Forrest Dunbar's blog

You Can't Spell Mamlyutka Without "Lyutka"

This past weekend a number of Peace Corps Volunteers, including myself, congregated in Mamlyutka, Sarah’s village and the northernmost Peace Corps site in the world, to conduct a seminar on the communicative approach to English teaching.  The conference was a repeat—in a new location, and with a new audience—of the conference I did in Petropavlovsk approximately one year ago.  This time it was smaller, but still successful, and a great occasion for all us volunteers, who got to see some people from the south whom we hadn’t in a while.

 

The three out-of-Oblast volunteers were Sven Stafford, Chris Van Fossen, and Beth Sales; they are a good group, all from Akmola Oblast.  Sven happens to be more than 2 meters tall, which is always entertaining in public places.

 

We had to get up at 5:30 on Friday morning to make the Elektrichka (electric train) to Mamlyutka, which left at seven.  There are several elektrichka’s in this part of the country, running through cities like Petropavlovsk, Kokshetau, and Astana, and serving the outlying villages.  To my knowledge, one cannot ride an electrichka from Petro to Kokshetau, though from Kokshetau to Astana I don’t know.

 

After the first day of sessions (I went first, which I love. Why not just get it over with?) a number of us went over to hang out at Sarah’s house and wait for something… actually, I can’t remember what we were doing.  At any rate, it ended with Sarah’s host family demanding, demanding that we all stay the night (a few of us were headed to other houses Sarah had arranged).

 

“Will there be a banya?” someone asked.

 

“Sure, we can fire up the banya,” replied Sarah’s host dad.

 

Sold.

 

After a round or four at the local pub, we returned to Sarah’s house for a banya.  This is the setup I have seen for most private banya’s, including Sarah’s host family’s and my own: an entrance room to drop off your stuff and go out to cool down in, a bathing room for washing one’s hair and scrubbing (and storage of the branches), and the banya room itself, with benches for sitting on, an open coal container, upon which water is periodically dumped to maintain the scalding temperature, and several sweating people, often beating the living hell out of each other with what I believe are birch branches.

 

Sarah’s banya did not disappoint.  Her host father beat the bejeezuses out of my back and legs (Russians consider this a “massage”), along with Sven and Phil’s, and then we all retired to the living room for relaxation and a cool glass of tree juice (I think the tree from which they extract the “juice” is also birch).

 

Now, Sarah’s house is not very large, and there were seven volunteers, her host parents, her host grandmother, and her host brother and sister all sleeping there.  Somehow I got roped into sleeping on a strangely comfortable mini-pullout futon/recliner in the same room as the host parents and the 12-year-old host son (all three of them sharing one bed).  Fortunately, the banya so thoroughly wiped me out that I slept like the dead.

 

Actually, since I do not have a bed here in my apartment (I sleep on a few layers of blankets on the floor) and my side hurt too bad to really enjoy my friend Mika’s futon down in Shymkent, I can honestly say that that was the best sleep I have had in at least the last two months.  Probably much longer.  Does Sarah’s host father snore?  I have no idea.  It was like I fell into a soothing pit of blackness and emerged nine hours later (did I mention that I had already done my session on the first day?  Going first is always the best… except in scholarship interviews where the interviewers still don’t have any idea what they’re going to ask and thus give you bullshit questions with no bearing on your planned field of study… but that’s another story).

 

The next day we closed out the session and returned to Petropavlovsk.  It was Beth’s birthday (or at least we were celebrating that day; I think it was actually the following day), so Sven made pizza, with the help of Meghan’s sauce, and we had a bit of a party at my house.  I still have yet to clean up all the remnants from the gathering.  I’ll get around to it eventually.

 

Our Regional Manager is also in Petropavlovsk this week, doing site development.  It looks like North Kazakhstan is going to get two new volunteers to replace the three Kaz 18’s that will be leaving this fall.  Which brings a net change of… dangit I’m so bad at math… one?  Is it one?  Maybe.  But any new PCV is contingent upon Ekaterina (the RM) finding host families.  For some reason, host families have become harder to come by.  This might just be because Peace Corps has tapped out the supply (there’s an informal three-volunteers-per-family rule), or because—as any Kaz PCV could tell you—our living allowance, and thus the percentage paid to the host families, has not kept pace with the inflation rate.  Keeping a volunteer might just be too expensive for some locals.  And volunteers themselves sometimes have a hard time making ends meet, or at least living a lifestyle that keeps them psychologically fit to serve.

 

Speaking of money, I spoke with Sven, who is my traveling buddy for the summer, about getting a visa to Uzbekistan, and we both agreed that it was too expensive and too much of a hassle.  Uzbekistan is the new geopolitical disaster of the region, run by a murderous, megalomaniacal kleptocrat named Islam Karimov.  Google “Andijan” and “massacre” and that might give you some idea.  Still, it would have been nice to see Uzbekistan’s many historic sites; the country probably has more than any other in the region, since it seems to have been settled by sedentary, non-nomadic people the longest.

 

So it looks like in July Sven and I will be going to Kyrgyzstan, followed by Tajikistan, and then back through Kyrgyzstan, ending at our Close of Service Conference on July 28^th.  Kyrgyzstan’s visa is simple, though it costs about $80.  Tajikistan, like Russia, requires an invitation, which I will probably have to purchase from a travel agent.  I am expecting to pay between $250 and $300 just for freakin’ visas.  I hate the modern visa system; I eagerly await the day when the whole world is peaceful and developed and racially tolerant enough to allow the free flow of people across the imaginary lines that demarcate our borders.  I guess I shouldn’t hold my breath.

 

До свидания

Nauryz, Almaty, and the Grim Reality of Physical Possessions

The Kazakh word “Nauryz” means both “March” and “Spring”, and is the name of the largest Spring Festival held during the eponymous month.  Last year, dozens of Kaz 17’s and 18’s gathered in Shymkent for the festival, and this year the tradition was repeated by the 18’s and 19’s.

 

Neither Sarah nor I went down for Nauryz last year, so we decided to make the trek this time.  Phil, Mike, Ashley, and Tim, all North Kazakhstan Oblast 19’s, joined us for our vacation.  Meghan didn’t come because she had the unenviable task of being flown to Austria by her father to go skiing.  She was very upset.

