Haven't posted in a while

I haven't posted in a while (which is probably the single most common way to begin a blog entry in the whole internet). But I hope to make up for it by posting not only a post about my fascinating travels in the South, but three book reviews, none of which I hope will get me in trouble with the Peace Corps, and a new set of pictures, a few of which feature me looking stupid. So accpet this and forgive me, gentle readers!

Book Review - Kashtanka

In Chekov's short story, Kashtanka, a loveable and innocent dog named Kashtanka is accidentally lost in the winter street by her drunken, abusive, carpenter master. She is rescued from death in the cold by a sympathetic circus clown animal trainer, who nurses her back to well-fed health, introduces her to his other performing animals, including a lazy cat, loquacious goose, and kindly pig, and trains her to take part in his act. Kashtanka is re-christened Tyotya, and after a brief period of nostalgia nearly forgets her old life and learns to love the clown and doing tricks for him. When the goose dies, we see how much the clown cares for his animals, too - he weeps and mourns as for a human. We cannot but believe he loves Tyotya no less.

But on the fateful day of Kashtanka-Tyotya's very first live circus performance, her old master happens to be in the audience. Recognizing his lost dog in the circus ring, and being the dolt that he is, he whistles and calls to her, upon which Kashtanka runs to her old master reflexively. What, exactly, transpires after that between the clown and the carpenter isn't related, but in the last chapter of the book, Kashtanka is doggedly and lovingly following at the heels of her old master, who smells of "sawdust and glue", and her life with the clown now seems to her no more substantial than a dream.

This is a clear metaphor for the willing, animal-like subservience of the proletariat to its capitalist exploiters. Chekov was ahead of his time in presenting to us the story of Kashtanka as a dialectic tragedy. Kashtankas of the world, unite!

Nauryz

My school has two weeks off for Nauryz, the traditional Kazakh New Year, which takes place on the spring equinox instead of the winter solstice. Someone from my school said to me, "The other volunteers we had traveled a lot more." So, always eager to please, I decided to take a trip down south to see how they met the new year in the most Kazakh part of the country.

The first part of the trip was, as always, a train ride, this time twenty eight hours, departing Kokshetau at 6pm Saturday and arriving at Shymkent at midnight between Sunday and Monday. The North always rolls platscar, as what is now becoming a point of pride, and plats was packed with un-ticketed folks this time. After Karaganda the first night the luggage racks were claimed immediately, and all night long I had strangers sitting on my feet. However, maybe because we had a group of four Americans together, nobody was even pressured to give up their spot. We talked a lot, got ourselves beaten badly by an old Kazakh babushka in Jyndy, a local card game, and bought up all the delicious train platform food we could eat. (I'm not being facetious - in the south, the train platform food is the best street food in Kazakhstan. I look forward to it whenever I travel.)

A lot of volunteers had come to Shymkent - one count was about forty - and every region had an apartment rented for them, for a total of four apartments. So mostly our time there was spent in your typical Peace Corps conversations, whether it was in the apartment, at a bar, in a restaurant, or walking down the street. The highlights were:

- Bryan getting his eyebrows singed in the giant green fireball that enveloped the apartment's gas-fueled hot water heater when we were trying to light it the first time without really understanding how it worked,

- The two kegs of beer, complete with a giant electric beer refrigeration device of some sort, that somehow one of the volunteers had gotten for free and which provided disco-less entertainment both nights,

- The fact that it was hot enough for me to get a sunburn, and

- The horse games. We got to see the Kazakh traditional horse games at the Shymkent hippodrome on Nauryz itself, which was just awesome. There were normal races as well as special games. For example, there was horseback wrestling, where two men try to pull each other off their respective horses. There was also Kyz Kuu, which means "Chase the Girl", wherein a girl in traditional dress on a horse tries to outride a boy in traditional dress on a (different) horse. If the boy catches the girl, he gets to kiss her. If he doesn't, she gets to ride with him again past the crowd while beating him with a whip. But the prize was "Kok-par", which is basically polo played with a freshly decapitated sheep carcass. And I mean the whole carcass, the innards and all. Each team tries to reach down from horseback to pick up the carcass and throw it into these giant bins at either side of the field. It was incredible.

