"Wanna sing about it?" Ecik's Youth Leadership Camp

I spent the last week helping the Local Community Foundation to organize their first youth summer camp. It was focused on youth leadership and project design. 17 young people from all over the Almaty Oblast came to the camp, and my director and I showed them how to write a project proposal plan, a budget, and identify community resources. In short, it was kind of like the Project Design Management seminar I helped organize in Taldykorgan for Peace Corps, but for youth. And way more fun.

Why do good kids go bad? This poster has the answer. Too bad its a jumble...half upside down, half in Russian and Kazakh.

"Parts of a project" in Kazakh.

Although learning how to design a community project doesn't sound like a sexy theme for a youth summer camp, it wasn't all we did. We also had a couple of sessions on leadership and played a lot of team building and leadership games. The LCF partnered with an ecology camp in Ecik, and they organized several day trips for us to see many of the cool things around Issyk like the Golden Man, Lake Issyk, and the waterfalls behind Turgen, a small town about 15km from Issyk. Through them, I learned so much more about the history of Ecik and the Golden Man.

Lake Issyk. Located about 15 km from my house, it is a lake hemmed in by mountains, and also provides some water for the town. According to my director,about 50 years ago (I forget the exact date) the dam that held in the water broke, and all of the water rushed downhill, taking out the town below and killing a lot of people.

Opening the door to the "rock yurt". Yurts are traditional Kazakh homes, as back in the day Kazakhs were nomadic. Yurts are usually made of cloth, and are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. This yurt is special, because it's made of stone.

But what really made the camp enjoyable were the kids themselves. They were fantastic, motivated, and always interested. And they were very musical. Out of the 17 youth, 6 could play the guitar and dombra, 4 were enrolled in music schools, and all the rest had some musical ability.

Talent. She has it.

And they sang. And danced. And played dombras, drummed on tables and rocked out on the 3 guitars they brought. On their breaks they would have impromptu jam sessions. They would invent songs on the fly about anything: the weather, the food, how they were feeling. It was kind of like watching a 5 day Glee marathon. Although I had to physically cut them off so that we could continue our work, I enjoyed every minute of it.

We spent hours having conversations about the history of jazz music, and the stories behind some of the most popular Kazakh songs. It also made me realize how much I miss playing my saxophone. Since coming to Kazakhstan, I haven't been very musical, and I miss it very much. When I get back to America, finding a sax is going to be a high priority.

It was by far the most fun I've had at a camp, ever.

Hanging out

After the camp, I was exhausted. My director and I worked 8 days in a row setting everything up and doing the camp. And while I want to curl up on my couch and watch episodes of Dexter (my now second favorite TV show), I can't take a break quite yet. I have 15 days to close 2 grants, organize a session on fund raising for other local NGOs, and another summer camp session.

I will work for cookies (The best week. Ever.)

Today, the summer volunteer at the Local Community Foundation (LCF) remarked that lately I've been smiling a lot and asked what was so funny in my life. I told her that there was nothing funny in particular, but that things in my life are going very well. It's not a singular event that has made me feel this way, but a bunch of smaller things grouped together. And while maybe even talking about it may cause it to end, I figure that if I'm going to blog about the difficult times, I should also talk about the good times too. (After I typed that, I knocked on wood, spit air three times, and moved my evil eye from my bag to my back pocket. I should be ok now.)

So why have I been so happy lately? I'm happy because:

• The LCF gained 2 new employees, a summer intern, and a lawyer. This is very important, because in August, the LCF will lose their grant and project managers to different work. However, now we have replacements. Even better, the project manager decided to continue to work with the LCF into July part time to help train her replacement! Our office is a little bit crowded right now, but I love it because there is always someone to work with, and everyone is so nice. And the new people and intern insist on stuffing me full of cookies every day. On the other side I shared some Girl Scout Thin Mints that my loving mother sent me, and among 6 people, they ate only 3 cookies! They said they were "interesting", which is code for "not very good". Their loss, as I will eat the rest.
  

  
  

• I also learned that I too have a new job. In August I will become a training assistant for the newest group of Peace Corps volunteers to Kazakhstan. While my exact role and duties are to be determined, I'm very excited. If you told me 2 years ago that I'd not only still be in Kazakhstan but helping to teach new volunteers about Kazakhstan and Peace Corps, I would call you a liar. Even reflecting about where I was at physically and mentally even 4 months ago, I think this would have been unimaginable. This Peace Corps journey has been a long and winding one, and I think that this will bring a sense of closure to my time here. This new job also brought me one step closer to learning the exact date I can leave Kazakhstan since I will staying until the completion of the training of the new volunteers. So now I'm targeting somewhere around the 6^th of November.
  

