- I really like Al Jazeera's People and Power series. I just found this report on Crimean Tatar housing and land issues in Crimea. It is worth a watch if you're interested, and comes in two parts.
- When I first met my Russian teacher, she was rather upset about my project. She told me she didn't want to talk about politics and that my project was political. I told her I wasn't focusing on land rights or housing, but about language education and schools. "It doesn't matter," she said. "It is all related, and it is all political."
I now strangely agree, and regret trying to convince her otherwise. On my first visit to a Crimean Tatar school yesterday, I took a marshrutka into one of the areas settled in the last 20 years by Crimean Tatar families. The area was filled with houses at various stages of completion, many most likely built by the families themselves, with the porous, orange-ish stone extracted from quarries in Crimea. The school itself is large and beautiful, but its surroundings of recently built houses on the outskirts of Simferopol make it impossible to visit without thinking about housing, land, and resettlement.
- For the past two weeks I've been helping out at a local organization working on housing issues for Crimean Tatar families. Barbara, a Peace Corps volunteer working in Simferopol, introduced me to the organization and asked me to help out. A Swiss architect is in town as a volunteer for a few weeks helping to plan a housing project for a few different settlements throughout Crimea. I've been stopping by from time to time and trying my best to help out as a translator, and it has been an amazing opportunity. Last week we travelled to a few villages and settlements. The whole experience has given me much to think about. I'm also a bit disappointed the volunteer is leaving this weekend, because it means an end to the daily routine of stopping by and spending a few hours with everyone working on the project.
2 comments:
It's very cool to hear that Peace Corp individuals are still out there in places of need. It seems that if there are "We Need You, join the Marines" advertisements there ought to be something about the Peace Corp.
"....extracted from the quarries" is a nice way of saying, "putting in long, difficult hours lifting, carrying, pounding, mixing some sort of compound to make the bricks stay together), and I would bet they don't own the nice work gloves needed to keep your hands from being destroyed after a few days of this work.
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