.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!