So another week gone. I didn’t do anything on my last day off. I studied and did laundry, so no nice pictures from this week. Sorry. This past Tuesday was my birthday though and that was nice. My host mom greeted me in the morning with a box of chocolates (see picture below) and a blueberry pie (sara lee style). She apologized profusely for not having a cake and was relieved when I told her I’d rather have a blueberry pie instead.
(problem with computer-can't load the picture. Will try to later.)
She also made me a special lunch. I had previously told her, by accident, that my favorite food was spaghetti. I realized after I said it, that I had made a mistake, but decided to let it go, since I do like spaghetti a lot. So on top of the chocolates and pie, she also had made me spaghetti for lunch. So off to school I went, loaded down with tons of food. Upon my arrival back to home, she had a huge baked chicken and potato dinner waiting. The food I’ve been eating has been good, but there has been a shortage of meat (lots of soup and borsch), so this was a real treat and I ate myself silly.
The rest of the week has been uneventful. Langauge for 4 hours in the morning and technical sessions in the afternoon. This ranges from how to create a business plan to cultural things in Kazakhstan.
Next week we are going on a “field trip”. The idea is that a group of us will travel to a city, see current volunteers at work and get an idea of what their lives are like. For those of you who know PC, this is in lieu of a site visit (this is too expensive for PC, as KZ is huge). My group is going to Karaganda.
Karaganda is the 4th largest city in KZ. It is a big coal town, south of Astana (capitol of KZ). Coal has been mined here as far back as the 1850’s. It wasn’t heavily developed until the Russians invested in the industry in the 1930’s, when they decided to use these coal reserves to fuel the industries in the Urals (in Russia). To do this, you need people. Thus Karaganda became notorious for its many concentration labor camps (Gulag). Most of these are actually outside the city in a region known as KarLag. Many ethnic groups who were deemed enemies of Stalin were deployed here.
Karaganda is a 20 hour train ride from Almaty (with a 1 hour 40 min bus ride to Almaty from Esik), so it will be a long haul. We will leave Monday afternoon on a night train and return to Esik on Friday. I don’t know the details of what we’ll do in Karaganda but I suspect we’ll get to see only a small section of the city and nothing more- instead focusing on visiting current volunteers. The Gulags will have to wait for another trip I imagine.
But I’m excited to see the KZ trains and get a little country under my belt. They also (like nearly every town in KZ) have a Stalin statue that I’m looking forward to seeing. Ha. I love the old communist statues. If you’re interested in reading online about the gulags, the labor camps known as KarLag stretched out over a huge area southwest of Karaganda in the towns of Dolinka and Spassk. I suspect that if you google these words, you’ll find more info than I have, as my internet is still limited.
In the map below (problem with internet- can't load map. Will later.), you’ll be able to see where Karaganda is (central KZ, south of Astana). My town, Esik, is about where the “a” in Almaty is. This should give you an idea of where I am now. By the way, I’m getting tons of warnings to take warm clothing. Haha.
After we get back, we have another week of training, then site announcements the following week…then counterpart conference. Training ends on Halloween and we depart that day or the next for site. So it will pass by quickly from now on. All the volunteers are buzzing now in regards to site announcements. We were given a list of 12 organizations that we’ll get put at (without names, cities, etc—just what the org does) and there were 3 national parks/orgs that worked directly with national parks in it, so I’m feeling pretty good about the chances. I’m the only one in the group who has clear env experience, so I think I’ll get one of them for sure. But I’ll know for sure in a couple of weeks.
That is it from here. Until next time.
