Petropavlovsk and Haikus

First, and most importantly, I wrote three haikus about the cows in the road which I mentioned in my last post:

Many cows walk home
Disrupting traffic patterns
Warm poop on sidewalk

Sixty cattle roam
Slowly down the busy street
Plop goes the warm poop

Plop. Plop. Plop… warm poop
Rush hour bovine traffic jam
Only Kazakhstan

In other, unrelated news, we had our site announcement on October 5th. Drum roll please… I’m going to Petropavlovsk, the northern-most city in Kazakhstan, where 200,000 of my soon-to-be newfound friends currently reside. The site announcement was held at a swanky school in the village of Chemolgan, where 8 Kazakh-learning trainees are located. The school is where the current President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazurbaev, spent his early years, and he has come back and pumped tons of money into a new building, including indoor restrooms and a swimming pool (although not enough money to fill the pool with water). In the auditorium, the 50 or so education volunteers were divided into our future regions and handed envelopes containing all the information about our site. Naturally they wouldn’t let us open them until the Chemolgan group presented their well-rehearsed song and dance, but finally, our futures were told and I’m heading north. Here’s what I know about my site:
• Petropavlovsk is the northern-most city in Kazakhstan. (I’m pretty sure it is also the most northern PCV post in the world.)
• It is named after Peter (Petro) and Paul (Pavl), and was a Russian military outpost to guard against the nomadic Kazakhs of the south.
• It lies near the Russian border (60 km) at 55ON latitude, which is roughly even with Edmonton Canada.
• It gets REALLY cold there (-30 C / -22 F) for long periods of time.
• In the worst of the winter, there will be less than 7 hours of daylight.
• Russian is the primary language spoken, although ethnic Kazakhs still make up %45 of the population.
• There are roughly 200,000 residents.
• I will be working at a secondary school (school #8 to be exact, 160 Mira is the address if you care to google an image of it) as well as at a teacher training facility (PDI- Professional Development Institute)
• By train, it is 8 hours from Astana (the capital), and 33 hours from Almaty.
• There is an airport just outside town with flights to Almaty.
• Landscape is flat and steppe/forest vegetation, and Ishim River is 2 km east of downtown.
• Current Kaz-18 volunteers in Petropavlovsk include Forrest, an EDU volunteer, and Meghan, an OCAP volunteer.
• Mike Mesquita, my roommate at the hotel back in DC will be working at the university in the city, and Ashley Taylor, a fellow Uzunagach trainee and my Sunday morning running partner, will be in a village 10 minutes away.
• There are a couple theaters, clubs and internet cafes, and public transportation is easily accessible.
• Centralized hot water and heating are common and mostly reliable.
• Peace Corps has been in Petro since 1996.
• There is a computer lab with internet in my school.
• My counterpart, whom I’ll meet in Almaty the week of Oct 15-20 for the counterpart conference, is Saule Zikirina and is a good friend of one of the technical coordinators working with us Kaz-19s.
• My Russian teacher, Darya is also from Petro and will be returning there in November following training. She is excited and says she might be able to still tutor me during my service.
• 3 potential host families are listed, one of which is a school teacher. One single woman with no children listed, one single mother with two kids (24, 18) listed, and one couple with two kids (17, 10) listed. Darya says one lives two blocks from her house, and one other lives downtown.

That’s a lot of info, but I still want to know more about it. I would love any info you care to find if you’d copy and paste websites, pictures, and text and send my way.

We have our second hub day on October 15th, and then two days of lessons, before I go back to Almaty for the counterpart conference. That is a 3 day conference (Wednesday-Friday) where our counterparts from site (my Petropavlovsk teaching partner whose classroom I’ll share for 2 years) come to Almaty and we met and orientate and train ourselves. On Saturday morning I leave for Petro and will be on a train until Sunday afternoon/evening. I stay in Petro until Thursday night, I believe, and then come back. That means that I have very little time left in Uzunagach, because we have only a week and a half after site visit before we leave for good. It’s amazing how fast time can go by when we’re so busy teaching and studying.

Speaking of teaching, I taught my last lesson in Uzunagach on Saturday, wrapping up a 5 lesson unit on travel. We learned all about travel, where, how, when, and why people travel. My favorite dialogue from the week:
Me: Where do you want to travel?
Gulnur (student): I want to travel to the moon.
Me: The moon?! How are you going to travel to the moon?
Gulnur: I’m going to take a spaceship.
Me: That makes sense. Why do you want to go to the moon?
Gulnur: I want to travel because I want to see new places.

I think it’s great that I get to pick what my students will learn. I’m not sure when that conversation will come in handy, but Gulnur and I both enjoyed it. You should see my visual aids, too. Once I invested the 250 tenge (2 USD) on an 8-pack of Disney Princess markers, my drawings have just gotten better and better. I really have taken up doodling and drawing as a fun activity, mainly because I spend so much time drawing visual aids for my lessons.

I’ve added a wishlist to the right sidebar of this website, and I’ll add and remove stuff as things come up. Feel free to send anything this way. I’ll try to open up a PO box while I’m visiting Petro so that I can put that address up here as soon as possible, but if I don’t get the chance, I’ll do it ASAP after Nov 10th.

In conclusion, here’s another haiku:

In Petropavlovsk
I’ll need a big soviet coat
What a long train ride!