This Onion article from last spring about the Stanley Cup Playoffs made me cry with laughter. I'm just looking to spread a little joy this holiday season:
STACKLEY CUP PLAYOFFS UNDERWAY
NEW YORK—The 2008 Stackley Cup Playoffs, a set of odd-number-of-games series that will determine the champion of the National Huckie League, are well underway, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman confirmed Monday.
At press time, the four hackley teams in contention for the Stickleby Cup were the Detroit Red Wings, the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Pittsburgh Flyers, and a team from Dallas, TX. The Red Wings, one of the NHL's Original Four Teams, and the Penguins, who feature one of hinky's rising young stars in Sidney Crossberry, are leading their respective series and are expected to advance to the championship round, or Storkaley Cup Finallys.
Hucklebee, which is played on ice by stick-wielding six-man teams who attempt to strike the hokey puck or "ball" into the opposing goal, is naturally a cold-weather sport. For this reason, hooky is believed to have originated in Canada. This will be the first year since 2003 that no Canadian team will make it to the Shaklee Cup Finals, and no Canadian team has won the Cup since 2003.
"This is the best time of year to watch the great sport of [huncky]," Commissioner Bettman said in a statement released by the NHL public relations department. "We still believe that our game is the fastest, toughest, most exciting game in the world, and we look forward to demonstrating that to a national audience as we determine the 2008 NHL Champion."
However, despite a fiercely loyal core fanbase, achieving mass popularity has been difficult for the National Honky League, which currently ranks behind the NFL, NBA, NASCAR, MLB, college football, NCAA basketball, tournament poker, and figure skating in television viewers. The sport, while definitely colorful, is somewhat difficult to watch on television; many say the fast action is actually too hard to follow, as they are unsure where the hanky puck is at any given time. The sheer number of games is also somewhat intimidating; the NHL season is believed to have actually began sometime last year.
The sport was also dealt a rather ugly setback with many viewers during last year's Stanbly Cup playoffs when two players dropped their ice bats and gloves and became involved in a shamefully brutal fistfight.
However, the passion of the teams involved in the Stagolee Cup Playups is impossible to deny or ignore.
"Way back when I was a kid playing on frozen ponds, I dreamed of winning the Cup," Detroit's Brian Rafalski told reporters Tuesday. "It's every player's dream to hoist the Cup above their heads and have their name engraved on the side."
One of the grand traditions of the sport is that each hicky player from the Cup-winning team is allowed to take the trophy with them for a day to show their families, friends, and presumably even coworkers at their actual jobs.
"Winning the Cup would be the ultimate dream come true for me, the reward for a very long, hard struggle," said foreign-born Penguins player Alexander Ovechkin, who, like most hochuli players, has based his life around the sport and has no real-world skills. "But really, just to play this game, to be part of something that brings so many people joy, that has been a great gift as well." Horklee is presumably extremely popular in Ovetchkin's home country.
"Our dream is that, when the Stanley [sic] Cup Finals end in June, everyone in America has seen those games and realized how much fun it is to watch the NHL," Commissioner Bettman said. "These are, without a doubt, some of the world's finest athletes playing in some of the world's most competitive games. I know I'm prejudiced, but I honestly think that anyone who watches will agree that hockey [sic] is the greatest sport in the world."
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Merry Belated Christmas and Happy Early New Year!
In Kazakhstan, where I currently live, the big holiday this time of year is New Year's, but in America, where I'm originally from, it's Christmas. So, I figured the smart thing to do would be to strike a balance between the two and post an entry at exactly the halfway point (depending on your time zone) between the two holidays. I'm trying to get back into posting more regularly too, seeing as how I wrote all of two entries this semester. We'll see how it goes.
First, I hope everyone is having a happy and safe Christmas season wherever you are celebrating it. Here in Kyzylorda, the weather turned brutally cold just in time for the holidays, bringing along with it a few inches of icy snow that actually feels more like tiny shards of ice cold glass or maybe smaller balls of dippin-dots ice cream when it hits you. The other day when I was walking to a lesson I was convinced my face had started bleeding from the relentless onslaught of ice pellets (turned out I was just a giant wimp). And all this after it had been really, really warm for the last two months. I had really started believing all the people that were telling me that because it was so cold last winter, this winter would be much warmer (turned out they were just giant liars).
Not a lot new I can add at this point. I recently secured a "Peace Corps Volunteer Resource Room" in my school's building, where I'll be able to store the boxes of English books I received from Darien Book Aid (in Connecticut), and where I'll be able to have a much more structured work schedule, perhaps with actual office hours when the semester starts up later next month. I'm also in the process of trying to secure multiple weekly teaching hours with each group at the school, something that the administration has been unflinchingly opposed to, mostly because right now the school has too many teachers and not enough students/hours to give, and also because the PCV's weekly lesson is viewed as an "extra lesson" in terms of the hours allotted by the syllabus, and so giving the volunteer two lessons would be too much as it would take away from the content of the actual syllabus. This is what I was told by my dean this week. The thing is, even though I don't like it, I understand it better now, and we kind of had a breakthrough this week where we finally understood each other's point of view. This new-found mutual understanding might have been helped along by the fact that my PC regional manager made a phone call to him this week saying that if I wasn't given more hours with each group the school might not receive another PCV after me. Either way, I'm hoping it will work out in my favor, but I'm prepared to deal with it if it doesn't and work harder at thriving in the system I'm stuck in. Last semester I was too lax with the students and didn't demand enough from them; although we had a lot of useful speaking practice during the lessons, and they generally seemed to enjoy the lessons, I didn't really attempt to give them grades, mostly since I had tried to do that in the previous semester and gotten extremely fed up with the futility of trying to give them grades. Well, I plan on trying that again, hopefully without getting so frustrated. It just would be a lot less frustrating if I could see results of my work more easily; right now the results aren't so easily visible, even with the one group I saw multiple times a week, because I was still working at the mercy of the teacher who had given me the class and thus was not in total control, as I wanted to be.
Ok, enough about that. I spent Christmas this year with the two new volunteers from the nearby village and one of my students, whose family is hosting one of them. We hung out, watched A Christmas Carol, exchanged a few gifts, and mostly just relaxed. It was a nice Christmas, though certainly not the same as being back in America with my family, which I'm really looking forward to doing next year.
And tomorrow begins the parade of New Year's parties - one at the university, one at a friend's house, another one at the university-owned restaurant, and then finally the real thing on New Year's Eve. I'm planning to host a few friends from Shymkent, a city about 8 hours to the south, and we will "meet" the new year together, as they say here.
One other thing- I was starting to think I was going to escape Kazakhstan without experiencing the sheep's head dinner, and I was a little disappointed about this. Well, I didn't escape. The other day I was invited to a "betashar" party, which is where the new bride covers her head with a large white cloth while all the guests are individually asked to make a small contribution in exchange for a promise of lifting the cloth at the end so everyone can see the bride. It's an interesting ritual, and I later found out that these donations actually go to the emcee - the guy who is playing the dombyra (2-stringed guitar-like instrument) and "inviting" guests to donate - whereas I thought they went to the bride's family, who put together the whole huge party and feast. I was a little disappointed to learn this later, but I guess that's how these guys make their money. Anyway before the ritual we all sat down to a giant feast, and I was at the table with all the respected, older men (I'm not implying I've attained the stature of an old, respected Kazakh man here; I'm just a foreigner, and they LOVE foreigners here. Unless that foreigner is Uzbek). So they set down the sheep's head just a couple feet from me. I had actually seen this once before, but it was during training and we were with our language teachers who were able to explain why we might not be that into eating eyeball or taste bud. So this was the first time I experienced this totally on my own. I'm lucky it happened at this point in my service and not much earlier because I've just recently gotten to a point where I feel relatively comfortable speaking Kazakh. Anyway I was more or less coerced by the colleague who brought me into a) cutting a piece off the face, from just under the right eye, b) eating it, and c) eating a piece of the roof of the mouth. I wish I could tell you how they tasted but I basically just swallowed them hole, since I figured puking on the table might not be well-received. It was a little unsettling, the whole thing, but I tried to keep reminding myself how many poor animals I've contributed to the slaughter of through my almost daily consumption of meat over the last 26 years. That was how I was able to get the pieces down, anyway. In spite of all this, I have no plans to become a vegetarian at this time. Maybe down the road, when I have more alternative ways of incorporating protein into my diet (read, when I'm back in the US).
Well that's all for now. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!
First, I hope everyone is having a happy and safe Christmas season wherever you are celebrating it. Here in Kyzylorda, the weather turned brutally cold just in time for the holidays, bringing along with it a few inches of icy snow that actually feels more like tiny shards of ice cold glass or maybe smaller balls of dippin-dots ice cream when it hits you. The other day when I was walking to a lesson I was convinced my face had started bleeding from the relentless onslaught of ice pellets (turned out I was just a giant wimp). And all this after it had been really, really warm for the last two months. I had really started believing all the people that were telling me that because it was so cold last winter, this winter would be much warmer (turned out they were just giant liars).
Not a lot new I can add at this point. I recently secured a "Peace Corps Volunteer Resource Room" in my school's building, where I'll be able to store the boxes of English books I received from Darien Book Aid (in Connecticut), and where I'll be able to have a much more structured work schedule, perhaps with actual office hours when the semester starts up later next month. I'm also in the process of trying to secure multiple weekly teaching hours with each group at the school, something that the administration has been unflinchingly opposed to, mostly because right now the school has too many teachers and not enough students/hours to give, and also because the PCV's weekly lesson is viewed as an "extra lesson" in terms of the hours allotted by the syllabus, and so giving the volunteer two lessons would be too much as it would take away from the content of the actual syllabus. This is what I was told by my dean this week. The thing is, even though I don't like it, I understand it better now, and we kind of had a breakthrough this week where we finally understood each other's point of view. This new-found mutual understanding might have been helped along by the fact that my PC regional manager made a phone call to him this week saying that if I wasn't given more hours with each group the school might not receive another PCV after me. Either way, I'm hoping it will work out in my favor, but I'm prepared to deal with it if it doesn't and work harder at thriving in the system I'm stuck in. Last semester I was too lax with the students and didn't demand enough from them; although we had a lot of useful speaking practice during the lessons, and they generally seemed to enjoy the lessons, I didn't really attempt to give them grades, mostly since I had tried to do that in the previous semester and gotten extremely fed up with the futility of trying to give them grades. Well, I plan on trying that again, hopefully without getting so frustrated. It just would be a lot less frustrating if I could see results of my work more easily; right now the results aren't so easily visible, even with the one group I saw multiple times a week, because I was still working at the mercy of the teacher who had given me the class and thus was not in total control, as I wanted to be.
Ok, enough about that. I spent Christmas this year with the two new volunteers from the nearby village and one of my students, whose family is hosting one of them. We hung out, watched A Christmas Carol, exchanged a few gifts, and mostly just relaxed. It was a nice Christmas, though certainly not the same as being back in America with my family, which I'm really looking forward to doing next year.
And tomorrow begins the parade of New Year's parties - one at the university, one at a friend's house, another one at the university-owned restaurant, and then finally the real thing on New Year's Eve. I'm planning to host a few friends from Shymkent, a city about 8 hours to the south, and we will "meet" the new year together, as they say here.
One other thing- I was starting to think I was going to escape Kazakhstan without experiencing the sheep's head dinner, and I was a little disappointed about this. Well, I didn't escape. The other day I was invited to a "betashar" party, which is where the new bride covers her head with a large white cloth while all the guests are individually asked to make a small contribution in exchange for a promise of lifting the cloth at the end so everyone can see the bride. It's an interesting ritual, and I later found out that these donations actually go to the emcee - the guy who is playing the dombyra (2-stringed guitar-like instrument) and "inviting" guests to donate - whereas I thought they went to the bride's family, who put together the whole huge party and feast. I was a little disappointed to learn this later, but I guess that's how these guys make their money. Anyway before the ritual we all sat down to a giant feast, and I was at the table with all the respected, older men (I'm not implying I've attained the stature of an old, respected Kazakh man here; I'm just a foreigner, and they LOVE foreigners here. Unless that foreigner is Uzbek). So they set down the sheep's head just a couple feet from me. I had actually seen this once before, but it was during training and we were with our language teachers who were able to explain why we might not be that into eating eyeball or taste bud. So this was the first time I experienced this totally on my own. I'm lucky it happened at this point in my service and not much earlier because I've just recently gotten to a point where I feel relatively comfortable speaking Kazakh. Anyway I was more or less coerced by the colleague who brought me into a) cutting a piece off the face, from just under the right eye, b) eating it, and c) eating a piece of the roof of the mouth. I wish I could tell you how they tasted but I basically just swallowed them hole, since I figured puking on the table might not be well-received. It was a little unsettling, the whole thing, but I tried to keep reminding myself how many poor animals I've contributed to the slaughter of through my almost daily consumption of meat over the last 26 years. That was how I was able to get the pieces down, anyway. In spite of all this, I have no plans to become a vegetarian at this time. Maybe down the road, when I have more alternative ways of incorporating protein into my diet (read, when I'm back in the US).
Well that's all for now. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!
Friday, December 5, 2008
Why Are You Still Here?
(I originally typed this on Dec 1 but didn't get to internet until today, Dec 5)
I'm writing this month from sunny and still remarkably warm Kyzylorda. Actually just today it got cold, but what do you expect from the official first day of winter, according to the people of Kazakhstan? For the last couple of weeks though it's been really warm. So warm I haven't even had to wear a hat or my heavy winter coat. This is a big switch from last year at this time when I was bundled up everyday like the little brother from A Christmas Story, though thankfully I could usually get my arms down.
So a lot has happened since the last time I posted an update. Apparently that's the way it goes when you go two and a half months between entries. I'll start with a story from school.
Last week I did an activity with my students that I thought of off the top of my head in a desperate attempt to get my first-year students talking, that ended up going really well. (It's amazing how you can plan a lesson for 3 hours that bombs and then have an idea in the span of a split-second during class that ends up being really successful.) I told them that I was thinking of moving back to Almaty - not totally untrue either, even if only a fantasy - and split them into two groups. One group had to convince me to go ahead with the move, the other to convince me to stay, and I started in the middle of the room and moved gradually to one side or the other depending on the reasons given for each. This got even my quietest groups shouting over each other, which was great, seeing as how it's otherwise impossible to get a word out of them most of the time. Anyway the day after one of these lessons in which the Almaty group had won, I was walking down the hall when one of my students yelled from behind me "Mr. Chris....Why are you still here?" After my initial confusion I realized what she was talking about, but I couldn't help but notice how much that question resonated with me in a real sense. Even though a lot of my lessons are going fine, lately I've been feeling like I've had very little impact here, and mostly because I'm completely handcuffed by the university's rules prohibiting volunteers from teaching their own courses. I still see all but one group for only 50 minutes each week, which, even when the lesson goes great like the moving activity did, is so laughably inadequate that it's starting to get maddeningly frustrating. I've had countless discussions with people here about this, including other teachers in my department and the former dean, and I was surprised to learn that no previous volunteer has ever asked for the kind of schedule change I am. But then I realized one reason for this is that before I came, most of the students were still studying according to the "traditional system," which meant grades of either 2, 3, 4 or 5 and classes 80 minutes long. They've recently switched to a new "credit system," in which students receive grades comparable to those given at American universities, like A, B, C, D, and F according to a 1-100 scale, though the scale is a little (a lot) kinder here. Anyway now they only study for 50 minutes each lesson, whereas in the past volunteers had 80 minutes with each group, and it's obviously a lot easier to complete a productive activity in that amount of time. So, long story short, the frustration has been building inside me and the last couple of weeks I've realized I've been a lot more irritable. This is also partly because some students constantly ask to be excused from lessons, don't come to lessons, come late to lessons, do work for other classes during the lessons, and are generally completely disrespectful in ways that make me want to throw sharp objects at the back wall just past their heads. That's probably an over-exaggeration, but you can probably see how when these things happen, a small piece of me dies inside as I realize I'm having even less impact than the allotted 50 minutes per week allows me.
Enough venting. Plenty of good/funny/interesting/just plain weird things have happened since the beginning of the semester. Under the "good" category, I went back home in October for Kevin's wedding, which was a blast. I got to see a lot of you all which was awesome, and thanks also to Kevin for timing it perfectly so I could see Game 7 of the ALCS through the decisive Game 5 of the World Series (in the airport terminal just before boarding - seriously couldn't have been more perfect timing). On that note congrats to all the Phillies' fans reading this - 2 of you, at last count - on your world championship. Even though as an O's fan I was living vicariously through the Devil Rays - and yes to me they still are and forever will be the DEVIL Rays - I am happy for my good Philly-fan-friends (not to mention a little jealous if we're being honest, and we are).
