.it's no better to be safe than sorry

Written Tuesday, November 25, 2008

I almost killed my host sister today. Over butter.

Thanksgiving is this Thursday, but since us Volunteers don’t get the day off (it’s not exactly a Kyrgyz holiday), we’re postponing the celebration for Saturday. All the Chui Volunteers are getting together in Bishkek, renting an apartment, and eating ourselves stupid. It’s a potluck, but we’re also going out and buying some of the rotisserie chickens they sell on the street in lieu of cooking a turkey. Cooking a turkey would be ridiculously difficult here, given that most of us who have access to ovens are constrained by the fact that ovens here are essentially oversized toaster ovens, which would be difficult to fit a twelve-pound bird in. That, and we’d probably have to buy a live turkey, which would be a little more adventurous than most of us (myself included) are willing to get.

But anyway, for my part in the potluck, I’m making pies. One apple, one pumpkin. This’ll be exciting, because it’s the first year I’ve ever attempted making pumpkin pie on my lonesome, and also the first time I’ve ever had to start with the actual pumpkin. They don’t really have “pie filling” here. Whatever, I’ll give it a whirl. As long as it comes out reasonably edible, everybody’ll be happy.

But in preparation for such an undertaking as pie, one has to be ready to make some pie crusts. Now, making pie crust is actually one of the easier cooking endeavors to embark upon, considering that a pie crust is essentially flour and butter and an egg mashed together. My host mother sells butter, but as it’s homemade, it’s usually served out of a teacup. I figured that a block of butter would be easier to “measure” with. (When I cook, I don’t actually measure anything. There are no such things as measuring cups here.)

But, anyway, yesterday I went on a shopping adventure for pie. I got some pumpkin and, condensed milk for the pumpkin pie, and apples and lemon for the apple pie. I’ve already been well stocked with cinnamon at home, and I also have supplies of sugar, baking soda, cloves, salt, and eggs. Happy and ready to go on a cooking adventure, I brought everything home.

As one would expect, I put the butter in the refrigerator. Now, I admit that the following row was partially my fault, as I didn’t alert the family to the fact that I had put butter in the refrigerator, and it was not to be eaten. In my defense, though, the family never buys butter, as the host mother makes it. I figured that on that merit alone, my butter was safe.

I have had problems with putting things in the refrigerator in the past. For dry-store items, the family has provided me with a special shelf in the china hutch, so I’ve never had issues there. But occasionally, when I bought eggs, I would poke in the refrigerator for some, and find none left, because they had been used.

Today, I go to school, you know, whatever, and come back. I opened the refrigerator to get some fixings for lunch, and… a huge corner of the block of butter I had bought had been hacked away. I opened the jar of natural peanut butter I had, and there was a noticeable dent made in it, as well.

I may as well mention that my host family (primarily the younger sister, and to a lesser extent the mother) have been driving me up the wall in the past few weeks. If I wear the wrong pair of slippers into the kitchen, it’s dirty. If I use the wrong bowl for washing dishes or clothes, it’s dirty. If I put my sweatshirt in the wrong place, it’s dirty. The younger host sister just will not leave me alone, and the constant assaults on my locked door continue. The frustrations with finding a new place to live and being stonewalled hadn’t helped.

On that note, there’s a small block of apartments, right next to the school. There can’t be more than ten units in it; I figured it was nearly a waste of time to ask about it, but I did anyway. Turns out, my director (principal, basically) owns one of the apartments, and there’s nobody living in it currently. But my counterpart said that she had asked about the apartment and the director had said no. Mystified, I had went to the Peace Corps office and asked about it… turns out the major reason that the director doesn’t want to rent the apartment to me is because the director has a beef with my counterpart. Yep. Here I am, basically homeless in a couple of weeks, and the director won’t rent her empty apartment to me because of my counterpart. Make sense? That’s Kyrgyzstan, sometimes.

So when I picked up the mangled block of butter, the gold wrapper peeled away where the thief had gouged out the corner, I was livid. I mean, like, swirling red spots and instant blood-pressure-spike infuriated.

The only other person at home at the time was the younger sister, and she was obviously the culprit, as the parents hadn’t been at home all day, and neither had the older sister. I called out her name, and she ran and hid. I don’t know, maybe the near-visible waves of blazing fury radiating from my persona tipped her off.

I slammed my way out of the house, cursed my way across town in a matshruka, and pretty much plowed through the throng of people blocking my way to the Peace Corps center. Literally. A guy holding a box ran into me and bounced off.

