Anywhere is the Center of the World

Hello All,

It’s a daunting task to try and keep this blog as up to date as I’d like. I looked at my posts since arriving in Kyrgyzstan and realized how few, though lengthy, they’ve been. It’s hard to really feel like I’m keeping everyone back home up to speed on what’s been going on and what I’ve been up to, but I’m doing the best I can. The highlights (and one low point) of the last three weeks have been: suffering a week long bout of bacterial something-or-other in my intestines (from which I’ve fully recovered), finding out where my permanent site will be, visiting my permanent site and hiking through the hills to a neighboring lake with my site mate, Joe. Finding out where our permanent sites was a breath of fresh air. This pre-service training phase can be a real grind sometimes with only one day off per week, and meetings the rest of the six each week. But it has its perks as well since all 60 of us K-16ers get to hang out often without much transportation needed. Having just finished college, PST definitely took the proverbial wind out of summer’s sails – at times it feels like I’m still in school, only I’m in another country.

But my permanent site and site visit is mostly what I’d like to report on. I couldn’t be more excited and pleased about where I’ll be living and working for the next two years. I’m living in a larger town located in the bottom of a mountain-bowl. If you can’t see a mountain while you’re there, then you need to open your eyes. The scenery is quite breathtaking. A 20 minute walk from my permanent house is a hilltop that looks out over a valley covered with patchwork farmland, beyond which are mountains and a sizeable lake. The city is clean, there’s a large bazaar, a handful of cafes and IP Telephone offices (where there is supposedly free internet I can use just because I’m a foreigner. We’ll see how that works out.), and a beautiful well-shaded park next to the town square.

My buddy, Joe, from my language group in PST happens to be my site mate. The next closest Peace Corps volunteers are at least a 4 hour drive away, so we are definitely the two most isolated volunteers in the country (remember that this country’s only the size of Nebraska, though the mountainous terrain makes a short distance a long drive). The funny part is that this town, even though it is quite isolated, has a very urban, even European feel to it. During our visit was the Kyrgyz Independence Day, and there was a large parade in the town’s center. Everyone was very well dressed (women in dresses and men in suits and/or ties) and gathered in the square for the parade and the shashlik (shishkobob) stands set up all over the place (which smell and taste amazing). There’s a pretty good story from this day: as my host father and brother were walking me to the parade, I called Joe to see if he was going to be there so we could meet up. When he answered and I asked where he was he said, and I kid you not, “Yeah man, I’ll be right there. I’m carrying a banner in the parade.” Sure enough I look up and see him coming down the street carrying a banner for the school he’ll be teaching at. Supposedly the director of his school knocked on his bedroom door that morning, woke him up, walked him to the parade and handed him a banner. I’m still cracking up about that one.

But, of course, scenery and parades aren’t the only things that make me excited to live and work there. I’m teaching at a gymnasia (sometimes called lyceums), which are advanced schools in Kyrgyzstan. They are smaller than normal schools, and the students have to pass advanced learning tests to get in. This means that the students are generally very motivated and anxious to learn. I will be teaching two 7th grade English classes, and one 8th grade English class Monday-Thursday mornings. Two of these classes are Russian students. Not ethnically, though. All of this town’s population is Kyrgyz, through and through. But for some reason students in schools here are divided into Kyrgyz and Russian courses, meaning that all of their classes are either in Kyrgyz or in Russian, but not both. I’m not sure why. But anyways, the director at my school wanted me to work with the Russian speaking students primarily since at this point my Russian is far better than my Kyrgyz, though I feel like it’s getting better day by day. In the afternoons I will teach English clubs to the advanced and intermediate students who #1 are very anxious to learn English and #2 will be competing in the country-wide English Olympiad in November, which is a big high school competition in Kyrgyzstan. Supposedly the school I’m teaching at won first place in its oblast last year, so the bar is set pretty high already.