Sticking with the baseball theme, what's the best thing about the offseason for Orioles' fans? Probably that they can't lose any games during the winter (though if any team could find a way to pull this off....they'd be among my top 3 or so guesses). Alas next season will start and the losses will start piling up again soon enough. No use in pretending otherwise, Chris.
I have a feeling that a lot of blog-worthy things have happened in the last couple of months that I'm just not thinking of at the moment. I'm hoping that a few will come to me if I keep typing. Ah yes- before I left for the US we gave a practice TOEFL Test to about 22 interested locals. The TOEFL Test is the test foreigners need to pass in order to study at most American universities, and it is by no means easy. I'd call the reading section a watered-down LSAT - easier, for sure, but for foreigners it's really a challenge. Even native speakers have to read the texts carefully and think hard to answer a lot of the questions. Anyway, we gave this practice test thinking it would be an easy first step in our latest idea for a community project - creating a local translators group that could supply interpreting help to foreign visitors, for example people adopting or people just visiting Kyzylorda completely on their own (this never really happens but hey, it could someday). It ended up being a pretty sizable pain in the арс, especially because we kept the signup period open until the night before, meaning we had 22 50-page tests to start printing less than 24 hours before the test. This became especially problematic when my brand new printer ran out of ink 8 pages in. Thankfully we didn't panic(<---not true) and were able to scramble around town the morning of and make all the copies, but we cut things awfully close. It was also a pain getting the room we needed at the university reserved, which reminds me of another ridiculous thing.
Back in September I think I mentioned that a few of my students expressed to me their sincere interest in learning baseball. Obviously this kind of talk is music to my ears, so I set up a "baseball club" to meet twice a week. We had a couple successful meetings, though never with more than 3 people at a time, which made it less baseball than 1-on-1-on-1 whiffle ball. Anyway even with the low turnout these were going well enough, until the university security guards one day refused to give me the key for the спорт зал, or gym. When I asked why, it was because they were told by somebody - they were unable or flat refused to tell me who - not to give the key to anyone, including the dean. After several weeks of trying in vain to figure out what the hell was going on, I finally was told that the school rents the gym - which is inside the university building - from a private company. Regardless of this, which in itself seems ridiculous, I could vent for pages/hours about how ridiculously stupid it is to restrict access to a completely empty and mostly unused gym, but I'll spare you all the time and save myself the subsequent rapid rise in blood pressure. And there might be some rationale behind the whole thing, but these days I'm generally not in the mood to give people the benefit of the doubt. Suffice it to say, as far as I'm concerned it makes absolutely no sense and is completely and utterly devoid of reason. For the time being I've given up, mainly because for awhile each day I'd ask and each day it would just make me angrier and angrier. Also to be fair people weren't exactly knocking down the door to play either - a few times I had to hook in stragglers - "Oh hi Aigerim from 05-1, what are you doing back at the school at 4 p.m.? Oh you're going to the library? Why don't you come play baseball with the three of us in the gym instead? Oh you can study later. And it's okay that you have high heels on, it's just whiffle ball."
Back to the TOEFL. Mostly it went fine. Grading the tests also took a lot longer than we'd expected, and we hadn't realized beforehand that it wasn't logistically possible to have a speaking section and finish before midnight, since we would have had to listen to 22 people all at different times, so we ended up turning it into a writing section, which was of course less than ideal. But all in all, it was fine. Only three students became certified "Contact Club Translators" available for hire based on their scores, but this wasn't a big surprise considering how difficult the test is.
What else has happened? Oh yeah, America has a new president! Congratulations to Barack Obama. I don't want to get into divisive political issues, but I will say I was extremely happy and proud when I went to the internet on the morning of November 5 and saw the New York Times headline: "OBAMA." It put a hop in my step going back to my building, and it was the only topic of conversation for the rest of the day. Political leanings aside, I don't think I've ever been as proud to be an American as I was on that day. And how thankful I was to be able to spend that historic day in a foreign country, to see firsthand the reactions of non-Americans to such a historic election and get to share the moment with people of another country, who clearly had a stake in the result. People here generally grasped the significance of America electing a black president, as they have a working knowledge of our ugly racial past, but more than that they almost unilaterally expressed to me their happiness that someone other than Bush was coming in. (In the run-up to the election, only one Kazakh person told me he wanted McCain, and many told me they thought McCain would be a continuation of Bush, if that gives an idea of "how the world would have voted"). Many people asked me why Bush was leaving, and I explained about the (bloodless coup) term limits. Actually right when I got back to the school that morning after checking the internet, one Kazakh teacher approached me and said "How's your Kazakh these days?" Telling him it was okay, he then proceeded to ask me a lot of hard questions that would have been difficult for me to answer in English, let alone in a language that lay virtually untouched during 70 years of Soviet rule. For example, "How are things going in Iraq?" "Why did America go into Iraq?" "Will Obama start more wars?" and after telling me the only reason we went into Iraq was oil, "Iraq has a lot of oil. Kazakhstan has a lot of oil. America invaded Iraq. Should I worry that America will someday invade Kazakhstan?" At first the obvious answer to me was "Of course not!" We're so mired in two unpopular wars that something drastic would have to happen for our leaders to plunge us into another one at this point. Not to mention most Americans don't even know Kazakhstan is a real country yet, and the political situation here is stable enough that Kazakhstan is probably among the last on America's list of "next countries to invade." But then I thought about it for a second and changed my answer to say that it wasn't going to happen in his lifetime (he's about 60). "Yes, but is it possible? I know I don't need to worry, but I'm asking because I worry for my children," he said. Then I thought more about it and realized that if someone in Iraq had asked this question to a foreign visitor, say, 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, they might have had the same initial reaction I did. So then I said that yes, it was possible. It's interesting the effect giving this kind of answer has - on the person giving it. Of course I wasn't coming literally face to face with war casualties or seeing things up close in that way, but when you're trying to be honest and straightforward and you feel you have to tell someone in a foreign country that yes, it's possible that your country might one day invade their country, endangering the lives of your children and grandchildren, the whole picture can become a lot clearer in your mind, and it did in mine. Being abroad, especially at the current time, has taught me one thing - how much much of the rest of the world is at the complete mercy of America, and not just its foreign policy. From the global impact of our economic "situation" to Kazakhstanis' concern about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to their tracking of the election, for almost a year before Election Day, even to seeing two middle school age boys walking down the street listening to American rap music and shouting "TALK IS CHEAP MUTHA F***KAS!!!" has made clear how far America's reach can be.
I was also, before I came, a little afraid of a perceived worldwide anti-American sentiment. But I've been surprised at how easily and naturally people here separate the regular citizens of America from the ruling class. They know, for example, that just because you're from the US doesn't automatically mean you agree with everything your government is doing. Perhaps it was naive of me to think, or fear, that that might be the case, but either way I've been relieved to find it's not.
Wow, what else? This has been a slightly heavier entry than most of my past ones. Rest assured there have been plenty of lighter moments recently, but for some reason they're not есиме тусип жатыр, or literally "dropping into my mind" at the moment. Ah, a belated Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! We celebrated a few times here with different groups of students before having a celebration with all (now 5!) of the volunteers in our oblast. All in all it was a good Thanksgiving. And Halloween - that was spent in a hotel in Amsterdam following the news of a 24-hour delay on my connecting flight to Almaty. So the Thanksgiving celebration was a lot better. I think for Halloween I just watched the news in Dutch - actually even less exciting than it sounds.
Ok before I wrap this one up, one quick anecdote from yesterday. A local school teacher had tracked me down at work a few days earlier and asked me for help with an open lesson project "according to the internet regime." I was thoroughly clueless as to what exactly she needed me to do, but I told her I'd do it. (Partly I just wanted to meet this "internet regime.") So she ended up calling me on Sunday and telling me to come down to the main building at the university, and to bring an American flag if I had one. Luckily I had brought back a few foam ones from the US, so I took one of these with me. When I got there I realized what was going on: this teacher was doing an open lesson about American holidays and wanted her students to interview me via Skype, presumably to show how technologically advanced her (open) lessons are. So I got there and they sent me to sit at the computer in the adjoining room. They then took my small foam American flag and glued it to the wall behind me with gluestick. It was becoming apparent that they were going to pretend I was in America, when in fact I was 30 feet away and in the same building. Ok, that's cute, I'll go along with it, I figured.
At the start of the interview the students introduced themselves as Baghzhan and Akmaral, both 8th grade students. The interview went fine, and when we finished I told them that their English was very good. "And you guys are only in 8th grade?" I asked. "No, we're in 11th. That was a lie." And they all laughed, including the teacher. This didn't really bother me at the time, partly because they were so friendly and full of questions, but as I thought about it more it started to gnaw at me. We've seen this kind of thing time and time again here: teachers not only not reprimanding students for dishonest behavior, but actively engaging in, participating in, and even provoking it. So I've come to this most recent conclusion regarding the Kazakhstan cheating epidemic: people everywhere are naturally going to do dishonest things, whether it's in the US, Kazakhstan, Romania, Brazil, wherever. But I've noticed here that one difference between here and the US is that my students generally feel no shame when they cheat, and thus it's just standard accepted practice. Why is this? Are people here naturally more dishonest? No, I think it's that on a much larger scale than in the US, teachers here don't instill in their students that cheating and lying are wrong. Example: teachers here that don't allow their students to cheat are regarded as "strict," as in, "Mr. Chris why don't you let us cheat? You are so strict!" Wow, okay.
I could go on and on about problems with the current structure of the educational system here, from kindergarten on up through university, but I won't.
Well, if you've made it this far, you deserve a prize. Remind me in about 10 months and I'll get you something cool from the bazaar for when I get back. I should really try to write shorter and more frequent entries, but I figure this one makes up for the last two or so months of silence. Plus it was pretty therapeutic for me. Well, till next time, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! (and Happy Valentine's Day?). Be safe everyone.
I'm writing this month from sunny and still remarkably warm Kyzylorda. Actually just today it got cold, but what do you expect from the official first day of winter, according to the people of Kazakhstan? For the last couple of weeks though it's been really warm. So warm I haven't even had to wear a hat or my heavy winter coat. This is a big switch from last year at this time when I was bundled up everyday like the little brother from A Christmas Story, though thankfully I could usually get my arms down.
So a lot has happened since the last time I posted an update. Apparently that's the way it goes when you go two and a half months between entries. I'll start with a story from school.
Last week I did an activity with my students that I thought of off the top of my head in a desperate attempt to get my first-year students talking, that ended up going really well. (It's amazing how you can plan a lesson for 3 hours that bombs and then have an idea in the span of a split-second during class that ends up being really successful.) I told them that I was thinking of moving back to Almaty - not totally untrue either, even if only a fantasy - and split them into two groups. One group had to convince me to go ahead with the move, the other to convince me to stay, and I started in the middle of the room and moved gradually to one side or the other depending on the reasons given for each. This got even my quietest groups shouting over each other, which was great, seeing as how it's otherwise impossible to get a word out of them most of the time. Anyway the day after one of these lessons in which the Almaty group had won, I was walking down the hall when one of my students yelled from behind me "Mr. Chris....Why are you still here?" After my initial confusion I realized what she was talking about, but I couldn't help but notice how much that question resonated with me in a real sense. Even though a lot of my lessons are going fine, lately I've been feeling like I've had very little impact here, and mostly because I'm completely handcuffed by the university's rules prohibiting volunteers from teaching their own courses. I still see all but one group for only 50 minutes each week, which, even when the lesson goes great like the moving activity did, is so laughably inadequate that it's starting to get maddeningly frustrating. I've had countless discussions with people here about this, including other teachers in my department and the former dean, and I was surprised to learn that no previous volunteer has ever asked for the kind of schedule change I am. But then I realized one reason for this is that before I came, most of the students were still studying according to the "traditional system," which meant grades of either 2, 3, 4 or 5 and classes 80 minutes long. They've recently switched to a new "credit system," in which students receive grades comparable to those given at American universities, like A, B, C, D, and F according to a 1-100 scale, though the scale is a little (a lot) kinder here. Anyway now they only study for 50 minutes each lesson, whereas in the past volunteers had 80 minutes with each group, and it's obviously a lot easier to complete a productive activity in that amount of time. So, long story short, the frustration has been building inside me and the last couple of weeks I've realized I've been a lot more irritable. This is also partly because some students constantly ask to be excused from lessons, don't come to lessons, come late to lessons, do work for other classes during the lessons, and are generally completely disrespectful in ways that make me want to throw sharp objects at the back wall just past their heads. That's probably an over-exaggeration, but you can probably see how when these things happen, a small piece of me dies inside as I realize I'm having even less impact than the allotted 50 minutes per week allows me.
Enough venting. Plenty of good/funny/interesting/just plain weird things have happened since the beginning of the semester. Under the "good" category, I went back home in October for Kevin's wedding, which was a blast. I got to see a lot of you all which was awesome, and thanks also to Kevin for timing it perfectly so I could see Game 7 of the ALCS through the decisive Game 5 of the World Series (in the airport terminal just before boarding - seriously couldn't have been more perfect timing). On that note congrats to all the Phillies' fans reading this - 2 of you, at last count - on your world championship. Even though as an O's fan I was living vicariously through the Devil Rays - and yes to me they still are and forever will be the DEVIL Rays - I am happy for my good Philly-fan-friends (not to mention a little jealous if we're being honest, and we are).
Sticking with the baseball theme, what's the best thing about the offseason for Orioles' fans? Probably that they can't lose any games during the winter (though if any team could find a way to pull this off....they'd be among my top 3 or so guesses). Alas next season will start and the losses will start piling up again soon enough. No use in pretending otherwise, Chris.
I have a feeling that a lot of blog-worthy things have happened in the last couple of months that I'm just not thinking of at the moment. I'm hoping that a few will come to me if I keep typing. Ah yes- before I left for the US we gave a practice TOEFL Test to about 22 interested locals. The TOEFL Test is the test foreigners need to pass in order to study at most American universities, and it is by no means easy. I'd call the reading section a watered-down LSAT - easier, for sure, but for foreigners it's really a challenge. Even native speakers have to read the texts carefully and think hard to answer a lot of the questions. Anyway, we gave this practice test thinking it would be an easy first step in our latest idea for a community project - creating a local translators group that could supply interpreting help to foreign visitors, for example people adopting or people just visiting Kyzylorda completely on their own (this never really happens but hey, it could someday). It ended up being a pretty sizable pain in the арс, especially because we kept the signup period open until the night before, meaning we had 22 50-page tests to start printing less than 24 hours before the test. This became especially problematic when my brand new printer ran out of ink 8 pages in. Thankfully we didn't panic(<---not true) and were able to scramble around town the morning of and make all the copies, but we cut things awfully close. It was also a pain getting the room we needed at the university reserved, which reminds me of another ridiculous thing.
Back in September I think I mentioned that a few of my students expressed to me their sincere interest in learning baseball. Obviously this kind of talk is music to my ears, so I set up a "baseball club" to meet twice a week. We had a couple successful meetings, though never with more than 3 people at a time, which made it less baseball than 1-on-1-on-1 whiffle ball. Anyway even with the low turnout these were going well enough, until the university security guards one day refused to give me the key for the спорт зал, or gym. When I asked why, it was because they were told by somebody - they were unable or flat refused to tell me who - not to give the key to anyone, including the dean. After several weeks of trying in vain to figure out what the hell was going on, I finally was told that the school rents the gym - which is inside the university building - from a private company. Regardless of this, which in itself seems ridiculous, I could vent for pages/hours about how ridiculously stupid it is to restrict access to a completely empty and mostly unused gym, but I'll spare you all the time and save myself the subsequent rapid rise in blood pressure. And there might be some rationale behind the whole thing, but these days I'm generally not in the mood to give people the benefit of the doubt. Suffice it to say, as far as I'm concerned it makes absolutely no sense and is completely and utterly devoid of reason. For the time being I've given up, mainly because for awhile each day I'd ask and each day it would just make me angrier and angrier. Also to be fair people weren't exactly knocking down the door to play either - a few times I had to hook in stragglers - "Oh hi Aigerim from 05-1, what are you doing back at the school at 4 p.m.? Oh you're going to the library? Why don't you come play baseball with the three of us in the gym instead? Oh you can study later. And it's okay that you have high heels on, it's just whiffle ball."
Back to the TOEFL. Mostly it went fine. Grading the tests also took a lot longer than we'd expected, and we hadn't realized beforehand that it wasn't logistically possible to have a speaking section and finish before midnight, since we would have had to listen to 22 people all at different times, so we ended up turning it into a writing section, which was of course less than ideal. But all in all, it was fine. Only three students became certified "Contact Club Translators" available for hire based on their scores, but this wasn't a big surprise considering how difficult the test is.