 

We left on the night of the 18^th, and spent the next 32-hours on the train, gradually watching the snow disappear behind us.  The train journey to Shymkent is approximately equal in time and expense to that which goes to Almaty, although Shymkent is significantly farther south.

 

To get the festivities started off right, Phil and Tim filled up two 5-liter water bottles at the local beer fountain; we drank the crappy beer out of tea cups and it helped us get to sleep on the first night.

 

The second day of the journey none of us felt much like drinking.  I can’t imagine why.  In Chu (pronounced “Shoe”), a southern city famous for its drug trade, my first mini-catastrophe struck.  I had been using my Leatherman tool to cut the skin off some cucumbers, and, though I stored it in its case and put it at the back of our table, I forgot to take it with me when I stepped outside for a few minutes for air.  Predictably, a local probably one of the merchants passing through our compartment stole it.  I loved that Leatherman, but I tried not to let its loss get me too down.

 

In Shymkent, our group joined several others at the train station and met Zach and Mika two Shymkent-based volunteers, who had helped organize this year’s trip.  All of the volunteers were housed in a series of apartments downtown, some owned by the Shymkent volunteers, some rented.  Before I left Petro, I had heard that about 80 PCV’s were headed to Nauryz, but I believe the final number was more like 50.  Still, that’s a lot of Americans to have in one place at one time in the Former Soviet Union.

 

We arrived at around 2 in the morning, but Mika still got up early and went to work the next day (Japanese people are so lazy).  In the afternoon, while the other PCV’s were touring the city, I accompanied Mika, Zach, and two locals from Mika’s human trafficking NGO on a “raid”.  Basically, we just went to construction sites and passed out literature explaining Kazakhstan’s immigration laws to some of the many Uzbek laborers who often work here under slave-like conditions.  Zach and I didn’t really do anything, but it was still a very edifying experience.  Mika’s work is far more interesting than teaching English.

 

The next day all the PCV’s piled into a bus and took a three hour drive out to Turkistan.  Turkistan is one of the oldest and most important cities in Kazakhstan, though it is not very large.  The central draw of the town which marks it as a Muslim holy site is the massive Mausoleum.

 

Built by Tamerlane in the 14^th Century, it commemorates (and contains) a Muslim holy man whose name escapes me, who brought Islam to that region of the country.  Three trips to Turkistan are equal to the Hajj to Mecca, at least according to local Kazakhs.

 

While in Turkistan we toured the Mausoleum, aided by a remarkably helpful and well-informed tour guide, and listened to a recitation of the Koran in Arabic.  We also took pictures next to a camel and her daughter camel, which had been rented by a Turkistan PCV.  Finally, we had some delicious and inexpensive Shashlik (kebabs), which are plentiful in the South Kazakhstan Oblast.  With baranina (mutton) and okorochkom (chicken) shashlik at 100 and 150 tenge respectively, we could eat our fill of greasy cooked meat.  The same meal would cost two or three times more from a stand in Petropavlovsk.

 

The night after our Turkistan tour, the group visited a night club not far from Mika’s apartment.  A very strange night; first the music wouldn’t work right, and the lights and sound would come on and off.  Then the guards were refusing to let people out to smoke or use their telephones, claiming there were gangs waiting outside to rob us (there weren’t. We found out later that the club manager was worried that somehow Americans were getting in without paying the cover).  Finally, all of the lights went out, and the club became pitch black inside.  At that point we all headed for the exits.  Thankfully, everyone got home safely, and besides one missing cell phone, so did everything they owned.

 

The next day, March 22^nd, was Nauryz itself.  Separately we made our ways to the Hippodrome the big horse-track/field at the edge of town.  I went with Mika, Sarah, and Tim Koss, an ACCELS employee who had come down from Almaty that morning.

 

Nauryz is a big deal in this heavily-Kazakh part of the nation, and the festival included dancing, parachuters dropping out of the sky, lots of free food, even more inexpensive food, and various contests revolving around horses.

 

Beyond simple horse racing, which we saw a lot of, there was also Kazakh-style wrestling, in which one rider tries to pull another from his horse, another contest where the rider has to dip down off his horse and pick up little beanbags at a gallop, and finally Kok-par goat carcass polo, which is exactly what it sounds like.  I have put pictures of everything up on flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/forrest .

 

There was also a contest in which a man chases after a woman on horse back and tries to kiss her.  Then on the way back, the woman whips the holy bejeesuses out of the man.  It’s less funny than it sounds, although the first time or two they did it everyone laughed heartily.

 

Actually, the most ridiculous part of the whole Hippodrome experience happened as we were leaving.  A few of Mika’s local friends were traveling with us, there were probably about 30 Americans in our group, and because we were in a rush, the local friends commandeered a marshrutka (the little private busses that are everywhere here).  They literally went up to the driver, said “we’ll give you 1500 tenge if you change your route”, and had the driver throw the people who were already on the bus off.  I was a little embarrassed by the whole thing, but the locals, even the ones being kicked off, seemed unfazed.  Can you imagine someone getting on your city bus, paying the driver, and having you kicked off?  I would have been beside myself with anger.  But again, the locals took it in stride.  People are just more fatalistic here they’re used to things being taken from them.  I think this, in turn, makes them more likely to take things from others.  More on that in a bit.

 

After our marshrutka ride, many of the volunteers changed into athletic gear and headed down to the sports complex.  After jumping the fence (the beautiful complex is closed off for some reason.  Maybe just because it was Nauryz), we had a spirited basketball game: North vs. South.  And just like our Civil War, this was a bloodbath; when the dust settled, the good guys, the Union, if you will, stood triumphant, 20 – 18.

 

There were a few other mini-events in Shymkent, mostly involving drinking beer, but nothing too spectacular.  Mika made sushi for a small group of us the day after Nauryz, and it was one of the most wonderful meals I’ve had in this country.  God, I miss the food in Tokyo.

