The Project

(From 9/14)
As a part of pre=service training, every village has to do a project for their community. This year, our projects were funded by an unnamed businessman in Kant. Most villages did clean-up projects in the local schools or parks, but my village decided to go beyond that. At the local primary school (where we held our English clubs), there are five outdoor stage areas where the kids can play. They look like this:

We were concerned by the rotten floorboards, since they are obviously a safety hazard if kids are going to be running around.

We wanted to replace the broken floorboards, but the director of the school was only interested in having the stages repainted, so we agreed to do both. We spent most of the last two weekends working. The girls started scraping at the old paint, while the boys (and a random but very helpful Kyrgyz man) replaced the floors.

We also had the help of a few Kyrgyz boys one day.

(in our sunglasses, so the paint chips didn’t fly into their eyes)

By the end of the second full day of scraping at dirty old paint, we had made great progress, but we were all exhausted and tired of scraping.
(Jess, Joni, and Serena)

The final product, however, is really exciting. The floors are now safe and much better looking than before.

The walls are my pride and joy, after spending hours on them. We used a pattern Jessica’s mother made for the cushions she makes, and added a creation from Micah, our resident artist.

After finishing completely, the last six volunteers still standing

The final product!

Peace Corps was here.

After our second day of painting, we were proud and a little loopy from exhaustion and paint fumes, so we had a photo shoot, using my camera’s timer:

Three Musketeers style

“Sword” fight. I’m throwing paint on them, if you can’t tell (we ran out of brushes to pose with)

Too cool for school

Perfecting the Kyrgyz squat

Can can

Normal group shot: Me, Micah, Chris, Jess, Joni, Serena, and Mike

Also at the school, this is a normal slide for little kids to play on. The top looks much the same.

Other than the project, everything is coming to a close right now. This Thursday is Swearing In, when I will officially become a volunteer (because until then I’m just a “trainee”), and on Friday, I leave for Jalalabad with my counterpart to start my real work. I’m really excited to start, but sad to leave my village with my family and friends and the whole PC group.
Also, my language group has adopted two dogs who hang out around the house where we have class.
This is Puppy. He’s grown a lot while we’ve been here.

This is Mangy. He doesn’t like to stand still for pictures. He’s usually very wiggly. This is the best I could do.

9/17

Tomorrow is the big swearing in, and the official end of PST. On Friday, I head down to Jalalabad, and I start work on Monday!

I don't know when I will get to the internet next -- I may stick around my village at first to get oriented and everything there, but the city isn't far away.

