Summer Fun

08.18.10 [sorry, backlogged again]

This summer in Shymkent has been both sweltering and fun as promised.  It’s about 100 degrees here and the perfect time for some serious pool parties!

The day after we got back from the Summer Leadership School, I didn’t even have a chance to catch up on sleep because the birthday celebrations continued.  I held a belated party with over 20 great friends in attendance: all our ABWK/Dostar volunteers/counselors from SLS, 6 of us PCVs (my sitemates, as well as Tes who came up from Zhetasai and Leah who came up from Turkestan!), and local friends from English club and basketball.  Olga, one of my best local friends and former roommate, helped plan the whole thing at a water park out in Aksukent, about 20 minutes outside of the city.  The water was cold, the weather was hot, there were two fast and fun water slides, and they played American music on the dance floor – all in all a perfect party destination.  :)

[I gave everyone more Chinese tattoos :D]

[Bubbles!!]

Honestly, on this THIRD birthday celebration day, I once again had never felt so spoiled and adored.  Our Dostar volunteers got me a basketball with all their names signed on it, my fellow PCVs got me an AMAZING blender (smoothies for everyone!!), my bball fan club got me a hilarious mug with their pictures on it as well as 23 long-stemmed red roses.  I also received souvenirs, trinkets, a Russian book, a customized t-shirt (that says “Becca We Love You” in French;) and a real Hawaiian lei, as well as a ton of sweet cards. 

[All my adorable gifts!]

In return, I made everyone American(/Chinese) picnic food (thank you Phillip for your culinary genius and assistance as always) and bought an obscene amount of watermelon and delicious SKO melons for everyone.  We had potato salad, ranch pasta salad, Chinese black bean eggplant, coleslaw, cornbread and brownies to share!

The next weekend Evelina had another pool party at her house, which was also amazing. We went into the hot banya (the post-Soviet version of a sauna) and poured water on the hot rocks until the small room filled with hot steam.  You basically cook like a dumpling until you can’t stand it anymore, and then run outside and jump into the ice cold pool under a sea of stars, then run back and do it all over again.  We also put my blender to good use making ice cream and berry smoothies, ate delicious shashlik, sang karaoke, and just generally had a blast.  “Family Reunion,” they called it… a volunteer tradition in celebration of the end of summer and everyone’s eventual return to school or university. Many of our guys will be going to study in Almaty or Astana in September – they’ll be terribly missed here! :’(

This weekend Anna was also able to spend time and visit as she was down in Shymkent for work.  She graduated ’09 from H and is spending the summer as an intern in the Political Dept of the U.S. Embassy – small world!  We went on a Sunday trip to the mountains to show her a bit of nature.  We cooled a watermelon in the river, played cards, took a little hike and came back to picnic.  :)

[The great Kazakhstan geyser...?:P]

[YUM.]

But before you think my life is all fun, I must say I’ve never been busier at work!  This week I attended various embassy dinners (including a nice dinner at Kokserai with the Deputy Chief of Mission who was also down in Shymkent recently), volunteer meetings in preparation for our August 21^st conference with the orphanages, and intensive planning for my upcoming trip to the fair capital of Astana for donor development.  That trip will actually be sandwiched in between two trips to Almaty, the first of which is to meet the new Peace Corps Regional Director for all of EMA (Eastern Europe, Mediterranean and Asia), and hopefully the new Kaz-22s!  We also won two more grants this week; one Y-PEER advocacy grant for work with journalists, and one research grant from the Soros Foundation (well done and congrats to our hard-working grant writing team!). I will actually be attending the mandatory Training of Trainers in Bulgaria for the project this September with another volunteer on our team as part of the grant stipulation.  I am getting so many interesting opportunities here that I could never even have imagined in the U.S., which just goes to show that valuable resources and rewarding professional experiences exist everywhere if you just know how to find them.  :)

With so much work and play, I can definitely say that this summer has not been boring by any means. And that’s just how I like it!