Ahh...winter is OVER!!!

Well, I had my first Valentine’s Day in Kyrgyzstan and it turned out to be the first holiday that I’ve celebrated exactly like I would have back home! My site-mate, Patrick, and I met at our local café where we ate cheap food and drank cheaper beer while watching terrible Russian music videos play for about 4 ½ hours. Okay, so I probably wouldn’t have been watching Russian music videos back home, but the cheap food and beer has been pretty much the Valentine’s Day norm for me throughout the past couple years so for the first time in a long while I felt right at home! I stumbled home drunk (again, pretty much the norm for a successful Valentine’s Day…at least according to my past) and ate some Kyrgyz food while answering questions from my family regarding this wonderful holiday. “So James, you don’t have a girlfriend? Why not?” Or, “So, when will you get married?” Or my personal favorite: “twenty-five is very old to not be married, you should have at least a few children by now…otherwise it’s considered quite ooyat (see previous blog post for ‘ooyat’ explanation).” I know, I know (my usual response to this line of questioning) when I get back to America I will marry a nice girl and settle down (this is usually spoken through stifling laughter) then I’ll have lots of children to work on my farm (again, stifling laughter). This seems to placate their concerns for my family-man-future enough to continue eating and ignore the giant “single” elephant in the room long enough to finish their meal and call it a night. What a Valentine’s Day indeed!
On a different note, my Winter Camp has been going great! I had some excellent people come from the local health center to give a two hour long presentation on HIV/AIDS and discuss safe-sex in a culturally appropriate manner the first day, then the second day my other site-mate Liz gave an excellent presentation on reproduction. All in all the first two presentations were stellar, and considering how bad they “could” have been (considering how extremely sensitive these two subjects are in Kyrgyz culture) I feel that the first two days kicked the camp off nicely! Wednesday, my buddy Cameron gave a great presentation on nutrition. I specifically asked him to do this because being exposed to the Kyrgyz diet over a prolonged period of time has given me plenty to be concerned about and I think that he got his points across nicely…again, while not completely dissing on Beshbarmark (see previous blog post for explanation) which I never could have done! Thursday all of the volunteers that I’ve invited to my camp gave some excellent information on drug and alcohol abuse through presentations and skits and Friday I gave out certificates to everybody then organized a rousing game of Dodge Ball! I purchased the balls with my camp money as an “extracurricular activity” expense and gave a brief overview before letting the kids at it. Even though I had the translators there to help me the kids played like they’d been doing it for years. It must be something instinctual in all of us that says throwing things at other people is not only really funny but also a lot of fun! Anyway, I got some great feedback from the other volunteers that helped me, the translators I organized, my counterpart, the school director and all of the kids involved (55 in total!)…all in all, it was a huge success!!
Other than that these two brief snippets there’s not really much more to report on my end. This winter has been extremely relaxing, if not quiescently irresponsible, and I finally go back to class on March 2nd…which is one week before I got to Bishkek again for PDM (Project Design Management conference) for another week. I just can’t seem to escape the big city, which all things considered isn’t really that much to complain about at all!