.the beat goes on

All right.

Peace Corps has three main goals. The first is to provide trained men and women to organizations and schools in the host country who ask for it. The second is to provide a real-life example of American culture to host country nationals. The third is to teach Americans at home about the host country.

The third goal was the reason why I decided on a public blog rather than an email list. As much as I have friends and family who would like to keep tags on my misadventures, the blog was more of a message in a bottle to whomever passed by. Maybe it's a future Peace Corps Volunteer who was wondering what it was all about, like I was in the months preceeding my service. Maybe it was somebody who was interested in Kyrgyzstan or teaching English abroad. Maybe it was somebody who clicked the "random" button on blogger.com and this came up. Whatever.

But unfortunately I seem to have made a bit of a target out of myself with my last post, for better or worse. I no longer feel comfortable writing here, and I think it might prove detrimental to the rest of my service if I continue to do so. It's too bad, but that's the way it is.

You usually don't have to tell me something twice. Usually.

Basically, if anybody is interested in getting occasional emails about what I'm up to and how I'm dealing with it, you can leave a message with your email in a comment, or you can get ahold of me on facebook, or you can send me an email saying you're interested.

It's my birthday. And I'll write if I want to.

.tell me how to stay strong

I just got censured. I guess at least somewhere, somebody is reading my blog. And they thought it was too intense.

I'm going on hiatus. Thanks to the readers.

Good night, and good luck.

.russian roulette is not the same without a gun

Housing search, the remix. (Bum-chicka-bum-chicka-uh-uh-uhhhhh.)

My counterpart texted me the other day to say that she had an apartment option for me to see. Her sister had found it. I was excited because this was actually the first option I've had that has worked out in a relatively concrete way. Not to mention, it's smack in the part of town that I wanted to live in - maybe a five minute walk from school.

The microrayons of the town I'm going to live in are actually pretty nice. Since training was there I'm very familiar with the town's center and all the "hot spots" (of which there are few, but enough to live very comfortably on), but the microrayons are much more towny. Most of them are courtyard-type clusters with broken down old Soviet-era playground equipment that is usually used to inadvertently hurt children or dry rugs on in the middle. Some even have well-tended flower gardens. The area of town I'm going to live in is populated mostly by old women living alone and children playing on the dangerous playground equipment. I rarely see people between the ages of twenty and fifty puttering around, but that's fine with me. It means that the area must be safe-ish if all these old women are living alone and the children are killing themselves on the jagged metal slides unsupervised.

Obviously, if I was looking at this through the untrained American eye, I'd think it looked like the projects. This is because Soviet-style apartment buildings are actually based off of the projects. Seriously. They're cheap and easy to build, mostly because all apartment complexes are the same. Unless the owner's done some serious remont (renovation), Kyrygz apartments have about five different styles, and the entire apartment complex has the same style of apartment. But now that I've eased into life here, I can recognize nice apartment buildings for what they are.

And the one that my counterpart had to show me was nice. It's a first-floor one-room (meaning that there's one main living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen) apartment that has a balcony opening straight onto a beautiful garden with tasteful tall grass, cornflowers, daisies, and some hollyhock. I have no idea who maintains the garden, because when I went in to see the place there was obviously a funeral party going on, and the owners said that the grandmother who lived in the apartment had died a couple months back. The garden was looking way too well pruned for that.

Another malady with most apartments in the area that I want to live is that none of them have been well-furnished. I don't know why, since in every single other area in Kyrgyzstan, even village apartments, they've come decently-equipped. One of my friends (who ultimately ended up moving to Bishkek) lived in a huge, new three-room apartment with a kitchen. His furniture count was thus: one kitchen table, two chairs, a small sofa table, a small cabinet, and a bed without legs. All of his furniture could have easily fit into one room. Half a room. My other friend has another newly-remonted apartment in the same town with two giant rooms that doesn't even have a bed. It has a kitchen table, two chairs, and one upholstered chair. She sleeps on piles of tushuks.

