Here come Santa Clause

With less than a week before Christmas, I can finally say that it is starting to feel a lot like Christmas! Jalal Abad had its first snow last night, it was really only a dusting but its always fun to get out of bed in the morning and see the ground covered in snow. In addition to the snow, the whole city is covered in holiday decoration, there are Christmas trees on sale at the bazaar, the grocery store has a giant Santa in the entrance and all the students are wrapping up their classes and getting ready for the exams- just like I was this time last year! Despite the Christmas feel, the Kyrgyz are actually getting ready for New Years.

It’s quite strange, their New Years looks a lot like an American Christmas.
I can’t figure out exactly where this Christmas spirit comes from, but an interesting fact, which I believe contributed to this Christmas spirit, was when some Swedish researchers located the most strategic place where Santa’s North Pole should be; they pinpointed Kyrgyzstan! As would I if I were Kyrgyz, they are quite proud of the fact that if Santa really existed, he would live in the Tien Shan Mountains of Kyrgyzstan. But even with their enthusiasm, this is a predominantly Muslim country so they couldn’t quite fit Christmas onto their calendar and therefore decided to improvise. In Kyrgyzstan, Santa Clause delivers presents on New Year’s Day for all the good little boys and girls of Kyrgyzstan.

But in Osh and Jalal Abad, Santa will be joining us on Christmas day. This Thursday the Osh and Jalal Abad volunteers are all getting together on Christmas day and doing secret Santa. About a month ago we all drew names and decided on a cap of 200 coms (about $5) to spend on our secret santa. In addition to a gift exchange we will be putting together a Christmas dinner. And even though I was not present last weekend, when the volunteers were organizing the menu, I was nominated to make my synthetic sweet potatoes again! This time it will be a lot easier to make the dish because I have finally moved into my apartment!

The move took place this morning, the actual moving was easy but it was hard to leave the family. Because my Russian is not up to par, prior to packing I had a woman write a letter to my host family on my behalf thanking them for their hospitality and kindness. When I gave them this letter my host mother, host sister and the new wife all came to my room sat down and started asking why I was leaving. The one thing that I didn’t want them to do was to take my moving personal but to a certain extent I think it was inevitable since people don’t move away from family in this culture. For example a young woman only leaves her parents home when she gets married, the youngest son must live with his parents and take care of them as they get older. So when I said I wanted to move to an apartment by myself, they were a bit taken aback. Only after lots of reassurance that I loved their family and I would visit often would they accept the fact that I was leaving. In spite of the difficult goodbye, I am really excited to have my own place and the timing is perfect! This apartment is like my Christmas present to myself!

So as I move into my new apartment and slip and slide through the icy streets of Jalal Abad, keep me in your thoughts because this is the first Christmas I will spend away from my family!!! Happy Holidays to everyone!

Wish List

As Christmas time is approaching I have received a couple of emails asking me what they could send me for Christmas.

Here is a wish list that I have compiled;

Coffee- ground for French press
Puzzles- (1000 piece- I got some cold winter months to kill!)
Flaming hot Cheetos
Teeth whitening strips
Chocolate
Herbal teas
Ranch dress seasoning packets
Seasoning packets for things like tacos, chili, soups, ect.
Travel money- I’m planning a trip to Uzbekistan- please send this one to my parents!

This is my mailing address so you can just print this out and tape it onto the package. Also if you can find the muslim symbol (its just a cresent moon and star) on the internet and stick/draw that onto the package as well that is suppose to deter tampering.

KYRGYZSTAN
715612 Jalalabat city
Toktagul Road
House 7, Apt. 11
Martha Haddock

КЫРГЫСТАН
715612 г. Жалалабат
Переулок Токтогула
Дом 7 КВ 11
Хэддок Марта


I really appreciate the warm thoughts that people have been sending me!

