Brief synopsis

I think what will be best is to just start from today, and play catch-up later. Otherwise I'll never get anything done. A brief synopsis of January - March:

After an OK Christmas, we had a school New Year's party at the Pyramid in Astana. It was quite a big event, pretty much a combination of Halloween, Christmas, and New Year's, with the children dressing up in different costumes (mostly the girls were dressed rather fancy, the boys were animals and soldiers).

Sophia & I flew to Germany for our winter break, where we visited my younger brother who attends university near Bremen, in northern Germany. I marveled at how COLD I felt. The weather was only slightly below freezing, but it was so wet, my toes felt cold for the first time in months.

Sophia loved Germany and seeing her uncle, of course, and we flew back to weather colder than -20 Celsius. January and February in Astana were, of course, extremely cold. It reached -40 more than once. School was only canceled once due to this. Apparently the parents complained when that happened, so it didn't happen again!

Our driver quit on one of those extremely cold mornings, which ended up being a sort of turning point for me, in how I feel about the cold. I took an extra half hour getting Sophia dressed, and when we got outside, she said, "It's not cold!" Well, I figured, if I can bundle her up so that she doesn't feel cold at -38, then I've done something right. We can handle this winter.

Of course, bundling up to that extreme isn't fun, and my fingers pretty quickly get so frozen that they feel as if they're burning, so we were very happy when March came along and the weather started to get warmer. By warm, I mean 0 to -10 Celsius. In this weather you don't need to have your gloves on before you leave the house; you don't need your thick Siberian-style hat; you don't even need long underwear. You can enjoy the snow.

Because Valerie, the other American, had quit, I now had an extra class to teach--5 hours a week of math to Valerie's former class. I also created more worksheets and tests for my grade 5 math class, and I started teaching phonics & reading to my 1st grade class, which requires a lot of work since we don't have phonics or reading books. I also spent January job-hunting. So January, February, and March were extremely busy.

I met a Kazakh woman at church who has a daughter Sophia's age, and we started hanging out in mid-January. We've gone ice skating and we now have a regular date for Saturday nights to go dancing at the Radisson hotel (where the Winter Charity Bazaar had been). A middle-aged French man teaches some basic ballroom dance steps to a large group of mostly beginners. We don't learn too much, due to the crowd, but we do learn some, and it's free, and it's fun. And our daughters have fun too.

When I was offered this job last summer, I asked one of my brothers if he would like to come stay with me in Astana, and he said, "Sure." The letter-of-invitation process took forever, and he finally arrived towards the end of February. It's been nice to have someone else around to help with the groceries and with Sophia, and he's been dragged dancing every Saturday, too.

Valerie's replacement finally arrived last week, from the Philippines. The Philippines summer vacation just started (guess it's not really a "summer" vacation), so she didn't have to leave a job in order to take this one, which is nice. She's never taught below 4th grade, and she's never taught math or science, and she's used to teaching well-behaved children who already know English, and now she's teaching 1st grade, English, math, and science to children who know very little English. Needless to say, it's a challenge!

Our spring break has just started--the weather is warmer, the snow is beautiful.... (Although, it's already started melting and that is not beautiful!) 2 1/2 months to go!