I just got back from my permanent site visit today. I left Saturday to spend three days where I will be spending the next two years. Overall, I am very excited about what I’m about to do. PST has been a lengthy transition period, and I finally got a taste of what reality will soon be for me. My village is small – supposedly there are 5,000 people, but it’s likely that a sizable number of them are in Russia. There is one small store, a school, and a lot of houses. Physically, the village is beautiful. It’s very green – lots of trees bordering all of the streets and all over the yards, and is surrounded by farmland. There are a lot of sunflower fields around, which still cease to amaze me. On the outskirts of the village, there are small hills, which allow for great views and peaceful solitary time (which is hard to find). There are the obligatory (for Kyrgyzstan) views of the farmlands with mountains shooting up in the background, which still amazes me. My family is “untraditional”, but will be really great. The head of the family is a grandmother. There is also her daughter (my aunt) and her 14 year-old daughter Aichurok and her daughter-in-law (my host mother) and her 2 year-old daughter Elnura, 13 year-old son Adel, and 15 year-old son Bakit. My host father is, like many Kyrgyz men, living in Russia to work, because there is much more money to be made there than in Kyrgyzstan. My mother is a nurse in the closest town, and works most nights, so she is often out of the house for dinner. It is nice to be living in such a community of women, though. It’s a nice change from many Kyrgyz families to see the grandmother as the most respected figure in the household. The house itself consists of three buildings around a large yard. I live in one building with my mother, sister, and brothers (though now the boys sleep outside). One building is the kitchen, and the other is where my grandmother, aunt, and cousin live. There is also a large outdoor kitchen area, because there is often no electricity in the afternoons, as in all of Kyrgyzstan now. We have a lot of animals, which is really fun. For all I know now, we have 8 sheep, a lot of turkeys and baby turkeys (who are surprisingly cute), chickens, three dogs, a cat (his name is Tom and he is amazingly friendly and needy, which I obviously love), cows, and possibly a horse. My favorite part of the house (and houses in the South in general, I think) is a large outdoor platform, which they cover with tushuks (cushions). That is where the grandmother spends much of her time and where we eat dinner every night. It’s really nice to sit out with the breeze and all of live going on behind us. The 14-year-old girl in my family will be a really great asset for me. She was Danielle (the K14 I am replacing)’s pet project and most fulfilling project of her service, she said. In Danielle’s first year, Aichurok (at this point, 12 years old) convinced Danielle to teach her English. At this point, her English is really impressive. Her biggest dream right now is to do the FLEX program, where the US government sends Kyrgyz high schoolers to the US for a year. She’s still too young to apply, but I hope to help her in the next year so that next year, when she applies, she’ll be ready. She is the most self-motivated 14 year-old I have ever heard of. On my first night at the house, she came up to me and asked if I had any English grammar books. I showed her one that Peace Corps gave us, and she smiled and sat down to look through it. She asked if she could borrow it later, because she needs to work on her grammar. I’m very excited to see a young girl so invested in her own education and am very excited to work with her. She’s also a really sweet girl, so she’ll be fun to get to know. Monday was the “first bell” ceremony – the first day of school in all of Kyrgyzstan. It isn’t technically a school day, but there is a ceremony where students are welcomed back. It was my first day with the school, which was exciting. Danielle and I were recognized by the directors and were given flowers by students, which was nice. I got to meet all of the English teachers (our school has 6!) and a few other teachers. After the ceremony, we had a brief meeting, and the day was over. On Tuesday, the teachers had organized a party to celebrate Danielle and me as well as the building of a fence (Danielle’s biggest project at the school). We went into the town near our village with a few teachers and a few of the main masters (builders of the fence) to a café. On the way, we picked up Sareah, another new volunteer in the region, who was added into the party. At the café, we got food and vodka and cognac. The builders and a few teachers drank the liquor, while the rest of us sipped Cokes. After a few toasts and shots of vodka, they decided it was time to dance. We all go up and, while other tables of people continued to eat, danced in a circle. This was all, of course, around noon. We danced for two songs, then went back to the table for more food and liquor. After a few hours and right as the men ordered more food and beer, Danielle, Sarah, and I gracefully exited. That was both my first teacher party and my first Kyrgyz party all in one, which is exciting and different than anything I could have expected from a teacher party. During the visit, I also went into Jalalabad city with the people in our area and the two people who live near here from last year. We got to walk around the city, see the important sites (the grocery store, the best internet café, etc) and hang out with the people who are closest to us, which is exciting. I really like the two k15s we met and am excited to get to know them and the other 16s better. This morning, on the way to the airport in Osh, we all stopped in at a café that is famous for serving American style food. I got a cup of real coffee (my first since July 2nd!) and amazing vegetable fajitas. It’s amazing how happy those little things can make me after just two months. Now I have less than three weeks left here before I swear in as a full volunteer and start my real adventure! Love to all!
Leslie













