Life in KZ in pics

Volunteers at one of the restaurants for one of the major American holidays.

That is one of my host brothers in the front and some of the related family members















Another host brother this ones 9 entering 5th grade next year
























My host sister and one of my best students. Notice my host sister has freckles weird stuff. Both are full Kazakh but to me like they are from different parts of Asia.













These two girls are 1st cousins. But one has green eyes and the other looks rather Chinese at least to me. Both very good students and that's me post weight lose.

Weight Loss....

So yes I've been writing about my life but it takes a while to get to the internet I usually save my posts to a flashcard then paste them all at once. Thats why I have 3 posts in one day. I will probably be doing this every couple weeks.

We are a society concerned with our weight. Not a week goes by that I don't read in my weekly Newsweek provided by the peace corps about health and some new kind of diet trend. The easy advice I have to any man that wants to lose weight quick- MOVE TO Kazakhstan. Men for some reason go through major weight lose in this country while usually women gain weight. Since I've been here depending upon if Ive gotten sick in the last week or not, I've lost between 20-25 pounds.

Its funny though I not quite sure why I've lost so much weight. The Kazakh's I live with, only eat twice a day and with a very lite breakfast in the morning so when I eat I stuff myself. The sugars I used to eat in mass quantities has trickled down to nothing and its almost in possible to find luxury items like chips in my village. So the aspect of snacking, which we do in the states so often has been completely erased. Another thing is since I live in a village I walk everywhere. To school and back is about 3 miles with a full pack so I get my workout. But those these things should be countered by...

"But Jose what do you eat?"
This is the funniest part I eat mostly bread, potatoes, noodles, rice, and mutton or cow meat. So the Adkins diet makes no sense to me after living in Kazakhstan. I think I should be gaining weight. The winter diet here includes mostly starches since the weather is so cold. Only now in the middle of February have I begun to see good fruits again. The weather has begun to change and its getting prettier and nicer everyday (even saw a wild flower yesterday) but thats not to say all volunteers are the same. This country is huge and parts of it are quite close to Siberia. My good friend in the northern most central part of Kazakhstan is still having-15-20 degree Celsius weather right now. COLD.....

Another one of my buddies has lost 30 pounds and he was already skin and bones when we got here. In conclusion whatever muscle mass I had prior to coming here is gone now. Even though I've begun to work out regularly at the school gym and in my room. My clothes which fit me well when I came to here now make me look like a college kid, since they are so baggy. But to any future male Kazakhstan volunteers out there make sure to but a couple holes in your belt and bring some clothes that are a little tight and under your current size.

Monsha etiquette

Every week I get to bathe, well its not really bathing it’s called a monsha, in Russian it’s called a banya. And yes I’ve begun to consider bathing not as a right but more of a privilege, this is coming from the guy who used to shower twice a day. Anyway the local monsha is in the village center so usually on Monday’s I go there. It’s only open Saturday-Monday, I like going on Monday because it is never very crowded then. I can also avoid creepy questions about my nationality and about the crazy amount of hair on my body when compared to Kazakh men. Anyway the monsha is separated first by sexes and then into three parts: the locker room, the bathing area, and the steam room.

So once you pay for your ticket into the monsha you then go into the locker room where you strip down and put your stuff in a locker. Then you take your red tub and your soap products then go into the bathing area which is a collection of benches in a horseshoe around a fairly big room. So first you mix steaming water and cold water which come from different pipes into a good mix which you use to wash and lather yourself. In the bathing area you have up to twenty men lathering themselves with soap, shaving, and washing themselves with the water from their red buckets.

Then after you get your water and find a spot on one of the benches and entrench your soap near your water bucket. You go and steam yourself in the steam room. I will usually steam myself then wait in the locker room, cool down and drink water three times or so per monsha visit. The heat is closer to a wet moist heat of a steam room than that of the dry heat of a sauna but the room looks more like a sauna. After which you thoroughly lather yourself with soap, fill up your bucket and dump your bucket on yourself 3-4 times. Then your officially clean or at least I hope the sweat and scrubbing makes your skin clean. But after a week of grime that develops anything with water on your skin makes you feel clean.

Anyway this week when I went into to the Monsha, I did the normal routine. First I bought my water and ticket. Then I went into the locker room stripped. Then I took my bucket and soap products and went into the bathing room. Filled up my bucket full of properly mixed cold and hot water placed it on a spot on a bench, then went to the steam room for my first sweat. The first sweat is always the best all that grime that develops from a week of work, walking, and sleeping sheds so quickly. You feel like your the wicked witch of the west but you become a beautiful butterfly after. After that I went into the locker room and cooled down then went back into the bathing area and sat down.

