.let me bring you love from the fields

Written October 7, 2008

Coffee is a precious, precious commodity here.

Tea, of course, is ubiquitous. I can barely walk three feet in this country without getting what me and some other volunteers have dubbed “chaied.” “Chai,” is, of course, the Russian and the Kyrgyz word for “tea.” In my training village, whenever we went over to each other’s houses, it always ended up with a lengthy chai-ing, or if we really had to get somewhere by a certain time, we would sneak into the compound and tap on windows, hoping not to alert the host mother on premises. There is no such thing as “eat and run” here. If you get roped into getting chaied, you’ll be there for about an hour, at least.

Not that I am really complaining, I guess. Sometimes it bothers me in a distant way, because, you know, I was raised with the maxim “time is money,” and it’s kind of difficult to slow down. Even when I have nothing in the world that I have to be doing, I always feel that I should be doing something with myself. Damn Protestant work ethic. But, on the other hand, it’s kind of nice/amusing to be in a place where drinking tea is a perfectly acceptable excuse for being late.

But anyway, it’s chai for breakfast, chai for lunch, chai for dinner, and chai for chai chisov, or “tea time.” It’s a good thing that I like tea. I probably drink, on average, at least twenty cups a day. When I lived with my Turkish host family, it was black tea with an inordinate amount of sugar (I’m still mildly surprised that my internal organs didn’t become candied), and with my Kyrgyz family it’s green tea with honey. Most of the time I forgo the honey in my tea, because I spent too much time in Japan and it always hurts me a little when people try to sweeten green tea. But, sometimes I partake in the abomination because the honey here is like God.

But coffee is still my hot drink of choice. Color me American. During PST, when the host family provided all three of my meals I mentioned to them that I liked coffee in the morning, and they promptly went out and bought me some instant. Now, all things considered, I loathe instant, but they were kind enough to go out and get it for me, so I drank it. Another perk is that it was essentially a couple scoops of fake coffee with a load of sugar and fresh milk, so it was actually pretty damn good. Not what I would consider real coffee, but good.

Since I cook my own breakfast and lunch now, I’ve broken out the supplies I brought with me from America. Two pounds of dark coffee, that have be laying in wait for me like the promised land ever since I got off the plane. Obviously, they’re not quite as fresh as I would like, considering that I had to have them ground before I left the States because grinders here cost like, a billion som, which is more som than I’ve got. But they’re real coffee beans, and every morning I get a fresh-brewed pot complements of my French press.

I like cream with my coffee, and I loved having fresh milk in the morning, but it’s just too much trouble to finagle it myself. You see, I’m actually very lucky in that I figured out that my host mother works at the bazaar, and sells dairy products. This means I can buy milk and other sundry dairy things direct from her, and I have full confidence that they won’t kill me. So, I have an endless supply of milk products, which, for a milkfat maven like myself, is heaven.

However, because they’re not pasteurized, that means I have to boil the milk before I can use it in anything, and most mornings I can’t be arsed to boil milk for my coffee when it’s six in the morning and there’s no electricity and it’s freezing and I just want my damn hot beverage.

So, I have joined the cult of Frima. Frima is a brand of non-dairy creamer, and for some reason, it has a cult following among quite a few Volunteers. I have no idea why, even though I’m a part of this cult, and that’s how good it is. It’s just in such a cheery red and white package, and it’s so damn useful. I use it in my coffee, when I need to thicken soups or porridge, and it’s cheap, too.

I also like to have after-dinner coffee. For a couple of days I would use fresh coffee grounds for my second cup, and while this was fabulous, it was quickly depleting my supply. Ground coffee is pretty rare about these parts, and unless I wanted to resort to instant again, I had to stop. Now, I make fresh coffee in the morning, and then just keep the grounds for reuse again at night. The second brewing is considerably weaker, but I’ve found that if I mix it with a copious amount of condensed milk, it makes a decent beverage. Again, not quite the same as real coffee, but it’s not as though I’ve made a point at turning my nose up at sweetened Starbucks concoctions; this is essentially the poor man’s version of that. Or, rather, the "Peace Corps Volunteer" version, which means the VERY poor man's version.