  
  

• I also took a mini vacation to the large town of Zharkent. Situated about 350 kilometers to the east of Almaty and about 50 kilometers from the border of China, Zharkent is unforgettable to me as it was the place where I cut a sheep's face with a kitchen knife. I went mainly to hang out with a fellow Kaz 20, relax, and see a project that a new volunteer designed during the PDM conference that I helped organize in Taldykorgan a couple of months ago. The project was a summer English camp, where interested students at the local college could get extra grammar lessons and practice talking in English in a fun environment so that they wouldn't forget what they learned over the long summer. It was cool to see this project evolve, from an idea scribbled on butcher block paper to being realized in a classroom. But best, was just hanging out. There was chili, French fries from scratch, chili with French fries, a Southpark episode about Kanye West, great conversation with friends old and new, an outdoor picnic, and a Kazakh spaghetti style dinner where we talked about centered on obscure magical pagan traditions.
  

  
  

• For the really random things. I bought a mango in Almaty from a strange man in the Green Bazaar; the first one I've eaten in 2 years. I got a free ride from a Serbian man because we talked about the World Cup and how awesome soccer is from Almaty to Ecik. Kids in my apartment complex have been nice. My neighbor gave me some homemade bread. When I find cocoa powder, I'll try to make brownies for her. Dogs haven't troubled me. A good friend from Kostanai will visit me soon on her way to paradise (Europe). It's summer. Tomorrow is July; I have only 4 full months in Kazakhstan. I don't have to work from July 4^th through the 7^th, as it is a national holiday in Kazakhstan. My father called… all the way from Afghanistan. Fanta has a new flavor called "lemonade" which tastes like diet cream soda.
  

And I love all of it.

Mo' Money Mo' Problems: NGOs, grants, and grassroots fundraising

This week I've watched all of the Star Wars movies in order in their entirety . Watching the Phantom Menace was painful, but I toughed it out. So while this post has a point and is important towards explaining my work in Kazakhstan, it is also full of nerdiness.

Warned you, I have.

A big problem for NGOs in Kazakhstan (and by extension, the PCVs whom partner with them) is raising money to pay for their employees and to finance their projects. This is hard because:

• It is very difficult to organize fundraisers to gain community support, mainly because very few people know about what an NGO is or does.

• Because of the first sentence, many NGOs in Kazakhstan are dependent on grants to survive.

Notorious B.I.G was right when he said "Mo' Money Mo' Problems". Money alone will not solve the problems for NGO's in Kazakhstan. However, money pays for food, rent, and gas of the people who work in them. Many of the grants I have seen in Kazakhstan allow for a certain percentage to be allocated toward salaries. I think this is fair; even I can't (and don't want to) work for free forever.

However, grant money is not free money. To get the grant, you usually have to do something. For NGOs, this usually means organizing a social project. Many organizations that finance NGOs usually have a theme, like helping youth, the unemployed, and educating people about about AIDS/HIV. So if you write a grant proposal and win, you are expected to do something.

So on one hand, NGOs have employees that need money to feed their families. On the other side, there are only a finite number of organizations that give out money in Kazakhstan. The number of international organizations that fund NGOs in Kazakhstan are shrinking, and while there are domestic donor organizations, there aren't a lot of them. This is because of many reasons, both good and bad. The point is that there is not enough grant money to go around for all.

This can lead to grant chasing, which is an awful problem. By my definition, grant chasing is when NGOs start applying for grants just because they need the money, and don't pay attention to their mission, vision, or goals. In the short term life seems easy, because the NGO gets money.and everyone is happy.

In the long term, grant chasing can be devastating. Grants are contracts, and if the NGO doesn't fulfill it's end, or does a bad job doing it, then they can get blacklisted. In Kazakhstan, blacklisted NGOs become dead NGOs. Donor organizations talk, and blacklisted NGOs are avoided like the plague.

The danger starts when an organization gets in "over it's head". For example, I've heard of an NGO in Kazakhstan that focused on HIV/AIDS suddenly win an ecology grant, just for the money. Instant disaster. I don't think they are around anymore. Grant chasing is risky. As Yoda said, "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny." A great NGO director Yoda would have been.

