Auliekol

The final stop on the whirlwind tour of the Kazakhstan ended in a small town in Kostanai Oblast called Auliekol, the site of one of my language training group’s members. I had visited Kostanai earlier in the year and, outside of one of my region’s members insulting Kostanai Oblast, it went well. Chris was the volunteer at my site who was forced to move to Kostanai when he chose to extend for one year. The other members of the oblast, Bree, Jonny, Janelle and Trenton, are all good friends of mine. To sum it up, this oblast has a special place in my heart, mostly for the people.

So after finally arriving in Auliekol, Chris and I headed over to Janelle’s apartment, since that was to be our residence over the week. It was a nice little place with an awesome pull-out couch. It was like a trundle bed that extended out then pulled up to level with the rest of the couch. Chris also brought his Wii for our entertainment purpose (don’t ask how or why he has a Wii in Kazakhstan). We set up a rotating cooking schedule and, true to the course of Janelle’s anal-retentive side, started planning the activities for the week. I really can’t knock Janelle’s organizing since that was what made the first half of the camp such a success.

So, Monday we got to her school, met the students and divided the students into four teams for the duration of the week. Divide and conquer is always a good philosophy. Throughout the week we had various themes, like holidays and the like, to give us a little framework to deal with. By Tuesday, all the volunteers were at Auliekol, making the apartment a little cramped but cozy. Honestly, if it was anybody else in the apartment, we would have been at each other’s throats, but we’re all chill and mellow people. The course of the camp was pretty much us playing games until noon-ish then volunteers playing as we do. Jonny did have his baseball gear with him, so we got to teach a new batch of students baseball and confuse them as much as possible with the rules. Honestly, if you don’t know the rules, baseball is a game that is very hard to understand. Outside of Janelle’s students being particularly good at English, nothing spectacular happened at the camp. The kids were good, and that’s the best that can be hoped for.

There were a few interesting events. We spent a couple days by a lakeside and a riverside. The lakeside was in walking distance from Janelle’s apartment and was probably one of the cleanest lakes I’ve ever seen in this country. There was clear water, a nice sandy beach and good company. The riverside was a little different. We had to drive out to the river in a couple of cars with a few locals. Supposedly this was the best and cleanest body of water in the Auliekol area, which in my opinion was a lie. I mean it was pretty good for Kazakhstan but the shore was littered with bottles and cow defecation. I mean, we enjoyed ourselves with Janelle’s counterpart, since this was her idea, but the lake was closer and much nicer.

The last event was outlandish, even by our new expectations. After living in Kazakhstan, us volunteers are used to local people doing some inexplicable things. So often, people will suggest something and totally flake out the day of or they’ll ask us to do something on very short notice. That’s par for the course. So, Janelle’s landlady came by the apartment. Janelle had just happened to pop out to get a few vegetables for supper. Anyway, Janelle’s landlady comes in and starts poking around the apartment. We tell her that Janelle will be back in a few and that we’re just a few friends helping out with her camp. However, her impression was that we were living there with her indefinitely. She just starts yelling at Janelle when she got back, saying that there are 150 Americans living there and that we’re going to steal her clothes and other stuff. I mean, we obviously can’t be trusted considering we came here to teach children. We are a devious bunch. Janelle’s counterpart had to call her and have a 2 hour conversation to explain to her the situation.

So, this ends the summer series. I wrote this a little too far after the fact, but somehow my procrastinating nature followed me here. Next time, I’ll have a lengthy diatribe on random thoughts after a year in Kazakhstan. Until then…

Language Camps

Well, the summer isn’t just reserved for the kids. Us volunteers do have a chance to do something for ourselves in the form of improving our Russian. Even after almost a year of studying Russian, my speaking abilities are still deplorable. So, the only way to improve is study.

The first Russian camp was in Petropavlovsk in the far North of the country. It’s one of the most Russian places in the whole country. It’s where my best friend in country, an Indian guy named Sidd who has the same acerbic sarcasm that I possess. Lodging was also free because we stayed at the dorms. The downside was that we had to be in the dorms at 10 pm. No late night partying, well, not in the normal way. So my dorm room was Aaron, the 30 year old married dude from Texas, Brendan, the whitest Irish-American I’ve met who dispenses decent advice, and Jamie, the New Englander who lives in the middle of nowhere, which is saying something in this country.

