.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.