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.