I am finally back in Petropavlovsk, after a long foray in the South. Mid Service Training was fun, more relaxed and interesting than In-Service Training, which was held a few months ago. We stayed in the dormitories of a university not far from the PC office. That, coupled with a raise we all just received, made this stay more convenient and more fun than previous meetings in Almaty.
I roomed with Sven, Dusty, Adam and Chris, and generally lived it up: delicious Shashlik at a nearby café, pirated DVD's from Turkey, free-flowing beer, and loud music late into the night. The showers at the Peace Corps office are also wonderful.
On one of my last nights in Almaty, I joined a group of revelers headed for a distant Indian restaurant called "Namaste". There, I ate the most delicious dish I have so far in Kazakhstan— Thai green curry chicken. The more I think about it, the more torn I am over where to spend my last vacation days next summer. On the one hand, this is probably a unique chance to see Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and/or Russia, a region I hope to cultivate a specialty in, and which will deepen my Central Asian Peace Corps experience. On the other hand: Thailand. Right now I see the split at about 50/50.
After MST, Dusty and I rode a bus out to nearby Talgar, a village not far from my old site of Ecik, to join Arthur, a fellow PCV, at his camp. As we waited for Arthur's ride to take us up into the mountains, Dusty and I swung over to Ecik to visit our host families. As it happened, my former host father had turned 60 the day before, and a small party was in full swing when I got there. After downing a few drinks of cognac and vodka, Dusty (whose host family was unfortunately absent) and I returned to Talgar.
Art's camp was located near the Talgar River, up a gorge which I believe is also named Talgar. Art, Dusty, myself, and the additional PCV's Anson, Nora, Jose, Erin, and Crystal spent the next week teaching, playing, and hiking with 25 or so Kazakhstani youth. The "Environmental Camp" actually drew its funding from ExxonMobile, a fact I did not realize until I had arrived. Still, our compact with the Devil resulted in some wholesome fun, and I think a pretty great experience for the kids. The nature hikes were beautiful, and I will post pictures on www.flickr.com/photos/forrest.
A few highlights from the camp:
+ relay races with the campers
+ reading the new Harry Potter novel
+ frolicking with the children in a spectacularly picturesque waterfall
+ the gargantuan patches of marijuana scattered about a mountain near the camp. Not that we partook; they were just fascinating in their immensity.
+ building a makeshift dam in the fast flowing river with Anson, Dusty, and Art
+ frequent campfires and delicious S'mores
+ PCV's cooking Spaghetti the last night, providing a break from the daily fare of potatoes, noodles, and beef broth.
+ Watermelon
So that was the last of my camp experiences this summer. It is already chilly in Petropavlovsk (and I am coming down with a cold) so it appears autumn is upon us.
One last, rather long item from Almaty. My friend Amar, who runs a small section of the Washington Post's website, agreed to publish one of my articles. He asked me to write a piece on how Kazakhstanis see America and Americans, which is the theme of his project (for this purpose he has traveled to England, India, Pakistan, and is set to go to Syria).
I decided I had better run this idea by my country director, so I explained the theme of the article while visiting him in his office and he told me to go ahead and write it. I wrote most of it on the train, then sent it to my director the first chance I got.
Here is his response:
Forrest,
Your article is well written and contains nothing which would be offensive to our Hosts, but and this is a big but, you can not send it for publication because it is the type of report a embassy political reporting officer would write. Publication of such an article would make anyone reading it wonder if PCVs are collecting information for reporting and make them less likely to discuss anything with PCVs - we would probable be accused of being spies, collecting information about attitudes and reporting them to Washington.
If you were a Embassy political officer, you would be expected to produce such a report, but you are a PCV and this is simply not our role.
So I regret that I must say no to publication/submission. I do encourage you to consider the foreign service after Peace Corps - they could use your talents.
John
Now, I did not realize writing my impressions collected on a train ride was espionage. Just in case it never runs on the WP website, here is the article I submitted:
There is no better place to have up-close-and-personal contact with Kazakhstanis than on a Soviet-era train lumbering across the steppe.
On this particular 31-hour journey northward, I am joined in my compartment by a 30-something Kazakh woman, a young Russian and his mother-in-law, and a pair of elderly Russians the wife a former Soviet airport director.
It’s a colorful group, with a seemingly endless stream of questions regarding my life and American life in general. Soon, the Russian man passes me a bottle of beer, as the mother-in-law breaks out the garlic-infused chicken. Generosity with food seems one characteristic all of Kazakhstan’s 100-plus nationalities (of which Kazakh and Russian are by far the largest) share.
