31 March 2009

Photos from another Planet... I mean Naryn.






Nooruz celebrations, a bridge over the river Naryn, views from the intense mountain pass into the most mountainous oblast, and the Martian Naryn landscape.

20 March 2009

Real World - NARYN

11:30 16 March 2009

As I mentioned earlier, I was coming to Naryn City for Diversity week. I’m here now, but first let me back track a bit. I spent the last weekend after PDM in Bishkek with my girlfriend. It was really wonderful to go out and enjoy real dates, good food, and the big city together. We did everything from eating Sushi and Lebanese food to seeing “Marley and Me” in Russian to going to cool bars to taking strolls in the park. It was so weird, having come from our village, to be presented with so many opportunities of things to do, and it was nice but definitely overwhelming. While Bishkek is no New York or Paris, it does have its share of Western-looking establishments and it is so bizarre to be go to a mall that could be in any American town or to restaurants that have actual ambience and semi-legitimate foreign food.

Nevertheless, it was really wonderful to have an opportunity to enjoy the big city with my squeeze, going out on dates is such a novel concept for me considering we have been together for over three months and we have only been on a few real dates. So I’m happy we had this opportunity to grow closer. She makes me feel wonderful :)

But onto Diversity week, I got here Sunday to Naryn from Bishkek which was an intense drive. The landscape in Naryn Oblast is completely different from my village and oblast and almost in some ways resembles a moonscape. The road to get there was really intense, we came through a mountain pass that was semi-paved and got really high; Naryn oblast is the highest oblast in the country with no land under 1,500 m. The city that I am staying in is the largest city in the least populated and poorest oblast and basically consists of one long road that everything is located on. As I said before, the landscape is very bizarre, the city is flanked on both sides with mountains unlike any I have seen, they are jagged peaks of loose dirt and rock. A morning hike yesterday brought me close to the summit of the smaller mountains and it was some pretty stunning views. Another interesting aspect is how “Kyrgyz” this city is. Unlike my village the Russian presence here is close to nil and I never hear it spoken, some of the kids here don’t even speak it very well. It’s a bit difficult to get around, but all the older folks speak Russian, and I know basic Kyrgyz (numbers, how to ask for stuff, etc.) well enough that I can get by.

The conference itself was interesting on the first day. I am involved with three sessions during my week here: Campus Life, Religious Interactions in America, and US Government and Comparison with Kyrgyz Government. The first sessions today on immigrant life were interesting, several volunteers who are first or second generation immigrants spoke and hearing their stories that I had no idea about was really cool. I also think that the Kyrgyz students here really appreciated learning about the different types of people that live in America and how they got there. I am looking forward to giving the sessions I am involved in and seeing their response.

I got the PDM Blues!

09:00 14 March 2009

PDM finished up two nights ago and we had a blast. At the last night of it, my friend Daniel, who was a classical guitar major in college, organized a concert for anyone who wanted to participate. While I didn’t bring my axe, three other volunteers did and I think we put on quite a show. The concert started off with Daniel playing several classical pieces, one of which he composed for a friend of his birthday! They were really superb and I was really impressed with the self composed piece. He ended his set with a fun rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” which I really enjoyed. After Daniel, my friend Cameron did a solo rendition of a Bob Seger piece and then Daniel rejoined to play Weezer’s “Say it Ain’t So” which was a real hit with the audience.

Following Cameron’s set, my friend James played three self-composed pieces that were really heartfelt; his production is amazing, he had written them all in country and said he has about seven more! I closed the concert with, at first, a solo piece that I had written the music to years ago but couldn’t find good lyrics to (the lyrics still weren’t good, but I wanted to perform it so I did). I then brought out Daniel so I could play the Beatles’ “Ringo’s Theme/This Boy” which was fun and our solos came out really well. For the end of the concert, I had written the “PDM Blues” in the same spirit that I wrote the “PST Blues” that I mentioned several months ago. It featured some great solo work by Daniel and we also brought up our friend Katie for some harmonica support. It was a big hit with the crowd and I really enjoyed playing it. I’m going to try and get the videos of my performances to my parents, so if you are ever curious about seeing the aforementioned performances, try and hit them up.

Avalanches in J-Bad

1815 10 March 2009

While our PDM has been very useful for me so far, some unfortunate circumstances have caused about 25% of our group to not be able to make it. The Southern Kyrgyzstan volunteers have the option of flying to Bishkek or taking the 10-12 hour long taxi ride. As a group they decided to save money and take the taxi. This would have been all well and good, except an avalanche in one of the numerous mountain passes that exist between Osh/Jalalabad and Bishkek completely cut off traffic as well as killing a few Kyrgyz people. Luckily, the only negative consequence for volunteers and counterparts is their absence at the conference (after the avalanche all the airline ticket got bought up very quickly) but it’s scary to think that that could happen to volunteers in transit too.

One of the more “bad ass” stories from this actually comes from one of the counterparts. This Kyrgyz woman, once her taxi came to the edge of the avalanche and was being directed to turn around, decided to leave with all her baggage and make the several hundred meter traverse across the mountain pass on top of the avalanche snow to the other side where she picked up a taxi. This made sure she was the only CP or volunteer from the south that had taken road transport that made it and also severely showed up her volunteer as he has yet to show up. I’m just thankful that none from our group of volunteers and CPs were hurt though.

