 Okay, um, thank you very much and and my talk is I do not speak your language But I do speak in Proven. It's about my experience when I was a Fulbright or at In Kazakhstan and a small university there back in February March just recently here But before I really get to talk a little bit about that the the picture that you see up there is Something I took a few years ago when I was on safari in Kenya and I watched the young jackal the young vulture They were looking at each other under the parents eyes But their parents never interfered with the two to come together And it was totally non-verbal obviously because they don't speak the same language and I do not speak Russian and I do not speak Kazakh I do speak a little French which actually came in handy for me when I went there So this is sort of what I felt is kind of epitomizes applied improv And This is just my troop for the first two classes. I took I began taking classes in 2017 Six of us are still involved in improv within the Cincinnati area through improv Cincinnati In case you don't know where Kazakhstan is it's South of Russia It's west of China It sits where a lot of the other stands sit and it has one small little C area there called the Caspian C Now as a Fulbright specialist a little bit different than a Fulbright scholar Fulbright scholars actually write proposals for a University where they'll go for a semester or two a Fulbright specialist you can fill out anytime during the year and You will get if you're lucky a three-year appointment to sit on the bench It doesn't mean you get the play then you bid on Proposals and I bid on one proposal before and was turned down and this one came up and said well I'll probably get turned down again, but it was an interesting proposal. So multi-lingual education. Well, okay I'm not really particularly versed in that but University Cincinnati does have many languages spoken there via interactive and cognitive teaching I'm an IT guy. We are not the most interactive people in this world You just have to understand that but it was accepted and I did not expect that I had to go tell my department head that hey, they want me to come in October. He said no, no, no, no Can't do it right now. You have to wait till the winner will they wait till the winner and then they did they said Yeah, come out and February it'd be great because our New Year's is done when New Year's should be done It's down to the vernal equinox when spring begins. I said you'll get you'll have a lot of fun during that time period And that's right when you I'd be leaving anyway, so We're down to shim kent, which is southern part of Kazakhstan whether similar to what I would say Cincinnati gets It does get cold, but it's not real real bad And it's certainly not as cold going further up north or over at all muddy to the eastern side of things This is the university. This is one of their five campuses right in here. It's Maras University They're small private University about 5,000 students five campuses Fairly small. They have a small it program there and that's what I was there to help them with their technical Component now when they teach and this is part of Kazakhstan in general K all the way up through college Your classes are taught in English, Kazakh and Russian My main contact there. She grew up in during the old Soviet time period. She spoke Russian. No, Kazakh She went to an English school and and that's how she was able to kind of help me with things The other guy my main technical component guy there He knew all the mechanics of English, but really couldn't speak it. I mean one-on-one he could speak with me And we also found it had Google translates great It's never perfect, but it is great It still does help and so we use that to communicate back and forth, but they would have a PowerPoint slide with three languages and There would be some teachers who spoke Kazakh in English some of them spoke Kazakh and Russian some that God knows what they spoke But they would have to read the slide This is what this is really is happening here And so you had to do that and it's like how do they do that? It's crazy So I did have some of those cultural challenges and it's a really rich culture Goes way back when excellent horsemen that originally the horsemen. This is where they learn to ride horses. I did learn Some kind of an interesting thing if you come to tea if my wife I'd invite you to tea that means tea cookies and some chocolates If you go to tea and cosmic that means you get whoops You get a meal That looks like this And if you don't eat they're gonna ask what's wrong with you That was really difficult for me because I just got done eating lunch And then I buy it for tea to go to one of professors house and why aren't you eating? You're insulting us and I can't your stomach needs to grow. I like my stomach the way it is. Thank you So there's a lot of cultural things I did run into I was kind of humorous when you go into the labs This is a computer lab and they still would put on Jackets the lab jackets. So it's kind of humorous to see this in a computer lab Why are they putting a jacket on a computer lab? But anyway, it was fun And I actually went to a French class down below in the middle there that I very first class The business was actually a French class and I got to speak French with them And they got to speak French with me and we knew our French wasn't that great. So it was kind of fun I didn't have to worry about getting the pronunciations correct But the big thing was I was interested to do they have an improv scene Well, guess what they have an improv scene in Kazakhstan and it is very very old It is older than rap is in this country. It's called the a tish This was like whoa It took me a while to find more about it But finally I found a book from on Google books, but it was from somebody from Indiana University Wrote about it and it's like oh, this is so cool reading about this stuff what they do so it is it's a musical improv played with instruments and Originally back in the days before you had cell phones and everything else to take your distraction away These things that go for hours until somebody would surrender, but basically it's competition It doesn't have to be and they have six forms of this. I got gosh six forms of this thing This is really neat. We do some of this stuff short exchanges back and forth. I'll give you a riddle You give me the answer type of thing There's the insult we have done insults and some of my improv classes for just insult each other Just go through an insult as best you can So that was really fantastic when I saw this and they have a short and long form So it's there. It's just not there in the form that we know it as but they actually have it there So it was finally like this is fabulous But I also I was asked about all the holidays in the United States and I went through all holidays and I knew all holidays and Like they didn't have st. Patrick's Day So I had to give him st. Patrick's information and one of the things I did was I taught about limericks and it was great Nancy yesterday did the limericks and and I was like well, I got two and I found limericks work really really well So it was kind of neat Finally, I did teach them improv games the one I had the most fun with was throwing a knife Flowing a lion and throwing my granddaughter baby Hazel And they were really gentle with Hazel and I don't think they ever lost Hazel But I know the knife and the lion got dropped on the ground a few times So it was kind of interesting the other thing I found I had to avoid too much English Even when I would speak slowly and special English I was better off to demonstrate things or I used some cards and things along those lines like Storymatic cards or Rory story cubes, which I really like because they're just pictures and images and they have Dr Who as well so I just like was really great And I gave some classes to the English teachers and English students to the point where they've asked me to come back to teach The English students, which is not at all my forte. So we'll see where my adventure goes. Thank you