 

On the night of the 23^rd most of the Kaz 19’s took a sleeper bus to Almaty in order to attend their In Service Training.  Sarah and I decided to tag along and spend a few days in Almaty.  Neither of us had taken a break in months, so why not, right?

 

When we arrived it was early in the morning, and I was carrying a white bag full of food, most of which belonged to other volunteers.  In the night I had put my camera and some documents/reading material in the bag, as most of our stuff was stored in the bus’s belly.  Long story short, I set the bag down while we were loading our taxi, we took off in the taxi, I left the bag; by the time we got back it was gone.  So…

 

Now I have no camera.  If whoever took the bag was in a charitable (read: civilized) mood, they wood use the information on the documents, which inculded Peace Corps Almaty's offices phone number many times, to return the bag.  Let's just say I'm not holding my breathe.  On the plus side, the camera hadn’t been working right, and I probably needed a new one.  Still, it would have been nice to have something to take pictures with just for my last five months here.  And its loss underscored how much crap has been claimed by my PC service.  Since I am now certain of my return to the US, I have begun to take stock of what exactly I will need when I get back.  The list is frustratingly long:

 

 New laptop (as I write this, my five year old Fujitsu is ten minutes from overheating).

 New camera (stolen)

 New iPod (stolen)

 New Leatherman (maybe not necessary in Boston, but stolen)

 New pants (all of my jeans have mysteriously deteriorated, much faster than I have ever seen in the US.  Only one of the pairs I brought are now wearable)

 New dress shoes (the pair I bought when I came have vanished.  I checked my apartment, my host family’s in Petro, even my old host family’s house in Issyk.  I have no idea what happened to them.)

 New regular shoes (the ones I use here are from Kyrgyzstan and are made of plastic.  I don’t think that’s going to fly in Cambridge.  Maybe for the first couple of weeks)

 New cell phone (unless I can get the old one I had before I came to work once more.  I never threw it out.  The phone I bought and used here is on a different system and can’t work in the US)

 

Arrgh.  I don’t even want to think about how much this is all going to cost.  I probably just won’t get a Leatherman or an iPod.  Maybe next summer, after I work and earn some money.

 

Back to Almaty.  Sarah and I snuck into the sanatorium where the Kaz 19’s were being housed, and successfully spent three nights sleeping on people’s floors, free of charge.  We spent our first day up near Modeo a famous ice-skating rink in the mountains and the nearby ski resort, just sightseeing.  Except the fog was so thick we couldn’t see a damn thing; still, it was nice of Tim to drive us up there, and we ate at a great Chinese restaurant afterward.

 

The second day in Almaty we spent mostly at the Peace Corps office.  The area around the office is developing rapidly; a huge Marriot skyscraper has gone up just in the last couple of months.  Almaty’s new roads and underpasses also make that region of the city much easier to drive through (or ride the bus, as Sarah and I did), though the center of the city is still a cluster&*%$.

 

The final day Sarah accompanied me out to my old host family’s place in Issyk, which turned out to be a much more pleasant experience than expected.  My host father never once critiqued my Russian; the four of us (including host mom) conversed for about two solid hours.  My host mom made delicious lagman, which Sarah was unable to finish, and my host father cordially demanded we down an entire bottle of vodka with him.  Which we did.

 

On the way back to the sanatorium, Sarah had the wonderful idea that we continue drinking.  Which we did.  It was great, until we went to visit the NGO volunteers at the separate sanatorium they were staying at.  The OCAPS as their group is called were engaged in a spirited round of Capture the Flag.  Naturally, Sarah and I joined in.  Unfortunately, Sarah and I had a little incident (involving a cute boy, baby-guarding the flag, and a bit of Capture-the-Flag-psychological-warfare text messaging), which may or may not have ended in tears.  But we got back to our own sanatorium safely, and Phil comforted her while I won some money off a few other Volunteers in Texas Holdem’.  Everything worked out ok in the end, though Sarah swears she’ll never drink vodka again (or at least until her host mother’s birthday party).

 

We left the next day on the train to Petro; the thirteenth time Sarah has taken that 31-hour ride, and the fourteenth time I have.  Before getting on the train, we had lunch at Govindas, a vegetarian Hare-Krishna Indian restaurant in downtown Almaty.  If you’re ever in the largest city in Kazakhstan, and have time between 12 and 2 in the afternoon (the only time they serve lunch), I suggest you check it out.  Delicious.

 

One final note: my enjoyment of the whole vacation was dampened slightly by shooting pain coming from below the ribcage on my left side.  Eventually Doctor Victor looked at it and concluded that it was just a pulled muscle between the ribs, probably combined with a pinched nerve.  It happened about a week before the trip began.  He gave me some extra-strength ibuprofen, and told me to wait it out.  Hopefully I can get back in the gym in a week or two.  I’m glad I didn’t have to medically separate.

 

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A Note on Totalitarianism

This quick entry will probably be the most incongruous of all my blog posts.  It’s a thought I had last year, but never really wrote down.  I want to put it down here, just so I can reference it in the future.  I am worried I might forget it in the chaos of my eventual return to the US.

 

During my American History class last year we had two courses on the New Deal and World War II.  At the time, I had been reading Arthur Schlesinger’s political-theory manifesto, “The Vital Center”, as well as the second book in his three-part series on Roosevelt.  I also read Niehbur and Isaiah Berlin around that time, so suffice to say my head was crammed with thoughts of liberalism, determinism, free will, and totalitarianism.

 

Many of these political philosophers/historians, and particularly Schlesinger, made the point that, at root, communism and fascism are very similar.  We touched on this in my American History class, but because I did not want to confuse my students, and I did not want to insult kids who still might hold strong views on the Soviet Union, I drew a quick graph and did not dwell on it.

 

What I drew was a circle.  I said, “if you go too far in either direction, the left or the right, you end up in nearly the same place”.  I do not know if the idea of drawing a circle is original or not.  I think I might have taken it from Schlesinger, though I do not remember exactly.

