Friday, October 17, 2008

.like the pine trees lining the winding road

Written October 16, 2008

Work has started to settle down somewhat.

They’ve finally solidified my teaching schedule down to eighteen hours a week, which is definitely an improvement on the ten-hour schedule they had me on before. Not that I necessarily minded the five-day weekend, but, I mean, I did come here for something to do.

As with many things here, the school day is different than in the States. The day is broken up into the morning and the afternoon; high-school age students go to school in the morning, and middle/elementary-age students go in the afternoon. There are six periods in each half of a day: the high schoolers go from 7:30 in the morning until 12:30 in the afternoon, periods one through six, and the younger kids go from 12:40 until 5:35, also periods one through six.

There is no lunch period, though there is a cafeteria that serves up basic fare like pelminis (sort of like Hot Pockets), cookies, a set lunch, juice, and, of course, chai. I can only assume that this is primarily for the teachers, as I figure that the older kids just eat lunch at home, and the younger set eat before they arrive. There is also a library (that I’ve never been in) and a gym that I’ve never seen used. They don’t have PE or art or any real electives. In fact, I think the only choice they get is if they want to study English or German. (In this, English is the clear preference, because I end up with classes of forty students while the German teacher has classes of six. Sometimes, I wish I taught German.)

Frankly, I’m of the opinion that the students don’t go to school nearly long enough. Of course, I’m a product of the seven-hour school day, and people look at me like I’ve got horns growing out of my head when I tell them that, in America, we go to school like it’s a job. But on the days when I don’t have to go into school until the afternoon, my younger host sister is always all up on me like white on rice, since her parents are at work and her older sister’s at school, whining that she’s bored. I’m always like, “You need to be at school, then!”

Anyway, the grades are divided into “classes,” for example there’s 11a, 11b, 11v, and 11g. I have no idea how they decide the divide-ups in grades, but I have heard rumors that the “a” classes are supposedly the most advanced, while the “g” classes are, well, the lowest on the rung. I have no idea if this is actually true or not, as this information comes from other volunteers rather than from my school, but I have noticed that my “a” classes tend to be easier to teach.

But, the kids are assigned these groups when they enter school, and they take all their classes with the same group for their entire school career. That is, unlike American schools, where students are assigned (or choose) different classes and thus each individual has a different schedule, in Kyrgyzstan class 11a has math first hour, and then English, and then Russian, and so on.

Additionally, as I think I mentioned before, school is only mandatory until ninth grade. However, unlike in America, a great percentage of students here don’t continue their education in the public schools, instead opting to go to “college,” where they finish a condensed version of secondary school in one year rather than two, and then start to learn a trade. It’s essentially vocational school. Students who stay in the secondary schools take classes for another two years, and then have the option of going to “institute,” or what Americans call college. This resulted in mass confusion when I first got here and was telling people that I went to college… people would raise an eyebrow and ask me if I had learned to be a hairdresser or a cook. I hate saying I went to “institute,” though. It makes me feel like I went to a mental asylum. (I did go to college very near an old, creepy abandoned mental asylum, though, which I guess is close enough.)

The vast majority of the classes I teach are in the mornings as I’m contractually only supposed to be a secondary school teacher. My main counterpart and I have rigged it so that she primarily teaches the first class of the week – high schoolers take two classes a week in each subject – and I primarily teach the second. This is nice because it means I can basically write my lesson plans during the first class, as my counterpart does most of the teaching, and I only step in to clarify something or answer a question occasionally. When I teach, she basically operates as translator, when the kids don’t know what the hell I’m asking them to do.

Most of my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, periods two through six. I get there for first period, though, because this is when I can discuss things with my counterpart, as she’s busy as hell the rest of the day and I can barely get a question in edgewise. It’s not bad, though, I only have to wake up at six in the morning twice a week, while the other five days I can essentially sleep as late as I want. Plus, as I’m not teaching, I can take my time getting to school, and I have a few minutes to prepare. On the days when I come in the middle of the school day to teach, I always feel a bit… well, rushed.

One of the other bizarre things about the school I teach at are the bells. Namely, the location of the switch that triggers them. The damn thing is just sitting out in the hallway, like a light switch. This means that anybody just walking down the hallway can set it off – including students. It’s not unusual for me to be in the middle of teaching a class when the bell will just randomly go off, likely because some student didn’t want to sit through the rest of his math class or whatever. Even weirder, the bell trumps the actual time, so even if it gets set off by an unauthorized person with twenty minutes left in the period, class is still considered “over.” And, of course, this screws up the schedule for the rest of the day. Who engineered that brilliance?

But, teaching as a whole isn’t bad. Working with the motivated students is definitely worthwhile. However, dealing with the unmotivated ones is ridiculously frustrating, as there’s really very little I can do with them. If students just aren’t working, I make rounds and ask in my angry Russian school-marm voice, “Why aren’t you writing? What are you doing?” I have become expert in these phrases. Usually, it’s enough to get a sheepish look and at least an attempted impression that they’re going to do work.

But with disruptive students that don’t care how much I yell at them or plead with them are another story altogether. As I mentioned earlier, my eighth grade class is just ridiculous because it’s so large, and it’s impossible for me to control it alone. Even with my counterpart, it’s rough going. There is a gang of boys who always sits in the back and basically ignores everything I or my counterpart do, and is generally disruptive.

Corporeal punishment is not unusual around these parts, but I don’t particularly want to employ it, and my counterpart doesn’t either. Unfortunately, there’s very little disciplinary support in schools, which is probably why so many teachers resort to smacking kids around. Beyond the fear of getting physically struck, there’s very little real motivation to behave, as teachers are technically not allowed to kick students out of class, getting sent “to the principal’s office” is unheard of, the school never calls home about students, and there’s a de facto rule against failing. In the case of the eighth graders, I would definitely assign seats to keep the troublemakers farther apart, but unfortunately there are not enough chairs for the students to sit in, making assigning seats impossible. Uhh.