Condensed milk is one of those things that I never really considered until I got here. Of course, I knew it existed and I’d used it a couple of times while baking, but I never ate it on its own or used it for a sweetener. They do it all the time here – at my first host family, I got served bread with a bowl of condensed milk for breakfast on numerous occasions. They also dip cookies in it, and use it to sweeten tea. It’s relatively cheap, about a dollar a can, and pretty good.

Of course, they don’t have a can opener here, so I open it the old-fashioned way: stabbing it with a knife. This always makes life a little more exciting. Will I get to enjoy tasty condensed milk, or will I have to go to the hospital to get my finger sewn back on? Who knows? Stay tuned!

I also love the cream here. Called smetana, it’s totally different than cream in the states, in that it’s spreadable rather than pourable. I smear it all over my bread and am a happy, happy expat. It’s kind of like cream cheese, with the exception that I don’t like cream cheese and I really like smetana. (Beta Stores does carry Philadelphia Cream Cheese, at about fifteen dollars a tub. Makes me happy that I don’t like the stuff; at least it’s not tempting.) Another thing that I love here is the cottage cheese. I’ve never been a huge fan of cottage cheese in the States, but here it’s absolutely divine. It’s a lot drier than the stuff in America, to the point of being crumbly. The Kyrgyz either eat it with bread or just from a spoon, but I like to mix it with cinnamon and sugar.

Cinnamon is, weirdly, kind of a foreign thing here, though they sell it at the bazaar. It’s cheap, too. The way they sell spices at the bazaar is out of large bags; you pick what you want and they dole it out in shot glass-sized measuring cups. I got two shot glasses of ground cinnamon for twenty som, or about sixty cents. However, my host family had no idea what it was, even when I told them the Russian name for it. I was like, who the hell buys the cinnamon? Maybe the Russians like it.

Anyway, in my last post, I got a couple of questions about how I deal with living in a more conservative country than America. It’s a good question.

The thing to remember is that most countries in the world are more conservative than America. Might be kind of hard to believe if you watch Fox News, but whatever the politics may be, Americans, in general, are pretty live and let live in personal matters, aside from a snide comment here and there. Now, obviously I wouldn’t tell Matthew Shepard that, and that’s not to say that bigotry and other dumb things and people don’t exist in spades at home. But, generally speaking, you can do what you want.

Kyrgyzstan is more socially conservative than America. But the ways in which it’s conservative don’t really affect me all that much in my everyday life. Now, another factor to keep in mind is that I live right outside of Bishkek, which is the biggest and most Westernized city the country can offer. There are certain strips in Bishkek where I walk down it and see bars and hair salons movie theaters and 24-hour grocery stores and think that, wow, this could be any city in America. …then oftentimes I turn the corner and there’s a herd of cows grazing in the median or a gigantic statue of Lenin and I’m instantly disabused of the notion, but the point is made. Most of the people my age dress the way that fashionable teenagers would dress in America.

The southern part of the country is Uzbek-dominated, and, as a whole, the Uzbeks take their Islam a little more to the letter than the Kyrgyz do, so it’s far more conservative. Headscarfs, long sleeves in the middle of a sweltering summer, and head-to-toe coverings are far more common in the south. In the north, a lot of the older women wear the hijab, but most of the younger women forgo it, particularly in the city. And most of the women who do bother with headcoverings only wrap their hair up; they don’t seem to mind about exposing their necks.

For me, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised that the way that I normally dress coincides quite well with Kyrgyz expectations of “appropriate” dress. The one major thing that I had to give up was wearing spaghetti-strap style tank tops with no bra, but I generally only did that around the house/dorm in America anyway, so it wasn’t a total loss. I should probably say, though, that I’ve never made any attempt to dress fashionably, by any standards. I actually have a maxim that I follow when I pick out clothes.

I’ll pick up an article, and then ask myself, “Would a ninja wear this?”

Ninjas, as a rule, do not wear anything sparkly, ruffly, skimpy, or restrictive. Ninjas eschew high heels. They like clothing that’s soft, comfortable, and allows for movement in all directions. They are very fond of hippie skirts and jeans. (The school where I studied ninjitsu was obviously a little unorthodox.)

Aside from me being weird in the head, I’ve never had any aspirations to be “pretty,” in the strict sense. If people are going to remember/like/be attracted to me, it’s going to be for something other than the cut of a skirt. Basically, this means that I wear nothing but jeans and t-shirts, and when I dress up it’s in plain t-shirts and black slacks. If I liked low cut tops and high-cut skirts, I might have more problems.

