A Paucity of Cheese

Cheese is a troublesome thing. The pizzas here would be fine if they had some decent mozzarella and parmesean. A sharp cheddar would be nice, and maybe a few more exotic styles just to try from time to time. It is, of course, entirely possible that there are some really good cheeses, either imported from more bovine areas of the world or produced in the area served by the trains and rolled across the steppes in great herds of curdled milk, but I haven't found them yet, and it has been suggested that the 'cheese' that I have so far located is, in fact, not cheese at all but rather a milk derivative similar to Kraft. I remain optimistic and will continue my pursuit of cheese everywhere within a 10 minute walk of where I live, although often the assorted cheeses aren't really labeled.

Post Office Anecdote

I have missed all of November. Woe! Thus far I haven't really hit my post per week target. Nevertheless, I will valiantly continue to try.

The weather at the moment is much warmer than I was led to expect. It has been hovering around 0 degrees Celsius for a week or so, with only one day of minimal snow. My heavy faux-fur coat has been sitting unused, although we had one day of -15, which while fairly cold, still did not merit the big coat for the walk to and from school. I have also learned where the post office is, and improved my general understanding of the layout of the town.

The schedule for my school still evades my complete understanding, but my fourth form students will not have classes with me again until March, which means that I need to acquire a few more classes to make up the time, although that will probably be difficult since I think the rest of the courses are winding down for the winter break, although I don't know when that will be and suspect that it will be different for each group of students. I likewise don't yet know when the Lyceum students will end for the year, but I am told they will continue for now.

You may or may not know, but Kazakhstan has a standard 6 day work week. Everyone works from Monday to Saturday, including students, and rests on Sunday. On holidays, however, it looks like they sometimes work on Sunday as well to make up the day they lose when they have a 2 day holiday like the 15th and 16th. It seems strange from an American perspective that looks forward to plenty of 3 day weekends.

I also have now a great deal of time to read, for which Project Gutenberg has been helpful. I am still really thrilled with my E-Reader, though I'm not sure how much I would want a stylus with it as the new model has. Also I am still waiting for the price of ebooks to descend to a reasonable level.

I search for anecdotes, but suspect my life lacks a certain pizazz. I also have only been here a month or so.

Today I went to the post office to try and get a package that had arrived. The package slip listed only the P.O Box number without any name and it was my first time trying to do something with the post office. I filled out the back of the slip and waited patiently for someone to pay attention to me, and after standing in the wrong line for a while, I managed to get the attention of one of the blue-clad workers (all women, of course). She wandered off into the back for a while, then wandered back and asked to see my passport. I showed her and she wandered out back again. The second time she returned she told me that the package was for someone else and then dismissed me from her mind. I tried, but failed, to convey that I wanted the package slip back, so after a few moments, I too wandered out, saddened by the absence of a package. O great woe!

My story lacks something. Maybe I should fictionalize it. It could be a love story, or, in light of recent political events, a war story. Or both, of course, though I wouldn't want to get too ambitious. I could make it a serialized choose-your-own-adventure for my readers, like the Ctrl-Alt-Del comic.

At any rate, things are still going well, though I have misplaced a galstock, or tie. My green one specifically and my light blue ties look strange with my dark green shirt. Nobody has commented yet, however, and I choose to assume they are too overwhelmed by my obvious competence and self-assurance.

Wrapping up in the South

Hello everyone!

I am told that it is snowing in Petro already, but I have purchased a large, heavy coat. I am hopeful therefore, that I will be warm and happy. I may also purchase a furry hat, as I am told that they are the height of fashion in the winter. I am also told that -40 C is, indeed, very cold. It won't be that bad during my visit next week, but there should be some opportunity nevertheless to see snow at last, and hopefully walk in a snowy wood.

I am having much trouble and travail finding good yarn, which is not something I had expected. The best I have found so far is some really thin 50% wool stuff from China. It is reasonably inexpensive, and when doubled up is comparable to yarn of reasonable quality, though it will be a while before I can evaluate its warmth.

When I and my host mother came to the yarn stall, the guy behind the counter couldn't sell us anything since he was just watching the stall for his fiance. She had gone to show somebody something, and we expected her momentarily. We ended up waiting for 15 minutes or so for her to return, but I did get a reasonable price on the yarn.

Time is still compressed. Going now.

My phone number is 8777 165 1439. I am not charged for incoming calls, though of course it is quite a long-distance call for all of you. Please keep in mind the time difference. I get up at about 7 here, and go to bed at 10 or 11.

The end draws near!

I now know my permanent site in Kazakhstan. I will spend the next two years in Petropavlovsk, which used to be the most northern site in Kazakhstan (and possibly the world) until this year when there is a new site thirty kilometers closer to Russia than I. It apparently has excellent cheese and is a major producer of pasta and grain products. The soil of the steppe is very rich and the whole area was and remains the breadbasket of the region.