I was all but ready to descend on my program manager’s office in a storm of hellfire and sulfur, but she was at lunch. This was probably a good thing, as I likely would have yelled fit to bust the windows. For better or worse, I’ve been blessed with a loud voice even when I’m chatting, but if I'm pissed, they’ll hear me in Uzbekistan.

Went around to the Volunteer’s center, where the other people there helped me take the nonproductive edge off my anger. I went back to the program manager’s office to find her still not there, so I set about lurking.

The head program coordinator (my program manager’s boss, basically) saw me skulking, and asked what was up. I gave him an earful.

And, frankly, I know that it’s stupid to get so ridiculously upset over butter, I mean, Christ. I’m not normally the type to fly off the handle as such, but it’s just been a building result of pressure these past couple of weeks. I’m just not comfortable where I live, at all, and it’s starting to affect other areas of my life. I mean, in my last year of college, I went to school full-time, worked part-time, played a sport that took up six days a week, administratively ran said sport, and wrote a thesis. I was extremely stressed at times, and I was always busy, but I was never as… well, angry about things as I am now. I am sure that, even at my most stressed out last year, if somebody had taken some butter from me, I would not have gone off on a murderous rampage.

And I’ve been thinking about that recently, that if that’s going to be the person I’m becoming – somebody who can’t handle a little butter theft – then I shouldn’t be here. Not that I’m seriously considering throwing in the towel at the moment, but where I am right now is obviously not healthy or productive. Things need to change, and they don’t need to be changed in a couple of weeks, they need to be changed now.

So, I told him as such, and my program manager came up the hall, and I repeated it all to her.

The threat of ET (early termination) is always effective. I don’t think it’s something that should be made lightly, of course, but basically, I said that if I don’t get a new place to live where I can be comfortable and happy, I’m not going to stick around to the detriment of my mental health. But after I got finished talking with my program director, I got overwhelmed with a bout of tears, and unfortunately didn’t make it out of the office without becoming too obvious about it.

This attracted the attention of the Country Director (everybody’s boss), and she came out and sat with me while I tried to gain control over what remained of my marbles. She, the head program coordinator, and my program manager all had a meeting, because I was clearly a mess, to the point where even the government had to stand up and take notice.

So, there are a couple of housing options on the table: my counterpart asked a fruit seller in town (who apparently knows everybody) about possible housing options, and it turns out she has a mother who lives by herself. They’ve wanted somebody else to live there for a while. This would likely afford me more space and privacy than I have now, but I admit I’m still not entirely thrilled about it: call me slightly jaded, but I kind of just don’t want to deal with host families anymore, even if the family is only one person.

The other possible option is a house. My counterpart’s friend is moving to Russia soon, and her husband is already there. I could live in the house while they were gone, which is good for me, because, hell, I’ll have a house to myself, and also good for them, as I’d keep the house in order while they were gone. The one cravat is that they’d also be trying to sell the house at the same time, so there’s the chance that it’d get sold while I was living there, and then I’d be out of a place to live again.

Tomorrow, I’m going to go see at least the first option, to see what it’s like. The homestay period has also been cut for me: my program manager said I can move out of my current living situation as soon as possible, as opposed to waiting until December 18, which is when the three-month mandatory homestay period is over.

My program manager also asked if I’d like her to talk to my family about the stolen butter, but I was deflated by that time and just said it probably wasn’t worth it. I just wanted to move.

The day did get better, though: some other volunteer friends and I went out to Beta Stores, the Western supermarket, and I bought two pie plates and another container of peanut butter, to replace my stores that “mysteriously” disappeared.

I was happy about the pie plates, though. As Western-style pie isn’t exactly a common article to be cooked around here (they do have pirogh, which are actually kind of like pirogies – wonder where they got their name – where the filling is put into a circle of dough and then folded over like a Hot Pocket), my host family didn’t have any pans I could borrow, and I was worried that they’d be expensive as an import item. I had been planning on splurging on one for the pumpkin pie, and then just making the apple pie into a tart, by rolling out the dough, piling the filling in the center, and just folding the edges over it and baking it flat on a cookie sheet. But they had cheap non-stick pie plates for a little over a dollar apiece, which is affordable, even on my current budget.

So, happily, I get to make an actual apple pie, with a lattice crust topping. I went home, considerably happier than when I went out.

