701

Another entry for the Peace Corps Skippy list: Orcs do not shop at the Ramstor. The Horde does not need peanut butter.

So Apple's visit on Wednesday went well; she showed up on time and saw my better lesson of the two that day, where we jigsawed "A Visit From St. Nicholas" and all the students were 100% on and on top of things and well-behaved. Then we had tea with Natalia Borisovna, who apparently told Apple nothing but good things, when she wasn't advising me to cheat on E. "One boyfriend is a narrow life! You need two, three, four boyfriends!" Apparently the students quite dig me, and not just because I teach them things like "Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts." (Which, you would not think that would be so popular with the third course. But it totally is.)

(And I need to stop trying to type "ctudents." This is not Cyrillic. Or Verdurian.)

After that we checked out the apartment; Apple met the cats, complimented Valya's cooking, and chatted me up about secondary projects. A graduate of the college had actually approached me about some stuff going on at her language center, but since it's privately run and for-profit we decided it would be a little hinky for me to work there. Probably the same problem would arise if I tried anything at the orphanage attached to the Baptist church, though I want to keep a toy drive in mind for next New Year's if I can. Projects in the city also came up, when the weather (and daylight) improves, and a couple days ago I got an email passed along from an animal shelter in Almaty, basically trying to put together a KSPCA. This is not a culture where animal cruelty is an issue, sadly; in fact, particularly with dogs, there's an attitude that the animal is for protection, so keeping it locked up and underfed is okay because that'll make it a better protector. T, my awesome lady in Almaty, said her host family treats her like a lunatic because she plays with their puppies, feeds them, keeps them clean, etc. This group in Almaty is trying to lay the groundwork for building shelters and starting a spay-and-neuter program for strays, which—again, particularly with dogs—is all for the good, in my opinion. I just need to figure out where I could actually start with all this.

Apple also mentioned a little nugget to me—PCKZ likes Site so much that they want to put a Kaz-20 here, if one of the secondary schools can submit a good application. She asked Oleg and I to encourage this. To get a volunteer, schools need to write up a proposal to the Peace Corps, including all kinds of information about where the volunteer will work and with who; they need to get approval of like five layers of local government; and they need to pick a counterpart and find three willing host families. Then they go on a list, and usually there about three times as many sites as there are volunteers by the time assignments are made. But if we tell the school there's a good chance they'll get a volunteer if only they apply…hey, I wouldn't say no to a sitemate. We'll see.

Wednesday afternoon brought more good times, in the form of…packages! I got notices stuck in the door, and so Oleg and I went to pick them up from the post office. I had to sign for them, including my passport number, but in the end I got three—two big ones and a little one from the family. I tried to take the little one, but Oleg stopped me and gave me his portfolio instead. "You will carry my things," he said, "and open all doors."

"I don't think this is going to work," I told him.

He stacked the boxes and picked them up. The small box was bumping against his forehead. "Let's go!"

We only made it half a block before I had to take the little box, but it was a valiant effort. And the boxes contained all kinds of late birthday goodies. My aunt and uncle sent Doritos, a card, and a super cute blouse and sweater set. My parents sent great shoes for when the weather warms up and some blazers, including—check it out!—a brown corduroy one that matches my brown pants! Didn't I write about my corduroy blazer fantasies? They also sent some books and school things, including a twenty-four pack of colored Sharpies and "some pens and paper" from my mom's therapist.

Now, when Mutti wrote me to say she was sending "some pens and paper" courtesy of her therapist, I figured she meant loose leaf and Bics. I did not count on bright yellow note pages and mechanical pens advertising 1-800-WATER DAMAGE.

I certainly did not count on thirty notepads and two sacks of pens.

Guess what every volunteer in the oblast is getting for Christmas?

Update on the internet situation: MA has made two startling announcements in the last few days. The first is that City Mall has free wifi. The second is that the 24-hour Internet café near City Mall will permit us to bring our own laptops in and hook them up for about the same rate as using their own computers. This puts me in a conundrum, since on one hand I don't know where to get a wireless card for Fortitudium except Amazon (and would I be right in thinking that shipping from Amazon.de will be cheaper than .com or .co.uk?) but on the other, in the long run investing in the wireless card will be less expensive than 220 tenge an hour to use the café. And also City Mall is closer to the bus stop than the café is. Actually, I'm not sure I can even afford to buy a wireless card, unless (in a circle of life sort of way) it allows me to access my US bank account online; then I can use my credit card and pay the balance on it electronically. It's the conundrum of low income that saving up for a wireless card is impractical because that's the same money I'd need to spend to use the café. So my internet options are:

-Low-cost dial up that I can't actually get to work, and I don't know why,
-free Megaline from the college that occasionally shuts itself off and is slow as dirt and super glitchy, on the days when I can catch Zhana Nikolaevna in order to use it;
-free Wifi at City Mall that I don't have the hardware to access
-internet café for 220/hour

Hm.

