.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.