After Nauryz, I headed off to Chili, where I have two friends from training. It basically took an entire day to get to Chili from Shymkent although it's only a five hour drive away, partly because I had by that time already forgotten the real meaning of the Kazakh word "kazir", which is inaccurately translated in Kazakh-English dictionaries as meaning "now" (see my earlier post on this subject). One volunteer, a girl who studied Kazakh with me, is living with a Kazakh host family performing all the traditional duties of a Kazakh woman, such as cleaning, cooking, and laundry, in addition to teaching thirty hours at her school. She is one of those quietly awesome volunteers that make you wonder, "could I do that?" and who is visible beloved by all the local people around her. I delivered her 5000 TGZ worth of Kazakh novels from Kokshetau because strangely enough, she can't seem to find Kazakh literature in the South, although Kazakh is much more widely used there. She took me to a great local Nauryz party where I had the best Koje (a traditional Kazakh Nauryz soup) that I've tried yet. After that, I met up with the other volunteer, gave a lesson with him at his school, played football in the courtyard, and tried his special vegetarian "chili-borscht" recipe. (How often do you cook this, I asked. Oh, a couple times a week, he said, and I usually cook enough for a couple days. So basically, you eat this all the time, I said. He paused, looked down, and said, well, yeah. The guy is a vegetarian, and he's making it in Kazakhstan, bless him.) He's also doing great work there. Chili, I think, is a lucky town.

From that I headed for Turkestan, one of the oldest cities in Kazakhstan, and the only place that I've been here that I would call touristy in some respect. (One facet of that was that I got my passport checked, which rarely happens to me outside of trains.) On the train to Turkestan I got invited to sit with some babushkas with literature degrees who wanted to serve me tea and talk about Iraq. Having given them answers that satisfied them and chatted for some time longer, one of them ceremoniously presented me with a little bone that she had been keeping in her purse. "Don't lose it, always protect it!" she said. "It means you are like a son to me now!" I really didn't know what to say. When we arrived at the train station, I helped carry their bags to a taxi and they all kissed me on the cheek before departing.

And suddenly, when I turned around, there was to my surprise another volunteer friend of mine whom I had last seen heading further west from Shymkent to celebrate Nauryz in Araslk. After expressing our astonishment to each other at running into each other accidentally, I asked what he was doing there (and what follows is a paraphrase based on my memory - if you're actually in the know and I get details wrong, well, live with it). "Well, I was in Aralsk waiting for a 3am train to Kyzylorda," he said. "I had gotten to the station around 8pm, and as trains came and went the station would alternately fill up and get empty again. I had been sitting in the station cafe for about five hours - it was about one in the morning - when a very drunk Kazakh man came up to me and demanded money. I refused to give it to him, and after going back and forth for a while, he said that after the next train left the station would be empty, except for me, and he would come back with a bunch of his buddies and 'nobody would ever find me.' So I decided that I had better get on the next train. Since I didn't have less than a 5000 TGZ note on me I couldn't get away with paying less than a 2000 TGZ bribe to the conductor -- there's no way to force him to give you change. I rode the train until I got to someplace else where there were volunteers and where I could catch a train back to Astana, and that ended up being Turkestan."

So I saw Turkestan for a day, had a delicious dinner of beer bread and taco-salad at yet another wonderful volunteer's apartment, and then headed home on the 3am Kokshetau-bound train. And nobody asked me for money in the train station, thank goodness.

Book Review - Gift of the USA

"Gift of the USA" is an famously critical book about the early days of Peace Corps in Kazakhstan, written by a disillusioned volunteer, Ruth Moss, who actually served here and terminated service after only one year in country. All page numbers refer to the 2002 iUniverse hardcover printing.

Reading her book, one has to agree that Ruth Moss was most likely an excellent volunteer. She was experienced, strong, able to take initiative, a hard worker, and able to build close local relationships. And so, when she delivers her climactic speech to her tearful counterpart describing why she is terminating her service after only one year, instead of cheering her brave denunciation of Peace Corps like we're expected to, we can only shake our heads and with she had had the strength to stick it out.

Ruth is the kind of person, it seems, who can find and scorn the flaws in an organization, country, or culture, but at the end of her tirade leave no good solutions, only bitterness. And it is a bitter book. Living in Kazakhstan can be infuriating at times, and as Ruth so often observed, can bring out emotions that one thought, living in the USA, were under control. Consequently, separating the substance of her critique from the anger, arrogance, and generally poor writing style takes some effort. Regarding style, you'd expect that someone who disdainfully mocked a fellow volunteer for saying "until you hear different" in a phone conversation instead of "until you hear differently" (pg. 368) would have herself avoided mistakes like "Anne was effected most by the talk..." (pg. 342). And regarding her arrogance, you'd expect that someone who (rightfully) tore into the Peace Corps country director for mispronouncing the Russian last names of guest speakers' names at the swearing in ceremony would have gotten the president of Kazakhstan's name closer than "Nurshan Nazabaev" (pg. 14).

