.out from behind the bitter ache

Written Saturday, December 20, 2008

Oh, Kyrgyzstan. The land of many firsts. First time learning Russian, for instance. First time in an apartment. First time my oven exploded. First time getting evicted from an apartment. You know. The glory of firsts.

Yesterday, I had three friends over at my place. Two of ‘em were a married couple that lives about an hour away from the city; I had been extolling the virtues of my new pad and they wanted to come check it out. That and my friend is good at haircutting, and my hair was getting long enough in the back to grease it up into a duck’s ass, so I figured I should take advantage of her skills.

The third was another volunteer out from Talas. He needed to be in Osh, the south of the country, by late today. He left Talas yesterday, but it’s virtually impossible to get a taxi to go straight to Osh from Talas, so he made a pit stop in Bishkek first. As it’s about a six hour ride from Talas to Bishkek, completing the ten to twelve hour Bishkek-Osh route would have been a lot in one day. So I said he could crash at my place.

We all got back to my apartment around sixish. We had picked up some fixin’s for dinner at the bazaar, as all I really had at my place were carrots, potatoes, radishes, and some rice and eggs. (I eat stir fry more often than not these days, as it’s a filling meal that’s got quite the vegetable content and is easy to cook. Add an egg for protein and it’s as well-rounded as it’s ever going to get. However, I didn’t have enough on hand for four people, and it was worth getting something a bit fancier.)

The married couple offered to haul some of their coal over. You see, the house had a banya, but I had never fired it up for myself because a) it was too much friggin’ trouble to go through the process of firing it up just for one person, and b) the house was gas heated, so I didn’t have any coal. But there was gonna be four of us in residence that night, so we all figured that it might be worth our while, to get a nice warm place to bathe.

So, we started dinner (a tasty pre-prepared laghman, which is basically noodles with spices and vegetables), poured a couple of glasses of beer, and got the banya lit up. All and all, a pretty tame evening. We had plans to watch some movies after we bathed.

Except, in the middle of the banya-firing, my landlady came by. Now, I hadn’t seen hide nor tail of her in a while, so I was pretty surprised when she showed up. And she was pissed. (I can only assume that she had the neighbors call if it looked like I had any guests over… we weren’t being loud by any stretch of the imagination. In addition, the nights when I was alone, I was up until the electricity went out, about 11pm, blasting my music. So it couldn’t have been a noise thing.)

First, she started lecturing me about having too many people over. We actually had a discussion about this when I moved in; initially, she wanted me to ask before I had anybody over, but when I was definitely not agreeing to that, she said that I could have one or two people over occasionally. I wasn’t planning on throwing a beer blast, so I didn’t think this was unreasonable. Sure, I had three people over that night, but we weren’t doing anything rowdy or loud, so I didn’t figure it would be a problem. Well, apparently, I was wrong.

Also, she was spitting mad about the fact that I was using the banya. When I moved in, I said that I probably wouldn’t be using it much since I was living alone and it was too much trouble. But, I didn’t think that precluded me from using it entirely. Plus, the banya was located in a separate building, which I actually had the key to. There were certain parts and separate buildings of the house that were locked off to me, and most of them I didn’t care much about, but the banya rooms were unlocked. She was pissed off because the banya room was dirty, which bewildered me because I said I didn’t care. Besides, if she was so pissed off about it, maybe she should have cleaned it before I moved in. It’s not as though she didn’t have a week’s notice to do anything about it.

But after tearing into me in front of my guests, she stormed out of the house, saying she’d be back tomorrow. I was a little unsettled, but we went on with our evening.

The next morning, the friend from Talas left early, as he had to go wrangle a taxi to the south. My other two friends and I slowly got up, washed the dishes, cleaned up the house and rearranged the furniture back, as we had moved some things in order to get all the beds I had into my room, which was the warmest room in the house.

The landlady comes back at about nine, still pissed off as all hell. She got on my case about having so many people over again, and I tried to explain that I had the one person over because he was from Talas and needed a place to stay, and she said, and I quote, “That’s your problem.”

Then, she demanded my keys to the house, which I gave her. And she went outside and started storming around, dismantling the table I had set up in front of the outdoor couch I had used for my morning coffee breaks, and yelling about how I needed to find a new place to live. At this point, I realized I was out of my league here with my own Russian, and tried to call my program manager to talk to her. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a hold of her, so I called the program manager for the NGO workers instead, as one of my friends had her number. I got a hold of her, and handed the phone to my landlady.

There was much yelling going on outside, so we waited for it to end, and the landlady came back and handed the phone to me. The program manager told me that the landlady was pissed off because of the people I had over, and the use of the banya, which I knew about, but was also complaining that the house was dirty and I was living “like a homeless person.”

This I cannot comprehend, as I swept and mopped the house pretty regularly, did a couple loads of laundry, always made sure to empty the slop bucket from the gravity sink when it was full, and did dishes virtually the second I was done using them. (And, frankly, the house wasn’t all that clean when I got it, anyway.) The program manager also told me that the landlady had initially wanted me out of the house that day, but the program manager told her that that was an unreasonable amount of time, and that I at least needed a week.

When I heard all of this I was pissed, namely because the landlady was gone at that point, and she had taken the keys, so I had no way to lock the house. There was no way I was going to leave all my worldly belongings around in an unlocked house, so I just started packing up immediately. I called my counterpart and told her what happened (she was shocked), but she wasn’t in the village at the moment, but she said she’d try to talk to the landlady when she got back.

To which I told her not to bother, because there was no way in hell I was staying in that house. Frankly, if it was the last friggin’ house in Kyrgyzstan, I’d erect a yurt in the schoolyard. We packed up all my stuff, and my friends stayed in the house with it all so I could go to the closest bazaar and pick up a taxi to help me haul it.

Once I got the taxi, we loaded all my things into the car and drove it over to the village English center, as the only people who have keys to it are myself and my counterpart, and just dropped it all off there. I’m currently at my friends’ village, staying with them, as I am now essentially homeless.