 

Anyway, yesterday I got to thinking about this stuff again, and I decided to draw the circle on two axes, with a little more detail.  Also, I dropped the Democrat and Republican party on there to give people in America (like me in the future) a better reference for what I am thinking about.  Here is the graph:

 

 

Fascism Communism Circle

 

 

It has been bothering me recently when people in the American chattering class draw a dichotomy between “liberals” and “conservatives”.  I know that these terms in the American political context have changed from their original meaning—and that liberal, in particular, is now used as a pejorative with little connection to what the word actually means.  But someone needs to point out that the opposite of liberal is not conservative.  It is “illiberal”.  Nearly everyone in America, certainly everyone on the center left and the center right are “liberals” in the classical sense of the word.  Liberalism, with its free markets, representative democracy (admittedly limited in the early days), and individual rights is at the root of the American sociopolitical traditional.  It is only on the extreme wings of the parties that the term ceases to apply.

 

Of course, neither party is perfect, and each harbors its own pet restrictions on freedom in the name of “order”.  Democrats like to regulate markets, and they go overboard sometimes.  Republicans like to control peoples’ personal lives, and favor economic and education policies that often restrict the ability of working-class citizens to actually participate in their society.  Because I am a Democrat (and a registered Democrat, as of this January) I obviously think the Republican party is more beholden to its radical elements, and has slid farther down the circle’s side towards illiberalism.  But just for the sake of not sparking pointless arguments, I put them at equal levels on the graph.

 

But, in general this is how I see things.  Both Democrats and Republicans, and any liberal, must stand up to illiberalism and totalitarianism, regardless of what form it takes. I will comment more on how this graph relates to the former-Soviet Union, and the interesting similarities between communism and fascism, once I am in a different situation—ie not in the Peace Corps—where I am not required to hold my tongue on internal politics.

 

Sorry this is not more like my other travel-journalesque posts.  I’ll put up something interesting on the Nauryz Festival when I get back from Almaty.

 

До свидания

 

PS I am also aware that “communism” never existed, and that it was really Stalinism over socialism, and that there were different kinds of socialism and different kinds of fascism, and that the whole debate seems anachronistic today.  But my graph is a musing, not a grad thesis, so I wanted to get it down before I left Kaz.

 

PPS One more thing, I just discovered moments before I was going to post this; I have been accepted to the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and the Kennedy School at Harvard.  I know Princeton is great, and Woody Woo would be much cheaper… but I just cannot turn down Harvard.  So, if all goes well, I will be in Boston starting September, 2008.

Irrational Exuberance

 

Well, immediately after I posted my last entry I fell sick; that’s what happens when you declare how happy you are in a frigid, post-Soviet nation.  Fate gently reminds you where you are, and makes you miserable again.

 

However, sufficient time has passed that I am now on the upswing once more, and feeling good.  This means, given my earlier statement, that another sickness/problem/catastrophe is probably around the corner.  But for now, I am going to enjoy my health.

 

A little more than a week ago Phil, Mike and myself went down to the lake for a picnic with Mike’s counterpart Yevgeniy Petrovich.  This is nothing out of the ordinary—we do it every couple of weekends.  However, on this particular day Petropavlovsk was being slammed by spectacularly terrible weather, with extremely high winds and sideways snow.  It actually made the picnic more fun, and the three of us set about making a video using Phil’s digital camera.  We edited it earlier this week (took me and Phil about three hours), and here is the end result:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2EWmnryxk8

 

Please pass the link on to any of your friends who might be curious about what Peace Corps Volunteers do when not technically “at work” (though they say the Peace Corps is a 24/7 job).

 

The new apartment is still wonderful.  Yesterday I vacuumed, and did laundry, and took my bedding outside to shake it out.  It’s strange how things that I used to detest as a kid—domestic chores—become oddly rewarding and pleasurable when one is attending to one’s own little domain.  I still sleep on the floor, but I bought a new, hypo-allergenic pillow and the warmer conditions have meant I can now sleep on top of most of my bedding instead of under it.

 

Yesterday was 2 degrees Celsius!  The sky still dumps snow, but the temperature continues to climb.  Spring has sprung, I suppose.

 

Medvedev won the Russian Presidential “election” this week.  I want to get worked up and upset about it… but I really can’t.  I have been significantly jaded by 18 months of dictatorship—sham elections don’t make me nearly as depressed as they used to.  There is also the peculiar puzzle of Medvedev himself; he truly seems like the least-bad option, a rare moderate in an administration of creepy, neo-KGB nationalists.  I know that Putin is going to keep him on a short leash, and because Dmitri lacks a power base in the secret service he must obey or be killed (literally), but I am still a bit hopeful.

 

This all has echoes of 1999/2000, when it looked like Putin himself would be a young, intelligent reformer.  Well, he was.  Just in the opposite direction the world hoped (towards fascism, rather than liberalism).  Russian leaders since Gordbachev always seem to capture the American imagination—and I am guilty of this with regard to both Putin and Medvedev—and then betray liberal ideas and stomp on human rights.  And yet.  And yet.  I can’t help but hope Medvedev will be better!  Amazing what even the thought of a democrat in the Kremlin does to Western sensibilities.  Imagine the possibilities of a free, democratic Russia!  Arrrgh.

 

Speaking of Democracy, I am not very pleased with how the March 4^th primary went.  However, I am still fairly confident Obama is going to win.  Even if he loses Pennsylvania, I think he is going to end up with more pledged delegates.  Even after winning Ohio and Texas, Clinton’s net gain in delegates was very small.  Take away the superdelegates—many of whom will probably back the winner of the popular vote regardless—and Obama’s lead is even greater.  Of course, for those of you living in the US and subject to relentless election coverage this is all old news.

 

On a completely different note, my classes are going fairly well.  Before the semester started my counterpart Irina Vasilovna asked me to teach an American literature class.  I am now doing so, and have developed a model whereby I speak very little and the class does a heck of a lot of work during our 1.5 hour period.  I teach the class twice a week, to groups 31 and 32.  It is going well—my first classes were Poe, Poe, Twain, Twain, Poetry… and next week one more Poetry.  Then on to Sci-Fi, I think, or maybe some Hemmingway, and then end with Stephen King (because I have a simplified text of his story “The Body”, and I want to show the movie “Lean on Me”).  Not a complete overview of American Literature by any means, but I think I have done a fairly good job, given that I have to develop all the materials myself.

