Greetings from Kyrgyzstan. We are now entering the phase of training where it's time to get down to serious business. This is a stressful time for us trainees. As if adjusting to a completley different culture, learning a far-out Turkic language with a wild alphabet, and diarreha in outhouses wasn't enough, the Peace Corps keeps our days completely full with community assignments, culture presentations, and english clubs. At the end of training we will have to have started a community project of some sort within our training villages. We've been considering a school trash pickup. There are tons of broken glass vodka and beer bottles riddled all over the playground at the school. Apparently the playground is the hot spot for boozing in this village. We also plan on repainting the Elementary School's playground. Every Monday and Thursday afternoon my training group and I put on an English Club for children in our training village to help improve their language skills. On our first day we had a very high turnout of about 50 or so. Kids ages 8 to 16 showed up to learn some sweet English skills. Me and two other trainees are working with the real little ones. The kids are fairly well behaved and actually can speak a decent amount of basic English. We'll take our group of 15 eight-year-olds outside and play games and sing songs like hokey pokey. They definitely dig the Hokey Pokey. You really can't have too much lecture-style teaching working with these kids. They'll get bored pretty fast and want bolt. English club starts an hour after training has finished. After 7 hours of language and technical training I need some serious nutrition. I have about thirty minutes after training to sprint home to eat some egg and tomato and get my host sister to take her to English club. I'm pretty beat by the end of the day yet there is still more to be taken care of. I'll come home and fill buckets of water for my host mom at the well down the road and then get started on my homework. Pretty soon after that my host mom will cook me a scrumptious dinner and by then it's 8 or so and itching to get some sleep. I'll talk with my host family in the best Kyrgyz I can for an hour or so. We talk a lot about food, Kyrgyzstan, and the neighbors. Apparently the Russian neighbors next door don't take to kindly to Americans and that I should try not to talk them. My familys has been slowly introducing more and more Kyrgyz foods. The other night my host sister brought me a plate of something that looked very strange. She told me that they were sheep intentestines diced into small pieces. After some pressure by my mom I told her I'd do one. It tasted and felt liked a baloon in my mouth. I'm pretty sure my face turned green as I tried to chew this foul tasting food. I eventually gave up chewing it just swallowed it whole. I could feel it sitting there in my stomach. From my facial expression at the time they understood I didn't want seconds. I'll usually go to bed around 9:30 or 10 every night. By then I'm so beat I'm just dying for some sleep. Me and my host sister are "getting along." I'm pretty sure she thinks I actually her older brother. Sometimes when I'm late for a session I'll come outside to find one of my shoes missing (It's customary in Kyrgyz culture to remove your shoes before entering a house). Despite my obvious frustration, she finds it unbeleivably amusing to watch me (from the kitchen window) hoble around with one shoe on while I look for my other. A few weeks ago, while my mother was gone for the weekend (unfortunately my host Grandmother past away and my host mother was at the funeral), my host sister and I got into a scuffle. She through a serious fit because I wanted to cook eggplant to go along with dinner. It was really bizarre. I had never seen someone through such a tantrum over eggplant. But still, I had to have my eggplant that day. So I went out back and picked a couple to chop up. I was minding my own business as I chopped up a delicious eggplant, tomatoe, and potatoe medely, and suddenly I felt a pair of claws dig into my back. Now my sister had been doing this to me all week and I just about had it by now. I snatched the kitten and and ran with to the other side of the house. As I approached my destination, my sister grew more terrifed as she was learning the potential fate of her little kitten. Now my family owns a ravenous, rabies-infested, dog chained up out back that they use as a sort of security system. I held the helpless little kitten within a good distance of this beast and said "EET Mushulk Jayeet!" Which means "Dog eat cat!" She hasn't bugged me with that cat ever since. She actually has been gone for the past two days. She's taking a well-deserved vactation at her older sister's house on Lake Issy-Kul. She works incredibly hard. She's up every morning at 5 milking the cows, feeding the chickens, watering the garden. She's a real trooper and she's only twelve! I think I'm going to miss my host family when I have to move to my permanent site in a month. I've only been living here for 7 weeks and I'm starting to get pretty attatched. It will be interesting living with a completely new host family when I move. Kyrgyzstan definitley has been having great moments but sometimes, when you least expect it, something else happens. A few weeks ago me and three other fellow PCVTs were riding a taxi back to our village from the bazar in town. I was sitting in front with my head down looking for some cash in my wallet when I hear a loud bang and a large spray of broken glass showered the top of my head and all over my body. I have to say I was pretty terrified and slowly looked up to see an giant spider web-style shatter on the taxi winsheild. Apparently some kid threw a rock at us while were driving down the country road. Luckily I was not hurt. Had I not had my head down working on the cash situation I might have goten broken glass in my eye! Not good. The taxi driver causally brushed the glass off his dashboard as if it happens everyday. No big deal. Lately I've been struggling with some bowel issues that