I have already bought a doublonka, which is a heavy Russian coat that goes to my knees. I think it is fake fur, but you never know. I paid 12,000 tenge in Baraholka, which is the largest bazzar in Kazakhstan and probably the region. It is a very heavy jacket, and I anticipate that it will be very warm in the coming months. I will visit Petropavlovsk at the end of next week, and will take a 33 hour train ride to get there, much like traveling from California to Oregon. If I miss my stop I may be in trouble since the train goes from Petro to Russia, for which I will not have a visa.

Baraholka was an experience, although not as terrible as I had feared. It is really big; I only saw a small part of it when I was there, but the but took 30 minutes to crawl out of the parking lot. Traffic efficiency is not well developed. I am actually in the internet cafe writing this so it needs to be short. I will try and add some anecdotes to my next post, hopefully on Monday.

Internet at Last!

Limited time, I'm afraid, but hopefully (again) I will today have an opportunity to post this backlog of text. Our community project ideas have distilled down to two--a fitness day, which has the benefits of being able to reach a very large number of people and requiring the very limited funds that we actually have, and expanding the internet access of the Russian school to more than the one computer. We shall see how matters progress.

It is possible (edit: I will be going) today that I will go to Almaty this afternoon to see the Kazakhstanian Orchestra play. I am told that the tickets are about 500T, which is about 4.5 dollars, and we are told that the orchestra is very good.

I taught my first class portion on Wednesday, and it went very well. The students all participated and seemed to enjoy my presentation. I also had two hours of prep for an English test they have called the Olympiad (possibly spelled differently, and presumably in Cyrillic). The first time I had 8 girls, who seemed to enjoy the activity, and the second time I had two girls, though it was a Friday afternoon. Now I have a copy of a practice test for the exam, so I will design some appropriate activity focusing on that specifically. I will also teach at least two hours next week, and I am hopeful that things will continue to go swimingly.

TTFN

No Internet

The internet cafe was, in fact, out of commission before, and I ended up with a shortcut to this file on my flash drive rather than the file itself when the group went to Almaty and the Peace Corps Office. Almaty was very busy and had a lot of people. The green bazaar had lots and lots of people. It also had a huge selection, though most of the stalls were very small, and each had it's own shopkeeper. I bought a copy of Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox (I think; I haven't translated the title yet.).

I also failed to find yarn, though others in my group recall seeing it. I tried to ask directions but was unable to find the necessary stall. I retain hope that next time, or when we visit the even larger bazaar outside the city.

First Day of School!

Unless the internet cafe is out of commission this evening, I will actually post this today. I now have a cell phone and can distribute the number to interested persons. I still like the bread. I don't have much to say at the moment. Doot. Doot. Doot.

Monday was the Day of Knowldege and the first day of school. We volunteers introduced ourselves in Kazakh and Russian. (As an aside, I just saw a cow walk in front of my window. For the last few days I've been seeing some crowds and a donkey cart.) There was a ceremony where the principle (here Director) spoke and they had the top students parade with the Kazakhstanian flag. They also had some of the older students escort the new students to their place in the crowd. it was very nice. At the end everyone went into the school for their first classes.

We also today had our first overview of community projects. We will need to figure out what the community here in our training site wants, and how we can provide it in the next 5 weeks. We will also start class observations tomorrow. Borsh yesterday and today for lunch.

Summary

I was going to post this on the 29th using the computers and internet connection our school has generously allowed us to use. It turned out to be a bad day to use the internet, however, and the posting was postponed. I may just go to the internet cafe and post it there. Russian is progressing, and I think I successfully conveyed to my host family that I would return at 8pm on Friday. Dinner is very late here, generally 8 or 8:30. I think I have also managed to say that I will be going out with friends tomorrow (Sunday) at 9am, and expect to return by noon or 1, I'm not sure which [chas] means, and I haven't looked it up recently. I will be with a REAL PCV (I'm merely a trainee) so she will have a cell phone with which to advise my host family if I will, in fact, be later than I had thought.

We will be going to the nearby bazzar. My host mother took me there today as well, so I got to have an initial experience of the place. I hope to get as much practice as possible before I am called upon to use this edifice or ones like it on my own. It is very large. I haven't seen one as large in the US, and I think it may be larger than the one I saw in Rome, though I can't remember the name of that one. This bazzar is also permanent; it opens every day. While I don't think we can buy anything here, there is certainly a huge variety of things, and the selection of food is quite wide. I wish I had my own kitchen that I could stock.

