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