The Bitter Taste of Joy

In case anyone reads this, I want to warn you that whatever else goes into this blog is simply the internal self-gratifying mental wanderings of the author.

So it turns out that five days of getting drunk, eating too much, and marinating in a hot tub is a bad way to transition from a village in Kazakhstan to the United States.

If life went as fictitiously scheduled, I would have just flown home from Almaty to a hot Minnesota summer. As it were, I’ve just returned from a week in the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area.

I am extremely blessed, blessed being the reluctantly used word describing a state of fortune that is due to something beyond my comprehension. Maybe fortunate is a better word, less weight. Whereas my experience in Central Asia didn’t end well, there is no other reality in which it would have ended differently, and it made me the man I am today.

Not much has changed on the surface, I’m still unsure of the world around me, let alone my place in it. I’m still enthralled by people and our ability to be beautiful and kind, and horrified at our capacity for evil. I’m still enchanted by women and wonder at their ability to be magical. However, somehow everything looks different, the world looks different. It’s filled out and dirtier, deeper, sadder, lovelier, more horrifying, funnier, but most of all more fascinating and deserving of a life well lived in service to others.

Every once in a while when I smell something like burning trash, or see the sunlight catch the edge of water in a way that reminds me of a river, I violently push memories into the recesses of my mind until they no longer turn my stomach. I’m much better when someone asks me about being in the Peace Corps, my stock of replies are more associated with telling stories than reality, and they’re easier for me to digest.

I wish it was only melodrama, but the truth is that I hate the fact that part of me was shaking with joy when I found out I was going home. I hate it because the second I felt it, it was a betrayal. It was a betrayal to the people I cared for and a place I was learning to build a life in, I was betrayed by my emotions at a time when I thought I was content with the life I was living.

Now it all feels like a dream, except for the bitter taste that joy left in my mouth.

The Transition

Jeans, boots, knife, tape-measure, pencil, belt, long-johns, shirt, jacket, and wool-socks, all replace my dress clothes and winter coat as I transition from teacher to construction worker. I’m trying not to think much about being back. I thought about it twice while working. Once I almost tipped off a scaffold plank carrying blocks, and the other time I started to get queasy while cutting through a block with a partner saw. Although it could have been from the paint fumes coming off the metal bucket we were blowtorching to keep water warm.

 

It is weird to be back. Less than a month ago I was walking home from school in a -25 C blizzard, marveling at the fact that although on the surface my life seemed to suck stupendously, I was happy. As Russian worked it’s way deeper and deeper into my brain, I started to better understand and appreciate the world around me. A single phone call on Wednesday afternoon changed my life. The only thing I remember from the four-minute script that my Country Director read to me was the “Peace Corps has decided to suspend it’s program in Kazakhstan,” and “You’ll receive an email tomorrow with more information.”

 

I was in denial. I immediately decided that when my counterpart found out, I would tell her that I’d stay on in Sergeevka on my own. I figured that I could pay my way until June when school ended. The email I received the following day instructed me to be in Almaty by the next Wednesday, which meant that I needed to leave on the Monday night train. It was Thursday night. I only had three full days left in Sergeevka to pack and say goodbye. Those three days were heartbreaking and difficult, and I managed to make them weirder for myself by not fully aknowledging that it was my last goodbye. I capped off the last night by doing a three-hour public banya and beer with the military teacher, and the birch whipping-broiling-overextended-event at least saved me from thinking about leaving.

 

Then I was off, first on a bus to the city, then on a train to Almaty. Kazakhstan went out of its way to make our last trip interesting by having train police come into our wagon, take all of the volunteer’s passports, and threaten to put us in jail for drinking beer that was purchased on the train. Fortunately I hadn’t been drinking and negotiated us out of the situation by way of heartfelt apologies and bullshit. We were cracked out when we pulled up in Almaty at 5 am, and then basically short-circuited when we walked into the hotel that Peace Corps put us up in. I walked into the five-star Rahat Palace, looked up into the glittering skylight ten floors above me, and then I mentally transitioned into a place of thoughtlessness decadence.

