I wake up at 7 a.m. to the noise of buses and marshrutka taxi vans honking and backfiring on the street below, but also to something different: a lone bird singing. After an unusually cold, snowy winter, it's a warm sound. It's Nauriz, the Kazakh name for March and a boisterous springtime festival will take place on the 22nd, when the days and nights are equal in length. I'm looking forward to seeing my first game of kokpar, a Central Asian version of polo played with a headless goat's carcass instead of a ball.

I eat my breakfast of blini smyodom ee smetanoi—thin Russian pancakes with honey and sour cream—and a couple of cups of Nescafé. Afterwards, I hop into the piyatyoka (No. 5 marshrutka) for the 10-minute ride to the academy where I teach English.

My 9 a.m. conversation class goes well. Tomorrow is International Women's Day, a holiday for giving chocolates and flowers, but nobody in class knows it was actually first "celebrated" in America 95 years ago by suffragettes demanding equal rights. Eighty percent of my students are female, and I enjoy giving them the real lowdown. We spend the rest of the class discussing idiomatic American jokes about men. Question: What do you call an intelligent man in America? Answer: A tourist. Naturally, 80 percent of my students love this. I consider it my Women's Day gift to them.

Normally on Fridays I stay after this first "pair" (university classes here are taught in segments of two academic hours) to do lesson planning, eat lunch at our canteen, and teach American literature. In all I teach four subjects (written English and critical thinking are the other two) to 10 different groups a week, a demanding schedule that tests my creative abilities daily.

But today is different. Today I will help judge the Miss Academy pageant. As a liberated American, I'm uncomfortable with what to me is an outdated and arbitrary way to define female beauty, especially one requiring contestants to display their womanly talents by cooking blini. But here being asked to judge is an honor, so I agreed, and despite my reservations, the pageant goes well.

Now I usually would leave to meet my Russian tutor for an hour of grammatical torture, but she's also busy with Women's Day festivities, and I have one more to attend as well: a post-pageant tea. Tea is not only the national drink of Kazakhstan—narrowly beating out vodka—it's a way of life. And it's never served without food, lots of food. Today we feast on plov (an Uzbek rice-and-meat dish), paklava (a dried fruit-filled pastry), black currant cake, and pots of strong black tea. I make what to me is a full-blown speech in Russian—four complete sentences, including a Women's Day joke. Shto Bok skazal posli tavo kak sozdal Adama? "Ya magoo sdilat loochshe." (What did God say after creating Adam? "I can do better.") Few of my colleagues get it. It was my intonation, they explain.

The party is still in full swing when I excuse myself to leave for one of my two English clubs. I co-lead this particular one, which packs in 20 to 40 people a week. I tell my joke in Russian again, and everyone laughs. "Your Russian is getting better," one regular says. Perhaps it improved on the ride over.

The club is only supposed to run from 5:00 to 6:30 p.m., but the conversations are so lively, we rarely leave until the building closes at seven. Tonight we depart 10 minutes "early" because a small group of fellow Volunteers has arrived for a visit. Though this is the one night a week when I relax with my friends, I'm already thinking ahead to my work for the weekend: choosing stories for the university newspaper I advise, meeting with a student to help edit a scholarship application, beginning the critical thinking workshop I'll be presenting in two weeks, finishing lesson plans for next week.

When the Peace Corps promised that Volunteering would be a 24-hour-a-day job, I initially thought that phrase was metaphorical. Now I know it's literal. But despite the occasional frustrations—anything you can do in America takes at least three times as long to do here—I simply can't imagine being anywhere else.