I favor humiliation. Getting singled out is about one of the worst things that can happen here, collectivist culture and all. One day, I dragged one of the boys to the front of the class and basically proceeded to tell him he was stupid. Not exactly one of my most “encouraging students to learn” moments, but he had been in the back of the classroom playing with the ringtones on his cell phone until I took it away, and then he kept on pulling some girl’s hair who was actually trying to participate in the class.

Finally, I stopped the exercise I was trying to coax the rest of the class through, and asked him to complete a sentence. Of course, he hadn’t been paying attention the entire time, so he had no idea what in the hell was going on.

My Russian is still not all that great, but I have enough to be able to lecture at this point. “Why is my Russian better than your English even though I’ve only been studying it for three months? Because you don’t listen. Why don’t you listen?”

You could have heard a pin drop. I made him stand in the corner for the rest of the period. The thing about lecturing in Russian is that it’s usually extremely effective… provided that I don’t mess up the language. The word that really makes me nervous is “to write,” which, if you stress it incorrectly, turns into “to pee.” Yeah. I never say it in front of the class, because I’m just not willing to risk the mistake. Which, I mean, is kind of difficult, given that “to write” is a pretty common classroom word, but I just want to practice it until I get the pronunciation down to a science to save me the repercussions of telling a class to pee in their notebooks. Best case, it would send the class into hysterics, worst case somebody would actually listen to me for once.

Then there was the Hitler guy. You see, there actually used to be a huge population of Germans that lived here, many here during World War II. Their legacy looms about still, even though most of their descendants have repatriated themselves. There are towns here called “Luxemburg, Kant, Rotburt,” and other some such. Unfortunately, part of the legacy they left is that occasionally the Kyrgyz like to shout out “Hail Hitler” to anybody who happens to be of European decent. (Or, rather, “Hail Gitler.” I have no idea why the “H” got replaced with a “G.”)

One of the eighth grade hooligans decided to “Hail Hitler” me in front of the class, where I proceeded to storm over (probably with a very frightening look on my face, judging by the way the class shut up and the kids leaned away), grabbed him by the shirt, and walked him out of the classroom. No, I’m not supposed to kick kids out of class, but I’m not even going to put up with that shit. I told him that when he actually understood what the hell he was saying, he could come back.

Frankly, if I was teaching alone, I’d probably be kicking kids out left and right. See, another one of the oddities about the system here is that if kids don’t show up to class, it’s considered the teacher’s fault. The result of this is that some teachers, rather than actually teach the class, will instead roam the halls looking for errant students. My counterpart is awesome and doesn’t do this, but I think the school knows where their butter is, and she’s an amazing teacher, so they don’t nag on her as much.

But I have no real desire to teach kids who don’t want to learn, so if I didn’t have my counterpart to help me manage the unruly ones, I’d just kick ‘em out. To be honest, I think it’s a better arrangement for everybody; the students who want to learn get more attention because I don’t have to spend valuable class time screaming at miscreants, the miscreants get to go off and vandalize something, and it’s less stressful for me.

But one of the more annoying parts is that, in addition to being a conversational English teacher, I’m supposed to be teaching about English-speaking countries, as stated before. However, this week I just decided to hell with it, because it was damn near impossible to combine the two and have it be an actually efficient lesson. My counterpart, though, still urges me to teach the students about the countries, because apparently there are questions asked about them at the national exams.

Which, I mean, frustrates me, because all I get is 45 minutes a week with these kids. It is physically impossible for me to teach both a comprehensive English lesson AND a social studies class in this time. Especially because my Russian isn’t strong enough to teach a class about foreign countries in it, so I would have to teach the whole thing in English, with my counterpart translating, so it would be extremely slow. I mean, if it’s more important for the kids to know about Australia than conditional statements, I can dig it, but it means that the English lesson is gonna get shelved. And ANY Kyrgyz teacher can teach kids about Australia. I’m here because I speak English, not because I know a hell of a lot about England. (I don’t. I actually know more about Asia. Heh.) Plus, not to mention, there’s no guide to what the students need to know about these countries. My counterpart just told me to teach “the most important things,” but, I mean, what are “the most important things” about New Zealand? The capital is Auckland, my roommate from college studied there, there are a lot of sheep, they call themselves Kiwis, the Lord of the Rings was filmed there, they have a really good rug-

No, wait, this just became awesome. The most important thing about New Zealand is clearly the All Blacks. Most New Zealanders would probably agree.

Fuck yeah, teaching.

Written October 14, 2008

There are good days and there are bad ones.

On the bad days I lay in bed in my dark room devoid of direct sunlight or electricity and bemoan the fact that, despite the fact that I consider my life to have been at least moderately successful thus far, I don’t have a pot to piss in. Literally. On the good days, I think that at least I have a hole with a roof over it, when, at the bare minimum, all you really need is the ground.

When storm clouds gather and I just don’t think I can take it anymore – the flies, the heat, the cold, the endless flash-drag-breathe of gold teeth smoking lips forming words heavy and precious like Faberge eggs scattering away, untouchable, unknowable, always lost – I breathe and try to take solace in vices that aren’t quite mine. Vodka, and tea. This is post-Soviet country, and there’s nothing these things can’t cure, comrade. Clink the glasses, curse the government, down it all, take another round. (This is the ritual for both beverages.)

There is a certain curiousness to this experience, which I guess just comes with the territory, like angry natives. It’s just so lonely, and there’s no other word I can find in all the languages I know to describe it better or less petulantly.