But the apartment that they showed me was definitely well-inhabited. There's a divan, a bed, a large table in the main room, a table in the kitchen, a clothespress, a free-standing shelving unit that takes up most of the wall, several small cabinets, and four kitchen chairs. There's two stoves: a gas and an electric. And a large refrigerator. And a washing machine. And all the plates I could shake one of my billions of forks at. (The washing machine is Kyrgyz-style, but hey. It means I can wash my sheets.) They said it came with all of the furniture. And it has hot water and a SHOWER and an INDOOR TOILET. And heat in the winter.

And it was only 3000 som a month. Usually you get reamed for apartments where I want to live. Sold, sold, and sold.

The only thing about it is that there aren't bars on the windows, and since it's first-floor apartment, Peace Corps will pay for it. I just have to get it done. The landladies said that they didn't mind if I put bars in as long as they didn't have to pay for it, so it's cool.

And I get to look out at a nice garden when it's the season for it. Quite idyllic. I'm within five minutes of both my work and a supermarket and a small bazaar. I'm a twenty-minute walk from the center of town where there's bigger supermarkets and bazaars. And there's constant transportation everywhere.

As good as my extended vacation in Bishkek has been, it'll be nice to have my own place. I don't want to impose on my host here too much longer. He's got dates to go on. And to be able to not have all my shit spread out all over the resource center will be a pleasant change.

Here's hoping that something stupid doesn't happen this winter and I end up losing it again. I've been on a semester-by-semester basis here in Kyrgyzstan: three semesters of school have eclipsed since I've been here, and I've had three sites. Very neatly divided, in my opinion. But it would be nice to break with tradition for this last year. I don't think I'm going to want to move again.

When I look back on my Peace Corps experience, at least I can say that I got a true understanding of the nomadic aspect of Kyrgyz culture. I'm more nomadic than most of them will ever be. For better or worse.

.oh, Canada

I usually don't blog this much, but since I'm currently living in the capital and am basically surrounded by Internet constantly, might as well. Particularly when I have the brand of randomly awesome times that I had yesterday.

I was at the Peace Corps office when I ran into a Volunteer who was having mondo counterpart and site problems and was pretty down in the dumps. And by "down in the dumps," I mean, "pretty much going to Early Terminate." Part of this whole experience is being everybody else's damage control team. People have done it for me a number of times, when I was set to nuclear meltdown and other Volunteers have plyed me with entertainment, kindness, and the occasional day of substance abuse. When I'm in the position to do it for somebody else, I leap on it.

I ditched on some plans with other friends for lunch to take my woeful friend back to the apartment I'm staying at, after buying some cheeseburgers and chocolate and coffee for lunch and then having her partake in the shower facilities. Especially for Volunteers who live in the village, a chance to take a long, hot shower is the equal to going to a souped-up spa in the States and ordering the special without having to worry about cost. It's a big deal, and being properly clean without having to use buckets can be a great boost to the spirits.

Thus revitalized, my friend went back to Peace Corps to charge headfirst into more meetings about her situation, and I walked over to join my friends who I had ditched on lunch plans with.

That's when we met the Canadians.

We were at a place called Metro Pub, which is not an unusual place to meet foreigners. In fact, it's gotten rather dangerous to go there in certain respects, particularly at night. Lots of people who've walked out of there without taking a taxi have gotten followed and beaten up and robbed. It's not so notorious during the day, but it is pretty expensive, so I've only gone there maybe once or twice during the past six months or so, and never at night. Most of the time, I was living in the village anyway, which gave me a default curfew of 7pm, unless I wanted to fork out a ridiculous amount of cash for a taxi. Which I didn't.

When I walked in my two friends were playing cards at the table with these two other guys. They promptly ordered me a beer and invited me to sit down. Turns out they were playing poker - high stakes poker. 1000 som buy-in, which is about thirty bucks. In comparison, when Volunteers play poker with each other, it's usually a 50 som buy-in. Maybe 100 if it's near the beginning of the month and we've all just gotten paid. Yeah.

But the Canadians were doing all the buying. I wasn't going to play, not with that kind of a buy-in - I enjoy a spot of gambling every now and again, but not with nearly a fourth of my monthly salary. They rolled their eyes, threw a 1000 som note into the pile, and raked some chips at me.