 

We had a pool, sauna, hot tub, gym, and three meals a day of gourmet buffet-style food. I had a room to myself with a king-sized bed. Every day there was a morning session where staff passed out forms and information, and a late afternoon session with more of the same. Between these two sessions we were broken into small-group sessions covering everything from counseling to thirty-second elevator speeches. I skipped every one of them in favor of hot tubs, napping, and working out. There were some volunteers who complained about living out of a hotel, but I would have been cool spending another five months. It was a wild week and by the time they kicked us out on Monday morning I wasn’t sure how I was still standing.

 

Then I went to Nepal..

Evacuation to Paradaise

- All Peace Corps programs in Kazakhstan were abruptly suspended on November 15th “due to a unique and unfortunate combination of ongoing safety, operational, programming and Volunteer support concerns.”

- I couldn’t get a visa to stay, so after a 5-day closing conference at a 5-star hotel, I flew to Nepal to travel and trek before I go home.

 

Lagman

I’m getting better at, uh, heating my house. Nights have been dipping down to five to ten below-zero, necessitating heating the pechka too early in the morning. This means falling out of bed onto my cold floor, pulling on my cargo pants, and stumbling outside into the frigid black air before my blood even thinks about circulating. I put twice my weight in wood on my right arm because I don’t want to make two trips, and stumble back inside, avalanching the wood down in front of the pechka. Then I squat in front of it trying to get the snow-covered wood to catch fire, eating into my breakfast and coffee time. The sad thing is that the house doesn’t really get warm until I’m gone. After doing this for a week, because I went to college, I figured out how to make my life easier; bring three armfuls of wood in the night before.

My life is currently an exhausting combination of the new and old world, or maybe just the underdeveloped new world. Between working full-time, running clubs, heating the house, cooking, and shoveling snow, I just barely have enough time to get in a run or two through the steppe. There’s a strong correlation, controlling for multiply variables, between the minutes of skype and teaspoons of Nescafe into my yellow mug. I’m thinking of scrapping skype. But yes, I’m back to running in the snow again, and I love it because it actually gives me an extra three or so hours of running time due to increased visibility. Long story short, I’m realizing what a luxurious life I’ve lived that’s allowed me to spend free time reading books, watching movies, playing piano, and doing yoga to Rodney Yee videos.

Continuing my Odyssey. The train rolled into Almaty at some ungodly morning hour, so I sat in the train station drinking poisonous coffee out of a machine, waiting for the buses to start running. It took me over three hours to get to the Peace Corps office which is a thirty minute cab ride away, but I didn’t care because this trip was about adventure and spending my money wisely on food, drink, and cover charge. The bus I was on quickly blew past capacity due to rush-hour commuting, and by the grace of God I was squeezed and pooped out of the bus at the right stop.

I immediately stripped off my stale train clothes, pulled on my stale running clothes, and jogged out the front gate. Peace Corps office is a little removed from the center of the city and so its home to stunning views of the mountains and city, perfect for a frosty fall morning. Toward the end of my run I found myself in a huge park with a sort of pantheon at the entrance. I ran around the edge of the park, but felt myself eventually drawn to a huge raised monument in the center at the back. I ran up the stone stairs, watching the Tien Shin mountains grow in front of me like giant white monsters, and when I got to the top I spun around to face the city. It spread out before me in all it’s smog and glory, the polar opposite of the ice capped wonderland at my back. It was a cold morning, but I was feeling epic, so I stayed at the lookout and did a monstrous workout as the sun came up. By the time I got back to the Peace Corps office, it was late in the morning and I felt like a god.

