PCV Visit Continued 10/15/05

Hello all...fair warning, this is a pretty long post, so feel free to break up the read, unless you're really bored at work and then i suppose you owe it to yourself to indulge in something interesting....one more thing, in reference to the description of "midgets" later in the post, i have been assured that they take no offense to the use of this terminology (sp?) in this country

As I began to explain in the post before last, the PCV Visits as they are called are a chance for all trainees to go see different parts of Kyrgyzstan and stay with current volunteers in those regions. All trainees are assigned regions at random. Mine happened to be the Talas Oblast (there are six oblasts (states)) in the west of Kyrgystan on the other side of the mountains. I stayed with a volunteer named Erich from Virginia in the village of Kerovka. Kerovka is a rather large village containing several kafes, three different schools, and internet source, and a kind of town center. It is the Rayon capital (kind of like a county seat) so there are also a couple of office buildings.
To me the whole trip felt like college visit flash-back. Here we trainees are these kids who've been in the country all of three weeks, we have no language skills, and peace corps hardly even lets us out of their site for more than a hour at best. We all have cabin fever pretty bad by this point.
So me and about 8 other trainees who are also venturing to the Talas oblast jump in a "marshutka" (large taxi van) and begin the 6 hour ride through the mountains to talas. When we get there the taxi drops us off in Talas City (the state capital) at this cafe where all the volunteers that people are staying with have been waiting for us for a couple hours. They are each about five beers deep by this point also. They are very excited to see us and take us under their wing (aka show us a good time, they having been in the country a year but still having a clear recollection of the obnoxiousness of training).
So we have a few beers at the cafe and its time to leave. There are three volunteers in the village of Kerovka, and two of them were at the cafe, my volunteer Erich and a girl Nicole, withc whom two trainees were also staying. So the five us jump in a taxi and head to Kerovka from talas city. we are all sitting in the back piled on top of each other and there are two kyrgyz gentleman, slightly intoxicated, riding double shot gun. when they realize we are american (which took about one glance) they begin talking to erich telling him that we must all go and drink vodka and eat turkey at his house in kerovka when we return. erich politely refused but the man then felt he had been disprected. erich assured him that he did respect him but that he was hosting guests himself and they must be getting home. so erich set
a date for the day after tomorrow to go this man's house to eat turkey and drink vodka. erich and the kyrgyz man both new that this date would not be kept, but it satisfied them both for the evening.
The next day i go to erichs classes and observe him teach...although technically the semester had begun three weeks before, this was actually the first time erich had seen most of these students because they had been in the fields harvesting...erich told me that what happened this year (as happens every year) is that they ahve the first day of classes where all the students come and have class for about ten minutes, then they go home and the teachers start drinking...after that day, no students come to school for the next week because they are still working, so the county government decides to declare the next two weeks a holiday and to begin classes again two weeks later...that brought us to this tuesday that i was observing erich.
That afternoon Erich and i go meet up with volunteer nicole and the two trainees staying with her, anna and joanie. Up to this point, i still had not drank a sip of vodka in my three weeks in country. This is the case for most volunteers because peace corps scares the hell out of the host families telling them not to give us alcohol. the peace corps seems to think we all have drinking problems! crazy... so we're sitting in this outdoor cafe having a couple of beers when about 10 middle aged women sit down at the table behind us. They looked harmelss, being older well dressed well behaved women in the village. However, the volunteers in the village new better and told us to watch out for the drunk "eijei's" (women) behind us. No more than five minutes later they snatch up Erich and I and drag us to dance floor. They were then so impressed by our dance moves that they invited our whole table to join them. A slew of vodka shots insued, bottle after bottle resulting finally in a dance competition including drunk eijeis, other townies, peace corps volunteers, and the town midget (of whom i have pictures). This, however, was not just any midget, he was John's, the third volunteer in Kerovka who was not hosting trainees that week but joined us at the bar, favorite midget. John told us this man was his favorite midget because one time they had been at a party and the midget was very drunk and was standing next to one of John's friends. The midget wanted to put his arm around John's friend, but because of the height difference he could only reach the American's ass. This apparently did not bother the midget or John's friend and so they stood there for a while with the midget's hand on his ass. Anyway, i saw for myself that this midget was both a very good drinker and a very good dancer, even though his arms were rather short for his body.
The next couple days were a little more tame, but i did get to see a lot of kerovka, which is a very nice village and i would consider myself lucky if placed there. i also got to observe more of erich's classes and a couple of nicole's as well. i actually taught one of nicole's 8th grade classes and thought i did pretty well...we learned some new adjectives.

On another note, i have been able to read your comments the last couple of times and i really enjoyed them (fitz, your hard work is appreciated) so keep them coming...you just never know with these computers, but lately i've had good luck....also, i've devised a plan for posting pictures and hopefully will have some up in a few weeks.
if you made it this far reading this really long post then i applaud you.
bye for now,
rick