Swimmin in the city

A few weeks ago, I blogged about how I was jealous my friend’s city had a heated pool for swimming laps in. Well, since then I have found out that the city I live near (50 minutes by van, 250 tenge) has a heated pool with a bubble covering. (The pool in his city is actually outdoors.)

My first attempt to swim at this pool was an abject failure. After having been told about it by my friend in the city, I decided to visit it the next time I made the trip in. I was ready with my towel and shampoo when I entered the pool lobby at about 12:15 or so. The lady behind the desk told me to come back at 12:45, which confused me. I thought maybe they were closed for lunch. No, she told me, but I can’t go in until 12:45. While understanding some of what she was saying, I really didn’t understand what she was saying. 12:45 was too soon to the English Club I had to give, so I decided I would just go another time. I left feeling defeated and down on my Russian skills. I couldn’t even talk my way into the local swimming pool.

The next time I saw my friend in the city, she explained that you can only enter the pool on the quarter hour. You pay by the hour, so you go in at 12:45 and stay until 1:45. While this does make sense to some degree, I would have never considered this myself. I then realized that I didn’t understand the woman before because my mind was in no way prepared to hear that explanation in Russian. So my brain just couldn’t understand that foreign of a concept in a foreign language.

For my second attempt, I was ready and at the pool at 1:45 on a Sunday. This time I took no chances and quickly explained that this was my first visit to the pool and I had no idea what I was doing. She quickly asked if I was American (how she knew, I don’t know). I said yes, and I was on my way. I began by paying her the 400 tenge it took to enter the pool. Then the woman pointed me to the desk for the coats. I gave them my coat but the woman also wanted my shoes in a plastic bag. Fortunately I had a plastic bag with me from having bought a Goosebumps book in Russian (You Can’t Scare Me) earlier in the day, but this step was not expected. Now in my flipflops, I walked to the next station and handed my wallet and valuables to another woman who locked them behind a different desk. Then the first woman escorted me to the locker room and handed me off to a fourth woman. She was standing in there with a ring of keys, and unlocked locker number three for me. She told me to go shower and come back to her. I put my bag in my locker and just stood there. Where did I change, considering there is a keywoman standing in the middle of the locker room. She told me I could go in the bathroom area. I did this. Went to the shower room. Showered. And then went back to her. She locked my locker and then escorted me toward the pool area before handing me off to a little kid walking in, explaining that I was American.

Finally, I was at the pool. I felt a little silly having to be led through the entire process of getting in there, but I was comforted by the fact that even if I could speak perfect Russian, I would have not understood what the heck I was supposed to do.

The pool itself was about ten lanes wide and fifty meters long. There was a swim team practicing in the last three lanes and a lot of people just sitting on side of the pool in the first few lanes, but I had a lane in the middle all to myself. The water was not particularly warm, but warmer than most indoor lap pools I have been to. My only complain would have been the lack of flags at the ends of the pool to measure my backstroke flipturns. But hey, this is Peace Corps right?

I was tired after my first initial laps, but I felt determined to stay for the full hour. I was also lacking goggles, so my strokes had to be modified a lot, making them much less efficient. However, most of the time was just occupied by the surreal thought of me swimming in an indoor heated pool while in the Peace Corps. Overall though, I probably got in at least 1200 meters or so. Not bad for the first time in a body of water since my triathlon last July. Afterwards, one of the guys swimming next to me even asked if I had been swimming for a long time.

At about 2:45, the alarm went off and we all exited the pool area. I once again asked the woman in the locker room to unlock my locker. Then showered, and then changed in the bathroom area. Then I went back out. Got my valuables, my coat, and my shoes. This time I left feeling good. Not only for had I gotten a great workout, but I had also conquered the public swimming pool.

Life

My last posting was about work, but that’s only part of my day. Unfortunately, it’s most of most days, but not my whole experience. Life outside of work is pretty slow though.

I have found local pickup indoor soccer, which is a lifesaver most weeks. Team sports remains my favorite way to relieve stress. We play 4v4 at a local school on the basketball court with indoor goals set up on either end. I wish we had a futsal ball, but we usually play with a Size 4 instead. Some of the guys are pretty good with the footwork. The small court makes the game revolve a lot around making runs and passing, and really neutralized my speed advantage. I have a lot of room for improvement.

