Listen and Learn! Jennifer is here. Music is heard! I live, work and do more.
This does not represent the United States Peace Corps or the United States Government in any shape or fashion.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Monday, January 14, 2008
Let's talk about the weather because the rest is something entirely different.
-20 normally with a low of -35 so far. Also, there is snow.
My plant, Phosphorus, stoically stares out the window.
Had a productive meeting with a gym teacher and school director this past week, discussing plans for a basketball club and potential tournament between other schools in Pavlodar. This opportunity is really exciting, as I get to teach kids the fundamentals of basketball—there will be many practices on the Zen of boxing out—as well as get a little exercise in the process.
The school director mentioned that it would be a great chance to keep his students from sitting around, playing computer games and eventually turning to drinking or whathaveyou later on. I agree.
I must procure a photo of the school director, as his appearance conjures up thoughts of Humpty Dumpty, but with suspenders. Also he has a beard and wears flannel shirts, so perhaps he's more comparable to that of a rounded Al Borland. He is Legend.
Happy Old New Year.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
ring a ding ding
The man seems too short and young to be the man. He’s also uninspired, but what can you say about agreeing to sing the same two songs in at least ten different cafes over the course one evening. It’s not the most fun way to spend your New Year’s, though very lucrative.
The man in question is Serik Musalinof. Supposedly. He is known across the great Republic of Kazakhstan for singing a little diddy that harmonizes all the main cities of this nation, and another song about Pavlodar. People all dance and sing along to his songs, but a fair amount also let out a groan whenever they hear it as well due to its unbridled pop nationalism. It is a relationship similar to New Jersey with its Bon Jovi.
We’re at a restaurant, BierXanna, to ring in the New Year. We, as per the end of 2007 definition, are Adam, Nick, Nick’s brother Chris (visiting from LA), Jeffrey (new cool volunteer) and me. The restaurant reservation is a lovely treat, compliments of Chris. It turned out to be the usual fanfare of greatness: food, conversation, dancing with Santa Claus, belly dancers, beverages and President Nursultan Nazarbayev giving a speech at the midnight hour. Follow up the mid-day wake-up with a banya steam session, and you have yourself a proper payment of respects to 2007 and a necessarily clean welcome to 2008.
2007 was spent, minus for three weeks in the US, twelve hours in Germany, six over Europe and ten or so over the Atlantic, completely in Kazakhstan. It brought me a fine amount of accomplishment (AIDS awareness project, summer camps, English and film clubs, tutoring, translations, children’s clubs, book donations, etc.), frustration (communication problems regardless of language barriers), sickness (lick those rubber suckers, put em’ on my nipples and strap me to a radiator to check my heart rate again, nurse), and health (running, swimming in the Irytish, basketball evenings, basketball club).
I started it living with my good friend, Baurzahn Ablyavich and I have ended it living in my own apartment, now going on seven months. I started with attempting to get a mouse out of my suitcase that stowed away in my bag from a train ride and ended with me having a pet rat that either has an unfortunately placed tumor or has extremely fertile carry-on luggage (it’s a male, and quite male at that).
Most importantly, it started with a growing sense of doubt over my decision to join Peace Corps and over exactly how I could be of assistance to people here, and ended with a growing sense of excitement for the opportunities available and the pressurizing time left to accomplish works of importance.
My main organization shows signs of regular professional improvement, from the implementation of project planning, weekly volunteer meetings, transparent financial oversight even for the smallest items, gaining confidence in working with international health groups and simply a confidence knowing that we have worked as a team.
My secondary projects show signs of progress in that I helped send sixteen students to the US last summer for work, tutored two that will pursue their undergraduate and graduate degrees overseas, assisted one with international business presentations for a conference in Afghanistan, aided students to finally ask me a question other than “how are you?” when they greet me and have a different response other than “fine.”, showed students a different side of America and the world through independent films, camps and concert performances (with the grand assistance of the perpetually active volcano that is fellow volunteer Adam Henricksen), and laying the groundwork for a youth basketball club.
Run-on sentences happen. A lot, in fact, happens.
I received an e-mail from a dear friend of mine this past week that covered the topic of young adulthood and the questions that linger within. What is the point of work? What comes next? Why is it is so hard to compartmentalize the graying aspects of life so they can actually be dealt with? Add a little side order of confusion over relationships and a longing for the joyful past, and you have a lost path that I think is all too frighteningly common.
Putting aside the fact that we are dear friends, and no one else can substitute for that kind of understanding, who am I to answer these questions? I’m a young adult with constant questions of what is the point of this work? and what’s next? except there lies a very obvious expiration date to find the answers here. But taken flatly in a context outside of friends’ understanding, the answers fail to materialize quickly. This past week, however, and the experiences of the past year that led up to it, made me confident in confronting these questions and others.
My old friend Baurzahn invited me over to his home before New Year’s and we reminisced about the silliness of last year; how we barely spoke any Russian, the awkward dinner visit in which he slyly fed me a complicated toast in ode to a particular woman’s beautiful eyes and figure (whom I had just met), and an assortment of other daily happenstances that hold a special place between us.