My counterpart called me when I was waiting for the matshruka to go to my friends’ village, and she said that the landlady had agreed to let me stay in the house for the rest of the week, to which I said, “piss on that.”

Frankly, it’s infuriating. I am not a child. I understand that if I am living in a place where I’m renting, if I break or destroy something, it is my responsibility to fix or replace it. If I have guests over and they break or destroy something, it’s my responsibility to replace it. Now, if I was having twenty people over at a time for nightly keg stands, then, yeah, I could see how she might be slightly perturbed about my lifestyle. However, if I have three people over for dinner, a movie, and bathing for crying out loud, it’s not her business. If I’m paying her rent, an amount that she agreed to, then I get to live my life the way I want to live it, provided it’s not destructive to her property.

But my counterpart then asked how I was going to get to work next week, as the village where I’m staying now is about an hour outside the city, which is a difficult commute, to say the least. I said that I don’t know. Because I don’t. In all likelihood I won’t be at work this week, because I have no place to live this week. Today I actually had three classes to teach and a Russian lesson, but I didn’t get to do any of that because I had to pack and move at the drop of a hat.

This presents several problems, though. The main one being, I have no place to live. My friends here said I could crash with them as long as I needed to, and when I got to the Peace Corps office today I told my tale of woe to the volunteers there I got offered a couple other apartments to stay in, due to my compatriots’ generosity. Secondly, I have no way to get to work or go about my routine. This will essentially be solved by itself in less than a week, though, as it’s basically the end of the year and break starts soon.

I finally got a hold of my program manager, and she suggested a site change. Again. Which, really, is looking more and more appealing. I’d really hate to leave my village, as, despite it all, I like it there. I’m comfortable. I really love working at the school, and my counterpart is amazing. I love the proximity to Bishkek, and all the opportunities that affords me. However, she said that she’d put me in a place that has actual apartments, and the fact that, well, I have no place to live in my village now kind of puts a damper on things.

If there’s any silver lining to all of this, it’s that I actually hadn’t paid rent on the house yet. I made a couple of overtures towards it, but I think that people generally pay towards the end of the month here, rather than the beginning. Another plus was that I didn’t sign a housing agreement with the landlady. People don’t really get into contracts about housing here, but Peace Corps has housing contracts that we sign, mostly so there’s an official record of how much we pay a month so our housing allowances can be adjusted accordingly. However, I never signed one… I was going to, but considering how I only lived in the place for two weeks, I didn’t have enough time to get my marbles about me to do it.

The point there is that landlady bitch ain’t getting a single som from my ass. She can try, but then I’ll point out that she treated me like shit and then took the keys from me so I couldn’t lock the house. If she complains, I’ll just say the same thing she told me when I said I had a friend from Talas that needed a place to stay. Namely, “that’s your problem.”

In fact, I hope she wants money. I really do. I even already have my speech planned out. In English, of course, because I assume that either my counterpart or program manager will be there for this conversation. It will go something like this: “Oh, really? Well, listen, bitch, because you’re not getting a single som from me. And, furthermore, for all the times you yelled at me because you were speaking in rapid fire Russian and I didn’t understand, fuck you. My Russian isn’t that good. I know that. I’ve lived in this country for five months. I’d like to see you go to America, and see how good your English is after five months, because I bet it’d be worse than my Russian. You don’t understand how hard this is. And that’s fine, because you’ll never see the world beyond your goddamn front door. And that’s fine too, because you can have your front door, and you can have your mother’s front door, all of it. But you treated me awfully. And I never signed a contract with you, so you can’t even prove I lived in that house short of DNA testing, and if you want to fork out the cash for that, go ahead. And go to hell, while you’re at it. And sit on a dick.” [insert flipping the bird here]

This has all really made me take stock of what I’m doing here, and if it’s worth it. Is it? To be honest, I don’t really know. I’m mostly just waiting to see how the chips fall out at this point. But this won’t beat me, goddamn it, because… well, just because. I won’t let it. Something will work out. It has to. I don’t want to go back home yet. …now, to be honest, I can’t say exactly why I don’t want to go back, because between the exploding ovens and landlady issues and whatever the hell else has been going on, life’s been kind of bad recently. But for whatever reason, for the moment I want to stick it out. Maybe it’s nothing but a combination of pride and stubbornness, but it’s keeping me here for now.

Of course, if everything goes absolutely to hell, I’ll go back. At the moment, I don’t see how much worse it can get, though, considering how I’m homeless. If I can put up with this, I figure I can deal with just about anything else that comes at me.

Though, I guess I actually am living like a homeless person at the moment. Maybe the landlady was right.

Or maybe she can go suck a fat one.

Written Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Hey guys!

It’s… Christmas carol time!

Oh, you’ve got to be homeless for the holidays…
in Russian you’d say that I’m “bez dom”
If you want to be awesome in a million ways…
Spend a Kyrgyz De-cem-ber without a home!

Though, technically, I’m actually “bez doma,” but grammar don’t count when you’re singing. Or blogging.

Sweet. As Charles Dickens once made a child say, “God bless us, everyone except my stupid landlady. What a twat.”

Merry Christmas!

.there will still be love in the world

Written Monday, December 15, 2008

It’s amazing how difficult it is to not get paid.

My landlady’s son comes over every day to feed the dogs. At first I was a little perturbed by this, as it means that essentially I’m going to have a checking-up-on daily, but then I got over it. He’s not intrusive, and the dogs get fed a hell of a lot better than if I had to do it on my own dime. Furthermore, it’s one less thing I have to worry about.

But the son is actually a nice guy, and tries to exercise his limited English vocabulary every chance he gets. For about three days straight when he came by in the evening to feed the dogs and I was sitting outside, he greeted me with a cheery “good morning.” While this was cute, I felt bad about letting the clear mix-up in greetings slide, and corrected him.