The other day, a friend of mine from PST came up to the city for some reason or another, and we met for drinks. As we were walking back to Peace Corps HQ, she was talking about the village she lives in, and how she missed being able to dress up and wear cute shoes, because they’re not appropriate where she lives and they’d get ruined by the dirt streets anyway. Then she looked at me, in Carhartt’s and a plain heather-gray shirt with sneakers, and exclaimed, “And you’re so close to all these things, and you couldn’t care less!”

Which isn’t entirely true. I’m extremely happy to be so close to the city, but I don’t feel the need to wear three-inch spikes on my shoes to showcase my pleasure. Different strokes, I guess.

But, the point is, nothing in my wardrobe is really offensive to the Kyrgyz. I get complimented on how “appropriate” it is all the time, actually. Remember that old yellow skirt that I wore basically like a second skin? They love it here. I walk around the house in it, and everybody gives me thumbs up and “good job”s.

As for conservative attitudes, especially towards women… well, this both works in my favor and against it. When I asked to cook my own meals it wasn’t considered unusual in the slightest, and if I need to do anything that has to do with housework, it isn’t questioned. As I mentioned earlier, if I wash some dishes it puts them on the moon.

It can be somewhat annoying, though, to be constantly barraged with “are you married?” and looks of wonder and awe when I answer in the negative. I’ve mostly made my peace with it, though – I’ve equated it with the Western “What’s your job?” If I didn’t have a job at 23, that would be weird and I’d probably get some looks. My Russian when I’m talking about why I’m not married is flawless, because I’ve had to give the explanation so many times.

But, the same thing here applies as when I lived in Japan: I have an automatic get-out-of-cultural-expectations-free card. Nobody here actually expects me to be a Kyrgyz woman, and I’m fortunate for that much understanding. It always amuses me when people list off men who would be over the moon to marry an American, since I’m pretty sure that most of them would be exceedingly unhappy with me as a wife. I can’t do most of the things that are expected from wives here nearly as well as Kyrgyz women can, and I really have no inclination to try.

But they mostly leave me to my own devices. I told my family that I used to drink beer with dinner all the time, and my younger sister said that it was shameful, but I just shrugged and said “America is different.”

And, well, it is.

Written October 8, 2008

Fire is such a finicky, difficult, rudimentary, and absolutely necessary thing.

I was in pretty dire need of doing some laundry. (I am actually considering renaming this blog “The Laundry Chronicles,” because it seems to be all I ever write about.) I was sitting around wondering when I was going to do it, and then realized that, actually, I was going to have to start the process entirely on my own. Now, I’ve been actually doing my own laundry since the start of this whole business, but I’ve never had to heat my own water. I had always timed it to be directly after meals when I lived with my PST host family, or when the rest of the family was doing laundry, and thus there was always hot water around.

My new host family does not have a petchka, or a wood/cowpat burning stove. Or rather, I suppose they do, but it’s in the guesthouse and never used. For normal cooking, they use a gas oven, and I have since become a master of being able to light it with matches. I’ve only burned myself a few dozen times, and no clothes have been casualties of the experience, which I consider to be a small miracle. But, as with the last family, it’s far too pricey to heat the amount of water needed for laundry on the gas stove. When it gets to be laundry day, they use a smaller contraption that actually is supposed to be used as a grill, though I think they use it for heating water for laundry more often. It’s shaped like a C, and is about three feet in diameter. There’s a slotted grill top that’s next to it, but it also happens to be able to hold a big kazan or giant cooking pot. They fill the pot with water, light the fire underneath, and eventually, you get some heated water.

Among the many things that I’ve managed to pass through life without knowing is how to light a fire. The closest thing I’ve ever come to it is a charcoal grill, but that only requires soaking the charcoal in flammable liquid, throwing in a match, and praying to God that you don’t light the electrical wires strung above the town on fire. Here, of course, it’s different, namely in that there’s not as many electrical wires to worry about.

In addition, there’s no charcoal and no lighter fluid. I spent about twenty minutes wandering about the property, collecting various items that looked flammable and appeared to be trash. I ended up with a small pile of cardboard egg cartons, some sticks, flattened cardboard boxes, and an old straw broom. I arranged the broom and the sticks in a neat pyramid, on top of some shredded egg cartons and trash.