When I got home, I went through the confrontation about the butter. Though, I do have to wonder if my program manager went ahead and called them anyway, despite me telling her not to do so: the host family had bought a small tub of butter, and my host mother offered it to me, saying that, “When children want to eat, they eat,” in excuse for the younger host sister.

Whatever. I wasn’t in the mood to make a scene about it anymore.

Cooking is therapeutic. I went through and made three piecrusts, and it was satisfying to crumble the butter with the flour, and then punch it into dough with the egg. (Or, maybe just punching things is therapeutic.) I now have three nice rounds of pie dough chilling in the refrigerator, one for the pumpkin, two for the double-crust apple.

And I hope like hell I’ll be out of this house within the week. That’ll be something to have a real thanksgiving for.

Written Wednesday, November 26, 2008

I may actually have a serious option.

Today I went to see the fruit-seller’s house. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about it, because I had been told I would have to live with the fruit seller’s mother, and I didn’t know how I would feel about that. However, it was an option, it was ready for me to see it, and I’m not in much of a position to be too picky.

So, after class, my counterpart, my program manager, and I went over to collect the fruit seller, and then see the house.

My initial impressions weren’t too great, especially because we had to wait outside the premises for about five minutes while the fruit seller went in and wrangled with the absolutely enormous feral dog living there. It was chained up, but basically right next to the walk, so it wouldn’t have been difficult for the thing to just lunge across the walkway and take a chunk out of somebody. Eventually the fruit seller poked her head out and said that only one of us could come in to see the house, because that’s how long she could hold back the dog for.

Dubious, I was the one who went in, as it would be me living there. I pushed back the gate, and ran past the chained behemoth, who was distracted by the fruit-seller tossing hunks of bread into its enormous jaws.

The house itself is a definite step down, luxury-wise, from the one I’m in right now. It’s a lot smaller: there’s a three-season porch-esque room, a bedroom, a living room with a bed in it, and a kitchen. There is no running water inside, but there is a spigot in the yard, and a gravity sink in the kitchen. (A gravity sink looks kind of like a small china hutch. There’s a tank on the top, which you fill from a bucket, which is attached to a spigot. The water from the spigot runs into a basin, which empties into a second bucket. The second bucket you have to manually dump outside.) The outside has a small plot of land (mud at this time of year), an outdoor cooking area, and a never-used banya. It kind of smells a bit musty, like old ladies and pink baby powder.

I wandered around and poked into some of the cabinets, and then took the requisite look at the outhouse, which, was, well, an outhouse.

The fruit-seller distracted the enormous beast with more bread while I ran back outside.

My counterpart and program manager asked me what I thought. I was clearly unimpressed. Despite the step down in living conditions, the thing I was most turned out about, I told them, was that I needed more space. Even with one other person in the house, we’d basically be on top of each other.

This earned me some weird looks, and my program manager asked me how I could need more than an entire house to myself. Then I was like, wait, “to myself?”

I don’t know if I misunderstood what they said to me at the beginning (though I am positive I didn’t), but it turns out that the fruit-seller’s mother is in Russia, and there’s nobody living in the house currently.

This made me change my entire tune, basically from a flat “no,” to “I’ll take it and move in tomorrow.” It’s within walking distance of the school, it’s heated by gas (so I won’t have to finagle with coal), it’s space for me.

They also agreed to move out the gigantic beast guarding the front walk, but this leaves me with a smaller, yappy dog on the premises. Oh well. I guess you can’t have everything.

The only thing still up for grabs basically was the price. When they were discussing it in front of me, the fruit-seller said that she wanted a hundred dollars a month, which, in the grand scheme of things, ain’t a bad price for an entire house. However, in the Peace Corps scheme of things, a) I don’t get paid in dollars, and b) I make the equal of a hundred and fifty dollars a month. A hundred dollars is like, two thirds of my budget.

After some negotiating, the fruit-seller wanted 3000 som a month, which is about seventy-five dollars. My program manager called me later that day, and said that if I went to talk to the fruit-seller tomorrow, I could probably get it down to 2500, or about sixty USD. On top of this I’d have to pay for utilities. Gas is kind of expensive, and the fruit-seller says it costs about 1000 som a month in gas to heat and cook. Of course, this will vary greatly, and I’m not sure if that’s 1000 som to heat the house all day every day, or 1000 som just to get a little kick of warmth at night. At any rate, I’ll probably opt to be a little colder in order to save some som, and rely mostly on my electric heater, because electricity is cheaper than gas. The electricity bill will be by default low, considering that it gets shut off here for at least five hours out of the day.