So, he wants English lessons. As mentioned previously, I’ve tried to stay out of the individual tutoring business, but he’s a nice guy and it won’t kill me. The hardest part about it was getting around the conversation about me being paid.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I’m forbidden from taking on gainful employment of any sort. The school doesn’t pay me – Peace Corps does. I’m more than welcome (and in fact, actively encouraged) to take on as many side activities from my main job as is my fancy, but I can’t get paid for them. Of course, when I go into Bishkek to teach they reimburse me my travel funds, but I’m not paid for teaching itself. (Though, to be honest, they do over reimburse me a little bit… it costs me sixteen som to get from the school and back, but they just give me a twenty som bill, as it’s easier to do the math. So I guess I am getting paid. A nickel.)

So, I said I’d give the guy English lessons, and he asked me how much I charged. I told him that I was a Volunteer, and thus couldn’t be paid. He at first thought I just didn’t understand what he was saying, but after assuring him that I did understand he was offering payment but was turning it down, he was all like, “But I won’t tell anybody!”

Which I guess could work. Though I’m on paper forbidden to do a lot of things, it’s not as though Peace Corps is hanging all over my back 24/7. Theoretically he could pay me for it, and nobody would ever know. But, I mean, seriously, I took an oath for this shit, and “not being paid” is one of the key parts of all of this. I’d made peace with the fact that I wasn’t going to be making anything akin to actual money for the two years I’m here. In reality it really wasn’t that much of a problem for me in the first place, because as far as I’m concerned what I’m lacking in pay I’m making up for in experience. (…and my loans are on deferral and I’m getting health insurance. So…) I’m learning a new language, becoming accustomed to living abroad in far less luxurious conditions than I’m used to having at my disposal, proving that I can exist in a vastly different cultural arena than that which I grew up in… not to mention, having “Peace Corps” on the resume is a pretty big bang in and of itself.

But I was like, no, no, no, you can’t pay me. (Though, if I was smart, I might have asked him to get his mother to lower my rent. It’s not pay if I don’t see money!) I told him that, if he wanted to repay me, I wanted to learn how to speak Russian better. He laughed and said that he wasn’t a teacher, but he does have a lot of books and he could teach me rhetoric.

Right. Rhetoric. In Russian. I was like, “Dude, you know I’m not all that good at TALKING in Russian. You seriously think it’s time to break out the Socrates?”

Maybe I’ll ask him about Russian music. I like to collect music from the places I go, and I know diddly squat about the music here. About the only time I hear Russian music is when I’m in the matshrukas, and then there’s virtually no way to tell who’s singing the song.

To be honest, though, all he would really have to do is talk to me. That’s the best kind of practice there is. I’m first and foremost concerned with learning to speak well, and then I’ll get more into the semantics and the grammar later. I’m moderately literate as it is, mostly because I spend all my time in matshrukas squinting out the windows and trying to read things. I’m not very good with writing, though. My spelling is atrocious, and I only have the alphabet half-memorized. (Of course, I know all the letters, just not necessarily in order.)

When he comes over to feed the dogs tomorrow night, we’re going to have our first lesson. We’ll see how it goes.

But, another shift in my lifestyle recently has to do with feeding the dogs. The dogs here are actually extremely well-fed by Kyrgyz standards: twice a day. And not only are they fed often, they actually get their own kind of food, as opposed to straight table slops. There’s a meal they make for the dogs out of gretchka, potatoes, and water, and this is usually ladled on top of some bread and whatever meat bones the family happens to have.

But coming over twice a day to feed the dogs is a lot of work on their part, and they asked if I would be willing to take over the chore. They’d pay for the food, I’d just have to be the one to feed them. I said that I’d be willing to do it in the mornings, because I’ll definitely be home, but because my schedule here is so unpredictable, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it every night. Now, to be honest, I am home by the nighttime feeding of the dogs more often than not. It’s just that occasionally I’m out later, either on business or just with friends, and I’d feel bad having to worry about the dogs not getting fed.

Of course, the big thing about feeding the dogs was me getting close enough to the beastie dog. It has gotten used to me: it doesn’t bark its head off and strain at its chain anymore when I walk in the yard. However, I’d never actually approached it where it would be in potential striking distance.

The little dog and I have made good friends, though. I like to sit on the couch out back and watch the birds and drink my coffee in the morning. At first, the little dog would keep its distance, but after a couple of days, it started getting closer. Finally, it got within petting distance one day, and I mean, come on, I’m a sap, and gave it scratches. Now, whenever I go to sit on the couch, it pretty much jumps in my lap.

On a side note, I have become very good at pet-talk. You know, “Who’s a good girl? Who’s a good dog? It’s you, it’s you!” I can now do this in Russian. Every day, I get a little closer to the dream, I tell you.

But today I had to go retrieve the food bowl from the beastie’s pen, and so I walked up to its circle of chain. The dog started jumping a little, and I was like, “Look. I’m going to feed you. You can’t bite me.”

So, with a prayer to all the gods I could think of, I stepped in the pen. The beastie didn’t seem interested in more than licking at me, though. Just in case I happened to be a giant loaf of bread. You never know. The little dog helped. Whenever I bent down to the food bowl and the beastie would play-lunge and I would get freaked out, the little one would start barking. Like, “Dude, stop messing around, I want breakfast.”

So, operation feed the dogs was a success. I didn’t get mauled. I did feel a little bad, though, because there was only a heel’s worth of bread leftover from last night, so the bowl was mostly meal. And hot water. (They always pour hot water over the dish before serving it… I guess it makes it easier for the dogs to eat.) Oh well.

Look at me! I haul water, light trash fires, wash laundry by hand, feed dogs, and light the gas furnace! I’m like a little old Russian lady! I should get one of those babushka head scarves. It would be sweet.

I actually did go for the triple-point score and attempt to make my own bread. I bought a stove the other day, managed to haul it back (which was an adventure in and of itself), and got to work happily pounding out some bread dough. I love baking.

Unfortunately, my oven blew up. Yep. I had let the dough rise twice and put it in the preheated oven to bake, and was in the other room getting my Nintendo on, when suddenly there was a giant explosion. I at first thought it might have been the gas, so I leapt out of my bed and sprinted to the kitchen.

