PST

We've been so busy lately.  When I first arrived they talked about pre-service training as a kind of boot camp and it really is.  We have class six days a week, a mix between language lessons and administrative sessions.  We spend pretty much every waking minute with either our host families or other volunteers, we eat every meal with them and are always under their watchful eye.  We even have a curfew, although after our long days I wouldn't want to be out past 9 anyway.

Learning Kyrgyz is really a struggle.  It is so unlike any language I've ever studied before.  I commonly find myself listening to something my teacher or host family or the mashrutka driver is saying to me and realize that I haven't understood one word of it.

It's the small successes that keep me going.   Today I stopped by the bazaar to get some cashews and thought I'd try my luck with lentils.  I've been wanting to make daal for a few weeks now but most of the vendors don't sell them, and the market normally closes before I get out of class.  On a whim I asked a guy selling fish because I saw a few bags in the back of his stall and he actually had them so I bought half a kilo.  The more amazing thing is that I was able to do all of this in Kyrgyz!

As a treat since I haven't really taken any good pictures lately, here is a video of me and some of the other volunteers dancing today at Culture Day.  (I'm the one blocking the camera)

Adventures in cooking

Beans and legumes are considered 'poverty food' in many parts of Kyrgyzstan, so although they grow a lot of them, people don't eat them and most are exported to surrounding countries.  This makes it hard to get protein as a vegetarian when the only real protein option is sheep.

A couple weeks ago I decided to make make a meal myself and headed to the bazaar for lentils.  Of course, the word for lentil isn't in our dictionary, and it wouldn't have mattered if it were because the bazaar in Kant is mostly Russian anyway.  Fortunately everything is in large open bags so you can just point at whatever you want to buy.  I saw a large bag of горох at one of the stalls, it looked like lentils to me so I bought a kilo at the bazaar and brought it home.

I was surprised to see how large they got as they cooked! In fact as they cooked they started to look less and less like the lentils I was sure they were.  Finally I called my teacher and discovered that they were actually peas.  Oops!