Friday, July 18, 2008

July 10, 2008

Hello to all!

This will be my first blog post as a Peace Corps Trainee in Kyrgyzstan. I’ve only been gone for a week as I write this, but it feels like I have a year’s worth of stuff to share. I flew to Philadelphia and stayed there July 3rd-5th at a hotel where we had staging. Staging is a general introduction to the Peace Corps, not country specific. We had meetings all day, both Thursday and Friday, in which we got filled in on the Peace Corps mission, their philosophy of development, and also got some basic training on the difficulties of being a foreigner in these foreign communities. The meetings were long, yet informative. I think everyone was itching to know more about Kyrgyzstan, and so though all of staging was pretty important before becoming a volunteer, a lot of us volunteers were sitting around with a lot of questions brewing. But I guess it’s better that we waited since you can’t talk about Kyrgyzstan without experiencing it first, from what I understand.

After flying out of New York’s JFK airport, we arrived in Istanbul for an 8 hour layover. I wasn’t planning to go into the city from the airport, but two much more well-traveled volunteers, Erin and Chelsea, convinced me to do it. I’m glad I did. Istanbul is a pretty amazing and beautiful city, and really easy to get around. We visited the Blue Mosque and walked through it, and got to at least the outside of Hagia Sophia, but the line to get in was pretty long, and it was expensive to get in, so we ate at an outdoor cafĂ© instead.

We arrived in Bishkek, the capital city in the north of Kyrgyzstan, at 2:30 AM, and then were taken to the Issyk-Kol Hotel, a massive dilapidated soviet-style hotel on the outskirts of the city. The rooms were in alright shape, though I think my roommate, John, and I were lucky since we were one of the few volunteer’s whose doorknobs did not fall off when we tried to unlock the door. Since we arrived at night, we didn’t see much of the city until morning. And what an experience that was! I woke up at 7 the first morning, looked out my window and saw a bunch of gigantic mountains. I’ll take that experience again if I can get it. In Kyrgyz culture, bird nests on the outside of your house mean that your home is protected, so even at the hotel there were thousands of swallows’ nests all over the balconies. We left the door to our room’s balcony open all the time and the birds never flew into the room (my initial fear) as if the birds had some tacit agreement with the hotel management and guests. From our balcony we could see not only mountains, but also a bizarre soviet art park. What’s a soviet art park? I really can’t tell you. Picture a bunch of cubist soviet sculptures, abstract sidewalk design and a whole lot of concrete. But it was definitely a park. People living nearby were walking through it all evening. You could also climb up a 10 story tower/monument and get a better look at the city and the nearby mountains. The food at the hotel restaurant was pretty exceptional. Every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner was three or four courses with, of course, copious amounts of tea. At the hotel we began our health and safety, language and culture training sessions. These sessions will fill my time for the nest 10-11 weeks, so the three days at the hotel were just a foretaste.

After our third day of sessions, we had our host family matching ceremony. This was the really exciting moment when we get to go onto a stage and meet our host mothers for the first time, and then go home with them and meet the rest of their families. This took place in the city Kant, about 20 miles east of Bishkek. Kant is where all of the volunteers meet once a week (there are 62 of us total) on Wednesdays for general meetings. The rest of the week we are all spread out in neighboring villages according to our language groups. I am learning Kyrgyz, and I am right now living in a small village (about 2,000 people) outside the capital city. I have 4 other volunteers in my language group, and there’s another group of 5 living elsewhere in the same village. Six days a week we have 4 hours of language lessons from the morning to the early afternoon at our teacher, Nuyrjan’s house. Every day for lunch we eat at a different volunteer’s family’s house. I’m lucky to have such an awesome language group – Kristen, James, Joe and Jenna. We get along really well, and we all have senses of humor, so our time together is really enjoyable. It’s a relief to get together every morning and share our goofy stories that come from living with host families without speaking their language.

I’m considering myself extra lucky that I know some Russian, because that has really taken away the shock of living with a host family whose language is totally foreign. Everyone knows Russian in Kyrgyzstan, and everyone expects foreigners to speak Russian. Even our language teacher, who has good English, will accidentally start speaking to us in Russian during class. So I’m able to communicate pretty well with my family so far. I’m not sure, however, if my language teacher would approve. She tells me I shouldn’t speak Russian with my host family, only Kyrgyz. But that’s much easier said than done when I just started learning Kyrgyz two days ago and my host family uses Russian when I can’t understand them speaking Kyrgyz. Even my other peers said that their host families will consistently ask them if they know any Russian whenever they’re trying to communicate. But I’m excited to learn Kyrgyz. It’s much, much more simple than Russian, though it has some vowels that we don’t have in English that are hard for me to get used to pronouncing (like the German umlaut, and another vowel that sounds like saying “ewe” without moving your lips). Kyrgyz grammar is really fascinating, difficult in its own way, but easy in the grand spectrum of languages. More on that in another later post.

