Happy Women's Day!!

To all of you ladies out there, Happy International Women's Day!!

International Women's Day (IWD) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. The first IWD event was run in 1911 with more than one million women and men attending rallies campaigning for women's rights, thus it is the centennial of this great day. It's a really important holiday here in Kazakhstan, and in the rest of the post-Soviet sphere, and in many ways has a similar status as Mother's Day. The main difference is that Women's Day in Kazakhstan sees men honoring their mothers, wives, girlfriends, colleagues, etc. with flowers, candy, and gifts.

As I work in an office solely operated by women, there's was lots of Women's Day camaraderie. I gave my co-workers American cosmetics (they love this stuff!!) and roses, and in turn received:

1. vanilla shower gel
2. "herb" scented bath salts
3. a candle
4. palmolive soap
5. "Forest Fruits" shower gel
6. "Forest Fruits" deoderant

People here love to give each other toiletry products. I mean, really like toiletry products generally. Our office neighbors brought us a cake, and with my English Club (all girls) we played an hour-long game of UNO.

Tomorrow for the actual holiday itself I plan to spend it strolling through various parks with my co-workers, and going to a movie with my host sister.

Ladies, I implore you. Take the day off! This day's for you!


For more info on International Women's Day, I refer you to The Internet.

50 Years!!!

Can you believe it?? Peace Corps is 50 years old! 50! That's oooollllddd! Seriously, though, on October 14, 1960, then-Senator John F. Kennedy spoke in the early morning to a gathering of the students at the University of Michigan who were waiting for hours to hear the presidential candidate speak in Ann Arbor.

On the steps of the University of Michigan Student Union, President Kennedy challenged the students to serve their country in the cause of peace by living and working in developing countries, an idea that inspired the creation of the Peace Corps.




On March 1, 1961 President John F. Kennedy signed executive order 10924 to establish the program, and in September of that year congress authorized the program with the passage of the Peace Corps Act. The act declares the program's purpose:

"To promote world peace and friendship through a Peace Corps, which shall make available to interested countries and areas men and women of the United States qualified for service abroad and willing to serve, under conditions of hardship if necessary, to help the peoples of such countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained manpower."

Since 1961, over 200,000 Americans have joined the Peace Corps and have served in 139 countries. Currently 8,655 volunteers serve in 77 countries in the areas of education, youth & community development, health, business and information & communication technology, agriculture, environment, HIV/AIDS, and food security. Although times have changed, the Peace Corps continues to promote peace and friendship by remaining true to its mission, established in 1961:
1. To help the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women.
2. To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.
3. To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.

Peace Corps volunteers and RPCVS (Returned Peace Corps Volunteers) around the world will be celebrating Peace Corp's 50 years all year long. Wanna join in the celebrations?! If you haven't seen it yet, check out Peace Corps Kazakhstan's website celebrating the 50th anniversary. The site has great information on how you can get involved in celebrations this year. One of my favorite features is our PC Kaz Family Mapping. On the top menu click "Map" to see where the supporters of Peace Corps Kazakhstan are. You can participate by printing out the PDF sign, filling it out, taking a picture and emailing back to us with your location. I can't wait to see this map fill up!

You know what I miss?

This beast.

Work Shake-Ups

It's been forever and a day since my last post, and this is long overdue, so here goes.

These past couple months have been full of all kinds of crazy. On January 25, after 4 days' notice, my director Lena moved across the country to the capital city of Astana to take a job as some sort of program manager with the National Youth Congress. It was a good career move for her, a good change for my organization that was in need of fresh leadership, and was great for me. I finally felt the collar loosen a little, and felt like for the first time I was actually part of the organization, actually was allowed to have an opinion about things, and could actually start to get things done.

Things weren't easy after Lena moved. We all were trying to figure out our new roles, my counterpart Nastya became the new director, and we had to hire someone new to take over Nastya's old position (1. The new hire was our accountant's 19-year-old sister who is studying fashion design, 2. the position is “President of the Human Resources Department”... we have 4 employees and no long-term funding, but we have a President of Human Resources...). Throughout February things were still tricky, but beginning to look up. I still wasn't getting any kind of direction from my co-workers, but Nastya was at least working with me at Volunteer Club meetings and holding regular staff meetings.

Then yesterday, who should come bounding into the office in overly-sized sunglasses and and sequined hair scrunchy? Lena! Of course! Who else. It turns out that it's cold in Astana, and having a real job is hard. She didn't like working somewhere where she “couldn't do exactly what she wanted”. It made her “uncomfortable”. Thus, my old director is back, my new director is now no longer director, and we have an extra, recently-hired employee that we're not quite sure what to do with.