…where I promptly slipped on glass shards and took a magnificent fall, reminiscent of my rugby days where getting laid out by a woman twice my size was life’s greatest pleasure and reward. Sigh.

Except for the fact that rugby fields aren’t usually made of linoleum and covered with glass. Usually. So I scratched the fuck out of myself and my oven blew up.

Fortunately, I did not buy the oven from the bazaar. I actually bought it from Beta Stores, because after some price comparison, they were far cheaper there than at the bazaar. Maybe it’s because they explode, but this is just a guess.

I do still have the receipt, though. My program manager is coming over today to check out the house, as she wasn’t able to do so before due to the beastie being on too long of a chain. I’ll ask her about Beta’s return policy. And maybe she’ll help me out there, as I don’t know how to say in Russian, “Dude, your oven blew up all over my kitchen the day after I bought it. There had better either be an exchange or a return involved in this story.”

I figure my chances are better getting a return at a store than at the bazaar. Hopefully. We’ll see.

But, you know what they say. If ever your oven explodes, bake, bake again. Or something like that.

Written Wednesday, December 17, 2008

I really can’t believe it’s already into the latter half of December. Time flies, when you’re eating sheep fat.

They’re already making preparations for the new group of Volunteers to come, which is weird. Now, they’ve actually changed the Pre Service Training date for this country… I came ‘round these parts in July, but the new Volunteers are coming in March. This is being done for a bevy of reasons, but mainly for the problem that the administration is having with the TEFL volunteers. You see, in our second year of service, our COS (close of service) date is technically in September of 2010, but most people go for the one-month early COS date and leave sometime near the middle or end of August.

But the school year here ends in May. Which means that the TEFL volunteers are looking at a whole summer’s worth of no real work with nothing but leaving the country at the end of it. Compounding this problem is the rule that PCVs can’t take annual leave during the first three months or their last three months of service. Now, you can do program travel, which means you can go about the country, but you can’t take annual leave and go anywhere else. Most TEFL volunteers, during their first summer, do a combination of travel and summer camps or do a Habitat for Humanity stint over by the lake, but the second summer is mostly consumed by wrapping up whatever projects are still on the table and getting ready to leave the country to go do your next big thing.

However, this usually doesn’t take a whole three months, and a lot of people get stuck in the country with no work, an inability to travel, and about two months left to do absolutely nothing with. Consequently, a lot of Volunteers early terminate during the last summer, mostly due to boredom and a readiness to get on with things. The other problem is graduate school: some of us have plans on yet more book-learning after this, and if you’re planning on entering graduate school, which starts in September, you’re going to need to be back in America before the last days of August. For some dumb reason, Peace Corps will give people the three-month early COS date if you have a job waiting somewhere, but not for graduate school. Ergo, more ETs.

So they’re moving the PST date to March, which would make the COS date for the new volunteers in May of 2008, the end of the school year. This would also solve the problem of people going to graduate school in September, as three months would be enough time to decompress and get your affairs in order to start studying.

Though, I do see some other problems inherent with this new date, namely that the Trainees would swear in as Volunteers in May… which, for us TEFL, is the end of the school year. So the new kids on the block would be in their villages, knowing nobody, and doing nothing for three months. It’s entirely possible that Peace Corps has some sort of plan to get the new Volunteers involved in camps or something of the ilk, but if they’ve got no plans, I have no idea what they’re thinking. Sure, it was a bit fast to drop straight into teaching classes the weekend after swearing in, but it gave me something to do other than sit at home and stare at the ceiling. Community integration is also bolstered incredibly by work, particularly work at a school: virtually every child between the ages of six and seventeen in this village knows who I am, now. I’ve got a routine (of sorts) and I’m comfortable with it.

To be fair, I guess there’s no real prime time to have people come in. A few years back they actually had people coming to country in, like, November, which drops everybody off in the middle of a frigid Central Asian winter, which probably didn’t do much for the ET rate during PST. In spring, you run up against the end of the school year. Summer, the problems I described above. Middle of winter would just be filled with all kinds of stupid. Kyrgyzstan apparently has the highest ET rate out of all the Central Asian countries and Eastern Europe, so I guess whatever they do to change it can’t make it any worse. (For the curious, I’ve been told that the country with the highest rate period is Jordan, due to the very strict Muslim culture. I’ve actually heard that they’ve had entire groups ET. They’re mostly Muslim here, to be sure, but they also slug vodka straight from the bottle so most people are more casual about it than anything else.)

But, anyway, in the realm of teaching, I’m actually done for the year at the school, all things considered. See, I mostly teach on Thursdays, and because last week was the mysterious Olympiad that I couldn’t attend, there was no class. This week is the term exam, so I don’t do anything but show up and practice the math section of the GRE. (Not that I have any plans on taking that in the very near future, but, uh, I can use all the help I can get when it comes to numbers. It’s… been a while.) Next week the students are going to be taking oral exams, so while I will have to listen and evaluate, no teaching. And then, uh, it’s the end of the year.

Wow.

I don’t really have any concrete plans for my winter break: because my school is heated by coal and not electricity, I only have a month off. And In Service Training, which I have to attend, bisects that month. I had been considering going somewhere for two weeks, but I figure I can save some money and keep myself entertained well enough around these parts, considering my proximity to the capital. Maybe I’ll take in a ballet or a play… or see the circus, if it’s in town. (They actually have a permanent building for the circus, here. Lonely Planet describes the architecture of it as a crash-landed UFO from the 1950s, and I can’t come up with anything more astute than that for it.) I’ll go hang out in the foyer of the Hyatt and pretend I have money. I’m not sure about my classes at the TOEFL center, but if they’re in session, I’ll keep teaching there. Maybe I can pick up a few extra classes in exchange for some more Russian lessons.

This summer, I’ll travel. I’ve heard tickets to Prague are relatively cheap, or maybe Emma will come and visit and we’ll do us some China. I don’t think I’ll be wanting to hit up Thailand or India in July, so I’ll head for somewhat cooler locales.

