More pics!

I have finally had a chance to put up some more pictures. These are from Christmas 2008 to the winter camp in the beginning of February. And believe me it was a cold as it looked in these pictures, but thankfully things have really started to warm up! Enjoy!

Guesting

To Guest n. 1, To visit friends and family; a common Kyrgyz tradition that typically consists of hours of eating, drinking and gossiping.

Upon arriving in this country I was very quickly introduced to the practice of guesting. During PST, trainers warned us of this lengthy custom and by living with host families I became very familiar with the guesting experience! Not that it is a bad tradition, but for volunteers guesting is particularly difficult seeing as the primary activity is speaking in Russian or Kyrgyz, we are often forced to muddle our way through toasts and there is always the never relenting host who will continue to fill your plate with more food, pour more vodka, and pressure you to eat more after hours of consuming food and drink!

Initially I would tense up at even the thought of guesting but now I really appreciate the custom. In my past life, I was always so busy with school, work, going to the gym, and hanging out at restaurants and coffee houses that I would never invite people over to my house for a meal. Only with my closest friends would I go to their house for dinner and it very rarely would that last longer than two hours! But over the months of being in Kyrgyzstan, guesting seems to be one of the Kyrgyz traditions that I have truly embraced.

In the last two weeks I have hosted volunteers from all over the country, all the staff from my NGO and have been doing quite a bit of guesting myself! Most recently I had my NGO over, since I moved into my apartment I have been meaning to invite my office over for dinner for multiple reasons. In addition to offering a gesture of friendship and transparency, I wanted to thank them for finding my apartment and having been so supportive of me, for a little cultural exchange (American cuisine in a Kyrgyz setting) and finally to put their hearts to rest by proving to them that I am surviving quite well on my own. There is an assumption that, as an American, I am so depended on technology that I will surely starve without my microwave dinners, I will live in filth without Swifters and vacuum machines and my clothes will never be cleaned as I am unable to function without a washing machine. To be honest, initially their fears were not unjustified; but I have learned a lot since I have been here!

Last Monday after work, four of my co-workers and my director’s daughter came to my apartment. I had decided on spaghetti for dinner, it’s quick, easy and was a hit with my host families when I would cook for them. In my opinion dessert is a crucial part of every meal so the night before I baked a large chocolate cake with vanilla frosting. Right as I finished dinner my co-workers arrived with juice, a bottle of vodka and diet coke- they have seen me chugging diet coke more than once- what can I say, it’s a rare and joyous occasion when I find diet coke and can justify spending money on that sweet, sweet beverage!

The dinner went well, we all made toasts. Everyone seemed to enjoy the meal and took my leftovers home to share with their families. My director surprised me with a pair of earrings which the whole group had pitched in for! They had bought them for me last Christmas and had finally found an opportunity to give them to me. I was so flattered!

Nights like that one are one of the reasons that I truly love being a Peace Corps volunteer. Even though that evening was no school built or large community project, I was still filling my role as a volunteer by making friends and sharing cultures.

Microfinance

Less than a year ago I graduated from the University of Missouri with my Bachelors of Science in Business with an emphasis in finance. When I was nominated as a volunteer I was selected as a business advisor, but when I arrived at permanent site I was placed with a women’s NGO where I had little access to their business plans or financing. Although I love working at this NGO, I have been on the lookout for a side project where I can continue my finance education and share the knowledge and experience which I have.

A couple of months ago this opportunity fell right into my lap at a café while I was waiting for a friend to finish an English club. I was enjoying a cup of freshly brewed coffee (there is only one restaurant with this luxury in the whole south of Kyrgyzstan,) as I began to converse with a German man, Chris, who was also enjoying a late morning breakfast. As we introduced ourselves it was discovered out that I had a (short) finance background and he was the country director of an international program which funds microcredit financing to the rural populations throughout 13 countries in Africa and Central Asia. Upon this discovery he started telling me that he was looking for somebody to come in and give business trainings on subjects like time management, organization, using the internet and other topics which his employees had never been trained in but that he did not have time to teach them. That morning we agreed that I would start doing basic business trainings for his employees and that I would come to the Osh office once a week so I could get to know his staff and do some assessment on which areas needed attention.

Last Friday was my first day. The office was amazing, it was warm, everyone had a computer, and there was constant electricity and wireless internet!!! Up until last Friday I didn’t think that wireless internet existed in this country! Within a half hour of being in the office, I was in a meeting with the office manager, Anara, (who speaks beautiful English) and Chris. We decided that the first training would be on report writing since Chris had expressed a frustration with the lack of consistency in the reports throughout the 8 branches in Kyrgyzstan. So that day I started designing a presentation on how to write reports which will be presented to all eight branches in southern Kyrgyzstan.

At one point during the day I downloaded a couple documents about this microcredit organization to learn more about their mission and goals. My research turned out to be quite interesting. This organization is a branch of the Aga Khan Development Network which is a not-for-profit, non-denominational, international development agency based in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded and is directed by the Aga Khan, who is the spiritual leader of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims and a descendant of the Muslim Prophet, Muhammad. It’s a pretty cool development network that also has projects in economic development, social development and culture preservation.

