Night Sky

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

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...

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

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.