So we played. I also met the head of the golf course in Bishkek, the owner of Metro Pub, and various other bigwig-types around town. The company was good, the beer constantly flowing. At the end of the game, I had made about 4000 som. That's like, 100 dollars. That's like, my entire monthly salary. And I didn't even have to do the buy-in. And they paid for our drinks.

As we were nearabouts falling over ourselves with gratitude, one of the guys says, "Well, next time it comes up say something nice about Canadians, eh?"

So, here it is. I LOVE CANADIANS. CANADA IS AMAZING. CANADA HAS PRETTY DECENT HOCKEY BUT I'M FROM DETROIT SO DETROIT IS STILL BETTER THAN THE CANADIAN TEAMS. SORRY. BUT CANADIANS ARE STILL EFFING COOL. PARTICULARLY WHEN THEY'RE IN KYRGYZSTAN AND FEELING GENEROUS.

Duty thus filled to my gracious partner Canada, we get back to the business of being homeless. And being motherfucking LOADED at the same time. Life is good.

.she's got an appetite for lighting dynamite

I always have a hard time explaining to locals the logic behind a middle name.

I was at the bank today, picking up my money, when the lady who hands me the cash pointed to my ID card and frowned. “Laura?” she asked. “Or Elizabeth?”

I’ve had this conversation a few times in country. I told her that both were, indeed, my name, but usually I just go by the first one. I always say that the second one is only used when my mother wants to scold me, which usually gets a laugh and neatly diverts the conversation away from the subject. Not that I don’t like talking about names, but it’s kind of hard for me to explain why I’m stuck with a seemingly superfluous name that nobody ever really uses.

I suppose that in most respects, it is excessive to have two names. Practically speaking, it can be useful to have a middle name because it differentiates you from all the other people in the world that might happen to have the same first and last name. And I know that some people get middle names for religious purposes, but to me it just seems like a nice way to compromise between families when both sectors want to name the baby different things. You can name the baby both! Problem solved, and family dinners won’t be any more awkward than usual.

Also of interest is surnames. Russians have patronymic surnames, meaning that the child’s last name is derived from the father’s first name. Ivan to Ivonovich and so forth. In traditional Kyrgyz style, the child’s name would be (father’s name) uluu/kyzy (given name). Uluu means “son” and kyzy means “daughter,” so traditional Kyrgyz names are “so-and-so’s son/daughter so-and-so.” Though in the more Russified areas ethnically Kyrgyz people are likely to have the Russian-style last names. I always get a kick out of trying to explain my last name, which has no conceivable connection to a first name. I got into a conversation with a taxi driver about the practice of passing down names through the father’s side, as well as the more recent tradition of hyphenating names, married women keeping their maiden names, a husband taking the wife’s name, or even husband and wife taking on an entirely new name.

The taxi driver said it was confusing and I said that yeah, America can be pretty confusing sometimes. Whachagonnado.

So, more on the homelessness front, since I am now officially that way.

Last week was, to put it succinctly, a clusterfuck. My original move-out date was last Thursday, but on Wednesday my ex-director told my program manager that she was going to call my host family and ask for a couple more days to do the housing search. I get home Wednesday night to find that she hasn’t called. I tried to call my program manager back but she wouldn’t answer, so I just tidied up the house, woke up early on Thursday morning, and called my program manager to ask what the hell was going on.

My program manager said that she didn’t know. I would have asked my host family, but they had left the house for work at that point.

So I just said the hell with it and went to go stay with a friend for a couple of days. I needed a drink. And not to mention my entire kitchen had been packed away and I hadn’t actually been able to cook a semi-decent meal since I had gotten back to Kyrgyzstan - not even fried eggs. And while eating grapes out of a bag for a week is what all the cool kids are doing, it gets old pretty fast. And I needed a drink. Drinks. And I got them. There’s nothing classier than drinking Moldovan Merlot straight from the bottle and caterwauling along with Piano Man. Classy, and quite stress-relieving. We even had a plastic corkscrew, so I didn’t have to push the cork into the bottle and drink floaty bits along with it. It was a good night.

On Saturday my program manager called me again, and said that my ex-director had located a possible compound housing situation for me within the village. I said that I wasn’t going to live in a compound if it was the last standing building in Kyrgyzstan. She told me to humor the director and just go to the school to talk to her about it.