By lunch time I had been assigned a second project in helping build a commercial leasing contract, a feat way over my head! But despite my insistence on lack of experience and education on writing contracts, Chris persisted that I help one of his employees design a rental lease for an office which they will be moving into shortly. To be honest I am really appreciating a new type of challenge in my work. Although I have been working very hard at my primary site, my energy has been directed to finding and initiating projects, while in this office I am given a finite task and I am to work until I have finished, a method much more common in my prior work experience. I think I will really enjoy the balance of the two work manners.

After a full day of work I was invited out with the office to celebrate Men’s Day! Men’s day is actually today and the whole country has taken the off day to recognize its men…so we celebrated Men’s Day on Friday. Back in the day, this holiday was more like a Labor Day type of holiday where soldiers were to be recognized, but over time it has become a day to celebrate men. This has been another situation where initially I was fairly stunned because in my opinion every day is men’s day, but like so many other things I’ve had to let it go as this is not my issue to confront. So I celebrated Men’s day with the microcredit office! We went out to a nice restaurant where there was lots of eating, dancing, celebrating and of course, all the women gave toasts of appreciation to the men of the office! So a shout out to all my male friends and acquaintances; Happy Men’s Day!

Spring!

Spring is finally here! After a few days of spring showers, the weather is hovering around 65° F. As I walk to work everyday, I find myself looking for longer routes so I can enjoy the weather a little bit longer. Another benefit of spring’s arrival is volunteers from the north are coming to visit and enjoy the warm weather. Yesterday I had two groups of volunteers come through Jalal Abad, one just passing through and the second group is to stay for a couple of days and see a little bit more of Jalal Abad. Last night we celebrated Fat Tuesday in my apartment and today as I went to work I sent them off to see the city of Uzgyn where their are some ancint relics from the Silk Road era. I'm not going to lie, I'm pretty jealous that they are out enjoying this amazing weather while I am at work!

Spring has also initiated the start of school. All of my English club students had over a month of winter vacation because the school buildings had such poor heating systems. Many schools had planned on school starting on the first of March but since this has been a particularly warm winter many schools have started early. With school open again, I have resumed my English clubs. I have decided to only have two English clubs this semester because I would like to have more time to work at my NGO and on secondary projects.

The first couple of lessons that I have had with my clubs was reading and writing letters. While school was not in session I received a package of 140 letters from 6th grade students in Houston, Texas through the World Wise School Program. This program allows a Peace Corps volunteer and a teacher in America to be matched up and to teach their students about the others culture through letters. My WWS counterpart is a social studies teacher and integrated Kyrgyzstan and Peace Corps into her curriculum so that her students could write to my students or me. About half of the letters had were written to me and half had were written to the students.

The letters from America contained more American culture than I could ever even list. The students wrote about their families, their hobbies, one boy even made a point of describing ding-dong ditching! Some of the letters were sprinkled with the southern “ya’ll,” which was an excellent opportunity to describe the different dialects in America. I even read one of the letters out to the students with a southern accent! Although they thought my monologue with a southern drawl was hilarious, my students connected with it because of the huge cultural and lingual differences between the north and south of Kyrgyzstan.

My students expressed a great interest in reading the letters and responding but I felt that one of the young women began to feel a bit defensive when some of the students asked if we had telvisions in Kyrgyzstan or video games. I tried to explain to her that the class had been learning about Kyrgyz traditions and had seen pictures of Kyrgyzstan's natural beauty rather than the major cities so it would be easy for the stuents to assume that there was a lack of technology. That prompted me to try and remember what misconceptions I had of Kyrgyzstan before I moved here. I had no idea what I was going into because most of the websites about Kyrgyzstan talked about a traditional culture and nomatic lifestlye. With this in mind, I encouraged her to explain her daily life in a way that the students would have a more realistic understanding of life here.

So far this has been one of my favorite activities that I have done with my Engish club for a number of reasons. First of all it is a chance for them to practice their Engish with someone other than myself. It gives them an opporunity to share who they are wih the world and just as importantly it allowed them to get a glimps of how they are precieved in the world. This is an activity that I would definatly do again!

Winter Camp!

Last week was the first time in ten years that I attended a camp! This time around was quite different than my last camp experience! Not only was there no bon fire and marshmellos but it was also in the dead of winter! Initially the idea of a winter camp was absolutly absurd to me but with the current situation for students it made perfect sense as to why camps right now is the perfect idea! Let me explain, due to the lack of electricity and the harsh winters, almost all of the schools in Kyrgyzstan closed for the months of January and February. As a result many of the volunteer teachers, who were not looking forward to being cold and bored during the break, designed winter camps to keep students out of trouble and their minds active. Throughout Kyrgyzstan there are camps taking place about a whole variety of things but I decided to help out two of my friends that designed a camp on life skills.

