I'm skipping a safety and security session to write this. PC keeps a really tight leash on trainees and it's incredibly frustrating. We have to get permission to go anywhere outside of our tiny villages of a few hundred people. So everytime a group of us finally gets to the internet cafe, we only get a few minutes because there's always someone else waiting. So until I'm at my permanent site in December (or some amazing person sends me a flashdrive ;) ), I'm not going to be posting a lot...unless I keep skipping sessions. ;)
We have language lessons 4 days a week in our villages. The other two days, we meet up with all the other volunteers (62--4 people already gave up and went back to the States!) for either technical training or medical/safety/cultural training. After 5 language lessons, I can read Kyrgyz! Every time I meet new people here, I'm surprised at their "eh, whatever" attitude about English. Everywhere else I've been, people want to learn English and make an effort to communicate in their broken English. Not here--not yet anyway. Either you speak Russian, Kyrgyz, or smile and nod, like I've been doing at home with my host family. So, yay for language training.
Squat toilets are still no fun. I've been trying to avoid running to the outhouse in the middle of the night for fear of falling in the hole or something. That would be the end of my life for many, many reasons. Being COVERED in shit is just one. Everything in Kyrgyzstan has an upside though... I stopped to look at the sky on my way back to the house and wow. The sky here is clearer and has more stars than I've ever seen. It's gorgeous.
Doing laundry by hand is no fun either. I haven't yet seen the good side to that though. Of course, I'll never again toss a clean shirt into the laundry basket just because it's wrinkled.
On Saturday, we had a culture day at Burana Tower, the site of one of the hubs on the Silk Road in the 9th and 10th centuries... it was pretty cool. We also slaughtered a goat, and I got a great two minute video of it that I'll post one day...when internet access isn't such a rare commodity.
Tomorrow I'm going to visit another volunteer on the north coast of Lake IssyKul. It's a huge tourist attraction... I'm excited, especially since I think I'll be placed in the south after Pre-Service Training. (Fruits and vegetables are more readily available there in the winter and my being a vegetarian means I'll probably end up there.)
Days go by quickly, but time passes slowly here. It feels like I've been here forever and I have so much more to write, but as usual, my internet time is up. Send me a flashdrive someone!
posted by Unknown at 1:56 AM
3 Comments:
I have an extra USB flashdrive. ill send it...when i find it :)
-j
1:31 AM
what's your e-mail, can you check it?
your country made the news:
Rice Reaches Pact on Keeping Central Asia Base
Published: October 12, 2005
BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan, Oct. 11 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meeting with the new leaders of Kyrgyzstan, reached agreement on Tuesday on long-term rights to maintaining an air base here for servicing military aircraft on missions to Afghanistan.
The United States and allied forces may continue to use the base, adjacent to the international airport here, "until the situation in Afghanistan is completely stabilized," President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev said at a news conference.
Last July, Kyrgyzstan, along with three other Central Asian states and Russia and China, issued a statement calling on the United States to evacuate all its bases in this region. A short time later, the Kyrgyz defense minister told Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that the United States could continue to use the base.
But since then, Kyrgyzstan has formed a new government, and a senior State Department official said the government had waffled on a commitment before the agreement reached Tuesday.
The agreement is particularly important because neighboring Uzbekistan has asked the United States to leave its air base there, and the Defense Department says it will have withdrawn from that base by year's end. That leaves only the Kyrgyz base near Afghanistan.
The State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the host country's sensitivity on the issue, said the agreement was reached only after difficult negotiations. Officials said Kyrgyzstan had demanded an accounting of the money already spent. The United States does not make a specific lease payment for the facility, but spends $40 million to $50 million a year locally to purchase fuel and other supplies for the base.
Mr. Bakiyev told Ms. Rice that he believed that the former government of Askar Akayev had stolen much of the money, though no specific accounting was given. Mr. Akayev was deposed in an uprising last March. He had ruled here for 15 years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Bakiyev also asked for more money in exchange for basing rights, but Ms. Rice made no promises, noting that the Defense Department manages those payments, the officials said.
While the basing rights was the only issue on which a concrete agreement was made, Ms. Rice said most of her discussions here centered on political and economic reform efforts. Under the former government, corruption was common at virtually every level of government, and Mr. Bakiyev said the new government was working to address that problem while trying to rewrite the Constitution. Ms. Rice said she hoped Kyrgyzstan could finish the constitutional revisions by the end of the year, a goal that Kyrgyz officials seemed to embrace.
9:59 AM
Wow... you really need to work on updating your blog more frequently! I know for a fact you've skipped more safety and security sessions since that one and haven't managed a blog post during them... What *are* you up to during all that time?
12:02 AM
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