A sense of humor definitely goes a long way during this transition. Every Peace Corps in the world gets a medical handbook called “Where There Is No Doctor,” which is a health guidebook that offers suggestions for people living far from doctors and hospitals. It’s also meant to be used by foreign health care workers in remote villages who are new to western health care. It has a section on what superstitions/natural cures “work”, and which ones don’t “work.” I laughed for about ten minutes straight when I read one page: “If you have a strange sickness, do not blame a witch, do not go to a magic center, but ask for medical advice.”

I think that’s all I can fit in on this post. I will have to write about my host family later, which is probably best since I don’t have everyone’s name down quite yet (families in Kyrgyzstan stick together. Not only do the mother and father stay here, but their three sons, their wives and kids too. It’s busy.)

Everything is well so far. I am healthy and engaged with what I am doing. I hope everyone reading this is doing well.

With Love,
Jonathan




July 12, 2008

Right now it’s Sunday morning, and Sundays are the weekend in Kyrgyzstan. Their work week is six days, and last night really felt like a weekend night. I went with my host family to their dacha (summer cottage) located in the mountains that lie about ten miles away. I didn’t know what was involved with going there, but I’m really glad I went. They never actually stay over night at the cottage, but it’s basically a way to get away for an afternoon and evening and have a barbeque. You didn’t know they have barbeques in Kyrgyzstan? Well they do, and they enjoy them just as much as we do in the states, except for one extra detail – the goat slaughter. I was just hanging around minding my own business, taking pictures of the mountains and watching my Apa (host mother) start a fire when my Ata (host father) and host brother walked in dragging a goat with its neck slit. I took it as an educational experience and my initiation into Kyrgyz culinary art. My host brother Max had that thing skinned in about 12 minutes, which seemed pretty quick. The only thing that was a little odd was when they cut into the chest cavity, the lungs decompressed (they must have still had air in them) and the goat made a strange wheezy exhalation sound for about a minute. But then my other host brother, Erlan, grilled shashlik (shishkabobs). It was all pretty delicious. We ate a bunch of watermelon, tomatoes and cucumbers with it. After dinner I rode with some of my family to a small lake that was further up in the mountains and we jumped in for a quick swim. The water was pretty cold, but it felt amazing. I couldn’t swim for too long because the altitude was really high and I could tell by my heart beat.

Now I’ll explain who I’m living with. My host Ata’s (father) name is Talai, and my host Apa’s (mother) name is Jumagul. They are in their 50’s or early 60’s (my guess: it’s rude in Kyrgyzstan to ask adults how old they are) and they have three sons. The youngest is Azat who is my age. He works for a bottled water company in the nearby city Tokmok, so I’ve only seen him once since I arrived. The second oldest is Max or Maxim. He is 25, and his wife, Nargiza and him have a one year old girl named Sadat, and Nargiza has another baby on the way soon. I always forget that she’s pregnant because she does just as much work as everyone in the family and rests the least often. Max knows some English, half of the words from studying it in school, half of the words from American rap music. It makes our conversations pretty entertaining (like instead of “Let’s go, Jonathan,” it’s “Come on everybody now, let’s go,” even if I’m the only one around). The oldest son is Erlan. He’s a police officer in Tokmok. He’s 28 years old, married, and has two daughters, Elina (2 or 3 yrs. old) and Medina (1 yr. old). Elina is pretty much the cutest kid ever. She walks around giggling all of the time and making faces at people. When I gave my host family some different chocolates as gifts, she claimed the bag of Reese’s Pieces as her own: I’m pretty sure she ate the entire bag herself. And then, with her face and hands covered in chocolate, she walked up to me and raised her two fists in the air and gave me a big smile and a loud scream as if she was celebrating her victory over foreign chocolate.

These are the main family members, but many times extended family members stop by for a meal or two and occasionally sleep here. Kaibek (9 yrs old), Max’s young brother in law, and Albina (10 yrs old), Erlan’s young sister in law are over often. I can tell that Apa and Ata are really happy, and if their children and grandchildren are always around, why wouldn’t they be. My Apa is really energetic and yet patient with me. She teaches me a lot of phrases in Kyrgyz, and she will tell me longer stories in Russian, yet she always stops after a sentence and asks if I understood. My Ata is a great guy. He likes to crack a lot of jokes. I go on beer walks with him (this is when we walk down the block, buy a bottle of beer at the Magazin (the omnipresent small stores in Kyrgyzstan), walk to the railroad station and then back again) most every evening after supper. One evening when we got back to the house their cows were still grazing in the backyard. I asked him if the cows spoke Russian, or if they spoke Kyrgyz. He responded that they not only speak both, but they know English as well, but they only talk in the mornings, never in the evening. Also, he insists on my need for a devushka in my life. Devushka is Russian for young lady. Every morning he asks me if I dreamt of a devushka. The funniest is when he says “Jasho Jakshi, tolka tebya devushki net,” which is a mix of Kyrgyz and Russian meaning “Life is great, except you have no young lady.” It gets me and his family cracking up quite a bit when he says it, which is often.

Today is Sunday, which means it’s banya/sauna day. This is the day when the sauna ritual is enacted by most families in Kyrgyzstan. I’ll wait to describe it since I will not have experienced it yet for another couple hours.

Until next time, be well.

Love
Jonathan