As the goal of my trip was to have fun, my first night in Almaty was spent at bars, smoking hookah, and didn’t end until around four in the morning. I rolled out of bed at ten and struggled outside into the cold drizzle in order to get in a run before my six-hour bus ride to Zharkent, where I was going to help conduct a teacher training seminar. The run got better as it went on and by the time I got back to the apartment I was literally shaking with hunger. My traveling buddy and I packed quickly and trudged outside into the rain, finding a ‘lagman’ restaurant on our block, across the street from the Green Bazaar. Lagman is an Uighur (ethnic group between Kazakhstan and China) food that’s basically fantastic spaghetti. As we looked at our heaping plates of noodles, my friend commented that this would either be the best or worst decision of the day. Halfway through my plate I declared it as the best decision, which he cautioned might be premature. On the taxi to the bus station the situation became critical as I broke out in a clammy sweat and my tongue got thick. It was hands-down the worst decision of the day, maybe my trip, but I was healed by a trip to the soviet bus station bathroom and passed out cold once we got on the bus.

Six hours later we rumbled into Zharkent and were met at the bus station by one of our incredible volunteer hosts. He stuffed us in a cab and drove us to his girlfriend’s house where a feast of more lagman awaited us. The table was spread with cakes, vodka, wine, cookies, cognac, and chocolates, but like I mentioned, the main course was another steaming plate of lagman. I don’t know how my stomach handled it, but I didn’t leave my seat for over three hours. Maybe the vodka settled my roiling gut, I’m not sure, all I know is that it was one of the best nights in Kazakhstan and I woke up the next morning feeling like a champ, ready to give a presentation about developing meaningful relationships with your students.

Happiness is warm bread and fur hoods

Since I got back to site on Monday, the weather’s felt like the dead of a Minnesota winter, and as I walked home today with the cold wind blowing snow this way and that, I marveled at my adaption to Siberia. My fur hood keeps the cold wind off my face, I skate the roads like a babushka, I heat my own pechka, I speak Russian, and so hence therefor and so on and so forth, I am finally, no longer, a complete baby. Last year I was rarely delighted with my life, last year when it snowed in October, I thought “oh shit, here goes four months of hell.” But when I arrived home on Monday afternoon, coming off a week-long trip of crazy down south, my change of attitude shocked me. Little things like seeing people in the street, teaching, and jogging home from boxing with a fresh loaf of bread curled in my arm like a football, that all just seems awesome now.

I’ll write about my odyssey to Almaty in sections, sticking as much to the story as appropriate. So here goes, and I guess it makes senses to start at the beginning, a Saturday night snowstorm. My train ticket was for 11 pm, scheduled to arrive in Almaty on Monday morning. A cold snow storm was ripping through Petropavlovsk, making the old Soviet city harshly beautiful. After getting a questionable haircut from my favorite stylist, I met two friends for the only good dark beer on tap in this entire country. Coming off a pretty severe cold, I let them do most of the talking in our train station bar, and just tried to eat meat chunks and drink beer without coughing or making disgusting noises with my nose. It was pleasant, and I got on the train and passed out.

The next morning I got a better look at my section companions and noticed that it was a Russian father and son, another Russian guy, and a Kazakh babushka. I’m talking ethnicities (whatever that means), they were all citizens of Kazakhstan. The men were unusually civilized and compassionate for men, and we were all treated to a holiday breakfast by the Muslim babushka, it was the first day of Kurban Eid. I’m not really a fan of the moral behind the story of Abraham offering to sacrifice his son, but the holiday itself manifested in a pleasant multi-cultural breakfast, always a treat.

