Busy day

And I don’t mean just for me. Today it seemed like the entirety of the Peace Corps staff in Almaty were descending on Saimasai; that can’t have been easy. I was teaching eighth grade today – the same grade I will be teaching for my unit plan – and I was being observed by Natalya (one of the Peace Corps regional managers and one of our technical trainers in Saimasai) who came here along with Ufilmalik to observe classes. Thankfully, this lesson was one of the smoothest I’ve had yet, with some of the best-behaved students; I got through my entire lesson plan, as James Taylor might say, ‘like a Swiss watch’. Natalya had some very positive feedback for me: the only real criticisms she had were my use of Russian in the lesson and my lack of clarity in giving instructions for one of the practice activities. But the students were enjoying themselves and doing the work gladly (I saw no reason not to give every one of them a daily ‘5’ – the highest grade possible – though one Qazaq girl was doing so well with the exercises that she should have gotten a ‘6’).

Secondly, Dr Viktor arrived from Essik and decided to pay me a visit, just to check up on my mental health status. His visit was also generally useful – I think he was able to understand me a bit more, and it seemed like he could identify with some of my hangups, he himself being a perfectionist with regard to his own actions. Thirdly, Paul and Ekaterina arrived to do site placement interviews. Paul took my interview, and we had a pretty long chat about pretty much everything, from Qazaqstani history to education to life in С— to paranoid rumours about Peace Corps’ modus operandi. (And we got around to site placement somewhere in there, too.) Basically, I had two major requests for site placement: that I be at a site where both Qazaq and Russian are spoken, and that I have access to a young, inexperienced counterpart who wasn’t set in his or her ways (and would thus be more open to new ideas). I had thought I wouldn’t be able to cope with not having full access to running water before coming here, but a couple months in С— disabused me of that misconception about myself. I mentioned this to Paul, and he basically told me that people can adapt to pretty much any kind of situation – and we’re going to be in places where people live and enjoy relatively happy existences. I think it goes to illustrate Bill McKibben’s point that up to a certain point, affluence and development correspond positively with happiness, but beyond that point there is zero correlation. We also discussed the rumours that occur with Peace Corps – I told him about one in which Peace Corps assigns sitemates whose personalities don’t match in order to facilitate better site integration, and Paul laughed and said that that consideration was incredibly far down the list of factors, and that even if there were such a consideration, the end goal would be the same: to ensure a successful service for the Volunteer. He said there would be no point in the Peace Corps staff screwing Volunteers over to make their service more difficult, because all that would do in turn would be to make the jobs of Peace Corps staff more difficult.

I’m still curious to find out where I’ll be placed, but that won’t be decided for at least another week yet. I’ve got some suspicions on where I might be placed, but I won’t talk about those here – at least, not for another week or so. Suffice it to say that I’m not setting any unrealistic expectations.