What else has happened? Oh yeah, America has a new president! Congratulations to Barack Obama. I don't want to get into divisive political issues, but I will say I was extremely happy and proud when I went to the internet on the morning of November 5 and saw the New York Times headline: "OBAMA." It put a hop in my step going back to my building, and it was the only topic of conversation for the rest of the day. Political leanings aside, I don't think I've ever been as proud to be an American as I was on that day. And how thankful I was to be able to spend that historic day in a foreign country, to see firsthand the reactions of non-Americans to such a historic election and get to share the moment with people of another country, who clearly had a stake in the result. People here generally grasped the significance of America electing a black president, as they have a working knowledge of our ugly racial past, but more than that they almost unilaterally expressed to me their happiness that someone other than Bush was coming in. (In the run-up to the election, only one Kazakh person told me he wanted McCain, and many told me they thought McCain would be a continuation of Bush, if that gives an idea of "how the world would have voted"). Many people asked me why Bush was leaving, and I explained about the (bloodless coup) term limits. Actually right when I got back to the school that morning after checking the internet, one Kazakh teacher approached me and said "How's your Kazakh these days?" Telling him it was okay, he then proceeded to ask me a lot of hard questions that would have been difficult for me to answer in English, let alone in a language that lay virtually untouched during 70 years of Soviet rule. For example, "How are things going in Iraq?" "Why did America go into Iraq?" "Will Obama start more wars?" and after telling me the only reason we went into Iraq was oil, "Iraq has a lot of oil. Kazakhstan has a lot of oil. America invaded Iraq. Should I worry that America will someday invade Kazakhstan?" At first the obvious answer to me was "Of course not!" We're so mired in two unpopular wars that something drastic would have to happen for our leaders to plunge us into another one at this point. Not to mention most Americans don't even know Kazakhstan is a real country yet, and the political situation here is stable enough that Kazakhstan is probably among the last on America's list of "next countries to invade." But then I thought about it for a second and changed my answer to say that it wasn't going to happen in his lifetime (he's about 60). "Yes, but is it possible? I know I don't need to worry, but I'm asking because I worry for my children," he said. Then I thought more about it and realized that if someone in Iraq had asked this question to a foreign visitor, say, 30 or 40 or 50 years ago, they might have had the same initial reaction I did. So then I said that yes, it was possible. It's interesting the effect giving this kind of answer has - on the person giving it. Of course I wasn't coming literally face to face with war casualties or seeing things up close in that way, but when you're trying to be honest and straightforward and you feel you have to tell someone in a foreign country that yes, it's possible that your country might one day invade their country, endangering the lives of your children and grandchildren, the whole picture can become a lot clearer in your mind, and it did in mine. Being abroad, especially at the current time, has taught me one thing - how much much of the rest of the world is at the complete mercy of America, and not just its foreign policy. From the global impact of our economic "situation" to Kazakhstanis' concern about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to their tracking of the election, for almost a year before Election Day, even to seeing two middle school age boys walking down the street listening to American rap music and shouting "TALK IS CHEAP MUTHA F***KAS!!!" has made clear how far America's reach can be.
I was also, before I came, a little afraid of a perceived worldwide anti-American sentiment. But I've been surprised at how easily and naturally people here separate the regular citizens of America from the ruling class. They know, for example, that just because you're from the US doesn't automatically mean you agree with everything your government is doing. Perhaps it was naive of me to think, or fear, that that might be the case, but either way I've been relieved to find it's not.
Wow, what else? This has been a slightly heavier entry than most of my past ones. Rest assured there have been plenty of lighter moments recently, but for some reason they're not есиме тусип жатыр, or literally "dropping into my mind" at the moment. Ah, a belated Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! We celebrated a few times here with different groups of students before having a celebration with all (now 5!) of the volunteers in our oblast. All in all it was a good Thanksgiving. And Halloween - that was spent in a hotel in Amsterdam following the news of a 24-hour delay on my connecting flight to Almaty. So the Thanksgiving celebration was a lot better. I think for Halloween I just watched the news in Dutch - actually even less exciting than it sounds.
Ok before I wrap this one up, one quick anecdote from yesterday. A local school teacher had tracked me down at work a few days earlier and asked me for help with an open lesson project "according to the internet regime." I was thoroughly clueless as to what exactly she needed me to do, but I told her I'd do it. (Partly I just wanted to meet this "internet regime.") So she ended up calling me on Sunday and telling me to come down to the main building at the university, and to bring an American flag if I had one. Luckily I had brought back a few foam ones from the US, so I took one of these with me. When I got there I realized what was going on: this teacher was doing an open lesson about American holidays and wanted her students to interview me via Skype, presumably to show how technologically advanced her (open) lessons are. So I got there and they sent me to sit at the computer in the adjoining room. They then took my small foam American flag and glued it to the wall behind me with gluestick. It was becoming apparent that they were going to pretend I was in America, when in fact I was 30 feet away and in the same building. Ok, that's cute, I'll go along with it, I figured.
At the start of the interview the students introduced themselves as Baghzhan and Akmaral, both 8th grade students. The interview went fine, and when we finished I told them that their English was very good. "And you guys are only in 8th grade?" I asked. "No, we're in 11th. That was a lie." And they all laughed, including the teacher. This didn't really bother me at the time, partly because they were so friendly and full of questions, but as I thought about it more it started to gnaw at me. We've seen this kind of thing time and time again here: teachers not only not reprimanding students for dishonest behavior, but actively engaging in, participating in, and even provoking it. So I've come to this most recent conclusion regarding the Kazakhstan cheating epidemic: people everywhere are naturally going to do dishonest things, whether it's in the US, Kazakhstan, Romania, Brazil, wherever. But I've noticed here that one difference between here and the US is that my students generally feel no shame when they cheat, and thus it's just standard accepted practice. Why is this? Are people here naturally more dishonest? No, I think it's that on a much larger scale than in the US, teachers here don't instill in their students that cheating and lying are wrong. Example: teachers here that don't allow their students to cheat are regarded as "strict," as in, "Mr. Chris why don't you let us cheat? You are so strict!" Wow, okay.
I could go on and on about problems with the current structure of the educational system here, from kindergarten on up through university, but I won't.
Well, if you've made it this far, you deserve a prize. Remind me in about 10 months and I'll get you something cool from the bazaar for when I get back. I should really try to write shorter and more frequent entries, but I figure this one makes up for the last two or so months of silence. Plus it was pretty therapeutic for me. Well, till next time, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! (and Happy Valentine's Day?). Be safe everyone.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Halfway Point
As I start typing this my left leg is stiffening up. I don’t know what it’s from, but it might have something to do with standing in the freezing cold for an hour and a half before starting this morning’s running competition. I was asked yesterday by my department head if I could be at the town sports center at 8:30 to participate in a race. How far is it? Who is running in it? Irrelevant, apparently. "Just show up at 8:30 for registration wearing this uniform and the race will start at 9:30.” Ok.
Just a couple quick things to say about this. Never again am I showing up an hour before the stated start time for anything here. There was no “registration,” just a lot of standing and shivering, waiting for the race to start. And on that note, never before have my hands felt closer to being frostbitten, no joke, even though it was only about 40 Fahrenheit. In addition these minor irritations, I counted no fewer than 873 people asking me the same question: Why was I wearing shorts? I tried to be patient with this at first, when I could still feel my hands, but somewhere between the 870th and 880th inquiry about my legs and why I hadn’t brought “warmer trousers” I said “MY LEGS AREN’T COLD. STOP WORRYING ABOUT MY LEGS. MY HANDS ARE FROZEN.”
After 90 minutes of waiting, the race finally started, and I was nearly trampled to death by 150 Kazakh kids that started at a dead sprint. The course was almost a mile, so I ended up passing a lot of these kids later, but I also ended up finishing somewhere around the middle of the pack. And eventually my hands did regain feeling, at least enough feeling to type this entry.
Well, we’re at about the halfway point of our time in Kazakhstan now. It’s a little bit hard to believe, sometimes, but really it feels about right. However if the first three weeks of this school year are any indication, this next year-plus will go by a lot faster than the last 13 or so months have. Most of the groups I teach this year are the same ones I had last year, so I had a much better idea of what to expect going into this semester. And this year I’ve had the opposite experience of last year, insofar as it’s been great seeing the students all back and talking with them about their summers, while the administration has been giving me more headaches with their ever-changing class schedules and general lack of understanding of my purpose here. It’s slowly getting better, but I guess I’ve realized that the kinds of things that in America we would be accustomed to having figured out days before the first classes start are generally worked out in the first 2-3 weeks here, and sometimes beyond. For example, the class schedules. Those are still being worked out. And the submission of curriculum plans to the dean’s office. Those are still being turned in. Maybe it doesn’t actually work any better than this in the US - I would have no idea having never taught there - but it can be pretty frustrating this way and requires a lot of patience, something I used to think I had a lot of.
So, the first three weeks of classes have gone more or less okay. I’m more at peace with not being a “real teacher” in most of the classes and so have stopped giving silly quizzes and meaningless homework assignments and pretending I have the power to give the students zero’s for failing to do these assignments. And you know what? It's been great! We’ll usually either have a debate about something (the state of the Kazakh language and the number of days per week students study are about the only topics of concern for them - they’re not quite the political animals American university students are), or we’ll go over new colloquial or slang terms and practice using them, or we’ll read an excerpt of America the Book by Jon Stewart because I think it’s hilarious. (We’re also watching The Office - once a week, if all goes to plan - in one of my classes.) The students mostly tell me the lessons are helpful for them and this way the whole job is a lot less unnecessarily stressful for me, the classes are more fun for them, and we’re always speaking English so they’re getting listening and speaking practice, which is the main thing they need and ostensibly the main reason I'm here. If I give homework and the students turn it in, I’ll check it and give it back to them with corrections, which I hope is helpful, but I’d be kidding myself if I thought I had any real power or leverage with which to give them assignments and expect anywhere close to 100% compliance. I could do this if the university were willing to give me my own class, but it’s mostly opposed to this idea, primarily I think because I’m not a teacher on their payroll (Peace Corps pays us) and each teacher on their payroll has to accumulate a certain number of hours. So I would have to take hours from a local teacher, and if I took hours from one and not the others that wouldn’t be fair to the others. Not that I haven’t thought about making a secret arrangement with one or two teachers to do this, and not that I’m not necessarily doing this, but this is why the university can’t endorse the idea.
Moving on, Happy World Languages Day! You didn’t know today was World Languages Day, you say? Well, now you do! (And September 30 is Translators Day! I’m not making this up!) It seems that every day, somewhere in the world (usually in Kazakhstan), there is a holiday for something, regardless of whether it is deserving of celebration/recognition or not. We have Men’s Day, Women’s Day (why not just merge the two and call it "Day"?), Children’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, Education Day (the first day of classes- really it’s just a holiday) here in Kazakhstan, Secretary’s Day in the US, not to mention all the other exciting and unique facets of life that are recognized with weeks or even months in their honor, like Dental Awareness Month, Library Week, Clean Drinking Water Month (I’m sure this has been designated somewhere).
Anyway, every holiday here means an occasion to have a concert. Yesterday, in honor of World Languages Day the World Languages Department threw a concert celebrating the different world languages. They invited basically all of the foreigners affiliated with the university and had us do something either in Kazakh or in our native languages. For me, they asked me to say about a minute-long greeting in Kazakh, and then recite a Kazakh poem, both of which I had memorized. The greeting went pretty well, as it was much easier to memorize since I actually knew the meaning of what I was saying. The poem, on the other hand - let’s just say I spent the better part of a week trying to fix these 27 lines of Kazakh grunts and noises into my head, and I simply couldn’t do it. It was pretty embarrassing getting to the middle and forgetting where I was, finding my place, and then getting within 4 lines of finishing and again forgetting where I was. I felt pretty bad about failing at this, but even with the mistakes the crowd seemed generally pleased that I had tried to do something in Kazakh, especially so literary and difficult, and gave me a nice round of applause. Many local citizens don’t know the language, so when they hear a foreigner even attempt to speak it people here are generally pretty pleased. This is what I was told afterwards, and while this is all true I think this is was mostly politeness to make me feel better, and I was still pretty angry at myself for not being able to pull it off. But you move on.
In other news, there is a small handful of students at the university that seems genuinely excited about the idea of learning to play baseball. In particular there are two students that have been asking me when we will start playing every week since last spring, and this week, after I explained that I was waiting to hear from the dean on whether we could unlock the gym to play whiffle ball, one of them said “I am sick and tired of asking.” Well alright! While perhaps a bit rude, this was all I needed to hear to be convinced that these kids weren’t just appeasing me because they knew I liked baseball, but actually really wanted to play. So we got the gym opened the next day and played 2-on-1 whiffle ball. It was pretty fun, and they definitely grasped the general concepts, while some of the rules like overrunning bases and tagging versus touching the bags didn’t quite sink in. But walking home they told me they wanted to start a Kyzylorda team that could travel and play teams in other cities (there are apparently teams in some of the bigger cities, like Almaty and Astana). So, I think this has become my primary secondary project (if that makes sense).
And one funny anecdote from class this week before I sign off. We were talking about the Peace Corps’ mission and its stereotype in America in one of my lessons when I asked the group if they had already known all of this, or if any of the information I’d given them was new to them. One girl said - and I asked her if I could retell this story to my friends in America - that the first time she met a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan was just after September 11th, 2001. Up to this point there had only been a handful of foreigners in the country, and particularly few in Kyzylorda, so in trying to make sense of why this guy would have possibly wanted to come to Kazakhstan from the US, she and her friends (in 9th grade at the time) decided that he was sent personally by George Bush to gather as much information as he could about the country before taking back all of his newfound knowledge to the president, in order for him to prepare an attack on Kazakhstan. “’Ooh,’ we thought, ‘George Bush is smart,’ she said, giggling.” It’s interesting, but people here are keenly aware of Americans’ irrational fear of any countries ending in ‘-stan,’ and in fact several people have asked just that question, if all Americans are afraid of any country ending in ‘-stan.’ One of the most important things I think I’ve learned here is how globally aware people here are, comparing especially with us, and how much they know about the rest of the world, with their ability even to empathize with other countries in a way I would never have expected. They certainly put me to shame with this breadth of knowledge. It’s one of the lessons I’ve taken to heart here and one that I’ll definitely take back with me.
Just a couple quick things to say about this. Never again am I showing up an hour before the stated start time for anything here. There was no “registration,” just a lot of standing and shivering, waiting for the race to start. And on that note, never before have my hands felt closer to being frostbitten, no joke, even though it was only about 40 Fahrenheit. In addition these minor irritations, I counted no fewer than 873 people asking me the same question: Why was I wearing shorts? I tried to be patient with this at first, when I could still feel my hands, but somewhere between the 870th and 880th inquiry about my legs and why I hadn’t brought “warmer trousers” I said “MY LEGS AREN’T COLD. STOP WORRYING ABOUT MY LEGS. MY HANDS ARE FROZEN.”
After 90 minutes of waiting, the race finally started, and I was nearly trampled to death by 150 Kazakh kids that started at a dead sprint. The course was almost a mile, so I ended up passing a lot of these kids later, but I also ended up finishing somewhere around the middle of the pack. And eventually my hands did regain feeling, at least enough feeling to type this entry.
Well, we’re at about the halfway point of our time in Kazakhstan now. It’s a little bit hard to believe, sometimes, but really it feels about right. However if the first three weeks of this school year are any indication, this next year-plus will go by a lot faster than the last 13 or so months have. Most of the groups I teach this year are the same ones I had last year, so I had a much better idea of what to expect going into this semester. And this year I’ve had the opposite experience of last year, insofar as it’s been great seeing the students all back and talking with them about their summers, while the administration has been giving me more headaches with their ever-changing class schedules and general lack of understanding of my purpose here. It’s slowly getting better, but I guess I’ve realized that the kinds of things that in America we would be accustomed to having figured out days before the first classes start are generally worked out in the first 2-3 weeks here, and sometimes beyond. For example, the class schedules. Those are still being worked out. And the submission of curriculum plans to the dean’s office. Those are still being turned in. Maybe it doesn’t actually work any better than this in the US - I would have no idea having never taught there - but it can be pretty frustrating this way and requires a lot of patience, something I used to think I had a lot of.