Dad, if you’re reading this, I blame you for my compulsion to make geometric shapes before I burn things. He always piled the charcoal into a pyramid before he lit it, and for the longest time, I thought that it was an absolutely necessary part of lighting a grill. Logically, I have been disabused of the notion, but for some reason, I still do it. Long live the burning pyramid.

Anyway, I was squatting in front of the contraption, trying to figure out what to do next. I lit a couple of matches and tried to get the egg cartons to light, but the matches weren’t hot enough. After a few tries and a couple minutes of puzzling, I heard a throat clear softly behind me.

It was my host aunt (at least, I think she is… I can’t keep track of the people who rotate in and out of this house), and she had a familiar look in her eyes. After one year of life in Japan, and a few months here, I was well acquainted with the look.

She had the look of You’re Doing It Wrong, and she carried a ball of wadded-up newspaper in her hand. If nothing else, I have become both very good at Doing It Wrong, and very good at gracefully accepting it. I shuffled out of the way while she took my place, shoved the wadded newspaper into my pyramid, and lit it on fire.

It was enough to catch the egg cartons, and everything lit instantly. She smiled thinly at me and walked off, another person amazed at the things that I don’t know how to do.

Being here is a very different kind of Doing It Wrong than in Japan. In Japan, there are etiquette rules for damn near everything, and I could barely go a day without putting my foot in it somehow. Here, the looks have more to do with my inability to do every day things, such as light a fire to heat the water so I can wash my clothes by hand.

Oh well. In America, we have machines for these things. Think about that next time you’re too lazy to go do laundry. And then think of me, lighting my pyramid of trash on fire to heat water.

Almost as soon as the fire caught, I had to go find other things to feed it, since there weren’t really any substantial pieces of wood laying around. I did succeed fantastically at making the world’s smokiest fire, though, feeding the flames on trash and dried reeds and more egg cartons.

About a half an hour of poking and feeding and praying to fire gods later, the water finally got hot enough so I could haul it over to the outdoor sink, and then proceed to squat for an hour and a half as I washed my pile of dirty clothes.

I have started becoming smart, though, in regards to laundry. Now, whenever I take a bath, I always take some clothes that need to be washed in with me. Recently, they haven’t been firing up the banya much, so I’ve been bathing by boiling two teapots of water and just taking it in the unheated banya to bathe. This is really not all that pleasant, as it’s starting to edge into cooler weather and taking a bucket bath in a cold cement room isn’t exactly the same as a nice hot shower, but, hey. Clean is clean. I usually only do it once or twice a week, anyway. (On that note, it’s almost disturbing how adjusted to that I’ve become. One day, I didn’t have anything else to do, so I was laying on my bed and pondering life, when I realized that I could take a bath. I instantly dismissed it, since I had “already bathed the day before yesterday.” Then I laughed. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to such things.)

But when I’m in there, I always reserve at least a little bit of hot water to wash my underwear, since those are the only articles of clothing that really need to be washed before I wear them again. Things like socks or pants or shirts can go at least like, nine times. I’m serious. I used to wear my shirts twice before I washed them, but now I’ve graduated to about four times that number. When doing laundry is as big of a pain as it is here, you make allowances. Winter is going to be a riot, when it’s going to be too cold to either bathe or do laundry. Hooray!

But, on the other hand, I’m going to be amazing at the end of this. I’ll be able to cook from scratch, light fires with nothing but damp trash, plow fields, and jerryrig like MacGyver anything what needs jerryrigging. Maybe I’ll save money when I move into an apartment in the States, because I’ll be so accustomed to doing laundry by hand that I won’t need to go to the laundromat.

Hahahaha, just kidding, I’ll probably do a jig on the way to put quarters in the washing machine.

Written October 9, 2008

One of the happiest re-discoveries of the day was World Book 2004 on my computer.

I’ve always known it was there, in a latent sort of way. It came with the computer when my parents bought it, and whenever I came across it I was always like, “I should probably delete this,” but I never got around to it. And boy, am I ever glad I didn’t get rid of it.

When I had the internet (back in the day…), the entire program was pretty much obsolete, since I could access much more current and comprehensive information, so I never used it. After a day of browsing it, it’s obviously not a quality scholarly resource, as all of the articles have a semi-ridiculous bias, but it’s perfect for my needs, as they stand.

