lessons in patience

My trip back from Bangkok, from when I left the hotel in rush hour traffic until I walked in my door in Petro, took four days and seven hours. Each trip to Almaty is thirty hours on a train—each way. My fellow northern Kazakhstan sitemates and I are on course to spend one whole month of our twenty-seven-month service sitting on a train. The combination of a large country and slow trains has created for us a valuable exercise in what many call patience. I prefer the term “boredom management.”

I am writing this sitting on a hard, flat, grey wooden bench in a bus station in northwest Kazakhstan. A few dozen people—all wearing different colors and makes of footwear—join me in the main terminal under a shiny jagged ceiling that reminds me of a giant sterling silver meat tenderizer. I’ve been here for an hour and my mind is already wandering pretty far from the paper in front of me. I’m sure by the time my bus leaves in three hours, my train of thought will have already reached the next oblast over. At that time I’ll board a charter bus heading east, where I’ll sit for nine hours with nothing but the rolling Kazakh steppe and my iPod to keep me entertained.

Each person faced with the opportunity (read: dreaded necessity) to sit for seemingly eternal periods of time must come up with their own system to prevent themselves from feeling overwhelmed. A dead iPod with ten hours till the next electrical outlet is a bleak prospect if you are unprepared. My solution to boredom management is making lists. A sample list from the last train I too to Almaty with Mike went like this:
· Make a list.
· Eat
· Drink
· Sleep
· Read
· Play cards (gin, rummy, 9s, durak, Go Fish!, speed, war, etc)
· Make crossword puzzles
· Solve crossword puzzles
· Complain
· Reminisce
· Study Russian
· Talk to a stranger
· Make up a song
· Listen to music
· Make up stories
· Plan future clubs/classes

The process of making a list, especially if you include everything you might possibly want to do, can feasibly cut half an hour off you trip. Plus, that’s already one thing you can mark off. The real test comes on a lengthy bus ride by yourself. The bumpy pothole-ridden roads and the driver’s braking tendencies eliminate nearly all the items on the above list. Reading becomes nauseating and writing illegible. Sleeping is uncomfortable and talking to yourself is bad PR. So I sit. I let my mind wander from past to future, from the real world to an imaginary one, from memories to dreams. Every hour or two we stop and I stretch. At one point I buy a snack to hold me over. I eat as slowly as possible. Along the occasional smoothly paved roads near bigger cities I do crossword puzzles. I try to relax. I know the trip with eventually end. I just have to be…patient.

Kazakhstan has altered my sense of time. I find myself more present-minded than I used to be. I focus less on the future and tend to notice more in the now. I am trying to capture every moment, every detail of my life here to take back home. I finish my PC service six months from this week, and as much as I’m looking forward to going home, I’m excited about my last six months of opportunities, experiences and stories to tell my grandkids. So when I found out I have to go to Almaty next week for a flu shot, meaning sixty hours on a train for six hours in Almaty, I surprised myself for not reacting too negatively. Sure, I grumbled at the silliness and unnecessary hassle of it all, but I’m somewhat looking forward to it. After all, just think of all the things I can do in those sixty hours.