Fine. I went to the school... and the director wasn’t there. I was able to locate my counterpart, who said that the director was in the rayon center for paperwork reasons, and that she had no idea what was going on as much as I did. I had some nice conversation with her and a few other teachers who stopped by to say hello, before going outside, calling my program manager, and saying that if this shit kept on happening, they could book my flight.

To which my program manager said that she had another site to show me.

This second site was about thirty minutes north of Bishkek, in a village that is actually called “Grape Village.” They grow grapes. Obviously.

Grape village was actually quite nice. It was mostly Kyrgyz, but the director there spoke flawless Russian and seemed very motivated to work with a Volunteer. They even had an apartment to offer me. The only problem was that the apartment was actually in the school.

My married friends actually live at a school also, but it’s an orphanage and therefore more like a campus. This was actually a living unit in the school. It was a decent setup, though: a big main room, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a squat flusher and running water. It shared the school’s heat, which is electric and therefore susceptible to outages, but it also had a petchka in it for coal. There was little or no furniture in it when we looked at it, but the director assured me that the school could provide everything that was necessary for a comfortable living space.

To be honest, I felt kind of bad about saying no. But... I just didn’t want to live in the school. I would never be able to get away from where I worked. Not to mention, I don’t work on Saturdays but the kids are still in school, so even when I wasn’t working I’d be overrun with students. Also, it was a first-storey apartment and I’d have no place to hang my laundry.

In addition, the director said that it would probably be better if the school’s Volunteer spoke Kyrgyz, which, well, I don’t. I do think it would be a nice site for somebody, though, like a brand-new starry-eyed Volunteer who has the energy to be really thrown in with the culture of the school.

I hate to sound like a total curmudgeon, but I mostly just want to be left alone at this point. I want to do good work at my school and with my secondary projects, and then I just want to go home to an apartment and lock the door and decompress. I would also like to be more within a town center, so I can do things like walk to a bazaar. I don’t hate village life: the things that were uncomfortable about it for me weren’t bad enough to really be worth raising a stink about. I mean, water goes out sometimes, I had to travel an hour for groceries, there was nothing to do. None of those things were horrible.

But since I’m being thrust out into the world again, if I’ve got the choice, it would be nice to live in a place that has cafes, lots of reliable transportation, internet, and a bazaar.

When we were coming back from Grape Village, my program manager asked what we were going to do now, and I said I had no idea.

This was resolved when I walked into the resource center. Everybody here knows that I’m homeless by this point. Word travels fast. One of my friends who lives in a town in my oblast said that she knew a teacher in her apartment building that had wanted to work with a Volunteer but didn’t get one this year for some reason. The teacher spoke fluent English, and was very motivated. I got in contact with her immediately, and we met up this past Saturday.

And she seems like she’d be a dream to work with. Whatever my shitty luck with housing has been, my counterparts have all been a definite cut above the norm. Also, funnily enough, the school that my counterpart works at is right behind the place where we had our training last year. Haha.

But it’s nice because I’m already familiar with the area, it’s not too far outside of Bishkek, and there’s even other Volunteers in the direct area, which will be a nice change from my usual status of isolation.

Now the issue is finding an apartment. I’m actually heading out there today to do some cold-calls... basically knocking on people’s doors, seeing if they’re home, and asking about their landlord. Sometimes, if you want something done right, you’ve got to get to the source of it, I suppose.

And in the meantime, I’m living in Bishkek with my Volunteer-cum-expat friend who now works for American Councils as a recruiter for the FLEX program (that student-exchange program with the US that I did the pre-departure orientation program for this summer).

So there are two ways to look at this. The wrong way is that I got jacked around again and lost my house and had to move and it’s September and I don’t really have a job or a place of my own and all my belongings are in a heap in the Resource Center.

