23 April 2009

Cool Experiences...





12:45 19 April 2009

I have had nothing but awesome people come visit me off of couch surfing! This past weekend I had this really interesting and intelligent Mexican national come visit, he is so cool! He has worked with National Geographic, written a prize winning book, and even worked with Gabriel Garcia Marquez! We took a great walk around my village on a beautiful day and I showed them all the sites of it. I found a cool new place in my village too, there used to be a PMK, a construction materials collective factory and the remnants of it exist today, including an absolutely huge sickle and hammer symbol. Anyhow, the pictures tell the stories better then the words. All of these are courtesy and copyright of Temoris Grecko.

Spring Left?

1530 16 April 2009

I wrote earlier that Spring had returned. Perhaps my mistake was having written that on April Fool’s Day. While this is still true to a certain extent, I was reminded this morning that I still live in quite a cold country. After a few weeks of nice and mild weather, trees beginning to blossom, and the color green being reintroduced to my life, I awoke this morning to a few inches of snow blanketing the landscape. It’s already mostly melted, creating muddy conditions everywhere, but it was still quite a shock to arise in mid April to snow everywhere! Unfortunately, I was also told that the late cold snap after the trees began blossoming might mean that the apricot harvest this year will be severely less than usually hoped for in the summer.

Дурок anyone?



17:30 06 April 2009

I just had a great experience! Some couch-surfing Israeli tourists came to visit and stayed at my apartment for two days! And they couldn’t have come at a better time, it was during Passover and I got to share a very pleasant Shabbat, except for one experience, and it was the first time I really prayed since I was in country. We even made matzoh brie and ate kosher food! It was so exciting. I was surprised and impressed how observant they are staying in spite of the difficulties that come with travelling. They brought a huge bagful of Israeli kosher meat, matzot, and other goodies that they were more than happy to share with me.

In the process of their staying here I learned a lot of cool stuff , my favorite being the Russian card game “Дурок” or “Fool” that is a lot of fun to play. In addition to playing a lot of card games, we also ate even more good food, learned a tiny bit of Hebrew to augment my miniscule knowledge of the language.

In other news, I’ve been slowly but surely making my apartment “my” apartment by putting up stuff, cleaning, and getting all the necessary home items that make it all nice and lived in. I went to a flea market in Karakol and got loads of old Soviet high quality cookware (all the new stuff is poor quality and Chinese made, the good stuff is the old stuff, and it’s also cheaper!). One thing I think is interesting about all the Soviet era products is that the prices were so stable then that they were actually stamped upon the metal products! So I know that my frying pan cost one ruble, my forks were each 15 kolpeks (ruble cents) and my pot was one ruble, 50 kolpeks. All of these are incredibly low prices, and it really makes me understand why, in an economic time of high inflation, high unemployment, and other problems, why so many people here pine for the Soviet Union.

22 April 2009

Spring Returns!

14:00 27 March 2009

Yesterday I did the new apartment dance! I moved into an apartment in my village and I am so pleased! I moved mainly because while I, overall, got along quite well with my family, I missed the freedom of being able to cook for myself on a daily basis, go and leave as I please, and have guests over whenever I wanted. My old host family was really nice and even helped me move by getting all my stuff into a horse cart and taking it over, I was going to hire a taxi but they were really willing to help out and I really appreciated it.

My new place seems like it will be a great location for all of this. It’s located in a really nice, calm, area of town on the first floor of two in a complex that used to house the workers of a Soviet era factory. The apartment has a lot of cool Soviet-y things about, little quirks like a radio that only has one channel on it (during Soviet times, it was used to receive the radio channel, there was no possibility to receive other frequencies) and a commemorative plaque from the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. Other than these, it’s a pretty typical apartment with two bedrooms and a nice kitchen with a refrigerator! I even have running water and a toilet, though I still have to buy a seat for it. The nicest part of it though is the gorgeous balcony I have out back, overlooking a rose garden that is going to be just beautiful once they bloom, the mountains to the south, and a little glimpse of the lake to the north.

