Red Center

That's the literal translation for the town, or city, that I'm moving to in a month. We got our site assignments yesterday, and one other volunteer and I are going to be spending the next two years in Kzylorda. It's a city of 200,000 people (the number of livestock is still undetermined) situated in south-central Kazakhstan (very similar to south-central LA, from what I hear). Just as I was hoping for, there are no mountains or lakes, lots of camels, lots of heat in the summer, lots of sand, essentially no beautiful sights or landmarks, lots of water and air pollution, and it's more than a dozen hours by train to both Almaty and Astana, the capitol.

Although it apparently isn't going to be the small, rural, picturesque town in the foothills I was envisioning, I am looking forward to going there and finding out what it's like. I will be there with one other volunteer who also happens to be in my language group, which I think will work out well because we have gotten along so far.

Also, for some unknown reason they have placed me at a university, so after a month of learning to teach and manage a classroom of 30 eleven-year olds I will be teaching a group of twenty-year olds the virtues of Mark Twain and Atticus Finch (or if I have my way the guy from The Giver). I actually don't know if the students I teach will be that advanced in English or not, but this is my fear. Either way, it should be an interesting two years. And having lived in the desert for a while, I'm hoping I can handle the Kazakh-summer heat.

In other news, the word for "but" in Kazakh is "birak" but pronounced "Barack" like Obama. Naturally as soon as I learned this I looked in my Kaz-English dictionary to see if there was a word for Obama. I found that "Oba" means cholera epidemic, and if you add "ma" to the end of a sentence it becomes a question. So "Barack Obama" in Kazakh literally means "But, (a) cholera (epidemic)?" This is neither an endorsement for or slight against Mr. Obama; I just thought it was funny.

Some bad news came earlier this week when one of my good friends in our language group decided to terminate his service early and leave Kazakhstan. It was a sad day and was totally unexpected for all of us, but life in Chamalgan went on as we are all extremely busy, and now a little bit busier with Mr. Allen (his teacher's name) and his guitar back in America. But things are still going well. My five little elephants dwindled down to one, but is now back up to five as we acquired four new elephants (two girls, who like to smack each other as hard as they can, roughly every 45 seconds). But our talent show is on Friday and I think they will be ready. It is pretty funny to watch them recite the poem- they know it pretty well but not perfectly, but every time we practice it they yell it almost as loud as they can.

To avoid confusion, here's the poem:

Five little elephants
Standing in a row
Five little trunks (sometimes pronounced 'troonks')
Waving "hello!"
"Oh" said an elephant
"Time to go"
Four little elephants
Standing in a row

And so on until there are no little elephants standing in a row.

I'm currently trying to upload some of my pictures onto this computer at the internet cafe, but it doesn't seem to be working. Maybe when I get to my site I will finally figure out how to post my pictures.

Also I realized that I hadn't really given my address out to anyone. So in case anyone feels the sudden urge to send me mail, my address is:

Peace Corps Kazakhstan
P.O. Box 257
Almaty 050022
Kazakhstan
ATTN: Chris Chaplin

Hopefully I will have a flash drive soon, so I will be able to type posts on my computer and just transfer them on here when I get to the internet. So I hope to be putting a few more posts on here, since I can only get to the internet once a week and then when I do I have usually forgotten a lot of the stuff that's happened that's worth mentioning.

Also, I'm going to ignore my own request to not talk about the Orioles anymore, but was there really talk about them moving? For the record, if they're not, this is not a subject to joke about.

I also heard from my mom that I missed a great pennant race. Hopefully the playoffs are just as exciting. I think I would be rooting for the Rockies if I were able to watch.