked with an efficiency that suggested that it wasn't the first time they've dealt with such a problem.

Upon our evening arrival in Kyzylorda snow was falling once again, which I found disconcerting, but fortunately it was the last snow I saw. We had planned to spend the night in the city with other volunteers, but we had made friends with a Kazakh guy and a Russian girl on the bus who were also continuing on to Shymkent, so we took a late train. In classic Kazakhstan style, the train was sold out, but the Kazakh guy "knew people" in Kyzylorda and we somehow managed to procure tickets.

By 9am the next morning, our motley crew pulled into the station -- 25 hours after departure from Zhezkazgan. For the record, that's making great time.

Kazakhstan in Pictures, Part I

2009-03-13T00:37:00.005-04:00

In the American psyche, Central Asia is a mental black hole. It is such an unknown area that most people don't know at thing about its nations, peoples, or geography. At least we can superimpose a vision of a jungle on obscure African countries, whether or not that image is accurate. For Central Asia, we lack even such a generic template to kick-start our imagination.

Kazakhstan is, of course, dominated by the sub-Siberian steppe. However, it is the 9th largest country in the world; fortunately, there are a few other geographic features scattered around to distract from the endless expanse of the steppe. Much of Kazakhstan's topographic diversity is located in the southeast corner of the country where a giant wall of mountains separates the country from Kyrgyzstan and China. Fortunately, this is Almaty's region, so I was able to enjoy the mountains for a few months during before I moved to a drier, more sparsely-populated version of Kansas.

(Issyk from above)

(At the Talgar Nature Reserve....dinner springs out of the bushes??)

(The view from above Lake Issyk, the source of one of many small rivers that flow down from the Tian Shan to feed Lake Balkhash)

(The results of the most-anticipated event of PST. Zhezkazgan is a long way from just about everybody)

(Almaty. Perhaps there is a small dose of irony in Kazakhstan)

(Russian Orthodox cathedral in Panfilov Park, Almaty. Notable for being built without any nails)

(My daily route to training in Issyk. Despite the summer heat, the snow never quite disappeared from the mountains)

(Almaty's "Silk Road" pedestrian street)

(On the road to Charyn Canyon. The southeast corner of Kazakhstan is the most primal place I have ever seen. No people and few living things of any sort other than hardy grass. Just gritty land, snow-capped mountains, and sky)

(The comparisons to the Grand Canyon are silly, but the Charyn Canyon is nonetheless an impressive sight)

(I guess the river ran dry somewhere down the line)

(Despite a raw fall morning, the day turned into a beautiful one. Those mountains in the background really aren't that far from China's westernmost frontier)

Myths

2009-03-09T15:00:00.002-04:00

Every culture has its collection of folklore and old wives' tale and Kazakhstan is far from an exception. Some of the ancient wisdom that locals have tried to pass down to me has been predictable. Other tidbits have been downright strange. Still more have simply been horrifying. Sadly, I have not been able to make even a modest breakthrough in any of my many attempts to refute these tales. Intellectual curiosity is not Kazakhstan's forte.

* I discovered one of the more innocuous superstitions when I had the gall to sit at the corner of the dinner table. Apparently, my chances of getting married are now hanging in the balance. For now, that is probably a good thing, so if the Kazakhs know something that I don't, that is fine by me.

* There is a depressingly large percentage of the population who think that vodka has not one, but several medicinal uses. While I personally have avoided this misguided fate, several other volunteers have been exhorted to take a shot of vodka to cure whatever ailed them. I have also heard stories of a few doctors who routinely inject vodka intravenously as a remedy, which I sincerely hope is not actually true. Perhaps the best vodka-based panacea was the warm-vodka neckwrap that one volunteer was encouraged to wear during Pre-Service Training when she had a cough. It seemed more like an ironic advertising campaign for Absolut than reality.

* Germ theory has not made it to Kazakhstan. During the winter, you will often hear people worry about the health ramifications of an open window despite the extreme temperatures to which they heat their buildings. Many people in Zhezkazgan also have an unshakable belief that snow and/or frost "kills viruses". Not the cold, but specifically the snow or frost. In my time here, nobody has put two and two together and realized that these pet theories flatly contradict each other.

* The most stunning piece of "conventional wisdom" I have encountered in this country dates back to my time in Issyk. Another volunteer had developed a bit of a cough, which slowly worsened. His family generously suggested that they opt for the tried-and-true method of killing a dog and rubbing the fat on his chest. Of course, it wouldn't be acceptable to use one of Issyk's dozens of mangy stray dogs -- one must buy a clean one from a pet store. Dave declined the offer. It's the thought that counts!

* The Kazakh discomfort with the cold extends to drinks as well. I am an oddity for enjoying plain cold water -- although drinking buckets of cold water is a singularly American thing. When another volunteer recovered from a short illness, we went to a cafe and had a few beers. Upon his arrival back home, his family admonished him for drinking cold beers so soon after being sick, which is an entirely reasonable thing to do; except, of course, their argument was entirely based on the fact that it was a cold drink, not the fact that it was alcohol. Apparently, cold drinks give you sore throats and make you even thirstier. I don't know how I've survived the past 22 years.

What The Heck Do You Actually Do? Part II

2009-03-04T08:50:00.002-05:00

The bulk of my time is devoted to Damu-Ulytau and the Association of Family Physicians, but the scope of my work extends a little bit beyond NGOs. Most volunteers in Kazakhstan become involved with work in English sooner rather than later. For EDU volunteers, English Club is an inevitable fate. OCAP volunteers have a little more leeway in the matter, but I was sucked in almost immediately. Today, I am involved with five clubs spread out over six days. I may soon discover that I am overcommitted, but for now I am largely enjoying it.

English Club is a funny thing. Clubs generally consist of a variety of games and activities that force kids to practice their English. While they are not meant to be lessons, our interactive style and the lack of the typical authoritarian atmosphere lends clubs a radical novelty that makes some meetings feel, at times, like a social event. In truth, this is a good thing. English Club can be fun practice for language, but it is a far cry from a real lesson. For me, that's not the point.