The right way is that I’m essentially on extended vacation at the moment, I don’t have to answer to anybody, and I get to live in Bishkek for free in a nice apartment. It’s been kind of surreal, actually. The past few days have been filled with delicious restaurant dinners, beer garden-sampling, and being able to leave the apartment at 10pm to go to the 24-hour grocery store on the corner for yogurt. The apartment also has a washing machine, Internet, and unlimited hot water. It’s also very well-located, so I can walk basically anywhere I’d want to go in the city. And my friend gave me a set of keys, so I can come and go at my leisure. And since he’s out around the country for at least four days of the week doing testing, I even get the run of the place to myself for a while. When he’s in, he’s a very nice roommate who offers good company and also happens to know a lot of good places to go in Bishkek for a drink or a dinner.

In addition, I was helping a K-15 go through her Close of Service measures (actually, I was helping her get all the papers she needed to get her cat back to America), and since she was leaving she went out in a bonanza of good food and beer and taxi rides, and I got to ride the coattails of that.

My routine right now consists of getting up at around eightish when my friend does, talking with him for a while over a cup of coffee, and then heading out later to pick up some more coffee and go to the Peace Corps office to hang out with who’s there, check in with the staff, and pick up some gossip. Then I go run my errands: I’ve been back to my old village to do an official goodbye, and networking with people to try and find housing in my new site. Then I usually go out to a meal with friends at some point, and my last few evenings have been spent carousing pleasantly around the city, checking out restaurants and bars that I haven’t had the chance to yet and hobnobbing with the city’s expats.

Also, they’re installing a shower in the Peace Corps office for Volunteers, which will be a nice upgrade to my life after I move out of the Bishkek apartment which has unlimited hot water.

So all and all, I’m sitting pretty right now. It’s not a bad life. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to sustain it for, as I don’t think that Peace Corps really wants me to be living in a friend’s apartment indefinitely and it’s not a cheap way to live, but I think I’m good for at least another week. Especially because, you know, I actually am trying to find an apartment.

Knock on wood. Knock, knock, knock on wood.

.it ain't no fun unless we all get some

The journey back to Kyrgyzstan was fairly uneventful, just long. I had a nine-hour layover in Istanbul that was perfectly primed for me to go out and do some exploring, but I let exhaustion win over the adventuring spirit. I had to buy a visa to go and get my luggage, which was annoyance enough, but at least the airport staff were nice to me. After I grudgingly forked out the 20 dollars for the visa and went to fetch my bags, I was on my way to get one of those airport carts.

I took an obscene amount of luggage back with me – much more than I brought originally. Of course, it’s all full of food and supplies and the like, things that I either can’t get in Kyrgyzstan, like vanilla extract, or are just too expensive for me to buy, like olive oil. And, I mean, I definitely packed to the extreme. One of my bags was overweight, and the other one was pushing it.

But in order to rent the little airport carts in Istanbul, you need Euro coins. I managed to locate some staff that spoke reasonable English to ask what I should do. At first they were telling me that all I had to do was go to a change machine for coins, and I had to spend about five minutes patiently convincing them that even if I did put a dollar bill into a coin machine it would not give me euro coins. And if it did, I would put all my dollars into it, because that would increase my spending money by about twenty-five percent. Exchange rates and all that nonsense.

Eventually, I think they got tired of dealing with me. Or that or they saw the despair well in my eyes when I realized that I’d have to drag all 130 pounds of my luggage to an exchange booth to trade a large-ish denomination dollar bill in for some euro just so I could get one lousy euro to get the cart, and then I’d be stuck with all this euro that has no use in the foreseeable future. I’d have to change it back to dollars or into som, and then I’d lose a ridiculous amount of money in the transaction. They eventually just waved over some dude to unlock a cart for me for free. Score.

And then when I went to check my luggage through again, the check-in lady was unbelievably generous and didn’t charge me overages on my luggage again, even though I was nearly ten kilo over it. Whatever. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, is what I say. Or rather, when somebody cuts you a break you smile and thank them politely, then run as fast as you can in the other direction so they don’t have time to change their minds about it.

After all that, I was standing in front of another currency exchange booth, wondering if I actually wanted to exchange for lira to go out into Istanbul. I really do like Istanbul: I had a blast the few hours I was there when I came to Kyrgyzstan initially. But this time around I was by myself and not with a group of Peace Corps Volunteers, some of whom were bewilderingly well-informed about Istanbul, and others who spoke Turkish. Not to mention, I was exhausted and kept on leaning up against poles to keep myself upright. Not exactly prime shape to be in to go around exploring a city I’m unfamiliar with that speaks a language I don’t know.