I'm rolling with the punches, etc., but it's been frustrating.

On the upside, it's March!! The month of spring, Maslenitsa, and Nauryz! Nauryz is the new year holiday celebrated by many Turkic people (Kazakh, Uzbek, Tadjik, and others) and falls on March 22. It's a national holiday here in Kazakhstan, and is especially important in the south, where I live, due to the large Kazakh population. Everybody gets off of work for 3 days, people gather with family and friends and eat copious amounts of food, these same people drink copious amounts of alcohol, and traditional events pop up all over. Traditional dances and performances are put on, and horse games [including but not limited to: polo with a goat carcass [kok par], races, men chase woman on horseback, and woman chases man on horseback with a whip. Exciting, huh?!]

Lots of Volunteers venture down to the south for a taste of balmy spring weather and traditional Kazakh culture. Only 2 weeks of eager anticipation before a glorious reunion with my friends from training, and epic amounts of Kazakh culture.

Oops, gotta run. My old/reinstated director Lena just sent one of our 15-year-old interns off as a representative of our organization. She's supposed to speak to the directors of 3 state universities and convince them to allow our organization to run voter's rights trainings at their respective places of higher learning. This could quite possibly end in disaster.

Serious Clubbing

At the moment I'm sitting in my office prepping for one of my weekly English clubs, and figured I'd write a quick post about the kinds of clubs I lead every week. First off, you should know that Peace Corps loves clubs. I mean, LOVES clubs. Peace Corps is pretty convinced that community clubs make the world a better place, and in many ways this is true. Clubs that volunteers lead provide a safe space for youth to hang out, interact with their peers, and get a decently structured hour of after-school programming. Clubs are also an easy way to get a foot into the community door and to show your place of employment that even though you don't know the language very well, you're getting things done and working with youth. Hence, we do a lot of clubs around these parts. 

Quite honestly, I don't really like clubs all that much. I'm not quite as beholden to their magical powers as my Peace Corps superiors, but my organization wants me to run clubs, so I run clubs. 

On Mondays, I run a 90-minute English club for beginners at my organizations office. It's called "English Stars". My director thought it was really important that it have a name, so I let her choose. I have about 6 regular participants (which is a small group, but a good size considering we only have 6 chairs in our office), all girls between the ages of 16 and 20. They're a good group, but they really don't know any English and seem to be hoping that I can teach them to speak fluently overnight. They're not terribly patient, and not terribly willing to put in any extra study time. I bribe them with chocolate and the translations of their favorite song lyrics (usually Rihanna, Beyonce, or Britney Spears) to keep them motivated and engaged. For the month of February, we're doing a unit on biographical information; appearance, character traits, birthdays, family, work, hobbies, these sorts of topics. Most of our clubs start about like this:

Me: Today we'll be talking about character traits and personality. 

The English Stars: In Russian? 

Me: Is this Russian club? 

The English Stars: No, it's English club. 

Me: So probably English, don't you think? 

The English Stars: But it's easier in Russian. 

They generally mean well, and they're good kids, they're just still figuring this whole language learning business out. 

Other than my organizations clubs, I also help out with other clubs that the volunteers here run as a group. We take turns leading to keep things interesting. On Tuesday we run an advanced English club at the American Corner of a local library. ( American Corners are amazing and wonderful things financed by the US Embassy. The American Corner in Shymkent has a conference table and chairs, a computer and internet, and a small English language library. It's a great space for English clubs, and the local staff are pretty great.) At this club we cover all sorts of topics from holidays to cooking to music. This month my pal Phillip is running a series of clubs celebrating Black History Month. 

Wednesday is Women's Club day. I help lead this club with 2 other volunteers. It's more of a discussion group than a club, and is conducted entirely in English. It's a safe space for women to come and discuss topics that they often can't openly discuss at home or at school (sexual health, gender politics, all kinds of things). It's pretty sweet. This is one place that I can really feel the difference I'm making here. We bring topics to Women's Club that locals have never even considered, you can see their minds opening up and their perspectives changing. It's pretty sweet. 

After Women's Club we run a movie night at an old Soviet move theater. We show movies in English with English subtitles, and provide important vocabulary and questions about the  film plot and characters. It's a nice, chill end to the day. 

Thursday one of my sitemate's runs a beginner's English club at the American Corner. When she's out of town, I take over for her. 