When we introduce new games, it can be baffling to watch how much some kids struggle with them. It has nothing to do with a language barrier and everything to do with a culture barrier. More specifically, it shines a lot of light on the the differences in our cultural attitudes. Recently at our big English Club, we played a modified game of Pictionary. After several fairly standard rounds, we started giving kids absurd things to draw like 'a dancing computer' or 'a texting horse'. At first, it was a formidable challenge to get them to simply use their imaginations, but after they got over the hump, everything went smoothly.

The culture in this country is marked by very strong social pressure to conform. A dinner party at one house is a dinner party at every house. When I am invited to come 'guesting', as they say, it is invariably very pleasant, but always extremely predictable. In an insular society, people simply are not exposed to many differing methods or viewpoints in many areas. Since the vast majority of Zhezkazgan's English students will not end up using the language, encouraging them to think outside the box seems like the most efficient use of English Club time. Like any country, Kazakhstan has many problems, but here people seem to have a high level of acceptance and apathy towards them. By instilling a creative spirit into everything, I hope that I can help a few people to truly consider things in another light. Since many English Club participants are studying to be English teachers, my most immediate hope is that they will remember the usefulness of interactive learning methods in their future careers. While I do not have any illusions about the impact that a few evening English clubs could have, you do have to start somewhere. After all, Peace Corps is no place for a pessimist.

So, What Is It That You Actually Do?

2009-02-21T06:38:00.004-05:00

Instead of babbling inanely about Kazakh culture, for once I'll write about what, exactly, I am doing in Zhezkazgan.

Peace Corps in Kazakhstan currently maintains two programs: Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) and Organization and Community Assistance Program (OCAP). TEFL claims about twice as many volunteers as the OCAP program. In some ways it is a very simple program – they teach English! That does not mean it is not a big challenge and in truth it is not nearly that simple. The problems with the education system in Kazakhstan are, to be charitable, byzantine. In a school, a TEFL volunteer's task is not only to teach classes, but to train teachers. The ethical problems in schools are simply shocking, but the system is deeply engrained; each element of the system is so interconnected that it is extremely difficult to isolate and improve one area without disrupting the entire machine. It is also very difficult to be a maverick and try to implement something new when your ability to work effectively depends on personal relationships. I think I would have found life as a TEFL volunteer very frustrating and I probably would have firebombed a few too many bridges along the way. TEFL work is a long, slow process and admire those who can really get through to a group of teachers.

The OCAP program is very different. TEFL volunteers have a relatively steady flow of work. On this side of the fence, it can be feast-or-famine because each OCAP volunteer is in a very different situation. Some organizations are great and some organizations are not. Some are big and some are small. Some are busy and some are essentially vacant. That's the great thing and the terrifying thing about OCAP. There is a huge range of outcomes from our work -- so much is possible, yet it is also possible to accomplish nothing. We are community volunteers so although we are assigned to an organization, we are not chained to them and we can leave if there is no work. At least, I could because I live in a city and there are many NGOs. Village volunteers have fewer options.

In Zhezkazgan, I have been assigned to two NGOs: a health organization and another organization that is nominally ecological, but currently suffers from an identity crisis. Both are quite small and both are very different. The health NGO has an established track record and full-time employees. At the moment, we are trying to find funding for an oncology seminar for about 30 local family physicians – in Kazakhstan, doctors are not prestigious and the standard of practice is not the best. In Damu-Ulytau, the organization is the project; they are ambitious and passionate but inexperienced and unrealistic. I am planning to facilitate a project-planning and NGO management seminar to improve our organizational capacity. If the long process of building an NGO is a marathon then, essentially, my director is a pure sprinter.

Sometimes work is easy and sometimes it is a big challenge. There's nothing better than a good Russian-language strategic/philosophic argument on organizational strategy. Needless to say, it is easy for things to get lost in translation – or at least lost in the wild jungle of Russian case endings and verb aspect. In the grand scheme of things in PC-Kazakhstan, I have a good situation. I am working with two organizations who are active and who care. An apathetic organization is the kiss of death, but if there is motivation, progress can be made, no matter how grim the situation may appear. It is a process and that is why we are here for two years.

Kazakhstan in Love

2009-02-13T13:28:00.006-05:00

Last Sunday was a momentous occasion for my host family: the younger of their two daughters got engaged. The Kazakh engagement is definitely not the typical American on-bended-knee type of proposal. In fact, the engagement itself is a long, planned-out party. The whole process felt more like Sonia was getting engaged to her boyfriend's family rather than her boyfriend himself, a feeling that was fueled by the fact that the groom-to-be wasn't even present! It's tradition, I'm told.

(Sheep's head is one of the most notorious delicacies in Kazakhstan. Thankfully I wasn't deemed important enough to partake.)

The festivities began around 3pm in the afternoon in the same fashion of every social function in Kazakh culture. The guests came and everyone took their seat around the table and began tucking in to the disconcertingly huge piles of food heaped everywhere. My host mother then brought out several huge platters of beshbarmak, the Kazakh national dish. Kazakh women seem to gain a great deal of personal satisfaction by exhorting me to eat as much as I possibly can. The only way to cope with such a gastronomic onslaught is to leave something, anything, on your plate. This method works nicely for me because that "something" is usually the huge mess of horse fat, tendons, and arteries that inevitably sneaks onto my plate. While that may be appealing to some people at the table, I call that killing two birds with one stone.

(One of many heart-felt toasts, I'm sure, but I wouldn't really know because everything was in Kazakh)

The whole event lasted about six hours, which for me is pretty intimidating. Kazakhs are perfectly content to sit around a table for hours on end, but I became unbearably restless by the end of the third hour, especially because all conversation was in Kazakh, except for my toast in Russian. Fortunately I had home-field advantage and I was able to wander around the few other rooms in the apartment to stretch my legs. This also served a dual purpose because I was able to keep my soon-to-be-engaged sister company while she wasn't allowed in the dining room! While the two extended families were meeting each other for the first time, Sonia was biding her time in the next room. Eventually, her older sister brought her into the room to officially meet all of her in-laws.

