I appoligize for any spelling/grammar errors in advance, this is a rushed entry.

This past weekend I had the great pleasure of travelling to Pavlodar for yet another sports competition: the winter mnogoborye, aka the winter equivalent of the multi-event competition I reported on last summer. Only three events this time around, but equally curious: skiing (3km), shooting (10 shots on a bullseye from around 10 meters), and push-ups (not wussy push-ups with arms going sideways, but serious, elbows-back, nose-the-floor, on-your-toes monstors).

Our team, as to be expected, took first among the rural teams. Yea! I personally earned the team 135 points (each event is worth 100), which is pretty damn good for a beginner. If I'd earned 200, I could have become a Candidate for Master of Sport. At 230, you earn the title Master of Sport, I think. Every sport, from basketball to chess, has its own benchmarks for Master of Sport. From there you can earn Master of Sport titles on the national and international levels. Perhaps these titles were good for bonuses during Soviet times; now they simply indicate to your competitors that you are not to be messed with.

Unfortunately, I wasn't quite good enough to be an individual medalist. This is mostly due to the fact that all three women from our region fell into the same age bracket, and the other two are both Masters of Sport, so they and another woman kicked my butt and I took fourth. Curiously enough, shooting was again my best event, though I was disappointed -- I've shot close to 70 at practice and only managed 55 in competition. Skiing was decent, I earned 44 points on an icy track with a strong wind (points are given based on finish time). But push-ups...

To be honest, I'm pretty pleased: three weeks ago I couldn't even do a singe one of these arm busters, and on Saturday I managed 11 in a row. The set-up was pretty grim -- we were doing push-ups straight after shooting on a cemet floor covered by a thin oriental carpet, seperated from the metal pings of the range by only a thin curtain. Our judge (also my coach...) placed a wooden box about 2 inches tall on the floor. "This box has one loose board," he informed us, " so I'll be able to hear if you really get low enough." And he could, also disqualifying any attempts at push-ups with poor form.

After I did mine, the judge watching the guys doing pull-ups asked me why I wasn't breathing right. "How are you supposed to?" I asked, "and why are you telling me this now?" "I thought you'd know physiology," he replied. "No, I teach English," I said. "Yeah, she's our American. Speaks Kazakh fluently, too," put in our coach (I'm fluent in Kazakh to those who don't speak it). "Yeah," chimed in one of my competitors from another region, "I saw her picture in the paper in full Kazakh costume!"

Celebrity that I am, I was blown out of the water on those push-ups. One woman from my region has a new baby and hasn't trained seriously in two years. She did 26 push-ups without thinking twice. And my other teammate who trains seriously and is studying to be a coach did 51. A few years ago, our coach's wife (also a Master of Sport) did 126 in under 4 minutes at a competition. She's in her forties. How many can you do?

Later, I was sitting in a very focused room filled with athletes waiting either to shoot or push/pull. My phone rang, loud in the anticipatory atmosphere. Why is it that other volunteers always call me at the worst possible time? I answered, because volunteers are cheap and there's no guarentee that this friend would ever risk the cell phone minutes to call again, and began speaking hushed but unmistakably English. Usually my strategy is to never speak English in public. That way strangers can choose to believe that I'm ethnically German but still Kazakhstani, even if they've heard rumors of an American in their midst. And this is why: as my teenage teammate later reported,"it was amazing! Everyone in the room turned and stared at you with these huge eyes and shocked faces!" Needless to say, it was a short conversation under that kind of pressure. But when I hung up, my teammate couldn't resist rubbing it in: he nudged one of his acquaintance competitors and said, "She speaks fluent Kazakh, too!"

This weekend I also hung out with some other volunteers in between events. I think Jeff is reporting on those discoveries, so check with him for news of pickled watermelon, the bunker bar, and the man in the hip coffe shop we knew was foreign and guessed to be German, Italian, or Danish. When we worked up the courage to ask him, he turned out to be from Michigan. The only other American in Pavlodar, and we couldn't even recognize on of our own! Though he worked for a German/Italian company, so we were partly right.

Sometimes, through all the fun and excitement of this life, real horror creeps in. Coming home to the hostel where the team was staying, the woman on door/key duty made sure that I knew that I was coming in late (it was 10:30), and that there was no way she was going to let in the young man accompaying me (it was another volunteer making sure I got there safely). "I recognize my own," she said. I explained the situation and she was quite surprised to learn that I was foreign ("don't be offended, but I thought you were German with your pretty round eyes"). Within 30 seconds of her discovery, she asked me to do something for her and invited me in to her lounge. There she took out her wallet, opened it to three pictures of a beautiful blond woman and two of a young boy. Her grandson, she explained, and her daughter. "I just thought," she said, " that maybe you'd seen her in your travels, see how she looks like Alla Pugachova's daughter?" It slowly became clear, as my host began crying, that this daughter was lost. "Look at her nice breasts," said this mother, "You can understand why they would take her?" Human trafficking, she said. Words that aren't meant to go together. In the sudden tears and my shock, I missed most of the details, but the essence remains. I promised I would keep my eyes open for this seven-years-gone woman, and also that I would pray.

The next day, she was ending her shift as we went to breakfast. She greeted me as "her beauty," answered my awkward questions about the hostel, and we said warm good-byes. And I will pray and hope. What else is there left to do?

Love,
Nora