While I was debating, this guy comes up and asks if I want to go to the city. He’s got some official airport decals on, but I figure he’s attached to a taxi company somehow. I have an automatic bias about anybody associated with a taxi in any way, shape, or form these days, but I just got my luggage checked through for free and was feeling charitable, so I struck up a conversation with the guy.

I said I wasn’t going to the city yet, and made up something about meeting a friend just so we could evade the whole pressure-sales schtick. He asked how long I was staying in Istanbul, and when my reply was “nine hours,” that got a raised eyebrow and we got into the whole American-working-in-Kyrgyzstan thing. He told me that it was, “quite unusual.”

I said that somebody had to do it.

After that, I decided to hell with it and just went back into the airport where I ate overpriced cheesecake and surfed the free wi-fi for a while. I even fell asleep in one of the large chairs they had at the café I was sitting at. Jet lag for me is a weird thing. I think I do worse when the change is between 6-9 hours, like in Istanbu, rather than when it’s 10-12, like Kyrgyzstan. It’s easier for me to change my internal clock, somehow, if day and night are flipped completely rather than shifted a few hours. Dunno why. At least none of my shit got stolen, but I was kind of sleeping on top of it.

Got back to Bishkek without incident, and I even managed to find a taxi driver that wasn’t a total jerk. He said he’d take me back for 500 som, and I said I’d pay him 400 and he said okay. Done, and done. (Technically, the fair price is 300, but it was four in the morning and raining and I was exhausted and 100 som is about two dollars and fifty cents. Usually I don’t think of som that way because comparing it to dollars is an excellent way to get poor real fast, but to hell with it.)

I got to the Peace Corps office at about 5:30, and then promptly passed out on the resource center couch for approximately four hours before some of my friends burst in to the room with intentions to use the internet and found me instead. Not that I particularly minded. I could have used more sleep, but it was nice to see my fellow batshit crazy Volunteers again.

At any rate, the most interesting thing going on is probably the homeless situation, which is getting more and more ridiculous as it goes. Like most things ‘round these parts.

After I had gone out to buy some minutes for my phone, I called my program manager. I felt a little bad since it’s Saturday, but since I had sent her two emails over my vacation asking questions and had received no answers my qualms with disturbing her weekend weren’t too severe.

When I got a hold of her, I got the surprising news that I didn’t have to move. According to her, she had called my counterpart, who talked to the director. They did a cursory search for some apartments but had come up empty-handed. When that happened, they talked to my host family and convinced them to let me stay until next August.

I greeted this statement with mixed feelings, really. It was nice that I wouldn’t have to move at all, not even within the village, but I didn’t know how I felt about my current host family being guilt tripped. I can only imagine the conversation about if-you-don’t-keep-her-we’re-gonna-lose-her. And while it’s to some extent true, especially if they couldn’t find me an apartment, still. I didn’t know if I wanted to live in a place where I was only there because of outside pressure. It wouldn’t be a comfortable living environment for any of us.

But, whatever. Again, the whole thing about gift horses and such. I figured I would talk to Peace Corps and see about throwing on another 500 som to my rent check, since I’m well under the housing allowance limit for where I live and it might make my host family happier about keeping me. Thus resolved, I went out to lunch with friends in an attempt to stave off the jet lag.

When I got back, I was dragging a heavy rice bag with me. I figured that instead of shelling out a crapton of money on a cab to bring back all of my goodies, I’d just bring them back a trip at a time, which is cheaper. I was struggling with the bag when one of the neighborhood kids walked up and took one end of it, which made it a lot easier to carry and was quite sweet of him.

When we got to my house, my host father came out and laughed at the sight of me and this kid dragging an enormous bag down the road, and then came out and carried the back the rest of the way into my house.

After some cursory talk about how was America and all that, I brought up the fact that my program manager told me that I could live in his house for another year. I wanted to make sure that he was really okay with it… I mean, it is his house. I’ve dealt with a myriad of unreasonable people in country, and my current host family is not one of their number. From what my host father told me when he said I had to move out they merely wanted their space back, which, I mean, is not an unreasonable request. I didn’t want them to be unhappy, both for their sake and mine.