Two unfortunate things followed. First, halfway to Almaty in the former-gulag city of Karaganda, the single Russian man was replaced by a Kazakh man with a penchant for beer and salted fish. He was harmless, but he stank and was irritating. The fish didn’t help. The second unfortunate event was that I had a completely inappropriate thought while standing by the bathroom. I was listening to music and staring out the window when the this thought just popped into my head: “Taylor Swift is the musical voice of our generation.” Don’t know where that came from, but the feeling was uncomfortably sincere. Then I started reading Little Women

Holloween (Spelled as such by me, on the blackboard, every day until Halloween)

Halloween night. I’ve had better, watching my Auntie Jeanie go psycho with her witches brew. I’ve had weirder, watching Catwoman on an overnight at St. Stephens. Either way, I like it better every year; the parties, the costumes, the idea of it, the dirtier and more complex I see the world, the more I want to celebrate it. It’d been snowing for four straight days, so Halloween was feeling more like Christmas, but my counterpart and I planned a party for our 7th and 8th graders, and were both going to dress up for it and bring activities and food. I dressed up as a coal miner, I took some charred wood from the pechka and rubbed it on my face, then I put my headlamp on. My counterpart didn’t dress up.

The kids rocked it though. There were souls, a headless horseman, James Bond, Zorro, and a lot of stylish zombies and witches. Girls all over the world are the same, it’s like they have this little switch in them that goes off at Halloween, even if they’ve never celebrated it before, the switch tells them to use this holiday to make themselves as pretty as possible while still kind of being spooky. Not that it always works, but the effort’s there. Maybe this shouldn’t surprise me, maybe it’s just another example of how "In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panopticon male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgment".

My friend asked me what I thought of that quote the other day, and besides thinking that there was some truth in it, my biggest thought was wondering why the author didn’t just say: “Nowadays most women feel like they’re always being judged by men?” I know that it’s fun to put a little Foucault in your writing, but you end up sounding like such a prick. Shit, me using the word “prick,” must be the panapticonal chauvinist writer residing in my own male consciousness.

We had a costume show and I threw candy at their heads, a mummy wrapping competition, pumpkin carving, bobbing for apples, blindfolded sampling of chocolate, brains, and eyeballs, and a disgusting bobbing of apples/sharing germs. It was amazing. One girl left and said it was the best day of her life, I think she had too much chocolate.

Last Monday I remembered that someone had told me about a basketball game at the sports school on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so I put on my running shoes and jogged over after dusk, a nice twenty-minute jog that wasn’t as fun coming home. I expect everything in this country to be a tweaked version of what I’d normally expect, but basketball was refreshingly normal. At first it was just a bunch of high school kids, but then a bunch of guys my age showed up and we played against a rotating high school squad for over ninety minutes. It was good basketball; the kids were below average individually, but played well as a team offensively and had a vicious zone defense. I was hacked, jumped on and the victim of too many moving screens, but I was in heaven.

It was pitch black at nine when I walked outside the gym to go home. I literally couldn’t see five feet in front of me and stumbled around until I got to a road and followed it home. I felt bad ass until I stepped through a snow-covered puddle, then I felt sorry for myself. Anyways I was frozen by the time I got home, so the first thing I did was bring three armfuls of wood in and heat up our stove until the water boiler was making groaning sounds. Then I kept my eyes open just long enough to fry some eggs, eat them by the pechka and sink into bed.

I could barely stand up the next day. Basketball rocked me.

The last time I wrote, I mentioned running through a part of Sergeevka that I’d never seen before, which is sad because I live in a small town in Siberia. While I was on that run, I came to a road that seemed to connect our town with a tiny neighboring village that I’d also never been to. My reasons for avoiding this village were a little better, because before I saw this road, I’d thought that the only road to Akambarak was a single-laner that runs straight west from a complex of abandoned buildings on the north side of town. I used to live in this area and was repeatedly warned against running this road because of dogs, but had to find it out for myself just to make sure.

As I ran past what looked to be old turkey farms, I heard barking and turned to see four massive dogs running at me from inside the low buildings. I sprinted ten or so yards back down the road to a section of torn up asphalt and started throwing it at the dogs. The worst part was that their human just stood behind them and watched the attempted assault. Anyways, I’ve been avoiding that road and subsequently that village ever since, but when I saw another way to get there, I figured it would be the perfect Saturday run.