So, the first three weeks of classes have gone more or less okay. I’m more at peace with not being a “real teacher” in most of the classes and so have stopped giving silly quizzes and meaningless homework assignments and pretending I have the power to give the students zero’s for failing to do these assignments. And you know what? It's been great! We’ll usually either have a debate about something (the state of the Kazakh language and the number of days per week students study are about the only topics of concern for them - they’re not quite the political animals American university students are), or we’ll go over new colloquial or slang terms and practice using them, or we’ll read an excerpt of America the Book by Jon Stewart because I think it’s hilarious. (We’re also watching The Office - once a week, if all goes to plan - in one of my classes.) The students mostly tell me the lessons are helpful for them and this way the whole job is a lot less unnecessarily stressful for me, the classes are more fun for them, and we’re always speaking English so they’re getting listening and speaking practice, which is the main thing they need and ostensibly the main reason I'm here. If I give homework and the students turn it in, I’ll check it and give it back to them with corrections, which I hope is helpful, but I’d be kidding myself if I thought I had any real power or leverage with which to give them assignments and expect anywhere close to 100% compliance. I could do this if the university were willing to give me my own class, but it’s mostly opposed to this idea, primarily I think because I’m not a teacher on their payroll (Peace Corps pays us) and each teacher on their payroll has to accumulate a certain number of hours. So I would have to take hours from a local teacher, and if I took hours from one and not the others that wouldn’t be fair to the others. Not that I haven’t thought about making a secret arrangement with one or two teachers to do this, and not that I’m not necessarily doing this, but this is why the university can’t endorse the idea.
Moving on, Happy World Languages Day! You didn’t know today was World Languages Day, you say? Well, now you do! (And September 30 is Translators Day! I’m not making this up!) It seems that every day, somewhere in the world (usually in Kazakhstan), there is a holiday for something, regardless of whether it is deserving of celebration/recognition or not. We have Men’s Day, Women’s Day (why not just merge the two and call it "Day"?), Children’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, Education Day (the first day of classes- really it’s just a holiday) here in Kazakhstan, Secretary’s Day in the US, not to mention all the other exciting and unique facets of life that are recognized with weeks or even months in their honor, like Dental Awareness Month, Library Week, Clean Drinking Water Month (I’m sure this has been designated somewhere).
Anyway, every holiday here means an occasion to have a concert. Yesterday, in honor of World Languages Day the World Languages Department threw a concert celebrating the different world languages. They invited basically all of the foreigners affiliated with the university and had us do something either in Kazakh or in our native languages. For me, they asked me to say about a minute-long greeting in Kazakh, and then recite a Kazakh poem, both of which I had memorized. The greeting went pretty well, as it was much easier to memorize since I actually knew the meaning of what I was saying. The poem, on the other hand - let’s just say I spent the better part of a week trying to fix these 27 lines of Kazakh grunts and noises into my head, and I simply couldn’t do it. It was pretty embarrassing getting to the middle and forgetting where I was, finding my place, and then getting within 4 lines of finishing and again forgetting where I was. I felt pretty bad about failing at this, but even with the mistakes the crowd seemed generally pleased that I had tried to do something in Kazakh, especially so literary and difficult, and gave me a nice round of applause. Many local citizens don’t know the language, so when they hear a foreigner even attempt to speak it people here are generally pretty pleased. This is what I was told afterwards, and while this is all true I think this is was mostly politeness to make me feel better, and I was still pretty angry at myself for not being able to pull it off. But you move on.
In other news, there is a small handful of students at the university that seems genuinely excited about the idea of learning to play baseball. In particular there are two students that have been asking me when we will start playing every week since last spring, and this week, after I explained that I was waiting to hear from the dean on whether we could unlock the gym to play whiffle ball, one of them said “I am sick and tired of asking.” Well alright! While perhaps a bit rude, this was all I needed to hear to be convinced that these kids weren’t just appeasing me because they knew I liked baseball, but actually really wanted to play. So we got the gym opened the next day and played 2-on-1 whiffle ball. It was pretty fun, and they definitely grasped the general concepts, while some of the rules like overrunning bases and tagging versus touching the bags didn’t quite sink in. But walking home they told me they wanted to start a Kyzylorda team that could travel and play teams in other cities (there are apparently teams in some of the bigger cities, like Almaty and Astana). So, I think this has become my primary secondary project (if that makes sense).
And one funny anecdote from class this week before I sign off. We were talking about the Peace Corps’ mission and its stereotype in America in one of my lessons when I asked the group if they had already known all of this, or if any of the information I’d given them was new to them. One girl said - and I asked her if I could retell this story to my friends in America - that the first time she met a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan was just after September 11th, 2001. Up to this point there had only been a handful of foreigners in the country, and particularly few in Kyzylorda, so in trying to make sense of why this guy would have possibly wanted to come to Kazakhstan from the US, she and her friends (in 9th grade at the time) decided that he was sent personally by George Bush to gather as much information as he could about the country before taking back all of his newfound knowledge to the president, in order for him to prepare an attack on Kazakhstan. “’Ooh,’ we thought, ‘George Bush is smart,’ she said, giggling.” It’s interesting, but people here are keenly aware of Americans’ irrational fear of any countries ending in ‘-stan,’ and in fact several people have asked just that question, if all Americans are afraid of any country ending in ‘-stan.’ One of the most important things I think I’ve learned here is how globally aware people here are, comparing especially with us, and how much they know about the rest of the world, with their ability even to empathize with other countries in a way I would never have expected. They certainly put me to shame with this breadth of knowledge. It’s one of the lessons I’ve taken to heart here and one that I’ll definitely take back with me.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Bad at Blogging
It's a good thing this blog doesn't have any real "following" to speak of, or it might be slightly irritated with my recent lack of updates. While it's been a fun summer it's also been a bit slow, so honestly there hasn't been a lot to update. That's the excuse I'm going with anyway. Certainly not laziness.
Here's a brief rundown of my last two months in Kazakhstan (and Italy!). At the end of June I went back to my training village of Chamalgan to celebrate my host brother's birthday and just hang out and relax for a few days. Little did I know this would be my last extended opportunity I would have to speak Kazakh or pick up any conversational Russian for almost two months. After that I went up north to a village outside Ust-Kamenogorsk, only a few short hours from the nuclear test site city of Semey, for a second summer camp. This was a mostly nice, relaxing time because there weren't very many students, plus the weather was absolutely beautiful, even getting cool enough to put on a coat on a couple of nights. The village was very small and spread out, and you could see thousands of stars at night. The place had a really great, relaxed atmosphere. From here I took a bus 22 hours south back to Almaty where I flew out to Italy to meet my family. There we stayed in a sprawling rooftop apartment with an awesome view of the city, Siena. It was a nice break from Kazakhstan and wonderful to get to see my family again for the first time in almost a year. It was also great to eat Italian food on a daily basis. The only disappointment was, after dreaming of chicken parmesan for almost a year, I found out that this dish is the Italian equivalent of Chinese chow mein, that is, a strictly Americanized version of Italian food. I guess I'll have to wait another 14 months or so, but one of my first trips out when I get back will be to the closest Applebees' for a huge helping of chicken parm. Otherwise, Italy was a beautiful country. We stayed mostly in the Tuscany region, saw Florence, a little bit of wine country, and Chinqua Terra, a small string of connected cities on the coast. And there was a lot of stopping for gelato.
This brings me just about up to date. Right now I'm at a third and final summer camp up in Zhezkazgan, a 9 hour bus ride north from Kyzylorda. And I can't say it's a normal bus ride. There's really only one road that runs in any semblance of a direct route from my city north to Zhez, and this includes several narrow and bumpy dirt paths through the steppe. (The only other option for getting there is to take thhe train through Astana, which is WAY northeast and would take about 50 hours.) Somewhere around half of the road is paved, but much of this portion of the road is filled with pretty sizable potholes which require a lot of off-roading. The only way I can think to describe the ride is to say imagine riding a giant jackhammer the size of a 30-year-old small Soviet bus with 15 of your closest local acquaintances. For nine hours. Then think of how sore your back would be the next day (this was something I failed to consider beforehand). For about 8 of the 9 hours there is just absolutely nothing as far as the eye can see, except for one bizarre pitstop around the halfway point at a small compound-like setup where a family appeared to live. The three pictures I included in this entry are from this stop. I'm not sure if they capture the odd remoteness of the place, but take my word for it, it was remote. I couldn't begin to figure out how this family survived beyond what they charged bus passengers for tea, or where they spent any money they earned beyond what they gave to the busdriver for him to pick up food for them and bring it back the next day.
Finally after about 8 hours and 45 minutes you could see a city emerging out of the steppe and seemingly out of nowhere. Zhezkazgan is mostly a copper-mining city but has a strikingly modern feel to it, at least as opposed to Kyzylorda. My impressions so far are really that it is a nice little city tucked into the steppe without another city anywhere close for more than 100 miles. It might be a product of the grass always being greener, especially when it's as boiling hot as its been back in KO for the last few weeks, but I definitely like the city and wouldn't mind living here at all. Though I would have to try a lot harder to learn Russian since they don't really speak much Kazakh here.
Other than that, not a lot going on. Classes will start back up at the beginning of next month. I'm hoping to persuade my dean to let me teach my own class with my own syllabus this term, but that could be a longshot. When I proposed the idea to my department head a couple months ago she pretty clearly shot it down, explaining that all the regular teachers had to accrue a certain number of teaching hours and that it would be unfair for me to take one teacher's hours but not another's, so I would have to continue "as a volunteer teacher," which seems to mean just "practicing speaking" with the students, without a syllabus or textbook most of the time. Not exactly what I want to have happen again, so I'm hoping we'll be able to work something out.
This was a bit of a boring entry. I'm hoping next time I'll have some more interesting things to write about (but not too interesting, Russia). Hope everyone is having a good summer, enjoying the Olympics, and staying safe. Til next time.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Hot as ДОПТАР
I have really been slacking off lately on the blog-writing. I had no idea until I checked just now that I had completely skipped over the month of May. So let me give everyone a quick update on that month: Not a lot happened. I taught my last class at the university on about the 3rd of that month and everyday after that I went into work without any assigned tasks, so I'd usually end up editing students' diploma works (theses), which can be pretty stressful, especially when they use a computer program to translate the things. It is impossible to make sense of about 70% of the sentences in computer-translated papers, so I'd usually just end up making a lot of small grammatical corrections but still not really know what the person was trying to say.
Also in May I moved into a new place. My host family had been great, but my Peace Corps regional manager found me a great deal on university teacher housing. So I moved in there on the 1st of the month- it's a small room, smaller than my freshman year college dorm room, but with a bathroom, tv, fridge, small freezer, phone, and communal kitchen. So it's not bad, but I'll probably look to find something a little bigger and more centrally located when I come back in a month (I'll be doing some traveling shortly). The other reason I want to move is that at this place there is more oversight than I had even with my host family. Whenever I leave I have to give my room key to the security guard, who always asks me "Where are you going? When will you come back? Last night you were very late, you need to come back earlier tonight." This was something I wasn't exactly expecting, and although I think it's more just conversation than actual nagging or scolding, it would be nice to have my own-own place again, seeing as how I'll be 26 in a couple months, which is terrible, but that's for a different day.
Onto June, I spent the last two weeks at a summer English camp for kids up in a village near Aktobe, about 18 hours north by train. It was me and the other 6 remaining volunteers from our training group in Chamalgan, plus some Kaz-18 volunteers who will be leaving for good in a couple months. The whole thing was a lot of fun, involved a good deal of work, and was a nice two-week getaway from my site to someplace cooler. I had a fifth grade class of 10 students, and they were a lot of fun to work with. The first two hours each day were reserved for English lessons, the second two for outdoor games, then we ate lunch before lesson planning with our local teaching counterparts for the next day's lesson. The high point for me was when my 2 hour lesson on the first day ended after about 50 minutes, and I took my group down to the gym to play whiffle ball. They were all really eager and excited to learn how to play, which made explaining the rules in a mix of broken Kazakh and Kazakhstani English a lot easier than it might have been with an older group of kids. Most of them seemed to love it, even most of the girls and especially one of the boys, and by the next week when they went outside to play frisbee they were screaming to play baseball again (politely screaming; I taught them sportsmanship too). They seemed to understand the rules for the most part, although it was a little more like T-ball where someone hits the ball, it rolls past everyone all the way to the outfield (where no one wanted to play) and someone would run after the ball and throw it in but several seconds after the batter had crossed home. So, like I said they understand most of the basic rules, but I think they have a slightly inflated idea of how common homeruns are.
When we were on the train coming back yesterday, I knew I had only a couple days before I would leave again and not come back until late July. So I made myself a list of things I had to get done in my 2 or 3 days back at site (typing a blog entry was not one of them, but here I am). By the time I got off the train I had a list of 10 things I had to do, but upon my arrival home I quickly added dropping and shattering my surge protector, almost electracuting myself*, and buying a new surge protector as numbers 11, 12, and 13 respectively. After completing 11-13 first, I went with my sitemate McKenzie and a couple local friends Takhir and Galim to the river bank, where they've brought in a bunch of sand to simulate a beach. It's pretty awesome, especially on a hot summer day, but the current is a lot stronger than it looks which can make racing to the buoy more harrowing than it seems.**
In a couple days I'll head to Chamalgan to hang out with my host family from training for a few days and celebrate my little host brother's 10th birthday. After that I'll head up to the north-east for another summer camp, and then meet my family in Italy for 10 days. Should be a fun next few weeks, and it will be nice being in a country not called Kazakhstan for a while.
Before I sign off let me just quickly say congratulations to my sister Betsy on graduating college earlier this month. W&L is no cakewalk to get through, and I'm extremely proud of you, karyndasym (little sister in Kazakh). You've got a bright future ahead, and I can't wait to see you all in Italy.
Other than that, I hope everyone back home is safe, staying cool, and doing well.
*It wasn't that bad, Mom and Dad
**I won't do that again
Also in May I moved into a new place. My host family had been great, but my Peace Corps regional manager found me a great deal on university teacher housing. So I moved in there on the 1st of the month- it's a small room, smaller than my freshman year college dorm room, but with a bathroom, tv, fridge, small freezer, phone, and communal kitchen. So it's not bad, but I'll probably look to find something a little bigger and more centrally located when I come back in a month (I'll be doing some traveling shortly). The other reason I want to move is that at this place there is more oversight than I had even with my host family. Whenever I leave I have to give my room key to the security guard, who always asks me "Where are you going? When will you come back? Last night you were very late, you need to come back earlier tonight." This was something I wasn't exactly expecting, and although I think it's more just conversation than actual nagging or scolding, it would be nice to have my own-own place again, seeing as how I'll be 26 in a couple months, which is terrible, but that's for a different day.
Onto June, I spent the last two weeks at a summer English camp for kids up in a village near Aktobe, about 18 hours north by train. It was me and the other 6 remaining volunteers from our training group in Chamalgan, plus some Kaz-18 volunteers who will be leaving for good in a couple months. The whole thing was a lot of fun, involved a good deal of work, and was a nice two-week getaway from my site to someplace cooler. I had a fifth grade class of 10 students, and they were a lot of fun to work with. The first two hours each day were reserved for English lessons, the second two for outdoor games, then we ate lunch before lesson planning with our local teaching counterparts for the next day's lesson. The high point for me was when my 2 hour lesson on the first day ended after about 50 minutes, and I took my group down to the gym to play whiffle ball. They were all really eager and excited to learn how to play, which made explaining the rules in a mix of broken Kazakh and Kazakhstani English a lot easier than it might have been with an older group of kids. Most of them seemed to love it, even most of the girls and especially one of the boys, and by the next week when they went outside to play frisbee they were screaming to play baseball again (politely screaming; I taught them sportsmanship too). They seemed to understand the rules for the most part, although it was a little more like T-ball where someone hits the ball, it rolls past everyone all the way to the outfield (where no one wanted to play) and someone would run after the ball and throw it in but several seconds after the batter had crossed home. So, like I said they understand most of the basic rules, but I think they have a slightly inflated idea of how common homeruns are.
When we were on the train coming back yesterday, I knew I had only a couple days before I would leave again and not come back until late July. So I made myself a list of things I had to get done in my 2 or 3 days back at site (typing a blog entry was not one of them, but here I am). By the time I got off the train I had a list of 10 things I had to do, but upon my arrival home I quickly added dropping and shattering my surge protector, almost electracuting myself*, and buying a new surge protector as numbers 11, 12, and 13 respectively. After completing 11-13 first, I went with my sitemate McKenzie and a couple local friends Takhir and Galim to the river bank, where they've brought in a bunch of sand to simulate a beach. It's pretty awesome, especially on a hot summer day, but the current is a lot stronger than it looks which can make racing to the buoy more harrowing than it seems.**
In a couple days I'll head to Chamalgan to hang out with my host family from training for a few days and celebrate my little host brother's 10th birthday. After that I'll head up to the north-east for another summer camp, and then meet my family in Italy for 10 days. Should be a fun next few weeks, and it will be nice being in a country not called Kazakhstan for a while.