Gold Leader cat seys:
Plz rite grants only 4 projeks u noes how 2 do and r in akkordance with ur missen and goals.
K thx by!!!!1

So the question is: How can the Local Community Fund (LCF) begin to reduce it's dependency on grants? In theory, community funds gather money from the community to use to finance local projects. A good community foundation should be able to run without grant support. The LCF doesn't do this. But how to get to there? I don't know the answer to this. Neither does the LCF. But we know people who do.

So we wrote a proposal to an international organization to send my director, accountant, and program manager to Ukraine to learn fundraising skills for community organizations. They will get a 3 day personalized seminar focused on how to begin to raise money from the community.They leave tomorrow which is why I'll have a lot of time on my hands in the near future.

What will I do with my free time while they are gone? I need to stay busy. In Kazakhstan I'm sort of like a purpetual motion machine, because staying active makes the time go faster, and it makes it easier to cope with homesickness, missing people in America, and my growing restlessness. So for the next 10 days, I'm going to do everything in my power to stay busy, beginning with hiking in the mountains near Almaty for squabbits so I can do this,

Gut Check: What’s my motivation?

Between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I took a summer job as a sanitation cleaner at a major meat company. For the summer, the pay was great, the hours were awesome, and I grew to like using a fire hose and dangerous chemicals to clean off big machines that would take logs of ham the size of my leg and hack them into thin slice lunchmeat. Or my leg, if I wasn't careful.

Every night, before we started to work, I had a ritual with one of my co-workers, Sam. He would grab my shoulder and ask, "Kyle, what's our motivation?" I'd grab his shoulder in return, and say, "To make our pockets super phat". Part inside joke. 100% truth.

Although I left Oscar Meyer a long time ago, (and I refuse to eat their meat) I still find myself asking Sam's question at various points of my life, particularly when things aren't going well. Since I've been in Peace Corps, the short answer to the "What's my motivation question" is to help NGOs, learn about a new culture, and gain professional and personal experience. Its a bit more complicated than this, but that is the basic idea.

When things were at their worst, somewhere between midnight and dawn on Tuesday, I asked myself the usual question, and I didn't have an answer. I freaked out.

This has happened before, and will probably happen again. I've found that I go through cycles of feeling good and bad, and these feelings can switch pretty fast. It's part of the bumps and bruises of being in Peace Corps in Kazakhstan. Some days I rock Kazakhstan. Some days Kazakhstan rocks me

After I got a hold of myself, I took stock of things. Why was I feeling this way? Could it be burnout? My primary organization, the Local Community Foundation, works about 40-50 hours a week. I'm not talking about sitting around for 5 hours drinking tea and then working for 3 hours (although we did this one week), but 8-10 hours a day of real work such as typing documents, writing and reviewing grants, assisting other NGOs in the region, and stuff like this. Working 50 hours isn't a problem, but I get tired faster than I normally would in a work environment where I'm communicating and writing in two and sometimes three languages .

Events that happen in America also have an effect on me. It seems silly because I am so far away. Is it worth expressing dismay about situations that I can't control, or is it better to not worry about it, shrug it off and continue on? I still don't know the answer to this one. However, I do know that I'm only as strong as my base, and when the base is rattled I shake too.

There is also the future. I have started to think about my life after Peace Corps. However, this is an awkward time. With under 200 days remaining before I'm finished, I can see the end, but it's far enough that it is too early to start applying for jobs. And I don't know what exactly I want to do! As Yoda said, "Always in motion is the future."

So with my head full of work, worrying about loved ones in America, and worrying about my future, I didn't sleep, and watched the sun rise. I then trudged to work.

Besides babushkas, the only people in Kazakhstan who can take one look at me and know that something is wrong are my former counterpart and my current director. Babushkas, in addition to being always correct, also have mind reading powers. My director saw me first thing when I went to work. She asked me what was wrong, and we had a heart to heart.

I learned that I wasn't the only one that was feeling down and having a tough week. My director is also exhausted. The working hours also take a toll on her. In addition, the members of my organization have gone without pay for 2 months. They will get paid next month, when they receive another grant. (If they could operate without grant money, this would never happen. We think we've figured out a way to make this a reality. I'll write more about this later.) She looks for a new accountant, but nobody wants the job because they pay the minimum salary. We lost our grant manager. Nobody knows what an NGO is. Times are tough. Her back hurts. Then we sat together for awhile and wallowed in our respective miseries. Then my director said this:

"I could quit. I could go home. I could be a principal again. But that is easy. Other people do easy things. We do not. We have an open perspective. And I need to see with my eyes what will be our end result."

