Second Summer

Now that we're past the one year mark, time is going by extra fast.

To catch you all up on my work, I finished school at the end of May. With the end of school came the Gallery Opening for Photo Club. We had a great time as a group setting up the room at the DANKO office and being creative with displaying our photos. On the gallery opening day, a local news paper came and interviewed some students as well as the local news station. That was fun to hear the kids talk about the importance of photography and art. So proud of the work we accomplished together!

After the end of school I took a much needed break to travel to Taiwan and Hong Kong. One of my good friends in Kyrgyzstan, a fellow volunteer, has family in Taiwan. They kindly invited me into their homes and took me around their beautiful country. I am so thankful for my time with them and the experiences I had. I think I can add Taiwan to my top three favorite countries! After Taiwan, my friend and I spent a few days in Hong Kong grabbing food, seeing sights, and soaking up consumerism before we headed back to Kyrgyzstan.

When we returned, all volunteers met up for our mid-service training in the capital city. We talked about what we had done the past year, or goals for next year, and got ready to take on our final year of service. After mid-service training another good friend had family in country and they took us traveling with them around the Naryn oblast. We went to two famous lakes and had fun sleeping in yurts and exploring nature. I'm thankful again for this experience. I don't know if I would have made it out to see this part of the country without their invitation. 

After all this, it was already the end of June. Woah, the summer was going by fast! I tried to get students excited about coming to English Clubs over the summer but no one was showing up. I think since I wasn't new and exciting this year, students wanted to stay at home and sleep-in. Luckily, three volunteers and I had written our GLOW grant. This kept us busy organizing, planning, purchasing supplies, etc. In July we held a training for the volunteers and their counter parts. In August we hosted our camp.

Our Issyk-Kul GLOW 2016 camp was held from August 1st to the 6th in a village on the south shore. The camp consisted of 35 participants from the Oblast between the ages of 13 and 17. It also included four peer leaders, three camp counselors, four counterparts, and five volunteers. Shout out to all the volunteers for their hard work! Participants came from Balykchy, Baet, Cholpon-Ata, Karakol, and Keytai.

Issyk-Kul had 22 sessions through the week and covered topics such as self-esteem, Dance4Life, goal setting, finding their passions, peer pressure, UN Women's One World, body myths, volunteerism, leadership, and lesson planning. Also included this year were sessions that helped the girls explore their creative sides (art hour), as well as providing them the opportunity to meet role models in their communities who are good female leaders. Almost all sessions were taught by peer leaders or camp counselors, with more sensitive topics carried out with the help of a volunteer or by a volunteer and counterpart.  

Besides logistics, gathering supplies, the exchange of money, and scheduling, the camp is largely peer driven. Participants at camp who demonstrate great leadership skills and good teaching techniques back in their community can be chosen to be peer leaders at the next year's camp. This year we wanted the camp to be even less volunteer lead and developed the role of camp counselor. Camp counselors are those who were peer leaders the year before and now have a role in organizing or leading events and giving more lessons. This year we had a wonderful leadership group of seven girls from Balykchy and Karakol who made this camp great!   

Girls will now go back to their respective villages and teach six lessons from camp to their peers. In November we will meet again to share teaching experiences and remember the good times at camp. Thanks to everyone who worked hard on this project! It was a great success and Issyk-Kul now has 35 more female leaders in its midst. 

After camp I took some time to recuperate and then helped with a Volleyball camp hosted by a fellow volunteer. At this camp girls learned or practiced playing volleyball in the afternoons while mornings were filled with lessons on anti-bullying, puberty, and healthy lifestyles (to name a few).

Soon it was the end of August and school started September 1st. While the schedule was still being worked out, I took the weekend to attend the World Nomad Games. These games are inspired by nomadic cultures from Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and another country in this area. However, countries all around the world have similar games (and nomadic histories) and are sent to compete. This was a great experience to learn more about Kyrgyz nomadic culture but also to support my fellow volunteers who were playing for team USA. So awesome! 

Currently, my schedule has settled and I am starting classes and clubs again. This year I am teaching two 11th grade classes (equivalent to our 12th grade), one 6th grade, and one 5th grade. On top of my classes and clubs I am working on teacher trainings for my city this year with my site mate. We will have a lot of planning and work with our counterparts. It should be great to help other teachers in our city and share the knowledge. I also hope to start my library trainings soon in Bishkek. I'll write a post about this when it begins. 

So far so good! I'm off to a great start to my second school year and things are going good. Speaking of good, I have a little story I'd like to share. It made me smile the other day:

Yesterday, we called together our first GLOW club meeting to watch the video of our camp, reflect on camp and the lessons we learned, and plan our 6 lessons the girls will give to their peers. Almost always, peer trainings are the idea of a volunteer or other authoritative figure. Someone else comes up with the idea, organizes, and helps the students prepare. Peer trainings are hardly ever youth initiated or planned. Until yesterday. 