I don't mean to sound entirely unsympathetic - behind her critique of the "peer group mentality" in the opening pages one can hear a voice that feels lonely and out of place. Every Kazakhstan volunteer knows what it feels like to get unexpectedly angry at an incompetent bureaucrat. And behind all her emotional fog lie substantial critiques of Peace Corps in Kazakhstan. The volunteers were young and inexperienced (but if that's a surprise to Rush, and it reads like it was, you have to wonder how much research she had done before deciding to join the Peace Corps). The training and recruiting sounds like it was poorly conducted. Since the sites had no real motivation to provide good housing, they often didn't. Site selection was flawed, volunteers sometimes had no work, and the administration was unresponsive to volunteer complaints. Volunteers were sometimes damagingly culturally insensitive (although I doubt that Ruth herself ranked very high on the cultural sensitivity scale - consider, for example, where she, a woman alone in a bar, gets drunk in the afternoon with a group of strange men (pg. 313) ).

But if only Ruth herself had been more able to separate her emotion from her argument, she might have stayed and continued to do good things for Taraz. After all, by the second half of the book whe was already shedding some of her one-sided fury and recognizing why Kazakhstan was the way it was. In her own words, she was "no longer just criticizing but was starting to understand the people, to empathize with them." (pg. 327) The reader wants to cheer for her as she rants against one of the Rose-Kaplan school's teacher's complaints of being "exploited" (the complaining teacher wanted an exactly equal share of the profit with the school's founder, who had taken the risk and advanced capital to start the school, instead of the normal university-level salary she was being paid). When she vividly describes to children of her counterpart's relatives how different America is from the America of communist-era textbooks, one feels proud. And her numerous public refusals to accept or participate in corrpution are an excellent example of American ideals for the people around her.

But for some reason, she actually laments, in her going-away soapbox speech, the "Western Ideals" that she brought with her. It seems that because her "Western ideals" can't be implemented immediately and uncompromisingly, she feels that they aren't worth presenting at all. Similarly, she somehow doesn't appreciate the value of her growing understanding of the real living situtation of ordinary Kazakhstani people, even though on page 421 she complains of the impossibility of programs like free condom distribution operating without a good local understanding, and on page 402 writes "'It is hidden, Jezzet. No one can see what goes on without living in this society. I'm convinced of that. Someone said to me recently, "You have an Ambassador here. Your government knows what's going on." Yeah sure. Our Ambassador gets into her chauffeur driven Lincoln and goes to see what she's shown, just like the visiting officials and the Red Cross.'" She actually says this as part of justifying why she's leaving, somehow not seeing that Peace Corps itself is part of the response to exactly this kind of problem. America, and all the other aid organizations in Kazakhstan, need people who have "lived there". One group of such people is Peace Corps volunteers. And in her afterword, she describes how the Rosh-Kaplan school she helped found had a positive, sustainable effect on English education and economic development in Taraz.

These accomplishments of Ruth's are, to the letter, the three goals of the Peace Corps: educating the host country about American values, educating Americans about the host country culture, and providing qualified individuals to create sustainable solutions to expressed needs. So why did she leave? It wasn't, I believe, because of the righteous objections she tried to put forth in the closing of her book. I think it was simple frustration, weariness, and a consequent inability to see how much good she was doing and could continue to do. It's a shame. There are good volunteers and there are bad volunteers, and if the good ones leave because the Peace Corps and the host country aren't good enough for them, then nothing gets better and the Peace Corps will. indeed, be a failure.

Fortunately for everyone, nobody heeded Ruth's advice to disband Peace Corps Kazakhstan, and instead things have gotten much better. The Peace Corps, instead of sites, now provides housing. Training for my group was conducted mostly by experienced teachers of teachers, espcially local experts. Site placements are both done more carefully, it seems, and certainly with greater support and flexibility when things go wrong. Problems persist, both in Kazakhstan and Peace Corps, but good people are persisting at improving them. We can only wish that a talented volunteer like Ruth would have done the same.

Book Review - The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years

(Please note that in writing this, I'm going to have to give away some of the book, so if you intend to read it and don't want any of the story to be spoiled, you'd best read it first and then come back to this post. But in my opinion, knowing ahead of time the facts of a novel like this doesn't detract from reading it any more than looking at a beautiful sweater beforehand spoils the pleasure of wearing it.)