Before I sign off let me just quickly say congratulations to my sister Betsy on graduating college earlier this month. W&L is no cakewalk to get through, and I'm extremely proud of you, karyndasym (little sister in Kazakh). You've got a bright future ahead, and I can't wait to see you all in Italy.
Other than that, I hope everyone back home is safe, staying cool, and doing well.
*It wasn't that bad, Mom and Dad
**I won't do that again
Monday, April 28, 2008
Springtime in the City
As I sit here listening to Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know?” on my iTunes shuffle (thanks Joanna!) and trying to think of what to write, I am reminded that I should have made a more concerted effort to add more of my own music to my sister’s computer before leaving the country in August. Not that I have anything against Whitney Houston, but my shuffle rotation usually goes something like this: Mariah Carey, John Mayer, Mariah Carey, Dixie Chicks, Mariah Carey, Mariah Carey featuring Whitney Houston, John Mayer, The Format, Usher, TLC, Mariah Carey featuring Usher, Jessica Simpson, Norah Jones, Norah Jones featuring Mariah Carey....you get the idea.
Not sure exactly what I can say at this point. Another two (or so) weeks have come and gone (slowly), another round of lessons and modules have passed, the school year is coming to an end soon, and nothing too exciting has happened recently. It’s gotten past the point of everything being new and exciting, and it’s now moved into the phase of “Wow, I really love America!”
I guess I’m at that point of my cultural experience that falls under the “culture shock” category- I remember early on our trainers showed us a chart detailing how our adjustment to the new culture would go, and the chart, drawn as a straight horizontal line indicating the passage of time, looked something like “1) Everything’s new and exciting! 2) Culture Shock 3) Move to site- everything’s new and exciting again! 4) Culture Shock 5) Settle into a routine at your site, which is also new and exciting! 6) Culture Shock.”
If I had to place it, right now I’d say I’m in phase 4, the second round of Culture Shock. This term is a bit of a misnomer though. I’m not walking around in shock of my surroundings all day, but rather just kind of inbetween things being new and exciting and actually understanding the culture and my surroundings. Hopefully I get to the fifth phase and actually do understand what in the world is going on here, because right now it’s pretty confusing.
Well what else is new? I still miss baseball. I’m not sure if it’s better that I’m in a city with regular access to internet, or if it would be better to be in a village where I would be completely isolated and disconnected from the outside world. Honestly this is kind of what I wanted coming in, but I think it’s more the kind of thing that sounds cool until you actually live in a village for six months with no internet, limited food options, and no good English speakers. Maybe it’s better that I’m able to confirm the Orioles’ latest loss each day rather than wonder to myself “Did they win last night?” They say the first sign of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result...but this is what they do every year. They start with a glimmer of hope, going about 11-7 through their first 18 games (they have actually had this record each of the last three seasons) before the law of statistics catches up with them and the rest of the leagure realizes that they have Kevin Millar batting cleanup and Aubrey Huff DH-ing. Then usually sometime around August they lose a game 30-3 to the Rangers, get no-hit by a Red Sox rookie, and I leave for Kazakhstan. Or something like that.
Back to Kazakhstan...
In other news I attended my first "Becik Toy" yesterday, which means "Cradle Party." It's similar to a baby's 1st birthday party, which apparently is big in a lot of eastern cultures, but here it's celebrated when the baby is two or three months old. The idea, as I understood it, is the family invites family, friends, and colleagues to their house, sets up several tables of Kazakh food mostly drizzled in mayonnaise (but still good nonetheless), everyone makes at least one toast, then we go outside and dance for a minute, then come back in for the ceremony where the baby is placed into his cradle (a gift from the family) in the middle of a room full of people, and everyone there gets a huge handful of candy. The whole thing was pretty interesting, if not all that different in structure from other Kazakh ceremonies, and it was really nice of my teaching department to invite me to expose me to a unique cultural event. Apparently the becik toy is only thrown for the first child, who receives countless clothes and toys in addition to the cradle, which then get handed down to any later additions to the family (there always are). The highlight seemed to be when I was beckoned to give a toast, and I'll just say it's amazing how far a rudimentary knowledge of Kazakh will take you in a situation like this. I stumbled through a few lines of a pretty simple toast to the new baby and his mother, and when I ran out of things to say in Kazakh I asked if I could finish in English so that my toast would be longer than 20 seconds. But before this, which was about an hour in, I had been able to fly beneath the radar. After it, I was instantly a star. And I think it had nothing to do with anything other than the fact that I was able to speak a little bit of Kazakh. People here, we've noticed, particularly in Kyzylorda, are intensely nationalistic, and tend to get very offended when people, especially ethnic Kazakhs, speak Russian, and on the flip side feel intensely proud when people, especially foreigners, and especially foreigners that look Russian, speak Kazakh, even if barely passably. I don't know if this kind of blinding nationalism is fleeting and will pass after some time, or if it's something that will only get stronger. There's still no doubt that Russian is the more international language, and is really needed for career success, so I hope people don't get too carried away with the Kazakh-only thing. But, in this instance anyway, it worked out pretty well for me.
Before I forget, there's a program that was recently initated by the government here sponsoring 10 English teachers in each oblast (like state). The hope is to attract native English speakers to basically do the same thing I'm doing for a lot more money and less time. The year will run from September to May, teachers are paid $2000/month which will go a LONG way here, and their flights to and from will be covered, including traveling home for holidays. We've started working with the local Minsistry of Education Director at the request of Peace Corps, and she wanted us to get the word out about this, so if anyone thinks they might be the least bit interested and wants more information, please drop me an email. I think it would be an awesome experience. To summarize- you'd teach a full academic year of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at either a secondary school, college, or university, make a lot of money, get free room and board, fly for free to and from, and get to experience Kazakhstan's unique* culture. So let me know if anyone's interested and I'll get some more information out to you.
*Believe me it is unique
Not sure exactly what I can say at this point. Another two (or so) weeks have come and gone (slowly), another round of lessons and modules have passed, the school year is coming to an end soon, and nothing too exciting has happened recently. It’s gotten past the point of everything being new and exciting, and it’s now moved into the phase of “Wow, I really love America!”
I guess I’m at that point of my cultural experience that falls under the “culture shock” category- I remember early on our trainers showed us a chart detailing how our adjustment to the new culture would go, and the chart, drawn as a straight horizontal line indicating the passage of time, looked something like “1) Everything’s new and exciting! 2) Culture Shock 3) Move to site- everything’s new and exciting again! 4) Culture Shock 5) Settle into a routine at your site, which is also new and exciting! 6) Culture Shock.”
If I had to place it, right now I’d say I’m in phase 4, the second round of Culture Shock. This term is a bit of a misnomer though. I’m not walking around in shock of my surroundings all day, but rather just kind of inbetween things being new and exciting and actually understanding the culture and my surroundings. Hopefully I get to the fifth phase and actually do understand what in the world is going on here, because right now it’s pretty confusing.
Well what else is new? I still miss baseball. I’m not sure if it’s better that I’m in a city with regular access to internet, or if it would be better to be in a village where I would be completely isolated and disconnected from the outside world. Honestly this is kind of what I wanted coming in, but I think it’s more the kind of thing that sounds cool until you actually live in a village for six months with no internet, limited food options, and no good English speakers. Maybe it’s better that I’m able to confirm the Orioles’ latest loss each day rather than wonder to myself “Did they win last night?” They say the first sign of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result...but this is what they do every year. They start with a glimmer of hope, going about 11-7 through their first 18 games (they have actually had this record each of the last three seasons) before the law of statistics catches up with them and the rest of the leagure realizes that they have Kevin Millar batting cleanup and Aubrey Huff DH-ing. Then usually sometime around August they lose a game 30-3 to the Rangers, get no-hit by a Red Sox rookie, and I leave for Kazakhstan. Or something like that.
Back to Kazakhstan...
In other news I attended my first "Becik Toy" yesterday, which means "Cradle Party." It's similar to a baby's 1st birthday party, which apparently is big in a lot of eastern cultures, but here it's celebrated when the baby is two or three months old. The idea, as I understood it, is the family invites family, friends, and colleagues to their house, sets up several tables of Kazakh food mostly drizzled in mayonnaise (but still good nonetheless), everyone makes at least one toast, then we go outside and dance for a minute, then come back in for the ceremony where the baby is placed into his cradle (a gift from the family) in the middle of a room full of people, and everyone there gets a huge handful of candy. The whole thing was pretty interesting, if not all that different in structure from other Kazakh ceremonies, and it was really nice of my teaching department to invite me to expose me to a unique cultural event. Apparently the becik toy is only thrown for the first child, who receives countless clothes and toys in addition to the cradle, which then get handed down to any later additions to the family (there always are). The highlight seemed to be when I was beckoned to give a toast, and I'll just say it's amazing how far a rudimentary knowledge of Kazakh will take you in a situation like this. I stumbled through a few lines of a pretty simple toast to the new baby and his mother, and when I ran out of things to say in Kazakh I asked if I could finish in English so that my toast would be longer than 20 seconds. But before this, which was about an hour in, I had been able to fly beneath the radar. After it, I was instantly a star. And I think it had nothing to do with anything other than the fact that I was able to speak a little bit of Kazakh. People here, we've noticed, particularly in Kyzylorda, are intensely nationalistic, and tend to get very offended when people, especially ethnic Kazakhs, speak Russian, and on the flip side feel intensely proud when people, especially foreigners, and especially foreigners that look Russian, speak Kazakh, even if barely passably. I don't know if this kind of blinding nationalism is fleeting and will pass after some time, or if it's something that will only get stronger. There's still no doubt that Russian is the more international language, and is really needed for career success, so I hope people don't get too carried away with the Kazakh-only thing. But, in this instance anyway, it worked out pretty well for me.
Before I forget, there's a program that was recently initated by the government here sponsoring 10 English teachers in each oblast (like state). The hope is to attract native English speakers to basically do the same thing I'm doing for a lot more money and less time. The year will run from September to May, teachers are paid $2000/month which will go a LONG way here, and their flights to and from will be covered, including traveling home for holidays. We've started working with the local Minsistry of Education Director at the request of Peace Corps, and she wanted us to get the word out about this, so if anyone thinks they might be the least bit interested and wants more information, please drop me an email. I think it would be an awesome experience. To summarize- you'd teach a full academic year of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at either a secondary school, college, or university, make a lot of money, get free room and board, fly for free to and from, and get to experience Kazakhstan's unique* culture. So let me know if anyone's interested and I'll get some more information out to you.
*Believe me it is unique
Friday, April 11, 2008
Take a Mental Picture
And I hope you have a photographic memory because this image won't last for long.
2008 American League Standings
East
W L PCT GB Home Away DIV Streak
Baltimore 6 3 .667 --- 5-1 1-2 1-1 Lost 2
NY Yankees 5 5 .500 1 1/2 4-3 1-2 4-3 Won 1
Boston 5 5 .500 1 1/2 2-1 3-4 0-3 Won 1
Toronto 4 5 .444 2 3-3 1-2 4-2 Lost 3
Tampa Bay 4 5 .444 2 1-2 3-3 3-3 Won 1
So it comes out a little jumbled, but the point is the Orioles are in first place. How long will this last? No one knows for sure, but most experts agree somewhere between two and three days. That's why I had to rush to the internet to see the standings before it all disintigrated and the inevitable plunge to fourth place began.
...But let's just say this continues, for the sake of argument. Will I empty my savings account in October to fly back for a playoff game? Probably. Will Peace Corps understand and let me come back? Probably not.
Good thing this isn't an actual legitimate concern. Yesterday's doubleheader sweep was probably just the first domino to fall in a long, precipitous dive toward the cellar.
But does this mean I'll stop racing to the internet building 4 times a week to check the Baltimore Sun for updates? Probably not.
Anyway, things are moving along pretty slowly here these days. After meeting up with our other American friends in Shymkent and Almaty a couple weeks ago I think most of us have hit the post-meeting-with-other-Americans-slump, as it is known in my head. Each day feels like about two weeks, give or take a day depending on how many of my meals I don't have to pay for. The teaching has more or less hit a rut, as it's difficult to be perceived as a real teacher when you're only seeing each group once a week, in theory. Often the schedule changes or the dean makes the students clean outside the front of the building on Saturday morning which cancels (some) classes for that day- it's hard to ever know exactly which classes are cancelled until 5-10 minutes into when your class is supposed to begin. So I'm hoping to push for a more regular teaching schedule next year, where I only have 3 or 4 classes and teach them full-time. If this actually happens I'm almost assured to come back with chronic hypertension from the students' attempts at blatant cheating and disregard for instructions to the contrary, but at least I would be more like a real teacher than a once-a-week break from real lessons. Anyway, we'll see what happens.
No complaints about the weather- it has been absolutely beautiful here all week, if a little blustery- temperatures in the upper 50s or low 60s, sunny skies, dust blowing everywhere, constant honking, polluted air from the traffic and who knows what else. Like I said, the weather has been good. People here claim that the reason for the wind is Baikonur, the site of the Russian space station that sits about 4 hours away by car. When someone was telling me about this I said, "Oh, so maybe the wind from the space shuttles causes some of the windy conditions we have here?" and they responded, "Not maybe. It is certain." So that was the end of any potential argument, or discussion, on the topic.
My language is improving a little bit, though I'm reminded as I hear a conversation in the hall that it still sounds to me like everyone is yelling at each other. When someone says something incorrect the other person always says "NOOOOO" as if they are very annoyed, but the first person never seems to get offended. Maybe I'll figure the whole system out in two years, but right now I'm still pretty confused by most things.
2008 American League Standings
East
W L PCT GB Home Away DIV Streak
Baltimore 6 3 .667 --- 5-1 1-2 1-1 Lost 2
NY Yankees 5 5 .500 1 1/2 4-3 1-2 4-3 Won 1
Boston 5 5 .500 1 1/2 2-1 3-4 0-3 Won 1
Toronto 4 5 .444 2 3-3 1-2 4-2 Lost 3
Tampa Bay 4 5 .444 2 1-2 3-3 3-3 Won 1
So it comes out a little jumbled, but the point is the Orioles are in first place. How long will this last? No one knows for sure, but most experts agree somewhere between two and three days. That's why I had to rush to the internet to see the standings before it all disintigrated and the inevitable plunge to fourth place began.
...But let's just say this continues, for the sake of argument. Will I empty my savings account in October to fly back for a playoff game? Probably. Will Peace Corps understand and let me come back? Probably not.
Good thing this isn't an actual legitimate concern. Yesterday's doubleheader sweep was probably just the first domino to fall in a long, precipitous dive toward the cellar.
But does this mean I'll stop racing to the internet building 4 times a week to check the Baltimore Sun for updates? Probably not.
Anyway, things are moving along pretty slowly here these days. After meeting up with our other American friends in Shymkent and Almaty a couple weeks ago I think most of us have hit the post-meeting-with-other-Americans-slump, as it is known in my head. Each day feels like about two weeks, give or take a day depending on how many of my meals I don't have to pay for. The teaching has more or less hit a rut, as it's difficult to be perceived as a real teacher when you're only seeing each group once a week, in theory. Often the schedule changes or the dean makes the students clean outside the front of the building on Saturday morning which cancels (some) classes for that day- it's hard to ever know exactly which classes are cancelled until 5-10 minutes into when your class is supposed to begin. So I'm hoping to push for a more regular teaching schedule next year, where I only have 3 or 4 classes and teach them full-time. If this actually happens I'm almost assured to come back with chronic hypertension from the students' attempts at blatant cheating and disregard for instructions to the contrary, but at least I would be more like a real teacher than a once-a-week break from real lessons. Anyway, we'll see what happens.
No complaints about the weather- it has been absolutely beautiful here all week, if a little blustery- temperatures in the upper 50s or low 60s, sunny skies, dust blowing everywhere, constant honking, polluted air from the traffic and who knows what else. Like I said, the weather has been good. People here claim that the reason for the wind is Baikonur, the site of the Russian space station that sits about 4 hours away by car. When someone was telling me about this I said, "Oh, so maybe the wind from the space shuttles causes some of the windy conditions we have here?" and they responded, "Not maybe. It is certain." So that was the end of any potential argument, or discussion, on the topic.
My language is improving a little bit, though I'm reminded as I hear a conversation in the hall that it still sounds to me like everyone is yelling at each other. When someone says something incorrect the other person always says "NOOOOO" as if they are very annoyed, but the first person never seems to get offended. Maybe I'll figure the whole system out in two years, but right now I'm still pretty confused by most things.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Grapefruit Season
I don't usually have enough Internet time to get as thoroughly caught up on the Orioles as I'm accustomed to. Thankfully, a quick glance at the headlines from the Baltimore Sun's Sports Page was all I needed to be reminded I'm not missing anything.