But for now, winter.

.listen, children, all is not lost

Written Thursday, December 4, 2008

I measure my life in toothbrushes.

One new toothbrush when I came to country. Another when I left my PST host family in September. And yet another when I move tomorrow into my new digs. Ah, dental hygiene. How you so succinctly number my days.

There was a slight blip in the plan, though, mostly owing to the fact that my landlord hasn’t yet removed the monstrous dog guarding the grounds. She said that her son didn’t come by last Saturday to remove the beastie, and that I should wait to move in until Sunday. However, I was all like, “dude, you told me last week I could move in on Friday, I told everybody else that I was moving in on Friday, and come hell or high water, that’s what I’m going to do.”

And so it is.

On another not-moving, note, my brains are becoming absolutely scrambled by all the languages I’m attempting to pack into them. Sometimes, these days, people will talk to me and I don’t know what language they’re trying to use. Oh, sure, I realize that the Americans I know are generally using English, and most of the host country nationals I interact with are using Russian and virtually nobody speaks to me in Japanese, but it’s just all mooshed together these days.

It’s kind of unnerving, really. I still outburst in Japanese occasionally, or answer in Russian or English when I should be using the opposite. Just today when I was lecturing in my classes in English, I could not, for the life of me, remember the word “pepper.” I was talking, and then a strange look crossed my counterpart’s face when I just busted out with “perez” in the middle of an English sentence. She had to supplement the English word when I completely blanked. And I still have a problem with “choot choot,” which means “a little,” as the Japanese “chotto” is just too similar and goddamnit I can’t keep anything straight anymore.

Even weirder is when somebody speaks to me, and I’m only half-listening, and for a couple of moments, I have no idea what language they’re using. Like, I can’t even identify it. Weirder yet is when I understand what they want, but I just don’t know the words. This has even happened to me on the occasions when my current host family was speaking to me in Kyrgyz (which I don’t know why they do, because everybody here knows I don’t speak that language worth a heap of Talas beans). Somebody will say something to me, in any language, and I’ll know exactly what they want, but not which language they’re wanting it in.

I think a lot of it is due to the simplicity of most communication. Having done the whole “dropped in a country where you don’t speak the language” thing twice now, I’ve found it’s amazing how much you can get accomplished by not speaking, or even just using a couple of incorrectly conjugated words. Oh, sure, it’s like the difference between using surgical instruments to get your point across and just beating something with a rock until you get something like what you wanted, but it’s doable. My first two weeks here the only things I could really say with any regularity were “hello” and “good,” but I got by.

Sometimes, I like to think about how well I could express myself if I lived somewhere where everybody spoke English/Russian/Japanese. I mean, that’s three languages worth of talking. Of course, most things I can say best in English, but there are certain turns of phrase that just work better in either Russian or Japanese. Not to mention, there are enough swear words in Russian to fill a dictionary, so I can express my displeasure so much more fluidly these days. I am no longer limited to “shit,” and “fuck,” and “damn,” but I can now tell somebody to go fuck off and sit on a dick. And I suppose it’s not as though I can’t say that in English, but it’s just so much more… emphatic in the Russian.

Which I suppose is a perk to all of this. Japanese is a beautiful language, but the swearing in it is rather limited. Unless you want to sound like a yakusa (which, I mean, everybody probably does) and speak in straight Osaka-ben, but that’s kind of hard to pull off. I’m just not cool enough for those designer shades.

Oh, life. Five years ago, who would have thought I’d be living in Kyrgyzstan, hopelessly screwing up the Russian language with errant Japanese vocabulary? Let’s hope the adventure never ceases.

Funnily enough, I did have a chance to exercise some Japanese the other day. December fifth was International Volunteer’s Day (I know it’s a huge holiday in the States, so bear with me on this), and we celebrated by doing a little performance at a local orphanage. There were American, Japanese, and Spanish volunteers there. The performance went relatively well, considering that we had done zero planning beforehand. Basically, I ended up leading everybody in the YMCA, which I had to make up on the spot. Oh, sure, the REFRAIN of the song is pretty famous, but, you know, there’s the rest of it, too. There was a lot of jumping. And some Macarena. (The Spaniards actually did present the Macarena, and I was like, dude, that’s Mexican.)

But I managed to get into a conversation with some of the Japanese volunteers. It was probably the most fragmented conversation I’ve ever had the grace to be a part of, considering that we were speaking in an equal mix of Japanese and English with Russian thrown in on my part, and Kyrgyz on the Japanese’s part.

One of my directors was watching the whole exchange with a bemused look on his face. After, he asked, “So, how many languages were you speaking in again?” And I was like, “Four. DON’T MOCK ME BECAUSE I CAN’T HAVE A CONVERSATION IN ONE LANGAGE ANYMORE GEEZ THIS IS YOUR FAULT.” He seemed to think it was hilarious. I, on the other hand, was bemoaning the fact that I can’t speak coherently anymore. Lesson learned: Never Be An Expat.

Though, due to that spectacular mess of a conversation I was invited to come to the Japanese Corner in Bishkek. I’ve never heard of these before, but Kyrgyzstan has a Japanese Corner, and American Corners in nearly all major towns. There are also Russian Corners. They’re like little language centers, full of books and usually computer resources. I’m interested in going to the Japanese Corner because perhaps I might get some Japanese lessons if I smile prettily enough. …maybe even for free, because God knows I can’t afford to pay for anything these days. I could offer English lessons in return, I suppose. That’s an arrangement I have with a language school in Bishkek; they got my number through the previous volunteer that lived in my village. I now teach two hours worth of talk classes a week and help out with TOEFL classes occasionally, and in return I get an hour’s worth of Russian tutoring. This is bomb diggity, because it’s actually a language school where they teach expats Russian, so knowledgeable teachers who know how to deal with dumb Americans will be teaching me. I’d be more than happy to make a similar arrangement at the Japanese Corner.