This novel, written by ethnic Kirghiz Chingiz Aitmatov during the Soviet Union, is four-way juxtaposition of Central Asian folk stories, the lives of Kazakhs working at an small, isolated railway junction in the middle of the southern Kazakhstan desert, the story of single day in which the same Kazakhs try to bury their deceased elder according to Islamic tradition, and the encounter of American and Soviet space agencies with an advanced alien civilization from the planet "Lesnaya Grud" (Forest Breast). The result is, as you'd expect, a book that is thickly knitted with metaphors, from which the reader is free to find all sorts of symbolic meaning, and I was lucky enough to find a meaning that relates directly to my life here.

The main character, Burrani Yedegei, is throughout the novel given the privelege in every plot and subplot of standing on the edge of loss. His birthplace, which he longs for throughout his dry and desolate days in the Sara Ozek desert, is the steadily disappearing Aral Sea. The novel opens with, and is framed around, the death of the oldest and most respected Kazakh of their railroad station, who knew all the legends of the Sara Ozek. A long-suffering Kazakh family is torn apart by the injustices of Stalin's rule. The people of Earth, unable to resolve their petty political differences in the broader interest of humanity, decline contact with the aliens of Lesnaya Grud. And in the final moments of the novel, Burrani learns from a Russian-speaking Kazakh that the Sara-Ozek's most ancient cemetery, the Ana-Beiit, will be destroyed for a housing settlement as the military rockets that will seal Earth's orbit off from helpful intrusion by the enlightened alien race fire off from the desert all around him, causing him and his camel to flee in uncomprehending terror.

Although the only connection between the storyline about the aliens and Buranni Yedegi occurs at the very beginning and end of the story, when Buranni is mystified and terrified respectively by inexplicable unscheduled rocket launches, the implication is that a race without a sense of history, traditional morality, and place is incapable of overcoming its petty political, beurocratic, and personal imperfections for the long-term benefit of the planet. Where Buranni becomes, through his struggles, a good and worthy man, the Soviet world in which he lives not only stifles, torments, and corrupts the good in the people around him, but fails in its basic role to provide for a great society when given the chance.

When this novel was written, I imagine that there was little if no expectation in Aitmatov's mind that Kazakhstan would ever have a chance for the revival of its traditional culture that is now being undertaken. And as I'm living here in Kazakhstan now, trying to learn and live this culture as it's being born anew, this begs some questions. Aitmatov's novel takes place in the 50's, and at that time the old Kazakh culture was in its dying days in Burannly junction, where the novel takes place. Certainly the main character, who sees himself as the last vehicle of the old ways in his small town, would be dead by now. Is it too late for a sincere revival of Kazakh culture? After all, what is being lamented is not loss of superficial aspects of the culture but a feeling of continuity with them. For example, the ability to play the dombra is not celebrated per say as the way in which Burrani is able to listen to it and hear the voices of his ancestors.

And if it does exist, is that culture continuity available to me, as a Peace Corps volunteer? Although, of course, many aspects of traditional culture are positive, very often, people around me call out cultural differences to justify things that I find objectionable, for example, marital infidelity, nepotism, corruption, or wife-napping (that is, kidnapping a woman and forcing her to marry you -- if anyone tells you it isn't a reality in modern Kazakhstan, they're lying to you). This isn't the kind of culture that Aitmatov was referring to. I would like to call this kind of culture surface culture, where Aitmatov is lamenting the loss of deep culture, by which, again, he meant a sense of historical continuity and place. (Burranly's character, by the way, spends most of the novel wrestling with, and conquering, the desire to be unfaithful to a wife he loves, and it's hard to imagine him accepting a bribe.) As someone who's living here for only two years, will I be afforded the chance to take part in Aitmatov's deeper culture, if it exists? Or is that only for people who spend their life here?

When I ask this, I think of my fellow volunteer with whom I studied Kazakh together when we first arrived. She's living in the South, which of course embraces a much more traditional Kazakh culture than the North. She's living with a host family as if she were a Kazakh woman in that family - that is, when she gets home from her thirty hours of classes, she works for hours to cook, clean, and provide a household for the family. Bless her, she is willingly and without complaint trying to take upon herself what women all over this country are expected to do unquestioningly and without complaint. If she can't answer these questions after two years, then nobody will be able to.

So Aitmatov, by writing a novel many years ago that lamented the way things were turning out, had unwittingly provided a description of what might be learned for a group of Americans that I'm certain he never imagined would be living in Kazakhstan and asking these questions. History has turned his exclamation point of a novel into a question mark, and it will be fourteen months before this volunteer, at least, will be able to try to begin to answer some of them.