My host-sister and her daughter moved out because she is going to start working in the city. That just leaves my host mom and me in the house. I’m going to try and start cooking more often. We made tortillas last week and some version of a seafood taco with imitation crab meat. Earlier this week we had a movie marathon. She had borrowed a DVD from a friend that had 40 episodes of a TV series on it. So Sunday though Wednesday was pretty much made up of watching 40 hours of television during any free moment we had. It was actually great practice for my Russian.

I met my neighbor last weekend randomly. I was eating lunch with a guy I had met earlier in the week, and there was another guy there. So Guy I Know (Nurlan) says to us, you know you two live in the same house, right? (I live in a duplex.) We both look at each other, slightly confused. Nurlan continues, yeah, you live in the same house. My neighbor didn’t even know I was living in the house, which is weird, but I’d never seen him before either. So that’s how I met my neighbor.

For the reverse of that story, I was walking around town last Saturday because I had nothing else to do. (I’m still trying to find a good translation for “I have nothing else to do” in Russian, as it is something I want to say all the time.) I walked into a magazine that is clear across town from my house. And as soon as I open my mouth, the girl behind the counter asks if I’m the American that lives with Fatima. Apparently her mom is friend’s with my host-mom, and her mom had actually talked to me on the phone the previous night. So my own neighbor doesn’t know me, but people clear across town seem to.

I don’t know why, but I love answering the phone at my house. It’s hardly ever for me, but I enjoy saying “Nyet tu” when they ask for someone else. Last week two people actually talked to me for a while even though they weren’t originally wanting to. One claimed I had a phone number I did not have, and would not believe me when I said I didn’t. The other asked why I didn’t know Kazakh if I’m living in Kazakhstan. I get that question almost every time I meet someone. It’s really annoying.

I am learning how to juggle. For Christmas, my parents sent me a book about juggling that came with three bean bags. I leave the balls out on the table and practice a few times a day whenever I walk by. My basic three ball cascade is slowing improving, although I still lose it after about 30 seconds. I’m also working on some tricks. I think in two years, I should be decent.

This week I vowed to begin learning Kazakh, but I still haven’t started. I need to. I am tired of being left out at social events because I don’t know what on Earth the people around me are saying. I guess I could make local Russian friends, but our town probably has about a 2% Russian population.

Updates from when I wrote this a few weeks ago. My host brother has moved home for a few weeks. He's having trouble finding work with the financial crisis. So it's been fun to have him around. I was left alone last week and made gnocchi (maybe spelled like that). Its potato pasta dumplings and it was so easy and tasty. I am much better at the juggling now.

In response about people smiling in the photos, people here don't smile in photos usually. Some of the Kaz20s actually take a series of photos now. We have the normal smiling, the Kazakh (serious), the open mouth (in honor of Christina), and the dinosaur (in honor of Jessie trying to do the open mouth. I think that's where it originated anyway.)

Work or Something Like It

I was not a naïve Peace Corps Volunteer that thought they would be changing the world when they arrived in country. I knew that most volunteers struggled to make major accomplishments, and you had to learn to relish the little victories. However, I thought there would be some work toward the little victories. My biggest struggle so far in the Peace Corps has been trying to find actual work that makes a difference. Any work.

I’ve hinted that I don’t understand my organization before in previous posts. And yes, it is true. I have no idea what we are supposed to be doing. We are supposed to be a business incubator, and honestly, we don’t have enough funding for that. And because of that, we just kinda give up helping businesses in any way. It is already the end of February and we haven’t written our plan for the year. Whenever I bring it up, my director just says, oh, we should have done that. We’ll do that soon. We are supposed to be helping small and medium businesses, but I don’t ever see any results. Occasionally, someone comes in and wants help with a business plan. That’s happened three times in just under three months. So far, none of those people have actually completed a business plan.

I am still the main consultant for how to write a business plan, despite the fact that I don’t speak Russian very well or Kazakh at all. Yeah, I can get by in conversation, but when it comes to asking about what the annual income of someone’s target market segment is, I don’t get very far. I don’t know why my director hasn’t taken the time to read the materials I prepared or the professional materials I obtained from PRAGMA (a group that works with organizations just like mine) to learn how to write a business plan.

One of the most common and aggravating questions I get from family and friends here is about work. How’s work? It’s meant with the best of intentions, but it really just puts me in an anxious mood. I don’t like saying, What work? So I answer: slow, boring. It goes. What I should really say is, I get to work. Say hi to people. Play flash games. Listen to Russian tapes for an hour and a half. Go home for lunch. Come back and repeat the sequence. Go home for dinner. Maybe I prepare my lesson for an English Club or write up a future project plan that will never happen in the mean time.