The oven where they bake bread in my house









My counterpart, another English teachers, and two welders breaking it down
















Welders know how to have a good time
















The view out my window -- those are rose bushes, if you can't tell
















The compound of my new family -- that's the house where I live in the background











The kitchen
















The outdoor platform where we eat and hang out

The outdoor kitchen, and part of the other house

My bed in my new house

The seating area of my room

The view from the flight to Osh

There are mountains in Kyrgyzstan

Lots of mountains

Me and my PST host family outside our house

It’s been a while since I last updated, and it’s been quite an eventful few weeks! Last week, I had a pretty intense bout of food poisoning, but with some medicine and about two and a half days of straight sleep, I quickly improved. I was feeling better just in time to get married last week! Every year during PST, each village puts on a performance of a cultural tradition, so our group did a consensual (ie not bride kidnapping) Kyrgyz wedding. Mike and I were the lucky couple from our village. We were told that we were very much in love, so we should be happy about it. I was told I made a good Kyrgyz bride, in that I pretty much went limp and let the mothers braid my hair, put earrings in, and lead me around to greet various people. It was fun to get together and see what all the other villages have been up to. There were four weddings (mine, a bride kidnapping, Russian, and Turkish), and some other traditions. After the performances, the event turned into a middle-school dance party (to lots of Christina Aguilera and other hits of that time), with most of the trainees and some language teachers and other Kyrgyz family members dancing in a field in the middle of the day. We have to take what we can get. The other big news of the week was our permanent site announcement. I’m going to Jalalabad, practically on the Uzbekistan border. I’m really excited because that’s the South (and we all know that everything is better in the South…) which means the winter won’t be quite as brutal and we have access to good fruits and vegetables all year, because most of Kyrgyzstan’s fruit comes from Uzbekistan. Some other highlights of my region include: the world’s largest walnut forest, a large almond forest, mountains and lakes all around, good Uzbek inspired food, and really good volunteers around me. My site is near Jalalabad City, and also only about 2-3 hours from Osh, which is supposed to be a really cool city. Next Saturday, I’m heading there for a 5 day visit, where I will stay with my new host family, meet my coteacher, introduce myself to the school on the first day (which is a big holiday/a big deal here), and meet all of the other volunteers in the region. I also get to meet the volunteer who I am replacing, which will be really helpful. I’m really excited about my assignment and the fact that it means that I’m getting started with my service soon! Yesterday, we had a group trip to Bishkek. We got to see the Peace Corps headquarters, which are beautiful and very comforting. It’s amazing how excited we got about a real bathroom and a giant wall full of books. It’s the little things… After the visit to the headquarters, we were on our own to explore the city. I ended up getting a cheeseburger and French fries (which were both extremely amazing – again, it’s the little things…) and a charger for my camera battery (because my old one was stolen out of a box…). It’s always good to hang out with the big group of volunteers and get out of our normal villages. I’m heading today with some other volunteers to visit another training village, just to see different people and different places. Training is going well, but kind of starting to wrap up. We had our last English club last week. When we told our girls that it was the last class, they all got really sad. At the end of class, they all came up and hugged us. Afterward, they stood around the door, saying goodbye repeatedly. It’s really nice that I had so much fun with the club, because it was a good precursor to actually teaching. Kyrgyz is still coming along well too. Our teacher set a rule last week that if we speak English in class, we have to buy the whole class ice cream. That hasn’t happened yet, but it sets the precedent that we have to work to speak as much Kyrgyz as possible, which is helping a lot. I like that I can get around a lot better now with my Kyrgyz. I’m also excited that in Jalalabad, there is very little Russian, so it’s mostly Kyrgyz or Uzbek, but mostly everyone will speak Kyrgyz. The news on TV is even in Kyrgyz, apparently, which will be nice to at least try to pick up a little. All of the TV here is in Russian, so I don’t even try to pick out any words when I watch it with my family. I’m still loving my family here. I met my 22 year-old brother briefly, but I think he left again to go back to Issyc Kul, where he lives now. The rest of the family is great – I’m still obsessed with my two younger sisters because they’re so cute and great to talk to. My mother is such a warm, generous person, and my father is hilarious. They’ve been really ideal for PST. It’s going to be hard to leave them, but I’m sure my next family will be great too. I already promised to come back and visit my family here when I’m in Bishkek. They told me that this will always be my home too, so I’m welcome any time I want. All of the other people around me are doing well, for the most part. One more girl left last week, which makes it 4 ETs (early termination), which is a record low for this point in PST. Everyone says our group is really great, compared to other groups in the past, and that we’re doing better at the language and the adjustment than other groups. I hope that means we don’t have as many ETs, because it would be hard to lose half of the group, which is pretty normal for PC Kyrgyzstan. I really like the group we have here. Everyone I’ve met is really nice and interesting. The current volunteers have all been great too. I’m really excited to meet the other J-bad volunteers next week. I hope everyone’s doing well at home – school’s starting back soon, I’ve heard. Let me know how everything is going back in the US! Love to all! Leslie
Also: I have a new address, but can't post it for safety reasons. Ask my mom if you want it.




















































The girls in my village















My whole village

















My 16 year old sister, me, my mom, and Mike













That's my teacher on the side

One month!?