Instead of a ring, the engagement was made official by two earrings, a gift from the groom's family. After this little ceremony, everybody stayed for another few hours. A few hours and countless bottles of vodka and cognac later, the visiting family finally departed.

(A proud father makes a final toast)

The wedding is in early April and that should be really interesting. Sheep's head for everybody! Hopefully the groom will show up for that one.

There's Trouble In Paradise

2009-02-05T12:48:00.002-05:00

The economic crisis officially hits Kazakhstan.

I'm not well-versed in macroeconomics, but this comes at a very unfortunate time for Zhezkazgan. The Kazakhmys corporation was laying off miners and limiting the hours of others before this even happened. The devaluation of the tenge has already led to some price increases in stores here, which is unfortunate considering the declining incomes and unwise spending habits of many families here. From what I can tell, saving money isn't very popular and most people seem to live paycheck-to-paycheck even when times are good.

At least takes a whole lot of pressure off the Peace Corps Kazakhstan budget...

Hot and Cold

2009-01-26T05:56:00.002-05:00

People often ask me what surprised me the most about Kazakhstan. It's a hard question to answer because I came to this country without finely crafted expectations and after five months here, some of the strangeness has already faded into normality. There is, however, one thing that I still haven't come to terms with on a deeper level.

Culturally, it was hard to know what to expect. Weatherwise, it was not hard to know what to expect. With the exception of the milder southern belt, winters are brutal across the country. I was sure that I would be among a sea of hardy Kazakhs, laughing in the face of -20 F and wind. I couldn't have been further from the truth. Everyone in America has a friend who is always freezing, no matter what -- and in Kazakhstan, everyone is that person. Every building in Zhezkazgan feels like a furnace and people love it.

As wimpy as Kazakhstanis are (this attribute is universal and runs across ethnic lines) in the cold, the local population displays an inhuman tolerance for heat, which is why they will probably have the last laugh come the summer. On trains, in house, on buses, and everywhere else people can be seen luxuriating beneath mounds of clothes and blankets despite the stifling oppressiveness of the air -- all the while downing cup after cup of piping hot tea. I dread summer traveling because the trains are hot and stuffy enough in the dead of winter; in warmer times I expect sleeping to be nearly impossible for us colder-blooded Americans.

During Pre-Service Training we were told that heating in Kazakhstan can be iffy in the winter, which is the most utterly untrue thing I have been told by Peace Corps to date. Maybe Zhezkazgan is an exception -- most village homes are heated by coal-fed pechkas, so their warmth likely fluctuates depending on the diligence and determination of their occupants. While it's possible that this is simply a Zhezkazgan thing, I suspect that it's common throughout Kazakhstan. I think it must be because people here have no conception of, on a global scale, how warm their homes are or how bland their food is. I think it's safe to assume that there's a different scale for many things when a red bell pepper is viewed as the mother of all spicy foods.

A Very Kazakh Christmas

2009-01-20T22:50:00.002-05:00

I didn't know what to expect Christmas to be like in Kazakhstan. Kazakhs are Muslims and Russians are Orthodox Christians, neither of whom celebrate Christmas on December 25. Furthermore, Russian or Kazakh, this country is possibly the most secular I have ever seen -- Islam is very weak in Central Asia except for Uzbekistan. Nonetheless, the locals here know not to waste a good religious holiday and at the very least, they become family gatherings.

Christmas was ignored by many, but some people took advantage of the opportunity to throw a bit of a party. People don't understand much about Christmas here -- in fact, many people believe that the name of the holiday is "Merry Christmas" and asked me what one says on "Merry Christmas". "Do you say 'Happy Merry Christmas?'" Furthermore, most people think that Jingle Bells is the official song of Christmas and is the main carol. I've heard the techno version so many times that it became painful.

For the three volunteers in Zhezkazgan, Christmas amounted to a series of parties. Parties here are a lot different and first and foremost they require structure. Here, structure means a seat at the table and a well-defined agenda. Kazakhs hate any sort of mingling and generally become extremely uncomfortable when forced to do so, especially at a party where not everyone knows each other. Parties here generally consist of a big dinner with several courses interspersed with various dancing sessions and other games. Among other things, I've been to a party during which I was forced to wear a diaper and later was eating apple slices off of my sitemate. Yes, things can get weird. At our main Christmas party, we were surprised to be thrown without warning into a dance contest, so we did the best we could. Dancing all the time here has already become a norm so we didn't think twice about it.

On Christmas Eve my sitemate Drew organized a small Christmas festival at his school. It largely consisted of songs, skits, and a few games. To sweeten the deal for the kids learning Christmas carols, we promised to perform a traditional Kazakh dance. One of the younger girls tried to teach us but we proved to be poor students. Nonetheless, we did our best and this haggard performance was luckily our best execution:

The 21st Century Peace Corps Volunteer

2009-01-17T02:35:00.002-05:00

Life in Kazakhstan provides for plenty of reading time. Thirty hour trains, bad Russian television, and the familiar comfort of the English language have driven me to read a lot more than I did living amidst all the distractions of America. One of the books I have recently read is Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. His premise is that over the past 20 years, a variety of technological advances and historical developments have combined to create a much more globalized economy in which a person's ability to find work and reach their potential is no longer handicapped by geography.

Ironically, the land of the steppe is not a particularly “flat” country. Cities such as Astana and Almaty are Westernized to a certain extent and connected to the global community. Outside of the big cities, however, everything immediately becomes more insular. In Zhezkazgan, I can read about financial crises, political happenings, and foreign affairs but everything feels very remote and slightly surreal. Nonetheless, even in this hidden corner of the world, we have telecommunications companies and DSL. It may take weeks of processing paperwork, but technology has a way of inexorably, if slowly, marching into even the most obscure and esoteric locales.