Kaztelcom, Blogger, Peace Corps, and My Money

I put my tenge on the table during prime time (4.17 tenge per minute, and seemingly more likely to get a connection that actually works) for no less than ONE AND A HALF HOURS, and now archives work, there's a new post, I got the week of backlogged mail that Kaztelcom has been denying me, and I downloaded information from three graduate schools.

Not only was this money well spent, but this is Peace Corps Kazakhstan budget survey month, so this is going towards the salary requirement estimates for urban Kazakhstan! And I had yogurt for breakfast, too!

Women's Day Weekend

Next Tuesday is International Women's Day. Which means volunteers have to go execute this conversation over and over and over again with everyone we know: "Next Tuesday is International Women's Day." "I know." "Do you celebrate it in America?" "No, we don't." "How can you not celebrate it? It's INTERNATIONAL Women's Day." "Yep."

It also means we get Monday and Tuesday off work. Between this and the two weeks we allegedly get off for Nauruz, I'll be vacationing more than I'll be working this March. All the volunteers from the area between and including Petro and Astana congregated in Kokshetau, bascally spontaneously, which was the biggest Kokshetau gathering since Mckay's birthday. Bryan, Mckay, and I were thus de facto hosts, a task that we executed well enough, I think, considering it was the first time Bryan and I tried to handle so many people. What did we do?

We had a bayna at Mckay's on Friday. It was a normal banya, with the usual whacking-with-branches and standing naked in the snow looking at the stars. Bryan and I got a ride back to Kokshetau from Mckay's dad, who, on the way, explained his financial troubles and entrepenureal hopes for overcoming them. He has two plans - the first is to plant wheat in some land he's managed to gather together. He has all the equipment he needs, he says, but cannot afford seed. To get a bank loan (at 20% interest), however, his farm must be in operation for a year. So he needs to somehow raise money for seed to start. One of his plans to raise money is to sell to a wealthy western businessman the rights to a process his friend, a Kazakhstani mettalurgist, designed, which he claims will increase the output of any steel refinery by ten percent. Now he just needs a trustworthy contact in the west with a lot of money.

He talked about his projects so intensely and passionately that he had to stop the car once to elaborate them for us. It's probably mostly the company I happen to keep, but whatever the actual merits of his plans, I've never met anyone in America who seemed to believe so passionately in the possibility and promise of entrepeneurship. He spoke with an urgent and real sense that with the fall of the USSR, Kazakhstan had been opened up, and there was money laying out there for him and his family if he was only smart and dedicated enough to get it. Damn, I hope he makes it, one way or another.

After Mckay's, volunteers slowly conglomerated variously and without coordination in both my and Bryan's apartments until about six, when we went sledding. This was like no sledding I've ever experienced in my life. For sleds we had six $1 butt-sized pieces of sturdy, purple plastic with handles in front.
To get to the hill, we took the number one bus to the edge of town, where there are some woods and what seems like some sort of artificially dug pit with one very, very steep side. On the steep side, sledders have worn down two parallel chutes that have been worn Kokshetau sidewalk-smooth and slick. You put the plastic between your legs, shuffle to the top of one of the chutes, sit down, lift your legs, and off you go. After about ten feet you're going a comfortable speed, after twenty the speed becomes uncomfortable, and after thirty you no longer have any control of anything. About now, your sled comes out from under you and you can't see anything from the flying snow. If you try to steer or slow down with your feet, you'll only do somersaults the rest of the way down. It's best to keep your legs up and in a devil-may-care manner slide on your back until you slowly realize that you are no longer moving and are face-down in a snow drift somewhere near the bottom. Then you'd better start hustling back up the hill - the exercise will make all the snow inside your clothes seem less cold. It wasn't until we were waiting for the bus that I finally managed to get all the ice out of my eyelashes.

Bryan and I cooked spaghetti and garlic bread for everyone that night, which went mostly well except that we had only three forks and about fifteen people, and then we went to a disco. On Sunday we played chess in the morning, the crowds mostly dispersed, Gulshat and I tried to learn how to sing "I'll Fly Away" in two-part harmony (which will be an insufferably-cute-couple thing to do if we ever get it right), played pool at Jekebatyr, and ate vereniki and watched "Big Fish" on Bryan's computer. And so the weekend ended.

All in all, a good time, and good practice -- I understand the traditinal duty of Thanksgiving for the volunteers in the North will fall to Kokshetau next year.