I’ll be honest with you – my expectations for this village were very low. But it has exceeded my expectations in many ways! It’s bigger than I had pictured, for one. And there are more little stores than I had thought there would be. It’s much quieter than the last village I was in, not nearly as busy. That might have to do with the fact that most people work in the city, and there aren’t many businesses around here. Plus it’s so small, and the roads so… unpaved that people just walk – therefore not as many cars. I’m happy to say that my fear of death by car has dramatically reduced since coming here!
I’m now living with a nice old lady and her grandson in a little house only about a 10 minute walk from the school. After the, uh, intensity of my last host family, this is a nice change of pace. My babooshka here is keeping me warm and well fed, so I’m happy. She is also very good at knitting and offered to teach me, but I told her that my mom and grandmother both croctched, she thought I should, too! So, she taught me a simple knot and I've been practicing!
It’s a small house, but there are two stories (my room and the grandson’s room are upstairs) and there is a toilet in the house (hurrah!) and no shower, but we do have a bannya, which is nice, because my other host family choices didn’t have one so I’d have to pay to go to a public bannya once a week. Oo, and I can stand up all the way in this one too! While bannya-ing last night I was comparing this to my last one when I realized how funny it was that I – Holly Morrison – a young girl from Utah, was comparing bannya’s in Kazakhstan.
I have moments like that every now and then where I just think to myself “How in the world did I get here!? Crazy!” I had another one of those moments while I was standing in the “bathroom” on the train brushing my teeth. If you had asked me at this time last year to imagine the most random thing I could see myself doing a year from then, I would never have been able to come up with that. I love it. Speaking of the train, I’ll just quickly mention – that was one long ride. It was quite the feat to get all of our bags and everything on, to begin with. And although there were 3 other girls and a counterpart in my train car, all of my friends were in a different car, so I didn’t get to see them too much. But I watched some Arrested Development with the girls in my car, and the next day I read something like 150 pages of a really crappy novel I picked up at the PC office. It was a good way to pass the time though. The first half of the ride was really hot and uncomfortable, but once we got farther north were we would see the occasional patch of snow on the ground, it was fine. I started getting a little antsy though as we started dropping people off at random, barren-looking villages. I was glad I would be getting off in the city, so that I would at least see some civilization before going into my village. Ease into it, you know? Anyway, speaking of my village, let’s get back to that…
The school here is also very nice. I commented to my counterpart about how nice the floors and walls and chairs and desks are compared to the school I was teaching in during training. She says the director of the school likes to keep it up and looking nice – I appreciate that! Speaking of the director, she is a lovely lady. So nice and welcoming! She gave me my first gift here in Kazakhstan – a little ceramic yurt (a yurt is the tent-ish house that the nomads lived in) filled with chocolates. I like chocolate. All of the teachers here have been very welcoming as well, and I even played basketball and volleyball with them my second day here! It was fun, and since I don’t need to know Russian to play the game it wasn’t as stressful an experience as I thought it might be.
There has only been one “problem” here in this first week, and it turned out to be just fine. But here’s what happened – we went into Kokshatau to the Department of Education to get my teaching contracts signed (2 in Russian, 2 in English). The woman we spoke with, who is in charge of language teaching in the schools, said she needed the head of the department to sign. So she took my contracts (Ah!) and said they would call us in for another meeting with him. Then my counterpart called the next day and said we would be meeting with the head of the department the following day and he asked that the director of our school come as well. I didn’t think too much about it, but when Liudmilla picked me up the next day I could tell she was a little stressed about it. And here’s why…
During training, back in September, there was an incident at the café in my village. I won’t get into the details, but nevertheless, the newspapers started writing articles about how Americans just get drunk and cause bar fights. Anyway, one of the people involved in the incident was the volunteer I replaced here in Krasney Yar. So, of course, the newspaper up here found out about this and published another slanderous article about the drunk Americans teaching their kids. Well, my counterpart had seen this article and she was afraid it would make them think twice about signing my contract…
So! We get to the Department of Education and meet with a lady who was slightly intimidating. She was assistant to the chief of education, or something like that, and she put me through a bit of a job interview, which was difficult seeing as I’ve only been speaking Russian for 2 and a half months now, but I did the best I could, and Liudmilla translated the rest. Then a bunch of other people came into the office, including one of the volunteers in Kokshatau and a couple of people from her school. We were then invited into the office of the head education guy – Chief of Education, I guess. So we go in, shake his hand, and he invites us into a connecting conference room. And that room, we were surprised to see, was set up for tea! Lots of candies, cookies, fruit, bread… it was a nice spread. So we sit down, they serve tea, and the chief guy begins by welcoming us and thanking us for our work and tells us that if we have any problems, questions, comments, their doors are always open. He went on and asked us more about where we were from, how we liked Kazakhstan and things like that, and then we just talked. He told us about the huge fish in the tank near us and, and that the building we were in was originally used by the KGB and people in the building late night say it’s haunted because they hear footsteps. Anyway, point is the meeting was totally relaxed and everything was ok. Afterwards I got my contracts back, and they had already been stamped and signed. No problem. Later on, my counterpart told me that the first lady we met with had seen the article and said it was a shame that the newspaper let the journalist publish such harsh things about Americans. What a relief!
So, that about wraps it up. School is out until the 13th for fall break. So in the next few days I’ll just be preparing lessons with my counterpart and taking care of a few other things like getting a mail box set up in the city and I need to go shopping for a few things, like winter clothes! It’s already been down around -5 Celsius or about 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Yikes! Winter in Kazakhstan… can’t wait!
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