As the peer leaders and camp counselors were helping the campers pick dates and organize their trainings, one camp counselor and peer leader turn to me and explain that while GLOW ends in November, they want to give HIV/AIDS trainings on World Aids Day in December. Now, they had not talked about this at all with me and I hadn't heard any gossip about it in our WhatsApp group. My heart jumped! These girls who have been giving trainings with our (volunteer) help for 2 to 3 years have now taken that next step. They plan to give trainings on their own to their peers!  

These young female leaders took the initiative, have a plan, and I have every confidence that they will carry out these trainings. Not only is it their idea to help share knowledge with their community, but the theme is a sensitive topic. This means they not only feel comfortable teaching to their peers, but teaching about topics that may make others in their community uncomfortable. Even if they don't end up teaching, just hearing that they had talked about it as a group and decided they wanted to teach their peers, without my help, was a great feeling. This is what Peace Corps is supposed to do right? Help transfer skills to others in the hope that they will initiate things to help their community. I got to see the benefits of my work and the work that has been started by other volunteers before me. It was an ah-ha moment! 

One Year, Spring, and What's To Come

Well I’ve been slacking on the writing again. I’m sorry. Spring is a busy season. It seems like after the Winter holidays everyone is hibernating until March. Then in March as the days begin to get longer and the sun shines more, people start to get active again.

Winter wasn’t too bad. Thank goodness. I did get a little bored because it was too cold to do anything outside so I would just cook and watch movies.  I was very inactive. Whoops. Next Winter I know not to let myself get that way. But in Balykchy is was so cold and windy all you wanted to do was hibernate. My external hard rive was how I got through those days.  

Hanging out with Alyssa's host family!

March went by in a blur and was the beginning of our last quarter in school. I visited another oblast to help them with their summer camps and got to see where some of my training village friends live now. At my school, some 11th form students asked for harder grammar concepts so my counterpart and I focused on sports, health, and different English speaking countries for the last quarter. We drilled students on progressive tenses and conditional tenses. Students seemed to like to learn about different countries and fantasize about what they would do there. In March I also started helping out my friend Chinara at the Education Center with one of her English classes. We turned it into a girls empowerment and English through learning about American cities class. My last class will be next week and I’ll teach them about Chicago and Miami.  

Talas in March!

In April I started up the Balykchy Photo Club again. I was trying to keep Photo Club going over the winter working on a website based in Wordpress, but the students weren’t coming and didn’t seem interested. I asked them in our first meeting back if they wanted to continue with the website and if it was interesting to them or if they were just finished. Sadly they said they wanted to do other things, so I decided to change the focus of the club. We decided to continue to take students to beautiful places around the Issyk-Kul area to show Kyrgyz youth their own back yard. Many people don’t leave their village, city, or rayon except to go to Bishkek or visit family in a neighboring village. Choosing to take the students places where many tourists go but they have not been has been fulfilling. The students get so excited and are always asking me when and where our next trip will be. We usually meet on Wednesdays for club at the local organization (DANKO) and work on editing pictures on the computers. Then every other Sunday or so, when students don’t have school, we go out on field trips. Our first trip was to the Barscone waterfall on the South shore of Lake Issyk-Kul. The water was still frozen but the students climbed up the ice and explored for half the day. 

Looking from the waterfall into the valley.

There were many statues commemorating Gagarin, the first man in space.

My students climbing up the first waterfall.

All of photo club on the second frozen waterfall.

Our second field trip was to Jeti Oguz and the Karakol Zoo. Jeti Oguz reminds me of Denver’s Red Rocks Park as the rocks are sandstone-like and a bright red. The Karakol Zoo was just for fun and on the way home around the lake back to Balykchy. 

Jeti Oguz!

Walking in the canyons.

Photo Club!

Our last field trip was today, to a small National Park in between Balykchy and Bishkek. The Park, Chong Kemin, is located in a beautiful valley where things are lush and full of life. I now know why Balykchy is so brown and desert-like. All the rain falls on that side of the mountains. Since there are villages in the nature reserve area, we just wandered around until we fond a spot close to the foothills for some exploring.

To the mountains! 

Walking in the foothills.

Photo Club! 

Our view laying on the mountainside.

Since we have been visiting many touristy places, for one of our final products we are making postcards. Each student will choose one photo from the entirety of the club and we will print it as a postcard. We told them it has to be a really good picture showing Kyrgyzstan and can’t be a selfie. All the postcards will be printed as a set and the local organization that partnered with us can sell them for future fundraisers. Our other final product will be a gallery showing where each student will have four pictures printed and hung in the organization’s office. This grant was written in partnership with the local small newspaper DANKO. We hope to write a blurb in the paper and have people from the city come as well as the student’s friends and family. I’ll update you all on how it goes. 