I suppose the good part about this is that it’ll give me a slight raise: I only pay 1200 for my housing currently, and they can give me up to 2000 for it. The extra 1500ish I’ll have to foot on my own. Holistically it’s not that much of a jump, because I currently pay another 900 som on top of the 1200 for dinner. I provide my own breakfast and lunch right now, so also making dinner won’t be that much of an extra financial burden. (Plus, I’ve gotten to the point where complete freedom over my diet seems like manna from heaven. I’ve had my fair share of soups consisting of mutton stock, sheep fat, a few slices of carrot and cubed potatoes, and while that was fine for a while, it’s… getting a bit old. In addition, my own kitchen would be a haven, where I wouldn’t have to dance around other people while I was cooking and be constantly paranoid that I was going to use the wrong bowl for something.)

Basically, we’ll see about talking down the fruit seller the extra 500 som, but right now I need an option and this is definitely the best one I have so far, and the first one to actually be somewhat concrete. Not to mention… dude, how many 23 year olds do you know with their own house? In Kyrgyzstan? I bet the answer is “one.”

Ballin’. That’s me. High living, on one fifty a month. I know, I know. You see me rollin’. You hatin’.

So, tomorrow I’m going to try and talk to the fruit seller. I’d like to move in as soon as possible, basically after they move the yeti guarding the walk and give the place a bit of a cleaning, so it’s not so musty. After that, I’m in like Flynn.

The only snag is that they’re only really looking to rent the place out for a year, as the mother’s due back from Russia next fall. I figure that a million things could happen between now and then (I could go home, the mother could get delayed in Russia, whatever), so this is a good, solid option until then. If it comes down to it, this time next year I’ll be closer to the end of my service, so if it’s an option, I might live with the mother for about a month, until it’s winter vacation. During next year’s winter vacation, I was half-planning on traveling somewhere (I can’t really go anywhere this year because we have In-Service Training smack in the middle of break), and when school starts up again it’ll be February (or even March, depending on the electric situation), and then it might be feasible for me to supplement for an apartment in Bishkek if there’s nothing available in my village, because I’ll only have about six months left of my service. I can’t afford to do it for nigh on two years, but a handful of months might not be as big of a burden.

Though, today almost made me a little sad, in terms of the good parts about having a host family. I made my apple pie today (which, by the way, turned out pretty good). I had woven the lattice topping and was cutting away the excess, when my younger host sister – who had been watching with almost scientific intent the entire time - asked me what I was going to do with the extra crust. I shrugged, and said I’d probably just throw it out.

The older host sister suggested making cookies with the leftover, which was a pretty damn good idea, considering that the pie crust was basically just butter dough. I rolled out the rest and the sisters made round cookies by using teacups and shot glasses to carve circles out of the dough. I kept on rolling it out until there wasn’t any left, and then we sprinkled the tops with cinnamon and sugar, and pressed Hershey’s Kisses into a couple of them.

It was actually enjoyable. It basically cements my conviction that we’ll all be a lot happier if I just come by to visit every once in a while. …it also makes me feel good about the fact that my host mother requested me to be out of the house, so then the onus of leaving isn’t entirely on me. I’m doing what’s going to make us both happy.

So, here’s hoping.

Written Thursday, November 27, 2008

Thanksgiving was more or less a normal day of work for me, since they don’t exactly celebrate it here. But, in lieu of the big feast, I now have a new place to live, which is like a breath of fresh air after breathing through an LA summer smog.

I went through my teaching stint (Thursday is actually my heavy day; I teach five classes straight), and it turned out that my counterpart was also done with work at the same time. (My counterpart works more than I do, because she also teaches fifth, sixth, seventh, and fourth graders in the afternoon. I also teach sixth grade occasionally, but it’s with a different teacher, and I’m technically only a secondary teacher, which is seventh grade and up.) As such, she graciously volunteered to go with me to talk to the fruit-seller about the house, since it was on her way home anyhow.

This was great, because I had been rehearsing ways to bargain for a house in Russian and not cock it up too horribly. Now, I didn’t have to worry about it. We went to the fruit seller’s, and she tried again with the hundred-dollar thing, but we got her down to 2500 pretty quick. To be honest, I think that she was as desperate to have somebody live in the house was I was to find a place to be; this way, it’s one less building she has to keep from going into decay. She said that she’d move the monster-dog by Saturday, and then clean up the house a bit.