I’ve started writing lesson plans for classes. I’ve talked to my counterpart, and we’ve decided to go ahead and use the absolutely heinous course books provided to us, at least for now. Another challenge to teaching here – the books the officials demand us to use are ridiculous, not engaging for students, and downright dull. (Well, they’re pretty entertaining for me, as they contain sentences like, “America has the best roads in the capitalist world,” and other such Soviet tidbits that amuse the hell out of me.) The books are idiotic, but unfortunately officials come around every once in a while to check the teacher’s lesson planners (which are also official and have to be filled out in a certain way) to make sure that they’re following the national curriculum, and they can get in a lot of trouble if they don’t.

The way that my counterpart and I have decided to divide the classes is by twos. Each group of students has two classes a week, and she teaches the first one, on grammar, and I teach the second one, on conversational topics. This makes some areas of life easier for me, as I don’t have to decide what grammar points I want to teach. They’ve already been dictated to me.

Of course, this has its downsides, too. The course books aren’t just on language, after all, but they also teach about different English-speaking countries and culture. So this amounts to me having to write a conversational lesson that practices passive voice and also teaches the kids about Great Britain.

Uhh.

First off, nobody really SPEAKS in passive voice. Well, okay, they do, but nobody has an entire conversation in it. And secondly, they spent about five years of my education teaching us NOT to speak or write in passive voice. Third, the majority of these kids can barely handle anything above “Hello, my name is ___ and I like cake.”

And it has to be about England. Great. For God’s sake if you asked American high school students to have a conversation about England in passive voice, I’d love to see what the majority of them would come up with. And they (probably) speak (some form of) English!

But, whatever, I make do. The good part about the subject “America” or whatever is that it’s a pretty large topic area. When I had to make a lesson about infinitives that was also about Canada, I just was like, “I want to go hike. In… Alberta. I like to ride horses. In… Saskatchewan.” It worked. Kind of.

Another latent advantage of this is that it’s teaching me about grammar. Which… may sound sort of stupid, considering that I'm not all that bad with the English language, but I do have to admit that I know squat about grammar. I know when things are right and when they are wrong, of course, but that’s knowledge built from an assload of reading and writing. Whenever we had grammar in school, I always seemed to be in the English class that, for some reason or another, wasn’t covering it.

Thus, when my counterpart asks me how to use participle one, I’m always like, what the hell is participle one? Modal auxiliaries? Uh, yeah, right.

Generally, once I see a few examples, I get it. For example, I had no idea that “-ing” form was called a gerund. I only learned this when I had to teach about it and Canada at the same time.

But that’s where the World Book comes in handy, for when I’m like, “How in the fuck am I going to tie this grammar point in with a country?” The World Book, while I certainly wouldn’t use it to write a thesis, provides a handy little bouncing board for ideas. It basically amounts to a non-Internet based Wikipedia.

My first day of bonafied teaching didn’t go off too badly. There were some definite ups and downs, the major downer being the eighth grade class. For some unfathomable reason, they’ve combined two classes for my eighth grade session, which means that I’m teaching a class with about forty kids in it. My counterpart even has a hard time controlling them, and she speaks fluent Russian. What made it even worse was that there was some sort of teacher meeting during that class period, and as my Russian isn’t nearly good enough to go to one of those and follow what’s going on, she went and left me alone with forty fourteen year olds, who don’t speak my language, and I don’t really speak theirs.

It was forty five minutes of absolute chaos. I tried to do a warm-up of charades, but I couldn’t explain it to them to where they would understand, so that fell flat. The next activity went better, where I had a sentence broken up into two pieces, and they each had to find their partner. After that, though, I basically lost control of the class. After about ten minutes of pleading and shouting, I finally gave up, told them that I wasn’t going to teach them if they didn’t want to learn, and just sat down.

This was clearly a response they weren’t expecting. A few of them just continued on talking, completely nonplussed, a few were shocked into silence, and a few were even guilt tripped into practicing some English by asking me questions. This was the last fifteen minutes of the class.

