The road

I made my last trip to the city today and on my way up, I realized that I have never really talked about this road here before, and now seems like as good a time as any to explain. This road between my village and the city is about 110 kilometers long. By American standards, this road would take about an hour to drive. It is covered in potholes and swerves and is extremely uneven, so it takes anywhere from an hour to 4 hours depending on the vehicle and the weather.

Fun Facts:

- It is a horrible road
- It is one of the better roads in Kazakhstan
- I feel safer on this road in the winter when the snow and ice level it out.
- There are two small settlements between my village and the city. (The first time I passed the middle one I thought, wow I'm glad I don't live there. Perspective is a great thing.)
- There are no rest-stops. But your driver will gladly stop by some bushes for you. (This is mostly true of all of Kazakhstan. Even long-distance bus trips will sometimes stop on the side of the road and tell the men to go to the bushes on one side of the road, and women to go to the bushes on the other. Say what you will about American rest-stops, but they exist and that in itself is amazing.)
- There is one police check-point. (The only time I've been stopped at a check point was leaving Astana just after Swine Flu broke out. The officer looked at my visa entry date and sighed with relief, "So you don't have swine flu then!" I said no, I don't, and I was allowed to go my merry way.)
- There are three Islamic cemeteries between my village and the city.

This last fact might seem weird, but it is significant because every time they pass the cemeteries (just the Islamic ones, the Russian Orthodox ones don't count) every Muslim in the car will say a prayer, which involves cupping your hands in front of your face and then symbolically washing your face after you're finished. "Every person" includes the driver, so oddly enough, even if you are not Muslim, you wind up praying that the car's alignment is good enough to stay straight when the driver isn't holding on to the steering wheel.

If you can't get a bus, taxis are almost always available. Taxi service is a lot like hitch-hiking. You just stick out your hand and a car will pull over and you get in. I realize that this sounds dangerous, but it's what everyone does. One day I was walking to the bus station when a car pulled up. "Are you going to the city?" I said yes, and the driver offered a price to go, and I jumped in. In America I will have to get used to not getting rides from strangers again.

Wrapping it up

I know everyone says this, but there is no other way to say it; I am shocked at how quickly time has gone by. And now we are getting down to the last WEEKS of my service here, hours go by like days and then suddenly a month has passed. This week is “language week,” which began at my school on Tuesday with a huge culture competition. About 12 different classes chose and presented on a different nationality, which included singing songs, presenting baked goods, and dancing. And during this huge (3-hour-long) pageant I suddenly realized that I would really miss all of this. Yes, working here is frustrating, yes, some people are very impatient and upsetting, yes, I dream about America (inaccurately, as my mind has turned it into this magical land where problems don't exist) almost every day. But there are traditions and people here that I will miss. All of this sentimental feeling was balanced out Wednesday when I had to teach a doubled-up class on my own for a while. The class sat, some sharing seats because there weren't enough chairs, one student complained that he didn't feel like learning today. The rest of the class agreed and proceeded to ask me questions about American cell-phone services, my close, personal friends Britney Spears and 50 Cent, and translations to some Pit Bull lyrics until my counterpart finally came into the room and whipped them into shape.

America! Land of burritos! Home of convenience! Free Wi-Fi with purchase of coffee! It's going to be so familiar and strange all at once. I'm going back to an America with a new president, an America recovering (? They say it's “over”) from a recession, an America without Scrubs or T.R. Knight on Grey's. An America that is obsessed with Vampires all of a sudden (I just got another load of magazines in the mail and am astonished at the amount of Vampire stuff that's come out. What's with all the Vampires guys?) America! Where something like Lady Gaga is possible! ANYTHING is possible!

I'm excited.



Prediction Post - November 30, 2009

Job-hunting sucks. America is loud, I'm sick from eating burritos three times a day for the past three weeks, and I have a nervous twitch in my left eye from drinking too much coffee.

After a couple years

I know about 6 months ago I said I would write more often, and this summer I failed miserably... This was due to a combination of travel, camps and the sad fact that the internet cafe in my village closed. Mid-July I walked by it only to find the door padlocked shut. So I asked the woman working at the shashlik stand next to it "Do you know when it will be open?"

"Probably never"
"What?"
"They took away the computers."

At least we had it for 11 months. This news was not as bad for me, but horrible for my sitemate who is trying to apply for grad schools from here... Anyway the reason I can make this post now is because school is back in session! Yesterday I attended my last first bell ceremony and received flowers from a hand-full of students who were just so grateful I haven't ditched them for America yet.