just won't go away. I'll spare you the details but having to run to the outhouse in the middle of night is no fun. Peace Corps training is A LOT of work. Language training is very frustrating at times and having to learn how to teach can leave anyone overwhelemed. In addition to our training we are required to turn in English club lesson plans, formulate community projects, and turn in language assignments. Every Wednesday afternoon all of the volunteers from their villages will take taxis into town and meet at the Hub Site in town for more lecture on health and safety in Kyrgyzstan. We also get our immunizations this time of week. I've had TEN shots since I've been here and each one has left me feeling ill and gunning for the toilet for some crazy reason. After all the work is done there is always pressure to hang out with fellow volunteers. Not that I don't like my fellow trainees but after a full packed of work I really would just like some down time to myself. "Sorry man I'm staving, I need go eat some home-made tasty-delicousness!" This past Saturday we had culture day and it was pretty awesome. On this day all of the training villages come together for a giant picnic. At this event each training village has performs a skit that reinacts a traditional Kyrgyz or Russian cultural event. Each group has been preparing for this event for quite sometime. My group and I performed a traditional Kyrgyz wedding. Guess who was acting as the husband getting married. My host mom presented me with a Чапан (Chapan) as my wedding suit. It just so happened that the Chapan my family had for me to wear was dark green with a gold embroidery. How flippin sweet is that. Not only was I wearing appropriate Kyrgyz attire for the event but I was also sporting my Oregon Duck colors. To complete my Kyrgyz wedding outfit I wore the traditional Kyrgyz hat: the Калпак (Kalpak). A fellow female volunteer was to be my wife. In preparation for the event we had many rehersals. Our host mothers were also acting in the skit as our parents and they just had a blast. They pretty much pretended we were their little dolls and played with us in their little doll house. When culture day came last Saturday we kicked off the festivities with the construction of the tradional Kyrgyz tent-like dwelling: the Yurt. Following the Yurt's completion we got right into the skit performances. All the performances were pretty cool. Especially the traditional Russian wedding when the husband and his two best men got drunk off vodka shots on stage. While most of this was going on was desperately trying to crunch my lines. Being the husband getting married I had a lot of lines to remember. My role was to tell my soon-to-be wife that I love her and that I would marry her and I'd buy her the traditional gold earrings. Then I would go to my buddies that I was getting married and invite them along to the wedding. It was hard because it was a lot of lines and they were in Kyrgyz! Oh man I was a nervous wreck! I hadn't memorized lines and acted in front of crowd since eigth grade! I was sweating pretty hard and my heavy Chapan that I was wearing was not helping. When it was are turn to perform it was go time. We got up there, I was given the microphone, and recited my lines. Nice! That was over but the skit was just getting started. The wedding ceremony went through successfully. My mother tied the traditional Kyrgyz white cloth around my wife's head and when I thought all was said in done there was more. One of the host mothers snatched the microphone and got up a started singing like there was no tomorrow. I was thinking "awesome she's singing" until my fellow volunteer friends started nudging me and telling me to dance. What was this? We didn't go over any dancing for this skit. Then out of no where some random guy started rocking out on his accordian. It was now or never. I was starting to turn bright red so I got up there and busted out some old school chalfer dance grooves on stage to get the party started. What a sight! Everything was going great until she stopped singing so I stopped dancing. But then she started singing again and once you stop dancing on stage it's incredibly difficult to start dancing again. Awkward! It ended shortly after that thank God. After all the skit were performed it was time to eat. Huge amounts of Plov, a traditional Kyrgyz dish consisting of rice, carrots, and sheep, was served. Plenty of bread, tomatoe, and watermelon to go around for everyone. It was afternoon and pretty hot outside and a dance party was slowly starting up. Kyrgyz and Kazhak pop music was playing and I was thinking how impossible it was to dance to when they put on some Ace of Base. I put down my watermelon and got out there: Kalpak and all. It was a pretty awesome site to see so many people dancing in grass field in the middle of the day. A couple of potential Peace Corps volunteer couples stopped dancing to sit and watch and get a little closser to oneother. Feels like sixth grade all over again. It's Kyrgyz tradition that when you dance you lay it out until you have nothing left. I danced till it was toilet time. My stomach is still adjusting to the Kyrgyz diet and I'm still trying to recover from some sort of food-borne bug I caught last week. Gross bummer but that's third-world livin' for ya! It was time to go so we all piled into our Marshrutkas and headed home. I got home and passed out for three hours or so. What a day. That night I showed the rest of my family my pictures. They really got a kick out of all the Americans wearing Kyrgyz attire. It was pretty funny. A new week is about to start and we find out where our permanent site is and meet our new host family this Wednesday. I'm pretty nervous to find out what part of the country I'll be living in for the next two years. I'm even more nervous to meet my new family! As hard as training is it's going by pretty fast. We are over halfway done with training and it's only going to get more intense. The work will continue to pile up but I'll keep my blog updated as much a possible. Till next time! Mike