I have definitely started to irrationally hate the word “hello.” While few students are willing to converse in English, most are more than happy to lob their single confident word at the lone foreigner, a two-syllable bomb that explodes on contact and then spreads like a cancer through the hallways or the street until every being with a voicebox is chanting it. It’s my daily collective greeting, an unholy symphony on my way to work, at work, during work, on my way home from work, and at home, where my family speaks Kyrgyz while I’m trying to learn Russian and each unfamiliar noise just beats sour because I don’t understand and God if there’s anything I hate it’s not understanding. And the word “hello.”

Sometimes, when the class is giggling over my mangled Russian or they’re trying to cheat me in the bazaar because they figured out I’m foreign, I just want to pick everybody up by the neck – the merchants, the choir of hello-ers – and scream, “Don’t you know how goddamn hard this is?”

But, I mean, it would be pointless because they don’t. Somehow, I don’t think most people do, because most of us aren’t harebrained enough to go gallivanting off to a country that most people haven’t even heard of without learning any of the native languages and just living with a family and trying to work at the school. It takes a special kind of person to be that variety of stupid.

And, well, that’s me.

It’s not all bad, either. Sometimes I’ll be teaching and somebody’s eyes will go from cloudy confusion to yes and I just want to punch the air in victory because, hey, that’s something. When I conduct transactions in Russian semi-successfully, or see the mountains looming over the city after a rain, or my neighbor’s three-year-old shrieks in joy when I come up the walk (he can’t speak Kyrgyz very well yet, so he hasn’t gotten to “hello”), it’s something, it’s a small thing, a button to tuck in my pocket to worry at when noun declension and the word “hello” threaten to make it all come undone.

Other volunteers are going home. They go back to America all the time; I remember a game I used to play when I was younger, with a large clear plastic tube. Halfway through the tube a bunch of holes were drilled, and you’d insert small plastic sticks perpendicularly through the plastic cylinder, and pour marbles in the top. One by one, you’d remove the plastic sticks and marbles would drop out as the supports lessened; finally, somebody would pull the last one and all the marbles would tumble down to the bottom of the shaft. Well, the supports are lessening and the marbles here are dropping; they have various reasons, too sick, too little structure, just fed up. Sometimes I wonder if the ground’s just going to fall out from under me, and I, too, will drop to the bottom and be on a plane back West, a casualty of so many things that could go wrong.

And if I did at some point, I don’t think that anybody would rightfully blame me for doing so. I mean, this is ridiculously difficult. I could just throw up my hands and be like, “Bitches, please.” But then… I know, for the rest of my life, there would be the small voice in my head, somewhere around my central fissure whispering, “Hey, you, quitter. Yeah, that’s you. Quit-terrrrrr. Who quit? Oh, that was you. Can you spell it? Q-U-I-T-T-E-R. What’s it in Russian? Oh, wait, you don’t know because you QU-“ …and I’d just as soon freeze to death in a Siberian winter with no electricity than deal with THAT.

But, if the quit urge has risen, now is not yet the time. Am I a hundred percent happy here? Well, no. But, to be fair, I’ve never been a hundred percent happy anywhere, so it’s unreasonable to hold this experience up to the bar of “completely satisfied.” Besides, I wasn’t exactly aiming for happy while doing this, because I don’t know what the hell I want. It’s hard to find happiness when you’re not even sure what you’re looking for. I do like being pleasantly surprised, though, and I figure that there’s a slim chance I might find it while knocking about. Maybe snowballs do have a chance in hell, if they end up in the Devil’s Frigidaire. You never know, and that’s my motto, my mantra, my reality.
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I am an amalgam of homesickness; I long for random pieces and places of experience and thus miss them in mosaics. I am homesick for the rolling hills and college ivy of Massachusetts, the old stained couch that’s too big for my living room in Michigan, the random bump in the lawn I named “county hill” in Indiana, my grandmother’s red tool shed in Kentucky, and the bamboo fountain I walked by every day on my way to the train station in Kyoto. These all attack me at different times, and it irritates the hell out of me because, no matter what I do, I can never have all these things. Aren’t you supposed to be homesick for one goddamn place rather than a schizophrenic salad of misplaced nostalgia for random things?

What I do have is rogue gypsy nucleotides messing with my DNA, a job, and a hole in the ground to piss in. Which, despite all my complaining, ain’t all that awful.

I like to think about my (hopefully) dignified, respectable future. Mostly, what I want now is to smile behind my cocktail at those future respectable dinners, where there will be unquestioned electricity and less sheep fat than there is now, to smile beyond the rattle of dinnerware and moderated use of the word “hello,” when people tell me that they want to see the world.

I will smile because I will have lived it.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

.let me bring you love from the fields

Written October 7, 2008

Coffee is a precious, precious commodity here.

Tea, of course, is ubiquitous. I can barely walk three feet in this country without getting what me and some other volunteers have dubbed “chaied.” “Chai,” is, of course, the Russian and the Kyrgyz word for “tea.” In my training village, whenever we went over to each other’s houses, it always ended up with a lengthy chai-ing, or if we really had to get somewhere by a certain time, we would sneak into the compound and tap on windows, hoping not to alert the host mother on premises. There is no such thing as “eat and run” here. If you get roped into getting chaied, you’ll be there for about an hour, at least.

Not that I am really complaining, I guess. Sometimes it bothers me in a distant way, because, you know, I was raised with the maxim “time is money,” and it’s kind of difficult to slow down. Even when I have nothing in the world that I have to be doing, I always feel that I should be doing something with myself. Damn Protestant work ethic. But, on the other hand, it’s kind of nice/amusing to be in a place where drinking tea is a perfectly acceptable excuse for being late.