During the first lesson a couple girls kept asking me questions: "Do you think there will be ice cream after school today?", "Did you go home this summer?", "When will you go home?!"

I told them November. "When will you come back?!" I said maybe after a couple years... "YEARS?! We will be so big then! You won't even know us!"

I've been gone a couple years. When I get back, maybe I'll be so big you won't even know me! Probably not, but you get what I mean.

Uralsk – You're in Europe! (Or you traveled so far, you might as well be!)

Uralsk is in the far western corner of Kazakhstan, and it currently has no volunteers, so any camps that want outside help have to bring us in. So three other volunteers and I made the impressive journey out there. To get an idea of what I did, look at a map of Kazakhstan, look at the far eastern corner, then follow the southern border until you make it up to the far western corner. You might ask, “Jessica, why didn't you just go through the middle of the country? There had to be an easier route!” The simple answer is no there is not. The easiest way, actually, goes through Russia and we aren't allowed on those trains.

When I first found out that living in Kazakhstan would mean a lot of train travel, my first reaction was to gasp with glee as I recalled the Hogwarts Express. I had images of people running around in their school robes, buying magical candies, and people pulling out their wands to practice defensive spells to counteract the Slytherin's hexes. Well, I am here to kill all those romantic notions as I say that riding the train in Kazakhstan is nothing like Harry Potter. People change into their train wear* not robes; people buy sausage, not snot-flavored jelly beans; and nobody knows any sort of spell, defensive or otherwise. Nobody even has a wand! It's a big letdown, and I thought I'd just clear that up now.

So after 68 hours of train, we got out and got into a taxi for another 5 hours to get to Uralsk where we were met by a really enthusiastic guy who was the camp organizer. He is a FLEX alum, which means he studied in America for a year in high school, and this camp is one of the ways he tries to give back a part of his experiences to the kids here. We were housed in a school and each of us given a group of 10 students (grades 9-11) to help for the week. The kids were amazing, they had to interview to come to the camp, so their English was really good, and they were just all around really creative and hard-working. The week came complete with English lessons every day (given by us), skits, American sports and a trip to the river to swim and get sunburns. AND a competition between the teams. They got points based on how well they did in sports, the evening activities, and (most importantly) their attitudes, and how much they didn't speak in Russian or Kazakh. My team started out really strong, (uhhh, I had one of the most competitive kids in the world on my team) so we won every sports game. Every single one. We even took first in the skits competition, but as the week went on they kept speaking Russian! I made a pie chart to show them that we could win every single game, but if we kept speaking Russian we would lose. Sports was only 18%, Russian/cellphone usage was 48%! Come on guys! I told them. It's SO easy to get these points! But in the end we lost 1st place to the Sunny Stars. It's ok, it was a close competition.

The camp ended with tears, the exchange of e-mails and phone numbers, and requests that we come back to Uralsk again. It was so fun to spend a week with the kids, to talk with them about the opportunities they have for their futures, to ask them their opinions about different topics, and to see them expressing themselves, really well, in English. Our “no Russian/Kazakh” rule had fully taken effect by the end of the week, and they were having private side conversations in English! Even little things like “are you going to lunch now? Let's go together!” It's incredible what a difference one week makes.

A second happy ending! We couldn't buy train tickets back because it's mid-summer and they were all sold out, so we got to fly to Astana. Granted, that is only halfway to where some of us needed to be, but I will take 3 hours of plane ride to replace 40-some hours of train any day. Just another 13 hours of bus, 3 hours of taxi and I am back, safe and sound, in my little corner of Kazakhstan.

Moral of this story: Kazakhstan is big. Really, really big.


*”train wear” means anything from sweats to underwear, depending on the person and how much they don't care that everyone can see them.

The multi-purpose fridge

One noticeable difference between a kitchen in America and a Kitchen in Kazakhstan is the refrigerator. For a while we didn't even have one here. It's cold enough in the winter that we just put our stuff on the front porch, and in the summer... just don't buy stuff that spoils.

In December my family got a huge, new, pure white fridge, and I noticed something really weird - it stayed white. Nothing was posted on it, no pictures, no magnets, no notes. Nothing. It was so strange to see a plain, white, magnetic surface with absolutely nothing clinging to it. So at the beginning of the summer, I made a calendar for my family to see where I would be and when and I used a magnet to put it on the side of the fridge.

This was the best idea ever, according to my host mother. I returned after a couple weeks of camps to find it covered in notes to my host brothers. "Don't forget! Feed the dog! Do the dishes! Don't spend too much time talking on the phone!"

It is the beginning of a new era.