Friday, July 13, 2012

Summertime, and the livin' easy

So it's mid-July and Alex's parents are going to be here in just two days! How exciting. We are planning to visit Issyk-kul lake and take them to our village. Should be a great time.

Alex and I have had a great summer so far. In late June we had a week long English day camp in our village which was great. We taught classroom vocab and some basic English and ended the camp with a pizza party. I taught a few lessons on Indian culture for some local friends' camps. They were sort of silly, people were very disappointed I couldn't sing or dance songs from Bollywood movies and surprised I'm illiterate in Tamil. Ooops! We recently visited Naryn City for a  second time to do some work and spend some time with our friends Keely and Tyler. We have a great 4th of July. We also stopped in Kochkor which is a cute town with a surprising amount of Swiss tourists. On the way back we tried to go all the way from Naryn to Talas (3 mountain passes, 10-12 hours) but got stuck in the Otmok pass for 4 hours! I found out I am a lot more patient of a person than when I left. Now, I'm in Bishkek awaiting Alex's parents and doing a bunch of grant research.

Things in Kyrgyzstan are going well. The new group of volunteers have arrived (and are almost done with training) and are WONDERFUL. I just finished a health curriculum booklet for my rayon and will be printing it and sending it to 22 schools so that students can learn about diseases that are prevalent in the area. Our 'Tolerance and other Cultures' camp is coming up in August and promises to be a fun and interesting experience for the volunteers and the students. Alex and I have begun to print textbooks for the three schools in our village which should make next year's classes better. Generally, I am feeling really good about my service right now. All of a sudden the 10 months we have left feels like nothing! Every week a new project pops into my head and I am beginning to have to admit I won't have time for all of them. 

Like last summer, the fruit trees are central to my existence. Cherries are ready and apricots will be soon. Horray! Alex and I, as I'm sure you all have guessed, have epic canning plans. This year Alex is going to make the perfect pickle and pickled tomato. Yum. I'm hoping to make more exciting new fruit chutneys.

Well, that's all for now. I'll put a bunch of pictures on Facebook by the end of the month. Everyone state-side, stay cool!

Athena

3 comments:

  1. I saw your IM this morning. You can bet that at your "Welcome back state-side" celebration at our house there will be some home made mint ice cream! Our apple trees have tiny little apples. The deer keep noshing on our plants, but soon they'll get their come-up-ins as my father-in-law gave me a solar powered electric fence! Can't wait to see you guys again!

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  2. Greetings Alex and Athena. Eric mentioned you now have a donkey, which is great news, although I hear it is a bit undersized at the moment. The only thing Eric did not know was the name of the donkey, which I am eagerly waiting to find out.

    Best of luck.

    Steve Ewing

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  3. Good morning how are you?

    My name is Emilio, I am a Spanish boy and I live in a town near to Madrid. I am a very interested person in knowing things so different as the culture, the way of life of the inhabitants of our planet, the fauna, the flora, and the landscapes of all the countries of the world etc. in summary, I am a person that enjoys traveling, learning and respecting people's diversity from all over the world.

    I would love to travel and meet in person all the aspects above mentioned, but unfortunately as this is very expensive and my purchasing power is quite small, so I devised a way to travel with the imagination in every corner of our planet. A few years ago I started a collection of used stamps because trough them, you can see pictures about fauna, flora, monuments, landscapes etc. from all the countries. As every day is more and more difficult to get stamps, some years ago I started a new collection in order to get traditional letters addressed to me in which my goal was to get at least 1 letter from each country in the world. This modest goal is feasible to reach in the most part of countries, but unfortunately it’s impossible to achieve in other various territories for several reasons, either because they are countries at war, either because they are countries with extreme poverty or because for whatever reason the postal system is not functioning properly.

    For all this I would ask you one small favor:
    Would you be so kind as to send me a letter by traditional mail from Kyrgyzstan? I understand perfectly that you think that your blog is not the appropriate place to ask this, and even, is very probably that you ignore my letter, but I would call your attention to the difficulty involved in getting a letter from that country, and also I don’t know anyone neither where to write in Kyrgyzstan in order to increase my collection. a letter for me is like a little souvenir, like if I have had visited that territory with my imagination and at same time, the arrival of the letters from a country is a sign of peace and normality and an original way to promote a country in the world. My postal address is the following one:

    Emilio Fernandez Esteban
    Avenida Juan de la Cierva, 44
    28902 Getafe (Madrid)
    Spain

    If you wish, you can visit my blog www.cartasenmibuzon.blogspot.com where you can see the pictures of all the letters that I have received from whole World.

    Finally I would like to thank the attention given to this letter, and whether you can help me or not, I send my best wishes for peace, health and happiness for you, your family and all your dear beings.

    Yours Sincerely

    Emilio Fernandez

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