Eventually, the talk of the young man turns to politics more specifically, of the soon-to-be-independent nation of Kosovo, and my Russian begins to fail me. It is clear that he is upset by US policy; the name “Condoleeza Rice” appears with a mixture of anger and respect (“Condoleeza Rice said it will be a new nation, so it will be,” he says with a bitter laugh). He asks me what America would do if Texas decided to secede; with my desire to be polite and inability to express complex ideas, I have to settle for a tame “That is very different”, as my response.
That opposing Kosovarian independence is a cynical geopolitical move by a Russian administration look for a chip to play in missile negotiations goes unsaid. As does the obvious point that ultra-nationalist Americans never attempted genocide on the Texans. Eventually, the young Russian brings up the subject of his wife and infant son, and the whole political-linguistic crisis passes.
This story illustrates fairly well the Kazakhstani dichotomy between pro-American sentiment on a personal level, and anti-Americanism (or more specifically, dislike of the Bush Administration) on the level of politics. While most of my compartment mates on this trip are of Russian descent, similar scenes have occurred with Kazakhs during my year here, and are echoed by the experiences of my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers.
Kazakhstan is a large and diverse nation, so it is difficult to draw general conclusions about how the population sees America. However, this dualistic trend friendliness towards individual Americans, dislike of the current US government holds fairly well.
In the predominantly Kazakh south, traditionalism creates more cultural distance from America. Yet Kazakh-language television is more focused on Kazakh culture and sculpting a new Kazakh national identity than on international politics. My old Kazakh host-mother once asked me who lived in Israel not in a low, “the Jews don’t belong there” way she honestly did not remember, and did not find the answer troubling.
In the more Slavonic north, news and other media is dominated by Russia. Here, rhetoric is more straightforwardly anti-American and anti-NATO (in a classic reversal of white hat/black hat most Americans would find amusing, NATO is portrayed as something of an Evil Empire). Many Kazakh news outlets also take their cue from Kremlim-dominated sources, but again, they do not have the same level of interest in grand geopolitical struggles, not viewing their capital as a “third Rome” or Kazakhstan as a counterbalance to American “hyperpower”.
I have never met a Kazakhstani who approved of President Bush, and to my knowledge, neither have any of my fellow PCV’s. Yet Kazakhstan, which has embraced American PCV’s, allowed Russian MTV to “corrupt” its youth, and even has it’s own “American Idol” rip-off, is not a bad place to be Western (providing you speak one of the two languages written on every sign). Our cultural and economic connections, particularly in the younger generation, are more important than the political divisions. For every drunk young man yelling “Yankee go home!” at a bar, there are a hundred well-meaning Kazakhstanis interested in working at an American summer camp or discussing David Bekham’s premiere with the Los Angeles Galaxy.
When my train journey began, one of the first things the Russian news-watching young man asked me was where I was from in America. When I replied that I grew up in Alaska, but was born in California, his response was, “Oh, Malibu… Mel Gibson and Jessica Simpson!” Thankfully, he never mentioned Paris Hilton.
Forrest Dunbar is currently an English teacher in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan
So that's it. It probably won't run, though I have appealed, offering to scrub mentions of Peace Corps and use a pseudonym. I am fairly certain he will reject me again—proving for a second time (the first was his denial of my work in Tajikistan, detailed in a March or April post) my impression of my director: a personally friendly guy, slightly duplicitous, with no vision beyond the bureaucratic machinations of his government background. And no, I am not going to be in the Foreign Service. To hell with the federal bureaucracy.
Finally, I hope to god our State Department is producing more insightful and significant reports than those of an untrained 22-year-old PCV without access to any kind of sensitive information.
До свидания
If that article ever gets published, feel free to use my name as a psuedonym (especially since it sounds like a watered down version of something a 17 year old me would write while half-drunk anyway). Also I think you oversimplified the Kosovo/Russia thing. Kosovo isn't a chip to play in a cynical game over missile defense; missile defense and Kosovo are both just mere chips to play in the overarching (and delightfully cynical) Russia being annoying thing. Latest news on that, the Georgia missile incident (ha, just outside Fulton County Stadium, perhaps?) and now, McCain just said that we should not invite Russia to the next G-8 meeting--which is a good point. Ahh McCain, you are just too damn smart for politics. I'm half tempted to go campaign for the guy just so that when we win in 2008, at least we beat a worthy opponent. Yeah I would be willing to bet that less than 5% of college-educated American adults could name the member states of the G-8, let alone differentiate between the G-7 and the G-8 (hint: the G-8 is the G-7 plus Russia, even though when the G-7 initially let Russia in, the Russian economy was smaller than that of non-G-7 member the Netherlands).
Posted by: Conan | 08/16/2007 at 01:55 AM