Some negatives ...

Amanda, one of the volunteers who lives here in Koktobe Eki, was taking a fifteen-minute taxi ride back home from the Peace Corps hub site. A couple of drunk guys got into her taxi and started harassing her, finally getting out and trying to follow her home. All the way they were trying to embrace her, slapping her butt, and presumably saying ungentlemanly things. Instead of going to her own home, she wisely went to Tim's, and called for help. Tim's host father and five other guys came running out and roughed the two drunks up a little bit. The drunks ran away, but the host family gave chase, finally found them in a bar in Turgen, and dragged them to the police station in Koktobe Eki. They're released now, pending trial.

Amanda's fine. The guys weren't local, they were Uzbeks, but it was the middle of the day, and we routinely take taxis home from Esik. It's good that we were reminded that stuff like that can happen here and that we have to be careful (especially the girls) and assert ourselves if a situation makes us uncomfortable. It also turns out that Tim's host family gave chase not out of eagerness for justice for Amanda, but because the Uzbeks called them some bad names. Swear words do mean more here.

Our computer project may be cancelled. The teacher who was helping us - mostly by just letting us into the computer lab - went on vacation last Friday. All along, the agreement was that the school director would let us into the computer lab while the computer teacher was gone. But for some reason, when we went in to get the key for our class on Friday, he refused to give it to us. His various reasons were that the linoleum needed to be cleaned, that we might break the computers, that he wanted the Peace Corps to buy him new drapes for the teacher lounge (and the Peace Corps agreed). In the end, though, he basically said that he wasn't going to give us the key because he didn't care. So unless we can find some new computers with powepoint that the kids can use, the classes will be cancelled. Immediately after talking to the director, we went to the town cafe to have lunch, and the computer teacher was there, in a three-piece suit, and stammering drunk.

But don't think this week has been all bad. It sounds like I might get a position teaching math and physics in english as party of an immersion program somewhere, which would agree with me a lot more than just teaching english. My fourth and final immersion teaching lesson went great - I had been trying to make my classes interesting with lots of critical thinking activities, but I was aiming way over the speaking level of the students. For the last lesson, I taught simple comparative statements like "the fish is tastier than the broom", and it went great. Last night there was a big party at my house because one of the family members bought a new car (a 1985 Lada without a starter - to get it running, you push it and pop the clutch), and both grandpas came over and got drunk, which always guarantees a good time. The morning after one of the grandpas was sitting at the table with me finishing off the bottle of vodka from the night before. Did I want any? No, thank you, I had class. And this morning the Koktobe Eki volunteers made chili.

I'm working on making the website better, so please bear with me. It turns out that the php "reference" that I downloaded so hasitly and without reading before I left is actually a php reference reference, that is, a four-page tutorial on using pointers in php. So after I can get some real documentation, I'll start making this a little nicer.

Week four ...

This Saturday was Kaz 15's "culture day", which is a big party in the morning with lots of food from every major ethnic group in the area (Uigur, Kazakh, Turkish, and Russian) and shows from each village put on by volunteers and locals alike. There was a belly-dance that blew the Kulture Klatsch away (you Boiseans know what I'm talking about), a roof-raising Uigur dance from the Koktobe Bir kids, a long jam by Dan on a giant Uigur dombra-type thing (I forget the name) that made me think of Alice in Wonderland's caterpillar and made old Turkish men get up and dance like they were forty again, and several traditional dombra-accompanied folk tunes from Koktobe Eki: the Kazakh standards Erkem Ai, Kozimning Karasin and the American standard Blister in the Sun. See the photos section.

If everything continues to go well, the kids in our computer class will have web pages of their own up on this site in a couple weeks. Again, if any of you with better internet access than I do want to mail me a primer on how to use Kazakh fonts in a web page in a way that will be readable to everyone, feel free.

In Kazakh, a literal word-for-word transcription of "I want to taste it" is "Eating towards-look is coming to me". The language is coming along, but with stuff like this, it takes some time. ("To taste" in Kazakh is "Eating-look", that is, the gerund of to eat followed by the infinitive for look. To say that you want something, you put the verb stem in the dative case, which expresses going towards something, and say that that verb is coming, that is, you use the verb for to come conjugated for the third person, and finally, to say that it is you and not someone else that wants it, you say "to me".)

I went ghosting in the middle of the steppe this Friday. An hour drive on paved roads and a half hour on dirt roads brought us to a tiny house under a big sky where my host father's younger brother lives. We ate bes barmak (meat on pasta served on big platters that you eat with your hands - the cleaner you get your bones, the more beautiful your wife will be!) and drank vodka by the light of gas lamps while wild ostriches (or something that looked a lot like an ostrich) ran accross the steppe somewhere outside. Someday, I hope to go to a party where the major source of entertainment won't be how badly I speak Kazakh.

Coming back from ghosting (at 3am, and by the way, at least some Kazakhs do have designated drivers) we got a flat tire. I was pretty impressed with what good humour everyone had, even though they were tired and drunk and there was no flashlight and no moon and no jack. Everyone was having a great time. How does one change the tire without a jack? Everyone gets out and lifts the corner of the car while someone piles stuff under it, repeat until the car is high enough to get the tire off.