The only thing the landlord had reservations about was having guests over – she was concerned about wreck and ruin, I guess. But I’m not exactly planning on throwing frat parties. I probably will have a considerable number of guests, considering that I have, oh, three extra beds in my house (my house, holy crap) and I’m ten minutes from the capital, but I figure that as long as everything’s relatively low-key, it shouldn’t be a problem. At least, I hope not.

My purported day for moving is next Friday, which I originally picked because I don’t work on Fridays (unless they change the schedule again). However, I forgot that Friday is also International Volunteer Day, and in commemoration of the event, I volunteered to go put on a little performance at a homeless children’s shelter that day. I suppose that I could always back out of it, as there’s going to be at least four or five other volunteers going, but I’d feel bad and I’m genuinely interested in attending. I’m hoping that they finish cleaning the house maybe before Friday, and that way I can get the keys a bit earlier and start ferrying things over there on Wednesday or Thursday.

The new place is almost equidistant from the school as I am right now, which is ballin’, because it’s only about a five to ten minute walk from school as it is. However, currently I live directly on the main drag through town, while my new house is set slightly farther back in the community.

Telling the host family that I was moving went off pretty well. The only minor snag was that when the younger sister asked me why I was moving, the mother cut in and said it was because I wanted to live alone. I said yes, but it was also because the mother told Peace Corps that she wanted the room back. Which was true. The mother kind of harrumphed her way out of the room after that, but I was like, dude, you can’t push all this off on me.

And in a certain way I feel kind of bad about the failing of this host family experience, as the past two I’ve done have been so enriching and really helped me learn culture and language. I suppose I could have been more flexible and patient on certain matters, but you can spend all day berating yourself about that, and it won’t get you too far. I also think that part of it might not have anything to do at all with homestay, but more with me just needing to actually live on my own. I think that, if I was in America, I could handle a roommate situation pretty well, but that’s not feasible or allowed here.

And, well, I’m not in America, so now I have a house. Which is probably going to bring a whole host of other issues with it: I’ve never had to take care of a house in an independent sense before, and, while I think I could probably handle it well enough in America, the houses here aren’t equipped like the ones back home. Basically, I’m going to learn how to burn trash and light gas flues and all sorts of things. At least they don’t have farm animals or a serious garden.

But, I mean, maybe I could plant a garden. Haha.

But I’m already planning all the cooking. Roasted vegetables, pot pie, stews, pizza, homemade macaroni and cheese, pasta, sautéed squash with basil and oregano, ohh. You know, cooking was one of those things that I always assumed that I wouldn’t like and wouldn’t be good at it, but I’m not half bad.

My host family did ask who else was living in the house, and they expressed deep concern when I said I would be there alone, and asked if I needed a dog. Which I recognize as a sweet gesture, as dogs here are more of a security device if anything. I assured them that the place did come with its own built-in yappy little terror, so they didn't need to worry. Of course, if I had my way entirely I would not have a dog, but whatevs.

They also invited me to come back and guest whenever I felt like it, which is extremely nice of them. I’ll probably at least do it once every other month or something. If nothing else, I’ll come back to buy eggs and dairy products from the host mother, as it’ll make her happy and I’ll need those things anyway.

So I suppose the whole thing wasn’t bust. I made my pumpkin pie today, which went off pretty well, I suppose. It smells and looks like a pumpkin pie, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, literally. Making a pumpkin pie from scratch requires a lot less pumpkin than I originally thought, only a half-kilogram. You have to gut it, chop off the skin (which is a task in and of itself) and then steam the pumpkin until it’s soft enough for mashing. Then, you mix in a can of condensed milk and a half-cup of sour cream, a couple of eggs, and cinnamon. I also added some ground cloves, because I’m a fan. You whip it all together, and pour it in the crust.

I had more leftover crust, and was feeling up to it, so I went and got the younger host sister and let her make cookies from the leftovers. She was genuinely excited, as she got to roll out the dough herself, make the round cookies, sprinkle the sugar on top, and grease the pan. I also helped her to cut some of the circles in half and make a flower-shape.

She was working while I was washing the other dishes, and she said that, “Laura, sometimes you’re mean, but sometimes you’re really nice.”

Which is, well, pretty astute, but she laughed when I told her so.