But anyway, it’s chai for breakfast, chai for lunch, chai for dinner, and chai for chai chisov, or “tea time.” It’s a good thing that I like tea. I probably drink, on average, at least twenty cups a day. When I lived with my Turkish host family, it was black tea with an inordinate amount of sugar (I’m still mildly surprised that my internal organs didn’t become candied), and with my Kyrgyz family it’s green tea with honey. Most of the time I forgo the honey in my tea, because I spent too much time in Japan and it always hurts me a little when people try to sweeten green tea. But, sometimes I partake in the abomination because the honey here is like God.

But coffee is still my hot drink of choice. Color me American. During PST, when the host family provided all three of my meals I mentioned to them that I liked coffee in the morning, and they promptly went out and bought me some instant. Now, all things considered, I loathe instant, but they were kind enough to go out and get it for me, so I drank it. Another perk is that it was essentially a couple scoops of fake coffee with a load of sugar and fresh milk, so it was actually pretty damn good. Not what I would consider real coffee, but good.

Since I cook my own breakfast and lunch now, I’ve broken out the supplies I brought with me from America. Two pounds of dark coffee, that have be laying in wait for me like the promised land ever since I got off the plane. Obviously, they’re not quite as fresh as I would like, considering that I had to have them ground before I left the States because grinders here cost like, a billion som, which is more som than I’ve got. But they’re real coffee beans, and every morning I get a fresh-brewed pot complements of my French press.

I like cream with my coffee, and I loved having fresh milk in the morning, but it’s just too much trouble to finagle it myself. You see, I’m actually very lucky in that I figured out that my host mother works at the bazaar, and sells dairy products. This means I can buy milk and other sundry dairy things direct from her, and I have full confidence that they won’t kill me. So, I have an endless supply of milk products, which, for a milkfat maven like myself, is heaven.

However, because they’re not pasteurized, that means I have to boil the milk before I can use it in anything, and most mornings I can’t be arsed to boil milk for my coffee when it’s six in the morning and there’s no electricity and it’s freezing and I just want my damn hot beverage.

So, I have joined the cult of Frima. Frima is a brand of non-dairy creamer, and for some reason, it has a cult following among quite a few Volunteers. I have no idea why, even though I’m a part of this cult, and that’s how good it is. It’s just in such a cheery red and white package, and it’s so damn useful. I use it in my coffee, when I need to thicken soups or porridge, and it’s cheap, too.

I also like to have after-dinner coffee. For a couple of days I would use fresh coffee grounds for my second cup, and while this was fabulous, it was quickly depleting my supply. Ground coffee is pretty rare about these parts, and unless I wanted to resort to instant again, I had to stop. Now, I make fresh coffee in the morning, and then just keep the grounds for reuse again at night. The second brewing is considerably weaker, but I’ve found that if I mix it with a copious amount of condensed milk, it makes a decent beverage. Again, not quite the same as real coffee, but it’s not as though I’ve made a point at turning my nose up at sweetened Starbucks concoctions; this is essentially the poor man’s version of that. Or, rather, the "Peace Corps Volunteer" version, which means the VERY poor man's version.

Condensed milk is one of those things that I never really considered until I got here. Of course, I knew it existed and I’d used it a couple of times while baking, but I never ate it on its own or used it for a sweetener. They do it all the time here – at my first host family, I got served bread with a bowl of condensed milk for breakfast on numerous occasions. They also dip cookies in it, and use it to sweeten tea. It’s relatively cheap, about a dollar a can, and pretty good.

Of course, they don’t have a can opener here, so I open it the old-fashioned way: stabbing it with a knife. This always makes life a little more exciting. Will I get to enjoy tasty condensed milk, or will I have to go to the hospital to get my finger sewn back on? Who knows? Stay tuned!

I also love the cream here. Called smetana, it’s totally different than cream in the states, in that it’s spreadable rather than pourable. I smear it all over my bread and am a happy, happy expat. It’s kind of like cream cheese, with the exception that I don’t like cream cheese and I really like smetana. (Beta Stores does carry Philadelphia Cream Cheese, at about fifteen dollars a tub. Makes me happy that I don’t like the stuff; at least it’s not tempting.) Another thing that I love here is the cottage cheese. I’ve never been a huge fan of cottage cheese in the States, but here it’s absolutely divine. It’s a lot drier than the stuff in America, to the point of being crumbly. The Kyrgyz either eat it with bread or just from a spoon, but I like to mix it with cinnamon and sugar.

Cinnamon is, weirdly, kind of a foreign thing here, though they sell it at the bazaar. It’s cheap, too. The way they sell spices at the bazaar is out of large bags; you pick what you want and they dole it out in shot glass-sized measuring cups. I got two shot glasses of ground cinnamon for twenty som, or about sixty cents. However, my host family had no idea what it was, even when I told them the Russian name for it. I was like, who the hell buys the cinnamon? Maybe the Russians like it.

Anyway, in my last post, I got a couple of questions about how I deal with living in a more conservative country than America. It’s a good question.

The thing to remember is that most countries in the world are more conservative than America. Might be kind of hard to believe if you watch Fox News, but whatever the politics may be, Americans, in general, are pretty live and let live in personal matters, aside from a snide comment here and there. Now, obviously I wouldn’t tell Matthew Shepard that, and that’s not to say that bigotry and other dumb things and people don’t exist in spades at home. But, generally speaking, you can do what you want.

Kyrgyzstan is more socially conservative than America. But the ways in which it’s conservative don’t really affect me all that much in my everyday life. Now, another factor to keep in mind is that I live right outside of Bishkek, which is the biggest and most Westernized city the country can offer. There are certain strips in Bishkek where I walk down it and see bars and hair salons movie theaters and 24-hour grocery stores and think that, wow, this could be any city in America. …then oftentimes I turn the corner and there’s a herd of cows grazing in the median or a gigantic statue of Lenin and I’m instantly disabused of the notion, but the point is made. Most of the people my age dress the way that fashionable teenagers would dress in America.