I was dressed warm and had all the time in the world to do my run, so I savored running through the new snow, shoes crunching and breathing in the crisp air. The first thing I did was circle the village to an idea of the dimensions, then I switch-backed through the streets. There were “big” houses and tiny houses, but the thing that bound them together was that everything felt old-world. Snow unquestionably added to that sensation, but it was magical to see a guy in a horse-drawn sleigh, or another bringing his cows to the well. Lassy-type, pull your bucket up wells; they were on almost every street, very cool to look at but probably not as cool to use. I tried to find the center of town, and to the best of my knowledge it was a street that connected the cemetery and the school. The cemetery was small and well-kept, and the school was a beautiful three-story building that dwarfed everything else in the village and made me jealous. Our school is not so nice. Running makes me feel epic and melodramatic, so the it seemed very significant that all the town had was a cemetery and school. Life and death, rebirth, that kind of thing.

The snow started to fall as I made my way back to Sergeevka, and by the time I reached the square it was falling fast in thick soft flakes. I stopped and walked through the square because I wanted to savor the moment. Looking at the looming abandoned apartment buildings through the heavy snow made me think about the fact that I live in a three-dimensional world, or that the world is at the very least three-dimensional, but probably has more dimensions than I can comprehend.

Then I started thinking about things like the fact that if I wanted to, I could just run off the road and go touch that tree, and that my body is real mass that takes up real space, and that I can do so many more things than I do, and that I’m not living in a track no matter how tracklike it seems sometimes. I think screens, brains, and laziness all obscure this idea, and I miss out on so much of the reality around me. It’s funny, because I look at our cat, and she doesn’t seem to be fooled by two-dimensional reality the way that I am. She doesn’t give a shit what’s on my computer screen. No matter how trippy it is, she’s way more interested in what’s simple, but real and in front of her, like my slippers or the curtain on my door. Hate when my cat’s right.

Sunshine Before Winter

I wrote this entry over a period of time, so I’ll list it journal style in the way that it was written.

Saturday the 15th of October

It’s Saturday morning. I’m sitting outside in the sun and soaking up all this Indian summer has to give me. After eating plouf (rice and meat soaked in oil) and singing to Disney musicals while making my coffee, I walked outside in my slippers to read in the sun. I drank a whole pot of gas station coffee and since no one is home I stood outside for number one, enjoying the steam that rose off the night-blooming flower patch. My host mother left for a pilgrimage to Turkestan (Kazakhstan’s Mecca), or at least I thought it was an important Islamic city, but I’ve since learned that it’s sought out by all kinds of people to cure their ailments, including my orthodox Christian host mother.

Haven’t figured out religion here or anywhere yet, but from what I can see, it’s a lot like culture, makes people feel special and different from each other, but ultimately results in everybody doing the same thing. Which makes sense then that people only freak out when they corner you and you’re pressured to admit that you haven’t got religion or any other orthodoxy, including atheism, blinded by fear to the openness that your position affords them in communication.

As I notice inconsistencies like this in the people around me, I wonder what inconsistencies they see in me. Health is another obvious one, people always searching for the magic potion, incantation, place, instead of sitting in the sun, eating vegetables, and exercising. But what do I do that doesn’t make sense? Actually, doesn’t make sense might not be the right term, because that implies there’s a “sense”. I’m curious about what do I do that brings me more pain than pleasure, or what I could do that would do the opposite.

Teaching is a mind trip. Every once in a while I like to sit with the students when my counterpart is reprehendalking to them and try to feel their place again. It’s scary how easy this is to feel without even trying, just the physicality of being in one of the chairs facing the chalkboard. I want to start chair circles. Teaching is kind of like growing up again, realizing the humanity of the institution that formed you. The wasted time, the crappy lessons, the flawed people, the imperfect ideology, are all scary when I think about it. But it’s not just the teachers, in fact, I’d say they’re often the ones who fight it the hardest. It’s our society, many societies, that have decided that education is just another thing, a shitty nine to five job for those who fell short of their ambition, instead of seeing it as the infinity complicated and magical thing that it is, the development of our next generation, the strengthening of what we are as a species.