My host family at site consists of a grandma, a grandpa and three grandkids who are living long term with them while their parents are off working in Moscow. My host (grand)father is quite the Kyrgyz national. He doesn’t leave the house without his suit, tie and kalpak (traditional male Kyrgyz hat) on. I think he was someone of major importance in the town before he retired because when I’m walking around with him everyone shakes his hand and greets him. I have a young host sister, Kanishai, who’s 6 years old, another, Kanikei, who’s 14 and studies at the gymnasia where I teach, and a host brother, Azamat, who’s 15 and is really anxious to learn English (he also goes by his second name, Semetei, the name of the Kyrgyz epic hero’s son, like Telemachus). My host brother and sister know Russian, but my host (grand)parents don’t speak it, so I’m glad that the opportunity to get better at Kyrgyz is there. Kyrgyz people fall in love instantly with any foreigner who speaks their language. They expect all white people to speak Russian, so the Kyrgyz garners lots of smiles and an occasional shocked stare. There are only about 4 million Kyrgyz speakers in the world, so I guess they don’t exactly expect the rest of the world to know much about it.

On a more personal note, it’s been really satisfying to see what work I will get to do with my service here in Kyrgyzstan. The work during PST is well worth it, despite my complaining, since in just a couple weeks I will begin to teach – something I wouldn’t be able to do in the states unless I returned to grad school for a couple years. Teaching has been a goal of mine for a long time, and in less than a month I will get to begin the struggle of finding my place in front of a classroom and all of the frustration and satisfaction which will accompany the profession.

Leaving my training village host family is going to be hard. Three months has been plenty of time to get attached to them, especially with the toddlers who are always around to entertain with their continuous “hello”s sung at me. A month ago my host sister had her second baby, and it has been a real honor to be here for all of the excitement that’s accompanied the occasion. My host family asks me to visit them whenever possible after I move, and my host father tells me all the time that when (he never says “if”) my parents and friends visit me then we can stay with them at their dacha and stay with their family that lives on Lake Issyk-Kul. My host brother Maxat really doesn’t want me to leave, and he even called me during my site visit to ask when I was coming back, but I think he understands that I need to start working like he does.

It’s funny to think that coming into this country I knew I would miss my family and friends in Minnesota a lot (and I sure do). But I never really guessed that I would soon be capable of missing people I was about to meet in Kyrgyzstan. Now I know that that’s a reality of living in this country where people treat you like family even when you can’t speak their language. I don’t feel ready to leave my current host family, but there are also some great things on the horizon in Kyrgyzstan.

I thought about a lot of this while I was at my permanent site and took a walk to the hill where I could catch a panoramic of the valley and mountains beyond, and I thought about where I’ve been, and where else I might get to go, and it all felt a little bit like a dream. If you look at a map of Kyrgyzstan, you can place a finger anywhere on it and there’s somebody there who would take you in as their own son or daughter. There are landscapes here that I’d never dreamed of existing before I came. Soon I’ll be living in one such landscape in the mountains while standing in front of eager students.

I miss everyone and everything in Minnesota very much, but I'm so glad to say that I'm very excited to be doing this right now, and right here.

Be well,
With Love,
Jonathan

The Inside Scoop

Hello Everyone,

Right now as I write it is August 1st, the beginning of my second month as a Peace Corps Trainee (PCT) in Kyrgyzstan. Right now I and the other 59 volunteers are going through Pre Service Training (PST, Peace Corps uses tons of acronyms – we even got a list of important ones we should know by heart) which lasts until September 20th. On August 20th we will be told our permanent site placements, which is very exciting since it is there that we will be spending our two years as official Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs).

