You're Leaving Soon. You Suck.

I almost went with "Where Have You Been All My Life, Regina Spektor?" as the title of this entry, because I just recently discovered all 52 of her singles not named "Fidelity." They're not all winners, but I really like the album "Far." At least it captures my current mood, kind of the same way Scrubs managed to steal my heart over the summer.

Anyway, I figure this will probably be my last update, for any of you still checking. I can certainly understand if some of you have stopped reading, what with the once-every-4 months entries. Though I can't understand, and won't accept, any other reasons.

I checked, and the last time I wrote on here was June, which feels like a lifetime ago. The following two months of summer were almost unbearably slow. I did have a Russian language camp, a trip to Astana, a trip to Kyrgyzstan, and a basketball camp near Astana, which were all fun, but aside from those when I was home, there just wasn't a whole lot to do. And I was encouraged to do even less by the fact that I had both internet and air conditioning, which made it that much easier to convince myself that it was too hot to go outside. I did, as I mentioned earlier, make it through all 8 seasons of Scrubs, easily one of my proudest and most notable accomplishments of the last two years. Another top one included buying and hanging two hammocks on my balcony, even though the first one broke and the second caught fire from a burning cigarette butt just days after I bought it. But I digress.

The reason for the title of this blog is that in one of my fourth-course classes this past month, we did a Scrubs unit - maybe I'm obsessed, but I wanted to make my last couple months of lessons enjoyable - and it's amazing how many new terms just one episode of that show can teach. I really wish I had discovered it sooner, because it's a wealth of everyday English colloquialisms and slangs. Part of it is that there's just so much dialogue on the show that it can't help but use a lot of unique expressions. Anyhow, there are plenty of less-than-polite terms and phrases used on the show, the understanding of which are often crucial for understanding the theme of the episode, so I decided to go ahead and not exclude teaching these bad words. That's why one of the expressions we learned was "you suck." Having never had to explain the meaning of this expression to anyone before, I was shocked to realize how many different meanings it can have. At first I wasn't sure they were understanding my multi-faceted explanation, until I asked them to give their own examples and one girl, Laura, said, "You're leaving soon. You suck." (You understand it correctly Laura.) I had never been so touched before by anyone telling me I suck.

Beyond teaching Kazakhstani students such poetic terms of endearment, I've been busy with a number of other things since lessons started back up September 1, the most notable of which was a "Healthy Living" Conference that in Kazakh was called Салауатты өмір салты (Salauattah umir saltah. For those really interested the translation would be something like "a splendid beautiful life"). We basically organized three days of interactive lessons/presentations about 6 different health topics, including HIV/AIDS, smoking, drinking, narcotic/alcohol abuse, exercise, and nutrition. I got a lot of help from my fellow volunteers here who each gave one presentation (mine was smoking). Most of the participants - one group of 15 students from the teaching college and one group of 15 kids from the local orphanage - either didn't know English at all, or didn't know it very well, so we used 6 of my best students as translators. Though the camp was for the kids who came, I was happiest about this aspect of it, because it was the first "live interpreting" experience for most of these girls, and they did a really great job. We also had a lot of help from the two village volunteers, Jenn and Andy, who came in and made huge amounts of lentil burgers and vegetable pasta salad, respectively, for the participants. The kids seemed to like the food, even though it was very different from what they usually eat here, and it's not easy to find locals who are willing to branch out culinarily. I'd be remiss not to mention my sitemates Cho, who taught HIV/AIDS awareness and narcotics abuse, and McKenzie, who taught exercise, and did an awesome job as well.

After the lessons we taught and played American football, which was a huge success, and tried to teach baseball, which was far less successful. It turns out you need more than 45 minutes to teach the rules of baseball in broken Kazakh. But they had fun hitting the ball around, so it wasn't a total waste.

Anyway, I've included a few pictures from the conference on here.

Aside from that, lately there's been a good bit of running around and saying all my goodbyes, doing all the things on my "list of things to do before I leave." And I have a feeling this will continue and intensify over the next 2-3 weeks before I do get on that last train to Almaty.