The realization that one month ago, I was in the air, on my way to Bishkek is surprising in many ways. First, it feels like this has been the longest month of my life, but secondly, it puts this whole adventure into some perspective. Every once in a while, I get the flashes of “oh my god, I am going to be here for two years!”. Even those moments house a lot of emotions simultaneously: so far, I’ve been loving this country and the people in it, so I am very excited to be here with them, working and learning and all of that; on the other hand, if I measure the next two years off of this last month, it looks daunting. That being said, I am very excited to be here and have been having a great time. I can’t wait to find out where I will be (I find out two weeks from today!) and to get started with my teaching and working with the community. I thought I had a good idea about where I was going to end up, but I found out today that that is probably not going to happen. I’m glad I found that out now, so that I won’t be surprised or disappointed when I do find out where I’m going, but I’m still really positive about all of the regions, so I’m sure I’ll be happy about any placement. I’ve gotten into a very comfortable routine here. Every day, I get up early (thanks to the animals), have breakfast and chai with my parents, relax, and walk my five minute commute to class at 8:30. There, the four of us have class until 12, when we meet up with the other group in town for lunch, where the host mothers continue to work to outdo each other. This competition is great for us, because every lunch has been amazing so far. After lunch, we usually have more sessions (cross cultural, or teaching tech) or sometimes just free time. I usually relax after class, either in my room, or outside with my sisters. We eat around 7:00 every night, then I talk with my family and read/study/watch movies on my computer until I pretty much pass out. It’s still exhausting to live here, in that it’s hard to escape the Kyrgyz and everything. The past few days have been a lot cooler, which is making everything easier. It’s nice to not wake up drenched in sweat (though I haven’t made it so far as to sleep with a sheet over me or anything), and it’s finally pleasant to be outside. It will be interesting to live in such a strongly “seasoned” environment. We get the best and the worst of each season, but I’ve experienced that already… Last week, we started “English Club”, which has been a lot of fun. Two days a week, for an hour a day, we hold classes. It’s great practice to be able to work with Kyrgyz kids on English before I even set foot in a real classroom. We split the group into three classes, with three volunteers in each group. I’m in one of the younger groups – our kids range from probably 8-12 years old. Their English also varies, but it pretty basic, for the most part. We spent last week learning body parts (meaning we sang a lot of “head shoulders knees and toes” and played the hokey pokey). This week, we’re focusing on clothing and colors. We even wrote our own song to teach the colors. Getting up in front of a group of students to present a lesson is encouraging. It’s been fun, and there haven’t been any real problems yet, so I’m not quite as scared about being a teacher in a month. One month from now, I will be just returning from visiting my permanent site, where I will introduce myself to the school and check out the community. From there, I have another week and a half before I’m sworn in as an official volunteer! Everything is still going well here. My family is amazing (I can hear squeals of laughter from my 10 year old sister in the next room now, as I pre-type this) and the other volunteers in the village are great. On Sunday, we got together to make American style brunch (hash browns, omelets, and French toast) at Serena’s. By “American style”, however, I mean cooked partially in a toaster oven, partially in a griddle on a hot plate with no temperature controls, and partially in a giant woodburning outdoor wok. It was definitely a process, but it was a lot of fun and tasted great! Kyrgyz classes are coming along well. For the past few days, I’ve been talking a lot more at breakfast and dinner with my family, and my father keeps telling me how good my Kyrgyz is getting. I’ve gotten to the point where I can actually carry on real conversations beyond the standard “hello my name is”. Yesterday at breakfast, I told them all about my host parents in India and we talked about how good it is to learn about other cultures. All of that in Kyrgyz, with no dictionaries or anything. Progress is always fun. Otherwise, everything is pretty much uneventful. I’ve been feeling good, sleeping well, eating well, and all of that fun stuff. I hope everyone else is doing well at home. Keep me posted on how everything is, so that I don’t fall too far behind on everyone’s lives. It may take me a week or two, but I will respond to the best of my ability!
Love to all, Leslie

And now, because I have the time and a USB port that works, I will overload you all with pictures. Some of these were stolen from Joni and Serena, but most are mine.



Me playing body part Memory with the girls in English club
















Serena with the boyssssss













Discussing body parts in English club

This is my ... foot

The usual spread at lunch. In the background are my Mom and little sister, Benazir

Making hash browns Kyrgyz style -- in a large woodburning outdoor wok, with Jess's little sister

At Serena's, making french fries (fried potatoes are easy to make in Kyrgyzstan)

Walking to the mountains with Aliya (Serena's sister) and Frank

This is the view from the village. Not bad...

This is across the street from my house. You can see Bert and Ernie, the donkeys.

The yurt (boz yuoi) that was in Chris's backyard. We ate lunch there. It was really hot, but totally worth it.

This is my house. Most of it is behind that beautiful tree

The view from the hotel in Bishkek during sunset

The whole K16 group. We've only lost three people so far!

The mosque in town, where women aren't allowed to go. Also a rusty trailer...

Joni's house. It's pretty typical of most houses in the village, including mine.

Istanbul!

The sculpture park thing behind our hotel in Bishkek

The sculpture stuff in Bishkek. There's a yurt in the background too.