In March and April two other volunteers and I wrote a grant for the GLOW camp this summer. I participated in the camp last summer and was set on keeping it going for this year. I have two great partners working on this huge project that will bring together 35 girls from around our oblast and teach them about leadership, health, and their rights as young women. We will hold a training in July for our teachers and peer leaders and then hold the camp in August. I am happy to announce that we got approved and will now go through the ‘let girls learn’ program to crowd source and apply for LGL money!

At the end of April, school started getting harder. It started getting harder to be motivated. Students seemed to be checking out, it kept getting nicer out, we had many holidays at the beginning of May, and now everyday it seems we have to test the students. This year our school is up for national testing to check the students' knowledge and understanding. With just two weeks left to the school year and four classes for each class, all we can do is review the year’s material and give our own test. I can’t believe I survived a year of teaching! I’m so thankful for working with my counterpart, having her experience, and being able to collaborate with her. I think the way this program of partnership and team-teaching is great. As volunteers we don’t just swoop in and teach English ourselves for two years, but we help build the capacity and improve the English of a Kyrgyz national who is already making a career out of teaching English.

As it’s been getting warmer, fellow volunteers and I have been taking advantage of our weekends. Last year since we were in training and couldn’t leave our training sites, we didn’t get to go exploring and experience KG. This spring and summer I hope to get out more and continue to explore this beautiful country with my friends!

Emily and I with our friend Chinara and her family in their village on the South shore.

Staring cow in the village.

At jailoo outside of Kochkor, Naryn.

Naryn Jailoo!

Ala-Archa National Park in Chui!

On our way to the waterfall in Ala-Archa!

Tamlyn and I at the waterfall! 

Hiking back down. Notice the heart? I <3 Ala-Archa!

So as things wrap up, my goals are to close the photo club grant, enjoy the closing of school ceremony, and finish my club at the Education Center. For the summer I am looking forward to meeting twice a week with my two English clubs (one for high school, one for middle school) and starting my FLEX/Essay writing club again. I’ll also be gearing up and planning for the GLOW camp and helping other volunteers with week long programs at their own sites.  In Balykchy we hope to have a learning English through theatre camp which I will help lead with a fellow volunteer.  

I am also excited about a new connection I made recently with the American Corners in Kyrgyzstan. I noticed a Little Free Library at their Bishkek location and posted about it. Long story short I got in touch with someone who had gone to America and seen the LFL phenomenon and it inspired her to bring it back to KG. Along with my mom, the gentleman who met the woman in the states and showed her LFLs, and the woman in charge of Libraries for the American Corners in KG, and myself, we have a project going to get the libraries stocked with English books and registered through the LFL program. Also I am hoping to help them with inspiring and sharing information about the LFL program to other American Corners around the country. Here we go library promotion and library information classes. I can’t wait to see where this project will lead. 

We are currently waiting for the new group of volunteers to come. We finally got our VISAs and have our accreditation and VISAs secured until next June. YEY no more VISA stress! We hope to see the new group in country sometime in June. Also during this time, the group before us is gearing up and ready to go home. Their 27 months are up and they are planning for what their lives will be like back stateside in a month! They have been great resources, good friends, and mentors. It will feel weird to be in country without them. 

For now, I’m counting down the days until school ends and I get to take a trip to recharge. I’m going to Taiwan and Hong Kong on May 30th with a friend who has family in Taiwan and who is also in the Peace Corps KG program with me. When I come back I’ll be re-energized and ready to take on the summer projects.  

Oh yeah, we passed that one year mark in April. It was weird. The time is going by really fast here yet it seems just like yesterday we were all told to go home with a family and spent six hours a day learning Kyrgyz. Many people have described this experience as being the toughest job you’ll ever love and I think I agree. Some days in our service are great and some days are bad. We live for the good days and press on through the bad. But when you look back, you really only remember the good. Here’s to another year of challenges and good memories!  

Holidays Abroad and an India Vacation

While I spent my Thanksgiving holiday out of my oblast, Balykchy (my site) hosted our Issyk-Kul region Christmas festivities. At the time we had two apartments so there was plenty of space for volunteers to stay and cooking space to make lots of yummy food. My new Issyk-Kul fam put on quite the show and we had food for days, as well as great company. We decided to do secret santa so we weren't giving gifts to all 15 some volunteers. This worked out great and everyone was so thoughtful and gave wonderful gifts. Our celebration included singing songs together, food, the gift-exchange, and of course games. We meshed our Kyrgyz life of eating together on the floor around a tablecloth with the American decorations of a christmas tree and star of David on the wall.