Just off the top of my head, a few other notable events from the past several months that would take too long (or be too painful) to recount in detail:
- going to Close of Service Conference in September and having to poop into a tube, easily the grossest thing I've had to do in two years
- finishing translation of To Kill a Mockingbird screenplay into Kazazkh with local teaching counterparts...we're hoping to get it published, and one counterpart, Nuraiym, is currently entering the Kazakh subtitles onto the movie file (an arduous process)
- seeing an impression of myself on Teacher's Day...it's a good thing I can't get videos to load on here
- discovering Pizza Hut and KFC in Almaty and TGI Friday's (3 times) in Astana
- getting a score of Advanced Low on my final Kazakh test and Intermediate High on Russian
- trying unsuccessfully to ignore the Orioles during their season-closing 13-game losing binge
- deciding to apply to law school for next year (also an arduous process - the applying and the deciding)
- teaching and playing baseball with school students in Andy's village (Zhalagash), with relative success - Andy's host sister proved to be a gold-glove caliber shortstop
- giving elementary Russian lessons to the new Filipino volunteers living in the city...I can only hope they find a better teacher when I leave
- buying tickets to Hong Kong and the Philippines to meet Betsy on my way home next month
- with 3 other PCVs and 1 local friend, Zhenya, beating a local traveling basketball team at basketball camp near Astana, 50-48, though at the end of regulation one of the opposing players walked by the scorer's table and whispered to the scorekeeper "just call it a tie," (there was no scoreboard) and then losing in overtime
- seeing beautiful Lake Issykul in Kyrgyzstan and being forced to speak only Russian for 5 consecutive days, and surviving
- being reintroduced to the card game "Oh Hell" and remembering why I used to love it so much
- celebrating my (cough)2(cough)7th birthday with new friends, American and Kazakhstani
- finding out for certain (finally) that I will be replaced at my university by another volunteer when I leave.

I think that touches on most of the big stuff that's been going on lately. If I can find the time and the motivation to post one more entry over the next three weeks I will, but it's likely this is my last one. So I'll just say thanks to everyone for reading and for your comments over the last two years. Writing these entries has been enjoyable and, at times, therapeutic for me, but I've had an absolutely amazing, unforgettable experience here. I hope that sentiment has been conveyed in what I've written.

A Few More (Shorter) Clips

These are from one of the Camp Assistant-Volunteer Games we had at the end of camp. Maira (in the white, pitching) would have won the MVP, had we awarded one.

Hope you enjoy these...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vTj0SHT3WU (Maira Overpowers Me - 0:28)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX3I5IMPAA8 (Maira Pitching - 0:44)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXGjdfIz3wg (Double to the Gap - 0:14)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBbZGqo4-aM (Game Action - 2:04)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7g4yWxwTk0 (Just Missed - 0:55)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aMi-93j5kc (More Game Action - 3:02)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TToFzw6Vugw (Close Play at First - 1:10)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnjg8ROaSts (Drawing a Walk - 0:18)l

About Time for an Update

Well it has been a while. I want to apologize to my loyal fan base - I've read the angry letters, the demands for more blogs (all of which have been mostly in my head), and I'm finally responding.


(As you can see in the above picture, we had a little Camp Assistant-Volunteer game, and the girl pitching, Maira, could really bring it. I may or may not have accidentally hit her in the face with a line drive immediately after this picture was taken.)


Things have been more or less routine here the last several months, as it's getting closer and closer to the end of my service (November 9). I'm finding as the date draws nearer it's harder and harder for me to motivate myself to study language, which is depressing because I really wanted to leave here with a strong handle on both languages. Right now I'd say I know Kazakh fairly-pretty well (strong to...quite strong) but I still have to ask people to repeat themselves a lot and it can take a while for me to understand what they're saying. And as for Russian, I think it would have come a lot easier if I had started out studying it instead of Kazakh, because the sentence structure and sounds are more similar to English. I'm not too strong in Russian but I can hold my own for a few minutes. On the train the other day I tried to pretend for the first few minutes that I didn't know Kazakh (because most Russian-looking/white people here don't, or it's assumed by most that that they don't). I held out for as long as I could before resorting to Kazakh, but the nice ladies on the train did graciously tell me I spoke Russian well - my first Russian-related compliment. So there is progress, albeit slow. And I'd love to continue with one or both of these languages when I come back, so if anybody has any ideas on how I might do this, without moving back here in the near future, I'm more than open to suggestions at this point.