Though, the funny thing about languages, I’ve discovered, is that they’re rather like amoebas in the way they develop in peoples’ brains. They stretch and grow in jelly-like formation, rather than linearly. Let me explain.

In theory, my Japanese is better than my Russian. However, I’ve come to discover that, in many respects, there are certain things that I can describe quite aptly in Russian that I have no idea how to say in Japanese. Now, this is undoubtedly somewhat due to the fact that I haven’t had to use Japanese in any real sense, other than academic, for at least two years. I didn’t take Japanese language classes my last year at college. However, I’ve just gone through a ridiculously rigorous crash course in Russian for three months, and now I use it every day.

But even beyond that, the ways in which I use Russian are vastly different from the ways I used Japanese, even when I was living in Japan. I can still speak remarkably well about studying, and theses, and World War II in Japanese, which are things that I’m clumsy with in Russian at best. However, I’ve become remarkably quick with numbers in Russian, no doubt to all the foraging I do at the bazaar. Also, my vocabulary in terms of foodstuffs in Russian is vastly superior to my Japanese: when I lived in Japan, I was with a host family who provided all my meals (to great excess, in fact), so most of my food vocabulary is limited to restaurant dishes and snack foods. I have no idea how to say “cinnamon” in Japanese. However, I can basically have a native-level conversation about spices in Russian, because I had to know what the hell I wanted to buy before I asked for it.

It’s just interesting because I never really considered the many angles to which you can “know” a language. Obviously, because I can speak every which way in English, I had always thought to be able to speak a language, well, it meant you can speak broadly, about anything. And I suppose that’s the nature of “fluency,” and I am certainly not fluent in either Japanese or Russian, but if certain topics come up in those languages, I can speak on them with a good amount of precision. Obviously, in all three languages I’m good with talking about myself, my history, what I’m doing/going to at any point in time, the basics.

But when it comes down to slightly out-of-the-ordinary topics, a lot of what I can and can’t say in Russian or Japanese is dictated by my lifestyle at the time. I remember a lot of Japanese being incredibly impressed when I told them I was studying the history of Yasukuni shrine and World War II and how it relates to Japanese and world politics today. I friggin’ had that down to a science.

But if they had tried to talk to me about cinnamon, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything but flubber my way through a few sentences. In Russian, I’m all like, “Oh, hells yes, cinnamon. I’m going to bake myself a pie; do you have any baking powder? I need it for the crust.”

“Crust” is another thing I have no idea how to say in Japanese. In Russian it’s “tecsta.” I can, however, say “small electoral district proportional representative parallel system” in Japanese. No joke. It’s “shousenkyoku hireidaihyou heiritsusei.” (For the burningly curious, it’s what Japan’s current voting system is called after the reforms in 1994.) I cannot say this in Russian. I can barely say it in English.

My head: welcome to it.

Written December 6, 2008

Oh sweet, sweet freedom.

So it’s happened. The first time I’ve ever lived alone in non-college-based housing is in Kyrgyzstan. I suppose that’s another mark in the “my life is bizarro” book.

There were some further blips in the plan before it happened, though. Turns out that they locked half the house off to me. The way this place is set up is with a three-season-esque porch in the back, which leads into a hallway area. Four rooms branch off of this hallway: a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. They all have doors, and they locked off the living room and one of the bedrooms. The reasoning behind this is that the mother (woman who actually lives here but is in Russia) would be pissed if she realized there was a stranger in there tromping through all her stuff. I can respect that, but why two rooms? Why not just put everything precious in one room? Sheesh.

When I realized that that’s how shit was going down, I was pissed, because (and I still maintain this) I was never told that the two rooms were going to be closed off. They claim that they did tell me, but if they did it must have been in rapid spitfire Russian.

Once I got over that, though, it’s not so bad. I mean, I’m only one person, so I don’t really need all that much room. And, to be completely honest about it, even with half the house inaccessible, it’s still the most living space I’ve ever had to myself before. In all the other living situations I’ve been in, I only had one room.

I’ve made do, though. Because the two rooms that are closed off are next to each other in the back of the house, I put my large table with the drop leaf in front of them, and I stole a cabinet from the porch area to be a bookshelf. The back of the hallway is now a dining room/work area.

The bedroom has two beds in it, and it turns out one of them is a convertible sofa. Of course, the supports that keep it in sofa position are nonexistent, so I had to go out and find a stool to wedge between the back of the couch and the wall, but goddamn it, it works. I had a second smaller table and a vanity thing in there that I arranged a bit, and a closet that’s mostly full of random old broken radios, but has enough room for my clothes. There was no place to hang clothes, so I removed a shelf from the closet, found some bent nails in the yard, and made a bar by driving some nails into the shelf supports, and putting two more nails into a stick I found. Then, I tied the nails on the stick to the nails in the closet with dental floss. That’s right. I’m the MacGuyver of home decorating. Wben I leave, I can just remove it and replace the shelf.

The extremely nice thing about having a house, though, is inheriting all the things that come with it: namely, cookware. I’m virtually drowning in pots and pans and rolling pins and jars and whatnot. Especially rolling pins: I’ve found seven of them. Why the hell you’d need seven rolling pins is beyond me, but, hey, I don’t hate on the way grandmas roll. (lololololololololo…)

I will have to buy a stove, though. The ranges here work (there’s actually an indoor and an outdoor stove, which is probably more useful during summer than right now), but the stoves don’t. To be honest, I’ve never been in a house here where the stove works. They all use the oversized toaster ovens.

Whatever. I don’t have to buy cookware or utensils, so it won’t be that big of a deal. Peace Corps did give us a settling in allowance, which is plenty to cover a stove. …and a couple of mugs. Not that I don’t dig on the handleless teacups, but sometimes you just need a big heavy mug to wrap your hands around. One of my wiser last-minute purchases back in the States was a travel mug, which has been what I’ve been using almost exclusively since I’ve been here. It’s perfectly fine, but, still, Laura want mug. They’re only like, a dollar apiece anyway.