My counterpart returned another class period later – it had been a long meeting – but the class after the eighth graders went much better. Classes of twenty or smaller I can do a pretty good job of keeping under control… and one of the double-edged sword things about teaching here is the ninth grade cutoff. After ninth grade, students don’t have to go to school anymore. It’s pretty much the same thing as in the US, but as far as I know very few students in America take the state up on it. A high school diploma/the equal is pretty much necessary nowadays in the States.

In Kyrgyzstan, large portions of the students don’t continue on in the school. Some of them continue on into “college,” which is kind of like vocational school. But this basically means that any students in tenth or eleventh grades (school only goes to eleventh here) are generally there because, at some level, they want to be there. This makes the classes much easier to teach, even for the students who don’t care so much about learning English. At least they’re not disruptive. Ninth grade is moderately hard, mostly because the students who just aren’t interested are plain unmotivated because they know they’re virtually done. Eighth is a nightmare, mostly because of the size of the class.

But, anyway, my counterpart came back and I told her that there was no way in hell I was doing that again. If I wasn’t doing team-teaching, I’d go to the director and flat out refuse to teach the eighth graders unless it was broken up into two hours. It’s just not a good learning environment for them, at all, and it’s certainly not good for my blood pressure. The best I can manage with a class that size is keeping them from killing each other. The only English they might pick up is what I yell at them in an attempt to stop the rain of spitwads. My counterpart smiled sympathetically. Like I said, even she has problems controlling them; I think she had a fair idea that she was leaving me to the hounds when she left me alone with them.

But the other classes didn’t go so badly. I have kind of a hard time engaging them; the vast majority of them don’t want to talk. Which is, well, frustrating when I’m trying to teach a conversational class.

I don’t know. It’s not bad, but I can’t say that I love it. To be honest, I’m only responsible for about five classes a week, so it’s not an overbearing amount of work. When my counterpart is in the room, I don’t have to really worry about behavioral problems, so my main thing is just figuring out how to teach about countries and grammar points and have it be at least moderately interesting.

I want to teach at a university. The PCV who was in my village previous to me taught at a university in Bishkek in addition to his work at the grammar school, and when I talked to him before he left, he said he found it much more stimulating than teaching grammar to kids, ninety percent of whom couldn’t give a hoot in hell about gerunds.

Written October 11, 2008

Well, my host sister is finally getting read the riot act. And while I feel somewhat guilty about it, I’m also relieved.

I have two host sisters: one sixteen, one thirteen. They’re both absolutely lovely, but the thirteen year old has some issues with the concept of personal space.

I admit that I am, by Kyrgyz standards, bewilderingly overprotective of my belongings and of my room. This is definitely a cultural thing; while I’m as friendly as can be under most circumstances, I need private space, and if I don’t get it, I become a bear. My younger host sister has a somewhat unfortunate tendency to do things like enter my room without knocking, or just walk in and start manhandling my personal belongings.

This wasn’t too bad at first; I decided to take the patient route, and told her that when the door was closed, she had to knock. This led to a series of events involving her knocking while she was opening the door, or knocking, pausing for a moment, and then opening the door anyway, without waiting for a response. A couple of times, she’s barged in on me when I was dressing. I’m not a particularly modest person, so I wasn’t bothered that she happened to see me in my underwear, but more that she just wasn’t listening when I was telling her to “wait, wait, WA-“

But still, I waited it out. Finally, after a while, I started getting more strict – if she was in my room and wasn’t listening to me, I would bodily force her out, which isn’t a hard thing, considering I can pick her up with one arm. But it was irritating, and a couple of times when I had to leave the house and was waiting to lock up my room, she was inside laying on the floor, positively refusing to budge until I did something drastic, like slam the bike lock that locks my door up against the wall in irritation, which would scare her out.

Today, she was in my room and mostly behaving, sans a couple of times when she started messing with my cell phone, but she stopped when I told her to do so. Finally, she asked to see my earring collection. I have them all pinned on one of my brother’s spare skate laces, and pulled them out for her to look.

I have a blue pair of earrings that she particularly liked, and tried on without asking. I made her take them out, which she did, but then she wouldn’t give them back. We got into a brief tussle about this, and she lost one of the backs to my earrings. Annoyed, I took the string of earrings from her, and demanded that she give me back the pair that she had. She refused.

I had threatened to tell her mother about her not listening to me several times before, and usually it had the desired effect. Sure enough, as I turned on my heel to go tell her mother, she said, “wait!”

