Assignment ...
Assignment day has come and gone. And I am going to Kokshetau (Kokshetav) in the Akmola Oblast, in the deep dark Kazakh north. Yes, my winters will be long and dark. But everyone I talk to calls that part of Kazakhstan the "Switzerland" of Central Asia, the most beautiful part of the country. Perhaps that's because they only visit in the summer. I'm thrilled anyway, and will be having my camping gear shipped to me. I'll also be living in a big city - it was the capitol of the northern Oblast before the borders changed, putting it in the same Oblast with the capitol of the whole country. 675k people will share my streets, and this means, among other things, internet access. I think I'll miss village life, to tell the truth.
I'll be working in a secondary school (where volunteers have worked before, some time ago) teaching math to seventh graders - yes, math, in English. This is part of a new English immersion program that the Kazakh government is hastily putting together and with which the Peace Corps is helping with fifteen volunteers who will teach non-English subjects in English. I hestitate to express much optimism or pessimism in such a public forum as this, but I know a number of volunteers who were assigned to non-English teaching assignments and who are now teaching English, because nobody understood them. We'll see. I'll give it my best.
I also will get a host family. I'll be living in a three-room apartment with a young man and his mother. There will be hot water. O! There will be hot water! The young man is described as 18 years old, "really smart" and a "character" who speaks English very well (which is a downside, really), and with whom it's ok to pair me because I "don't let people push me around". He plays guitar and gets in trouble at school. I think this'll be a lot of fun.
Another side note: there will be another volunteer in Kokshetau city with me. His name is Brian, and he will be leading discussion sections on English literature at a local pedagological college (early twenties) that's 95% women. At least three male volunteers who have served in Kokshetau ended up marrying locals. Now, before I left, my Uncle Ron gave me some good advice in Washington D.C. on this subject in the form of a story he heard in the navy. A cadet married while in service, and five years later the marriage was in ruins. While arguing one day, the wife said, "I was so stupid when I married you!" And the former cadet answered, "I know, but I was in the Navy, and too horny to notice." "Always ask yourself," Uncle Ron told me, "are you too horny to notice?"
I've made it through one week of practicum, too. It went pretty well. They have a lot of vocabulary (they know "rhino", for instance), but almost no speaking or listening skills. They're also expert at pretending to understand, so unless you're careful to do cheating-proof content-based questions, I can imagine an English teacher going weeks or months mistakedly thinking that their students understand everything. The question, "do you understand?" is completely worthless - the answer is always yes.
Since I got so many people remarking about how cute the puppy is, I'd like to talk about a dog's place in Kazakh culture. Akhtaban was in a litter of six, of which two survived. His brother, Sartaban, has a long hairless scar on his back where he was burnt with scalded water as a puppy for playing too close to the table. Sartaban is very sickly, and will probably not last too much longer. At my house the dogs are only fed bread, and mostly when they're puppies and the family likes them because they're cute. They don't have water dishes, either. Akhtaban's mother just gave birth to eight new puppies, of which five have already died, and the remainder of which my host mom says will be "thrown away" - we don't need any more dogs. Aktaban and Sartaban were caught the other day playing with the corpse of one of their new brothers. Given all this, I'd say there's as much of the photographer as the subject in those pictures of Aktaban. It was a very American thing to take those sympathetic pictures of our dog.
By the way, all you prospective volunteers should remember during pre- service training that the Peace Corps absolutely doesn't take relationships into consideration when making your site placements. There isn't a couple from PST that isn't placed less than twenty hours apart. I personally don't like it, of course, but I would do the same thing if I were them.
After playing in a concert put on by the volunteers a group of us went to a cafe (bar) in Turgen. Because of the concert I had my harmonicas with me and Dan, a great guitarist who lives in the next town over, had brought his guitar, so we went outside to jam for a while. A crowd gathered and started clapping and hooting along. After a while, one of the guys told us that we had to come inside, so we did. They had the DJ shut off the dance music, brought a couple of chairs to the middle of the dance floor, and we played while the whole drunken Kazakh bar stood around us in a circle, grinning and yelling and dancing. Afterwards, everyone wanted to shake our hands and clap us on the back and ask us questions we didn't understand. And I felt like a real ambassador.