First I wanted to give a general idea of my schedule during PST. It changes week by week, but here are the basics of my weekdays:

6:30 AM: wake up, clean my water distiller and find water (if there is any) to prepare water for the next day. Study more Kyrgyz and eat breakfast (usually it’s either fried eggs with onions and sausage, Russian pancakes, or this delicious fried bread, which I and my language group members call funnel-cake-nan since it tastes just like what you find at county fairs, all served with my host family’s homemade apricot jam.).
7:45: I walk to my language instructors house and stare at the nearby mountains incredulous.
8:00-12:00: Kyrgyz language class. Some days we get a half an hour break, other days 10 minutes. It’s pretty intense.
12:00-1:30: I and my language group members eat at someone’s host family’s home. The Apas (host mothers) have a dueling lunch competition. If one Apa serves something one day that we really like, more than likely the next day’s Apa will try to outdo the day before’s. This definitely works to our advantage (who doesn’t like to be pampered from time to time?), and at one point we even had ice cream for dessert three days in a row.
1:30-3 or 4:00: Technical and Cross Culture Sessions. At these they teach us how to teach and how not to break social taboos and ruin your reputation in Kyrgyzstan.
4:00: I walk home, dragging my feet -- take a big lunch followed by 2 hour meetings on a 90 degree day and you’d be doing the same. When I get home I usually take a short nap, read, start working on Kyrgyz, talk with my host family, etc.
7, 8 or 9:00: Dinner time. I never know when it’s going to be, but usually by then I’m pretty hungry and it works out well since the food here is usually sumptuous.
10:30: Crash.

Like I said, this is a typical day. There are sometimes aberrations that can make my day more interesting. Take last Monday, for instance.

When I came out for breakfast (we eat outside under a canopy), my host family was hustling around, which is strange anytime of day (people aren’t in hurries here, usually). Turns out one of their dairy cows broke its leg, and they’re trying to figure out what to do with it. I headed off to class and on my way saw the cow looking quite unconcerned, sitting on the ground in her usual spot. Later that afternoon, before I walked in the door to my family’s compound after class, I heard a lot of people talking inside. Turns out I had to go around to the front door because the obstacle blocking my way to the house was the cow on it’s back with its chest cavity open and my host brother Maxsat up to his elbow in organs while my host mom and her brother are helping him scoop everything from poor Daisy into bowls and spare pails. This was at about 4:00. When I go in the front door I see my host brother’s wife chopping the liver and kidneys in the kitchen, and I assume we’ll have dinner on the way soon.

At 4:30 my host brother’s wife’s little brother, Kanibek, knocks on my door and tells me to come eat bread. I assumed it was the typical afternoon tea and bread snack, but when I came out there were 6 people, no one I knew except my Apa, sitting around the table chowing down on a plate containing about 7-8 pounds of fried cow liver and kidneys. Apparently my Apa was celebrating the cow’s death because though this put them out one dairy cow, they were really rolling in the cash by selling off parts of our freshly slaughtered friend. I sit down and introduce myself to all of the neighbors and family friends sitting next to me, and before I know it there’s a large glass of vodka being poured in front of me.

Now I must digress in order to describe the ethics of Kyrgyz hospitality. My working hypothesis is that Kyrgyz hospitality originates from Silk Road culture. The ancient trade route did, in fact, run straight through this country, bringing many weary merchants through its villages asking for bread and lodging. As then, when you sit down as a guest at a family’s house these days, it’s a big deal. They will push food at you until you are stuffed, and after that they will bring out the main course. This has happened often to many of us trainees. As you sit there, sipping your tea and spreading homemade jam on your nan (bread), your host family will insist that you are not doing tending to your food correctly. “Chai ich, nan je!” they will repeat over and over again. This is not our American method of asking “Would you like some more tea/bread?,” but rather the verbs in the imperative mood – literally they are commanding you to “drink your tea! Eat your bread!” Older PCVs here call this Kyrgyz behavior “aggressive hospitality.” It’s really overwhelming sometimes. It’s okay to refuse more food, but even saying this takes courage since you know your refusal will be met with very concerned looks from your host family, as if you were just on the brink of starvation and you haven’t yet eaten enough to get you through the next ten minutes. As one Peace Corps staff member put it, “they’ll look at you like you just shot their dog.” I think my family has adjusted well, and they understand that I don’t need to eat a huge meal every night. I’m comfortable saying no, but it’s hard sometimes to get the timing right in order to minimize their reactions. That said, tea and food are not the only substances governed by this aggressive hospitality. Vodka is too. When it is only men drinking, do not get involved. Their drinking sessions turn into something reminiscent of what you see in Clint Eastwood films and the whole “cowboy approach” to drinking. I think you know what I mean. Plus, their tolerance of alcohol exceeds anything I’ve seen. I saw one of my Ata’s (host father’s) friends drink an eight ounce glass of vodka like it was water, then another, all the while still speaking to me in perfectly coherent Russian. Fortunately my Ata does not drink a lot of vodka often, so I’ve avoided the pressure, though there are definitely encounters on the street that are difficult to escape (in the late morning and afternoon, not just at night). Friendly foreigners will be offered vodka frequently, and it’s usually in a spirit of hospitality, not just in the spirit of spirits (if you know what I mean). In summary, Kyrgyz rules of hospitality apply to vodka as well.