 

I also received additional original materials for a typing class, which I now teach Tuesday nights.  Sarah—the world’s northernmost Peace Corps volunteer—made a series of Power Point slides covered with pictures and Russian, which seem to be effective for teaching typing.  Certainly, they are better then the couple of typing programs I have seen here.

 

Later in the month I am going to Shymkent for the Nauryz or “Spring” Festival.  All of the North Kazakhstan Oblast Volunteers are heading down, with the exception of Meghan, who is meeting her father in Austria to go skiing.  We purchased our tickets last weekend, and everyone is very excited about the trip.  Especially the Kaz-18’s—Sarah and I—who are nearing the end of our final winter here in Kaz.  To think, I haven’t left Kazakhstan since last June, and I haven’t left the city of Petropavlovsk since November, when we went a few hours south for our Thanksgiving celebration.

 

Speaking of leaving Kazakhstan, our Country Director John Drotos is gone.  No one in the Peace Corps has yet explained why he left, most of the PCV’s assume it was a personal issue, but he is going to be replaced temporarily by Jody Olsen—the Deputy Director of the Peace Corps.  Then in April or May we should get another permanent CD.  That makes four Directors the Kaz-18’s have seen—five including Jody—when CD’s are supposed to stay for three years!  John lasted the longest at about 12 months.  Something about Kazakhstan seems to eat people up and spit them out (note: right after I wrote this, we got an email from John.  Seems he was removed by the Peace Corps Director.  We haven’t gotten an explanation why).

 

And on that note, I am going to go grab lunch in the cafeteria before class.  Peace.

 

До свидания

Home Alone at Last

It’s been a great week; an unusually long streak of good-times that has convinced me to write another post.  Ordinarily, I have one up day, then one down day.  Often, as our Desk Officer in DC warned us before we left, PCVs will experience the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, all in the same day.

 

But not this week.

 

This week really started on Friday night, as I was riding back from Pizza House (a local restaurant that sells… uh… something) with my friend Serik.  As we approached my house we crossed an intersection where a large truck had smacked into the front of a small Zhugoli—the crappy, Soviet-era cars everyone drives.

 

“Wait,” I said as we sped passed, “I think that’s my host mom.”

 

Sure enough, when I jogged back to the crash my host mom and her sister (a grumpy, mean-spirited Russian nationalist from the Ukraine) were milling about, talking with their driver and the driver of the truck.  No one was hurt, and the damage to the front of the Zhugoli was minimal.  Apparently, it was the truck driver’s fault, and he was trying to convince them to take a cash payment before the cops arrived.

 

Serik and I stood there for a moment taking stock of things and chatting, when suddenly my host mother sprung an announcement on me: the apartment I had been waiting to inhabit—the one she owns—had been suddenly vacated by its occupants, and I could move in the next day.

 

So on Saturday I packed up most of my stuff, and, with the help of my friend Ermik, moved in to my new apartment near the center of town.

 

I love living on my own again, after 14 months—14 months!—of sharing a house at the edge of town.  No more half-hour commutes.  No more grandchildren screaming, running around, or playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (they are 5 and 6 years-old, and it shows). No more asking my host mother if I could have someone over for a visit.  Hand washing my clothing and cooking my own food is a small price to pay for independence.

 

I came back on Sunday to collect the last of my stuff, and stood for a moment in my empty room contemplating my time there.  I realized that I had lived in that chilly, cramped space longer than any room since I left my home in Cordova at 17.

 

But the new apartment wasn’t the only thing that went right.  Early Monday morning I rushed to a computer and—jaw dropped in disbelief, terrified it was all some kind of beautiful dream from whence I would soon awake—saw that the New York Football Giants had defeated the New England Patriots 17-14.

 

Ecstatic does not begin to describe my feelings.  Let me put this in perspective:

 

As a Raiders fan, I have an undying hatred for the Patriots, who robbed us of a chance to go to the Superbowl in 2000, a Superbowl that they won, launching their current “dynasty”.

 

Then, because of the Raider’s terrible ownership (die already Al Davis.  Die or get committed to a home and stop ruining every football season for me), our best player, and my favorite player in the whole league, Randy Moss, fell into New England’s lap, leaving me with a difficult decision to make about my Oakland Moss jersey.

 

Anyway, as everyone with a passing knowledge of sports knows, the Patriots went on to have the best season in NFL history; they were a record-breaking juggernaut fueled by Brady and Moss. They seemed unstoppable; semi-legitimate debates were cropping up everywhere about whether or not they were the greatest sports team in history.  Not just the greatest football team.  The Greatest Team… Ever.

 

And now it all lies in ashes.  Their perfect season has become the greatest collapse by any football team… ever.  They got beat by two Manning brothers in back-to-back-years.  They were held to 14 points in the Superbowl.  And Plaxico Buress called it!  He called it, and then he caught the final touchdown!

 

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA!!!!

 

18-1! 18-1! 18-1!

 

EEEEEEIIIIGGGHTEEEENNN AND OOOOOOOOOOONNNEEE!!!! AH-HA!  AH-HA!  AH-HAAAAA!!!   Ah-ha. Ah-ha.  *Whew*

 

So… I never liked the Giants (I used to intensely dislike them, actually), but I think I am going to buy an Eli Manning jersey and an Oakland hat when I go back to the US and wear them in tandem everywhere I go.  If they haven’t been made already, I am going to custom print a bunch of T-shirts with a giant 18-1 on the front and give them to my friends.

 

I hate the Patriots more than any team in any sport.  And if that last passage wasn’t dripping with schadenfreude, then I am not the writer I thought I was.

 

Ok.  Moving on (“Proyexali”, in loosely-translated Russian).

 

After my Superbowl orgy of joy, I turned my eyes toward my second passion—after football— politics.  I was worried that Obama was going to get his clock cleaned on Super Tuesday, and Clinton would go a long way towards wrapping up the nomination.