And I have a rice cooker. That’s right. It’s RICE TIME. And I can cook beans again. Which makes it RICE AND BEAN TIME.

I also appreciate having a yard. There’s an overhang in the back made out of corrugated metal. I like to call it my “lanai.” You know, like they have in Hawaii. Just… more… Kyrgyz.

They’re still trying to get me to keep the huge monster dog. I’m not as freaked out by it as I originally was, but that doesn’t mean I still don’t want it here. (Namely, I’m afraid that if I have some friends over and somebody gets drunk and just decides to go wandering… yeah, could end badly if somebody gets mauled.) The landlord was all like, “Well, if it can’t stay here, where can it go?” And I basically said, “Dude, not my problem. You told me you’d take the dog away if I moved in. If you’ve got no place to put the damn thing, you’d better come up with something.” Of course, my Russian isn’t nearly as good as to come up with something as assholish, so in actuality, I just smiled and shrugged.

I’ve warmed to the little dog, though. It’s not as jumpy or yappy as the ones at my old residence. I do, in theory, know her name, but the problem is that it sounds exactly like “chainik,” meaning “teapot,” which means I can’t remember its actual name.

So I’m just going to call the dog “teapot.” Teapot the dog. Sweet.

But now, instead of a host family, I’ve inherited a landlord family. They’ve been over every day since I’ve been here, mostly to feed the dog and do various repair jobs. Namely, currently, the stove inside doesn’t work. Well, it works, but the rubber tubing connecting the gas to the stove is leaky. I turned it on once and it started hissing at me and then the room smelled like a gas station, so I figured it would be a bad idea to do something like strike a match and attempt to cook.

The son has been the one coming over most often. We had a nice conversation yesterday, which I think finally proved to the family that I actually am not completely hopeless with Russian. It’s just that all the times they were trying to talk to me prior, they were talking about how the gas meter worked and other things that I have absolutely zip vocabulary for. The somewhat downside to this is now that the son kind of knows me, I think he’s worried about me living alone. He came over to light the gas heating today, and even though I was like, “Dude, that’s expensive,” he was like, “But it’s cold and you’ll get sick!”

Oy. One family for another, I suppose. But whenever somebody from the family comes over, they always attempt to turn on the heat, and I’ve found it’s nearly impossible to stop them. Now, basically, I let them turn it on, and whenever they leave, I turn it off again. It seems that they don’t understand that I can’t afford to friggin heat the house all the time. Yes, I know it’s cold in here. However, the rent alone is above and beyond what Peace Corps will pay for housing (which I think is asinine to begin with; the most they’ll give for this area of the country is 2000 som, and it is bonafied IMPOSSIBLE to have an independent living option for so little money here), so paying for heat above it is just not on, particularly because it’s gas heat, which is the most expensive kind there is. Now, for the purposes of winter Peace Corps will give us advance for our living allowances to pay for heating, but the thing is that the money there comes out of my salary for later months, which I need to pay for the friggin’ HOUSE in later months, so it’s more like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. So, I just wear a coat and sleep with a hot water bottle. It works. Fortunately I’ve always had a relatively high tolerance for cold, much higher than my tolerance for heat.

But the landlady is actually a shopowner. She owns a little store that she runs out of the front of her house. I went there today to buy some bread and chocolate condensed milk (mostly because I had never seen it before… it actually tastes remarkably similar to hot fudge). I think it made her happy, because she was probably thinking I had come to complain about something. It’s more expensive to buy things in the small stores than from the bazaar, but it’s a lot closer to where I live, and, hey, it’s worth the five extra som to make the landlady happy.

If nothing else, my living exploits have made me good connections. My old host family is all about the dairy products, and now I’ve got a dry goods store at my disposal. Good times.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about recently is chickens. There actually is a chicken pen here, and I’ve been rolling around the idea of maybe buying a couple of hens for it. I mean, the egg output alone would be worth it, as I tend to go through quite a few eggs. It would also be useful for my vegetable matter refuse. At my old house, they just fed all things like carrot and onion shavings to the dogs, but here I was told that the dogs don’t really eat that sort of thing, so I’ve taken to just throwing it out in the yard.

Obviously, I’d have to do some research on this first, because I don’t really know much about raising chickens. Furthermore, there would be the issue of what to do with them when I had to move, since the person who lives in this house is due back in about a year. The options would be a) leave them here, if the family is willing to have them, b) take them with me, if I end up somewhere where I can have chickens, or c) eat them. And, uh, I don’t know how much I’m up for killing my own chickens.

If I ever have kids, they’re going to be so messed up. Like, “Mooooom, why do you keep everything in jars? Why can’t we have Tupperware like normal people? And whyyyyy do we have to have chickens? And can’t we get indoor plumbing it’s like 2020-“

And I’ll be all like, “NO IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE STOP BITCHING IT’S TIME FOR THE DAILY FIVE HOUR NO ELECTRICITY TIME AND GO HAUL SOME WATER WE HAVE TO WASH THE LAUNDRY BY HAND AND LIGHT THE TRASH FIRE.”

All of which I did today, by the way.

And then for dinner we’ll have umiboshi onigiri and red miso fish with milk tea and matcha soft cream. Because, mmm, that shit’s the stuff. God, I miss Japanese food. And National Coney Island.

Written December 11, 2008

Working here is a trip sometimes, I tell you.

Today was the rayon-wide Olympiad. Rayons here are kind of like counties, I guess, and Olympiad is kind of like quiz bowl, at least as much as it was explained to me. I was assigned to help the students prepare for it, as well as come up with something for the speaking and listening parts.

For speaking, I came up with fifteen talking topics, that each of the students would choose, have a couple of minutes to prepare for, and give a two-minute speech on. Basically, impromptu, just like the things I used to love the hell out of in speech class. This is actually harder than it would seem to come up with, since you have to think of a topic that is broad enough to talk about for two minutes, is easily understandable, and yet requires no prior knowledge on the part of the speaker. After all, it’s mainly to judge the English abilities of the student, not their knowledge of geography or history or whatever.