So the form of the camp was very simple. We were divided up into groups of 3 or 4 and had 4 hour lessons in the morning everyday. After that, we were free for whatever. Because Sidd was in my class, most conversation ended being far too inappropriate, in both languages. I did learn a few good words though, like horny in Russian. Don’t know how that’s going to help in my conversations, but I’m glad I know it. Aaron was also with us along with Hannah, the stereotypical Midwestern girl from Minnesota. I actually enjoyed being in a structured class setting because it really focused me on improving one of the skills I truly wish to cultivate. I have a personal goal to speak 4 languages by the time I’m 25, which I’m on course to meet. I just need to improve my Russian and my Spanish, and I’m there. We covered all kinds of grammar components and vocabulary that I didn’t understand, and I’m extremely grateful for that.

Our afternoons were varied, but usually involved napping or walking around Petropavlovsk. I say napping because we ended up playing Risk until 4 in the morning a couple of times. That may sound lame, but we were all big strategy game buffs and did not give an inch in warfare. These were epic encounters not seen since Napoleon walked the Earth. Unfortunately, I was about as useful as the genius who came up with the Maginot line. In short, I lost. My ego was downsized a bit. We also played Carcassonne, which is another strategy game involving tiles, and I highly recommend it to one and all.

A couple times we did prepare epic group meals and drink some vodka and beers. We had Italian food and Plov (Uzbek pilau) and just sat and talked. It was honestly the closest to just hanging out with a bunch of buds that I’ve come to. There wasn’t anything spectacular that happened, just relaxation.

The second camp right after that was another language camp in Shuchinsk near where I live. The unfortunate part of this camp was that most of us were sick through most of it. The dynamics were different, but good. Sidd came down to this with his girlfriend, a local girl named Sveta. She was our teacher, and the rest of our group was Audrey, the other local Wisconsinite, her indefatigable and tenacious (in a good way) boyfriend Patrick and Jessie, the independent-minded girl of our oblast. These classes were a little more serious than the other camp, but that’s all right I think.

Because the other guys at the camp were crazy and lazy at the same time, which seems like an odd combination, but it works. Unfortunately, most of us were laid out with some kind of summer cold, so it was a little more low-key than we thought. Still, we managed a couple beers every night and some Scrabble and Risk action. No matter our personalities, we’re all nerds at heart. We also had a rotating chef duty and had some awesome food. Well, except for me. I had a nice stir fry all planned out, only to have the propane tank to run out 2 minutes after I started. I guess ramen noodles aren’t too far off.

The highlight of this all was the trip out to Borovoe. Borovoe is the resort town of North Kazakhstan and has the nickname of “Switzerland of Kazakhstan.” Obviously whoever came up with that nickname has never been to Switzerland or even seen mountains. It’s only Switzerland in the sense that the rest of the area around it is flatter than a plank. Sidd, Sveta and I actually hiked up one of the hills and had reached the summit after maybe 30 minutes. I think Audrey was right in calling it the Wisconsin Dells of Kazakhstan. Despite the misnomer, it was nice. Just as I imagine like other parts of the former Soviet Union, people in Kazakhstan take horrible care of their environment. Littering is endemic here with bottles and bags strewn everywhere and lakes almost as green as the bushes that surround them. However, Borovoe is such a resort with enough people coming that the lake and surroundings are clean and as pristine as nature can be here. So, Audrey, Patrick, Jessie, Hotrad, another one of the older volunteers) and I headed to the beach and just lay there or swam. No responsibility and relaxation. Just what the doctor ordered. I think it’s best to end on that note, lying out on the beach with cool clear waters reflecting the green hilltop.

Karagai

Since it was 30 hours to Zyryanovsk, by the laws of Sir Isaac Newton that’s how long it took to get to my next site at Lake Karagai. Well, actually 36 hours because the road was under construction. To all those who have experienced road construction in Wisconsin, take your worst experience and multiply it by 10. Between Astana and Karagai, it was a teeth-jarring brain-addling experience. I’m pretty sure my senior thesis popped out of my head somewhere around Balkhashena. But I made it.

This was a different camp because it wasn’t run by volunteers but by an organization that had had volunteers in the past. It was sponsored by Shell and was outdoors, meaning being with the kids 24 hours a day. Well, I did get a tent to myself for part of the time. The staff consisted of Natalya, the stuttering matriarch of the organization, her husband Vasilly, the stuttering son Misha (I only point out the stuttering because with my level of Russian, it could be hard to follow their conversations sometimes), his wife, the absent Olessya who showed up for only 2 days, and twin wonders Andrei and Vova. I ended up being here about 11 or 12 days.

