October: The Final Countdown

October: the last full month of my Peace Corps service. As of today, I have 40 days until I leave Kazakhstan. No more, and no less. I’m starting to get excited, because the end is in sight. I used to measure my Peace Corps service in years…then months. 40 Days? 40 Days is nothing!

I’m having a hard time finding motivation to care about anything work related, perhaps because I’m so close to being done. It feels like the last semester of college again, when I had classes to attend, stuff to do, but I didn’t really feel like going (and didn’t really care). Usually there is a sense of duty or obligation (and sometimes desperation) that provides the fuel that keeps me plugging away at whatever I’m doing, but over the week I’ve come to the conclusion that the motivation tank is running on fumes. I find myself using more and more of my time watching episodes of House and playing video games than focusing on things that I need to do.

The exception is my work assisting the Kaz-22 Youth Development trainees (who are coming along just nicely). Working with them is a pleasure, and now that I’m done with my primary assignment at the Local Community Foundation, they are my #1 priority. Honestly, they are the reason why I don’t barricade myself in my apartment and waste the month watching old tv shows and playing videogames until my plane leaves.

I don't think its very productive to watch the whole 3rd season of House...in two days.

Whatever the case, I have to snap out of it. The end is near, but there is a lot to do:

• Creating my "Close of Service Document", a one page account of what I did as a volunteer. This will be the only surviving document that Peace Corps will have of my service after I leave, so it has to be good, and more importantly, accurate.

• Confirming tickets home, and researching fun things to do in Istanbul, Turkey. I’m going to spend a week there on the way back to the US. After researching Egypt and Greece as other vacation alternatives, I decided that it may be better to go to one country and spend a meaningful amount of time there than skipping around to 2-3 countries but only spending 2-4 days in each. So as much as I want to travel to Egypt, the pyramids will have to wait. They’ve been around for 1000’s of years, so I think they can hold on for another decade or two.

• Revamping (again) my resume, so I won’t be unemployed (for long) when I get back.

• Retaking a Russian language test. I initially took it during the Close of Service Conference, but I wasn’t happy with my results, so I’m going to try again before I leave.

• Packing up my stuff. Giving away what is useful, throwing out the rest.

• Studying for the GRE. In between my House watching binge, I’ve been doing GRE prep. I have study materials, and run through problems for about 2 hours each day. One of my goals for 2011 is to go back to school. For awhile, I thought that I wanted to do law school, but since then I’ve changed my mind. It’s hard to do proper research on this sort of stuff from the other side of the world, but I’m seriously looking at schools that offer programs in Non Profit Management, Public Policy, or Central Asian Studies. Peace Corps also has a “Fellows Program” which allows for returned volunteers to get higher degrees for cheap (or free!) at some pretty good universities. So watch out! I may run an NGO someday.

• Tying up administrative loose ends with the Kazakh course project by turning in the final paperwork documents to Peace Corps. However, some of the documents and receipts that I need are still in Karabulak, so this means that I must pay a visit to Taldykorgan in October. Although it may cause some long days for me because I must still also help out the new trainees every day, I’m certainly not crying because Taldykorgan is the best city in Kazakhstan.

• Preparing my organization and site for a new volunteer. This means helping them to find host families, creating a plan of work, and recruiting a counterpart. As well as cleaning out my desk/shelf.

• Call it fate, magic, voodoo, and Act of God or whatever, but during the last 27 months I’ve met some very influential people in Kazakhstan; people who have shaped my service and my life. Some are teachers, students, old counterparts, and a few are even volunteers. I’m bad with goodbyes, and mushy stuff, (and will hopefully see some of them again) but I can’t leave Kazakhstan without telling them about the positive effect they have had on my time here, and thanking them for it.

Project Design Management Seminar

This week, I helped organize and lead a 3 day seminar on Project Design Management (PDM). This training was designed to teach people about how to plan a project. All of the Kaz 21s, the newest Peace Corps volunteers, from two oblasts (oblasts = states) attended, along with their Kazakhstan counterparts. My Regional Manager ran the Russian side of the seminar, and a volunteer leader and I handled the English equivalent. I had a great time, and was happy to be a guide to the volunteers and their counterparts by helping them to realize and formulate their project goals. And, it was great to spend a week in Taldykorgan, my favorite city in Kazakhstan.

If done correctly, PDM helps volunteers and their counterparts to create a logical plan to organize and implement a project and avoid confusion like the sport of Calvinball

While the concepts of PDM were easily grasped by the volunteers, the seminar had other hidden benefits. First, the seminar was a great chance for volunteers and their counterparts to get to know each other better and to improve their personal and business relationships. Relationships are very important in Kazakhstan, and especially when it comes to implementing projects. I've seen volunteers fail with projects, not because their ideas weren't good, and not because they didn't learn Russian and Kazakh, but just because they didn't spend time building that personal rapport with their coworkers. It's amazing how much closer you can get to a person after 3 days of working on a singular project, even if you do not speak the same language very well.

Second, the seminar was powerful networking tool. It gave leaders of NGOs and school teachers as well as the volunteers the chance to see what other people in their fields are doing. Teachers from Zharkent swapped English games with teachers from Ust Kamegorsk. NGO directors in Taldykorgan learned about projects in nearby Tekeli. Even if nobody learned a thing from the sessions, the chance to network made PDM worth it to all who attended.

Themes that we worked on during the sessions.

At the end of the seminar, each volunteer with their counterparts had to present on the projects they worked on. All of them had great ideas, such as:

• Starting a youth baseball league
• Organizing a volleyball camp
• Creating a resource center for English Teachers
• Advocating for the installation of disabled ramps to public buildings
• Saving an orchard that has rare apples found only in Kazakhstan
  
• Organizing a Frisbee camp
• Summer camps to teach youth about new cultures and practice English
  

Behold the future of philanthopy in Kazakhstan! The woman on the right owns a buisness, but donates a portion of her profits to ecological issues in her area. She doesn't have a volunteer, so I worked with her a lot during the sessions. She wants to find a way to maintain the apple orchards in her area which produce a rare type of apple only found in Kazakhstan.

All in all, it was a great seminar, and I had a great time.

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!