But my host father frowned, and said, “You can stay here until the tenth, remember?”

To which I blinked, and relayed what my program manager had said to me (in likely extremely atrocious Russian; I’m tired and pretty rusty after not having spoken Russian for a month) and he was all like, uh, no.

And I figured that this was just a delightful pickle, that both my sponsoring agency and my school think that I’ve got a place to live when I don’t, so I called my program manager back again. She asked me to put my host father on the phone, which I did.

I understood the gist of the conversation, a part of which seemed to be my program manager saying, “If she moves out, where will she live?” And my host father was all like, “Uh, not really my problem.”

Which… it isn’t. I’ve had people pull that on me before, and I’m not sure if it’s a cultural thing specific to here or not, but I really do hate it when you say you want to have nothing to do with something that isn’t your responsibility, and then the other person gets all upset about it. My old landlady at the house I got kicked out of did the same thing with the monster dog on the premises of the house. She told me she’d get rid of it if I moved in, and then when I moved in she asked where the dog would go if it wasn’t at the house. Um… maybe you should have thought of that before you told me you’d move it?

But I also heard my host father say that the problem has nothing to do with me, which is major points in my favor, considering how the last two places I lived ended less than amicably. At least this way it’s going to be nearly impossible for Peace Corps to claim that there’s something wrong with my attitude, behavior, or lifestyle. The people just want their damn guesthouse back, and that’s all. Wouldn’t matter if I were the world’s gentlest soul or the antichrist.

Once my program manager got off the phone with him, she said she’d call my counterpart again and encouraged me to get in contact with her as well, since I “know the community better.” Well, that may be so, but it’s not going to change the fact that there don’t appear to be apartments available and I’m not going to live with a host family anymore.

Which means one of two things: site change or early termination. I’m not quite in the mood to make that long plane ride back yet, so it’ll likely be site change over ET, provided that Peace Corps doesn’t get their knickers in a twist over it. Not that I can blame Peace Corps for being a little bit exasperated with my tenure as a volunteer thus far, moving-wise. If I change sites it’ll be my third one, which is virtually unheard of. And by “virtually” I mean, “I’ve actually never heard of anybody getting three sites before.” So it would be quite unusual. But, as I said before, I don’t consider myself an unreasonable person, and wanting to live in my own apartment after living four other places closely connected with a host family that ended on terms not of my own volition is not an unreasonable request.

Not that I can fault my program manager for trying to make me feel more empowered about the situation by doing an independent housing search, I suppose. To be honest, I don’t care much either way about it. I need to find a new place to live, and I’ve got a list of demands. I’m definitely empowered about the list of demands. Whether I find the apartment under my own power is moot. I just have to have one. And it’s not really my job to be house-hunting.

But I’ll have to call my counterpart anyway, so I’ll likely bring it up then. As it stands, I’m still not going to work on Monday, since I’ll need to be packing on Monday.

I’m just perplexed as to how my program manager came to believe that I could stay in my house when it’s not the case. Obviously it didn’t have anything to do with her (I’m somewhat jaded with Peace Corps as an organization to be sure, but I can’t believe that my program manager would misle me like that on purpose because it makes no sense), so the confusion must have happened somewhere between my director, my host family, and my counterpart. But… I also have a difficult time believing that, assuming that my host family said that I definitely couldn’t live with them after September 10th, my counterpart/director interpreted that as “Laura can live with them until August!” Maybe there was some sort of ridiculous misunderstanding, but that just seems so unlikely since they were talking about such a simple subject with a yes or no answer attached to it. (“Can Laura still live with you?” “No.” Hell, I could probably still have that conversation in Japanese if I had to.) Either that that my counterpart/director lied to Peace Corps. Which to me is… well, dumb, when you take into consideration that it would all be unmasked after September 10th, when I was still living in the house that my host family expected me to be vacating.

The only other thing I can think of was that my director/counterpart lied to Peace Corps just to smooth things over, but if that's the case then there's a serious lack of forward-thinking. Things would have been all hunky-dory until, well, next Friday.

