An Average Day

Earlier this week, I decided to write down everything over the course of a day to give a view of what an average day is like. An average day usually consists of the following:

• Work
• 1 interesting thing
• 1 bad thing that makes me angry/sad/annoyed
• 1 good thing that makes me happy and cancels out the 1 bad thing

Take this last Wednesday, for example:

7am: The sun wakes me up and I couldn’t go back to sleep. Daylight savings time is nonexistent in Kazakhstan, so the sun will rise earlier and earlier as the summer goes on, just making me a crankier person. I don’t do mornings.

8:30 am: After unsuccessfully trying to go back to sleep, I finally get up. It’s a nice day and very warm, so I open the windows and set my clothes out to dry. I have a washing machine, but not a dryer so I hang my clothes outside.

9:15 am – My landylady visits. I gave her the electric bill for the month, which has overcharged me 3000kzt. She’s angry, but not at me because after looking at the electric meter, she agrees with me that the electric company is incorrect. She leaves, saying she would take care of it.

9:20 am – I walk to work. Along the way I see two things that make me smile:

a. My neighbors using a home made flame thrower to roast a chicken. It was a really simple device. One person flamethrows (is this a verb?), the other holds the chicken on a stick. It smelled good. I talked to them for a little while about their device, and then moved on. What shocked me out the whole encounter was that it didn’t shock me at all.

b. Some random guys shoving a live sheep into a trunk of a car. With the warmer weather and the huge holiday coming up, I will see this more often. I don’t know why, but people stuffing live sheep into vehicles always makes me laugh, no matter my mood. Sheep in general make me laugh. It’s just one of my things, don’t ask me to explain it.

10:15 am – I get to work. It takes longer than I thought because I had to walk uphill. Usually I take the bus and get to work around 9-9:30, but I had to meet with my landlady about the electric problem. My director was ok with this, although she wasn’t around today. She left to go to Taldykorgan for the day to drop off a grant proposal for a summer camp on leadership for youth that we worked on, so it’s just the accountant, one local volunteer, and me holding down the fort. My work for today: to look and chart job listings from back listed newspapers to determine what the most popular jobs in Ecik are. It isn’t busy work, it’s for a future project we want to do.

10:20 am – The volunteer asks me to open the window. The accountant is totally against this, because there is a trash fire burning just outside our window. I agree with the accountant, but I do it anyway because she tested the wind and said that it was blowing away from the building.

10:25 am – The wind shifts, and the smoke blows into our office. I shut the window, and we decide to take a break until it clears out. I go to a local store and buy 2 kilograms of potatoes. (140 tenge..about 1 dollar)

11:00 am – We go back to work.

12:30 pm – I Use skype to call another volunteer. This isn’t an average occurrence…I talk on Skype about once or twice a month. Its rare, but its free!

1:00-1:40 pm - Lunch. I had lagman: a dish with noodles, meat, potatoes, carrots in a spicy sauce. It’s good, and it is cheap: (150 tenge).

Lagman: Lunch of Champions

2:15 pm – A lady comes by the office trying to sell perfume. The accountant sees my puzzled/dirty looks and asks me what’s the problem. I told her that people trying to formally sell things while at work is new to me. If we were in the US, the perfume lady could get into trouble (anti soliciting laws, anyone?). The dirty looks were for the perfume: it was making me sneeze.

2:30 pm – The perfume lady leaves.

2:35 pm - Called my Regional Manager to tell her that I will come to Almaty tomorrow to help her organize a training on Project Design Management for Kaz 21's next month.

2:40 pm – Print out copies of my leave form so I can go to Shymkent for the holiday. I’ll write more about this later.

3:45 pm– The accountant receives a call from the local bank. In January, we won a grant to send my director, accountant, and project manager to Ukraine to research how local community foundations in Ukraine raise local money. This project was going to be awesome, because the knowledge we would get from the exchange would help us in the future. Except, its now March and we haven’t received the money yet. It seems that somewhere along the line, someone in the bank messed something up, and our money is on hold.

4:15 pm – I finish graphing all of the available jobs in Ecik.

4:30 pm – I write a letter to the director of the donor organization about why we haven’t received the funds yet in English. The reason why I’m writing the email in English is because our donor is based in South Africa, and it’s easier for me to serve as a translator between donor organization and my organization. Why I’m writing the letter escapes me, because we’ve never talked to donor organization’s director, and their project manager already knows about the situation and is working on it. I don’t see how it will help, though.

4:35 pm – Finish the letter and send it, but I’m still confused about why.*

4:40 pm – My organization wants another volunteer! Yesterday, my director said that since I won’t be staying for a third year they want to apply for another volunteer. I was happy about this, because I’ve only been here 7 months, and I know that if a Peace Corps volunteer spent 2 years here, they could do more than I have ever done! I won’t write the application for them (that’d be cheating, and it’s in Russian. While I can speak, 3 year olds type better than me), but we lost the application form, and need to find it.

5:30 pm – Found the application form, hidden in a folder

5:45 pm – While I’m lucky because my organization has internet, sometimes it leads to time wasting. Once a day someone will look up an obscure news story and share it. Today’s article: a successful surgery in India. This one wasn’t mine.

6:05 pm – Leave to go home.

6:20 pm – Flag down a taxi for 50 tenge. Taxi prices change in Ecik depending on the weather and time:

Daytime = 50 tenge (33 cents)

Dusk = 70 tenge (around 40 cents)

Night = 100 tenge (75 cents)

Bad weather = 70-100 tenge

There was a guy in the taxi who tried talking to me in bad English. Normally I don’t mind, but he was being annoying, so I told him I was from Germany, and answered all of his questions in German until he lost interest.

7:00 pm – Get home. Make dinner, creamy potato soup from scratch. Yeah…I’m developing some cooking skills.

8:00-10:30 pm – Read a book, go over the Russian words that I missed during the day, and finish Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure. This is my first time watching it. Perhaps K. Reeves best performance, better than the Matrix.

11:00 pm – Go to bed

*Update: In the end, it didn’t matter. The next day, the problem with the bank was cleared!