Arrival Musings

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

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

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

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

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