Winter is a State of Mind and Quality of the Air

Monday, April 20 2009
Aktobe

The repeated attempts to relive winter are very tiring.  We have a term for the “second coming of Winter” – that roughly 10 days at the beginning of April where the weather pretends its main goal is to pretend it’s purgatory; snow, cold winds, and chilly rain – beskunak.  The term is in reference to a story of teenagers who went to celebrate in the steppe under clear skies, then the weather turned and they froze to death.  Beskunak is supposed to be a once-a-year occurrence.  One that just ended allowing us to play frisbee and American football in beautiful Spring skies yesterday.  I dismissed the rumors of returning snow.  Then, today the weather seems to have re-charted its course.  The snow has disappeared, the wind has arisen, and I hear more rumors of snow again, which are easy to believe now that dark clouds have engulfed the sky.

Life has been busier than the changes of weather.  For most of the past few months I have been traveling.  I was in Almaty for two weeks, holding a seminar on Volunteer Organization Development for organizations from across Kazakhstan and then I spent a week in India on vacation.  Back in Aktobe, we’re beginning construction on the wheelchair factory as soon as the weather settles down and Volunteer Club is continuously attracting more interest and volunteers; two of my coworkers will be spending about 10 days in America through a U.S. State Department program, “Open World”, for disability activists, frisbee and American football Sundays has begun, and English Club and Movie Club are fun, with both old participants and new students attending.

Winters provide a great deal of thinking time, especially when winter is in the middle of April.  It feels very strange that in November my service in Kazakhstan is finished.  There’s a great deal of more time before then and a lot to do, outside of specifically preparing for the next Peace Corps Volunteer who will work at my site – but it’s already easy to feel the pull to finish.  I’m not ready to leave, however.  I’m really enjoying my work and as the weather eventually chooses to transition into a sustained warmth, more opportunities will come together.  People emerge from the walls as the sun breaks through the clouds.

The day after I returned from India, we had a Seder for the first night of Passover.  Like last year, Ya’akov hosted the event.  This year, however, there were around 19 attendees, over double from last year.  We also had a new leader for the Seder, an Israeli man who is in Aktobe on business.  The group at the Seder was all male and mainly middle aged (40s-50s), with around six older men, and a few of us in our 20s.  The Seder started off very formal, but when we got to the Passover story, it quickly switched into interesting discussions.  We ended around 12:30 AM – an outstanding Seder.

For pictures, see http://picasaweb.google.com/pteicher/.