People told me when I came here that you’ll feel like nothing is happening, then at about 6 months, you’ll hit a massive wave of work and you’ll also get kind of depressed at the same time. It’s called the six-month-slump, and it’s kind of like the collegiate sophomore slump. You’ve been here long enough to miss some things about home, like friends and food, and suddenly you’ve got work. Luckily for me, I’ve got a lot of really exciting work to look forward to, and was kept on my feet by a series of literal disasters in the past few weeks.

First, since I piqued your interest, let’s talk about the disasters! There was a 5.9 earthquake here in Osh that I wrote about, which has been followed up by a week of large-ish aftershocks. Some things fell down on my shelves, but I’ve emerged otherwise unscathed from the shaking. We’ve done quite a bit of earthquake preparedness work, so if there is another one, I’ll be able to temper my panic slightly.

Then, there was a plane crash in Osh about 12 hours after I landed there on Friday. An Avia Traffic (parent company of TezJet) 737 was coming to Osh from Krasnoyarsk, and it ran off the runway when it landed here. The weather in Osh at the time was extremely smoggy, with visibility definitely below minimums, so the plane diverted to Bishkek, then “landed” in Osh on the second attempt. Most reports are saying the pilot landed so hard that all three wheels collapsed, causing the crash, while others are saying the running off the runway caused the landing gear to collapse. In any case, there are a lot of contributing factors, and I’ll let the investigators make the final conclusions. All I know is that I’m glad I was on the Avia Traffic flight into Osh the night BEFORE, when it was still clear, and that the other volunteers were on the next Avia Traffic flight into Osh AFTERWARDS.  I really need to consider switching to Pegasus…

Now, onto work. I haven’t talked a lot about work because, for the most part, there hasn’t been a ton. A great piece of advice for volunteers was to not worry about doing work for the first few months that you are at site; use that time to get to know people and your colleagues and soon a ton of projects and ideas will fall into your lap. I went from having very little at the beginning of October to having my time booked up solid two months in advance by the end of the month, with very little effort on my part.

Some of my stuff? I got an English talking club going at a local library. That expanded to several one-off talks about topics including World Pneumonia Day and a talk about Alaska Native art from my hometown in Alaska. I started a professional development training series at my NGO, which involves trainings based on what specific staff have asked for help improving. I’ve been helping proctor the tests that admit students to the FLEX (Future Leaders EXchange) Program for high school students to study in the US. And I’ve been laying the groundwork for a long-term project to revise the health program curriculum for the 59 schools in Osh City.

One of the work highlights was getting to lead a session at Jashtar Camp.  I was invited to give a session on goal setting to what ended up being a standing-room-only classroom of 70 Kyrgyz youth!  I’ve given this kind of a session before, so I was very comfortable with the material, and I talked with them for an hour about how to set goals using the SMART system.  They appeared to go through the stages of shock as white American me blabbed for an hour in Kyrgyz.  First, disbelief, then confusion, and so on.  At one point, a girl attempted to answer a question in Russian (which I still don’t understand fully).  I responded, “I’m very sorry, but I don’t understand Russian,” and was met with a standing ovation from the students.

At Jashtar Camp, I also had the exciting chance to meet Roza Otunbaeva, who was president of Kyrgyzstan from 2010-2011.  Her list of accolades is pretty crazy: she was Central Asia’s first female president, Central Asia’s first president to step down voluntarily, and the only ex-President of a Central Asian republic who is not in exile.  During the 2010 revolution, she ran around admonishing revolutionaries for looting and destruction of property, urging them to behave civilly and peacefully.  She’s widely respected here (although, as in any democracy, some people don’t agree with her politics).  Anyway, she gave a really great talk about the importance of education and youth, and after the talk, I got to meet her.  She told me that my Kyrgyz was excellent, and we talked a little about my background.  It turns out that she has actually been to Juneau, Alaska, very near where I grew up!  It was really special and it was probably one of the best compliments I could have received from anyone in Kyrgyzstan.

And there’s even more work coming in the pipeline! By the end of December I’ll have run my first major training with grant money, and I’ve also got a big vacation to spend Christmas with my parents to look forward to. Keep following along! I promise I’ll get the blog interesting again soon!