TAMAK!!

Alright, so it has been pointed out to me that I really need ‘ta get my stuff together and update you all on what the heck I’ve been doing over here the last couple weeks.  But since there has been SO much that I could potentially tell ya about, I am going to just break it down and tell about one of my food experiences.  I will try to post again in the next few days.  Life has just been a bit crazy busy for me lately...

A staple to any culture is food, yes?  Kyrgyz is no different.  Eating and drinking together is a huge part of how they bond here.  My host mom wakes up every morning to make me breakfast and then has dinner ready for me every night when I come home.  The funniest thing is how every day we trade off whose house we go to for lunch (between the 5 others in our language group it is set up so each host mom cooks for us once a week) and when I get home after ‘school’ one of the first questions my HM (host mom) asks is where we ate and what they made.  It is an unofficial competition between the moms to see who can feed us the best meal.  No complaints from us though, because the food is AWESOME!  

Story time: Earlier this month, Aidi (my little host sister) showed me that they bought a sheep and it was out in the barn.  My first thought was, oh no!  That is going to be dinner in a few days, eek!  Well, I got home from school a couple days later and we were outback planting some vegetables when I noticed that the sheep was gone.  I was like hm, yeap, they must have slaughtered it today.  And then Aigul (my host mom) and I went into the kitchen house and it smelled ‘interesting’.  As many of my food stories begin, it starts with walking into the kitchen house and noticing something smells a little… off.  Like something is being cooked up that maaaaaaay not fit into my regular dietary regime.  Thankfully there wasn’t just a giant sheep carcass laying there or anything, BUT she was boiling the intestines…  I was DREADING dinner time.  I couldn’t have been more relieved when like 20 minutes later I sat down to dinner and saw that she had potatoes on plates.  Whew! Crisis averted!!  Or not… I looked over and saw that she had used the intestine water to boil them AND she was putting the noodles into the same water.  Yeah, dinner that night was just potatoes and noodles boiled in sheep intestine water.  I got through most of the potatoes and almost threw up when I choked down three bites of the noodles.  There were bits of intestine in there and it tasted like animal product.  Aigul is a pretty perceptive lady and was asking me if I was ok.  I was like yeah, I am fine!  I kept eating until I honestly thought I was going to vomit when I saw a chunk in my noodles.  I then told her I was “toydum” (full) from an ice-cream cone I bought earlier at the bazaar.  That seemed to make sense to her and she was OK with me not finishing.  (Come to find out a week or so later, eating icecream before dinner is not that uncommon here, so perhaps that is why this worked out to my benefit)  I was proud of myself for getting that far into the meal.  I kept my composure a lot better than I would have guessed.  I think she only noticed, because normally I gobble down whatever she makes.  It is always SOOO good!  Possibly one of the highlights of this happening was when I was sitting at the table looking at my HM in the kitchen and I asked “where did the sheep go?” and her response was to laugh REALLY hard and say “Megan, it is off guesting at a friend’s…” She is a great lady with an awesome sense of humor.

And honestly, that was my first time NOT being able to eat whatever I have been served.  Overall the food has been AMAZING.  And with the language barrier that I am working with I normally have ZERO idea what type of meat or other product I am consuming, so I just go with the flow.  In Krygyz they call all meat, MEAT.  They don’t differentiate which type of meat it is, they have one word for meat and that is what they call everything.  So, if I don’t ask more about it, they don’t say.  It works out great for me so I don’t have to think about what I am ingesting.  I can down anything if it is shelled in a delicious homemade noodle.  Well, as long as it wasn’t boiled in intestine water.  :)

I am alive!!

Alright, so where to begin?  I left Alaska the night of the 23^rd and what an emotional rollercoaster that was.  Saying “see ya later” to everyone was just as hard as I imagined plus some.   Thankfully I was able to see most everyone (there were a few I missed and I am super sorry that the timeline didn’t work out for that) and we even had a taco night at my parent’s house for the final round of goodbye’s.  After the tears were shed and I was on my way to the airport things started to sink in the wow, I was really getting ready to leave Alaska…  That is when the freak out of packing began.  Thank heavens for Timothy’s patience as I sat on his living room floor and flung things out of my bag and packed and re-packed things into different ways.   But everything worked out and I made it to the airport with plenty of time to spare. 

Next came the 10 hours of flying to get to staging in Philadelphia.  There was another PC Trainee who was on my Phoenix to Philly flight and that was a blessing.  Since neither of us knew what exactly we should do with our 2+ years of baggage and a hotel that was 20 minutes away.  Our minds combined got us there and so began the staging portion of my PC adventure.  After we checked in Matt (from Flagstaff, Arizona) and I went to dinner and did some last minute shopping before passing out for the night.  I woke up in the morning to my roommate showing up from Montana.  Kimi is awesome and I totally lucked out having her as my roomie for the next week. 

That afternoon was the staging event.  I won’t bore with details of how that was.  It was a lot of “this is your future” and “you need to know this information before we let you leave America on our dime” sort of stuff. 

And I am just going to jump forward since I am running low on time.  Kyrgyzstan is amazingly beautiful and I am having a great time here.  The other trainee’s are awesome.  My language group (ie the people I spend a majority of everyday with) are bomb.  Couldn’t ask for a better group.  I have a great teacher too, so the language is coming along.  Sometimes it is still frustrating, but we keep reminding each other that we have only been in the country for a week and half.  It is HARD, but it is starting to make more sense to me.  Thank goodness, because living in a house with my host family not being able to speak more than like 5 words was getting old.  Language lessons have been intense, but VERY helpful.  We go to school full days 5 days a week and half day on Saturday.  8:30 – 5pm.  But we have 2 tea breaks for 30 minutes each and also an hour long lunch.  Food and drink are SUPER important here.  No wonder they tell us we will gain weight.  It is delicious and they force it on you.  Fresh made non (bread) every two days at my house.  YUM! 

Thankfully, I am starting to be able to form sentences though.  And while I still depend on hand gestures and my English-Kyrgyz dictionary A LOT it is getting better and easier to communicate at my home-stay.  Speaking of which: My family is awesome.  Men Ata (my dad), Ruslan, is an upper something or other in the militsia (their police) and men Apa (my mom), Aigul, stays at home to care for the 6 month old baby, Daniel.  There is also 15 year old boy, Asamat and a 12 year old girl, Aidi.  Both are super cool kids and they help me with Kyrgyz and I help them with English.  Great teaching relationships.  They treat me so well.  It is pretty nice.  I get along with them well.  Thank heavens. 

I don’t know much more about my job yet.  We won’t know where we are going until May 4^th.  At that point I can give you more info on how the next two years will be for me.  We will just have to wait and see.  We have interviews in the next week or two about where we would like to be placed.  I am pretty open to all the different options.  More on that later when things start to get figured out. 

I am going to get going now since I am writing this at night and I am uber tired.  They told us to expect to sleep between 10 and 12 hours a night during the first few months, but I didn’t believe them.  Holy hells were they telling the truth.  Learning a new language and being constantly on mental awareness trying to figure out what is going on really takes it out of ya. 

I will update more later.  It looks like I will only have internet access every few days.  It may only be once a week.  So if you are sending me emails, I am not ignoring you.  I promise.