Back to the story. It’s 4:30 in the afternoon. I’m chewing on cow liver (even enjoying it). There’s a vodka glass (about 4 shots worth) sitting in front of me and my Apa begins to give a toast. I look at the half liter bottle and it says, in English, “Special Order Vodka.” After I drink it I’m wondering, “special order to where?” This stuff was not good. I chase it with some liver and feel a little bit better. But sure enough, ten minutes later it’s time for the next toast (it’s bad luck to drink without a toast). Thing is, once you open a bottle of vodka in Kyrgyzstan, the cap doesn’t go back on. Then I make one of the most embarrassing moves possible – I accidentally knock over my glass and spill my portion. I hung my head in shame and apologized. I really had not meant to do that, yet part of me was a little happy that I wouldn’t have to have more – I felt that I was doing just fine for 5:00 in the afternoon. But sure enough the others refill my glasses from theirs. Now there’s no way I can refuse it (my previous plan). These people are just too darn nice right at the point when I wished my Apa had sent me to my room without supper and without more vodka. We do our next toast, I load up on liver and kidney, say my “omin” (the customary “amen” you say at the end of a meal in this Islamic country where food seems as spiritual as it is dietary) and return to my room. I spend the next 4 hours reading Garcia Marquez and listening to Radiohead, hoping that #1 the liver and kidney was cooked well and won’t result in a midnight outhouse run (yes that’s a pun), and #2 that my stomach would stop churning from the vodka. I’ve had vodka in the states, but this was much rougher than anything I had had before.

Abnormal day #2 is not as abnormal as #1. Abnormal day #2 is more like abnormal meal #1 – cow stomach and intestines boiled and served with noodles, which is apparently a Kyrgyz delicacy. When I scoot up to the dinner table in Kyrgyzstan I have much reason to be excited. The main course is usually quite delicious, the vegetables are fresh from my family’s garden/small farm, and the omnipresent watermelon is unbelievable. This meal was a surprise. And it wasn’t even the fact that it was stomach and intestines that put me off, but the fact that there was no seasoning added, it was just straight up boiled, and so it tasted just like it smelled the day before when they slaughtered the cow and all of the innards were sitting in buckets and bowls in the kitchen. This meat wasn’t dressed up at all, and they looked exactly as you expect stomach and intestines to look (stomach lining, unless finely ground, still looks like stomach lining, and you can’t really confuse an intestine with anything else). After feeling bad that I couldn’t enjoy this Kyrgyz delicacy, I decided I needed to draw the line, say “I’m full” and “thank you.” I ate about a third of my heaping plate, and couldn’t go much further (the last couple bites required tea to wash them down with). Then I returned to my room, studied some Kyrgyz vocabulary, and had the fleeting idea that my stomach was feeling nervous and concerned for its own well being as it digested its bovine equivalent. I would like to know the rule in design that makes stomachs able to digest other stomachs.

Later that night when I went out to brush my teeth, my host brother Max was blasting the detached cow’s head, propped against a shed well, with a blow torch. When I finished brushing my teeth he was pouring hot water over it and scraping off the skin.

I didn’t even bother to ask.