That resonated with me on so many levels, and was the answer to a great many questions and immediate problems at work, Peace Corps, and in my life. My director is a wise woman.

After that, she sent me home because I looked like a "zombie". She took Wednesday and Thursday off for rest, her first days off in over a year, according to our project manager. For me, the week got a bit better: on Wednesday, I finally figured out the post office. I'll write more about how this happened later. On Thursday, I went to nearby town to see a leadership seminar for youth that was done by some fellow volunteers. They did an awesome job. And Friday was a normal day in the office, and we even got out early! I'm looking forward to sleeping, cooking, and reading some old school James Bond thrillers and recharge myself to do it all again next Monday.

So while it was a very tough and draining mental week for me and everyone at the Local Community Foundation, we somehow got through it.

Like we always do.

"We'll now return you to your regularly televised program"

February seems to be one of those months that always kick Kazakhstan volunteers in the groin. It is the shortest month of the year, but it tends to be the time when people are at their crankiest. By February, the good feelings of New Years are done, the daily grind of work and school has taken over, and everyone is generally pissed because they have been cooped up in their houses too long. It could also be the weather, an awkward in-between phase when winter is done, but spring forgot to show up. And that is if you are lucky, because some volunteers in the northern freeze clear up into April.

Although I was gone for most of February, the last part of the month got me down, resulting in the funkiest of funks, and I’m not talking about this type of funk. The weather also didn’t help. The last two weeks have been a foggy, rainy, snowy mess. The roads have turned to rivers of mud, and the finale of this half month of misery was a complete drenching by a car that swerved onto the shoulder of the road to hit a mud puddle.

The only thing that has been consistently good throughout February is working at my organization. I’ve said this many times before, but I am so happy to be working with such dedicated and nice people.

Since coming back from vacation, I’ve changed my personal ideals regarding how I’ll do projects going forward:

The “S” word

Anyway,

Unless it is a Star Trek marathon (and not Deep Space 9), I rarely watched TV in the states. I watch it even less in Kazakhstan. However, this past two weeks I’ve been addicted to the Winter Olympics. When I first moved to my new place in December last year, my landlady gave me a TV, and installed cable “so I wouldn’t be lonely”. The first time I turned it on was when the Olympics started, and I haven’t been able to turn it off. There is a Russian sports channel has 24/7 coverage of the Games, and it is the only channel I watch.

I’ve found that watching sports in Russian is great language practice, as the commentators speak really clearly and I have a high interest in sports. Throughout the games, I’ve learned so many new words and phrases in Russian, such as “cleaning the ice” (women’s curling), “triple spin,” (women’s ice skating short program) and “they aren’t playing nice” (said about the Belarus hockey team during a scuffle). These phrases will probably never be useful to me, as I’m not into winter sports (except curling, which is the most interesting Winter Olympic Sport). Kazakhstan had some athletes in the Winter Olympics, and gained a silver medal in the women’s biathlon. You can read about that medal race here.

Now that the Olympics are done, I can’t wait until the summer, when the World Cup starts in South Africa. Until then, the TV stays off, so that I don’t have to watch more of this crap.

Scrooge: not welcome in Kazakhstan

Although it is hard to get into a working groove because of the numerous holidays in December, my organization and I have been busy this month. For the couple of weeks, my organization and I have been working on a project to buy presents for low income handicapped children in our area. They did a similar project last year, but wanted this one to be bigger and better. Together, we located 80 children in our region who fit our qualifications and invited them and their families to a New Years celebration.

An interesting thing about the project was how we were able to get money to buy the gifts for over 80 children and to finance the celebration. We went to the local banks, stores, and individuals asking if they would help us. While many stores and individuals did not want to give money, they gave gifts instead. Larger businesses donated a "holiday tree", food, candy, and sound equipment for the celebration. In-kind donations seem to be the rage in Esik, and personally, I prefer it when someone gives an item or a service to a charitable cause than money.