8th of March- International Women's Day!

21:30 8 March 2009

First of all, I just want to say a big “Happy Women’s Day” to all the fine ladies of the world and my readership today. I know that it is not really celebrated in most countries (despite the fact that according to the Soviets it was an international day celebrated across the world- something that confuses the populace when I tell them it is not celebrated in the States) but it is a big day here. I neglected to mention Men’s Day, it fell during my camp so I wasn’t able to participate in the celebrations, but I received a towel from my school as a present because of my anatomy… Anyhow, for Women’s Day, the traditional celebration includes, of course, men putting on a concert for women and feeding them at a big toy (Kyrgyz party). For my part of this, I got together with my counterpart and sang a few songs on the guitar with her. I found out she actually can play guitar quite well and she performed a song that sounded like a Soviet version of Joni Mitchell. It was very entertaining.

That school celebration was two days ago, and the day before I had an additional celebration where the boys from the leadership club I help run got together and laid a table and put on a concert and games for the women (girls) from the club, Saori, and the Director of the Dotz. I actually enjoyed this even more, because the boys literally did everything for the party, from organizing to set up to clean up afterwards and I was really proud of all the effort they put forth. It was inspiring to see that these boys could really take leadership positions in organizing the festivities.

But for the actual holiday, I am actually at my old host family’s house. While I have a good relationship with my host family at site, coming back makes me really miss some aspects of living with my old host family. First and foremost is that, being Russian, and me being a Russian speaker, I understand far more of what is going on that I do at site with the Kyrgyz/Russian mix I hear. It is also entertaining just to watch this family, when I first got to site I was confused and thought that the family was constantly arguing and hated each other. The more I learned Russian however, the more apparent it became that they were not mad at each other, simply incredibly argumentative. “PUT THE JAM ON YOUR BREAD! IT’S DELICIOUS!!!”, “I DON’T WANT JAM ON MY BREAD!!! I HAD JAM FOR BREAKFAST!”, “BUT IT”S VERY DELICIOUS! PUT SOME ON WITH BUTTER!”, “NO!!!” a typical conversation might go.

I digress, spending Women’s Day with my old host family was wonderful as we ate good food, I gave them some gifts, and we talked about life. I’ve also realized how incredibly liberal they are compared to most here. They just got a house dog! It is so cute, and I don’t know if you understand how incredibly rare having a “Domashnaya Sabaka” is here. It was really exciting to play with a dog that was friendly, bathed, and didn’t want to tear off my face. So yay for Women’s Day!

Bishkek Bound

19:45 5 March 2009

The reason for the aforementioned laundering of all of my clothes was because I am headed to Bishkek soon for our second In-Service seminar. This conference, entitled Project Design and Management or PDM, is centered around us learning how to design projects with our counterparts, how to secure funding for them, and how to run them once we are implementing them. My counterpart at school has a variety of ideas of what she would like to do with potential grant money and hopefully this seminar will give us guidance on whether the projects w have in mind are valuable, sustainable, and viable.

Directly after this trip, I will be taking my first “new oblast” trip to Naryn City to participate at the Diversity Week that a PCV is holding there. I’ve been working with a fellow PCV and Peace Corps staff to try and start a Diversity Committee within PC Kyrgyzstan. I think there is a large need for that here, and ideally we would do something in every oblast aimed at educating the Kyrgyz population about inter-group relations and how they work in the States. There are a lot of misconceptions about race, religion, and sexual orientation in this country and hopefully by showing how things worked in the United States we could encourage tolerance and acceptance within the country.

So while IST (In-Service Training) seems like it was only a week ago (it was actually 2.5 months ago), it will be really great to see everyone again, this is the last opportunity we have to all get together until our COS (Close of Service) Conference.

Dirty Clothes No More (for now...)

22:50 3 March 2009

13 socks, 10 shirts, 7 pairs of pants, 4 pairs of boxers, 3 sweaters, 1 towel, 4 hours, 3 blisters, and 1 sore back later I am done with my laundry. Out of all the chores that are more difficult here than I was used to, laundry by far ranks as the most annoying, physically difficult, and most loathed. Usually I wash a few of my clothes at a time, one pair of pants, a shirt and a few boxers and socks for the clothes of the next week but every now and then I have to do one big set of pretty much all my laundry. This sucks. While I am lucky that my family has a laundry “machine” (quotations because the machine is really more of a laundry spin-a-rounder than something that actually cleans clothes), I still have to get all the water, heat all the water, operate the washing machine (shockingly difficult to get it to work) wring out the “clean” clothes with the dirty soapy water that will be used for all of my laundry, rinse all the “clean” clothes in the basin of slightly less dirty water, wring them out again, and hang them out to dry. The really loathsome part is the bifurcated wringing process that leaves my hands red and sore for days afterwards and makes me wish I had the calluses of some of the older ajays (respectful term for older women in Kyrgyz) I have seen washing.

Nevertheless, it is certainly good to have my clothes as clean as they will get for the time being, and seeing the good half inch of dirt at the bottom of the washing machine when I poured out the water was simultaneously disgusting for how dirty my clothes must have been and satisfying for how much less dirt they contain now. But seriously, if anyone has heard of a drop off laundry service in my village, let me know. Come to think of it, it would be a great business proposition for some of my neighbors…