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 café 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

Inaugrual Peace Corps Post

voices to voices, lip to lip
i swear (to noone everyone) constitutes
undying; or whatever this and that petal confutes…
to exist being a peculiar form of sleep

what’s beyond logic happens beneath will;
nor can these moments be translated: i say
that even after April
by God there is no excuse for May

--bring forth your flowers and machinery: sculpture and prose
flowers guess and miss
machinery is the more accurate, yes
it delivers the goods, Heaven knows

(yet are we mindful, though not as yet awake,
of ourselves which shout and cling, being
for a little while and which easily break
in spite of the best overseeing)

i mean that the blond absence of any program
except last and always and first to live
makes unimportant what i and you believe;
not for philosophy does this rose give a damn…

bring on your fireworks, which are a mixed
splendor of piston and pistil; very well
provided an instant may be fixed
so that it will not rub, like any other pastel.

(While you and i have lips and voices which
are for kissing and to sing with
who cares if some oneeyed son of a bitch
invents an instrument to measure Spring with?

each dream nascitur, is not made…)
why then to Hell with that: the other; this,
since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid.

-e.e. cummings



On Thursday July 3rd, two weeks from tomorrow, I depart for my big adventure of teaching English for the Peace Corps in the Kyrgyz Republic (a.k.a. Kyrgyzstan). As the time seems to be rapidly approaching, I thought I should make an inaugural “Peace Corps Post” to designate this page as my official Peace Corps blog.

Here are the details: I will leave July 3rd from Minneapolis to Philadelphia and spend the 3rd, 4th and 5th there during staging – the Peace Corps name for our pre-service orientation. On the 5th I and the other 30-50 volunteers leaving for Kyrgyzstan will fly out of New York City, change planes in Istanbul, Turkey and arrive in Bishkek, the capital city in the north of Kyrgyzstan. We will then begin our pre-service training (PST) in and around the capital city (near a neighboring city called Kant), and we’ll be there until mid-September when we will be assigned our permanent post for our two years of service.

I know that I will be living with a host family during PST, and then with a different family for at least my first three months at post. After my first 6 months in Kyrgyzstan I will get to decide whether I want to continue living with my host family or if I want to rent my own apartment. My life until mid-September is fairly well planned out: I will spend 6-8 hours Monday through Saturday in intensive culture, job and language training. I’m fairly certain that I will be learning Kyrgyz, the native Turkic language of the Kyrgyz people, during PST. Since I took two years of Russian at Gustavus, I doubt that the Peace Corps office will have me learning Russian during this time. Learning Kyrgyz will be my number one task since it is much more conducive for building strong connections in Kyrgyz communities if you speak their language. Knowing Russian, however, will be my initial way of buffering the huge adaptations that will be required of me during the first few months (most everyone knows Russian in Kyrgyzstan, but not everyone who knows Russian knows Kyrgyz). I hope I will be able to use and study both languages equally wherever I am placed for the duration of my service, but time will tell if this will be the case.

The last two and a half weeks since graduating from Gustavus have been wonderful. I’ve spent them unpacking, repacking, relaxing, reflecting and spending time with friends and family. The highlights so far have been getting to go on big bike rides with my dad, road tripping to Chicago with Oaks and Law to see Iron Maiden live, seeing Mark Kozelek play at the Varsity Theatre with Michelle, and going up to Grandpa and Gay’s cabin with my family and Michelle for a weekend. Other than this, I’ve had to do a lot of shopping in preparation for being in Kyrgyzstan and for having a job that requires a more professional dress than my casual college student wardrobe.

I don’t know if I’ll be posting much on here before my departure, so let me end by saying how important each and every one of you who are reading this blog are to me. Sharing my experiences, photos and (possibly) videos while abroad will really help me feel connected with everyone back home whom I care about. Depending on how available internet is where I will be living, I may not be able to check email more than once a week (possibly less, possibly more). If I may make a request, please don’t hesitate to send me emails or leave messages/comments on my blog. Even if I can’t respond quickly, please know that your words will mean so much to me while I’m over there, probably even more than I anticipate right now.