Store in Esik that gave a boatload of candy

My job was to help out the newest volunteers to the Local Community Fund. We took the philanthropy to the streets, going stall to stall at the bazaar talking about the event and encouraging people to give money or presents. They are a rambunctious group (and the fastest Russian/Kazakh speakers I have EVER heard) that love to have fun. It went way better than I expected. We had a lot of fun, and I think that they are interested in helping out with future projects.

everyone together!

volunteers with hats

at the bazaar

Websites and Questions

The Local Community Fund now has a website! It's in Russian, but a free translator like Word Lingo can help out those who speak English that want to take a look. It needs some work and tidying up, but the main idea is there, and I'm happy and proud of them.

Speaking of other languages, the Local Community Fund wants to translate the website into Kazakh and English for their international donors. Guess which language I'm doing. When we finish the translated versions (this will take some time) I'll put up the link.

For those who wander across this blog (this includes you Facebook folks!) if there is anything you are curious about regarding Kazakhstan, my work, or my life here please send me an email, post a comment, use Morse code, smoke signals, or whatever. The longer I am here, the more things seem normal, and the harder it gets for me to figure out what things may be interesting to write about. Since my camera was crushed in Kyrgyzstan, I don't have a lot in the way of pictures, but I want to make sure that the content here doesn't get too stale.

Anyway, here is the Local Community Fund's website

Work Stuff

Because I can’t go back to my house until Sunday, I hung out in Almaty today. Most of my day was spent drinking lemonade at a coffee shop called 4A. I’m not a fan of coffee; caffeine turns me into a babbling idiot. It’s expensive for Peace Corps volunteers, but 4A has the best lemonade on Earth.

In a previous conversation with the Green Eyed Lady, she pointed out that since I moved to Ecik I haven’t said much about the work of my new organization or what I do there. If she doesn't know, then nobody knows, including myself. Granted, there were some more interesting things than work going on, but work is important stuff. Sorry if this is boring. So...

Who I work for:


My current organization, translated from Russian, is called the Local Community Fund of the Enbekshikazakh District (LCF-ED). They are not exactly an NGO, but qualify as a local community foundation. Community foundations assist NGOs and community initiatives in a particular geographic area. For my organization, the geographic area is the Enbekshikazakh District.


Usually the assistance that local community funds offer is monetary in the form of grants. The LCF-ED does this by receiving grants from large donors and then re-giving the money to small organizations in the community. It works out well because many of these local organizations would not be on a particular donor’s radar for a variety of reasons: too small, too new, too basic, etc, etc.


Community funds like the LCF-ED can help by awarding a small organization their first grant and giving presentations on grant writing and fundraising, project design and management, introducing transparent grants competitions and just basically supporting NGO’s in the area with their organizational needs.

What I do:

So far, I’ve helped the LCF-ED by writing grants in English, translating documents, and assisting them with the Youth Bank Idea. I’ve organized their grant writing folder (no more “where is the document with our mission statement?”). We've also created a website and am in the process of translating it to English (when its up, I'll post it) and began working to diversify their sources of income.

For NGOs in Kazakhstan, it’s easy to only rely on grants, but this isn’t very sustainable and risky. It’s better to get money from a variety of stable sources such as the community, government, international and local businesses. The best thing for this organization would be to establish an endowment, but that cannot be done in my time remaining and is currently out of the scope of myself and the LCF. However, we are thinking about how can they get there and starting to lay the groundwork now.

However, I feel that the most lasting contribution that I’ll make is just helping out with the little things. The LCF is a young fund: it was established in 2007. They were trained by the Eurasian Foundation of Central Asia, which for a Central Asian NGO is like learning how to shoot baskets from Larry Bird or having Master Splinter as a personal ninja master tutor. However, applying what you’ve learned can be daunting, and it’s easy to forget the little things. Such as formatting a grant, how to engage potential donors, or distinguishing between a goal and an objective for a project.


It also doesn't help that the LCF-ED is the only community fund of its type in Kazakhstan. Whereas other NGOs in Kazakhstan usually have an equilivent organization somewhere that they can talk/partner with if they wish, if the LCF-ED wants to do that, they must seek partners in Russia and Ukraine. It's tough being lonely.


I’m not saying that because the LCF-ED is a young organization that I’m the expert in this situation, because that's the furthest thing from the truth. Like the LCF-ED as an organization, although I am well trained, I'm relatively new to all of this and have had problems applying what I've been trained since college to do with regard to community work in Kazakhstan. However we work together, learn together, and we sort it out. All I’m trying to say is we’ve found that our collective knowledge complements each other well.

The people there at the organization are nice, professional (when they say 9am, they mean 9am), and I find it a joy to work and interact with them every day.