I didn't quite envision typing away on a DSL connection in the comfort of a sub-Siberian apartment when I applied to Peace Corps. It certainly does not fit the Peace Corps paradigm of a mud hut on the banks of the Volta or a hammock on a far-flung Pacific isle not seen since Captain Cook set sail. It is a different experience with a different set of challenges. Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteers can suffer from “close but no cigar syndrome”. Physically, Kazakhstan doesn't look incredibly different from America. Apartments, cars, groceries, Snickers bars, even barbershops are similar. The culture, however, is very different and this dissonance can be very frustrating and it inevitably wears on even the hardiest Westerner. I'm sure every single Peace Corps volunteer in Africa would roll their eyes at me. Of course, it's doubtful that more than a handful of them would ever be able to read this...

In any case, having a solid internet connection will allow me to post photos and videos of my trials and tribulations here, which will hopefully make Kazakhstan easier to visualize and less of a murky concept.

Rumblings From The Heart Of The Steppe

2009-01-07T02:15:00.005-05:00

Zhezkazgan is located in the center of the most desolate region of the Kazakh steppe. It is about equidistant between the larger cities of Karaganda (511km by road ENE) and Kyzylorda (428km SSW). Zhezkazgan and its smaller neighbor Satpaev owe every ounce of their existence to the discovery of copper many years ago. If, as rumored, the copper runs out in the near future and the Kazakhmys corporation leaves, the future looks very bleak. If no economic alternative can be found, Zhezkazgan will suffer from crippling unemployment and will face a mass exodus of its population. In 30 years it is possible that Zhezkazgan will exist only as a ghostly village trapped in the withered shell of a city designed to house up to the 150,000 people of its heydey. Zhezkazgan is currently home to only about 100,000 people; it has already been slowly bleeding population. However, all is not yet lost. Everybody in the city is keenly aware of an ominous future looming just beyond the horizon even if some prefer not to talk about it. Some way, somehow, a solution may be found.

I have a map of Karagandinskaya Oblast – the center of Kazakhstan – which makes Zhezkazgan's isolation even more clear. The Ulytauski region, which includes the entire western quarter of the oblast except for Zhezkazgan and Satpaev, can claim only 16,600 inhabitants spread throughout a handful of tiny villages. You could leave Zhezkazgan in almost any direction and travel for hundreds of miles without seeing any sign of human existance. There's a reason why the Soviets built their Baikonur space facility nearby.

In such isolation, it's become easy to equate life in my city with the rest of country. If that's a mistake in any country, it's doubly so in Kazakhstan. The climate, geography, ethnicity, language of choice, and even some major cultural characteristics can vary wildly from region to region. It's essential to travel – judging Kazakhstan from life in Zhezkazgan or in a village would be just as silly as drawing conclusions about the country from a comfortable perch in Almaty or Astana. That's why I was glad to get out of town and spend a few days in Karaganda.

Karaganda is the capital of our oblast and feels like a whole different world. Regional capitals in Central Asian countries are not often labelled cosmopolitan, but it's all relative. To be fair, Karaganda is the fourth largest city in Kazakhstan. It was built on the back of the coal mining industry and housed an enormous gulag under Stalin's rule, which explains the large numbers of Volga Germans who once lived here (the Kazakh SSR served as the dumping grounds for many internal Soviet – and even Czarist – exiles, but most Germans have left after independence). It's also centrally located in the Kazakh railway, which is the lifeblood of the transportation system here. Because of the complete dearth of human existence in the center of Kazakhstan, there's not always any easy way to navigate across the country. All things considered, Karaganda is where I would want to be based if I had to visit every Peace Corps volunteer in the country bearing in mind there are none in the far west. That's why it was a convenient place for volunteers to reunite, relax, and vent for a little while.

My sitemate Drew and I decided to do it the hard way and took the bus to Karaganda, a decision that required us to ignore the strenuously expressed advice of every local we knew. Despite apparently being the only two people to buy tickets for the 8pm bus and being bumped, the 10pm bus was sold out and crammed. At 5'11” I'm not exactly Gheorghe Muresan, but Kazakh men trend on the shorter side and the seats were built accordingly. There's no limit to how far seats can lean back on the bus, which makes for an unfortunate bus ride when combined with the fact that common courtesy in public settings is a poorly understood concept in this country. The contrast between the enormous hospitality of the home, and the brusque indifference shown on the streets is stunning at times. Needless to stay, we didn't sleep much. Nonetheless, it was an interesting experience if only to see the numbing emptiness of the icy road. Bumping along at the most frightening 55mph of my life, the headlights illuminated the wind-whipped snow screaming across the two lanes in strange patterns. Save for a few darkened towns, the only sign of life was the occasional snow rabbit scurrying for safety.

Even though the bus saved us about five hours, we took the train back. It was worth the extra $5.

Yes, It's Cold

2008-12-24T02:01:00.002-05:00

According to the locals, November was outright balmy, and really, it wasn't that bad. In early December we transitioned to what I am used to as "regular winter", which is the 15-35 degrees F range. That too was probably "balmy". Last week the temperatures really dropped, heralding the start of the real Kazakh winter. I still haven't figured out exactly how cold it is because I have yet to see a thermometer in this country. The locals don't really care exactly how cold it is and perhaps they actively don't want to know. I suppose the novelty of -30 C wears off after the first few years.

It hasn't gotten to be too bad yet and I don't think the temperatures have fallen much below zero degrees Fahrenheit. It's only the beginning, though. And yes, mom, I am already wearing thermal underwear. All that said, I have always liked winter and I want more. -40 degrees is about where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet each other so we might as well go all the way. I was promised miserable, freezing temperatures and I'll be disappointed if Zhez doesn't pull through.

Over the last week and half, Zhez has been blanketed with frequent but light snowfall and we probably have eight inches on the ground now, where it will stay until...April? We'll see. In any case, the snow has brought out an interesting development. From what I could tell from the summer, Kazakhs were never big on baby carriages and while they exist, there isn't exactly a suburban-mom-baby-stroller convention going on here. However, they are huge on "baby sleds". I see mothers dragging their 3-year-olds on tiny little sleds everywhere. Occasionally a man will come by dragging food or other random items on a big sled. The kids here are extremely sledding-deprived here, as you might expect from Children of the Steppe. Now that there's a little bit of snow, there are scores of little embankments up to and including snowed-over steppes to "magazines" (the identical convenience stores that make this country function) have been intentionally iced over and turned into pathetic little sledding hills. Better than nothing, I guess. But if those skiiers out West think it sucks in New England, they ought to come down here.