I’d also like to thank the people who have helped me immensely in getting to this point. Thanks to Phil Bryant, Will Freiert and Oaks for writing letters of recommendation during my application process. Thanks to Prof. Crnkovic and Prof. Rosenflanz for sharing their wealth of knowledge about Central Asia and of the Russian language with me. Thanks to all of my best friends (you know who you are) for our conversations and your support regarding this decision. And a huge thanks to my family for their wise advice and supportive conversations throughout the last few months. This opportunity would not be viable for me without any single one of you. Thank you.

Am I nervous about this, or excited? You tell me. I am so excited to go to Kyrgyzstan, to learn Kyrgyz and to speak Russian, to become a teacher. I am nervous for all the reasons that leaving home can strain the heart strings. I have little fear of the departure itself – it’s the return that intimidates me, since it’s then when I’ll realize how much life has happened since my departure, both for myself and for those who surround me right now. It seems to me that volunteering for the Peace Corps merely intensifies all of the normal feelings that come to everyone, anywhere: the excitement for the future coupled with a fear of losing the people and places that are apart of us now.

But for now I’ll let sleeping dogs lie, since “the thing perhaps is / to eat flowers and not to be afraid.”

The Nowhere Self: How the Self, Which Usually Experiences Itself as Living Nowhere, is Surprised to Find that it Lives Somewhere

"On the Johnny Carson Show, it always happens that when Carson or one of his guests mentions the name of an American city, there is applause from those audience members who live in this city. The applause is of a particular character, startled and immediate, as if the applauders cannot help themselves.

Such a response is understandable if one hails from a hamlet like Abita Springs, Louisiana, and Carson mentioned Abita Springs. But the applause also occurs at the mention of New York or Chicago.

Question: Do Chicagoans in Burbank, California, applaud at the mention of the word Chicago
A) Because they are proud of Chicago?
B) Because they are boosters, Chamber of Commerce types, who appreciate a plug, much as a toothpaste manufacturer would appreciate Carson mentioning Colgate?
C) Because a person, particularly a passive audience member who finds himself in Burbank, California, feels himself so dislocated, so detached from a particular coordinate in space and time, so ghostly, that the very mention of such a coordinate is enough to startle him into action?
(check one)

Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and a dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. You make enough money and move to a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: "Brooklyn 9.6 light-years." Explain your emotion."

-Walker Percy, "Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book"

"I feel you oh so near
when morning doves appear..." -Sun Kil Moon

Well, I knew I hadn't updated my posts in a while, but I hadn't realized it had been two whole months...Man, how time flies.

The biggest news for me as of now is that I've officially accepted my Peace Corps invitation to teach English for two years in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan (also called the Kyrgyz Republic), beginning July 3rd, 2008. I'm very excited for this opportunity: I know that it will present many difficulties, and that those difficulties will be repaid with rich rewards. I will graduate on June 1st from Gustavus, and then have the month of June to relax, recap, and repack before I begin this new phase of my life, one that is to have quite an impact on the years that follow. I could not be more happy with my destined country: Kyrgyzstan has a rich, ancient culture; a people formerly of nomadic Turkish/Mongolian tribes who were mostly industrialized by the Soviets in the 20th Century. In Kyrgyzstan there is Islam, and there is Orthodox Christianity; there is eastern mysticism, and there is post-Soviet materialism co-existing. It will be an enriching culture experience for me, right in the vein of my interests and curiosities.

The Peace Corps ordeal will deserve a longer post in the near future. Right now I'm dedicated to enjoying my final weeks living on the hill at Gustavus in St. Peter. Biggest news in that vein is that I've begun to go for bike rides again. This was a big step for me, since I'd not biked since my debilitating accident last August when I broke my arm. My first ride was three weeks ago, and it was really hard to get back on that proverbial horse: for my first five miles I kept getting flashbacks of my crash, but after that I loosened up and remembered why I like biking so much: you get to see more and breathe more fresh air than running, and it offers such a sense of freedom. It's really hard to beat.

