Pre-Service Training

I am typing this up in a hurry so please excuse any grammar/spelling errors since I will not have time to edit. Several things have happened since my last entry. First of all, our flights into Kazakhstan were delayed twice. So, the trip from Philadelphia (where our staging was held) to Almaty took 36 hours from hotel to hotel. Our group arrived in Almaty at 7AM local time on Thursday the 21st of August and Kazakhstan’s Peace Corps Country Director immediately ushered us into our first day of training. Our two days in Almaty involved attending presentations on Peace Corps in-country policy, getting divided up into our training groups (4 education groups and 1 community development group), getting our immunization series started, and learning a few phrases to help us through our first night with our host family. Friday evening everyone was shipped out to their training sites and introduced to their host families who will house us for the next three months until we leave for our permanent service sites.


My village is the farthest from Almaty of all of the training sites. Ten other volunteers are living here with me and we are split up into two groups for our Kazakh and teaching practicum classes. I chose to learn Kazakh instead of Russian as my primary language which means that I’ll be receiving about 30 hours of Kazakh language training per week and only 2-4 hours of Russian. Fun fact: our town is the birth place of Kazakhstan’s current president and the school where I have my lessons was established by him to serve the children in the area. The village is also the most rural of all the training sites. If I look out of my classroom’s window, I can see snow-topped mountains just a few miles away and I wake up in the morning to cows mooing and roosters crowing. I’ve discovered that, contrary to popular belief, roosters start crowing at around 5AM and continue to do so all day until about 9PM.


I feel very lucky to have the host family that I received. My host mom and dad have three sons but all three of them are married and live on their own with their families. So, for the most part, I just interact with the two of them all day. Both of my host parents are very kind and patient with me and find it amusing when I bring my notebook to the dinner table and start trying to practice phrases I learned in class today. We communicate pretty well, despite my lack of language skills, and as I learn more our conversations have started to incorporate more full sentences and less miming. I think that I have started to slowly integrate myself into their lives. They no longer get up every morning to make sure that I get to school, my mom host has started to let me help with the cooking, and washing the dishes after meals has become my official contribution to the family chore list. Their sons and their families are also fun to hang out with. Their youngest son and his wife both speak a little English so when they come over I get to sort out all of the little confusing episodes that have happened during the week. The son’s wife is only 23 and is incredibly nice. I think she may be my first Kazakh friend. My host mom’s other sons have children so when they come over I have started to try to win the kids over by making them laugh at my poor attempts at communication and giving them M&Ms. The house I am living in is great too. There are apple and pear trees in the backyard that I can walk up to and pick fruit to eat, my room is fairly big and has a window and a comfortable bed, and my host parents have a flat screen T.V. with satellite service. I still use an outhouse though and take bucket baths out in the banya (sort of a homemade sauna-one of the coolest things I have gotten to do here so far). The only downside to my living situation is that a psychotic dog has appeared on my street who does not like the fact that I have to walk past him everyday at all. However, I haven’t seen him around the last day and a half so maybe he has moved on to terrorize another street.


It still feels very surreal to be here. And I don’t think I’ll ever fully get over the fact that I am living and working so far from home. A little over a week has come and gone but to me it seems as if I have been here much longer than that. Yet, I have never felt more purposeful and determined. Three people of the original group have already left. At this point, I haven’t even contemplating leaving. There are moments that have made me stop and try to remember why I decided to do this because I feel scared, homesick or overwhelmed. But, there are also moments where I feel confident in my abilities or know that I wouldn’t change what I am doing for anything in the world. One of these realizations came to me a couple of days ago when my language group was practicing our numbers by tossing a Frisbee around in a circle to each other. All of a sudden we turned around and saw that a group of seven young boys from the village had seen us and sneaked up behind us to see what we were doing. We invited them to play and showed them how to toss the Frisbee and before long they were helping us count and correcting us when we made mistakes. It was one of the best afternoons I have had so far.


So, all in all, I feel very lucky to be here. I am not sure when I will have internet access again but please keep sending emails! I may not have time to answer them all at once but I promise I will get around to it. And, once I get a cell phone and figure out what my number is I will email it out to everyone so that you can call if you want. I miss everyone and hope that you are doing well!

So It Begins

I am going to spend the next 16 hours of my life traveling from the US to Kazakhstan. The other volunteers and I in the 20th volunteer group to ship out to Kazakhstan are departing from JFK at 9:35PM and will not arrive in Almaty, the former capital, until 11:40PM local time. I'm not entirely sure what day it'll be by then (Wednesday? Thursday?) but I do know that we will all be extremely jet-lagged yet anxious and excited to begin our pre-service training as well. To top it all off, I have to look "neat and presentable" when I step off the plane at the airport...we'll see how that goes.

The 62 Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) in our group all have different reasons for signing up to serve abroad for 27 months. For me, the Peace Corps presented me with the perfect alternative to fighting through interviews for a 9-5 office job. Last year, I couldn't see myself moving happily into the work force. I wanted adventure. I wanted to "trek off the beaten path," so to speak. And, I wanted to make a meaningful and lasting difference in the world. With these lofty ideals in mind, I couldn't think of a better option than to take the plunge and volunteer for two years while living abroad. I'm excited to fully immerse myself in the local culture, learn Russian (so far, I can only say "man" and "boy") and Kazakh, make new friends, see the Caspian Sea, and have at least one of my students' faces light up with comprehension. Plus, I get to tag along with Jamie and annoy him for a couple more years.

The last two days leading up to our departure were spent in Philadelphia for "staging." Staging involved meeting all the volunteers, getting information regarding Peace Corps policy and safety measures, and turning in a myriad registration forms. The icebreaker activities were fun and for the first time in a while I felt like I was surrounded by like-minded people who didn't think I was insane for agreeing to take bucket showers for two years. It surprised me how supportive and accepting everyone was and I am looking forward to getting to know as many people as I can in the coming months. One highlight: I discovered that everyone else is as worried as I am about getting bitten by one of the rabid dogs that supposedly populate the village streets on the steppe.

For the next three months I am going to be training with other secondary school TEFLs (Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) in a village somewhere in the southern region of the country. The teacher training groups get divided into 3 or 4 groups based on language preference and grade level while all of the community development volunteers train together. The first two days in Almaty will be spent at a hotel in the city and then on Saturday our host families will come and whisk us away to our training sites. I am a bit apprehensive about how I will communicate with them at first but I am sure that all the kinks will work themselves out by the time I fully transition into my family's life.

Everything still seems surreal. I don't think I'll actually believe I am doing this until I touch down in Kazakhstan. Even though Peace Corps has emphasized that we should expect nothing, I can't help but wonder what the next two years will hold for me. Right now, Kazakhstan represents a huge unknown. I hope that by the time I leave I will have lived the experience to its fullest and will regret leaving there as much as I regret leaving the US now. I'm ready to begin.