Anyway, enough boring language talk. I just got back a few days ago from Alga, a village near the city of Aktobe, which is pretty close to the Russian border in the northwestern part of this country. Another volunteer - my friend Emiko - put on a camp at her school up there for 5th, 6th, and 7th graders, and it was an absolute blast for everyone involved. We taught English in the mornings for 2 hours and then did 2 hours of activities. Two volunteers paired up and ran one activity - there was arts and crafts, theater, baseball, "sports" (apparently baseball is not a sport, whatever), and photography. You get 4 guesses as to which one I helped run, and if you can't get it in 4 guesses, you're either terribly unlucky, you weren't my friend to begin with, or both.

So my other friend Robert (I have two) and I ran the baseball hour, and it was a lot of fun. One thing that made it easier than it sometimes is, is many of the students were there from last year and remembered a lot of the rules, and so they were able to tell their friends who were new to the camp some of the things that were difficult for Robert and I to try to explain in Kazakh. So we had one group that came for baseball everyday, and then the other four groups rotated through once a week for the second hour. Not to brag, but we heard from several of the participants and the older Camp Assistants that baseball was the favorite activity of a lot of the kids. On the last day I got a little video happy and took roughly 40 minutes of clips - 5 of them are on youtube and 1 is on Facebook (because it was REALLY long and only Facebook allows for posting longer clips), so I encourage anyone who wants to to check those out. I've listed them below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG5RVepwqHs (Clip 1 - 9:31)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kigiiPmoMzU (Clip 2 - 6:56)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_yznz23cxw (Clip 3 - 7:14)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSGEtmJioCw (Clip 5 - 0:39)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaH_lj0iVOQ (Take Me Out To The Ballgame - 0:39)

It's a lot of me yelling "out" and "safe" but if you can just ignore my voice they are pretty good videos, or at least the kids are pretty cute.

Anyway the camp was a blast and I was able to meet some of the Kaz20s - the group of volunteers who came the year after us - that I hadn't met before, which was nice. Since the country is so big a lot of the volunteers are pretty isolated in their sites, particularly us here in Kyzylorda as we are 8 hours away from the next closest volunteers in any direction, and some volunteers are more than 40 hours away by train. There's just not that much of an opportunity to meet everyone, so when the opportunity comes it's nice.

In other big news, I recently bought a hammock and strung it up on my balcony. I was surprised that I was able to find a hammock here, but there are actually 2 outdoors stores here, and one of them had hammocks. I then spent about 3 hours walking around the bazaar looking for S-hooks but came up empty, until finally I tried the other bazaar and found some giant carribeaners. The bazaar trip was funny because I couldn't just say "Hey, do you have S-hooks?" because most people would have no idea what I was talking about, so I had to go up to each vendor and basically tell a story. "Hi, I have hammock - do you know 'gamak'? - ok, it's laying place, usually outside - yes, yes, and I need metal piece for hanging. Shaped like S. Do you have a thing like it?" (This is probably what I sounded like to them.) I walked around the bazaar so many times that I apparently made accidental return trips to a few tents. I know this because at one point after about 2 hours I started into my spiel and got as far as "Hi, I have a hamm-" when the lady said "No, no, we don't have any." I think that was when I decided it was time to try the other bazaar.

As for the teaching, that ended in the beginning of May. I tried to use the month of May to improve my language - especially Russian - but then I went to the camp in Alga and was around 10 Americans for 2 weeks and lost whatever forward progress I had been making. Oh well, it was fun though.

That's about all for now. Anyone who watches the videos, I'd love to hear what you think so leave a comment, or just say hello.

International Women's Day and a General Update

As I sit here listening to the timeless Erasure hit "A Little Respect" on my iTunes shuffle, I'm reminded of a) the Scrubs episode I saw before I left the US that actually led me to download it and b) how poor my musical taste is by most conventional standards. And as I try to start writing this update, I'm reminded of all the things that have happened over the last 3 months or so that I've wanted to write about, but haven't gotten around to writing.

I wanted to include some photos of the Axmet Yassaui Mausoleum in Turkestan that a few of us recently visited, but those pictures are still on my camera, which is in the apartment I just moved to, but haven't completely moved into yet (maybe partly because I don't have internet set up there yet). So hopefully I'll put those on the next entry.