This is usually the part where she corrects whatever she was doing, but when I asked for the earrings again she refused, so this time I actually went out, and didn’t stop when she said “wait!” again, and told my host mother.

My host mother said that she would talk to her, and as I turned back down the hallway with my room in it, my host sister appeared from nowhere, shoved the earrings in my hand, and promptly hid under her bed.

I kind of feel bad in a distant way about it, because her parents were none too pleased, but to be honest, I think I was a little more magnanimous with her than I should have been. It’s not as though she hasn’t been becoming increasingly more difficult as the weeks have passed and we’ve become more familiar. I had been considering just bypassing the whole telling the mother thing and going straight to my program manager, who in turn would tell the host mother for me. While going over the mother’s head would be just bizarre in America, it’s more or less par for the course here, but I was just tired of dancing around the subject and decided to just attack it head on. We’ll see if it works.

It’s just very strange to me, because I know that I live in her house and we’re “family” in the institutional sense, but I’m not actually family. I mean, I know that if we had a foreigner living in our house in the States, I wouldn’t have been allowed to just barge in and start drawing all over the poor person’s lesson plans. Especially not at age thirteen. Hell, I don’t think the thought would have even crossed my mind. I understand that there’s a major difference in the way that the Kyrgyz conceptualize personal space (namely, on a whole they don’t at all), but I still have a hard time believing that, well, what she was doing was okay, even by Kyrgyz standards.

Though, on the other hand, the fact that she ran and hid after I went to tell her mother, probably means that she was aware that she was doing something that she shouldn't have. Or, well, it could just be the whole guests-are-honored thing kicking in, and the bad part was that she was doing something that I didn’t want, rather than she was invading my personal space.

Again, we’ll see. Apparently, though, I’ve just been informed that I’m getting a new lock on my door, but I’m not sure if this was precipitated by the host sister or not. I have to say that I’m semi-relieved, since the way I lock my door now is kind of a joke: instead of the normal single door in the frame, I have basically half-sized French doors. I dislike them, because it’s damn near impossible to have the door actually closed. They lock (from the inside) with pole-style locks, which slide into holes drilled into the top of the doorframe. I have to have one of the two doors locked permanently, or else the doors won’t close at all, because there’s no latch between the doors. In addition, I can’t lock both doors at the same time from the inside, because the holes aren’t quite lined up correctly with the pole locks. I could feasibly hammer it in, but hammering my door every time I want it locked is just ridiculous. And then I probably wouldn’t be able to open it, and I'd be stuck in my room like a dumbass until my host family removed the doors from the hinges.

The way I lock my door from the outside, when I leave the house, is with a bike cable coated in thick green plastic. There are two doorknobs, so I wind it around the knobs and lock it. It’s as bad of security as it sounds; it’s very easy to just pull the lock out from around the knobs, even if you don’t have the key. (I do it myself when I’m lazy and don’t feel like digging in my bag for my keys.)

But, I mean, to be honest, I’m not actually worried about theft. There’s nearly always somebody home, and besides, a thief would have to get past the locked compound gate and the locked house in the event that nobody was home, before they got to my poorly locked room. I’m more concerned about the younger host sister coming in and molesting my possessions, which could result in things getting lost or accidentally broken. And I know that she’d be very sorry if she, say, broke my laptop, but very sorry isn’t going to bring back a thousand dollars worth of electronic investment.

I oscillate wildly on whether I want to move out or not. I like this family a lot: they’re very kind to me. I like the host mother’s cooking, and my room is extremely nice. But, oh man do I miss living independently. Another major perk to living with the host family is that my living expenditures are far less than they would be if I had an apartment, which gives me more money for travel. What almost makes it worse is that I’m living in an area where apartments do exist, so it’s a very distinct possibility. If I was somewhere where it was just not feasible, I might not want it as badly (or, I would, but I would have reconciled myself with the fact that I couldn’t get it).

My current plan is to stay with the host family until next summer, but that’ll also depend on the amenities of the apartments offered to me. It would be foolish to move into an apartment heated by electric means; most of the volunteers who have apartments that aren’t heated by coal have to move back in with host families during the winter, or risk not having any heat/water, due to the foreseen electric shortages. At any rate, I’m starting to put out some feelers, and we’ll see what comes back.