You Call That an Ending!?!?!

When I write I usually I pick an overarching theme for my post. An emotion, a current event, sometimes an anecdote. This time that’s been almost impossible. While it took me only a day or so to write about the first post about my egress from Kazkahstan, I’ve been trying to write this piece for over a month now. Before tonight every time I began to write I only got, at best, a few lines before I got frustrated and stopped. This was always followed, the next day or sometimes a few days later, by an attempted rereading of the previous draft, inevitable hatred of said draft, and another whack at a new draft.

Each time I failed to write anything that I thought was any good, I became more and more frustrated. I wanted so bad to write about how I had not felt sad on the train from Shymkent to Almaty. I wanted so bad to write that while I was lying in that cramped little train car, littered with food and luggage, that I had time to be introspective and had some epiphany about how everything would end up being okay. I wanted so bad to ascribe some profound meaning to what had happened. I didn’t want my last few days in Peace Corps to be a haze of bureaucratic procedure, airplanes, and exhaustion. I didn’t want such an ordinary ending for such an extraordinary collection of memories.

But after 15+ deleted drafts and a far greater number of swear words, I realized, that this post wouldn’t provide me any type of catharsis or do anything to change how the last few days of my time in Kazakhstan played out. So, like the end of my time in Kaz, this blog post isn’t what I wanted, but it’s what I got.

And the further away I get from my inglorious ( <— Tarantino reference!!) exodus ( <— not a Tarantino reference) from Kazakhstan, the more I realize that I’m really damn happy with my Peace Corps story (and accompanying blog posts,) bathetic ending and all.

A Rear View: Looking Back at the Work side of my time in Peace Corps Kazakhstan

I’m still trying to write about the last part of my exit from Kazakhstan but lately I’ve been having trouble finding the right words. Instead I will post some pictures from when I started  in Peace Corps Kazakhstan through the time that I left. We ended up landing in Kazakhstan at about 1 A.M and spent the first day or so in in Almaty. The way Peace Corps Kazakhstan worked was that volunteers would spend 3 months in a handful of villages around Almaty before being assigned a site around the country for our 24 month service.

Our time in the villages when we first arrived in country was called Pre-Service Training (PST.) One of the main purposes of PST is to help volunteers learn the local languages (volunteers are also given money for language tutoring after arriving at site) before we start training in the local schools. During our training volunteers either learned Kazakh or Russian. The first few weeks before we started practice teaching we spent about 6-8 hours a day learning a language. Here is a picture of one of our PST Kazakh lessons with our teacher Askar Aidarula.

P.S if you can see the green lined poster above his head, that is the Kazakh alphabet. It has 42 letters!!!

All schools in Kazakhstan start on September 1st (First Bell/Первый звонок.) During PST each teaching volunteer would have to teach lessons in tandem (or solo, depending on preference and previous experience) with a local teacher while being evaluated by other volunteers and local teacher that worked for PC Kazakhstan. Towards the end of PST each teaching volunteer would pick one of their classes and designs a week-long curriculum which culminates in a themed project i.e Travel (my theme.) Here is my 11th form/grade class that I worked with.

Here are some of the girls working on a poster for their final project.

At the end of PST, after being assigned our sites around Kazakhstan, volunteer returned to Almaty for a two day conference where we met the local counterparts that each of us would be working with during our time at our sites. On the November 7th, 2010 we were officially sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers. Along with speechs from a few volunteers and the director of PC Kazakhstan, a Kazakh official came and wished us luck in our future PC Kazakhstan endeavors.

Here we are after being sworn in as the 22nd group of Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteers.

After this ceremony all of us boarded trains with our counterparts and headed out to the four corners of Kazakhstan. For those of us going to Shymkent we were met at the train station by the volunteers who were already serving in the city. After dropping off our bags they showed us around the city and we spent the next few days going to visit all the possible host family options and visting our new work sites. While I worked at two sites I spent the majority of my time working at the local 1st Daryn school. In his Kazakhstan 2030 plan, President Nazarbayev wants more young people to learn English along side Kazakh and Russian, as you can see by the (KZ RU EN.)

For the first few days at a school volunteers do not usually teach, we spend time getting familiar with the teachers and students.  I started teaching after about three days and here is the first class I was given. I taught this class two lessons a week in my first year and three lessons a week in my second year.

Another important part of a teaching volunteers service are our English clubs, both school and community-wide. To me, the main purpose of these clubs was to give the students a place to practice their English where they did not have to worry about grades or anything else. One of my clubs favorite activities was playing “Jeopardy” on the interactive boards with categories such as famous people (pictured below,) famous writers, Enlish grammar, etc.

In Shymkent I also gave seminars to local teachers at the Oblast/область (region) training center. This was a place where teachers from around the region would come every so often to take two week courses (basically in-service training) where they would learn about topics such as using multimedia in your lessons, teaching English language idioms, and so on. About once a week, sometimes twice a week, I would give interactive presentations to groups of about 30 teachers at a time.

There you have it, a brief retrospect of the professional side of my service in Peace Corps Kazakhstan. While it’s far from comprehensive I tried my best to highlight the main points or my time working in PC Kazakhstan and I hope this gives anyone who reads it a better insight to my life while I was serving in Kazakhstan.