I do have a long list of ideas though that I say I’m going to accomplish. Unfortunately, they are my ideas made by me. And I’m an outsider. I don’t really know what the community needs. And I don’t know how I can accomplish these things on my own. I mean, I can try, but the for sustainability’s sake, local people really need to get involved. And right now, there’s no enthusiasm within my organization to do anything. So I’m trying to network some, meet people that can help. Befriend them, and then I plan on asking them to work with me on a project.

For example, I had this great idea for a project. There’s a local museum in town about this guy named Baurzhan Momushuly, but there’s nothing readily available in English about who he is. So I wanted to work with the museum to translate their displays into English using a group of local high school students. The students would get to practice English, the museum would get a free translation. And then I would teach the students about Internet research, Web 2.0, and wikis. And we’d post the information about this national Kazakh hero online for the world to know about. I thought about a ton of things that could go wrong with the project: the students not knowing enough English to translate well, not having readily available Internet access, not enough time, etc. But I didn’t count on the museum saying, oh, why would we want the displays translated into English. Any English visitor we get always has a translator. And while that is true, my entire project idea was temporarily put on hold by that one. I’m not giving up on it though, as I for one want to know more about this guy was that my town is named after.

Further ideas I have that have yet come to fruition are: formalizing the business plan consulting services that we offer at the business center, creating a guide for how to open a small business, centralizing all of the legal forms required for opening a business in our office, creating a local volunteer club, introducing freeware software at the library to be checked out, offering computer training classes for locals, creating an English dinner club, promoting Internet usage among the youth, creating a speakers’ series for the practicum students at the Akimat, and teaching about business in the schools. I have two years, right?

But for now, I practice Russian, play hearts, play Bubble Snooker, plan English Clubs, do English Clubs, plan projects, and nag my director. Even with lowered expectations, it’s not quite the Peace Corps experience I expected.

Pictures

Here are some pictures from my host mom's birthday party a few weeks back.

Cell Phones Part 2

In my previous post about cell phones, I forgot to cover how cell phone culture differs in Kazakhstan. It’s a really interesting example about how people’s behaviors adapt to their technical limitations.

So, in Kazakhstan, you are charged per second you are on the phone. This results in phone calls like:

Kaz Person: Hello.
Me: Hel-
Kaz Person: Where are you right now?
Me: I’m in Taraz.
::CLICK::

Prompt hellos. Little chatting about how life is. Get to the point. Get off the phone. Don’t worry about saying goodbye.

Another difference is that you can’t screen your calls as easily. For one, there is no voice mail. Why? I have no idea. I work in a government office and we don’t even have a voice mail system. Or answering machines. Houses are the same. As are cell phones. So if an unknown number calls, do you just not answer it? Maybe, but then you’ll never learn who it is.

And say you do know the number that’s calling. Do you let it go and call back at a more convenient time? Well if you do, it’ll be on your dime. Because when you pay as you call, you pick up when people call you. Because then they’re paying for it.

This system also results in an annoying practice of calling for one ring and then hanging up. So you might be sitting there and your phone rings. But by the time you get it out of your pocket the other person has already hung up. You see that it was Yerzhan calling, but you have no idea what he wanted. So you have to call him back using your credit if you want to find out. Some people abuse this system a lot more than others.

Dance Lessons

Dance Lessons

I think every really good PCV comes to a point in his or her life when they make an effort to learn a local dance. Or at least, that’s what I’m telling myself as I go to my dance lessons twice a week. But it’s not like I really need an excuse. I love dancing.

After a brief stint in high school of not really feeling comfortable with dancing, I found my rhythm in college with trips to Krush Girls, Ecuador, and Dr. Wheeler’s Ballroom Foundations 1. Now I’m ready to dance whenever and wherever. Which for right now, is Monday and Wednesday at 2:00 (2:20ish when the teacher finally shows up.)

Life here is a little boring. I think I’ve noted before that there isn’t a lot to do at night. I don’t speak the local social language. And I don’t really have friends here. So I wanted to seek out dancing as a way to meet people and occupy my time. I asked around and found out there was a dance teacher at the local dom cultura (house of culture, kinda like the cultural building in town.) So one day I went over there to find out when classes were offered. I was thinking it would be like a dance studio in America. Maybe Monday there would be classical dance, Tuesday and Thursday there might be ballroom, etc.