Also—and here we begin the Actual Content!™ portion of our program—there was a fascinating article in the international edition of Newsweek from last week that got me thinking. It's about the growth in for-profit international development firms, the ones that are to Blackwater what the Peace Corps is to the Marine Corps. Partly it's a form of knee-jerk conservativism, of course; if liberals think the solution to every problem is government, conservatives think the solution to every government problem is privatizations. But the article also quotes officials as saying that private firms are preferable to NGOs or charities because they "get the job done" without any kind of potentially messy ideological issues. You want to build 400 schools in the African nation of your choice? Parachute in a private firm and you'll get them, no questions asked.

Now, this was interesting to me because that attitude towards international development is the absolute antithesis of the Peace Corps. It's the attitude we actively campaign again, in fact. The basis of all Peace Corps programs is sustainable capacity-building, meaning 1) projects should be able to continue after a volunteer leaves and 2) we're here to help the host country do for themselves, not to do for them. Half my students, for instance, are going to go on to be teachers themselves, so the more I can give them now about the English language and Anglophone culture, the more each of their students will benefit. PCVs live long-term in the community and form last relationships with host country nationals, and that's how we get stuff done—not parachuting in to toss out resources like Oprah's favorite things. "And you get a hospital! And you get a hospital! Computers for everyone!"

I mean, don't get me wrong, computers are great. But there's a difference between handing out hardware on a grant and staying around to make sure everything is set up and the locals are trained to use the technology constructively. Insert your own fishing aphorism here.

(I got a copy of the Peace Corps Times along with this Newsweek, and that paper had an article about the Hearth Positive Deviance Model, which PCVs in Africa have been using in nutritional education. Basically, you find someone in the community who's already doing the right sort of things—the mom with the healthiest kids, maybe—and get her to lead classes for everyone else, to demonstrate ways in which they can already solve their own problems themselves with the resources available. After two weeks, children in the Hearth nutrition programs were already showing catch-up growth and weight gain, and it's a system that costs next to nothing to set up—provided you've got someone in the community who knows the local language and can facilitate. Try parachuting someone in for that.)

Of course, there's things that private firms are good at which the Peace Corps approach just won't work with. I can't repair the schools here at Site or at The Village. I can't do anything about the undrinkable tap water. I can't build a hospital. Infrastructure and large-scale development are the kinds of things that need lots of people and money, so why not contract it out to professionals? (Assuming they're not going to leech off two-thirds of your grant through their subcontracting practices, that is.) The Newsweek article pointed out that private contractors were great at building roads in Afghanistan*, and okay at building schools and clinics—when they could get community support for those projects. The community support angle is the difference between the Peace Corps or an NGO like CARE and a parachute contractor, and it's why, to my mind, the two approaches would work best hand in hand. If Congress wants to give me a couple million dollars and a professional construction firm, I will gladly round up support for new schools and clinics at Site.

Unfortunately, that's not how it's actually working out. Instead, the Peace Corps' budget has been stagnant for years while for-profit developers have quadrupled their revenues, and we're under more and more pressure to quantify our results. How many people have we taught or trained? How much money did we bring in? How many lives have we saved? Issue being, you can't quantify community development Peace Corps style the way you can quantify roads and construction. The success of the Peace Corps is in a million anecdotes about one-on-one relationships, or how one community was transformed years down the line because what one volunteer did. It's not quantifiable, but it's valuable, a different kind of value than you get from parachuting in contractors. We're in danger of getting bean-counted to death because we deal in things that you can't put into a spread sheet.

*There's also the issue of safety here. Peace Corps only goes where we're invited, and only when the government can guarantee volunteer safety. That's why there's no post in Afghanistan or Iraq. Hell, there's no post in Indonesia, and they've wanted one for years; the posts in Jordan and the Philippines are always on the verge of shutdown because of war and murder, respectively. But safety concerns are different for private companies, who can offer heavy compensation to employees volunteering to work near the line of fire—or just hire mercenaries like Blackwater to watch their backs. Politics, too, plays a part, because the current administration is increasingly using development aid as political leverage, and the countries they want to hit with that lever the most aren't ones the Peace Corps can safely send volunteers to. There's actually an African Development Corps in the works that was described in another Newsweek as "Peace Corps with guns," because the US wants to spread pro-American good cheer in East Africa while hunting for terrorists. No Peace Corps post in Sudan, either.

One bit of good news, though, from the PC Times: there are more active PCVs around the world now than ever before. We topped the 8,000 mark in 139 countries. Yay to that!