 

Instead, Obama seems to have fought her roughly to a draw.  Considering the contests coming up—Lousianna, Nebraska, Washington, the Virgin Islands, the “Potomac Primary” of Maryland, DC, Virginia, followed by Main, then Wisconsin and Hawaii—it looks like Obama might be able to put together two weeks of solid victories.  That leaves Ohio and Texas for Clinton to make her stand.  And just the idea of the presumed-nominee/overwhelming frontrunner from two months ago having to make a “stand” is wonderful.

 

Also, here’s my dad Roger on the Alaskan Caucus, also a Super Tuesday state:

 

No worries, Alaska kicked ass with 3 to 1 for Obama. Not sure how that compares to other states but I would guess it’s really good. There were so many people at the 40 below zero caucus they could not get in, and cops were threatening to tow cars. Being a high internet usage state, the Obama campaign has been goin on for a long time.  There are probably a few that just are anti-Clinton also. Take care.

 

Yep, things are going well.  This Saturday we’re going to have a birthday party for Tim, who is coming in from Yavlinka, which is doubling as a kind of house warming/christening for my new apartment.

 

So, that’s been my week (and what I am looking forward to).  Sorry it doesn’t have much if anything to do with Kazakhstan or Central Asia.  But sometimes what is happening back in the US weighs heavier on a PCV’s mind that the day-to-day drudgery of Peace Corps work.  Absence makes the heart grow fonder.  And the New York Football Giants have just about made my year… only one thing could make it better— President-elect Barrack Hussein Obama.

 

Дo встречи!

 

 

PS Why did I include his middle name?  Because $%&# those e-mails being sent around the Jewish community (and elsewhere) claiming he’s a closet Muslim, that’s why.  His middle name could be Hitler, for all I care.  His heart, his head, and his policy positions are in the right place.

Newness

Two days ago I was baptized a Christian.  That might come as a surprise for those who have read my blog and know that I am (or was) Jewish and as few people outside close friends and family read this, I assume that is nearly everyone.

 

Let me just say, I feel better now.  Cleansed.  Purified.  Damp.

 

Alright, I am kind of joking.  I wasn’t really baptized; I merely participated in the commemoration ceremony of a mass Christian baptism.  And I, along with another volunteer named Michael Quinn (Yale, ’06), dunked in the holy waters alongside the Russians.

 

The holiday is called “Krishenia” or “the Christening”.  I believe I wrote about it last year at this time, along with a brief description.  Basically, for one full day all the water is considered holy, and while technically what comes out of the tap is as good as anything, many people prefer to journey down to the river with jugs and stock up on a year’s supply.  Also, a fraction of the people who venture down, mostly men, take a dip in a frigid ice-pool which has been cut out specifically for that purpose.

 

It was cold.  Really, really damn cold.  Here’s the play-by-play:

 

My counterpart, her husband, and five volunteers Phil, Mike, Tim, Quinn, and myself all headed down to the river around 12:30.

 

After checking out the site and making sure there were plenty of cameramen at the ready, Quinn and I entered the specially-prepared tent, where dozens of Russian men (and a couple of women) were all in various stages of dressing or undressing.

 

We stripped down to our underwear and quickly walked outside to the pool which was really more of a trench with a set of staircases at both ends.

 

I went first, and was so locked in on my destination (my feet hurt from the cold, and the soles felt like they were freezing to the ice), that I didn’t notice anyone else in our group in the crowd.

 

I did a quick genuflection (when in Rome…), walked down, dunked three times, and walked back out.

 

Let me pause in the quick re-cap and go into a little detail: the wood on the platform was slick, and I had a little trouble getting down.  The three dunks literally took my breath away.  I was gasping, and every muscle in my body was flexed.  I had even more trouble getting out; it felt like my joints were locking up, and I slipped a little, clawed at the railing, and finally emerged.  The wind bit and robbed me of what little warmth I had as I emerged, and I had difficulty forming cogent thoughts.  The whole process probably took five seconds, seven tops, but the whole time my brain walked that fine-line between adrenaline-rush and outright panic.

 

As I got out, my counterpart God bless her ran up to me with a towel I didn’t realize she had been carrying.  I took it, let out a little “whoop!” of agony, and scuttled back to the tent, Quinn close on my heels.

 

We got back to the tent I put my counterpart’s towel down so we would have something to separate our feet and the sticky ice and we quickly undressed and toweled off.

 

It took an agonizingly long time to put my clothes back on.  My feet in particular were numb, far more deadened than anything I have experienced outside of a doctor’s office as if everything below the ankle had been shot through with Novacaine.

 

Quinn and I babbled about the affects of the water and the adrenaline flowing in our veins.  The old, semi-nude Russian guy to my side asked pleasantly, “So how was it?”  “Excellent”, came our reply.  Finally, as we were donning our jackets, my counterpart’s husband (a very laconic fellow) came in the changing tent and extended his hand.

 

“Maladetz.”

 

And so, like Jesus, my blog returns.

 

Sorry for the three month lapse.  I can’t promise I’ll keep adding to this until the end of my service.  And I can’t promise I’ll try.  But I’ll try to try.

 

Here’s a very quick, chronological re-cap of what happened in the three months I didn’t write:

 

1.     I didn’t go back to America in November, which messed up a lot of my plans.  I now have an abundance of vacation days stockpiled, and am deciding how to use them.

 

2.     I had a great Thanksgiving in Kokshetau.  We ate, drank, played American football.  It was everything you could hope for.  Pictures are up on flickr.com/photos/forrest.

 

3.     In early December I got jumped from behind by four guys who made off with my iPod.  Bastards won’t even be able to use the thing, since it’s all in English and uses Mac technology, which no-one here has.  It happened going into Meghan’s apartment complex; I chased them, but they went down a dark alley, and when I jumped out to the main street to look for a cop and ran parallel to them. However, at the end of the alley they mixed into a crowd near the market (it was only about 7 PM) and I lost them.  They were wearing the same dark jeans, black jackets and black hats as every damn Russian man in this country, so it was like finding a needle in a stack of needles.  The police were also of no real help since I never saw their faces.

 

4.     New Year’s was great.  Two volunteers—Victor and Dante—came up from Kokshetau, and we had a grand old time.  Also, I began looking for my own apartment, and I should be able to move out of my host family’s house in the beginning of February.  So I’m going to need lots of easily made American food and snacks, if anyone is in the mood to send me a care package (and thank you very much for the people that already have).