All my love,

Martha

My first Thanksgiving in Kyrgyzstan

One of the things that I have been dreading since I have been in country is spending the holidays without my family. To avoid feeling homesick over thanksgiving weekend I made tons of plans with other volunteers to celebrate the holidays. Starting with Thanksgiving Day I had planned on going down to Osh to have dinner with the Osh volunteers but as the day unfolded I felt obligated to stay at work and get some things done. By the time I had wrapped up all my work I didn’t have time to travel all the way down to Osh and make it for dinner. But luckily for me, two village volunteers, Lesley and Ariel, had decided to come into Jalal Abat and have Thanksgiving dinner in the city. So together we went to the bazaar and bought all the ingredients for a nice dinner. My purchase was a kilo of pork. Now this may seem insignificant to some but this purchase was actually one of the pinnacle moments of my service thus far. To put it in perspective, let me remind you that this is a Muslim country and eating pork is taboo, thus pork is not the easiest thing to find at your local bazaar but compliments to the small Russian population that still resides in this country it is here, you just gotta know who to go to.

I had been introduced to the pork lady by Fritz, who had been directed to the pork stall by an anonymous lead who claimed he could only buy pork in the dark of the night, when no one would recognize him! To get to the pork stand I had to go deep into the heart of the bazaar and slip behind some fruit and vegetable stalls. As the pork lady and I made the deal I had to remind myself that there was no need to look suspiciously over my shoulder every five seconds or sneak around corners, this was not that exciting and that I was just buying dinner.

With my pork mission completed, we returned to my friend’s apartment where Fritz, Ginger, Lesley, Ariel and I prepared our first Thanksgiving dinner in Kyrgyzstan. To go with the pig we had a salad and mashed potatoes, and for dessert we had an apple pie that Ariel made. It was amazing! By 10 pm the power had gone out and so we lit candles and continued to sit at the table and chat through the night!

The following Saturday was when we had all of the volunteers in town and hosted the bigger Thanksgiving dinner. Initially we had planned on buying a turkey and roasting it, but buying a turkey in Kyrgyzstan is a bit more of an ordeal than it is at grocery stores in the states. When you buy the turkey here, you walk away with a live and feathery creature dangling from your arm. Then you gotta kill it, gut it, and defeather it. We opted to go for fried chicken as our main dish since you can buy chicken pre-killed.

Cooking the meal was interesting. As if preparing food without the luxury of canned goods and food processing machines wasn’t hard enough, for some reason, the whole city was without electricity and water, it was inconvenient to say the least! But since power and water outages are not exactly a rarity, we had stored up gallons of water and were able to pull together a beautiful thanksgiving dinner. Fritz and Ginger fried buckets and buckets of chicken, Ted’s mother had mailed him pecans and so Lesley made a pecan pie and an apple pie, there were mashed potatoes, salad, beans, and finally sweet potatoes.

I was in charge of sweet potatoes. When I volunteered for the dish, everyone looked at me as if I had gone mad, rightfully so since there are no sweet potatoes in this country. But my mom has an amazing sweet potato casserole recipe that I was determined to make, so based on my highly developed scientific skills I created synthetic sweet potatoes. Now this is a very complicated and scientific process but here is a basic outline of the procedure; first I analyzed the characteristics of sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are orange roots that are sweet and starchy. Following that logic carrots are orange roots and pumpkins are sweet and starchy, therefore by boiling and mashing these two compounds and combining them together I created synthetic sweet potatoes! I’ll have you know it work and was a total hit. Just call me Dr. Martha!

The following day my parents called to wish me happy Thanksgiving. Hearing them talk about their Thanksgiving dinner made me a bit homesick but as I told them about the adventures I had, all in the name of celebrating thanksgiving, I had to laugh how exhilarating (and exhausting) my first Thanksgiving had been in Kyrgyzstan.

New Apartment

One of Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan’s requirements is that you must live with a host family during the three months of training plus an additional three months at permanent site. Living with a host family has numerous benefits including familiarizing volunteers with local culture and norms, language improvements and having family members show you the ropes around town. But living with a host family has been one of my biggest challenges during my service. Don’t get me wrong, I have been blessed with very comfortable homes, great host siblings, I have been included in weddings, I was present for the birth of a new family member and I learned infinites about Kyrgyz culture through these families. I can honestly say that I have really benefited from living with my two host families. Unfortunately America has instilled a sense of independence within me and I can only deal with so much of living in another family’s home! I am yearning for my own kitchen, for my own schedule and for the freedom of knowing that I am not inconveniencing someone while I go about my morning and evening routines. So come ten days, after I have served my time with host families, I will have my own place!