A Sobering Thought

2008-12-15T04:14:00.003-05:00

Drinking is a serious matter in Kazakhstan. I'd say too serious. Why? They don't have drinking games. Come on!

Not everyone in Kazakhstan drinks a lot and in fact many Kazakhs do not drink at all. However, the people who drink, drink a lot. Vodka is very cheap. As my sitemate Drew says, the cheapest stuff is fouler than you can imagine, but even the mid-tier vodka here is as good as higher-end vodka in America. I am a beer guy and while the local offerings are nothing special, they are much better than I had imagined. There's plenty of both and not much of anything else except for cognac.

Getting back to the original point, I had thought that a place like Kazakhstan with its long, cold, dark winters (sunrise is already after 9am) would be rife with drinking games to make the time go by until April. Sadly, I have been disappointed. I wasn't expecting to be greeted with a round of flipcup by my host family, but still -- there are no signs of anything anywhere.

This means only one thing. It's time to bring Dartmouth pong to Kazakhstan.

Wish me luck. I can't even convince the other volunteers.

Food, Revisited

2008-12-10T07:36:00.002-05:00

A while ago I pissed and moaned about the food here. It's true that Kazakh cuisine is pretty simple and lacks much of an imagination. However, my biggest problem has become clear to me over time. As much as I hate to say it (which actually isn't that much), my PST host mother was just a remarkably awful cook. I've had all the same dishes that she cooked since I've left Issyk and suddenly they are all decent. I think I'll write short posts about individual dishes at some point because some of them are pretty different, if nothing else.

I also received the Peace Corps Kazakhstan Cookbook in the mail. It provided a good view into food & vegetable availability too. This varies based on location in the country and city size, but it's a good rough guide. There's a decent variety in the summer, but the only reliably year-round items are apples, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, onions, and beets. I think other perishables can be found in Zhezkazgan in the winter, but they come a long way in non-refridgerated trucks so they are expensive and often not very good quality.

The PC cookbook is a pretty great resource to have, albeit one that I probably won't use for a while. It's pretty hard for any male PCV to defeat the notion that no matter what he says, there's absolutely no way he could possibly know the slightest thing about cooking. Members of my family sometimes work odd hours so it's not too rare that I eat by myself. In that case, my host mother becomes direly concerned that I will starve to death and goes to great lengths to show me how to turn on the electric stove top. Come on. But at this point it's become a joke although they never can quite let go of their instincts.

While my family is fantastic in every way, the only thing I've never really adjusted to is also related to the female Kazakh belief that all males are completely worthless in any sort of domestic sense (however, Kazakh males do not go to great lengths to dispel this theory). I can't so much as wander into the kitchen without my host mother or host sister getting up, following me in and asking if I am hungry. Only once or twice have I managed to sneak off to wash a dish myself and the few times I've even managed to come close to pouring myself a cup of tea, I've been received with utter bewilderment.

This obviously isn't a big problem, but it's interesting to see how neither side has acquiesced to the other culture's gender roles. Gender roles here are definitely more clearly defined than in America, but there's still a fair amount of wiggle room should a woman choose something off the beaten path. I'll keep on fighting because I don't think I'll ever feel that comfortable being waited on hand and foot, but I'm not sure I can win.

Obama

2008-12-03T00:44:00.003-05:00

Due to the presence of Russians, there are plenty of white people in Zhezkazgan, but nonetheless the three volunteers in the city stick out like a sore thumb -- in part because we may comprise the entire ex-pat community. Our obvious foreign-ness was summarized yesterday when I went to the post office f0r the first time. I walked up to the desk in the P/O box room and said hello to the lady, who obviously had never seen me before. Instead of questioning my identity or even asking what box, she reached into P/O box 18, handed me the contents, and resumed what she had been doing, all without saying a word. Well, that was easy. According to Robert, P/O box 18 gets every piece of English-language mail that comes to the city; if it is clearly labelled for another box, it is assumed a typo and given to us anyway.

When more talkative Kazakhstanis recognize that we are foreign, which happens frequently, there is usually a pretty standard set of questions whose lack of variety is limited by our language ability more than a lack of imagination on their part. It usually goes like this:

"Where are you from?"
"What are you doing here?"
"Where do you live?"
"Do you like Zhezkazgan?"
"Obama...he's good. What do you think about Obama?"

Talking American politics is a whole different ballgame here than it is in Europe. Kazakhstanis don't have a ton of knowledge about domestic American politics in part because they don't have the same international links that European society does, but mostly because the USA does not play a huge role in Kazakhstani foreign affairs. From what I can tell, most people know that (a)he's black and (b)he's not George Bush -- but most are unaware that he's not currently president. It's an interesting exercise in psychology that he can get universal approval from a society despite that society knowing virtually knowthing about him or his policies. I think Kazakhstan is far from unique on the world stage in this respect. I'm an Obamaphile but it's still slightly troubling to see the complete lack of reasoning behind a belief.

On the other hand, it's miles ahead of what it was like on the European hostel circuit during the Bush administration - especially because I've spent a fair amount of time in Eastern Europe when American travelers were more likely to be isolated. There's nothing worse than listening to a chorus of hypocritical coffeehouse Europeans bitching endlessly about everything under the sun. I became personally responsible for every decision and action of the US government and therefore became subject to knee-jerking groupthink of the worst kind -- even though I voted for the glorious John Kerry (sorry dad). Another one of my favorite things from this period were the Canadians who, to a man, had a maple leaf patch on their packs. They called it patriotism but it was clearly the "I'm not American so please don't even start with me" patch.

In any case, in over three months in Kazakhstan, I have yet to face even mild hostility over my nationality or anything else. The people here could teach most of the world a thing or two about hospitality.

