Monday, March 17, 2008

NBA JAM

Little Timor sends up a shot

Champions

One of my side projects is a youth basketball club. It's held every Sunday afternoon, and it's a time to feel the power of the gym teacher (whistles!) and the joy of Dikembe Mutombo (Rejected! Finger wag). Basically, the basketball club is full of kids that like to run around a gym and I get to teach them some basketball and exercise properly, and maybe some English, along the way.

Photo-op for some of the players



And just for kicks, a scene from the market.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

She came!


She's cute with the sheep


Not so much.


Men in hot rooms. This is my director's husband, flashing off his richness (belly).

Our sleigh driver, whom fell off a few times due to a few too many liquid coats.


Students celebrate Valentine's Day at the Pavlodar Library


It is with renewed vigor and a grilled cheese sandwich in stomach, that I attempt to convey the paradoxical nature of what happens when loving someone so intensely from so faraway comes so close to you for so short a period of time.

‘This is an act of mercy,’ is what shot through my mind when my loving girlfriend told me that she had purchased a plane ticket to visit me in Kazakhstan. Mercy from someone upstairs allowing her to come here unharmed and with a fair amount of swiftness, and also mercy from her in actually accepting my work in the world and coming here in the depths of the near-Siberian winter. This coming from the girl that is comfortable in the temperatures normally only found during the small windows of September 10th-15th and May 3rd-May 6th, these being the perfect days for 70° F in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Her timing to visit seems doomed to be unpleasant and nearly impossible, like a little brother pestering to play Wiffleball under a canopy of power lines and overgrown maple trees.

But she came! Flying across the world, past the expected and all too frequently used adage, ‘on the opposite end of the Earth’, all the way to Almaty, Kazakhstan, she came! Not to slight the musical appeal of the dombra, but she did not travel from America to Kazakhstan for the culture. It was a tertiary aim fo sho, but it is clear why she came so far. She came for me and her and so that we could be us for a brief period. To be together.

Her gesture was remarkable and she is stunning, making her beauty and valor and wholesomeness and understanding and allure to be regarded as legendary and therefore told through the ages.

We did many fun things, including:

-Riding a one-horse open sleigh across the steppe
-Meeting the former power lifting champion of Russia and Kazakhstan, unfortunately who is now missing all of his fingers
-Getting our personal photos taken alongside nearly all the significant artifacts in the Pavlodar Natural Museum of History
-Eating ten onions
-Playing with goats and baby lambs
-Making beshparmak (national dish of Kazakhstan)
-Smacking each other with birch leaves in a hot, steamy room
-Teaching three Spanish lessons
-Bathing a rat
-Preparing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s chef/head of food distribution
-Dancing like idiots

The point attempting to be conveyed here is that my girlfriend, whom has supported me in her own reluctant yet loving way ever since I knew I was going to Kazakhstan and for one and a half years called me nearly everyday since my work here began, totally broke out of her comfort zone and spent a great deal of time, money and faith in order to come visit me—and the recipe of us two together led to cooking up the greatest month ever.

As I am currently not in possession of fluxcapacitor-infused Dalorean, I can’t go back to that greatest month. This makes the next few months a bit trying.

I know there are many people out there that complain about long-distance relationships—tough no matter what the mileage—but there is an increasingly tangible goodness in this self-imposed unhappiness that I’ve put myself and her through. I’m not looking forward to my work here to be over anytime soon, as I feel accepted and useful here to a myriad of causes, but I am looking forward to actually being with the woman I am with for more than two months out of two years, and finally grabbing that carrot that has been dangling in front of us for so long now.