Listening, I originally suggested maybe some books on CD, as I burned copies from a bunch of different level books before I came here. However, my counterpart said that it should probably have something to do with the national curriculum on at least a nominal level, so that meant English-speaking countries. No problem, I just wrote little blurbs and was planning on reading them aloud. For America, I wrote about the Civil Rights movement, for England the Beatles, and for Canada a selection about Quebec wanting to succeed. Then, six or seven questions about the content.

Not too difficult, really. Weirdly, though, yesterday the zavouch (assistant principal, kind of) said that they were just going to use the material from last year, and that I didn’t need to go because there would be other volunteers going. (Not Peace Corps Volunteers… there actually is a Volunteer close to where the Olympiad was held, but his grandfather just died, so he’s in the States at the moment for the funeral.) It hadn’t been too much work to come up with the prompts or anything, but I still wanted to go just so I could see what it was like, even if I wasn’t going to be directly involved. I mean, next year I’ll be able to prepare students better if I know exactly what they’re going to be up against, right?

So I went this morning to the school, but the director told me again that I couldn’t go, because there would be other volunteers there and that they would protest if I showed up, apparently even if I just watched. These things are just not worth arguing about, so I went home. I suppose if somebody is thrusting a day off in my face, I’ll take it. Uncle, uncle.

I still think the whole thing is weird, though. If I were organizing something like an Olympiad, and other volunteers showed up, no matter whom they were, I’d be thrilled. Particularly if they were native English speakers: it’s more people to help me out, after all. And even if I had no use for them, I don’t think I’d be in any form bothered by their presence. I’ll just ask my counterpart about it on Monday. Namely, about whom these “volunteers” are and what their beef is. Tomorrow I don’t have class anyway, due to the schedule, and then there’s the weekend, so it gave me a four-day holiday from teaching at the school. I also didn’t do any real teaching this week, as Tuesday I was preparing the listening and speaking sections that didn’t end up getting used, and Thursday is my main day of teaching, and classes were canceled due to the Olympiad.

Whenever I get too frustrated with work, I like to watch The Office. It could always be worse.

In lieu of teaching today, I hopped over to the bazaar and bought about thirty eggs, a half-kilo of green tea, some butter, and some bread.

Thirty eggs is kind of a lot, but that’s how they sell them here in cartons. You can buy any amount of eggs you’d like, of course, but it’s cheaper to buy them in bulk. To be honest, though, I do go through a lot of eggs as it is, considering that they’re a great protein source and cheaper and easier to cook than meat. Also, a lot of the meat here is absolutely riddled with fat and gristle (not marbled like a beautiful cut, we’re talking globs and blobs), which isn’t exactly the way I like my beef pot pie. However, I have been told that if you ask for “black meat,” butchers usually have some on hand: these are the leaner cuts. And supposedly they’re cheaper than the regular stuff, as most Kyrgyz really enjoy eating fat. So, I suppose we’ll see.

Another thing I need to bite the bullet and buy is a stove. Then I will make some pot pie. And bread pudding. And roasted vegetables. And mm.

Today I attempted to make bean burgers, since I already had most of the ingredients on hand, and I wanted to celebrate my regained ability to cook beans. The recipe is fairly straightforward: cook the beans until soft but not mushy, and sauté some onions, carrots, and bell peppers until soft. Mash and mix together with an egg and some breadcrumbs, season with cumin, salt, and black and red pepper. Form patties, and cook on a griddle until done.

Unfortunately I didn’t have enough breadcrumbs on hand, and was too lazy to make more, so the patties were too wet to hold form. I ended up just scrambling it up and eating it with a fork on the plate. Still good.

Had minor landlady issues yesterday. She came over and basically started criticizing the way I had the house set up, insisting that I should put my clothes there or the table here or whatever else. This has happened to me at all three places I’ve lived here, and I have to say it’s equal parts mystifying and annoying. Look, it’s my shit, why do you care what shelf I have it on in the closet? And if I want the table in that corner, what difference does it make? I’m the one that lives here, goddamnit.

She also got upset with me because I didn’t understand half the things she was saying, and then she started yelling at me because of it. This is endlessly frustrating. Russian is a hard language, okay? I only studied it for about three months, have been speaking it for six, and I’m obviously doing the best I can. Maybe if you spoke a little slower or used less difficult vocabulary, I might understand it more. I understand even less when you start yelling, because not only are you speaking faster, I’m wondering how the hell I made you so upset, and still can’t understand what you’re saying.

I suppose a lot of it is being used to dealing with foreigners. Whenever I speak to somebody who knows English as a second language here, I always make sure to enunciate clearly, remove the idioms from my speech, and speak at a slower clip than I normally do. Not because I think people here are stupid, but I know that operating in a second language can be difficult and unless you’ve lived in an English-speaking country for a long period of time, most idioms aren’t going to make any sense. Man, I’ve been there. To be completely honest, I am there.

I also have to re-prove my competence at doing household tasks. The landlady likes to tell me things like, “wash dishes when you’re done with them,” and “make your bed.” I’m like… dude, all the dishes are washed and the bed is made. The hell?

I’ve started using the gas heat, because she said that if I don’t, it could cause damage to the heating system. Fine, fine. Today I had a little adventure in lighting the furnace, though. The son had showed me how to do it – turn on the gas pipe, cover the button on the furnace with the latch, light the end of the metal stick on fire, and stick it so the gas catches. Well, today I did just that, but it turns out the gas was on too high, and it kind of blew fire halfway across the kitchen. It’s all right; I didn’t need those eyebrows.

When the son came over the feed the dogs, he offered to light the furnace for me, and when I told him I had already done it he got a mild look of panic in his eyes, but he came and checked it out and said everything was fine. Boo-yah. …I’m just glad he wasn’t there when I actually lit it, but I’ll get better with practice. Hopefully. Maybe I’ll just get crispier with practice.

Thank God I have a sense of humor, I guess. It’s been the most useful thing I’ve brought. Well, that or the duct tape.