The one thing that I didn't see was olive oil although they have a huge variety of vegetable oils. They seem mostly to have sunflowers on the container, and I am told that they are brands from the general area: Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, etc. I did see what looked like arborio rice, however, which I found heartening, and they have spiniach, though I didn't see it yesterday, so I will probably make a spinach risotto at some point. I am also thinking about scones, though I will need to hunt down some baking soda.

Today we also had our first Kazakh lesson. I am told that the language is structurally easier than Russian, but has much more difficult pronunciation. So far that bears out. The language itself is Turkic and originally used the arabic alphabet. For reasons that hadve not been presented, they changed to the Roman alphabet in the 20's or so, and then to a modified version of Cyrillic in the 1940's. At that point they also got rid of many of the more complex aspects of their language like gender. They chose to make the alphabet entirely phonetic so each character represents only one sound, unlike English and Russian where, especially for vowels, the same written character can represent multiple sounds. At the same time, there are 40ish letters, and I'm not entirely clear on the distinctions between some of them, and several are very difficult to pronounce since there the sound does not exist in English.

Much of the vocabulary of modern life does seem to be more-or-less cognate with Russian and English, so I remain hopeful that I will be able to achieve conversational fluency in Kazakh, if not total facility. By the end of this three month training period I need to achieve an Intermediate Low on the American Teachers of Foreign Languages evaluation (I might have that name wrong), which means I need to be able to describe myself and chat a little with the examiner about myself and daily life. I certainly think I can achieve that, so I will shoot for Intermediate High, which requries me to converse with moderate fluency about myself as well as some other topics of interest to me. I know some other volunteers, whom I believe had no prior Russian, were able to achieve that, so hopefully I won't now embarass myself in three months by saying I'm still a novice.

Happy thoughts nevertheless. Looking back over my previous posts, I note that I left some dangling intentions. I chose to focus on Russian during training because in speaking with volunteers and staff I was told that Russian is the more difficult language, and is more commonly spoken. They also said that most PCV's do not become fluent in both languages. I am more concerned with fluency in Russian by the end of my service than Kazakh, so I decided to let Kazakh take a back seat. I do still hope to do well, but Russian will be my focus.

The food also is fairly good. It is different from the food that I generally ate in America. In America most of my meals were influenced heavily by Italian cooking, and had limited meat, were generally pretty dry, and were able to take advantage of the very specific subsets of a given piece of food that I could buy (think boneless chicken breasts; you never really think what happens to the rest of the chicken. The documentary Life and Debt suggests that all the chicken backs and necks that the US produces are exported to the Carribean at cut-rate prices in order to get rid of them).

The food that I have been eating is generally some variety of soup with either pasta or grain, and usually some pieces of meat. There is also generally an excellent salad composed of chopped cucumber and tomoto and onion covered with mayonaise. Their bread is also excellent and served with every meal. Breakfast is generally bread with cheese and sausage. There is also a cafe on the other side of town that has neat tables on elevated platforms. You kneel or sit crosslegged on the cushions around the table. Enough for now.

I am well and we will take a group trip next week to Almaty (where there is a larger bazzar as well as actual shops), the main city in this area and the largest in the country where I will have the opportunity to purchase a cell phone. Incoming calls are free for me, though perhaps expensive for you, and I will be able to receive text messages. I will find some way to distribute the number to interested parties. If you would like my number, send an email or post here.

Terrifying!

And not in a good way. You think you understand how important communication is to you (or maybe you don't), but it is very, very discomforting to be totally bereft of the ability to understand social cues or expectations, much less have a meaningful conversation.

We finished staging earlier this week and flew to Almaty by way of Frankfurt. In Frankfurt we had an 8 hour delay because our plane's landing gear was broken. They were unable to fix it, but eventually gave us another plane that had recently flown in from Cairo, which meant it took several hours for them to turn it around and prepare it for a trip to Kazakhstan. It meant that we didn't have any time between landing/traveling to the sanitorium (hotel/conference center) and beginning our in-country orientation. Some of us got some sleep on the plane, but I don't think anyone slept well during the flight, and we were all quite tired. There was a 10 hour time difference from staging in Pensylvania and 12 or 13 from California.

We had a very nice welcoming presentation which included a song-and-dance routine by the cultural facilitators and several traditional musicians. We also had a medical briefing and suchlike, as well as an afternoon of immunizations and medical interviews. Most people also attended an optional language session which was the only opportunity to learn how to introduce ourselves before we met our host families the next day.

The morning held more policy meetings and an address by the current US Ambassador to Kazakhstan who will be retireing in just a few weeks. In the afternoon we hauled our stuff out of the sanitorium and onto a truck which dropped us off in our training villiage where we met our host families. I am fairly fortunate to have a host mother who speaks excellent English, and teaches it herself, I believe in a university. I am hoping it will make the initial transition easier than having no way to communicate other than charades.

