When I fought Satan

I love dogs. They are nice and cuddly, loyal friends and I never get tired of watching dogs chase things. However, since I've arrived in Kazakhstan, I've had the problem of dogs trying to eat me for lunch. Many volunteers in Kazakhstan at one point or another has some sort of alteration with a snarling angry dog. After comparing notes with friends, I believe that I have more dog problems than the average volunteer. This is something that I don't understand. I love dogs (and cats too), but I've never had problems with dogs until now.

The first couple of months were the worst. Dogs would chase me down the street, bark at me for no reason, or start snarling even before I was in their line of sight. Because of my problems, I started carrying a "doggie rock": a rock that fit in my palm well, but dense enough to cause some damage if it hit a maruading canine (Yes, this was my exact thought when I found this rock).

My doggie rock actually saved my life. On my first night in Karabulak, I slammed the rock on a dog's head. It’s not like I did this for fun. It tried to sneak attack me while I was doing my business in an outhouse. It lived, but I think I gave it brain damage because it didn't walk in a straight line after that and was a bit crosseyed. My host was really puzzled about the dog's actions, but just chalked it up to someone else throwing a rock at the dog. I never told her it was me.

When it comes to pitching rocks, I don’t have an arm like Randy Johnson, but I’m getting more accurate. And just to be clear, I don’t like throwing rocks at dogs. But I don't want to become lunch.

Aurora and Capt. Jack with my brother and I. These puppies are so cute, and actual proof that I love dogs! Perhaps when they are older I'll throw marshmellows at them, but never rocks. But on the other hand they wouldn't try to eat my soul.

After training, my relationship with canines in Kazakhstan got slightly better. My host family in Karabulak had a dog called “Omega”. I taught him how to play fetch, and he was really well behaved, although he would steal my shoes and bury them behind the banya.

However, Omega was a rebel, and he eventually ran away to join the “dog fleet”: a mass of 20 wildish (or unchained dogs) that would go rampaging around the town at dusk eating chickens, other dogs, and anything else they could find. I saw Omega one day a couple months later, eating garbage. Although we had a good rapport when he was at my host families house, I steered clear of him after that.

When I moved to Esik, I decided to take another strategy regarding dogs. For the first time, I was going to be nicer to them and not go flinging rocks every time one of them looked at me like I could be lunch. Esik doesn’t have a dog fleet, although there are 3-4 dogs that hang around my apartment. While they don’t belong to anyone, they have never barked at me or gave me any trouble, although I wouldn’t pet them. I did throw chicken scraps at them every once in awhile, to keep to the peace. The arrangement worked quite well.

Then Satan showed up.

Satan is a small black mutt with Death Star laser beams for eyes, a permanent scowl of a mouth, and can probably consume your soul faster than I can eat a fun pack of jellybeans. On a Friday I came home to find Satan camped out in front of my apartment door, snarling at me. I brandished my "doggie rock", and he backed off enough that I could sneak inside my door. Satan growled at my door for about another half an hour. The good news: I was safe. The bad news? I was under siege by an evil soul gnawer. It paced outside of my door for awhile, and eventually lay down on my doormat. With a good steel door between me and doom, I didn’t think much of the dog until the next day, when I opened my food cabinet and realized that with the exception of two eggs, the Ramen package was the last of my food.

Satan. I took this picture by opening the door a crack and blindly snapping a photo while praying that Satan wouldn't wedge open the door, fly inside, and feast on my soul. I also took this picture so that if Satan ate me, people would know the truth.

This particular week, I worked more than 50 hours at the Local Community Foundation creating their first annual report, so I didn’t have any time to go shopping. I was planning on doing this on Saturday. I made a dinner of Ramen noodles (my last package), and went to bed. When I woke up the next day, Satan was still there. And still very angry.

For the next 20 hours, Satan laid siege to my door. I couldn’t leave. Every time I opened the door, Satan was there, baring teeth. I wanted to go to the store, but with a snarling dog at my doorstep, I really couldn't go anywhere. I ran out of food at lunch. Satan stayed.

Closer to dinner time, I heard my neighbors. They were returning home. Then there was some growling, a couple of swear words in Russian, and when I looked out again, Satan was gone. After over 20 hours of being locked in my apartment I was saved.

Southern Exposure

The Kazakh New Year, called Naruyz, was celebrated this year on March 22-24^th. Combined with the weekend, everyone in Kazakhstan got a whopping 5 day holiday weekend. I spent my 5 days doing what I called my “southern tour”: traveling to Southern Kazakhstan, and specifically the city of Shymkent.

Shymkent is about 13 hours or about 700ish kilometers, to the southwest from Almaty, and was easily reached by a “sleeper bus” that left Almaty in the early evening and arrived in Shymkent at dawn the next day. I had images that the sleeper bus would be like the “knight bus” in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but I was deceived and sorely disappointed. However, getting there was almost as fun because I traveled with several other cool volunteers.