Nick’s brother provided a very fresh, very American perspective on Kazakhstan—particularly on the raw emotion that people show here so often. I found myself ashamed that I was taking these displays and people for granted, as if living here for sixteen months makes them less interesting. Routine can do that to many, but why was I already in a routine of hum-hum acceptance? Why at age 23 in Central Asia while speaking Russian while meeting kind, seed-selling street corner grandmas and politically pushy drunken uncles, and eager-minded students, and open-hearted social workers and squeeze-box playing musicians, and yoga-teaching sport enthusiasts with funny English, and working with a memorable-quote-per-minute boss, am I in a routine that makes me not notice how great it all is?
So I snap out of it. I take notice once again, and again and again.
There is no time to compartmentalize anymore. Block scheduling is over. The dewey decimal system is useless. I have stopped my search for the period. Life is a run-on sentence.
2008 is up and running.
The man in question is Serik Musalinof. Supposedly. He is known across the great Republic of Kazakhstan for singing a little diddy that harmonizes all the main cities of this nation, and another song about Pavlodar. People all dance and sing along to his songs, but a fair amount also let out a groan whenever they hear it as well due to its unbridled pop nationalism. It is a relationship similar to New Jersey with its Bon Jovi.
We’re at a restaurant, BierXanna, to ring in the New Year. We, as per the end of 2007 definition, are Adam, Nick, Nick’s brother Chris (visiting from LA), Jeffrey (new cool volunteer) and me. The restaurant reservation is a lovely treat, compliments of Chris. It turned out to be the usual fanfare of greatness: food, conversation, dancing with Santa Claus, belly dancers, beverages and President Nursultan Nazarbayev giving a speech at the midnight hour. Follow up the mid-day wake-up with a banya steam session, and you have yourself a proper payment of respects to 2007 and a necessarily clean welcome to 2008.
2007 was spent, minus for three weeks in the US, twelve hours in Germany, six over Europe and ten or so over the Atlantic, completely in Kazakhstan. It brought me a fine amount of accomplishment (AIDS awareness project, summer camps, English and film clubs, tutoring, translations, children’s clubs, book donations, etc.), frustration (communication problems regardless of language barriers), sickness (lick those rubber suckers, put em’ on my nipples and strap me to a radiator to check my heart rate again, nurse), and health (running, swimming in the Irytish, basketball evenings, basketball club).
I started it living with my good friend, Baurzahn Ablyavich and I have ended it living in my own apartment, now going on seven months. I started with attempting to get a mouse out of my suitcase that stowed away in my bag from a train ride and ended with me having a pet rat that either has an unfortunately placed tumor or has extremely fertile carry-on luggage (it’s a male, and quite male at that).
Most importantly, it started with a growing sense of doubt over my decision to join Peace Corps and over exactly how I could be of assistance to people here, and ended with a growing sense of excitement for the opportunities available and the pressurizing time left to accomplish works of importance.
My main organization shows signs of regular professional improvement, from the implementation of project planning, weekly volunteer meetings, transparent financial oversight even for the smallest items, gaining confidence in working with international health groups and simply a confidence knowing that we have worked as a team.
My secondary projects show signs of progress in that I helped send sixteen students to the US last summer for work, tutored two that will pursue their undergraduate and graduate degrees overseas, assisted one with international business presentations for a conference in Afghanistan, aided students to finally ask me a question other than “how are you?” when they greet me and have a different response other than “fine.”, showed students a different side of America and the world through independent films, camps and concert performances (with the grand assistance of the perpetually active volcano that is fellow volunteer Adam Henricksen), and laying the groundwork for a youth basketball club.
Run-on sentences happen. A lot, in fact, happens.
I received an e-mail from a dear friend of mine this past week that covered the topic of young adulthood and the questions that linger within. What is the point of work? What comes next? Why is it is so hard to compartmentalize the graying aspects of life so they can actually be dealt with? Add a little side order of confusion over relationships and a longing for the joyful past, and you have a lost path that I think is all too frighteningly common.
Putting aside the fact that we are dear friends, and no one else can substitute for that kind of understanding, who am I to answer these questions? I’m a young adult with constant questions of what is the point of this work? and what’s next? except there lies a very obvious expiration date to find the answers here. But taken flatly in a context outside of friends’ understanding, the answers fail to materialize quickly. This past week, however, and the experiences of the past year that led up to it, made me confident in confronting these questions and others.
My old friend Baurzahn invited me over to his home before New Year’s and we reminisced about the silliness of last year; how we barely spoke any Russian, the awkward dinner visit in which he slyly fed me a complicated toast in ode to a particular woman’s beautiful eyes and figure (whom I had just met), and an assortment of other daily happenstances that hold a special place between us.
Nick’s brother provided a very fresh, very American perspective on Kazakhstan—particularly on the raw emotion that people show here so often. I found myself ashamed that I was taking these displays and people for granted, as if living here for sixteen months makes them less interesting. Routine can do that to many, but why was I already in a routine of hum-hum acceptance? Why at age 23 in Central Asia while speaking Russian while meeting kind, seed-selling street corner grandmas and politically pushy drunken uncles, and eager-minded students, and open-hearted social workers and squeeze-box playing musicians, and yoga-teaching sport enthusiasts with funny English, and working with a memorable-quote-per-minute boss, am I in a routine that makes me not notice how great it all is?
So I snap out of it. I take notice once again, and again and again.
There is no time to compartmentalize anymore. Block scheduling is over. The dewey decimal system is useless. I have stopped my search for the period. Life is a run-on sentence.
2008 is up and running.
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