The southern part of the country is Uzbek-dominated, and, as a whole, the Uzbeks take their Islam a little more to the letter than the Kyrgyz do, so it’s far more conservative. Headscarfs, long sleeves in the middle of a sweltering summer, and head-to-toe coverings are far more common in the south. In the north, a lot of the older women wear the hijab, but most of the younger women forgo it, particularly in the city. And most of the women who do bother with headcoverings only wrap their hair up; they don’t seem to mind about exposing their necks.

For me, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised that the way that I normally dress coincides quite well with Kyrgyz expectations of “appropriate” dress. The one major thing that I had to give up was wearing spaghetti-strap style tank tops with no bra, but I generally only did that around the house/dorm in America anyway, so it wasn’t a total loss. I should probably say, though, that I’ve never made any attempt to dress fashionably, by any standards. I actually have a maxim that I follow when I pick out clothes.

I’ll pick up an article, and then ask myself, “Would a ninja wear this?”

Ninjas, as a rule, do not wear anything sparkly, ruffly, skimpy, or restrictive. Ninjas eschew high heels. They like clothing that’s soft, comfortable, and allows for movement in all directions. They are very fond of hippie skirts and jeans. (The school where I studied ninjitsu was obviously a little unorthodox.)

Aside from me being weird in the head, I’ve never had any aspirations to be “pretty,” in the strict sense. If people are going to remember/like/be attracted to me, it’s going to be for something other than the cut of a skirt. Basically, this means that I wear nothing but jeans and t-shirts, and when I dress up it’s in plain t-shirts and black slacks. If I liked low cut tops and high-cut skirts, I might have more problems.

The other day, a friend of mine from PST came up to the city for some reason or another, and we met for drinks. As we were walking back to Peace Corps HQ, she was talking about the village she lives in, and how she missed being able to dress up and wear cute shoes, because they’re not appropriate where she lives and they’d get ruined by the dirt streets anyway. Then she looked at me, in Carhartt’s and a plain heather-gray shirt with sneakers, and exclaimed, “And you’re so close to all these things, and you couldn’t care less!”

Which isn’t entirely true. I’m extremely happy to be so close to the city, but I don’t feel the need to wear three-inch spikes on my shoes to showcase my pleasure. Different strokes, I guess.

But, the point is, nothing in my wardrobe is really offensive to the Kyrgyz. I get complimented on how “appropriate” it is all the time, actually. Remember that old yellow skirt that I wore basically like a second skin? They love it here. I walk around the house in it, and everybody gives me thumbs up and “good job”s.

As for conservative attitudes, especially towards women… well, this both works in my favor and against it. When I asked to cook my own meals it wasn’t considered unusual in the slightest, and if I need to do anything that has to do with housework, it isn’t questioned. As I mentioned earlier, if I wash some dishes it puts them on the moon.

It can be somewhat annoying, though, to be constantly barraged with “are you married?” and looks of wonder and awe when I answer in the negative. I’ve mostly made my peace with it, though – I’ve equated it with the Western “What’s your job?” If I didn’t have a job at 23, that would be weird and I’d probably get some looks. My Russian when I’m talking about why I’m not married is flawless, because I’ve had to give the explanation so many times.

But, the same thing here applies as when I lived in Japan: I have an automatic get-out-of-cultural-expectations-free card. Nobody here actually expects me to be a Kyrgyz woman, and I’m fortunate for that much understanding. It always amuses me when people list off men who would be over the moon to marry an American, since I’m pretty sure that most of them would be exceedingly unhappy with me as a wife. I can’t do most of the things that are expected from wives here nearly as well as Kyrgyz women can, and I really have no inclination to try.

But they mostly leave me to my own devices. I told my family that I used to drink beer with dinner all the time, and my younger sister said that it was shameful, but I just shrugged and said “America is different.”

And, well, it is.

Written October 8, 2008

Fire is such a finicky, difficult, rudimentary, and absolutely necessary thing.

I was in pretty dire need of doing some laundry. (I am actually considering renaming this blog “The Laundry Chronicles,” because it seems to be all I ever write about.) I was sitting around wondering when I was going to do it, and then realized that, actually, I was going to have to start the process entirely on my own. Now, I’ve been actually doing my own laundry since the start of this whole business, but I’ve never had to heat my own water. I had always timed it to be directly after meals when I lived with my PST host family, or when the rest of the family was doing laundry, and thus there was always hot water around.

My new host family does not have a petchka, or a wood/cowpat burning stove. Or rather, I suppose they do, but it’s in the guesthouse and never used. For normal cooking, they use a gas oven, and I have since become a master of being able to light it with matches. I’ve only burned myself a few dozen times, and no clothes have been casualties of the experience, which I consider to be a small miracle. But, as with the last family, it’s far too pricey to heat the amount of water needed for laundry on the gas stove. When it gets to be laundry day, they use a smaller contraption that actually is supposed to be used as a grill, though I think they use it for heating water for laundry more often. It’s shaped like a C, and is about three feet in diameter. There’s a slotted grill top that’s next to it, but it also happens to be able to hold a big kazan or giant cooking pot. They fill the pot with water, light the fire underneath, and eventually, you get some heated water.

Among the many things that I’ve managed to pass through life without knowing is how to light a fire. The closest thing I’ve ever come to it is a charcoal grill, but that only requires soaking the charcoal in flammable liquid, throwing in a match, and praying to God that you don’t light the electrical wires strung above the town on fire. Here, of course, it’s different, namely in that there’s not as many electrical wires to worry about.