With their students selected, a mini army of volunteers to control the mass of children and a small budget to work with, my two fellow volunteers pulled together an awesome camp! It was a six day, five night camp in a sanatorium in Bazaar Korgon which is a small town just outside of Jalal Abad City. Each day the kids attended three sessions on life skills. We cover subjects including; life goals, communication, relationships, HIV/AIDS, team building, problem solving, self esteem and presentation giving. I was in charge of life goals and communication, for both sessions I had a Kyrgyz volunteer help me translate a brief statement about goals or communication and then we would play a game that would reinforce what they had just learned. For example in the communication session we played telephone to practice speaking clearly, a game where students had to listen and repeat what they had heard (it was a lot more fun than it sounds, I let them throw a ball of yarn around) and for body language I had them get into teams and play charades.

After their three sessions for the day the students had two hours of activities including sports, art, English club, debate, dance or a movie. I was in charge of art. One day we decorated envelopes with magazine pictures and told them that these envelopes served as excellent wallets, another day we made friendship bracelets and for each day we had a new craft for the students to partake in. I was really afraid that the students wouldn’t take to any of the activities but it was amazing! Every activity, session and game that we played was a total hit with the kids! I really believe it’s because they had never done anything like this before and so there was no bar to compare it to!

In the evenings we would have games including Mafia, a scavenger hunt, a movie night and other fun games that would exhaust the children and put them to sleep. By the end of the week my daily mantra had become "Exaust the children so they will sleep so I can sleep!" The first couple nights were pretty rought. On the first night they were all so excited to be there that they were up late into the night giggling, and the second night they decided to reinact some American movie and put toothpaste on each other while they were sleeping! Sounds cute now but it definatly wasn't at the time!!!

All the meals were served there- as you can imagine I was terrified since I am not the biggest fan of Kyrgyz food or camp food! So to avoid starvation I had made four batches of granola and two batches of pumpkin bread! Luckily for me the food was fine and they even gave us fruit a couple of times!!! By the end of camp I was exhausted but I had so much fun! The kids had been great, I had a enjoyed setting up sessions and art classes and I got to work with some really great volunteers. Plus I learned how camps work in Kyrgyzstan so hopefully this summer I will be able to put together my own camp for some Jalal Abad City students!

Happy 2009!

First of all my apologies for, once again, falling behind on my blogging. The holidays through January has proven to be a very hectic time! Apparently the holiday spirit can follow you anywhere around the world and then some seeing as it has been a month since my last entry.

Since my last update Christmas has come and gone. Once again all the Jalal Abad crew got together and created an amazing holiday feast. By far the highlight of the meal was Fritz’s homemade eggnog; it had real eggs, real whipping cream and a lot of bourbon! He said that beating the eggs and whipping the cream by hand was quite the experience! After a non-traditional Christmas dinner- chili and cornbread- we had a gift exchange. I received a pair of mittens that one of the volunteers knitted, they were absolutely beautiful! I thought only machines could stitch things that pretty!

By the end of our Christmas weekend, New Years was just around the corner and so before I knew it I was preparing for people to come in once again for another holiday celebration. This time the group wasn’t quite as large, but yet again, we cooked up quite the feast and brought in the New Year with Moldavian Champaign and Chinese fireworks- both gave me reason to fear I might not live to see much of the year 2009!

The following week flew by as I prepared for my first trip back up to Bishkek since I had been at permanent site. I, with the rest of my volunteer group, were to go to the capital for a week long training. The first two days were spent with our counterparts, I brought my director. Having my director to myself was a real gift seeing as she is always so preoccupied with work. I really took advantage of the time and got to know her and learn more about her long term visions for the NGO. The rest of the week was dedicated to debriefings on security, health care, program details, and language lessons. The days were long and the sessions became fairly tedious but every evening all the volunteers would get together, have a couple of drinks and just hang out. It was so fun to hear about what people outside of the south were doing.

By the end of the week I had become quite sick and just wanted to go home, but I had planned on staying an extra day and doing some shopping while I was in Bishkek. So I spent my last day in the north running around the city and ended up with six pounds of brown sugar, a bottle of tequila, a bottle of rum and two new DVDs!!! I’m not going to lie, I went a little over board with the brown sugar!

But now I’m back in the south where it is starting to warm up. Most of the ice has melted and I am now walking to work every day which gives me about an hour of easy exercise and lots of fresh air. February is going to be another busy month. I have plans to help out with three camps in the region that other volunteers are organizing. Peace Corps helped find funding for volunteers to put on winter camps for students because majority of the schools will be closed through February due to the lack of heating in the school buildings.

At the apartment I am feeling more and more at home as each day goes by. I had been hoping to get a kitten to keep me company during the week, but Ian surprised me with two parakeets so no cat. The parakeets are really cute, its so funny to watch them interact with each other!

Well that is about all that I have been up to over the last month. My apologies again for the month without a post, I’ll do my best to catch up and put up some extra good stories this month!

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!