March 22, 2008
Hit by pitch, Millar suffers cut on finger
Game recap: Cardinals 7, Orioles 4
March 21, 2008
Guthrie works through rust in loss to Cards
Millar to go fourth as O's cleanup man
Millar just getting warmed up
Game recap: Mets 7, Orioles 0
Ray Frager: O's expectations dim despite bright spots
Keeping Trembley happy, one diet soda at a time
March 20, 2008
Loewen's return painful to watch
Game recap: Cardinals 12, Orioles 3
Guthrie makes pitch as Markakis' caddie
Childs Walker: Outfield plays shallow in '08
March 19, 2008
Game recap: Twins 4, Orioles 2
Two likely candidates vying to be 5th starter
March 18, 2008
O's face roster of decisions
Those Fantasy Guys: Previewing the Orioles
Postcard from Florida: Road to nowhere for O's?
March 15, 2008
Trachsel struggles in O's loss to Marlins
O's reconnecting with storied past
Game recap: Red Sox 7, Orioles 4
Postcard from Florida: Saturday night's not so all right
Depth a concern for pitching-starved O's
Hoey 'going to be fine'; return date unknown
Left-hander Loewen likely to miss start
Peter Schmuck: Throwing in towel on Cabrera
Game recap: Mets 6, Orioles 2
March 12, 2008
Game recap: Orioles 2, Cardinals 2, 10 innings
So onto a happier topic. It's spring in southern Kazakhstan, and a bunch of volunteers are gathered in Shymkent for Nauryz, the Muslim New Year. The holiday was yesterday, March 22, and we went to a hippodrome to watch horse races and kokpar, a game like polo where players vie for a dead goat carcass. Unfortunately I missed this event, but a few people got video that I'll be watching soon. There was also as much plof (like rice pilaf) and shashlik (like shishkabob with only meat) as you could eat. Some of it was being given away for free, some was really cheap, and all of it was really good. The weather here is unbelievable as well. Temperatures probably are in the 70s here. A lot of volunteers have come from the north where it's still in the -15 to -20 range and snow is still falling. This just drives home the point: Kazakhstan is a big country.
I'm in the middle of a 10 day break from teaching, which includes a few days here in Shymkent and then an in-service training conference in Almaty that goes until March 29. It's a welcome break from teaching. The teaching is still going fine, but there is a huge difference between each class. The fourth year students just finished their classes, which is too bad because they were some of my favorite groups. But hopefully I'll get some helpful ideas from this conference in Almaty that will help me in the class.
March 22, 2008
Hit by pitch, Millar suffers cut on finger
Game recap: Cardinals 7, Orioles 4
March 21, 2008
Guthrie works through rust in loss to Cards
Millar to go fourth as O's cleanup man
Millar just getting warmed up
Game recap: Mets 7, Orioles 0
Ray Frager: O's expectations dim despite bright spots
Keeping Trembley happy, one diet soda at a time
March 20, 2008
Loewen's return painful to watch
Game recap: Cardinals 12, Orioles 3
Guthrie makes pitch as Markakis' caddie
Childs Walker: Outfield plays shallow in '08
March 19, 2008
Game recap: Twins 4, Orioles 2
Two likely candidates vying to be 5th starter
March 18, 2008
O's face roster of decisions
Those Fantasy Guys: Previewing the Orioles
Postcard from Florida: Road to nowhere for O's?
March 15, 2008
Trachsel struggles in O's loss to Marlins
O's reconnecting with storied past
Game recap: Red Sox 7, Orioles 4
Postcard from Florida: Saturday night's not so all right
Depth a concern for pitching-starved O's
Hoey 'going to be fine'; return date unknown
Left-hander Loewen likely to miss start
Peter Schmuck: Throwing in towel on Cabrera
Game recap: Mets 6, Orioles 2
March 12, 2008
Game recap: Orioles 2, Cardinals 2, 10 innings
So onto a happier topic. It's spring in southern Kazakhstan, and a bunch of volunteers are gathered in Shymkent for Nauryz, the Muslim New Year. The holiday was yesterday, March 22, and we went to a hippodrome to watch horse races and kokpar, a game like polo where players vie for a dead goat carcass. Unfortunately I missed this event, but a few people got video that I'll be watching soon. There was also as much plof (like rice pilaf) and shashlik (like shishkabob with only meat) as you could eat. Some of it was being given away for free, some was really cheap, and all of it was really good. The weather here is unbelievable as well. Temperatures probably are in the 70s here. A lot of volunteers have come from the north where it's still in the -15 to -20 range and snow is still falling. This just drives home the point: Kazakhstan is a big country.
I'm in the middle of a 10 day break from teaching, which includes a few days here in Shymkent and then an in-service training conference in Almaty that goes until March 29. It's a welcome break from teaching. The teaching is still going fine, but there is a huge difference between each class. The fourth year students just finished their classes, which is too bad because they were some of my favorite groups. But hopefully I'll get some helpful ideas from this conference in Almaty that will help me in the class.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Spring Has Sprung
Today I’m writing from a science-defyingly warmer Kyzylorda. It’s been a stunning turn of events- two weeks ago it was still too cold for the Kelvin Scale to register a reading, and yesterday I went outside in my t-shirt and shorts. The other day I’m pretty sure it was well into what would have been the 60s in American Fahrenheit. Global warming or radioactive fallout from decades of Soviet nuclear testing? Anybody’s guess! (The winner grows a third arm from the top of his head- think how useful that could be.)
So ne bolda since the last time? My daily schedule, which started the semester pretty empty, is gradually filling to the brim. Today I gave my first “module,” or test, as we call it. I was laughed at by one of my yeriptes, or colleagues, when I typed the module out and titled it “Model,” but I swear this is how they pronounce it. They laughed and I said “Oh, mod-ULE” like that, emphasizing the second syllable, which only drew more laughs and a comment something like “haha you say it funny.” But there were so many counts on which I was in the right here that it just wasn’t worth arguing. For instance, we don’t call them models or modules, we just call them tests and quizzes, so they’re wrong there. Second, they pronounce the incorrectly translated word incorrectly. Third, they then laugh at my correct pronunciation and at my mistake, which - get this - is based on their incorrect pronunciation in the first place. So that bugged me. But, you can’t win ‘em all.
My first module went more or less as I expected it would- countless obvious attempts at cheating by the students and me coming dangerously close to losing my patience but managing to keep it together. I’lll go out on a limb and say my 4 years at Washington and Lee were not good preparation - at least from a classroom management standpoint - for teaching in Kazakhstan. For example, in response to the constant interruption of “Teacher may I go out” I made a rule saying “If you have to leave class, don’t ask, just leave.” But I’ve learned you can’t really do this because some students will just go to the cafeteria or go home. And you also can’t assume students will, if they cheat, at least do it so subtlely that the teacher won’t notice. I hardly took my eyes off the students for 50 minutes, and still there was endless whispering, even when I would make direct eye contact with them, and obvious sharing of information.
Now I’m not going to say that during my 18 years of formal schooling I never snuck an occasional peak at a neighbor’s paper or wrote the quadratic formula on the inside of my eyelids (think how easy school would have been if this had worked). But I would have never had the gall (stupidity?) to continue blatantly cheating after the teacher has given repeated warnings directed both at the class and at me personally, and is standing less than two feet away looking directly at me. After I took this particular student’s notebook, he finally seemed to get the point, and pretty much just gave up on the test. We had had a guest lecture from one of the other volunteers in the city, Cho, who works at the HIV/AIDS center, and one of the questions on the module was “name two ways to prevent getting AIDS.” So it wasn’t surprising to see that this student had copied an answer to this question on the outside of his notebook, but it was surprising that the only words he was able to scribble down were, and I quote, “not to use condoms.” So we’ll be having an AIDS Review lesson next week.
I feel like I’ve already learned a lot in just the 10 or 11 weeks I’ve been teaching here. One thing that stands out is how different each class is. You can give the same lesson to 9 different classes and some will go extremely well while some will bomb. It’s also interesting how some of the students are absolutely some of the nicest people I’ve ever met and I want to bring them back to America with me, and then some are completely rude and disrespectful. For example, students sometimes say “Teacher, may we go out” and then they just go to the cafeteria, or they often say at the beginning of an activity “oh that won’t be interesting, let’s do something else,” or I’ll just have finished a long talk about cultural sensitivity and someone will say, immediately after I’ve finished making what I think is a pretty important point, “Chris can I take a picture with you?” or “Mr. Chris you have chalk on your jacket” or “Mr. Chris how long will you live in Kyzylorda?” (2 years! I swear I’ve told them this 100 times.) Admittedly some of these are more funny than rude. But then from other students I’ve heard “Oh Mr. Chris you have a cold, let us prepare the lesson topic for next week,” or “you’re always standing, why don’t you sit down? Don’t you get tired?” I know in all my days as a student I never had this much concern for my teachers’ well-being.
Anyway, Saturday is Women’s Day in the Republic. Apparently there are two separate holidays, one of which is used to celebrate one half of the population and the other to celebrate the other half (Men’s Day is in May). Many here are flabbergasted that in America we don’t have a holiday dedicated to all women, and instead celebrate only mothers on Mother’s Day. I think this partly explains/is partly explained by the fact that on holidays here, people don’t say “Happy ___-day” or “Best Wishes” but instead say “Congratulations.” From what I can tell, individual achievements are less important here, so it’s not so hard to earn a “congratulations.” For example, all I have to do is wait until May.
I really need a walking laptop I can just type on as I walk. I swear I think of the best ideas for blog topics as I walk around the city, and then by the time I sit down to write I forget everything. So this is all I could think of for the last couple weeks, but I’m pretty sure a lot more has happened, I just can’t think of it all. Rest assured my life here is more interesting than my lack of a short-term memory makes it sound.
So ne bolda since the last time? My daily schedule, which started the semester pretty empty, is gradually filling to the brim. Today I gave my first “module,” or test, as we call it. I was laughed at by one of my yeriptes, or colleagues, when I typed the module out and titled it “Model,” but I swear this is how they pronounce it. They laughed and I said “Oh, mod-ULE” like that, emphasizing the second syllable, which only drew more laughs and a comment something like “haha you say it funny.” But there were so many counts on which I was in the right here that it just wasn’t worth arguing. For instance, we don’t call them models or modules, we just call them tests and quizzes, so they’re wrong there. Second, they pronounce the incorrectly translated word incorrectly. Third, they then laugh at my correct pronunciation and at my mistake, which - get this - is based on their incorrect pronunciation in the first place. So that bugged me. But, you can’t win ‘em all.
My first module went more or less as I expected it would- countless obvious attempts at cheating by the students and me coming dangerously close to losing my patience but managing to keep it together. I’lll go out on a limb and say my 4 years at Washington and Lee were not good preparation - at least from a classroom management standpoint - for teaching in Kazakhstan. For example, in response to the constant interruption of “Teacher may I go out” I made a rule saying “If you have to leave class, don’t ask, just leave.” But I’ve learned you can’t really do this because some students will just go to the cafeteria or go home. And you also can’t assume students will, if they cheat, at least do it so subtlely that the teacher won’t notice. I hardly took my eyes off the students for 50 minutes, and still there was endless whispering, even when I would make direct eye contact with them, and obvious sharing of information.
Now I’m not going to say that during my 18 years of formal schooling I never snuck an occasional peak at a neighbor’s paper or wrote the quadratic formula on the inside of my eyelids (think how easy school would have been if this had worked). But I would have never had the gall (stupidity?) to continue blatantly cheating after the teacher has given repeated warnings directed both at the class and at me personally, and is standing less than two feet away looking directly at me. After I took this particular student’s notebook, he finally seemed to get the point, and pretty much just gave up on the test. We had had a guest lecture from one of the other volunteers in the city, Cho, who works at the HIV/AIDS center, and one of the questions on the module was “name two ways to prevent getting AIDS.” So it wasn’t surprising to see that this student had copied an answer to this question on the outside of his notebook, but it was surprising that the only words he was able to scribble down were, and I quote, “not to use condoms.” So we’ll be having an AIDS Review lesson next week.
I feel like I’ve already learned a lot in just the 10 or 11 weeks I’ve been teaching here. One thing that stands out is how different each class is. You can give the same lesson to 9 different classes and some will go extremely well while some will bomb. It’s also interesting how some of the students are absolutely some of the nicest people I’ve ever met and I want to bring them back to America with me, and then some are completely rude and disrespectful. For example, students sometimes say “Teacher, may we go out” and then they just go to the cafeteria, or they often say at the beginning of an activity “oh that won’t be interesting, let’s do something else,” or I’ll just have finished a long talk about cultural sensitivity and someone will say, immediately after I’ve finished making what I think is a pretty important point, “Chris can I take a picture with you?” or “Mr. Chris you have chalk on your jacket” or “Mr. Chris how long will you live in Kyzylorda?” (2 years! I swear I’ve told them this 100 times.) Admittedly some of these are more funny than rude. But then from other students I’ve heard “Oh Mr. Chris you have a cold, let us prepare the lesson topic for next week,” or “you’re always standing, why don’t you sit down? Don’t you get tired?” I know in all my days as a student I never had this much concern for my teachers’ well-being.
Anyway, Saturday is Women’s Day in the Republic. Apparently there are two separate holidays, one of which is used to celebrate one half of the population and the other to celebrate the other half (Men’s Day is in May). Many here are flabbergasted that in America we don’t have a holiday dedicated to all women, and instead celebrate only mothers on Mother’s Day. I think this partly explains/is partly explained by the fact that on holidays here, people don’t say “Happy ___-day” or “Best Wishes” but instead say “Congratulations.” From what I can tell, individual achievements are less important here, so it’s not so hard to earn a “congratulations.” For example, all I have to do is wait until May.
I really need a walking laptop I can just type on as I walk. I swear I think of the best ideas for blog topics as I walk around the city, and then by the time I sit down to write I forget everything. So this is all I could think of for the last couple weeks, but I’m pretty sure a lot more has happened, I just can’t think of it all. Rest assured my life here is more interesting than my lack of a short-term memory makes it sound.
Sunday, February 24, 2008
My TV Interview
This is from last month at our university's sports competition. I'm not sure if it will work, but it took me about a month and 4 or 5 different attempts at various (2 different) internet cafes to get it up. So I hope it works.
Please don't laugh at me.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Insert Creative Blog Title Here
So I neglected to mention anything about the Erik Bedard trade. It’s good to see the O’s finally making a committed effort to full-scale rebuilding. To be fair though, until now they didn’t really have two players good enough to get a 10-player haul like this. As it usually goes with them though, chances are all ten will flake out either immediately or within 2-3 years, depending on when all of them will suffer their career-ending injuries and/or decide eating 6 meals a day at McDonald’s is more important than throwing in between starts (I wish you were reading this, Sidney Ponson).
On to (only slightly) more important things here in Kazakhstan. Although I’m busy, in Kyzylorda I’ve found I have a lot of time to myself to think, mostly as I’m walking around the city getting from place to place. Usually I think of what I think are great, hilarious blog topics, but unfortunately I’m not able to record my thoughts as I’m walking; the people that see me laughing and talking to myself already think I’m weird enough. Either they stare at me because I’m obviously American (although I swear I don’t look any different from the Russians here), because I look crazy laughing and talking to myself, or because I carry a Nalgene. No joke, at least half of all people I walk past on the street, if I follow their eyes, are looking not at me but at my water bottle. To people here it is the strangest thing in the world. I’ve had literally dozens of people ask me what’s in it. One student told me a few weeks ago “You know, I shouldn’t tell you this because it’s a big secret, but everyone at the school talks about and wonders what’s in your water bottle.” I found out the hard way that people here tend toward the gullible (read, overly influenced by the Soviet Union’s storied love affair with alcohol) side when I joked that it’s vodka inside, and people didn’t laugh but nodded knowingly. A few times I’ve had to tell them “No I’m just joking.” On that note, I also could very easily have had my host sister still believing that I dated both Jennifer Love Hewitt and Katie Holmes in the late ‘90s, but I felt too guilty keeping the lie going more than a few minutes. When I asked why she believed me, she said “You’re all from America, it’s possible!”