In addition, there’s no charcoal and no lighter fluid. I spent about twenty minutes wandering about the property, collecting various items that looked flammable and appeared to be trash. I ended up with a small pile of cardboard egg cartons, some sticks, flattened cardboard boxes, and an old straw broom. I arranged the broom and the sticks in a neat pyramid, on top of some shredded egg cartons and trash.

Dad, if you’re reading this, I blame you for my compulsion to make geometric shapes before I burn things. He always piled the charcoal into a pyramid before he lit it, and for the longest time, I thought that it was an absolutely necessary part of lighting a grill. Logically, I have been disabused of the notion, but for some reason, I still do it. Long live the burning pyramid.

Anyway, I was squatting in front of the contraption, trying to figure out what to do next. I lit a couple of matches and tried to get the egg cartons to light, but the matches weren’t hot enough. After a few tries and a couple minutes of puzzling, I heard a throat clear softly behind me.

It was my host aunt (at least, I think she is… I can’t keep track of the people who rotate in and out of this house), and she had a familiar look in her eyes. After one year of life in Japan, and a few months here, I was well acquainted with the look.

She had the look of You’re Doing It Wrong, and she carried a ball of wadded-up newspaper in her hand. If nothing else, I have become both very good at Doing It Wrong, and very good at gracefully accepting it. I shuffled out of the way while she took my place, shoved the wadded newspaper into my pyramid, and lit it on fire.

It was enough to catch the egg cartons, and everything lit instantly. She smiled thinly at me and walked off, another person amazed at the things that I don’t know how to do.

Being here is a very different kind of Doing It Wrong than in Japan. In Japan, there are etiquette rules for damn near everything, and I could barely go a day without putting my foot in it somehow. Here, the looks have more to do with my inability to do every day things, such as light a fire to heat the water so I can wash my clothes by hand.

Oh well. In America, we have machines for these things. Think about that next time you’re too lazy to go do laundry. And then think of me, lighting my pyramid of trash on fire to heat water.

Almost as soon as the fire caught, I had to go find other things to feed it, since there weren’t really any substantial pieces of wood laying around. I did succeed fantastically at making the world’s smokiest fire, though, feeding the flames on trash and dried reeds and more egg cartons.

About a half an hour of poking and feeding and praying to fire gods later, the water finally got hot enough so I could haul it over to the outdoor sink, and then proceed to squat for an hour and a half as I washed my pile of dirty clothes.

I have started becoming smart, though, in regards to laundry. Now, whenever I take a bath, I always take some clothes that need to be washed in with me. Recently, they haven’t been firing up the banya much, so I’ve been bathing by boiling two teapots of water and just taking it in the unheated banya to bathe. This is really not all that pleasant, as it’s starting to edge into cooler weather and taking a bucket bath in a cold cement room isn’t exactly the same as a nice hot shower, but, hey. Clean is clean. I usually only do it once or twice a week, anyway. (On that note, it’s almost disturbing how adjusted to that I’ve become. One day, I didn’t have anything else to do, so I was laying on my bed and pondering life, when I realized that I could take a bath. I instantly dismissed it, since I had “already bathed the day before yesterday.” Then I laughed. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to such things.)

But when I’m in there, I always reserve at least a little bit of hot water to wash my underwear, since those are the only articles of clothing that really need to be washed before I wear them again. Things like socks or pants or shirts can go at least like, nine times. I’m serious. I used to wear my shirts twice before I washed them, but now I’ve graduated to about four times that number. When doing laundry is as big of a pain as it is here, you make allowances. Winter is going to be a riot, when it’s going to be too cold to either bathe or do laundry. Hooray!

But, on the other hand, I’m going to be amazing at the end of this. I’ll be able to cook from scratch, light fires with nothing but damp trash, plow fields, and jerryrig like MacGyver anything what needs jerryrigging. Maybe I’ll save money when I move into an apartment in the States, because I’ll be so accustomed to doing laundry by hand that I won’t need to go to the laundromat.

Hahahaha, just kidding, I’ll probably do a jig on the way to put quarters in the washing machine.

Written October 9, 2008

One of the happiest re-discoveries of the day was World Book 2004 on my computer.

I’ve always known it was there, in a latent sort of way. It came with the computer when my parents bought it, and whenever I came across it I was always like, “I should probably delete this,” but I never got around to it. And boy, am I ever glad I didn’t get rid of it.

When I had the internet (back in the day…), the entire program was pretty much obsolete, since I could access much more current and comprehensive information, so I never used it. After a day of browsing it, it’s obviously not a quality scholarly resource, as all of the articles have a semi-ridiculous bias, but it’s perfect for my needs, as they stand.

I’ve started writing lesson plans for classes. I’ve talked to my counterpart, and we’ve decided to go ahead and use the absolutely heinous course books provided to us, at least for now. Another challenge to teaching here – the books the officials demand us to use are ridiculous, not engaging for students, and downright dull. (Well, they’re pretty entertaining for me, as they contain sentences like, “America has the best roads in the capitalist world,” and other such Soviet tidbits that amuse the hell out of me.) The books are idiotic, but unfortunately officials come around every once in a while to check the teacher’s lesson planners (which are also official and have to be filled out in a certain way) to make sure that they’re following the national curriculum, and they can get in a lot of trouble if they don’t.

The way that my counterpart and I have decided to divide the classes is by twos. Each group of students has two classes a week, and she teaches the first one, on grammar, and I teach the second one, on conversational topics. This makes some areas of life easier for me, as I don’t have to decide what grammar points I want to teach. They’ve already been dictated to me.

Of course, this has its downsides, too. The course books aren’t just on language, after all, but they also teach about different English-speaking countries and culture. So this amounts to me having to write a conversational lesson that practices passive voice and also teaches the kids about Great Britain.

Uhh.