Friday I run a volunteer club at my organization. We have about 10 serious local youth that come for the meetings. Right now I'm starting from the very beginning with them, discussing volunteerism, service, and community. There's no concept of volunteerism in Kazakhstan, so you have to start small. It's a challenge convincing my co-workers that we can't just leap right in with this group and give them huge assignments, because if we do that we'll lose them. We need to figure out what they're passionate about, what change they want to see in their community before we go any further. This is my most challenging club because it's run entirely in Russian, and my Russian really isn't good enough to discuss any of these sorts of things. But I try. I try really hard, and some days it seems like my volunteers are getting into the volunteer spirit. 

After volunteer club I jet across town to a cafe where a local friend holds a conversational English club. It runs for 90 minutes and usually draws about 30-35 locals of all ages. We volunteers come to provide native speaker support, and to lead conversations. The only topics off limits are politics and religion. Other than that, any topic is fair game. 

Well, dear reader, that's my weekly club schedule. As you can see, we're serious about our community clubbing here in Peace Corps. 

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This is a quick one folks, I promise. There have been a few interesting developments at work this last week, most amusing: our NGO office is now the home of Altau Car Insurance! Our cell phone-repairing office neighbor has recently come under the employment of said car insurance agency as a programmer, and came by to install the sales program onto our office computers and train my co-workers in salesmanship. Now about half of our accountant's day is spent with car insurance clients, we have boxes full of official Altau gear (mostly poorly functioning flashlights and some broken pens), and we have people coming in and out of the office far more interested in insurance than anything my organization does. 

When I asked about this whole car insurance business a couple weeks ago, my co-workers explained that by law every driver in Kazakhstan must have insurance, but it's cheaper to buy fake insurance than to actually get insured. When we opened up shop in the insurance business, I asked my co-workers if we were selling legitimate car insurance, they looked at each other and giggled. So we may or may not be selling fraudulent car insurance out of our NGO office. 

The Nationality Question in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan

Yes, the title of this blog post could be a International Studies/Russian Studies course at a liberal arts college, no I'm not trying to be cheeky. 

The question of nationality is an important one in Post-Soviet places, dear reader, including in Kazakhstan. I'm sure there have been a good number of academic articles written on the topic, which probably conclude that after 70 years of having a "Soviet" identity assigned to them by the state, people are taking their own identities back. I could see that. What's more interesting to me is how important ethnic identity is here.

When I first moved in with my host family, my host mom asked me my nationality. I was a bit confused. They had a volunteer live with them last year, so I assumed they new the Peace Corps is a program for Americans. I told her I was American, and she said, "But no one in America is "cleanly" American. There are all kinds of other nationalities mixed in." I said this was true, but that doesn't mean I'm not American. She said that there are no real Americans. I've been thinking a lot about this conversation, as I've met more and more people here. They always have the same first question "Who are you by nationality?"

Here's about how any taxi ride starts for me.

Driver: Where to? 

Me: The 11th microregion, 300 tenge

Driver: 400 tenge, gas is expensive

Me: 300 is a normal price

(He, because cab drivers here are always male, gripes for awhile, and then usually gives in to my price.)

Driver: You're a foreigner? 

Me: ... Yep

Driver: Are you English? 

Me: Nope. 

Driver: What's your nationality?

Me: I'm an American.

Driver: No, I mean your nationality.

Me: American.

Driver: No. Where is your family from? What are your roots? 

Me: American.

Driver: You must not understand Russian.

I'm not try to be cheeky with locals when I say that I'm American. And I'm not trying to be the uberPatriot. It just seems more true to say that I'm American, than to say "Well my mother's family came over from Easter Europe, specifically Slovenia and Slovakia about 100 years ago, and my father's family includes a smattering of German, English, and probably a few more nationality's I'm forgetting long before then. So that's what my nationality is."

It's interesting to come from the US, a place where civic nationality is often just as important as (or more important than) ethnic nationality, to a place where the opposite is true. If I was a newcomer to the US, or if my family had come over more recently, I might agree that the "American" nationality doesn't  properly fir the bill for me. But given the circumstances, I identify as American before any historical roots. No one in Kazakhstan would ever identify themselves as "Kazakhstani". Not in a billion years. Here when someone asks your nationality, they mean ethnic nationality. It doesn't matter that your family has lived here for 100 years, you still identify with the ethnic group your family came from. 

Kazakhstanis are very proud of their nationality, and the national make-up of their country. One of the first things I often hear from locals is that there are 140 nationalities here, and everyone lives together peacefully. Though I hear plenty of racial slurs against minority groups here, the living peacefully together bit is true. I work in an office with 1 Russian, 2 Koreans, and one American. Our office neighbors are a Kazakh and an Uzbek that fix cell phones. Down the hall there is a Tatar businessmen and his Russian business partner. Regardless of all the peacefulness, nationality is still important, and often the first thing people notice. I guess that's mostly what I wanted to mention.