July Harvest and other stuff

First of all... we have puppies! Rex had 5 adorable little ones. One will live with our family and one will live next to our compound house, the rest are going to friends and family. Awesome right? We're taking the adorable runt.

So anyway, its the end of July and all of a sudden it feels like time is flying. We have been doing a lot of work on our little house trying to get it ready for the fall. I think it is going to be a wonderful place to live and a good mixture of family life and privacy. We've also begun to start canning for the winter. So far we have 10 two liter jars of Kampot (fruit juice made by combining whole fresh fruit, sugar, and boiling water), 2 jars of apricot jam, and 2 jars of cherry jam. We picked all the apricots, rasberries, black currents, and cherries involved from our garden (like buckets upon buckets of fruit). It was absolutely amazing. Next we will start making winter salads, apple sauce, and various tomato things. I think we will have a good 70 two liters of food by the time September is over. This is uber important because vegetables and fruit are nearly impossible to find in the winter, which starts in October and ends in early March. Pretty nuts.

In addition to our household adventures, I finished the Tech Age Girls Conference in Bishkek where I taught 33 really wonderful girls how to use various computer programs, practiced English with them, helped prepare for their closing ceremony, and taught a seminar on gender equality. It was a really near program designed to teach the girls computer skills as will as setting them up with a short internship in Biskek. It was fun, but tiring (I am not nearly as energetic as 15 year old girls). Last week some of our friends came to visit from Issy-kul, Naryn, and Chui which was pretty cool. We visited the river and had some American type times, namely cheesy macaroni and cheese and a whole evening of speaking in English. We also went on an excursion with the town's library staff to a tiny village about 2 hours away. We all piled into the back of a truck bed (like 25 people) with a lot of bread, vodka, and fruit and headed toward the mountains. We turned off the main road and basically went straight for a while. After a beautiful and quite uncomfortable 2 hours the “road” ended in front of a house, our final destination. This particular house is owned by the old director of the library. Once a year the current staff brings here some books and exchange them for the old, in this way she runs a little library is the town. Evidently the exchange is a huge deal as about 50 people came to the party (a lot for such an out of the way place) and two sheep were slaughtered for the party. We spent some time hanging out by a stream, eating a lot of delicious food, listening to some great accordian music, and dancing to music played out of the back of someones van. It was a really good time.

That pretty much brings us to now. We will be spending the rest of the month hanging out and canning in our village. In the beginning of August Alex and I are helping with a democracy camp in Talas and then are attending a conference on health education in Bishkek. After that, we got a few weeks before school starts. I am absolutely astounded that the summer is almost over!

Until next time,

Athena