I need to preface that some of this was a few things that transpired beforehand. My regional manager contacted me about a month or so before the summer and proffered this camp to me. I had nothing planned for this time period, so I said I’d be able to help out with the camp with the hope that I could scrounge up some auxiliary support from other volunteers. Very shortly after this, the older volunteers in my oblast started telling me I shouldn’t do this camp because it was poorly executed the last year and that the organization didn’t allocate their resources smartly. I was stuck though, or at least to keep my integrity at least in myself I was stuck. To be fair, one of the contentions was that they had not fed the kids enough, which was not the case this year, so they had improved upon experiences from the past.

So, I arrived at the camp and they had set up a bunch of tents and a yurt along with a cooking area. I will eventually post photos on Facebook (I can’t on the blog because it’s technically blocked in Kazakhstan and too much work to e-mail my sister, who posts these, all the photos). This was not roughing it in the Boy Scout sense. They had brought two huge propane tanks and an actual stove. Guess hot dogs on a stick don’t fly. We had a couple of tents to eat meals under, but one was broken by the gale-force winds the first night before the kids came. I mean, the wind was like a banshee on speed.

So the first week was the little kids 10-13, who were awesome. Every activity I did, whether it was first aid or American football or improvised percussion instruments, they loved. There was kid in particular, Kolya, who spoke four languages, and I swore spoke better English than most of the people in the United States. Another one who stuck out in my mind was Madina, a small little Kazakh girl who was willing to try out everything, including swimming. I’m proud to say by the end of the week she was able to do the front crawl. There was a small problem in that I was the only volunteer who showed up for this and had the brunt of the tasks to do activities. I mean, there were supposed to be other people helping, like Olessya, who only showed up for 2 days because she was doing registration in Karaganda instead of helping out, but we’re kind of regarded as Supermen who can do everything. So I played with the kids, taught the kids, sang with the kids worked myself into a state of exhaustion. During this period I was sharing a tent with Andrei and Vova, who slept like it was a full-contact sport. In short, I was tired. Those two also spent more time flirting with the teenage girls than actually doing anything to help a brother out.

The midpoint was when the crew from Shell came to see how their grant was working out. I liked to think of this as the dog-show moment, where everybody put on their best faces. So, the traditional action is to make a song and dance and tour everything about the camp. I was particularly perturbed because I had done some improvised percussion stuff with the kids, which Natalya had taken to mean that these kids were savants and Mozarts even though most of them had no musical ability whatsoever. As sullen as I may have been, I had to put on a smile (okay, tried not to frown) and prepare them for an impromptu concert. The people from Shell were actually pretty cool. They actually brought a bunch of activities for the kids to do, like a version of Jeopardy and brainstorm sessions on health and other things. In essence, what the organizers of this camp should have done. But, I got to socialize with the Westernized directors of Shell who came out, and the older kids replaced the younger ones.

The older kids SUCKED! I know that teenagers don’t want to stick out because they’re “cool,” but why would you come out to a camp in the middle of nowhere if you wanted to just sit and text your friends all day. Some things are universal, and the constantly flashing thumbs across a dial-pad are now becoming ubiquitous among youth across the world, or at least in my humble opinion. So, with the generator broken (yes, they brought a generator to charge cell phones), most of the girls (and there was only one boy) were sulking the whole time. Come on, they had a cute American for eye candy. Haha. One girl actually came with one-inch nails, which seem ineffectual in normal life but completely useless in a camp. It was worse because the whether was extremely windy and cold. We wore sweaters the whole time because the wind cut with the precision of a sushi chef. In general, the mood was low with blips upward with the different activities prepared by moi. The whole thing ended on a sour note when two girls left early, plus the boy because he had spent a night in the girls’ tent. To make a long story short, there were lots of people passing by for day trips. Well, some of the girls heard voices and got scared so they asked this guy, Ablai Khan, to keep an eye on them. Lord knows if this was true or not, but the moral of the story is that they should have awoken one of the adults, preferably the one with a black belt. Teenagers not thinking is what it amounted to, at least in my opinion. So this came out in the morning, and Kazakhstan being more conservative in mindset, no matter how girls dress, he was sent home. I’d hate to see how the family reaction was to that.

That’s not to say that the whole time with the older kids was bad. We played some games, did scavenger hunts, picked wild thyme and practiced their English skills. I also taught them a bunch of card games, which they enjoyed enough that I left a deck of cards with them. I think it was definitely a learning experience. I learned new ways to entertain and educate kids through a difficult situation, and I think it was probably very fruitful. Now if you don’t mind, I’m, gonna take a nap and wake up in about 30 years.

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

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.