A Balykchy Christmas!

Being silly in front of the tree!

In Kyrgyzstan, Christmas is not a big deal.  Russian families celebrate Christmas in January, so the day proceeds just like any other. The big Kyrgyz holiday though is New Years. Many of the Christmas traditions we have is how Kyrgyz people celebrate New Years. This can get confusing when describing to my students, other teachers, and local friends. They think we celebrate New Years on the 25th of December or they think our Christmas is their New Years. It's confusing.

On New Years, Kyrgyz people get together with family and give presents. They usually have a decorated tree and stay up to midnight eating lots of yummy food. At midnight they set off fireworks themselves and it goes on for a good half hour at least. They also have a Santa Claus-like figure with his daughter that goes around and spreads the cheer. Way to make things complicated right? When I came back from vacation and asked my students what they did for New Years, I compared this to what Americas usually do. For example, we usually watch firework shows rather than set them off ourselves. We watch the ball drop in New York and we don't give presents. That sort of thing. I think they understood that comparison list more and it was cool to see what each of our cultures do for the same holiday.

To back track, however, after Christmas I finished out school. We had our second quarter test and were eager to leave for the month long break. Kyrgyz schools have a one week break scheduled for the winter holiday but this usually becomes longer because schools are so cold. So I decided to take advantage of this break. On the 30th, I met some fellow volunteers in Bishkek and we made our way to Almaty, Kazakhstan to celebrate New Years. Three of us were leaving to go to India from the Almaty airport and decided it would be fun to check out our neighbors in the north. We stayed at a hostel which occupied the top floor of an office building. Around midnight they let us onto the roof and we rang in the new year with a full 360 of the city and watched in amazement at fireworks being shot off EVERYWHERE. It was beautiful.

View of the city fireworks. 

On the rooftop surrounded by fireworks.

The next day my three friends and I stayed around and toured the city. We also went to the highest ice skating rink in the world!

View from up above the rink. I hiked like straight up on over 100 flights of stairs.

The rink!

We parted ways with the other half of our group and left to go to the airport. There are direct flights from Bishkek in KG to Delhi, India but my travel group and I wanted to start further south and make our way back up. We wanted to fly into Mumbai and so took the Almaty, Dubai, Mumbai route.  Our India vacation was filled with fruit, beaches, American food, Indian food, shopping, lassi, the steps of the Ganga, and the Taj. It was great! We went from Mumbai to Goa to Bangalore. Then Pondicherry to Chennai to Varanasi. Then Agra for the Taj Mahal and then Delhi.  We took every kind of transportation possible on our trip except riding bikes. India was colorful and full of great sites and food. It was overwhelming at times because of the mass amounts of people and the driving, but I'm glad I went and got to see regional difference from the South to the North.

Mumbai Sunset!

Elaphanta Caves UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Mumbai Taj Mahal hotel and the docks!

GOA beaches!

Art Museum in Bangalore.

Pundicherry beauty!

Pundicherry shore.

Varanasi Ghats walk.

Lasssssssiiiii!

Hanging out on along the Ganga!

Night prayer ceremony in Varanasi. 

The Taj. 

Taking the Taj in.

When flying back to Kyrgyzstan from Delhi, it was weird to not be flying home, home. America home. But I quickly got over this because the trip made me appreciate how things are done in Kyrgyzstan. It's quieter here, the air is cleaner, and it was familiar. It felt like coming back to a different home. Now it seems like time is going by so fast. It's now almost 10 months since we've been in country and the new volunteers are coming. I've been working on preparing for trainings for the new group about how to deal with cultural differences and writing a book with other volunteers. Before we know it, we'll no longer be the newbies but helping a new group of volunteers figure out the ropes.

For now, it's back to teaching the last two quarters. We will have spring break in the middle of March and then finish school on the 25th of May. I am also working on field trips for photo club in the Spring and writing the Issyk-Kul Girls Leading Our World (GLOW) grant with two other volunteers for the summer camp. I hope to travel to another oblast during Spring break to help them start writing their GLOW summer camp grant. When the new volunteers come I will be helping out with their training and getting them ready for this adventure they've taken on.  Spring seems like it's just around the corner and will be packed full of activities!

Also, my last site mate left after New Years, making me the only volunteer in my city for a short while. Since two volunteers had left during the visa problems, it was just one volunteer and I. After Christmas the other volunteer decided to return to the US as well. However, another volunteer was looking for a new site. Balykchy is huge with ten schools so I thought about offering up the idea that she move here. By the time I got back from vacation, I had a new site mate! This makes me very happy to have someone to do projects with, talk with, and make this town seem a little less big.