The Start of Summer

So the last blog and the current blog are going to kind of run together. The difficult part of this is that I’m running around and still have no access to internet. That should actually be a good thing because then I can put thought into these blogs. In theory, that’s what should happen. However, with so much running around, after I craft one of these beauties, I really don’t like to go over them and correct them. It’s a flaw that somehow I’ve gone through college with. Still got A’s on most of my papers. Hey, they say that first instincts are usually correct. Anyway, with all the running around, when I have time to put figurative pen to paper, I just want to blaze through it. That may be part of why some of my entries can be a bit more down-trodden than others. Mood swings are major thing that happen here, partly because of the weather, partly the distance from home. Anyway, I guess this is a back-handed apology for lack entries and quality maybe. Or just a blanket statement to cover my ass. Maybe I should be a lawyer. J

Anyway, so far I’ve done a few meetings and a few camps. At the beginning of June, we had to go to something called PDM, or in the non-acronym world Project Development Management. This is an extended weekend seminar to, you guessed it, develop projects. We are a clever people. The best part of this was a weekend on the booming metropolis that is Kokshetau. Well, it’s 100, 000 people and there are cafes. When you live in a village, standards are kind of low. Actually, the best part was that we got to stay in a hotel, with a shower! Even though most of the information covered were things I’ve dealt with in Youth Service Learning and Boy Scouts and Pi Sigma Epsilon, a refresher is always good. Plus we did it with our counterparts, so the hope is that we plan and execute these projects with our counterparts and they can then do their own projects after we have left the country. It’s our one big buzzword in Peace Corps: sustainability. So, that was a start to the summer.

About 3 or 4 days after that, Roshan and I hopped on a train down to Almaty to have our yearly physical. This also included a trip to the dentists, which was kind of a fearful moment before we got there. Due to the lack internet, I can’t recall if I wrote about my last brush with the Kazakhstani health system, but I’ll briefly touch up on it. I had an ear infection and I went into a time warp that brought me back to 1950s health care, except it’s alive and well in Kazakhstan. So imagine the consternation before going to the dentist’s. Well, it was actually a modern place and had at least one thing I’ve never seen before. Instead of a fluoride paste like at my dentist’s back in the States, they had some kind of gun. It’s hard to describe what came out of it. It was a cross between foam from a shaken up soda and salt. That may sound unpleasant but I swear my teeth were squeaky afterwards. And no cavities, which in itself is a minor miracle considering the massive amount of sugar everybody consumes here. Thank god the no-sugar-in-tea thing is working. I believe half the volunteers got cavities here.

The only other eventful thing on this trip was a lovely woman from Chelyabinsk on the train back north, and I saw lovely very tongue-in-cheek. She was a stereotypical Russian woman, body build between a linebacker and a defensive tackle with a strong odor and an even stronger voice. I believe her knob was stuck at 11. Anyway, Roshan and I were sitting there talking with another woman who happened to be on the train down a couple days before. To preface this, Roshan is half-Indian and half-Chinese and complete serenity, or at least only on the outside. He hides his anger a little bit. Anyway, this meathead of a woman had the gall to say that Roshan was not a real American because he was not white. Needless to say, we were pretty incredulous (trying to use a different term than pissed off) but luckily other people in the cabin were a bit stunned to. Luckily, she started explaining to a Kazakh woman near us why Russia was better than Kazakhstan, so we were able to extract ourselves from that conversation, but we were not in the best of moods afterward, as one can imagine. Come on, I’ve got plenty of friends of multiple ethnicities. It’s hard to deal with bigotry, even if you kind of expect it in other countries.

Anyway, in the last blog I talked about my camp in Makinsk, and the less said the better. It wasn’t bad, it was just non-descript, so the less said the better. I prefer not to bore you. Needless to say, the kids ran around, did some ridiculous activities that the teachers though were “authentic Native American,” went to the local museum and spoke a little English. Trust me, the other camps will have better tales, and I shall regale you with them. As for now, I have a ridiculously long 36 hours of bus rides ahead, so I shall write again soon.