Zhezkazgan By The Numbers

This week is full of meetings in Almaty, which is a very welcome departure from the monotony of the standard PST schedule. Today the OCAP group beat our way through an hour of Almaty traffic to assemble at the Peace Corps office. It was a slow day of logistics, seminars, and flu shots, but at least we received our travel information at long last. It's a pretty diverse array of public transportation ranging from Melanie's 42 hour direct train to Aktobe to Jacob's 30 minute cab ride to the next town.

Zhezkazgan isn't nearly as far as Aktobe as the crow flies, but due to layout of the rail network here, it can be tough to reach. I had heard a million different answers to the question "How long does it take to get to Zhez?", so it was nice to find the truth at long last. The full trip checks in at 37.5 hours. I'm taking a Saturday evening train from Almaty-1 (the harder-to-reach train station, unfortunately) which arrives in Karaganda 19 hours later. At that point, I will have what will surely be a riveting five hours to spend in the train station there, which will be followed by another evening departure and a 9:15am arrival in Zhezkazgan on Monday. The timing of my return is such that there is a direct train back to Almaty-2, which is a mere 30 hours. However, I don't think I will mind the layover too much because it will give me a chance to stretch my legs and restock on food.

I think we are all excited and nervous to meet our counterparts tomorrow. Our counterparts are employees at our organizations, so they play an important role in what we do. From what I've heard from current PCVs, volunteers have quite a range of experiences with counterparts, so we all are hoping for the best. If it works out well, they will be a great resource to help you get started at our NGOs and just as importantly, help us integrate into the community. I still have little information on my environmental organization and even less on the health, so I am anxious to find out the details.

Жезказган

Site announcement has come and gone. We sat in two rows facing a map of Kazakhstan lying flat on a table with little yurts marking the 20 assignments that the OCAPs were receiving. One by one we went up and located out site, discovering where we'll live and work for the next two years.

When my turn came, I circled the table until I found myself in the heart of the steppe -- Жезказган (Zhezkazgan), an old copper mining town of 90,000 people. I will be primarily working with an environmental organization, but in an unusual situation, I'll also be working with a health association. As far as I am concerned, this is great news. I am excited to work in those fields and I'm happy to be in a place of Zhezkazgan's size, which by Kazakhstani standards is a small city. I'll have three sitemates in the city and two more in a village 20 minutes outside of town, so while I will be thoroughly geographically isolated, there will be several Americans around.

Zhezkazgan is truly in the middle of nowhere. There is a direct train from Almaty that is supposedly around 34 hours, but it only runs once or twice a week. During my site visit in two weeks, I will have to take a train to Karaganda and then backtrack to the Zhezkazgan spur which apparently tacks on an extra 10 hours. Kazakhstan is big, but it's not that big. To create travel times that long, the trains must be both very slow and stop at every podunk station across the steppe.

And Mom -- now it's time to buy a monstrosity of a winter coat. It's going to be cold and there aren't any trees to block the wind.

Doomsday Beckons

Tomorrow morning at approximately 11am local time, the next two years of our lives will be revealed to us. If that sounds a little melodramatic, it is, but Site Announcement is still a momentous occasion that has been marked on our calendars for a long time. We have had the opportunity to express our preferences, desires, wishes and concerns and soon enough we'll know what the staff's deliberation has in store for us.

I've spent so much time contemplating the vastness of Kazakhstan and the incredible difference between the north and the south and village and city that I only recently considered how site placement would work in other Peace Corps countries. A PCV friend of mine is currently in Bulgaria, a nation that is positively dwarfed by the endless expanse of the Central Asian steppe. His entire training group will be no more than a few hours from each other at all times. Meanwhile, an OCAP will likely be faced with a trip to Aktobe, PC-Kaz's farthest-flung outpost which lies a mere ~45 hours by train from Almaty.

I can't say I am too nervous right now, simply because I understand that what I think I want right now may not be what I actually want. Since we still can't fully comprehend what village life or city life will be, it's hard to be confident in my preferences. What all this means is that if I have an existentialist crisis, it probably happen months down the road and not tomorrow. I think we're all too excited anyway.

Biology Lesson

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

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

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

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.