Anyway, starting with the most recent and working backwards, today (March 8) is International Women's Day here in Kazakhstan, and in a great number of countries not named "America." Actually I think it's a mostly former CIS-state phenomenon, but either way it's big enough that the security guard at my building told me America is "not correct" because we have only Mother's Day. I realized this year that really it's a lot like Valentine's Day is for us, where guys bend over backwards to please their girlfriends, wives, or girls they’re interested in. And this year with the holiday falling on a Sunday, it's been stretched over a roughly four-day period from Friday, when all the male teachers gathered and gave roses to all the women teachers, to Monday when we officially observe the holiday with a day off. And I started hearing "congratulations" being tossed out to women as early as Wednesday. Like I said, it's a pretty big deal here. When I'd mention to students (mine are mostly girls) that their one-day holiday had been conveniently stretched into 4-plus this year, some of them would laugh a little, and some of them didn't find it funny at all and I'd move on to something else.

So last night we had a small vecherinka, or party, to celebrate our women. We cooked plof, an Uzbek dish comprised of rice, carrots, and meat, we wore dresses for a short time, and we played a few different games including an “impressions” game where we did impressions of each other. It was all really fun except for having my face painted with lipstick and eye shadow that “comes off easily” in “2 or 3 minutes” (my eyes are still sore from trying to rub it all off last night). It was worth it though for the girls who do so much the other 364 days of the year - they really do a lot here - so we didn’t mind making a few sacrifices for one day, though I really hope none of the pictures surface at any point in the future.

For Valentine’s Day we also had a small party, but that was organized mostly by the girls. And there’s apparently been a recent push here, especially by older locals, to stop observing Valentine’s Day, even informally, because it’s a foreign holiday. It’s been informally celebrated by young girls and guys here for the last 10 years or so following independence, but I heard from a few people that this year for the first time they weren’t allowed to do a valentine card exchange in schools as they had been doing every year. I’m not sure exactly the reason, but according to most of my students it seemed to be just an aversion to non-Kazakh holidays and nothing necessarily anti-American.

As for my lessons, they’ve kept me very busy. We’ve focused a lot on essay writing this semester. I’ve seen some improvement in some of the students’ writings, but it’s been a challenge trying to teach some of the lower-level groups the idea of choosing an idea/opinion, putting it at the end of your first paragraph, giving reasons for your opinion in your second paragraph, and summarizing your opinion in the third paragraph. Much of the problem, I think, comes from the fact that when they’re asked to write essays here, it’s usually pretty general, like “write about friends” and then they just write everything they can think of about friendship. So when I give them a more specific prompt like “What is the most important character trait for you in a friend?” they see the word “friend” and then just write about what it means to be a good friend, without really thinking about what the question is asking. But each group is different with this, just like with everything, and some improve more quickly than others. It is funny though - I’ve noticed how difficult it is for them to understand me when I talk about how to write a good essay, but amazingly how easy it is whenever I mention anything about games, or I promise to bring my pictures from home to the next lesson. They don’t let me forget about these things. “Hey remember when I gave you that homework assignment last week and you promised you’d do it?” I want to say this often, and I probably will start soon. I’ve started openly making fun of my students recently, mostly because they deserve it, and generally they take it pretty well, I think because they know they deserve it. Granted they do have a LOT of lessons and a LOT of assignments, but they also tend to be pretty lazy pretty often, as I was when I was a student. Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile being hard on them and insisting they do the assignments when I know I didn’t always do all the work when I was a student, but the thing is, it’s not only the teacher’s right but also his job to insist on these things. So I try to remind myself of this often. Even so I often find myself being lenient, and especially with the groups I like and respect more, i.e. the groups that give my their respect in lessons.

