Our former Soviet doctor and a night on the town in А—

Two days ago marked one full week in Qazaqstan, but it feels as though it's been more than a year. So far we have yet to settle into a routine, but Peace Corps has given us a tentative calendar to work from. We will be working six days a week, Monday through Saturday, and most days will be partly technical training (basically another TEFL course replete with practice teaching) and partly language training in Qazaq. It's grueling, but now that I'm back in reasonable health, I think I can handle it. Most weeks, at least for one day a week, we have 'hub days' on which all trainees gather in the town of Есік for lectures on Peace Corps policy. This week we've had one 'hub day', which was thankfully hosted by Dr Viktor Breitkov (our PCMO in Qazaqstan) who kept both his lectures entertaining with jokes and anecdotes from his extensive travels and service as a medic in the Soviet Army during the war in Angola and as a PCMO in Madagascar (and who allowed us to get up and stretch every so often when some of us started nodding off). Dr Viktor is an incredibly interesting individual – he recognises that we might see irony in the fact that he was a member of the Soviet Army and now a member of Peace Corps staff, but he thinks of it as logical: he saw the Soviet Union as having provided a number of benefits to its people, was proud to serve it and was sorry to see it go, and he sees the Peace Corps and the American government in much the same light. He spoke of his admiration for Kennedy and Martin Luther King even from his former vantage point in the Soviet Union. I'd like to pick his brain more about it; it seems as though he has some poignant insights from his experiences. Also, if I want to understand the culture, I will need to understand the history and how Qazaqstanis tend to relate to it or define themselves within it.

We also spent some time learning about the Qazaqstani educational system. It is fairly different from that of the United States – because there are no substitute teachers, the schedule on any given day can change pretty rapidly, so flexibility is a must. Also, teachers here have much broader authority in the classroom in some respects than in American classrooms, but also much broader responsibilities. Discipline is not the role of the school administration (the director and the zavuches); the teacher is expected to handle all disciplinary measures in concert with parents. If a student is failing, it is considered to be the teacher's fault for not teaching that student properly. The most popular method of teaching here is still the teacher-centric grammar-translation method; the most popular method of discipline seems to be to shame a student in front of the class (which is probably quite effective). It will be a very different teaching environment from what I'm used to in the United States, and I'm sure it will have its frustrations and its pleasures.

We introduced ourselves to the teachers this week as a group, but classes don't start until next week. A lot of the teacher training, from what it sounds like, will be similar to what I already learned at Boston Academy of English, but I'm going to have to work on my team-teaching ability (that having been my own worst flaw as a teacher).

Again, this week has been pretty long – lots of language lessons, lots of visits with the residents of С— village. I've gotten to know a few people here pretty well, and can easily recognise some others when I see them, and for the most part they're very good people. (A lot of my contact within С— has been within one huge extended family – one of my host father's brothers, Satai Agha, is Courtney's host father; another is Lauren's host father – his terminally-cute daughter, Gaziza, showed off her culinary skills by making a couple of excellent pizzas for Courtney, Katharine, Lauren and myself when we came to visit; yet another has a son who works in Almaty, who speaks excellent English and who drops by to visit occasionally. I heard from Satai Agha that in his and my host dad's generation of the family there are ten brothers and sisters total!)

I'm getting used to some aspects of the cultural shift, slowly but surely. I'm no longer surprised to see a herd of sheep or a couple of horses or stray dogs sharing the road with the cars. I can find my way from school back home fairly well. Emotionally, though, being in Qazaqstan has been a very high-amplitude sine wave: at the troughs I feel like I'll never make it through pre-service training; at the peaks I feel like I can take everything on, that I can handle any problems Qazaqstan dishes out at me. That's fairly normal, from what I've been hearing. That in itself is kind of draining; I have yet to find a happy, stable medium from which I'll be able to work effectively, but that will come. Yesterday, I went to the new cafe / nightclub in the next village over, А—, with my host brother Quanysh, Laura, Dariya and Courtney – I'm still kind of tired out from dancing to Qazaqstani disco music. (Quanysh could really tear it up with the best, which was a surprise – usually he's pretty tired from work when he comes home. Bota's lucky to have married such a talented dancer!) Today I'm going into Есік (Issik) with my host sister to visit the bazaar to find a couple nice shirts to wear with a suit for next week (the plaid shirts I got from Savers' don't go too well with my jacket here). Hopefully I can also stop in for a brief while at an Internet cafe and upload the blog entries I've been working on.