Thinking about Thinking

2008-12-01T06:25:00.002-05:00

I've heard culture compared to an iceberg several times. It's a corny analogy but it persists because, sadly, it's fairly apt. The small, visible tip of iceberg conceals and draws attention away from the vastness submerged away from sight. It's easy to identify the music, art, language, architecture, food, dress, and even customs of a culture. A more difficult element of culture to grasp is the set of values that gives rise to those visible elements of culture. And more importantly, those values that comprise the foundation of a culture are inextricably intertwined with a cultural mindset, although I believe they are distinct. Combined, they result in the everyday attitudes, beliefs, and decision-making of a culture.

Of all the things I could possibly be thinking about on the subject of Kazakhstan, I dwell more on this than anything else. The way people think here is fundamentally different from the way an American thinks and this difference can be seen on a daily basis. The way kids behave in classrooms and in English club, the way people discuss relationships, the sort of questions they ask me and all the other volunteers, all the small cultural quirks people care strongly about (SHAVE your goddamn stubble for the love of GOD!!!), and many others things that I've gotten so used to that I am starting forget they are different -- they all belie not just different cultural values, but a different method of approaching fundamental things in life.

I haven't been here nearly long enough to make any sort of dramatic proclamations about Kazakhstani society because I am still learning and I still have more to learn before I can start to digest it all and really sort it out. At the moment, I am most fascinated by the challenge of explaining concepts that do not exist here. By concepts, I am not referring to discussing the finer points of Nietzsche or something -- I'm talking about trying to explain what a suburb is. Suburbs certainly do not exist in Kazakhstan, the 9th largest country in the world despite having a population less than half that of metropolitan Tokyo. (I don't think there's a word for "metropolitan" in Kazakh, either). That's not to say that an American wouldn't have some difficulty understanding some aspect of Kazakhstan that is foreign to us, but I do believe that this culture is a little less suited to that sort of thing. It's been isolated for a long time and only now do people have the freedom and in some cases, the money to travel.

On a micro level -- in a classroom, for example -- the kids are a strange mix of unadulterated enthusiasm and instinctive reticence that I suppose is an indication of the times; the first generation to have no living memory of the Soviet Union. They show up in big numbers and most of them are quite interested in learning English. When we run activities though, it's always hard to scrounge up volunteers to participate. They know the answers, but there's some instinctual nervousness preventing them, which isn't a huge surprise considering the rigidity and authoritarianism of the school system here. The worst aspect about it, to me, is that it really drills the creativity right out of these kids. Those kinds of activities are the toughest.

--

On Thanksgiving I was invited to a class of roughly 16 year olds who were studying to be English teachers (all girls -- any boy studying to be a teacher would be run ragged by his friends). The girls put on a presentation with a short play and some games. This school has had a series of volunteers spanning six years and ending this past October and it showed. They spoke good English, but what really stood out were several things -- the no-hands-baursak (pastry-ish) eating contest and a bake sale fundraiser for a local organization for disabled children.

On their face, those things are silly and mean nothing, but they do represent a creativity and an ability to think outside the box. If you take that creativity and willingness to delve into the unknown and uncertain and apply that to teaching or to running an NGO, you can accomplish anything. America is rife with the entrepreneurial spirit and as far as business ventures, marketing, fundraisers, and gimmicks, we've seen it all and we take it for granted, but it's not like that everywhere. Part of the reason we are so good at it is because we grow up with it and we are exposed to it from the day we are born. When it's just not there, it's a fitful learning process and one that isn't always successful. After the first wheel was invented, I'm sure everyone said "I should have thought of that!". That's easy to say, but as simple as that is, it took a sort of small brilliance to conceptualize something that had never previously existed.

I don't mean to paint a picture of extremes here and I hope that I haven't because that's clearly not true. Nonetheless, Kazakhstan is a country with ambitious plans and a promising future, but at the moment they aren't quite equipped on a societal level to drag their institutions (particularly education) forward. The average American's jaw would hit the floor if they were transported to Almaty or Astana, which are thoroughly cosmopolitan cities that couldn't be any more contradicting of Borat. However, the rest of the country needs to catch up to the city elite and building critical thinking skills is the best long-term way to do it.

The encouragement of that mental flexibility -- the willingness and ability to be creative and to critically analyze something and make it better -- is one of the pillars of every volunteer's job here. Even sitting at the kitchen table with my host mother, I frequently ask "why?". The question and the answer usually make both of us think about something in a new light.

Night Sky

2008-11-26T22:50:00.003-05:00

The night sky in Zhezkazgan is not particularly notable. While the city is hardly a metropolis, there's enough light pollution to render the fainter stars invisible. It's better than a big city, worse than an extremely rural region. That is, except for last night.

I had been invited to dinner to a local English teacher's house along with my sitemates Robert and Drew. She and her husband live on the outskirts of town and while everything in Zhezkazgan is walkable, the bus is only about 20 cents. The buses here are rather small and always incredibly crowded so when Bus #3 came the three of us just couldn't fit so we decided to walk it.

As we rounded the corner, we saw a huge light in the sky. My first instinctual impression was that it was the Northern Lights, but from the way the light was shaped it was clear that it was not. Zhezkazgan is roughly the same latitude as Seattle so we aren't that far north. Quickly we realized it was a rocket launching from Baikonur, Russia's space facility located several hundred kilometers away. It was moving fast and its exhaust trail was surprisingly beautiful. White light spread out a great distance on either end of its path, narrowing towards the horizon where it also turned increasingly red. Twice we could see the support booster rockets fall down through the sky.

It was pretty cool.

I probably have cancer.

Here

2008-11-16T22:58:00.003-05:00

The train is a lot more fun with friends for two reasons. First, the time passes a lot more quickly through conversation -- even though the Zhezkazgan crew has now logged nearly 100 hours on trains in Kazakhstan. Secondly, with friends around we don't have to contemplate the sad fate of drinking by ourselves to kill time... The trip to Zhezkazgan acquired a sort of Polar Express feeling when we woke up to a moderate snowstorm south of Karaganda. While Zhezkazgan is not the North Pole, it sometimes feels like it might be soon considering it's only mid November and it's below freezing most of the time. This morning the sun rose fully above the horizon at about 8:40am and we still have more than a month to go for the shortest day of the year. Nonetheless, it's not yet cold enough to prevent people from being around and about.

