Tall, fast, exotic, and famous

Kazakhstan has a funny way of fulfilling all my long-abandoned dreams. Here I am tall, fast, exotic, and famous – all things that I had mostly resigned myself to never be in America. These are the unexpected benefits of Peace Corps service.

The list of positive things I am learning about myself here goes on, of course, but this week brought out those four aspects. First, I competed in a volleyball tournament in Pavlodar as a new recruit representing our region. We didn’t play very well, but still, at a whopping 5’6” I’m poised to keep my spot on the team next year. Second, for the holiday on May 1st (used to be International Worker’s Day during the USSR, now is dedicated to national unity), I danced with a group of our teachers representing Uzbek culture. Organizations from around town took on a culture to present – ours involved national dress (hair in tiny braids, caps, tunics and flowing pants), dance (movement led mostly by wrist twisting and shoulder rocking), music (recorded horns and drums), and food (the ever popular plov – sort of like friend rice with mutton or chicken). Looking at pictures of the dance, I am the conspicuously tall, light-skinned redhead in a crowd of dark skinned, dark haired, round-faced dancers. And everyone in the crown seemed to already know me, I caught at least one “Americanka” spoken to a neighbor as we walked through the crowd. Such is my life.

You can’t help but encounter stereotypes of Americans here. Some are remnants of Cold War propaganda – one woman told me that her understanding of America was pornography and anarchy. More modern impressions come from film and mass media. And from these sources people have conflicting images; some see America as incredibly clean, trash free, and inhabited by movie stars. Others ask me if I’m scared to walk on the streets because of all the violence. Many think that there are no wild places left in America and that we all live in cities. Most believe that Americans don’t cook at all and only eat food prepackaged and factory made.

One student came to a harsh realization when I presented an “at the store” dialogue using dollars. “What, don’t you have tenge in America?” She was quite surprised to learn that we use only dollars. Her confusion makes sense, as here the dollar is often used to quote prices and the exchange rate is posted ever in our tiny two-teller bank. Saving money as dollars or euros is a natural reaction after the out-of-control inflation of the tenge during the 1990’s. So surely American banks must also display the tenge exchange.

Or the teacher, who when I told her that my parents bought tickets to come to Kazakhstan in July (yea!), responded, “It’s only May! Will it really take that long for them to get here?”

Like I said, I’m exotic here, with a very different understanding of the world than most people I interact with. It’s quite refreshing, even though I’m often bombarded with the same questions in every new social situation and it is a challenge to come up with new ways to explain who I am and why I’m here.

But it might be worth it all just to be fast: yesterday in conjunction with an upcoming holiday, the local government sponsored a track meet. School aged kids ran a relay and then the adults got to try their luck at the 1.4 km loop through town. Now, I’ve never run track or cross-county and at least once in my life I’ve renounced running for good and declared that I hate it, to the dismay of my marathon-running mother and sister. But I run here for exercise and may just have to start training more actively to keep up my reputation. Surprisingly enough I won the race for my age group, much to the delight of our gathered students, my friends from various sport events, and our school staff. Word spreads fast here and by the time we went out for a beer yesterday evening, the waitress knew enough to congratulate me on my victory. Not a bad first week of May.

In short, this can be a very difficult, confusing, stressful, sad, frustrating, and aggravating life. It is easy to feel angry, scared, and uncomfortable and want to bag the whole experiment and head home. There are certainly more pleasant or familiar places I can imagine myself, but even when things are the roughest, I know that there really is nothing else I would rather be doing and no experience I would rather be having.

Love,Nora