Well, I was told that the balletmaster was not back yet, so I waited around with a bunch of guys for a while. That’s always fun. I like the me-alone-with-locals situation because I get to meet new people and expose them to what an American is really like in person. After waiting about an hour, the balletmaster finally shows up and I tell her I want to learn how to dance. Instead of telling me when I can come, she asks me what time is best for me. Slightly confused, I run through my schedule. The only free times are when I have lunch for two hours and she only has lunch for one. Then we decide on twice a week: Mondays and Wednesdays. I tell her I’ll see her on Wednesday at 2:00 and head back to work.

Wednesday comes and I’m pretty excited. Something to do. And dancing. Ultimately I want to get back to ballroom, but I figure I’ll start with some traditional Kazakh dancing. Good way to ingratiate myself with the locals and learn for future parties and danceoffs. I’m still not entirely sure of what is going on. No mention of payment was made. I don’t know if there will be other students. Or anything really. But I show up at 2:00. And she shows up at 2:30. And we begin.

I learn that Kazakh male dancing revolves around a horse. Or rather the motions of riding a horse. So I learn a few basic steps that may be reminiscent of Monty Python, only I don’t have anyone following me around with the coconuts. She tells me that I don’t learn badly, and seems generally satisfied with my slow progress. I know that I’m a slow learner for choreography from ballroom and my experience with the Atlanta Bhangra Coalition (had to give a shout out), but I can pick it up with enough repetition. We call it a day after about thirty minutes.

Since then, I’ve had a few commitments that have kept me away, but I was able to make it back yesterday. I learned some hot new moves and got to practice my old ones as well. I’m really looking forward to being able to put them all together in about a month and a half when the volunteers have a danceoff at the end of March. I might even buy a coconut for it.

Cell Phones

One of the first major purchases of a PCV’s life in Kazakhstan is their cell phone. Within the first month, we found ourselves dropping about fifty dollars on a phone. Most of us chose the cheapest model possible: an old Nokia, screen with no color, no camera, no music. Just the basics (and a few games. Rapid Roll score of 4340. Try beating that. And if you do, please don’t tell me or else my addiction might start up again).

However, I think this purchase comes way too early for us to truly appreciate the cell phone culture here in Kazakhstan. For young people, your phone is like a status symbol. They may not have iPods or notebook computers, but most have a cell phone with a sweet color screen, that plays music, and of course has a camera. And these phones aren’t cheap, probably costing about the same as in America. 200 to 300 dollars. Although considering that the income level hear is just a fraction of America, that can be about one month’s salary from a regular job.

Once you have your sweet phone though, you have to choose your company. There are no ATTs, Alltel (yeah, that is (or at least was) a cell phone company back in the states), or Verizon here. We got Beeline, Activ, KCell, Pathword, and Neo (All of them usually written with the Roman alphabet). And all of the volunteers are encouraged to get Beeline because that’s what all the staff has and all the previous volunteers have as well. Because here in Kstan, the network makes a huge difference.

I’ve heard Pathword (one volunteer said it reminds them of the movie the Cable Guy) has a monthly plan of 1000 tenge in which you can call any other Pathword person for free. But other than that, you usually pay per minute here. That makes calling people expensive. But you don’t get a monthly bill, you have to buy cards with say 500 or 1000 tenge on them. Then you scratch off the back of the card and type in the number on your phone. It then adds the credit to your phone’s account.

There are various plans available from each company. But the average rate is probably about 20 cents a minute for phone calls. Usually it is more expensive to call a phone that has another company’s service. Text messages range from about 5 cents to 10 cents a text depending on whether you are texting someone who has a similar cell phone plan or not.

And of course, once you became really cool (at least in my mind), you start getting different plans with different companies. A lot of local people I know have a Beeline and an Active number (despite different names, I think KCell and Active are the same company, or at least have an alliance of some sort). But you don’t even need two phones to have two numbers. You just buy two simcards and switch them out when you want to call someone with that particular company. I’m not nearly that cool yet, but I’ve thought about it. (I’ve actually thought about getting another Beeline card as well and having a different plan that’s better for long conversations. I have an excel spreadsheet that tells me I’ll save money in the long run, but I’m not entirely committed on that yet.)

But for now, I have my simple Beeline plan and my simple Nokia phone. While lacking music or a camera, it does have a flashlight built in. And that’s good enough for me.