Zyryanovsk

I’ve already told some of the stories of the start of summer, or at least some feelings. To actually bring some life and happiness to this blog that has been sorely missing, I think a few anecdotes from some camps are in order. Well, in the next one I will do some griping, but you have been forewarned.

So, the first camp away from summer during the summer was a camp at Tom’s site in Zyryanovsk. Zyryanovsk was actually a closed city during Communism, and maybe a few years after independence (I can’t quite remember, might be making that up). Anyway, it’s mainly a one company town dominated by a zinc mining company. The area is very hilly, bordering on the mountainous, but what is amazing are the mountains of rock from the mines. In full view of Tom’s apartment was a mountain of mining rubble. The most interesting thing, at least for me, was the statue of Lenin in the town square. The reason for this intrigue is that it wasn’t torn down or placed elsewhere in the village. In Makinsk, we still have a Lenin statue but it was shunted over to the old folks home where the elderly people lovingly attend to it as their communal safety blanket. Zyryanovsk’s was still proudly in plain view. It’s the small things that turn our heads now.

Getting there was one of the biggest pains that I have ever endured in my life. I couldn’t take the train there because it crossed into Russia, and without a Russian visa I couldn’t even cross through Russian territory. So, instead I had to take a bus the whole way, or three buses to be exact. This was a lovely 30 hour jaunt through the Kazakhstani countryside, including stops in such illustrious cities as Cemeypalatinsk, where they set off nuclear bombs just to see how the local population would react to the radiation. To this day, we still don’t have volunteers there for fear of radiation. But, after arriving in Ust-Kamenogorsk, I got onto a small bus called a marshrutka and headed through some gorgeous country. It was nice to just see verdant, lush valleys and mountains. The greenery was almost an emerald quality and it almost glistened. This may just be to the relative brown quality of the steppe after the grass dries.

So, staying at Tom’s were myself, Tom (of course), Sam, Jonathan and Gisela. Tom’s a nice and cocky (in a good way) SoCal guy with an easy-going attitude, who is balanced by the sassiness of the Long Island qualities of Sam. Honestly, those two act more like a brother and sister more than I have with my siblings. Jonathan is a nice guy prone to funny quips, while Gisela is a motor-mouthed girl from Pennsylvania who is almost endearing because of the rapidity of sentences spilling from her mouth. In short, a good crew of people to spend a week with.

To sum up our activities, we woke up, drank coffee, and then lugged two huge bags of equipment, including baseball equipment, soccer balls, and footballs, to his school a few blocks away. There we would play random sports with about 20-30 kids from 7-10 grade. After a lunch in the school cafeteria, we would play a little bit with smaller kids who hung around. Finally, the rest of the day was what we wanted to do, which usually involved games and beers or a combination of both. I consider this a small sliver of heaven.

There were a few funny things from the kids. First, there was this group of girls that had a demented sense of what they needed to wear to play sports. In general, the fashion sense is to dress like ladies of the night in the West. I mean, honestly, they’re about a pair of stilettos away from looking like hookers. In that vein, there was a group of 3 girls who showed up everyday in miniskirts, tank tops and heels. They even took a few diggers. You’d think after the first day, they would have thought “Maybe a little stability from tennis shoes would prevent excess damage to my knees.” Nope. The other was one particular boy who acted like he had been given an extra dose of testosterone at birth. You could almost see the thought process in his brain, “ Hit the ball, hit the ball. Can’t stand still, must do push-ups, push-ups, now pull-ups. Gah, must run. AAAAh.” He would disappear for 30 minutes then reappear to throw a football, then disappear again. There must have been a Bermuda triangle around there.

All in all, the kids were fun to work with. All the volunteers we had there bonded in cooking and cleaning. One of the last nights we all got to play circle of death and finished off with a game of drunken or semi-drunken Twister. By far the worst rule was that if you said somebody’s name, you have to put your head on the table. Eventually, someone else will say my name so I can take my head off the table. J