Atyrau Journal - Atyrau State University

FLOOD UPDATE: High water but no flood yet! Picture below.

Rhonda has been volunteering on Thursday afternoons with the students at Atyrau State University which is about ten minutes from our house. She designs lesson plans that will help future English teachers and translators practice and improve their skills. Her lessons have included punctuation in writing. For example, the sentence, "I hope that you will enjoy my blog" would be punctuated in Kazakh, "I hope that, you will enjoy my blog." It's been fun to see the similarities and differences between the two languages - and it helps the students learn better. Lessons also included: identifying prepositional phrases, parallelism, as well as synonyms and antonyms. There have been conversations based on US citizenship questions, and one thing that they knew was that Americans celebrate the 4th of July; however, most of the students did not know it was because the American colonies had gained their independence  from Great Britain. Of course, "Would You Rather" has been a fun way to end the last few minutes of class. Rhonda was surprised that most of the Kazakh students would rather meet Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, current President of Kazakhstan, than the current president of Russia. (Google it, if you aren't familiar! Haha!) When she asked them about meeting their president, they spoke with so much respect for him - they view him as a good, kind person who is very smart, being fluent in several languages. After a few lessons together, Rhonda was grateful that they felt comfortable asking her to design lessons that would help them communicate at places such as grocery stores and banks to which she happily complied. This led to a great discussion comparing and contrasting US and Kazakhstan everyday life, with the students doing most of the talking - success!

Rhonda's friend Jexsi from Venezuela is on the far left. She is also an expat and sometimes co-teaches.

In this picture, Jexsi is right in the middle in a gray sweater. Another expat friend, Lisa from Wales, is third from the right. Rhonda is third from the left.