It all happened so quickly, less than two weeks ago my NGO director took me to look at a little apartment about 20 minutes away from the office and by the end of the week I had paid my first month’s rent! My future pad is a furnished apartment on the ground floor of an apartment building with one bedroom, living room, kitchen and get this; an indoor toilet! For the last six months my bathroom has consisted of an outhouse with a hole in the ground, but from here on out there will be no more going out in the cold winter nights to pee, just that sweet sound of a toilet flushing! Life will be good!!!

The kitchen is small and the oven can only be closed by propping a heavy board against the door of the oven, but it works!!! Last weekend I spend a couple of nights there and successfully made a loaf of corn bread with that oven. Had I seen this place 6 months ago I would have considered that kitchen impossible to cook in but I have learned a lot since then and last weekend I successfully make tacos, chili, corn bread and omelets!

In addition to the apartment I also have a huge veranda! Come summer it’s going to be great! I showed a couple of volunteers the apartment and the second they saw my veranda I could see each of them planning and arranging summer barbeques and at my house! Right across from my veranda are four little stalls, kinda like a mini bazaar, where I can buy any basic item including eggs, fruits, flour, sugar, soap, candles, bread and of course vodka!

As hard as it will be to say goodbye to my thirteen year old host sister, I think this apartment will have a huge impact on my peace of mind and comfort levels. Plus I’ll be able to distract myself from the cold by decorating my new home during the winter!

Research Project

Over the last three months I have spent a lot of time working on my language, settling in, getting to know people and working with the English clubs. But now that I am more comfortable at work, I am looking for some more sustainable and long term projects. For the last month I have been playing with the idea of doing a research project where I would conduct a survey, analyze the data and then based on what I concluded I will create workshops addressing the chosen theme. Until recently I wasn’t sure what area I wanted to focus on but when I was approached by a young woman who asked me to help her translate a letter which she had received from a British family, I was finally inspired.

The letter that this young woman wanted help with was a response from a man in the United Kingdom. Apparently she had been applying for nanny jobs in America and Europe over the internet and this man had found her resume and responded by offering her a job. According to this letter she would be flown to London where she would be in charge of watching over his two children in his “big house with a lovely garden.” The letter painted a charming picture and stated that this was a well off British family who needed a little help around the house. The only problem was that the person who wrote that letter was not a native English speaker. Each sentence had numerous grammatical and spelling errors, the wording didn’t make sense and in my opinion the whole thing seemed really shady. Prior to joining the Peace Corps I had helped plan a conference about human trafficking and so I have been exposed to what human trafficking is and some of the basic methods that traffickers use in order to recruit men and women for a life of slavery. The perfect nanny job found over the internet with no legal documentation seems like a text book example of how a person gets sucked into human trafficking.

When I shared my concerns with the young woman, she brushed it off and said she didn’t think that was the case. She thought that this man seemed very nice and it would all be fine. I started asking her questions like ‘what would you do if he had lied to you and actually wanted you to work somewhere else? What would you do if he didn’t pay you? What would happen do if you became sick? What if your mother became sick, would he pay for a ticket back to Kyrgyzstan? Who would you call if there was a problem? Where would you go?’ For every question I asked, I received nothing but a blank stare. She didn’t know anyone in the UK, she didn’t know how the legal system worked or even how to fill out a visa form. There had been no planning or forethought when she started applying for these jobs around the world.

Even after over an hour of explaining what human trafficking is, why I thought her letter was a scam, and how dangerous it could be, this young woman was still blinded with the hope of finding a job in the UK. I walked away really discouraged and frustrated. All that evening the only thing I could think about was this young woman’s vulnerability. Her vulnerability didn’t come from her lack of physical strength, or her inability to understand English. Her vulnerability stemmed from her desperation and lack of planning.

This interaction is what lead me to my research and workshop idea. Over the next 2 years I want to conduct a survey where I will evaluate the long term planning skills of local university women. Based on the results of the survey I want to conduct monthly workshops for women about topics such as goal setting, long term planning, having a plan b, how to use available resources and subjects along those lines. It’s going to be a lot of work but I think that it would be really interesting and rewarding. Currently I am researching how to research. It would only make sense if my research project on effective long term planning was planned out well!

But honestly, I can only hope that through this project I will plant the seed of long term planning in the minds of young women. So that people, like the young lady that I spoke with, will start looking at these opportunities with open eyes.