I unwisely deduced from these interactions that people don’t really know about or use sarcasm as a form of humor here, so I decided to do a lesson centered around the theme of sarcasm. As I found out early in the first lesson, it turns out there’s a Russian word for sarcasm pronounced “sarCASM” with the stress on the last syllable instead of the first. This has happened several times, when I think I have to go into great detail to explain a word to a class, and it turns out there is a Russian cognate that sounds exactly the same as the English word (same thing for “irony,” for example). As a result I hear “Yes, we know, we understand, please stop talking” pretty often. This only stops me for a minute though. A couple of the examples of sarcasm I used were when Joanna would dump an entire bowl of sugar on top of her grapefruit in the morning and someone would say “Why don’t you have some grapefruit with that sugar?” or when we would all go to a fancy new restaurant when we were younger and Betsy and I would order the chicken fingers/french fries dish, and we’d hear “Wow you guys are really branching out this time” (I took this opportunity to explain “branch out”). Most of the students seemed to understand these, though they didn’t find them all that funny. The important thing, though, is that I found them funny.
As for the weather here, it actually got above freezing for a few days in a row last week, which made for a nice sopping muddy surface on the streets, sidewalks, areas inbetween the streets and sidewalks, floors of the buses and marshrutkas, and pretty much every surface that humans might potentially need to walk on. I’ll put it this way, I’ve stopped licking the bottoms of my shoes every afternoon when I get home.
Most of the third-year university students in the teaching department are on their “practice” this semester, which means they are teaching at a local school for 8 weeks. I’ve gotten the opportunity to sit in on a few of their lessons this week, and they’ve been thoroughly impressive and entertaining at the same time. For example, during an English Week competition between the seventh grade students at one school, one team gave themselves the name “Happy Britain,” which made me laugh a little. The students were hilarious- I served as a judge for a couple of these competitions, and every time I awarded the highest score, a 5, the members of the receiving team would pump their fists and yell “Yes!” This only made me want to award a 5 to every team, every time, which I pretty much was doing anyway. Another entertaining aspect was that after each round of one competition, a contestant would be eliminated. Based on their performance in that round, we the judges had to choose which student would be eliminated, and after we made our choice, the teacher would say, “Ok, you must leave now.” One time the eliminated student tried to sit down in a different chair and the teacher said “No you must leave the room.” Pretty harsh. I’ve gotten more and more used to this kind of thing, but I still couldn’t really believe it. These kids here must have pretty thick skin; at age 12 that would have at least sent me running to the bathroom crying. Of course I also cried every time I struck out until I was about 15. I’m not sure how either of these things pertain to what I’m talking about, or why I’m writing about them, so I guess I’ll stop. But I just hope I’m asked to attend many more of these English competitions over the next two years.
On to (only slightly) more important things here in Kazakhstan. Although I’m busy, in Kyzylorda I’ve found I have a lot of time to myself to think, mostly as I’m walking around the city getting from place to place. Usually I think of what I think are great, hilarious blog topics, but unfortunately I’m not able to record my thoughts as I’m walking; the people that see me laughing and talking to myself already think I’m weird enough. Either they stare at me because I’m obviously American (although I swear I don’t look any different from the Russians here), because I look crazy laughing and talking to myself, or because I carry a Nalgene. No joke, at least half of all people I walk past on the street, if I follow their eyes, are looking not at me but at my water bottle. To people here it is the strangest thing in the world. I’ve had literally dozens of people ask me what’s in it. One student told me a few weeks ago “You know, I shouldn’t tell you this because it’s a big secret, but everyone at the school talks about and wonders what’s in your water bottle.” I found out the hard way that people here tend toward the gullible (read, overly influenced by the Soviet Union’s storied love affair with alcohol) side when I joked that it’s vodka inside, and people didn’t laugh but nodded knowingly. A few times I’ve had to tell them “No I’m just joking.” On that note, I also could very easily have had my host sister still believing that I dated both Jennifer Love Hewitt and Katie Holmes in the late ‘90s, but I felt too guilty keeping the lie going more than a few minutes. When I asked why she believed me, she said “You’re all from America, it’s possible!”
I unwisely deduced from these interactions that people don’t really know about or use sarcasm as a form of humor here, so I decided to do a lesson centered around the theme of sarcasm. As I found out early in the first lesson, it turns out there’s a Russian word for sarcasm pronounced “sarCASM” with the stress on the last syllable instead of the first. This has happened several times, when I think I have to go into great detail to explain a word to a class, and it turns out there is a Russian cognate that sounds exactly the same as the English word (same thing for “irony,” for example). As a result I hear “Yes, we know, we understand, please stop talking” pretty often. This only stops me for a minute though. A couple of the examples of sarcasm I used were when Joanna would dump an entire bowl of sugar on top of her grapefruit in the morning and someone would say “Why don’t you have some grapefruit with that sugar?” or when we would all go to a fancy new restaurant when we were younger and Betsy and I would order the chicken fingers/french fries dish, and we’d hear “Wow you guys are really branching out this time” (I took this opportunity to explain “branch out”). Most of the students seemed to understand these, though they didn’t find them all that funny. The important thing, though, is that I found them funny.
As for the weather here, it actually got above freezing for a few days in a row last week, which made for a nice sopping muddy surface on the streets, sidewalks, areas inbetween the streets and sidewalks, floors of the buses and marshrutkas, and pretty much every surface that humans might potentially need to walk on. I’ll put it this way, I’ve stopped licking the bottoms of my shoes every afternoon when I get home.
Most of the third-year university students in the teaching department are on their “practice” this semester, which means they are teaching at a local school for 8 weeks. I’ve gotten the opportunity to sit in on a few of their lessons this week, and they’ve been thoroughly impressive and entertaining at the same time. For example, during an English Week competition between the seventh grade students at one school, one team gave themselves the name “Happy Britain,” which made me laugh a little. The students were hilarious- I served as a judge for a couple of these competitions, and every time I awarded the highest score, a 5, the members of the receiving team would pump their fists and yell “Yes!” This only made me want to award a 5 to every team, every time, which I pretty much was doing anyway. Another entertaining aspect was that after each round of one competition, a contestant would be eliminated. Based on their performance in that round, we the judges had to choose which student would be eliminated, and after we made our choice, the teacher would say, “Ok, you must leave now.” One time the eliminated student tried to sit down in a different chair and the teacher said “No you must leave the room.” Pretty harsh. I’ve gotten more and more used to this kind of thing, but I still couldn’t really believe it. These kids here must have pretty thick skin; at age 12 that would have at least sent me running to the bathroom crying. Of course I also cried every time I struck out until I was about 15. I’m not sure how either of these things pertain to what I’m talking about, or why I’m writing about them, so I guess I’ll stop. But I just hope I’m asked to attend many more of these English competitions over the next two years.
Friday, February 8, 2008
What a Week
Well the Giants pulled off the impossible. Who would have guessed it? (Other than my subconscious.) Can't wait to watch the DVD of this unforgettable upset and reenact Super Bowl Sunday, in April. Was anyone betting on the Giants, or did everyone lose money? One benefit of being so far away from the action is that I was able to stay even.
A couple frustrating moments this week. The first came when I arrived at school for my 8:30 class Wednesday morning. At about 8:33, as class was closing in on beginning (I’m “punctual” in relation to most of my students) the teacher whose class it was came up and asked me if I’d heard the news. Apparently our dean, who has worked very closely with me and Peace Corps, speaks excellent English, and is an all-around great guy, was being replaced. As I’d come to find out later, he was just moving to a different position in the main building, so I’ll be able to stay in contact with him, but this was pretty unsettling news to hear right at the beginning of the day and on the heels of the start of a two-hour class.
There have already been grumblings about the new dean, a woman that reportedly will walk into every class, not introduce herself, ask curtly “Who’s not here?”, “Who hasn’t paid tuition?” and then yell at the teacher in front of her students. She’s only been on the job one day, so I haven’t had the pleasure of this experience yet, but it’s already happened to at least one of the teachers in our department. Can’t wait to meet her!
Another interesting moment came later that day when I arrived home from the school. A few minutes after I came out of the bathroom and was in my room beginning to prepare my lesson, my host mom gave me her usual “Krees tamak zhey” which means “Chris we’re eating now.” But then she did something unusual: she approached my door and said quietly, and with a smile, “In Kazakhstan we always wash our hands after using the toilet.” Embarrassed, I immediately tried to show her the hand sanitizer on my desk that I use about 37 times a day, but she didn’t seem to understand because she just repeated herself twice. Now, I had a few options here. I could have pointed out that the water in our apartment doesn’t run roughly 95% of the time, making conventional hand-washing a frustrating endeavor, that “in America we eat our food with forks,” or that this was the first full sentence she’d spoken directly to me since I’d moved here three months ago. But, I showed restraint and decided against all three, mostly because she would have gotten bored and left long before I figured out how to say any of these things in Kazakh. After thinking about it I later explained to her that I had soap from America that I always wash with after using the toilet that doesn’t require water. Thinking that earlier she hadn’t understood this concept when I’d tried to explain it to her, I asked if they had such kind of soap in Kazakhstan. “Of course,” she said. Of course, why wouldn’t they?
Then today at the post office, my favorite venue for collecting memorable anecdotes, I had another “Only in Kazakhstan” moment (or to be fair, maybe it was an “only at the post office” moment). I collected a slip from my PO Box indicating I had a package and took it to the front desk, where there was no attendant. Now the people at this particular post office are not world-renowned for their friendliness or customer service, so I was not too surprised and was prepared to be patient and wait a while. Perhaps this is why I didn’t go postal as the following events unfolded.
After a couple minutes, a woman came up next to me also requiring assistance. When she saw nobody at the desk she got impatient and bravely walked through the trap-door opening on the side of the front desk, walking directly into the back room where you could hear a lot of women talking and laughing through the open door. When she came out followed by the attendant that usually mans the front desk, I thought “finally I’ll be able to get my package.” Boy was I wrong. The attendant didn’t as much as look up to make eye contact with me, the only other customer at the counter, but instead focused her attention on pad-locking the trap door the other woman had walked through, then turned around and returned to the back room, being sure to close the second door behind her this time. Normally I think I would have been angered by this, but I’ve been to this post office often enough to know the deal. There is simply no concept of customer service; you get helped when you get helped. Apparently it was lunch time and the workers were not to be disturbed.
After several more minutes had passed, another customer came up behind me and started knocking loudly on the counter hoping someone in the back room would hear him and come out. They did, and the same girl came out and said something in Kazakh before turning back around and returning to the party room. Finally after about 25 minutes of us standing at the empty counter, she decided her break was over and finally came out and angrily took my parcel slip. It then took her and her coworker only about 45 seconds to realize that my package was at the other post office on the other side of town. This has also happened before, so I wasn’t too surprised, and actually relieved because the workers at this other post office seem to have souls, unlike their crosstown rivals. Then the weirdest thing happened: as I was waiting for the other woman to bring my slip back, this first woman, who always works hard to give off an impression of hating everything about the world, especially anyone unfortunate enough to be her customer, started chatting me up about where I was from and what I was doing in Kazakhstan. She even smiled as I struggled through my introductory Kazakh responses. I have no idea how to explain this or make sense of it, or what is going through this woman’s head the other 23.9 hours of the day, other than to simply write the whole thing off as another cultural experience I couldn’t begin to understand if I tried.
The story has a happy ending though as I made it to the other post office without incident, picked up my package, and later watched my new “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” DVD for about an hour (thanks Mom/Dad!).
And finally, a funny moment from class this week: another teacher and I gave the students an assignment to draw pictures contrasting the differences between eastern and western cultures. In class I had shown them a number of pictures I’d gotten in an email where one side represented an eastern attitude or belief, the other side western. In one of the classes the students were especially creative, showing a Kazakh man spotting a pretty girl and dreaming in a thought bubble of making her his wife. The opposing picture was of an American man spotting a girl in a bikini and dreaming of a bed. So it’s good to know they think we Americans are so morally upstanding. Several other students' pictures showed Kazakhstanis returning home to a house full of people while their American counterparts returned to an empty apartment. I wanted to correct this oversimplified belief, but then I remembered that for the two years before I moved here I usually came home to an empty apartment myself. So I had to agree.
It's been a busy week, and I'm starting to realize I should have never complained about having nothing to do over break. All of a sudden every citizen of Kyzylorda wants to learn English in private one hour lessons. Luckily for me they mostly forget to show up, which leaves me enough time to eat and occasionally sleep. Whoever told me that in Peace Corps you'll probably have a lot of time to yourself to study the language or read was either a liar or a dirty liar. But truthfully, I don't mind being busy. In the end it's enjoyable working with so many people, trying to get to know their culture and the way they operate, and maybe helping them pick up a little English.
A couple frustrating moments this week. The first came when I arrived at school for my 8:30 class Wednesday morning. At about 8:33, as class was closing in on beginning (I’m “punctual” in relation to most of my students) the teacher whose class it was came up and asked me if I’d heard the news. Apparently our dean, who has worked very closely with me and Peace Corps, speaks excellent English, and is an all-around great guy, was being replaced. As I’d come to find out later, he was just moving to a different position in the main building, so I’ll be able to stay in contact with him, but this was pretty unsettling news to hear right at the beginning of the day and on the heels of the start of a two-hour class.
There have already been grumblings about the new dean, a woman that reportedly will walk into every class, not introduce herself, ask curtly “Who’s not here?”, “Who hasn’t paid tuition?” and then yell at the teacher in front of her students. She’s only been on the job one day, so I haven’t had the pleasure of this experience yet, but it’s already happened to at least one of the teachers in our department. Can’t wait to meet her!
Another interesting moment came later that day when I arrived home from the school. A few minutes after I came out of the bathroom and was in my room beginning to prepare my lesson, my host mom gave me her usual “Krees tamak zhey” which means “Chris we’re eating now.” But then she did something unusual: she approached my door and said quietly, and with a smile, “In Kazakhstan we always wash our hands after using the toilet.” Embarrassed, I immediately tried to show her the hand sanitizer on my desk that I use about 37 times a day, but she didn’t seem to understand because she just repeated herself twice. Now, I had a few options here. I could have pointed out that the water in our apartment doesn’t run roughly 95% of the time, making conventional hand-washing a frustrating endeavor, that “in America we eat our food with forks,” or that this was the first full sentence she’d spoken directly to me since I’d moved here three months ago. But, I showed restraint and decided against all three, mostly because she would have gotten bored and left long before I figured out how to say any of these things in Kazakh. After thinking about it I later explained to her that I had soap from America that I always wash with after using the toilet that doesn’t require water. Thinking that earlier she hadn’t understood this concept when I’d tried to explain it to her, I asked if they had such kind of soap in Kazakhstan. “Of course,” she said. Of course, why wouldn’t they?
Then today at the post office, my favorite venue for collecting memorable anecdotes, I had another “Only in Kazakhstan” moment (or to be fair, maybe it was an “only at the post office” moment). I collected a slip from my PO Box indicating I had a package and took it to the front desk, where there was no attendant. Now the people at this particular post office are not world-renowned for their friendliness or customer service, so I was not too surprised and was prepared to be patient and wait a while. Perhaps this is why I didn’t go postal as the following events unfolded.
After a couple minutes, a woman came up next to me also requiring assistance. When she saw nobody at the desk she got impatient and bravely walked through the trap-door opening on the side of the front desk, walking directly into the back room where you could hear a lot of women talking and laughing through the open door. When she came out followed by the attendant that usually mans the front desk, I thought “finally I’ll be able to get my package.” Boy was I wrong. The attendant didn’t as much as look up to make eye contact with me, the only other customer at the counter, but instead focused her attention on pad-locking the trap door the other woman had walked through, then turned around and returned to the back room, being sure to close the second door behind her this time. Normally I think I would have been angered by this, but I’ve been to this post office often enough to know the deal. There is simply no concept of customer service; you get helped when you get helped. Apparently it was lunch time and the workers were not to be disturbed.
After several more minutes had passed, another customer came up behind me and started knocking loudly on the counter hoping someone in the back room would hear him and come out. They did, and the same girl came out and said something in Kazakh before turning back around and returning to the party room. Finally after about 25 minutes of us standing at the empty counter, she decided her break was over and finally came out and angrily took my parcel slip. It then took her and her coworker only about 45 seconds to realize that my package was at the other post office on the other side of town. This has also happened before, so I wasn’t too surprised, and actually relieved because the workers at this other post office seem to have souls, unlike their crosstown rivals. Then the weirdest thing happened: as I was waiting for the other woman to bring my slip back, this first woman, who always works hard to give off an impression of hating everything about the world, especially anyone unfortunate enough to be her customer, started chatting me up about where I was from and what I was doing in Kazakhstan. She even smiled as I struggled through my introductory Kazakh responses. I have no idea how to explain this or make sense of it, or what is going through this woman’s head the other 23.9 hours of the day, other than to simply write the whole thing off as another cultural experience I couldn’t begin to understand if I tried.
The story has a happy ending though as I made it to the other post office without incident, picked up my package, and later watched my new “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” DVD for about an hour (thanks Mom/Dad!).