One week into life as a Volunteer and so far, so good. My host family is great and thus far have epitomized the kind of legendary Kazakh hospitality. My Russian is getting better but even so my host mom has been patient and accomodating by speaking slowly and clearly which has helped a lot. The food is a lot better than in Issyk. The winter is going to be a five month long feast of borscht and potatoes, but that's really not that bad. I've heard there aren't many fruits and vegetables in the winter, but thus far the bazaar has been well stocked with the staples of Kazakhstan. Most of the vegetables they eat here are pretty hardy anyway -- potatoes, carrots, onions, beets, cucumbers.

I'm still learning the ropes with my organizations. I think there will be things to do immediately with my health organization but it will take more time with my eco organization. Unfortunately, my counterpart is in France for a while, so the only person in the office is a woman who thought I was going to be a chemical engineer, which sadly, I'm not. With my lack of high-level language skills, it will take some time to talk them into some realistic projects, but that's why they put us here for two years.

Mainly, I've been running around and meeting people. The first month is supposed to be a pretty crazy time, especially for the non-teachers because we have such a flexible job and it's hard to get in a groove when we can't speak well and don't know the organizations, town, or people very well either. It's normal to spend some time just settling in, but we all want to turn the corner as fast as possible.

On the road again...

2008-11-07T06:10:00.002-05:00

Training has finally stuttered to a fitful close. Everything was essentially wrapped up by last Friday, so this past week has been light, filled with daily trips to the Peace Corps Office in Almaty for sessions on travel logistics and some other assorted last-minute trainings. The 55 remaining trainees of Kaz-20 swore in this morning and are now officially volunteers. Most of our group is actually on a train right now, but the groups going to Pavlodar and Zhezkazgan have trains that leave at night, while the Ust-Kamenogorsk people and volunteers within taxi/bus distance leave tomorrow. The bubble of training has burst and now it's time to get down to business.

While I have been ready to leave training for about two weeks now, it's a bittersweet moment. The 17 OCAPs in Issyk grew close over three months and yes, there were some tears shed by some people as we left. I think the other training towns are similarly close. At least we'll have plenty of couches available all across the country.

The route to Zhezkazgan once again goes through Karaganda because it's not the right time of the week for the direct train. We leave at 9:00pm on Friday and we'll arrive on Sunday morning. By the time I get to site, I'll already have logged about 100 hours on a train. I think that's one of those things I'm going to keep track of over the next two years.

Doldrums

2008-11-01T00:46:00.002-04:00

Site visit was the beginning of the end, but it's reached full force now with only a week to go. I feel like we've learned all we are going to learn in training at this point and most of us are ready to move on to the real thing.

The situation has been exacerbated by what's been a downer week for a variety of reasons. First of all, the married couple in our group left to go back to America which cast a pall on everything. Secondly, the little things are starting to get to me in my somewhat bored state in the end of training. The weather is cloudy, our classrooms are absolutely freezing because we don't have heat, my apartment hasn't had electricity in two weeks, the food in my host family has made me a bitter, defeated man, we have a skeleton staff crew after a bank poached two people, technical training is going in circles, and after the language test, our Russian class has collectively lost the will to live.

In short, swearing in can't come soon enough. In reality, life isn't so bad but I think I've reached a culture shock phase in which I've become a little frustrated and irritable. It happens to everyone and in truth I have yet to have a truly miserable day.

Dog Days of August

2008-10-26T08:49:00.002-04:00

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.

Five Days in the Steppe

2008-10-22T07:00:00.001-04:00

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.

The Long and Winding Road

2008-10-15T01:49:00.002-04:00

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.

Welcome to Boiledbeefistan

2008-10-09T02:59:00.003-04:00

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.

Zhezkazgan By The Numbers

2008-10-06T08:23:00.003-04:00

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.

Жезказган

2008-10-03T03:29:00.002-04:00

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.

Doomsday Beckons

2008-10-02T06:56:00.002-04:00

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.

Biology Lesson

2008-09-30T08:50:00.003-04:00

We find out our permanent sites on Friday morning, which is less than three days from now. It's tough to guess the field in which I will find myself or whether I will be placed in a city or a village. However, I've heard from the staff that there's a decent chance I will be doing at least some work with an environmental organization. That's a subject that I would be excited about even though I don't have a ton of practical experience in that line of work. Fortunately, however, I have been furnished with a real life laboratory in the comfort of my own home.

You see, my room is beginning to develop an ecosystem of its own now that the hot summer weather has been ushered out and the cold nights of autumn have begun. At first, I was simply bothered by flies who came in with the breeze that cooled my room. Not a big deal -- my host family has a fly swatter and frankly, swatting flies is the kind of six-year-old amusement that never really wears off...at least in my case. However, as time passed and the nights became chilly, more species took refuge in the nooks, crannies, walls, and ceilings of my aging Soviet-built apartment building. House centipedes began to appear on the ceiling and then I began to hear the listless rattle of pacing cockroaches somewhere in the dark recesses of the apartment paneling. But there's good news! I kill the flies and cockroaches love dead animal material. It turns out that house centipedes are one of the leading predators of cockroaches and it also turns out that I am one of the leading causes of death for house centipedes. As long as the house centipedes kill the cockroaches faster than I can kill the centipedes, I win. At least until the next generation of bugs establish a new homeland in the lofty fastness of my top-floor apartment ceiling.

The good news is that Africa would have been much, much worse.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend? For now....

Oddities

2008-09-23T07:17:00.002-04:00

In the Russian language the @ symbol in email addresses are referred to as "sabaka" which is the word for dog. Nobody seems to know why this is the case. I can't figure it out.

I found out today that my language teacher got engaged after knowing her husband for one day. I knew that Kazakhstani dating operated on a different timetable, but yikes. To be fair, by local standards she was very old at the time of her engagement -- 28. And yes, every guy in the OCAP group is now somewhere from nervous to terrified of local women (and particularly, their families).

I get yelled at when I sit at the corner of a table because that apparently is a terrible omen for my marriage prospects. Damn.

