more dirty animals

I went running in my hiking boots yesterday after classes (5:30pm). Sometimes, I had to walk or I would fall in the mud, and no one would ever find me again. They'd make up ghost stories about me.

But the dirty animal I refer to is a horse, the dirtiest horse I've ever seen. I didn't know what it was at first, because I saw it from behind, and it doesn't really have a mane or tail; it has burrs. The long hair is so full of burrs you can't see hair, and the rest of the horse is covered in mud, with burrs stuck on the mud. But there were also several deep scars on its body, and I could see its ribs. It was not happy to be a filthy horse. I wanted to give it a hug, kind of.

ducks

To get to school, I turn left after the green gate, right at the sewer, and walk past the alley where the babushkas just loaded the hay two-stories high. The alley is full of goats and cows at night, and now the street is strewn with hay, which helps with traction. I turn left again as the street dead-ends into the public bathhouse, and right onto the sidewalk. Right now, the sidewalk really serves as a bridge, since it's the only thing in that triangle-shaped field that is above water right now. There are filthy ducks who live in the house on the corner. Yesterday, I slowed down to watch them walk out onto the ice. Their duck feet either would keep plunging through the thin ice, or make the ice creak as they slipped around. But soon, the ducks had cracked through the ice and the puddles were puddles again, with squares of ice floating around on top. The ducks began to do that crazy thing with their beaks in the water. The ducks'beaks are always clean. Their eyes sparkle. They are happy to be filthy ducks.

winter kitchen

We have no central heat (in KZ, the gas is turned on on October 15, technically, but most places take a few days after that, even if it’s snowing). Instead, in the winter kitchen, there’s something that looks like a whitewashed stove. Dilda Apai, my host mother, usually starts a fire underneath it at about 6pm, and it burns out at about 9pm. There’s a little trap door, where she feeds wood and garbage, and on top four burner-type things. On the burners are various tea kettles, buckets, and other containers in all shapes and sizes, all filled with water. This is how we get hot water. If you lift the burner lid, there are high orange flames. The enclosed fire gives off smoke that goes into a tube that first goes through the wall into the living room. The tube snakes around the house then doubles back on itself like a giant paperclip. The fold is in my room, so I get the heat last. But that’s okay; we just wear lots of sweaters until about 8pm, then we go to bed at 11, when it's cooling down again.

I did laundry last night, and it was quite a production because of limited facilities. The kettles and buckets sitting on the fireplace are all filled with water every night, and used for various purposes in conjunction with some plastic basins. On Sunday nights, the girls wash their hair. Shataghoul and Dimira both have waist-length hair, and they wash it in a single bucket as one washes laundry. They dip it in a few times, rub in some Head and Shoulders (shampoo of choice in KZ) and, bending over forward, knead their hair in the water. They do this a few times, then get their scalps. Then, they twist their hair mostly dry like a towel. This is roughly the way I do laundry. It doesn’t get very clean. We volunteers were joking that pioneers in America had better equipment than we do, since they had rivers and washboards. In this house, there is a sink with cold running water, so I’m finally able to rinse my clothes adequately, but it’s so hard do get something clean in a bucket that’s seen two week’s worth of underwear, tights, socks, and other mud-caked items. Instead of a washbord, you just rub your clothes against each other to get stains out. Not extremely effective. Usually, the first few seconds in the sink, brown water comes from each item. Although it would be easier to just put them outside, since it rains every day, rain-rinsed clothes smell funny.

Podstyopnaya

I now live in a large village that’s across the river from Oral. Now, I’m in Asia. It’s different from either of the other villages where I lived, but it also has many cows and more employed women than employed men. But the cows here don’t clog all the empty space in the village in the evenings, as they did in Budarina. It’s hardly even noticeable when they come home. And the unemployment and the location make Podstyopnaya less safe and therefore less friendly than the other two places I’ve lived. The streets here are much narrower than in Budarina, and there are clearly marked yards. There is a sewer system here (Budarina and Sovet didn’t have any such thing), and they even steam in the mornings, just like Chicago sewers. The mud is amazing. It would take Herman Melville to fully expound on the mudiness of West Kazakhstan Oblast, but suffice it to say that everything is slippery, and it’s best to watch other people walk around first so that you can tell where it’s ankle-deep, and where you’ll go fully under.