I'll be working in a secondary school (where volunteers have worked before, some time ago) teaching math to seventh graders - yes, math, in English. This is part of a new English immersion program that the Kazakh government is hastily putting together and with which the Peace Corps is helping with fifteen volunteers who will teach non-English subjects in English. I hestitate to express much optimism or pessimism in such a public forum as this, but I know a number of volunteers who were assigned to non-English teaching assignments and who are now teaching English, because nobody understood them. We'll see. I'll give it my best.
I also will get a host family. I'll be living in a three-room apartment with a young man and his mother. There will be hot water. O! There will be hot water! The young man is described as 18 years old, "really smart" and a "character" who speaks English very well (which is a downside, really), and with whom it's ok to pair me because I "don't let people push me around". He plays guitar and gets in trouble at school. I think this'll be a lot of fun.
Another side note: there will be another volunteer in Kokshetau city with me. His name is Brian, and he will be leading discussion sections on English literature at a local pedagological college (early twenties) that's 95% women. At least three male volunteers who have served in Kokshetau ended up marrying locals. Now, before I left, my Uncle Ron gave me some good advice in Washington D.C. on this subject in the form of a story he heard in the navy. A cadet married while in service, and five years later the marriage was in ruins. While arguing one day, the wife said, "I was so stupid when I married you!" And the former cadet answered, "I know, but I was in the Navy, and too horny to notice." "Always ask yourself," Uncle Ron told me, "are you too horny to notice?"
I've made it through one week of practicum, too. It went pretty well. They have a lot of vocabulary (they know "rhino", for instance), but almost no speaking or listening skills. They're also expert at pretending to understand, so unless you're careful to do cheating-proof content-based questions, I can imagine an English teacher going weeks or months mistakedly thinking that their students understand everything. The question, "do you understand?" is completely worthless - the answer is always yes.
Since I got so many people remarking about how cute the puppy is, I'd like to talk about a dog's place in Kazakh culture. Akhtaban was in a litter of six, of which two survived. His brother, Sartaban, has a long hairless scar on his back where he was burnt with scalded water as a puppy for playing too close to the table. Sartaban is very sickly, and will probably not last too much longer. At my house the dogs are only fed bread, and mostly when they're puppies and the family likes them because they're cute. They don't have water dishes, either. Akhtaban's mother just gave birth to eight new puppies, of which five have already died, and the remainder of which my host mom says will be "thrown away" - we don't need any more dogs. Aktaban and Sartaban were caught the other day playing with the corpse of one of their new brothers. Given all this, I'd say there's as much of the photographer as the subject in those pictures of Aktaban. It was a very American thing to take those sympathetic pictures of our dog.
By the way, all you prospective volunteers should remember during pre- service training that the Peace Corps absolutely doesn't take relationships into consideration when making your site placements. There isn't a couple from PST that isn't placed less than twenty hours apart. I personally don't like it, of course, but I would do the same thing if I were them.
After playing in a concert put on by the volunteers a group of us went to a cafe (bar) in Turgen. Because of the concert I had my harmonicas with me and Dan, a great guitarist who lives in the next town over, had brought his guitar, so we went outside to jam for a while. A crowd gathered and started clapping and hooting along. After a while, one of the guys told us that we had to come inside, so we did. They had the DJ shut off the dance music, brought a couple of chairs to the middle of the dance floor, and we played while the whole drunken Kazakh bar stood around us in a circle, grinning and yelling and dancing. Afterwards, everyone wanted to shake our hands and clap us on the back and ask us questions we didn't understand. And I felt like a real ambassador.
posted by thegio at 6:29 PM
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