There are two other things that I just can't understand why they seem to be exclusively the trait of English-speaking countries. First, screens. It's not like Kazakhstan doesn't have heaps of scrap metal. It would be nice to open windows without turning the room into an exact replica of Vietnam, unless you enjoy the exercise of killing 25 flies and several other large unidentified bugs.

Secondly, years. English is the only language I've run across that says "19-93" as two numbers. Why would you say "One thousand, nine hundred and ninety three" when you could simplify it so much? No wonder the Soviet Union collapsed.

С днем рождения

2008-09-18T06:52:00.006-04:00

Last Friday happened to be the birthday of both my host mother and my host brother. Exciting stuff – they get to enjoy a birthday feast, right? Not exactly. As Kazakh tradition dictates, it was my host mother’s responsibility to throw a huge dinner party for the whole extended family. My host brother chatted with the family for a little bit before slinking off to carouse with his friends, like he does seven nights a week. He’s even worse than Tim, for christ’s sake.

I arrived home from training on Friday to a madhouse. My host mother, my host sister and the eldest daughter (now married and living in the next village) were crammed in the kitchen preparing all manner of food. The living room/storage room/three person bedroom took on yet another persona and had been transformed into a large dining room. The entire apartment was sweltering with the heat from the kitchen, primarily from that titan of Kazakh cuisine, beshbarmak (literally: five fingers). And yes, everything in the picture to the right was consumed -- even the fat, which was diced and tossed into the bowl.

Before long, the guests began to arrive in an unending stream. Everybody was speaking Kazakh, which immediately rendered me the functional equivalent of a two year old, but I was at least able to squeak through with a “Hello” and “How are you?”. We’ve only had about four hours of Kazakh, much of which was spent on numbers. That will be useful in the long run and in bazaars, but I don’t think listening to someone count to one hundred in Kazakh would really get their blood flowing. However, there was one spry old babushka sitting across from me who merrily chirped at me in Russian, trying to discuss something about languages and teaching but it was a little too much for me to understand.

I’m still on the fence with beshbarmak. The meat and noodles are ok, but the Kazakhstani obsession with eating animal fat is a little too much to bear. Other than shashlyk (basically all-meat shish kebabs), they don’t use anything to spice up the meat here so it’s really bland. As far as the alcohol here, most of the trainees in Issyk have yet to throw back their first vodka shot. I think the Peace Corps staff put the fear of God into these host families and led them to believe that we were the quintessential lightweights. However, I don’t think my family drinks that much, which is more typical of Kazakh families. One of the trainees, Mike, is even doing Ramadan with his family. Observance of Ramadan is unusual even among the Kazakhs of the town though. Kazakhstan’s relationship to Islam is encapsulated by the huge post-Ramadan feast that Kazakhs celebrate even though most of them don’t actually fast. On the whole, Kazakhstan is probably more secular than the United States.

The Sights and Sounds of Kazakhstan

2008-09-07T07:59:00.005-04:00

Kazakhstan is a strange place. Every day as I walk to and from school, I see all manner of animals – cows, dogs, cats, donkeys, horses, and sheep, often eating the trash that hasn’t been set on fire at that particular moment. At the same time, I’ve lost count of the number of BMWs and Mercedes I have seen, even though our training town is about an hour outside Almaty. There are Trainees whose families do not have a flush toilet, but do have washing machines. Despite the fact that I have worn a collared shirt every day of my existence in Kazakhstan, my dressing habits are upstaged by the eight year olds walking to school in suits – seriously. These are the signs of a country in transition. People have the disposable income to buy nice cars, nice clothes, and unnecessary appliances, but the country is not yet wealthy enough to provide the kind of infrastructure that you’ll find in the United States or Western Europe. For example, the Soviets installed above-ground water pipes in parts of Almaty because it was cheaper. I’ve never seen anything like it. This kind of cheap-o solution might fly in Africa, but it is idiotic in a place with the kind of winters that Kazakhstan suffers. The cost to heat the water so the pipes aren’t frozen for five months must be tremendous.

Another quirk of Kazakhstan is the transportation system. Like any other place, they have airports, bus stations, and train stations. These are all pretty normal; what stands out is the fact that every car is a potential taxi. There are ‘regular’ taxis, but most of the taxi business is handled unofficially. You just stick your arm out as if you are hitching hiking (no thumb) and within a few minutes someone will stop. Within my town the standard fare seems to be 100 tenge (about 85 cents). It’s pretty convenient although I never need to take a taxi anywhere in town.

Yesterday we explored Almaty for the first time. We technically had been to Almaty during our first two days in country, but we did not have any time to go anywhere outside the grounds of the hotel. Almaty sprawled out more than I expected although (obviously) I was well aware that it is the largest city in Kazakhstan. The Peace Corps office in Almaty was literally miles away from the center, hidden away in a small corner at the end of a narrow alley. Apparently they are trying to move to a more convenient location, which would be nice because it will be hard to find again. The city feels rather European and yes, Kazakhstan’s largest city has its very own Tiffany’s and Cartier. We saw some of the major sites like the huge mosque and the large Orthodox church, as well as the Green Bazaar, which was a honeycomb of small stalls that seemed to go on forever. Over the course of the day we ran into each of the EDU groups who were roaming around town as well. It was nice to catch up with some of them although there wasn’t too much time to chat.

We also ran into two current volunteers. One of them was a Kaz-18 who is serving in the northeast part of the country working on developing ecotourism in the Altay Mountains and giving seminars on cabin building. He cross-country skis all the time and his town is supposed to be one of the prettier spots in the country. Who knows if that will be a Kaz-20 post, but I told Andrew that I would fight him for the spot if it came down to it… More seriously, we will find out our assignments in three to five weeks, which is a very exciting prospect.

Live from Kazakhstan

2008-08-27T08:29:00.001-04:00

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

2008-08-27T08:24:00.003-04:00

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

2008-08-19T19:00:00.002-04:00

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

2008-08-16T19:26:00.003-04:00

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

2008-08-15T22:29:00.002-04:00

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?

2008-08-08T10:53:00.004-04:00

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.