Then for the first time ever anywhere, a pretty big old man approached me and asked, “Can you wash my back?” I was a bit stunned I not only understood his entire question but I didn’t quite understand if I should or if I didn’t would I make a cultural fopah. So erring on the side of caution I said, “ok”. There is a first time for everything right, so with his soap rag I lathered his back with a strong pressure. Then after a couple minutes I asked if that was enough and he said yes. He thanked me.

After glowing in the feeling that I had just had a pretty unique experience, I went to the steam room for another steam. In the steam room there was another older man probably 45 or so. We started chatting about how hot the monsha was today, the kind of standard small talk you’d have if you were in line in a grocery store or bank or something in California. Then after a couple minutes he asked me to scrape his back with this glove, which looks kind of like a scraping dish rag but is a shaped into glove. Since I had just scraped one old guys back, I said to myself whatever if one is good two is better and dug in for scraping. After I got down with his back he said thanks and offered to hit me with the birch leaves that every monsha in Kazakhstan has. I said no since they whack you pretty hard with those things and the scrapes probably would take 2-3 days to heal.

Well two backs and mine in one day, I was literally glowing. My cultural assimilation is going well.

Restart...

Well it’s been a while. Sorry about that I just have been trying to keep my mind busy. For me at least idle time is a killer. It makes me ponder things that shouldn’t be pondered. But anyways, “What is my life like now you ask?”

Well I went through Peace Corps training which was grueling. I never had much free time ever in the entire three months that I lived near Almaty. But the training was particularly thorough. I received the equivalent TOEFL (Teaching of English as Foreign Language) curriculum, received 4 hours of language instruction in Kazakh daily (six days a week- Kazakhstan uses a 6 day work week), and had cultural training on the do’s and don’t of Kazakhstan. At the time I thought training was a pain in the rear but now I think it may have been a bit like vacation. We had lots of friends, easy access to the outside world for news, and foreign nationals who spoke pretty good English.

Anyway during training Peace Corps through a committee (got to love those bureaucratic committees) assigns each volunteer a future site which the volunteer will work and live for the next two years. So future volunteers make a good impression in training your future 2 years depends on it. Supposedly the committee tries to look at each volunteer and assigns a site based upon the personality and interests of the volunteer and make up of the site. So somehow I got placed in a remote site in southern Kazakhstan. The closest city is Shimkent but it really isn’t that close. It’s like living in the central valley of California and saying you’re from San Francisco. Three and a half hour car ride is about the right distance away from Shimkent that I live.

My site is called a remote site. My site has no cell phone access, the phones sometimes break with the electricity and it’s in the middle of a huge plain of nothing the size of Kansas called a Steppe. And in the entire region only 50,000 people live. No one at my site speaks English very well but I enjoy the rural-ness and pure Kazakh culture of the village. It can be dauntingly lonely at time since I am never really able to speak my full mind due to the language barrier but on the upside it is one of the few places in Kazakhstan where a volunteer has been placed where Kazakh is spoken solely.

And yes very little Russian is spoken here at my site and mostly when Russian is spoken its only for very few words like “mala detz” – good job. Somehow this part of Kazakhstan maintained its Kazakh purity but it is very far from the oblast center as well.

The closest other volunteer is forty- five minutes away or so but it’s very difficult to get together and converse. First the transportation system here is still developing and if you’re not careful you may get stranded in the steppe or have to pay ridiculous amount of money to get home. Also due to the wonderful Peace Corps policies set up this year. Any time I spend outside of site is considered leave time, so if I leave my site (which I have too since I need money to survive and also for my own peace of mind at least once a month) I have leave taken away from my docket. Peace Corps volunteers only receive 2 days of leave time a month. So if I loose one day due to the need to get money and supplies for my classes. I can only save a day per month.

I believe National Peace Corps policies were meant for smaller countries where volunteers only live 20 miles away from another volunteer (i.e. islands in the Caribbean). Where volunteers can get to a city and back to site in less than an hour, for me it takes me 4 hours one way to Shimkent by the quickest transportation means possible, meaning 8 hours round-trip. Not really a day trip for me. Here in Kazakhstan where the country covers two continents and is the size of Western Europe, it is impossible to realistically impose the same policies. But whatever I have come to terms that the policy should be changed but probably won’t be for a long long time. At this point that’s life for a village volunteer in Kazakhstan, you just get used to it.