 

5.     Winter break at my college lasts until January 28^th, and it’s been quite eventful.  It seems every weekend we have a visitor, which precipitates get-togethers (and drinking).  First were Dante and Victor, then Meghan’s parents came from Nantucket, and finally Michael Quinn.  The month of January has been very hard on the pocketbook.

 

 

Finally, I’d like to close with a rather significant amendment to an early blog post.  I am not going to go back and change any of my posts because I feel it would be dishonest, but I just want to say that my Country Director John Drotos has been better than I gave him credit for.

 

My article I wrote a few months back didn’t run in the Washington Post, but that was my fault, not his; he approved an edited version, but it wasn’t what my journalist friend was looking for.  Also, JD has been supportive of the Vesti, which has had some problems lately, and of me personally.  He even wrote me a recommendation for grad school, even though it might cause me to leave Kazakhstan a couple of months early.

 

So again, I retract most of what I said about John before.  There are still plenty of months for my opinions to change back, but for now I have to say that he has been a very good Country Director.

 

And on that positive note:

 

До свидания

Because sometimes it's more important to read other people's work...

Alright, so I have avoided posting anything other than on-the-ground stuff from Kazakhstan, but I’d like to make an exception this time.

 

I read this article today, and it is one of those things I think everyone should read.  It isn’t earth-shattering for people who have been following foreign affairs the last few years, but it does do a very good job of summarizing what has happened between the Bush Administration and Al Queda, with a few illuminating anecdotes and empirical examples thrown in.  So please, if you have time, read this in its entirety, and share it with others if you can: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20071022&s=bergen102207 .  If the link doesn’t work for some reason, the story is “How Osama bin Laden Beat George W. Bush”, by Peter Bergen, and it’s the cover of the latest issue of the New Republic.

 

Nothing all that new going on in Kazakhstan.  Basketball started again, and we had a couple of good practices.  The old Kazakh teacher who runs them with me loves to have me play with the kids—let’s hope my back holds up.  It’s bothering me, but not as bad as last February, immediately after I injured it.

 

Classes are going fine, and I have been able to keep my general stress level under control.  I should have some big news about my library in the next couple of weeks.  And maybe the soup kitchen as well.  Finally, we now know how many new volunteers will be stationed in North Kazakhstan Oblast next month: three boys and one girl, bringing my “flock” (as I think of them, because I’m the warden) to seven, including myself.  I am hoping that the two boys placed in Petropavlovsk will help with PHP; the more the merrier.

 

Дo встречи

 

Tears and Beers in Astana

Well, things have calmed down a little, so it’s time for another update.  The weather has turned cold, and snow is expected in the next week.  However, this is actually preferable to the wet mud of the past few days.  So my spirits are up.

 

More importantly, I had a chance to get out of Petropavlovsk last weekend and travel down to Astana.  I went with a group of girls from groups 9A and 10A (in the 14-16 age range), whom I had been tutoring for an English competition.  Unfortunately, only 2 of the 7 girls made it to the second round essay competition.  We’ll get those results in four or five weeks.  If the girls prevail there they will go on to an interview.  The interview, indeed the whole competition, is run by American Councils; should the girls win, they will receive one-year scholarship/grants to study in America—living with an American family and attending an American school.

 

My personal experience as a 15 and 16-year-old in Japan makes me very eager to help them reach this goal.  However, the “concourse”, as they call it, is very competitive.  The private/magnate school here in Petro, modestly named “Best Gymnasium” had around 12 finalists to our two.  There were 680 applicants in all, for less than 50 slots.  Some of my girls started crying when they found out they hadn’t passed.  Tough couple of hours.  Still, most of our girls will be eligible again next year.  We also have a better sense of what will be on the test, so I think we have the potential to do very well. 

 

Before they posted the first round results we went into the center of the city and saw the Kazakhstani version of the National Mall.  “Baiterek”, the giant, golf-tee shaped building that stands where you would envision the Washington Monument, was cooler than I expected.  The view was spectacular, and the giant hand print which Nazarbayev put at the center of the monument, in the center of the capital of his nation, is just as megalomaniacal and ridiculous as I imagined.  I will put pictures of everything up on flickr soon.

 

During the down periods I hung out with Sven, the 6’ 8’’ volunteer from my old language group, who lives in the Astana suburb of Shortandy (which means “pike” in Kazakh).  We went out for beers and Shashlik after pointing my girls back towards Petropavlovsk (with another teacher/chaperone, who had come down with us).  We had a couple of bottles with my friend Tim from ACCELS, too.

 

I slept at Sven’s place on Saturday night, with plans to catch the afternoon train back to Petro.  Unfortunately, I misread my ticket and missed the train.  My problem stemmed from the fact that the Petropavlovsk train station is the only station in Kazakhstan (to my knowledge) that uses Moscow time.  So, though I bought the tickets simultaneously, my ticket down to Astana was in Moscow time, while my return ticket was local time (which is two hours earlier).  At any rate, I caught the next train, and made it back home by around 4:30 in the morning.

 

The second train, unlike the first, was headed into Russia.  So at around 3:00 AM a bunch of soldiers/border police came through to check documents.  One soldier made an issue of my passport, saying that I was missing a stamp.  In his defense, it looks like the border officer on my way back from China put the stamp in the wrong column.  The officer told me, in a voice convincingly full of regret, that I would have to pay a fine.  I told him to hold on, whipped out my cell phone, and said I was calling the US Embassy (which is what PCV’s say when we call our security officer in Almaty).  He then reversed course, and said I could go back to bed (he had taken me into the smoke-filled gap between the train cars).  The experience was actually not that unpleasant; for some reason I was in a good mood, and as it looks like there might have been some legitimate irregularity on my passport, I wasn’t angry with my interrogator.  Life in the former Soviet Union is strange, even a year in.

 

And it has been a year.  More, really.  Some day in this month will mark the half way point of my Peace Corps service.  Wild.