I took my bike on the Minnesota River Trail in Mankato, heading for 9 miles in one direction, and 9 on the return trip. It felt great. I did it all in an hour, which was even more thrilling. I had been doing some training in the athletic center here at Gustavus (most of all so that I'd be able to keep up with my dad on bike rides this summer), and it really paid off. The Mankato ride was great; cruising right along the river on one of the first beautiful spring days we had in April. I stopped off halfway to eat some dried fruit on the river bank, listened to the water flowing, and wondered how it could get much better. Oh yeah...maybe if my dad was there too.

Since then I've gone on a couple rides out West of campus on the country roads; they're well paved with little traffic. I'd say they're perfect for riding if it wasn't for the apocalyptic wind that comes blowing in off the plains at times. My first ride went smoothly; my second was brutal - 15 minutes to go six miles out, and 45 minutes to come back with a head wind. But it was worth it. After that ride I think I ate an entire half pound of Easter ham.

Since then they've been pretty normal rides; not too strong of a wind, just a little resistance here and there. But at this time of year, this part of Minnesota smells like dirt, the farmers tilling the earth, pitching the gutteral scent of mineral rich soil into the air to fill my nostrels. It also does not get much better than this.

That is all for now. This blog could become my official obligatory Peace Corps blog, so there could be some juicy bits to appear here soon. Until next time, be well, and God bless.

Слава Отцу и Сыну и Святому Духу, и ныне и присно и во веки веков. Амень.

J

Russian Poetry

It's strange how during the semesters I seem to forget my natural tendencies when unoccupied. I imagine I can be just as productive as I am during school, though able to take time to relax. This never seems to work out exactly as I expect because my melancholy is given plenty of space to move in. This feels like a burden at first, until I realize that it's only when I have let the blues sink in a bit that my brain and my heart really come alive again. I won't describe this further, only as an explanation for the rest of this post. It takes a lot of time before I can get in the mood to write things that I've been thinking about fragmentedly for months. So below is a poem analysis I have been working on of a poem by the Russian Areseniy Tarkovsky, father of the filmmaker. I have no delusions that it will be interesting to anyone at all, but of course I figure it doesn't hurt to 'publish' it, rather than keep it all to myself. Besides, I should like to prove that I haven't spent the last few weeks solely eating pancakes and indulging in irreverant pop music.

Вот и лето прошло,
Словно и не бывало.
На пригреве тепло.
Только этого мало.

Всё, что сбыться могло,
Мне, как лист пятипалый,
Прямо в руки легло.
Только этого мало.

Понапрасну ни зло,
Ни добро не пропало,
Всё горело светло.
Только этого мало.

Жизнь брала под крыло,
Берегла и спасала.
Мне и вправду везло.
Только этого мало.

Листьев не обожгло,
Веток не обломало...
День промыт, как стекло.
Только этого мало.


Summer came and went,
Like it never happened.
It was warm in its nourishment.
Only that’s not enough.

Everything that could come to fruition,
Like a five-fingered leaf,
Was laid straight into my hand.
Only that’s not enough.

Not in vain did evil,
Nor good disappear,
Light burned everything away.
Only that’s not enough.

Life took me under wing,
Guarded me and redeemed me.
It was so lucky for me.
Only that’s not enough.

The foliage was not scourged,
The branch was unharmed…
The day was sluiced clean, like glass.
Only that’s not enough.

