FAQs

22:30 9 December 2008

In response to some of my posts I have been asked a few questions (usually from my Mom) that I think that might be of interest if answered publicly. So here they go:

How does my money work?

As a volunteer, I theoretically work without pay. Essentially, I am given a stipend each month that should cover my living, eating, transportation, and entertainment expenses. The sum amount I receive each month is slightly over 7,000 Som (about $175 USD). Each Peace Corps volunteer has a similar amount (city volunteers get slightly more) and lives entirely off it each month. We all negotiate our rent with our host-families or landlords- in my case I pay 2,500 Som a month for my room and to share our food arrangement, what they buy I can use and what I buy they can use. Each month, on top of what I give my host family, I spend about 1,000-1,500 Som/month buying food, usually to cook either with friends (it is a prime pastime here) or interesting dishes for my host family. Beyond that, I use about 500 Som a month for transportation, 1,000 Som for various entertainment avenues- going out to lunch at a café or grabbing a beer when I am in the city. That leaves me with about 1,500 Som/month for incidental expenses like cell phone units, any purchases I have to make, and usually a little left over that I save up for the rare instances when I go to Bishkek (probably about 4 times a year)- life in Bishkek is very expensive and I can easily go through half a month’s pay there in two days without even doing anything terribly exorbitant. Needless to say, I get a fairly small amount of money each month, but it is pretty close or higher than what the people I am around get monthly, and amounts to about less than $6.00 USD a day. It’s sufficient, but for a pretty basic, or some would say authentic, life.

Where does my water come from?

Living near Bishkek in my training host family spoiled me with an outdoor faucet within the compound. Here at site the water situation is much more precarious. During the summer months a large irrigation canal runs to the fields with snowmelt from the mountains, this is next to our house and is a short trip to fill up buckets to bring back into the house. However, as I was shocked to find out one day, our river disappeared (it didn’t occur to me that the source was shut-offable and I was truly surprised as I came to the bank and starred at a dry river bed. Following this shut-off, we had to cart water from a public klinka, a permanently running outdoor water faucet fed by underground pipes, that was located way down our street over 100 m. That was the worst our water has been, they are currently working on restoring our water system, and they fixed a klinka closer to our house (the picture I posted a few weeks ago of the pools of ice around the faucet) and are alleging that we may be getting water in our house soon. I am somewhat skeptical of the latter ever coming true, the public works people came over a month ago and the progress has been extremely slow, but if it does every come to fruition it will indeed be amazing.

Why did I want to do Peace Corps?

This is a question that I have been asked numerous times from various people and the truth is not very clear. Perhaps my parents know better, but I know that it has been something I wanted to do for a very long time, at the very latest since early high school, and that it stems from a dual desire to serve my country and help people. Coming from a strong tradition of military service from both sides of my family, I think service to my country was instilled in me as a virtue from an early age. However, while at sometimes I flirted with the notion of joining the Navy like my parents did, I definitely think I would make a much worse sailor than I do a volunteer. Also, for those who doubt the real benefit to the United States from my service here, I have to state, with no detriment at all to the members of our armed services, that getting to know people that might otherwise have extremely negative attitudes towards the US and helping them form an image of what America beyond what they watch on Russian MTV might make America more secure in the long run. Beyond the sense of duty to my country, my desire to serve stems from an at least semi-legitimate desire to help institute changes that can better the lives of others. If you ask me in person, I may recount having first heard about the Peace Corps when reading about JFK and being inspired, but that story is at best an exaggeration and at worst a figment of my imagination that I have invented to fill a whole in my explanation. The baseline is that I wanted to work in development, I wanted to work abroad and live like the people I lived with, and I wanted to serve my country- the natural satisfier of all those goals was Peace Corps.

If any of you have questions that you would like to see answered in a public forum, please feel free to email me or post them as a comment here. I'll do my best to answer them within a month or so.