My house is part of a duplex. Our window-frames are Kelly green, and our neighbors’ are the usual bright blue. We share music, unintentionally, and I always jump when a guest knocks on their door.

The houses here are small, and nothing in the whole country is designed with heat or cold efficiency in mind. The ceilings are high, the central rooms are the kitchen and the hallway, which are often too warm, while the living room and two bedrooms are cold. Also, the windows leak. In the monsoons of autumn (yes, we're a bit north for monsoons, but it really is incredible) water leaks through the cracks in the walls and around the windows. So that my room smells of mildew.

Yards here, both front and back, are simply gardens. Right now, they are furrows of sopping mud with a few ruined vegetables scattered around. When I arrived, at the beginning of October, there were flowers everywhere. I think the flower to vegetable ratio is about 2 to 3. It will probably be quite pretty in spring (May, I’ve heard). So each house is a long, narrow property with a garden and a garbage heap in the front yard, a house in the middle, and the garden, outhouse, laundry, and stables/sheds in back. There is a house, however, with a gazebo made out of recycled goods, like Coke bottles. I’d really like to know the story for that one.

My house is on a street that dead-ends near the road to the airport, and on the other side is overcome with mud (shin-deep) and opens onto a field. Apparently the field is not used for grazing. On its far side, young couples are building new houses. There are wooden frames, and then they seem to have stuccoed/manured the walls. I don’t see any that are still working on the roof, so I’ll have to find out how they do that later. They begin with two rooms: a kitchen and a bed/living/TV room. There is an entrance that is sheltered on three sides. This is where you leave your shoes when you come in.

barbecue

This is an oldie, from the first week of October, when I was still in Budarina

It’s been hard to sleep for various reasons. It’s hard to live here knowing that I’m leaving in 4 days. I feel like I’m tricking them. I don’t feel at all bad about leavign my counterpart, who’s a sneaky person. My host father’s extended family had a cookout for me at their ranch a few miles away. It was so much fun. We had excellent excellent shashlik and there was good cheese and chocolates, and just as our hands were turning blue, tea. They were incredibly friendly to me and tried to speak in Kazakh although most of them speak in Russian all the time, since their mother was Russian. I only know a very little Russian. I hope to begin tutoring very soon. But the cookout was one of those times in fall when everything is perfect – a little chilly, a little dampish, yellow trees. We drove very fast over empty fields on the way back because the sun was setting. Telman, next to me, had an open bag of raw meat. I was hoping it wouldn’t jump on me on a bump, since my hands were not available – cars here are always overfull – and because I didn’t think anyone else would be sufficiently worried about raw meat on me. I had a terrible vision of some of it slipping down my turtleneck collar and resting there on my shoulder, marinating with me for twenty minutes.

There was a huge basin with the rib cage and innards of a sheep in the kitchen when I came back. Telman had slaughtered it – his first. I’m to the point that it doesn’t even turn my stomach. There are dead animals everywhere here; it’s just part of life. There are bones in the streets and skeletons in all stages of decay left out in the fields. I know now that there are parts of a sheep that are worse than the liver, but I will never like liver anyway. I don’t understand why of the entire sheep that’s all we’ve eaten for a couple days. Blagh. Soon, in November, I think, they will slaughter the horses.

long time

I just got off the train about an hour and a half ago, not too much the worse for a long trip - about 30 hours. The way to Kuzlorda was mostly dark, since we had two nights on that trip. But the way back, I got to see the desert with the camel herds. The land is so flat that it looked like it was spinning as the train passed, the closer ground and camels moving left, while some distant low hills moved right. There were camels everywhere, sometimes in clumps walking easily away from the tracks, sometimes standing apart from each other. White camels, black camels, camel camels. There would be low grass, then pure sand, then sand with dune grasses, then sand again. I only saw a little water, and I saw several lakebeds white with salt - or something. It was pretty cool. Then I started getting a bit carsick, so I slept. I had a top bunk in a cabin with three other women and a kid. It's a bit odd to lock the door against the strangers outside the room when we're all strangers in the room, too. But they were all quite nice.

I'm going to go. I've got severe blog backup, but I hope to post some going backwards in time next time I have internet. I hope you're all doing well.