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.