First off, nobody really SPEAKS in passive voice. Well, okay, they do, but nobody has an entire conversation in it. And secondly, they spent about five years of my education teaching us NOT to speak or write in passive voice. Third, the majority of these kids can barely handle anything above “Hello, my name is ___ and I like cake.”

And it has to be about England. Great. For God’s sake if you asked American high school students to have a conversation about England in passive voice, I’d love to see what the majority of them would come up with. And they (probably) speak (some form of) English!

But, whatever, I make do. The good part about the subject “America” or whatever is that it’s a pretty large topic area. When I had to make a lesson about infinitives that was also about Canada, I just was like, “I want to go hike. In… Alberta. I like to ride horses. In… Saskatchewan.” It worked. Kind of.

Another latent advantage of this is that it’s teaching me about grammar. Which… may sound sort of stupid, considering that I'm not all that bad with the English language, but I do have to admit that I know squat about grammar. I know when things are right and when they are wrong, of course, but that’s knowledge built from an assload of reading and writing. Whenever we had grammar in school, I always seemed to be in the English class that, for some reason or another, wasn’t covering it.

Thus, when my counterpart asks me how to use participle one, I’m always like, what the hell is participle one? Modal auxiliaries? Uh, yeah, right.

Generally, once I see a few examples, I get it. For example, I had no idea that “-ing” form was called a gerund. I only learned this when I had to teach about it and Canada at the same time.

But that’s where the World Book comes in handy, for when I’m like, “How in the fuck am I going to tie this grammar point in with a country?” The World Book, while I certainly wouldn’t use it to write a thesis, provides a handy little bouncing board for ideas. It basically amounts to a non-Internet based Wikipedia.

My first day of bonafied teaching didn’t go off too badly. There were some definite ups and downs, the major downer being the eighth grade class. For some unfathomable reason, they’ve combined two classes for my eighth grade session, which means that I’m teaching a class with about forty kids in it. My counterpart even has a hard time controlling them, and she speaks fluent Russian. What made it even worse was that there was some sort of teacher meeting during that class period, and as my Russian isn’t nearly good enough to go to one of those and follow what’s going on, she went and left me alone with forty fourteen year olds, who don’t speak my language, and I don’t really speak theirs.

It was forty five minutes of absolute chaos. I tried to do a warm-up of charades, but I couldn’t explain it to them to where they would understand, so that fell flat. The next activity went better, where I had a sentence broken up into two pieces, and they each had to find their partner. After that, though, I basically lost control of the class. After about ten minutes of pleading and shouting, I finally gave up, told them that I wasn’t going to teach them if they didn’t want to learn, and just sat down.

This was clearly a response they weren’t expecting. A few of them just continued on talking, completely nonplussed, a few were shocked into silence, and a few were even guilt tripped into practicing some English by asking me questions. This was the last fifteen minutes of the class.

My counterpart returned another class period later – it had been a long meeting – but the class after the eighth graders went much better. Classes of twenty or smaller I can do a pretty good job of keeping under control… and one of the double-edged sword things about teaching here is the ninth grade cutoff. After ninth grade, students don’t have to go to school anymore. It’s pretty much the same thing as in the US, but as far as I know very few students in America take the state up on it. A high school diploma/the equal is pretty much necessary nowadays in the States.

In Kyrgyzstan, large portions of the students don’t continue on in the school. Some of them continue on into “college,” which is kind of like vocational school. But this basically means that any students in tenth or eleventh grades (school only goes to eleventh here) are generally there because, at some level, they want to be there. This makes the classes much easier to teach, even for the students who don’t care so much about learning English. At least they’re not disruptive. Ninth grade is moderately hard, mostly because the students who just aren’t interested are plain unmotivated because they know they’re virtually done. Eighth is a nightmare, mostly because of the size of the class.

But, anyway, my counterpart came back and I told her that there was no way in hell I was doing that again. If I wasn’t doing team-teaching, I’d go to the director and flat out refuse to teach the eighth graders unless it was broken up into two hours. It’s just not a good learning environment for them, at all, and it’s certainly not good for my blood pressure. The best I can manage with a class that size is keeping them from killing each other. The only English they might pick up is what I yell at them in an attempt to stop the rain of spitwads. My counterpart smiled sympathetically. Like I said, even she has problems controlling them; I think she had a fair idea that she was leaving me to the hounds when she left me alone with them.

But the other classes didn’t go so badly. I have kind of a hard time engaging them; the vast majority of them don’t want to talk. Which is, well, frustrating when I’m trying to teach a conversational class.

I don’t know. It’s not bad, but I can’t say that I love it. To be honest, I’m only responsible for about five classes a week, so it’s not an overbearing amount of work. When my counterpart is in the room, I don’t have to really worry about behavioral problems, so my main thing is just figuring out how to teach about countries and grammar points and have it be at least moderately interesting.

I want to teach at a university. The PCV who was in my village previous to me taught at a university in Bishkek in addition to his work at the grammar school, and when I talked to him before he left, he said he found it much more stimulating than teaching grammar to kids, ninety percent of whom couldn’t give a hoot in hell about gerunds.

Written October 11, 2008

Well, my host sister is finally getting read the riot act. And while I feel somewhat guilty about it, I’m also relieved.

I have two host sisters: one sixteen, one thirteen. They’re both absolutely lovely, but the thirteen year old has some issues with the concept of personal space.

I admit that I am, by Kyrgyz standards, bewilderingly overprotective of my belongings and of my room. This is definitely a cultural thing; while I’m as friendly as can be under most circumstances, I need private space, and if I don’t get it, I become a bear. My younger host sister has a somewhat unfortunate tendency to do things like enter my room without knocking, or just walk in and start manhandling my personal belongings.

