written May 25, 2009
I officially planned, organized, hosted and completed my first solo secondary project here in Peace Corps Kazakhstan. I organized a Global and Cultural Awareness Week here in Merke for the students of my school, with the help of my counterpart Symbat. We invited 7 of my PCV friends to help with the execution of everything and I am happy to report that it all went off without a hitch! It really energized me as a volunteer - showing me what exactly we are capable of doing for the communities here in Kazakhstan and how much our students and teachers enjoy participating in our events.
The general overview for the week was that each PCV chose a country or region of focus and prepared a 15-20 minute presentation (all in English) to present in small groups, to over 50 eighth through tenth graders at my school. In addition, each volunteer was assigned a core group of 7-8 students to work with daily on an end of the week school-wide presentation associated with their country (things like skits, songs, dances, etc.). Between the eight of us, we focused on 7 cultures - Panama, Colombia, Southern USA, Asia (Korea), India, Africa (Ghana), and Ireland. Each core group came up with a slogan for their group, including "East or West, Asia is the Best!", "U-S-A, All The Way!". and "Crazy Colombia" and these slogans were chanted during our daily olympic events.
We had organized games from other countries (and some that are just plain fun - i.e. capture the flag) and had the countries compete against each other for the last hour of every day. Surprisingly, Africa was not even remotely a contender, the USA didn't walk about with any gold medals, and India was actually hanging tough for a considerable amount of time (despite their "Mathletes" reputation), and most shocking of all, the winner of the 2009 Merke Olympic Games was Ireland of all places - unintentionally breaking cultural stereotypes left and right.
In addition to a highly successful week of cultural education and fun, we had the added bonus of having most of our afternoons off to simply hang around the farm with some of our closest friends here in Kazakhstan. The eight of us ate some of the best food I've had here in Kazakhstan that week. We had our resident 5-star chef, Andy Park, in attendance (PCV in Zhalagash) who was highly responsible for the outstanding cuisine during the week. And Sagar had brought with him a duffel bag full of Indian food ingredients and made us one of the most outstanding home cooked Indian meals I've ever had - and that's taking into account the fact that everything was so delicious spicy people were sweating buckets at the dinner table and I actually had to make myself go outside and throw up because my body was experiencing flavor overload. (Try living on boiled meat and potatoes for nine months and then sitting down to Indian food - ahh!)
And considering that the Cinco de Mayo fell in the middle of the week, we took the opportunity to put together a full Mexican feast that evening. Cheese enchiladas, tacos, beans, mexican rice and tequila. Other meals included spaghetti and meatballs, pizza, Mexican leftovers, among others.
So, all in all, I re-energized myself as a volunteer and as an American during my friends' extended stay here in Merke. We even managed to make it up to the mountains twice! (More on that later...)
No comments:
Post a Comment