Tomorow, Saturday, we will begin our formal training program with four hours of Russian, and I am hopeful I will be able to say, "The food was excellent!" Thereafter we will have class 6 days a week and about 6 hours a day, though some of the time will be spent on technical training or policy/medical discussions. Assuming I don't fail the evaluations, I should know my final site on October 4th.

You may note that these posts are not regular and are, in fact, backdated. Hopefully that function will work on my blog, so I encourage you to go back a bit to check out the cool posts that may have been posted at the same time as the most recent post but have been backdated earlier.

Staging Ends

This blog is public, which means that anyone can view it and post a comment at the bottom. It also means that it will (presumably) be viewed by my family, friends, potential Peace Corps Volunteers, as well as people that I work with in Kazakhstan, and administrators in the Peace Corps itself (i.e. my bosses). My posts, therefore, will reflect the presumption that the abovementioned individuals will access this blog and read its contents, at least until the last post...

I am in Philadelphia. Tomorrow we embark on our epic journey to Kazakhstan. This is not as bad as I had originally thought. We have a break in the middle, and the flights, while long, are not excessive. We also get in very late to Kazakhstan. I don't recall what time we're getting up, but getting in late and tired will probably help us all adjust to the time zone change.

I am pleased to note that I am not the only person who has not yet mastered the Russian language, and so I shouldn't be behind everyone in the language. There are about 60 of us, which is quite a few people. We look quite a cluster when in a group and I'm sure we will look like a veritable horde tomorrow in the airport with our baggage (100 lbs per person limit).

The people are very nice, and the hotel is passable, though there is no free wireless in the rooms. The food in this area is very good, and it's been a good opportunity to eat delicious food. I had sushi today, and Cuban food yesterday. My goal is to have a Philly Cheesesteak tomorrow.

I'm having a lot of trouble remembering everybody. Hopefully it won't be representative also of my ability to learn the language. At the moment I'm leaning towards a preference for Kazakh, the national language. I would like to live in the northern part of the country where the weather is not quite so hot, and the facilitators have suggested that most people leave their service fluent or at least competent in both Russian and Kazakh. I think I can do a fair job of Russian grammar on my own, and I should be able to pick up the vocabulary from daily life, but I think I would benefit from directed language study in Kazakh. It is a less well-known language, so there are fewer resources to call upon when learning it myself.

They showed us some movies today in our long sessions which inspire one to reconsider the job. For the life of me I can't remember any specifics from this morning, but that is because I have been trying to memorize 60 names. Hopefully I will be able to edit this paragraph before I have time to post it, but we shall see.

First Post!

I will likely have another post by this name when I am assigned my first post sometime in October because homonyms are amusing.

My name is Niall O'Donoghue and I have been selected as a volunteer in Kazakhstan with the United States Peace Corps. I will be working in the field of education, probably teaching conversational English in some way. This blog will be updated at convenient points during my two years of service and is intended as a way to provide some degree of edification to those who read it on life in Kazakhstan, as well as a way of sharing my experiences and impressions.

This blog is censored; it will be registered with and reviewed by the Peace Corps and to my understanding is not permitted to present a negative image of the people or the country with which I serve. For safety reasons, I believe I am also prohibited from providing specific details of location or travel plans. There are, undoubtedly, additional aspects to this of which I am presently unaware, and will certainly be apprised of during the exhaustive training program.

At present, I am in California where I will remain until Staging begins in Pennsylvania in a little more than a week. Much of this remaining time will be spent studying Russian, which is one of the two official languages of Kazakhstan, along with Kazakh. We will spend a few days in Pennsylvania, then take a two day trip to Kazakhstan.

I found it very useful to read Peace Corps Blogs when I was applying, so I'll contribute back by providing a summary of my application process:

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with my life after I finished my B.A. I did enjoy teaching, and I wanted to become fluent in a second language. Although I had studied several, I had never gotten to the point of fluency, and the last two I had studied, Ancient Greek and Latin, were quite dead. I had interest in history and international development, which are not so far apart, and so I began to seriously consider the Peace Corps as an option. I looked into it more closely and liked how it was run and so I applied in the Summer of 2006.

I had a good interview, and a very strong resume for a position as an education volunteer, and so I was nominated around October and shuffled on to medical clearance. I sat on the paperwork while I sorted myself out, having recently moved to D.C. Eventually I got back on track, scheduled the appointments, and was rejected because of an error I had missed in my records. I said "ARGH!" and rescheduled some appointments to document that it was an error, and was accepted and placed in KZ20.

My advice to future applicants: Stay on top of the paperwork and don't let it sit on your desk. If something goes wrong, find out how to fix it. The people in the office are reasonable, but have a job to do.

Hopefully this will have been the first of many (I dare say) helpful notes on my experience.