And finally, a funny moment from class this week: another teacher and I gave the students an assignment to draw pictures contrasting the differences between eastern and western cultures. In class I had shown them a number of pictures I’d gotten in an email where one side represented an eastern attitude or belief, the other side western. In one of the classes the students were especially creative, showing a Kazakh man spotting a pretty girl and dreaming in a thought bubble of making her his wife. The opposing picture was of an American man spotting a girl in a bikini and dreaming of a bed. So it’s good to know they think we Americans are so morally upstanding. Several other students' pictures showed Kazakhstanis returning home to a house full of people while their American counterparts returned to an empty apartment. I wanted to correct this oversimplified belief, but then I remembered that for the two years before I moved here I usually came home to an empty apartment myself. So I had to agree.
It's been a busy week, and I'm starting to realize I should have never complained about having nothing to do over break. All of a sudden every citizen of Kyzylorda wants to learn English in private one hour lessons. Luckily for me they mostly forget to show up, which leaves me enough time to eat and occasionally sleep. Whoever told me that in Peace Corps you'll probably have a lot of time to yourself to study the language or read was either a liar or a dirty liar. But truthfully, I don't mind being busy. In the end it's enjoyable working with so many people, trying to get to know their culture and the way they operate, and maybe helping them pick up a little English.
Sunday, February 3, 2008
The Latest
Today is a bit of a sad day for me. For the first time since 1990, I’m missing the Super Bowl. Now I know not everyone can lay claim to the fact that they haven’t missed a Super Bowl in 18 years, so let me just reminisce out loud for a minute. It has been quite a ride.
I was there in ‘91 when the Giants (and Scott Norwood) shocked the Bills, in ‘95 when the ‘Niners shocked no one, in ‘97 when Brett Favre gave this bandwagon fan an AIM screenname (PackOs97), in ‘04 when the Patriots held off the Panthers, I was even there in 2000 to see the Titans come one yard short against the Rams. I know many on the east coast claim to have “lost power” and “missed that game” perhaps because of the “severe ice storm” that “shut down most of the mid-Atlantic coast” but to me these are all nothing more than hollow excuses, shrouded in cloaks of embarrassment and despair. I was there, sweating out every second right along with Jeff Fischer, Steve McNair, Eddie George, and Kevin Dyson. I was there.
And today, out of all the recent Super Bowls, I’m missing the one I would have wanted to see the most. I’ll note that there are two things in football I’ve wanted to see since I started following the NFL in about 1991: The Giants win another championship, and a team go undefeated. Today, one of those things will happen. And I won’t see it, unfortunately.
I dreamt the other night that the Giants held off the Patriots in a furious defensive battle, 9-6. This probably proves how little my subconscious has paid attention to the NFL this year, seeing as how most betting men would have more than 15 points being scored in the first 4 minutes of the game (mostly by the Patriots). But until I find out the actual outcome, I’m going to pretend this is what actually happened. This is one of the perks of living halfway around the world. You can make things up in your head and tell yourself they’re true, because there’s no Sports Center to give you the highlights or “results.”
Anyway, enough about football. I hope it’s a good game. In honor of the shrimp dip I’d be having if I were in the US, today I sprinkled some Old Bay into my imitation-Ramen. It was almost the same, except my body is probably screaming for something other than salt and carbs at this point. The most common meal I have here is rachki, a mix of pasta, carrots, potato, and a small helping of meat. Sometimes there’s a curve thrown in and we have rice instead of pasta, pumpkin instead of carrots, or sometimes camel instead of cow meat (which is actually really, really good). I end up eating out a lot too, relying on the local cafes to fulfill my body’s need for the kinds of nutrients found in cucumbers and tomatoes. There’s a really good Korean dish here called “kookcee” that has become a favorite for me, McKenzie, and Cho, the other Americans here in town with me. But wow, what I would do for a giant bowl of spaghetti or a hand-tossed Domino’s pepperoni pizza delivered fresh to my door.
As for a school update, after two weeks of classes, I can say that this semester (knock on wood) is going much better than last semester did. On the first day of class (which was really the second day, since I found out the hard way that most students miss the first day of class after a long break) I laid out my eight rules (in honor of Cal, and also because more would have been too many) and we played a true-false game to make sure they understood the rules. A little condescending maybe, but they seemed to enjoy the activity and understand the rules, and with my blood pressure reaching unsafe levels last semester it was necessary for me to do this. We also discussed our goals and the theme of "Why I'm Here." The second lesson focused on job interviews, which the students also seemed interested in. Hopefully I can come up with enough interesting, practical, and relevant activities to last me 13 more weeks. Creativity was never my strong point, so suggestions are always welcome.
What else? Something that’s been on my mind- I heard a lot about “Kazakh Hospitality” before coming here and in my first few weeks here. I’m realizing that hospitality can manifest itself in different ways according to what culture you find yourself in. For example, my host family has a clearly defined view of hospitality. Most Saturdays they say to me, “Here, why don’t you just stay here with this cat we both know you hate while we all go off to our parents’ presumably much nicer house we’ve never invited you to....but we left food for you.” Of course I say this a little tongue in cheek- my host family is great - they invited me to Shymkent for New Year's and generally take good care of me - but the word “hospitality” with them, as with many other families here, seems to depend more on how well they feed you than, say, how much time they spend talking to you. I think this is a cultural difference between our two countries, one that I’m slowly learning to live with. And one that my almost non-existent ability to speak Kazakh is still at odds with. I always kind of assumed that my language skills would just naturally improve the longer I stayed here; I never would have thought I’d be speaking English 98% of every day. Though this is disappointing for me right now, the way I’m coping is by bragging to all my friends about how good my English will be when I move back in two years. Most of them don’t care, but I tell them this anyway.
Well this was a long one. I guess I had to make up for my two-week silence. There’s plenty more to talk about than I have time to write right now, so I hope to post another update later in the week. Til then, go Giants! If they don’t win, please don’t tell me. Remember I’m still living in a fantasy world and will find out everything that’s actually happened in America when I come back in ‘09.
I was there in ‘91 when the Giants (and Scott Norwood) shocked the Bills, in ‘95 when the ‘Niners shocked no one, in ‘97 when Brett Favre gave this bandwagon fan an AIM screenname (PackOs97), in ‘04 when the Patriots held off the Panthers, I was even there in 2000 to see the Titans come one yard short against the Rams. I know many on the east coast claim to have “lost power” and “missed that game” perhaps because of the “severe ice storm” that “shut down most of the mid-Atlantic coast” but to me these are all nothing more than hollow excuses, shrouded in cloaks of embarrassment and despair. I was there, sweating out every second right along with Jeff Fischer, Steve McNair, Eddie George, and Kevin Dyson. I was there.
And today, out of all the recent Super Bowls, I’m missing the one I would have wanted to see the most. I’ll note that there are two things in football I’ve wanted to see since I started following the NFL in about 1991: The Giants win another championship, and a team go undefeated. Today, one of those things will happen. And I won’t see it, unfortunately.
I dreamt the other night that the Giants held off the Patriots in a furious defensive battle, 9-6. This probably proves how little my subconscious has paid attention to the NFL this year, seeing as how most betting men would have more than 15 points being scored in the first 4 minutes of the game (mostly by the Patriots). But until I find out the actual outcome, I’m going to pretend this is what actually happened. This is one of the perks of living halfway around the world. You can make things up in your head and tell yourself they’re true, because there’s no Sports Center to give you the highlights or “results.”
Anyway, enough about football. I hope it’s a good game. In honor of the shrimp dip I’d be having if I were in the US, today I sprinkled some Old Bay into my imitation-Ramen. It was almost the same, except my body is probably screaming for something other than salt and carbs at this point. The most common meal I have here is rachki, a mix of pasta, carrots, potato, and a small helping of meat. Sometimes there’s a curve thrown in and we have rice instead of pasta, pumpkin instead of carrots, or sometimes camel instead of cow meat (which is actually really, really good). I end up eating out a lot too, relying on the local cafes to fulfill my body’s need for the kinds of nutrients found in cucumbers and tomatoes. There’s a really good Korean dish here called “kookcee” that has become a favorite for me, McKenzie, and Cho, the other Americans here in town with me. But wow, what I would do for a giant bowl of spaghetti or a hand-tossed Domino’s pepperoni pizza delivered fresh to my door.
As for a school update, after two weeks of classes, I can say that this semester (knock on wood) is going much better than last semester did. On the first day of class (which was really the second day, since I found out the hard way that most students miss the first day of class after a long break) I laid out my eight rules (in honor of Cal, and also because more would have been too many) and we played a true-false game to make sure they understood the rules. A little condescending maybe, but they seemed to enjoy the activity and understand the rules, and with my blood pressure reaching unsafe levels last semester it was necessary for me to do this. We also discussed our goals and the theme of "Why I'm Here." The second lesson focused on job interviews, which the students also seemed interested in. Hopefully I can come up with enough interesting, practical, and relevant activities to last me 13 more weeks. Creativity was never my strong point, so suggestions are always welcome.
What else? Something that’s been on my mind- I heard a lot about “Kazakh Hospitality” before coming here and in my first few weeks here. I’m realizing that hospitality can manifest itself in different ways according to what culture you find yourself in. For example, my host family has a clearly defined view of hospitality. Most Saturdays they say to me, “Here, why don’t you just stay here with this cat we both know you hate while we all go off to our parents’ presumably much nicer house we’ve never invited you to....but we left food for you.” Of course I say this a little tongue in cheek- my host family is great - they invited me to Shymkent for New Year's and generally take good care of me - but the word “hospitality” with them, as with many other families here, seems to depend more on how well they feed you than, say, how much time they spend talking to you. I think this is a cultural difference between our two countries, one that I’m slowly learning to live with. And one that my almost non-existent ability to speak Kazakh is still at odds with. I always kind of assumed that my language skills would just naturally improve the longer I stayed here; I never would have thought I’d be speaking English 98% of every day. Though this is disappointing for me right now, the way I’m coping is by bragging to all my friends about how good my English will be when I move back in two years. Most of them don’t care, but I tell them this anyway.
Well this was a long one. I guess I had to make up for my two-week silence. There’s plenty more to talk about than I have time to write right now, so I hope to post another update later in the week. Til then, go Giants! If they don’t win, please don’t tell me. Remember I’m still living in a fantasy world and will find out everything that’s actually happened in America when I come back in ‘09.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Sorry and a Request
Sorry if everyone got another invitation email to this blog- I noticed that most of the people I had sent emails to months ago weren't on the list of people allowed to access the site. And I know some people have been having trouble accessing it. So I just reinvited everyone. It would be a whole lot easier if I didn't have to password protect it like this, but I'd rather stay on the safe side of things.
Anyway, I'd like to make a quick request to anyone reading this. Nearly everyone here has at one point or another asked me what Americans think of Kazakhstan. The answer for me before I came was of course "not much." But I think it would be really exciting for the students at my school to hear directly from Americans about what they think of/know about Kazakhstan. So if you have the time, I'd invite anyone reading this to send me your thoughts on my glorious new country. It can be one sentence or one page or however much you want to write; I think the important thing is that people here get a good sense of what Americans think of their country, because that seems to be very important to a lot of people here. I'm hoping to get enough responses to read some aloud in class and make it into part of one of my lessons. So any thoughts you have would be great, you can email them or leave them in a comment here.
On a different note, a quick sports update- the World Languages Faculty continued its run of utter non-dominance today with a resounding 16-2 defeat in basketball. I learned a lot about Kazakhstani basketball in the process too; they tend to not call fouls, and they play basketball the way they play soccer- lots of contact and lots of crazy off-balance shots and not a lot of structure or bodies under control. It got pretty frustrating as I'd watch guys dribble through traffic with their heads down and then throw up a crazy shot off the top of the backboard from behind the three point line, and also frustrating when I was mauled every time I touched the ball and only one foul was called, which just meant I got to take the ball out and have the same thing happen again. My last chance at athletic competence is ping-pong, but in playing for fun a few times I've realized there are a lot of pretty good players here that will immediately exploit my strategic weak point of not moving my feet. The funny thing is that when Brad and I used to play he'd be the one that would stand still and make me run all over the place. I guess in my advanced age I've adopted the feet-nailed-to-the-floor strategy, not so effective against guys that have been playing competitively for 15 years. So if the ping-pong experiment fails my last resort will be to start a baseball team in order to assert my athletic dominance, in something.
Anyway, I'd like to make a quick request to anyone reading this. Nearly everyone here has at one point or another asked me what Americans think of Kazakhstan. The answer for me before I came was of course "not much." But I think it would be really exciting for the students at my school to hear directly from Americans about what they think of/know about Kazakhstan. So if you have the time, I'd invite anyone reading this to send me your thoughts on my glorious new country. It can be one sentence or one page or however much you want to write; I think the important thing is that people here get a good sense of what Americans think of their country, because that seems to be very important to a lot of people here. I'm hoping to get enough responses to read some aloud in class and make it into part of one of my lessons. So any thoughts you have would be great, you can email them or leave them in a comment here.
On a different note, a quick sports update- the World Languages Faculty continued its run of utter non-dominance today with a resounding 16-2 defeat in basketball. I learned a lot about Kazakhstani basketball in the process too; they tend to not call fouls, and they play basketball the way they play soccer- lots of contact and lots of crazy off-balance shots and not a lot of structure or bodies under control. It got pretty frustrating as I'd watch guys dribble through traffic with their heads down and then throw up a crazy shot off the top of the backboard from behind the three point line, and also frustrating when I was mauled every time I touched the ball and only one foul was called, which just meant I got to take the ball out and have the same thing happen again. My last chance at athletic competence is ping-pong, but in playing for fun a few times I've realized there are a lot of pretty good players here that will immediately exploit my strategic weak point of not moving my feet. The funny thing is that when Brad and I used to play he'd be the one that would stand still and make me run all over the place. I guess in my advanced age I've adopted the feet-nailed-to-the-floor strategy, not so effective against guys that have been playing competitively for 15 years. So if the ping-pong experiment fails my last resort will be to start a baseball team in order to assert my athletic dominance, in something.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
And One More
Here is my new address, as I promised (myself I would put in my blog), in case any of you are just dying to send me cards, letters, or packages full of American candy:
Kazakhstan, Kzylorda
120014
Zheltoksan 32, OC 14, P/O 46
And in Cyrillic:
Kазаkстан, Kызылорда
120014
Желтоkсан 32, ОС 14, А/Я 46
It's probably a good idea to use two labels, one with the English and one with the Cyrillic version. Hope all is well back in America.
Kazakhstan, Kzylorda
120014
Zheltoksan 32, OC 14, P/O 46
And in Cyrillic:
Kазаkстан, Kызылорда
120014
Желтоkсан 32, ОС 14, А/Я 46
It's probably a good idea to use two labels, one with the English and one with the Cyrillic version. Hope all is well back in America.
Worth a Try
After waiting nearly an hour for the video to upload, it somehow didn't work. So now let me try a picture instead. It's a picture of me and my extended Kazakh family at New Year's. I'm the one in the middle, in case you couldn't tell us apart (many can't).
Friday, January 11, 2008
A Quick Video
Here's a video of one of my students singing "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" at a holiday party. I may or may not make a surprise appearance at the end. I'm hoping to add another video and some pictures a little later.
Until then not a lot new to update. I did the math and realized that by the time I start teaching again (next Monday) I will have been on break for as long as I've been teaching here (one month, 5 days). In my downtime I've been working on integrating myself into the community, which for the most part means yelling at people instead of talking to them, not holding doors open for people (and in fact closing them in people's faces), remembering that there is no such thing as a line in Kzylorda, and slowly getting accustomed to the glacial cold.
This week saw the beginning of the University sports competition, where all the different faculties compete against each other. So far we've only played volleyball and soccer, and lost every game. It's pretty interesting to see how intense everyone gets when we lose points, as if we've been practicing for years and this is the culmination of all our hard work and we're blowing it. No one on my team seems particularly concerned with the concept of bumping, setting, and spiking, and then they yell when we lose. Maybe by next year I'll be one of them, yelling at everyone in Kazakh. (I can only hope my Kazakh will be good enough to do that in a year.)
But apparently this competition thing is a pretty big deal, because the local news station came by on Tuesday and did a story on it. Each team marched into the gym one at a time while a band played, and the school rector made a speech in Kazakh I didn't understand. Later my dean, a wonderful, energetic man that speaks near flawless English, pulled me over to do an interview, along with a Turkish teacher in our department. I say interview, but all it was was basically me saying my name, where I'm from, what I teach, and what sports I will be participating in. The "interview" aired that night, and I was able to take video of it with my digital camera, so I'm hoping to post it on here soon. I think people will get a good laugh out of it.
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