To celebrate my new domicile, I had the JICA volunteers and Emil, an awesome HCN friend of ours, over for a dinner. I got to inaugurate my stove, dishes, table, and chairs in the place that I assume will probably be a hot spot for hanging out in my village, the JICAs both live with host families so it will be easier to cook at my place without getting in anyone’s way. Amid all the good feelings though, I do have to admit that I will miss certain aspects of living with a host family. The cultural integration I had on a daily basis and practice with Russian won’t exist as much, though I am lucky that I have a talkative neighbor to chat with and practice. I also really liked that family in general and hope that I can retain a certain attachment with them in the future.

Just bridekidding

1400 23 March 2009

After two weeks away from site, first at the Peace Corps Program and Design Management seminar and then the Diversity Week in Naryn, I am finally back in site just in time to enjoy a week off of school! It will have been three weeks since I last taught when we get back into the classroom, I hope I didn’t forget everything I knew! I celebrated Nooruz, a pre-Islamic Turkic spring holiday that is one of the biggest festivals in Kyrgyzstan, in Naryn with some other volunteers and an American tourist that I met there. The celebration consists of concerts throughout the county, eating traditional Kyrgyz food, and in some places the national horse games. While I have viewed riders preparing for the horse games, there were none in Naryn city (there are a few national horse games, the most interesting and famous being Ulak tartysh in Kyrgyz, known as buzkhashi elsewhere, an ancient, intense and violent game dating back to the Golden Horde where mounted riders try to pick up a beheaded goat carcass and deposit it into one of two goals using whatever means possible. It is often referred to as the most dangerous sport in the world as fatalities are not uncommon (and even expected) at the brutal international championships in Tajikistan- Usually the Tajik or Kyrgyz win, but the Afghans are renown for their bravery and frowned upon practice of playing with AK-47s). I was disappointed to not be able to see the horse games on Nooruz but have heard that they are played throughout the spring and summer and so I hope to catch a match at some point during the summer, I promise to upload pictures of the carnage then.

I was surprised and for a bit confused and worried this week however when I found out that my host-sister had been bride kidnapped. I knew that she had been dating one of her former classmates for quite a long time. Her boyfriend being Uyghur, a Muslim Western-Chinese ethnic/cultural/linguistic group, (bride kidnapping is pretty strictly a Kyrgyz/Kazakh) I was worried that some random Kyrgyz guy had kidnapped her non-consensually. I was relieved to find out that this was not the case and that it was indeed her boyfriend who had kidnapped her at the urging of his Kyrgyz friends. While she was unaware that it was going to happen, talking with her about it later made me believe that she was content with the occurrence and she seemed relatively happy in her new life. Bride kidnapping is a complex and controversial issue even here and not something I want to get started talking about in a public forum like this. However, it is often exercised in a cultural manner like with my host sister where the intent to marry was already in place, this I find still a bit off-setting due to my cultural upbringing but have many less intellectual qualms about.

Diversity vsio!

18:45 20 March 2009

The conclusion of Diversity Week was today and, having viewed and participated in the whole thing, I think it was quite successful. I was hesitant the first two days, all of the sessions were conducted in English (the primary participants were students from the English language program at the University) and given the rapid rate of speech of some of the volunteers and some of the slang they used I wasn’t sure the extent to which they were able to follow and understand the proceedings. Speaking with some of the students after the sessions one of the days, however, made me realize with some bit of surprise, that their English was actually quite excellent, and with the exception of some of the slang, they understood pretty much everything.

The sessions I helped lead were ones on university culture, U.S. government, and religion in the States. The latter two were especially dear to me as I spoke about my experience working on the Hill and my experience as a religious minority in the States and then how it effects my identity here. Overall, I think that they enjoyed my sessions, they asked a lot of interesting questions about them, they seemed pretty interested in Muslims in America, it was interesting to them that the Muslims in a non-Muslim dominant country like the States are, overall, much more observant than the Muslims in majority Muslim Kyrgyzstan. I was also impressed with their knowledge of the American governmental system, and it was really fun playing the part of High School civics teacher explaining checks and balances, the branches of government, and what a bicameral legislature is.

In addition to being a positive experience in general, another volunteer and I are trying to start a Diversity Committee within Peace Corps itself. While it would probably also work with individual volunteers and how they can deal with their personal diversities in country (something that can be difficult for some volunteers of different backgrounds to do) we have a goal to hold seminars and trainings through out the country to educate the Kyrgyz public about American culture and how we deal with diversity.