We arrived in Shymkent in the early morning. I was very impressed with the city. Word on the street is that it is the third most populated city in the country, although it gives off a small town vibe. Shymkent was more compact than I imagined, but very green because everything was already in bloom. Almaty and Esik are big mud pits, and winter still rages in the northern regions but Shymkent had grass, flowers, and it looked and felt like what Spring was supposed to be like.

However, I believe that all of the nice weather comes at a price. If the weather was already averaging 70 degrees already, I’m will to bet that summers there must be literally hot as hell. This just reinforces my belief that there is no perfect spot in Kazakhstan when it comes to weather: it’s always either too cold in the winter, or too hot in the summer. I know what I will do if I have a bad day in August: I’ll call a volunteer in Shymkent and ask them about the weather!

But all in all, I like Shymkent. It has amazing and cheap places to eat (if you are smart), doesn’t get too cold (but gets really hot in the summer), and people are very nice. My Russian skills were welcomed, and I even got the chance to work on my Kazakh language skills. I even had a babushka help me cross the street . Cars don’t really stop for pedestrians in Shymkent. Instead, they slow down. But, they will stop for babushkas, because in addition to babushkas be always right, they also always have the right of way. If you want to learn a bit more about the Shymkent and South Kazakhstan, go here.

While the food, warm weather, and getting to know new people better was great, I was disappointed for two reasons. First, I didn’t get to see a lot of my friend Becca.

Second, I did not get to see the very popular Kazakh sport called kokpar. Basically, kokpar is the Central Asian equivalent of polo, except about 10,000 times more badass. Check this: Kokpar is so awesome the “ball” is a whole goat carcass. The goal of the game: throw the goat carcass into your goal while riding on horseback. There is usually a kokpar game during Naruyz in Shymkent, but for some reason it was cancelled this year. Going to a kokpar game is one of my top cultural priorities in my remaining time in Kazakhstan, and I’m considering going back to Shymkent just to see a game.

Shymkent wasn’t the only place I went to on my southern tour. I also spent a couple of hours in Turkestan, a large town about 2 hours to the northwest of Shymkent. The one thing that stands out about Turkestan is that it contains the oldest mosque in Kazakhstan. Depending on your belief system, if you make a pilgrimage to Turkestan 3 times, it equals the same as a trip to Mecca.

I could drop some knowledge about this place, but I’ll just give you a website link instead, so you can learn more if you want:

Here are some pictures:

One awesome thing about the mosque is that there is a huge defensive wall around it. This picture is taken from atop the wall.

A picture with a fellow volunteer and some schoolchildren who came to Turkestan on a field trip.

According to a tour guide that befriended me and gave me a free tour, the whole mosque is covered in writing. While this may look like lines and "reverse swastikas", they actually say, "God is Great and Muhammad is the Prophet". Scientists and mathematicians are still unsure about the tiles and colors on this dome were created. This dome is the largest in all of Central Asia

I'm smiling because I'm 33% holier than you.

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!

March 8: Kinda a big deal.

Imagine what would happen if you forgot your girlfriend's birthday. And then you didn't get her a present for Christmas. And then for Valentine's Day, you sent cards to all of her friends except her.

Take a moment to think about how angry she would be. Take that anger, multiply it by two hundred thousand, and it still wouldn't equal half of the shame you would receive for forgetting Women's Day in Kazakhstan.

March 8, Women's day, is an official holiday in many countries (We did not work) but isn't celebrated in the United States. I think this is a bit weird because the idea of setting aside a day to honor women started in the United States. Yes, in the US we have Mother's day, also a good holiday, but Women's day is to honor all females, regardless of whether they are mothers or not.

Check out here for a short rundown and a short 2 min video (in English) about Women's Day.

Women's day is a big deal…You do not have to do a lot for the day, but you have to do something.

For the women at the Local Community Foundation, I bought a potted plant that will bloom every year around Woman's day. I also called my old director in Karabulak, who gave me a "Well done" in Russian (it is rare for my old director to say well done. Not that I did a bad job while I was working there…she only says it when she is really happy). For my friends at my old site, I bought small gifts, and will save them until I go back to visit. In the meanwhile, I called them to wish them a happy Woman's Day.

I tried to call my friend who tutored me in Taldykorgan, but I dialed the wrong number and got an angry man instead. I also called my host families, and got to talk with babushka, who yelled at me for my relationship problems. She also told me to eat more and to study my Russian. How she knows that I am thinner and took a break from studying Russian eludes me. She hasn't seen me since August. This just reinforces my belief that babushkas are always correct.

Now...a short two weeks before one of the biggest holidays in Kazakhstan!

"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.