-Arseniy Tarkvosky

Before diving into an interpretation of this poem, as with other Russian poems we must first consider the surface matters of its form. It is comprised of five four-line stanzas, following the rhyme pattern ABAB consistently throughout (not in my translation, unfortunately, but in the Russian). The first and third lines of each stanza end in masculine rhymes, while the second and fourth in feminine.
Keeping this in mind we can delve into the paradox which the poem reveals to us, the unifying tension between form and content. For without the last line of each stanza, the rhyme scheme would be stilted and the repetitive “Only that’s not enough” (Только этого мало) would not be there to tie all five stanzas together, thus leaving us with a more fragmented set of verses. But let us for the moment read the poem once again without the final line of each stanza. What we have is, I think, a thematically mirrored poem. Stanzas one and two work together, stanza three takes a turn, and stanzas three and four echo the first two, though effected by the cathartic third stanza.
In the first stanza, we have a light, pastoral sentiment: summer was here, it nourished me, but it passed too quickly. Nature gives and takes away. So far Keats and Wordsworth would nod approvingly. The next stanza moves us into fall: everything that grew during summer now is harvested, is reaped for our benefit. The inclusion of «five fingered leaf» is very important, since this poem itself is five-fingered (five stanzas long), written on leaves of paper. We now are not simply talking about nature, but also the art of poetry. The first stanza is thus not only about nature's summer, but the summertime of the soul, of warmth and happiness. Autumn brings its melancholy, and by the loss of summer we are given fodder by the muse of poetry, words of longing and remembered bliss.
The third stanza is our peripeteia, our turn or reversal: something ineffably catastrophic has happened. We can suppose it is winter, but Tarkovsky avoids terms to make this association. Instead, good and evil have disappeared and everything has been burned away. Cataclism, or merely a personal catharsis, who knows? But everything in the first two stanzas has disappeared. We start afresh after this stanza, unsure of the line between the pastoral and the spiritual from this point on. The fourth stanza answers our question, at least for now. The author has been saved by «life». But does he mean the green, lush life of stanzas one and two, or living, breathing human life? Has he found some solace in a human spiritual awakening, or simply shelter from nature's tumult? I think that he implies the former, since the verb used here, from the Russian спасать, meaning to save or redeem, has specifically relgious connotations. But this connotation merely introduces a tension in meaning. It comes from the Old Church Slavonic noun спасение, meaning «salvation». You still hear it in their church music. This connotation, however, I think the author evokes on purpose, only to give it a more earthly meaning. Life has redeemed him. But in the next line, he is merely the recipient of luck, of good fortune «везло». Life has picked him out haphazardly, and he feels gratitude for its nourishment. This reminds us, of course, of what summer did for him in the first stanza.
In the final stanza we are returned solely to the natural world. The trees are still standing, untorched and unbroken, the day is clear «like glass». Evidently the author has gone through some transformation, only to end up where he was in the first stanza. However, something has changed: he has become awakened, subconsciously to a different reality, the reality of redemption: if he meant спасать in the earthly sense, he now also understands its heavenly connotation.
I believe this awareness of the spiritual life is what gives us the cadence of «only that's not enough» at the end of each stanza. They are added because the author has realized the vanity of everything natural, the vanity of fortune and of the seasons and human emotion. Without the repetitive line, we would have, in a sense, a complete poem, replete with movement and imagery: it would be exactly a «five fingered leaf» that falls into our hands. With the cadence, however, the entire poem is reversed. It forces us to look not at what is in the poem, but rather what is absent from the poem. This realization becomes integral to the poem, inseparable from the ABAB rhyme scheme. To neglect the fourth line is to miss the whole point. The poem's entire meaning now hangs on whatever is missing from it. Luck, summer, warmth, light, nature and even poetry cannot satiate this void which the poet feels. So what would be enough?
My answer is this: the human will. In this poem the author is merely a passive recipient. There are no verbs which he is the agent of. In the Russian he is relegated to a recipient of action in the dative of the personal pronoun «мне», never the Я or 'I' of action, agency and control. What the repeating line deprives is the poem's natural vivacity, and replaces it with veracity. The poet builds the poem, lines 1-3 throughout, only to destroy it with line 4: the poem's form itself is a catharsis.
The poem is beautiful, as is nature: it has movement, beginnings and conclusions. But evidently it is not the answer to life's problems. «Only that's not enough» turns us away from the poem and its content towards a different philosophy, a different perspective on earthly matters: fortune cannot save you, and happiness fixed to this world is ultimately a lack of something else. Fulness in one sense is emptiness in another. One must act with one's will for true salvation. It will not be placed into our hands like good memories, friends, summer, food and shelter. The genius of th epoem is that this act of the will heralds into one's life a mirroring of nature's cycle of life, death and rebirth, the cycle of the poem. When one can choose, freely, to give up the life of this world, there then awaits a salvation that can satiate us, a redemption that is enough.