I Have Seen My New Home...

What's the best way to stop an SUV? Answer below. Hint: it turns the road into a slow-motion video game.

I'll bet you are all curious about my permanent site -- and if you aren't you should just skip to the last paragraph. In general, this is a super long entry, so take a break, go get a cup of tea, come back in a week, or skim as you see fit. This might be the last entry for awhile.

The time leading up to our departure for week-long site visits went well: our Halloween community event was a big sucess, but nothing like we had imagined it! Which I think is how most things will go for the next two years. The pumpkins our students carved ranged in color from grey to pink, and most were pear-shaped. They made for some wonderful jack-o-lanterns. Personally, I liked the one where our tenth graders carved the shape of a heart, wrote my name on the cutout piece, and gave it to me. Aww...

These are the same girls who I watched yesterday march around the school yard in military fatigues.They were participating in a Military Class competition, showing off their ability to follow the orders of a peer drill sergeant. And despite the sheer strangeness of seeing 10th grade girls singing marching songs and yelling commands, I was still pleased when my girls won.

But anyway, I was talking about my site...

To find where I'll be for the next two years, look up at the handy Kazakhstan map I'm sure you have tacked to your wall. Start in Almaty, down in the south east corner. Then head north, dipping around the western edge of the bizarre, half-salt, half-fresh Lake Balkash. Stop at the train station to pick up a huge, eyeless, split-open smoked fish from one of the vendors on the platform. Say good-bye to the hills you pass on the way -- they are the last bit of elevation you will see for quite a while. Welcome to the semi-arid steppe. Between here and Astana, the new capital, enjoy looking out the window at miles and miles of dust. Admire the ghost towns and the towns you think are ghost towns until you see smoke rising from dilapidated chimneys. Wave to the lone horsemen and their flocks of cattle. Imagine you are in western North Dakota.

You'll pass through Astana in the night, maybe waking up on your bunk when a new compartment-mate boards the train, or maybe stirring when the train comes to a station and you body senses the lack of motion. Be prepared -- when you get off the train and try to rest, your body will still sway, missing the rocking sensation. Get off the train at the end of the line, in the relatively large and mostly Soviet-looking city of Pavlodar. Then hail a taxi and follow the Irtish River north. In about 200 kilometers, just south of the Russian border, you'll come to a village of about 4-5,00 people. This is my new home. Total travel time: 30 hours by train and 3 hours by car.

I am excited about my site. The land is steppe, but the village is on one bank of the Irtish river, almost on the edge of the Siberian forests. So there are both a good number of trees and an incredible expanse of sky. The place gets cold in the winter with lots of good snow to ski on and hot in the summer with plenty of gnats. The people are a mix of Kazakh, Russian, and a small population of Tartars. There used to be a large German contingent, but most of them took up the offer of repatriation and abandoned the country -- leaving behind more ghost towns and German-looking genes.

Everyone in the village speaks Russian: the proximity to Russia means that the influence of both Russian and Soviet culture has been very strong. But the Kazakhs are making a comeback, as evidenced by my work site. I will be teaching at the new Kazakh 3rd School, which was completed in 2002. All classes are taught in Kazakh (theoretically; I've noticed teachers slip into Russian from time to time), and so are the day to day administrative operations of the school (ie, meetings, schedules, signs, etc). What is so wonderful about this placement is that I do not have to give up all my years of studying Russian, but that I also have motivation and opportunity to continue learning Kazakh.

I call the week at site my Trial by Fire in the Cold Rain and Snow. I met an incredible amount of people, used almost every word of my Kazakh, taught 20 hours of English in grades ranging from 2nd to 10th, met my new host family, broke in my winter boots, ate amazingly fresh and rich milk products, answered ridiculous questions about myself and America, helped in the cafeteria, schmoozed with the visiting school inspection comitee, etc, etc, etc. The 30 hour train ride back was actually a nice rest.

Probably my favorite parts of the entire week were the students, sweetend milk that tased like custard, and my new Kazakh/Mongolian tutor (she'll get her own entry later). Every morning, all 200 students at the school gather in the gym for pre-class aerobics. They form ranks based on grade, the smallest ones in the front and the 11th graders looking cool in the back. And then they all do stretching exercises to the count of their gym teacher. Bir! Eki! Ush! Tort!

If you've never seen eight-year-olds in suits doing hip swivels and reaching for the sky, I highly recommend it. I, for one, had to try my hardest not to giggle as I watched their earnest efforts: as a monitor for the activity, it would have been decidedly unprofessional to break into laughter.

The answer to the stop-an-SUV trivia question is: try to get it through my village just as evening sets in. Why? Because the streets fill with cows. Every night, just as the air gets dusky from coal-fired banyas and burning trash, cows pour into the village from wherever it is they go all day. They use the main streets, moving as herds until they get closer to home and then going their seperate ways. These cows do this every day without prompting: there are no herders, and only when a cow doesn't come home is there any problem. Unless you are trying to drive through town. Cows are slow, and they don't respond well to horns. But the impatient, and crazy, Kazakhstani drives don't let that daunt them. They weave through the cows and mud, crisscrossing the road in an effort to find the best path. It really does remind me of some sort of computer game: dodge the cows without going over 5 miles an hour. Don't get stuck in the mud!

The really fun thing is to walk against the flow of traffic, and by that I do mean the flow of cows. They just don't give a damn where you want to go. But if you can find a spot with the river and the mountains and the setting sun, it is worth the game of dodge-cow.

I have three more weeks to revel in the cows before I leave for my site. If for some reason you have read this far and were planning on sending me a package sometime soon, you should wait until I get a new address. Packages or letters that reach the PC office after I'm gone won't be forwarded to me, meaning I probably won't get them until January

Thanks for words, prayers, and love. Hope to give you some more contact info soon -- maybe even a cell phone number!

Love,
Nora