This wasn’t too bad at first; I decided to take the patient route, and told her that when the door was closed, she had to knock. This led to a series of events involving her knocking while she was opening the door, or knocking, pausing for a moment, and then opening the door anyway, without waiting for a response. A couple of times, she’s barged in on me when I was dressing. I’m not a particularly modest person, so I wasn’t bothered that she happened to see me in my underwear, but more that she just wasn’t listening when I was telling her to “wait, wait, WA-“

But still, I waited it out. Finally, after a while, I started getting more strict – if she was in my room and wasn’t listening to me, I would bodily force her out, which isn’t a hard thing, considering I can pick her up with one arm. But it was irritating, and a couple of times when I had to leave the house and was waiting to lock up my room, she was inside laying on the floor, positively refusing to budge until I did something drastic, like slam the bike lock that locks my door up against the wall in irritation, which would scare her out.

Today, she was in my room and mostly behaving, sans a couple of times when she started messing with my cell phone, but she stopped when I told her to do so. Finally, she asked to see my earring collection. I have them all pinned on one of my brother’s spare skate laces, and pulled them out for her to look.

I have a blue pair of earrings that she particularly liked, and tried on without asking. I made her take them out, which she did, but then she wouldn’t give them back. We got into a brief tussle about this, and she lost one of the backs to my earrings. Annoyed, I took the string of earrings from her, and demanded that she give me back the pair that she had. She refused.

I had threatened to tell her mother about her not listening to me several times before, and usually it had the desired effect. Sure enough, as I turned on my heel to go tell her mother, she said, “wait!”

This is usually the part where she corrects whatever she was doing, but when I asked for the earrings again she refused, so this time I actually went out, and didn’t stop when she said “wait!” again, and told my host mother.

My host mother said that she would talk to her, and as I turned back down the hallway with my room in it, my host sister appeared from nowhere, shoved the earrings in my hand, and promptly hid under her bed.

I kind of feel bad in a distant way about it, because her parents were none too pleased, but to be honest, I think I was a little more magnanimous with her than I should have been. It’s not as though she hasn’t been becoming increasingly more difficult as the weeks have passed and we’ve become more familiar. I had been considering just bypassing the whole telling the mother thing and going straight to my program manager, who in turn would tell the host mother for me. While going over the mother’s head would be just bizarre in America, it’s more or less par for the course here, but I was just tired of dancing around the subject and decided to just attack it head on. We’ll see if it works.

It’s just very strange to me, because I know that I live in her house and we’re “family” in the institutional sense, but I’m not actually family. I mean, I know that if we had a foreigner living in our house in the States, I wouldn’t have been allowed to just barge in and start drawing all over the poor person’s lesson plans. Especially not at age thirteen. Hell, I don’t think the thought would have even crossed my mind. I understand that there’s a major difference in the way that the Kyrgyz conceptualize personal space (namely, on a whole they don’t at all), but I still have a hard time believing that, well, what she was doing was okay, even by Kyrgyz standards.

Though, on the other hand, the fact that she ran and hid after I went to tell her mother, probably means that she was aware that she was doing something that she shouldn't have. Or, well, it could just be the whole guests-are-honored thing kicking in, and the bad part was that she was doing something that I didn’t want, rather than she was invading my personal space.

Again, we’ll see. Apparently, though, I’ve just been informed that I’m getting a new lock on my door, but I’m not sure if this was precipitated by the host sister or not. I have to say that I’m semi-relieved, since the way I lock my door now is kind of a joke: instead of the normal single door in the frame, I have basically half-sized French doors. I dislike them, because it’s damn near impossible to have the door actually closed. They lock (from the inside) with pole-style locks, which slide into holes drilled into the top of the doorframe. I have to have one of the two doors locked permanently, or else the doors won’t close at all, because there’s no latch between the doors. In addition, I can’t lock both doors at the same time from the inside, because the holes aren’t quite lined up correctly with the pole locks. I could feasibly hammer it in, but hammering my door every time I want it locked is just ridiculous. And then I probably wouldn’t be able to open it, and I'd be stuck in my room like a dumbass until my host family removed the doors from the hinges.

The way I lock my door from the outside, when I leave the house, is with a bike cable coated in thick green plastic. There are two doorknobs, so I wind it around the knobs and lock it. It’s as bad of security as it sounds; it’s very easy to just pull the lock out from around the knobs, even if you don’t have the key. (I do it myself when I’m lazy and don’t feel like digging in my bag for my keys.)

But, I mean, to be honest, I’m not actually worried about theft. There’s nearly always somebody home, and besides, a thief would have to get past the locked compound gate and the locked house in the event that nobody was home, before they got to my poorly locked room. I’m more concerned about the younger host sister coming in and molesting my possessions, which could result in things getting lost or accidentally broken. And I know that she’d be very sorry if she, say, broke my laptop, but very sorry isn’t going to bring back a thousand dollars worth of electronic investment.

I oscillate wildly on whether I want to move out or not. I like this family a lot: they’re very kind to me. I like the host mother’s cooking, and my room is extremely nice. But, oh man do I miss living independently. Another major perk to living with the host family is that my living expenditures are far less than they would be if I had an apartment, which gives me more money for travel. What almost makes it worse is that I’m living in an area where apartments do exist, so it’s a very distinct possibility. If I was somewhere where it was just not feasible, I might not want it as badly (or, I would, but I would have reconciled myself with the fact that I couldn’t get it).

My current plan is to stay with the host family until next summer, but that’ll also depend on the amenities of the apartments offered to me. It would be foolish to move into an apartment heated by electric means; most of the volunteers who have apartments that aren’t heated by coal have to move back in with host families during the winter, or risk not having any heat/water, due to the foreseen electric shortages. At any rate, I’m starting to put out some feelers, and we’ll see what comes back.