 

One more educational point: Sven’s host family is Ingush, a nearly-extinct, predominantly-Muslim people from the Caucuses.  You can read about them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingushetia#Ethnicity .  Both the Czars and Stalin killed and exiled huge amounts of them.  According to this article, the EU Parliament has also recognized Stalin’s 1944 purge of Ingrush and Chechens as genocide.  Ingrushetia, the Ingrush semi-autonomous Republic in the Russian federation, is now ruled by a Moscow-appointed strongman, a close ally of Putin.  Sven’s host mother has a sort of cranky, anti-Russian humor, which was funny and understandable, given their history, but still a little off-putting, coming from Petropavlovsk (where, of course, my family is Russian).  We were watching a show on Kazakhstani television documenting a Russian cultural festival in Omsk, when she growled, “Look at the Russian bitches”.  It took me a while to figure out what she meant; I had yet to learn the plural form for “female dog”.  “Suchki” or “Suki”, I think. At any rate, the food was delicious, and Sven’s site and host family both seem pretty good.  Being an hour’s train ride from Astana ain’t bad either.  Hopefully I’ll get back down there in the spring or summer.

 

Дo встречи

Why My Library is Closed

I just realized I made a reference in my last entry without explaining it.

 

My library, the English library I was running with Project Hope Petropavlovsk, has been closed since August 18th.  That also happens to be the date of the parliamentary election here, in which the ruling party, basically a rubber stamp for Nazarbayev, won every single seat.  Kazakhstan now has a one party parliament, like a Rovian fantasy circa 2004.

 

The week of the election I was sitting in the library with my Russian tutor Vladimir, having a lesson.  Suddenly a pudgy Kazakh guy in a suit bursts through the door and starts demanding to see some kind of documentation.  Through Vladimir I was able to determine that this pompous blowhard was from the Financial Police, and wanted to see some document that proved I had been paying the landlord.

 

"This is not America!" he yelled (in Russian) as he stormed out the door.

 

At first I thought we had been singled out for some reason, but soon my organization, specifically Alexei, my chief collaborator, established that every business in the building was given the same warning, and instructed to have everything out of the building by 6 PM.

 

Of course, that was impossible.  Eventually the deadline was extended until that Saturday, the day of the election.

 

Soon, we also realized that a small opposition party office had moved into the building, and the pieces began to fall into place.  The Akimat claims it is giving the building to the university to make a museum.  No one at the university seems to know what they're talking about.

 

Losha (Alexei's friendly diminutive monicker), Sarah, Meghan, and I moved the most valuable books, the DVD's, and the electronic equipment out of the building and into Meghan's appartment.  Many of the books we just left.

 

Fortunately (from our perspective), the building was just locked up.  Because we are on good terms with our former landlord, we can still access the books if we need to move them.  So for now it's like they are in storage, until we find a new place for them (rents are too high everywhere else, so we're looking for a partner).

 

For us it is not such a big deal-- we are just a non-profit.  But for the small business in the building it was devestating.  They were thrown out by the bureucrats with just one week warning.  And now, of course, the building sits empty and unused.  Corruption and waste are about as depressing as sham elections.  The Akimat certainly hasn't made my time here any easier.

 

До свидания

 

 

Meet Ken, the Republican Rocker

I realized today that I have been neglecting my blog.  Unfortunately, due to the busy-ness surrounding the start of the school year, as well as my time spent on another soon-to-be culminating activity, I think this trend will continue.

 

Tomorrow I will start my classes in earnest.  Though technically I have been working at my school for the last week, in actuality the administration had yet to prepare my schedule.  So I spent most of the day reading or doing some non-school related work.  I did teach one class last Monday at the University, and I will teach it again tomorrow.

 

Entitled “English through Current Events”, the class is now offered to 4^th course students (seniors), and should be available for 3^rd course students once some bureaucratic hurdles are jumped, at North Kazakhstan State University.

 

Basically, I introduce a news article every week it looks like I will be taking most of my stories from CNN.com and the New York Times’ site from which we draw vocabulary and discussion topics.  Ultimately, I hope to instill in them something of a “journalistic mindset”, and maybe send them out into the world to do a little investigation.  We’ll see how it goes.

 

In other news, last night Meghan and I (the only remaining PCV’s in Petropavlovsk, now that Shinae has moved to Uralsk), went over to the apartment of Ken (I haven’t heard his last name yet).  He had visited my school a few days beforehand, but I had not realized at the time and was sequestered in a room on the third floor.  Lena Yurievna, on of my fellow English teachers, had met him, and later gave me his phone number, along with a description: “he is a big, tall American.”

 

So Meghan and I arrived expecting to see a 6’3’’ white guy, possibly from the Midwest.  Instead, Ken turned out to be a beefy, 6’ 1’ Chinese American with long hair, who currently pays his bills singing rock and jazz at local clubs.  He is rooming with a Canadian fellow, who was in Omsk at the time, playing hockey (ah, stereotypes).  Ken had a unique biography: raised in San Jose, he lived for 11 years in Guam, founded a small software company, and then lived in Houston for a while, before coming to Omsk to work as an English teacher at Omsk State University.  In a further twist, he happens to be a hardcore Bush supporter, and raised his eyebrows when he found out I had worked for Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam).

 

Ken plans to stay here for a year or so, unless something comes up (which seems likely) and he moves back to Omsk, or onward to Astana.  We had a long and interesting conversation, in which he expressed his growing dislike of the Russian regime, and the “dark path” Putin and Russia were currently on.  He described Russia as “similar to Germany in 1937”, and derided Russia’s “thug at the top”.  While I do not think Putin is really similar to Hitler, I have to agree that the mafia, bureaucracy, and corporate heads (especially in the resource extraction sector), are increasingly one-in-the-same.  While Putin’s Russia is not yet fascist, it does seem to have certain tendencies in that direction.  The Economist has published a few features recently that are less panicky, but still extremely critical of Putin and his ex-KGB thugocracy.

 

So that’s it for now.  My grant for the soup kitchen is now online at: https://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/donors/contribute/projdetail.cfm?projdesc=306-042&region=europe .  If you have a few extra dollars, please lend a hand.  I still have not found a new place for the library, but hopefully we’ll find someplace soon.

 

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