Monday the 17th of October

So the past eight days have been perfect. Nights are cool, mornings are crisp, and the sun warms into the seventies during the day. Even if we don’t have a single other day like that for the rest of the calendar year I will be grateful. Each nice day past the first of October is a gift, because it could easily be total shit and misery. Not that our citizens don’t do their best to fight paradise by burning trash, creating the illusion, or maybe not, that Sergeevka is perpetually on fire. I didn’t feel bad about sneaking an evening cigarette the other day because I figured as long as I’m inhaling smoke, I might as well get narcotics. That’s not fair I guess, to the best of my knowledge we don’t have a waste disposal system here, so you do what you do. No, screw that, it is fair, you live in a town, your kids play in a town, clean that shit up. Anyways on Sunday afternoon, I sat cross legged on a granite cliff, looking at Sergeevka a few kilometers away, just breathing, breathing the fresh air into the bottom of my lungs, drinking it.

I went for a Sunday easy run in the brown steppe and stopped at the rock formation by the river to do yoga on my way home. I was only in my purple short-shorts and I figured that as any day could be my last, in the short-shorts, at least until spring, I’m gonna be naked as much as possible. Balance poses take a whole new kind of focus when falling means fifteen feet to granite.

So the last thing that I’ll say, is that becoming a short-term home owner makes me even more appreciative of the women in this country who do everything. I’m only taking care of myself and the dog, but between cooking, cleaning, working, and heating the house, I realize how precious free time is. It’ll settle down now I’ve bought groceries I know how to cook with, but these women… I’m impressed.

Saturday the 22nd of October

I talked up the weather on Sunday and then on Tuesday it mean-mugged me. The sky was gray, the air was damp, and my clothes weren’t warm enough for the first fifteen minutes of my run. My joints were uncomfortably cold and I wanted to get out and back as quick as possible. To avoid the wind, I ran into the village, crossing the main road to the other side of town. I snaked my way through the dead grass behind our tuberculosis sanatorium, aiming for the low-slung Russian orthodox church that I’d passed once in a taxi on my way our of town. The sanatorium looked simultaneously creepy and welcoming from behind, creepy because it’s surrounded by large trees and empty buildings, welcoming because in contrast to those other buildings, it was lit up inside.

The old church was beautiful; it sat low to the earth, the fat blue onion domes barely rising above the one-story houses surrounding it. Something about the church, the domes, the old-world stonework, the small windows, or maybe it’s angular grounds setup, seemed powerfully different and exotic to me. It made me think of a Jewish more than anything else, strange because it didn’t look like any temple I’ve ever seen, but the impression was still strong.

Running around to the other side of the church, I saw the cemetery stretching back into the brush, through the poplar trees, and finally into the steppe. I’d always been curious about our cemetery and it seemed odd that I’d never come across it, Sergeevka being such a small town, but it was one of those mild curiosities that just kind of simmered in the back of my mind. Each of the graves was lined with a small iron fence, usually painted white, and although the newness of many graves was evidenced by the photo impressions on the tombstones, the cemetery itself was overgrown and abandoned looking.

I kept running through the east side of our town, possessed by a kind of elation, the elation of discovering something new in a place you thought you understood. My head swiveled back and forth as I jogged through the streets, trying to absorb the atmosphere that felt increasingly old and Russian. The Soviet asphalt was mostly still there, the streets were long and clean looking, and the houses were tiny and new to me. I felt high by the time I reached home and opened my gate, completely changed from when I locked it an hour before. Fall might have touched down only to jump right into winter, but I have a good feeling about this year.