There’s one funny anecdote that actually happened a couple months ago that I’ve been wanting to write about, and it’s completely unrelated. Shortly after the new year a group of 6 of us went to a cafe that we would occasionally go to. My sitemate McKenzie, just back from vacation in Thailand where the service is apparently excellent, was making his first trip to a cafe since coming back to Kazakhstan. He ordered two dishes and when they didn’t come after a pretty long wait, he went to remind the waitress of his order. Apparently she didn’t understand, because she ended up bringing two of each dish. This wasn’t a huge problem for us, because we were hungry, so when the waitress refused to admit her mistake and indicated we’d be charged for it all whether we liked it or not, we went along with it and just ate everything. The problem came later though when the check came. We had ordered 5 beers total for the 6 of us (one didn’t drink) but we were charged for 6 beers. When we told the waitress about this, she again absolutely refused to believe us. That’s when it became heated, because she had already given us two meals we didn’t order, and now she was not only charging us an extra beer but also insisting that we were lying over a charge of 120 tenge on a 3600 tenge bill. We went to the head cashier/manager/I have no idea what to call her, but this was the most ridiculous part. Our local Russian speaking friend tried to explain the situation to her, but she was having none of it. Some of the lines she gave that were later translated for us included, “Why don’t you just admit that you don’t have enough money to pay” and “If you were a real man you’d pay the whole bill.” I was so offended by this, even though this wasn’t the first time we’d experienced sub-par customer service in Kazakhstan, that even though the food was both delicious and cheap I completely boycotted the cafe (until yesterday, when I was nearby and really hungry). Despite the fact that this country isn’t known for its customer service, I was completely shocked by this wait staff’s child-like behavior. Even if they thought we were lying, didn’t they realize that they were permanently alienating 6 customers over a charge of roughly one dollar? I still can’t believe it. It just makes no sense. But at least it was entertaining, and it’s made a good story in a few of my lessons. The younger generation here seems to share in these sentiments about the lack of service in the region, so hopefully it’s something that will change over time.

Ok well it’s time to move so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to post again, but hopefully it won’t be too long. I do want to get those pictures up. In the meantime take care and enjoy the start of spring (training!). Bye.

A-Rod

In case anyone is interested in what I think about the latest Alex Rodriguez news, this is pretty much it:

http://www.slate.com/id/2210814/

"...just like lawyers, doctors, and students taking pills to help them work through brutal hours, many ballplayers think that taking drugs will make them better at their jobs. This may or may not be so—no one has ever presented credible evidence proving that performance-enhancing drugs make athletes better at playing baseball—but so long as at least some players think that drugs will help them, players will take them. Cases like those of Bonds, Clemens, and Rodriguez will always be more complex than that of the average player looking to make a few dollars he might otherwise not make, bringing to bear as they do the various psychological problems that both drive an athlete to excel and convince him that to meet his own standards he needs to be better than he can possibly be. But these scandals boil down to players wanting to be good at what they do, something no amount of bad press and no drug-testing program can eliminate."

I'm planning to post a real update in the next few days.

Essays from the Steppe

As usual, it's been a while since I've updated this thing. If this were an audio blog, I would have made a recording by now to play that at the beginning of each talking post. This time around, I actually have a lot of things I could write about in terms of an update on my life here, but I'm not going to do that at the moment. Yes, that's partly out of laziness, but it's also inspired by the handful of really impressive recent essays I've received from a few of my students here. I was so blown away by a couple of them that I scanned and copied them to this post for my remaining loyal readers - all two of you, Mom and Dad (do you guys still read this?) - to take a look at and let me know what you think.

Except for one, these essays are in response to the prompt: "Pretend you are Barack Obama. Given your country's history of racial relations between blacks and whites, and then given the current state of affairs in the US and in the world, what would you say in your first speech to the nation?" What we did was in each class during Inauguration week we listened to and read along with Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" Speech and then discussed what it meant. I tried to give a rough background of the racial situation in America 40-50 years ago, which was admittedly tough since I didn't live through that time. A lot of the students didn't understand exactly what I was asking them, but some of them did, and these few did what I thought was a remarkable job. I asked permission to post from each of them, so their names may appear on some of the essays. They said they were fine with this (and mostly they were excited about it).

Only the fifth essay is in response to the prompt: "If you were pregnant with octuplets, what would you do?" The story of the California woman who recently gave birth to 8 babies and the accompanying discussions we had prompted a variety of interesting responses from students and teachers alike. The essay below is by far the best I received, and it's actually from a first-year student.

Any sincere feedback you all could leave would mean the world to these students who have devoted the better part of the last decade (or more) to learning and becoming proficient in English, so, as I always say to them, don't be shy! Whatever any of you say will surely be passed along to Zaura, Elvira, Elena, Anara, Laura, and Yermek.

Enjoy!