Almost Summer

As you’ve probably read throughout these pages, we Kazakhstan volunteers tend to go through our own trials and tribulations, some more ephemeral than others, but they still wear on our minds. However there is a silver lining: the magical time of year known as summer. As in America, teachers don’t work during summer because of the old idea that students have to be on the family farm to help the summer harvest. Though, that is somewhat true in Kazakhstan, or at least in the wheat belt in the North. And it’s quite not true for teachers because they still have to work at school during the summer, and I use the word “work” very loosely. Depending on how megalomaniacal the director is, the teachers either do bullshit work or they do nothing. It’s the system and we’re on the bottom.
That sucks for the teachers of this country (or doesn’t depending on the teacher), but it leaves plenty for the volunteers to do that is not school-related. Actually, instead of doing school, a lot of the teachers do summer camps, which here works out as a less-organized version of summer school. In America, students would be doing classes such as Kooky Spooky Science or Summer Theatre. In Kazakhstan, they let you run around as long as you don’t punch another student. Actually, I’m not being as charitable as I should to it. The summer camps do give something for the students to be doing. If not, they’d just be sitting around the house doing nothing. The summer camp lives and dies on the organization of the camp, so planning is important. I planned a bunch of activities for the kids, and I think they all went well. They got to run around, learn a little English and did more than sit under the gossipy teachers who did nothing. Sometimes the organization here can be infuriating, but if you teach the kids here, maybe they can change a few things when they grow up. Besides, they like hanging with the cool foreigner, and I get to let out my little kid, which they enjoy. It’s a win-win I say when the volunteer organizes stuff.
Now I know that the above does sound a little bleak, and that may be a little bit of jaded Scotty showing through, but summer is about recharging your batteries after a long, long winter. I’m always reminded by a joke back from Wisconsin. We have four seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter and road construction. Amended to life in Kazakhstan, it’s three seasons and there’s no road construction. My coccyx can attest to the jarring conditions of the road, but that’s neither here nor there. But, summer is a time for travel, and since all the volunteers put on camps they need plenty of help from fellow volunteers. We are all happy to oblige. The weather is warm and the camps vary greatly. There are sports camps, drama camps, English camps, other language camps. Anything and everything volunteers are willing to organize will happen. The camp in Makinsk was organized by teachers at my school, but next year it will be an extravaganza organized by myself. I’m looking forward to seeing volunteers, even after 18-hour train rides and 30-hour bus rides. Travel is a bitch, but there’s a merciful God who deemed it necessary to invent iPods and e-books.
Oh, the last thing about summer that is very exciting is the ice cream. When it’s –40 outside, it’s very hard to come up with a valid excuse to have ice cream. I keep thinking back to the days when I was younger when Dairy Queen actually closed in winter. In all honesty, a cup of warm chocolate always sounds better than frozen chocolate when you can scoop up frozen ice from your doorstep. Not so in winter. For the low price of 25 cents, you can get an ice cream cone from the local store. It’s not Ben & Jerry’s, but it works its magic. The best part is that Kokshetau, the regional center, has really good ice cream for 45 cents. Worth every penny. Gotta enjoy the goodies.

Return home, Kazakhstan style

The most positive thing about IST was the attitude that we had after that training. Most of us, including me, had a bit of energy injected into us, especially after a long winter that would just not go away. So, I returned to Makinsk to see that most of the snow had melted away, but left behind a ridiculous amount of mud that would just not go away. Everything got muddy, there was no way it couldn't because most of the streets aren't paved but dirt roads. Melting snow plus dirt roads always equals mud. This was not a good omen.
The most frustrating thing to deal with in the Kazakhstani educational system is complacency and laziness. These are problems that volunteers cannot single-handedly get rid of. An apt point would be an example. One of the first classes back from IST, I did a lesson on goals. This class was with a 10th grade Kazakh speaking class. Since, only 11 years of school are compulsory, this is basically the equivalent of a Junior class back in the States. This is the time that students start to think about what they want to after high school and hopefully have goals and ambitions. So, since we are only a couple hours away from the national capital, I thought I would hear a little ambition from the students. Instead, most of the students just wanted to stay in their little village, even though jobs are scarce and hard to come by. It's this complacency and the laziness that is attached to it that makes me feel like a Whack-A-Mole sometimes. You get an idea, but kind of get smacked back down by the lack of wanting to put a step forward. It's a cultural thing, but one I think that dates back a few hundred years. There were the Soviets but also the Tsars too who basically gave edicts to people and expected to be obeyed. Because of that, I still feel there's a bit of expectation that someone from above will tell you what to do and you do it. This is probably a trait that will take a long time to die. In the mean time, I need to give these kids something to be ambitious about.