Wonders never cease. I’m just glad I asked, I guess. And that I didn’t end up spending a crapton of money on a taxi to take all my goodies from America back to a house that I have to be out of by this Friday.

My program manager told me that I shouldn’t think about it right now, in favor of some rest. Which, really, isn’t bad advice if taken as is, but the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be living come next Friday makes it a little more difficult to take entirely seriously. I’m just glad I’ve never been a highly-strung person. I’d’ve gone bonkers by now.

.there once was a note, listen

There are two major events in my immediate future, one which is unquestionably good, the other which is more of a bummer.

The good: I am leaving tonight for a month's vacation in America. Yesss.

The bummer: I got kicked out of my house again. Noooo.

The housing thing just blows. I mean, seriously, how can my luck be so rotten with housing here? The good part, I guess, is that this time they said it had nothing to do with me. How true this is I can't fathom, but at least they're not going to rail at Peace Corps over it.

The host father came in to collect on the electric bill last night, and then told me that I had to be out of the house by September 10th. The official reason is that they just want the house back, and I think I heard something about the son (who is older, married, and lives in Bishkek) is coming back to live in the house for a while. Believable, but I also think I remember my program manager saying something about how the family I'm with didn't originally want another Volunteer. Understandable, I suppose, since they already hosted a Volunteer for two full years. I'm pretty sure that they mostly signed on for the extra income that was promised them, but they're probably just tired of sharing their living quarters.

Part of it is likely because I basically inhabit about half of their indoor living space. The compound house I'm in is bomb, and the main house isn't that much bigger. It's better equipped with an indoor toilet and a washing machine and television, but it's maybe about the size of my house plus half. Most compounds in this country have the guesthouse comprised of maybe a room and a half; my house has four, five if you count the banya. Maybe my house is smaller, but I definitely have more personal living space than the people living in the main house do. Particularly since it's summer and the younger daughter is living their over the school holiday.

I'm just kind of irritated at the prospect of having to move again. At least this time it's on reasonably good terms and they gave me about a month's notice, but it's too bad that that month I'm going to be out of the country. I called my program manager yesterday and told her about it, but she's also on vacation. (Normally I'd feel bad contacting somebody on vacation, but I figured the situation was important enough.)

This time around, though, I'm insisting on an apartment. I'm tired of living with host families: I've already lived with three. I'm done with being in somebody else's house. There actually are apartments in my village, but I know nothing about them, other than there's a block of 'em in front of the school. I don't know if any are vacant, and I don't know if they're up to Peace Corps' standards. The standards Peace Corps has aren't that ridiculous, but I don't even know if the apartments in my village have running water. This wouldn't be such a big deal, but one of the stipulations is that I at least have a private outhouse, which I don't know if the apartments do or not.

If I can't get an apartment in my village, there are a couple of options. One is that the adjacent village has apartments, lots more than my village has. However, there's a Peace Corps rule where you're not supposed to live outside of your community. I know of a couple of instances where Volunteers have lived separately, so I might be able to make a case for it if I fuss. Another option is just to change site completely, and move to a bigger town where there are more apartments.

I'm not wholly against the idea of changing sites again, mostly because my counterpart is planning on leaving after December, which puts second semester next year rather up for grabs. I'm worried that the school is going to want me to teach alone, which I'm not going to do. I would rather not have that fight if possible. Plus, in the unlucky event that I get booted yet again, I can find another apartment much easier in a town than I can in a village.

But I'd definitely rather move than live with another family. I just don't want to go through the whole process of getting used to a new family and their routines and quirks yet again. Not to mention, the compound that I'm living in now is by far the nicest compound I've seen in country. Unless there's some miracle hidden gem out there and I strike it lucky again, anything I get from a compound is going to be a step down in living conditions. At this point, I'm only willing to take a cut in luxury if I get complete freedom along with it. Not to mention, my current family was great to live with in the sense that they never bothered me. Ever. I would only tell them I was going somewhere if it was more than two nights. If I was just going out for the evening, I never said anything to them about it. I appreciated the freedom, and I don't want to have to deal with another overbearing host mother. I had one of those at my first site. Not again.

Reading all of this over makes me sound demanding, but let's face it. I've moved sites once and houses four times while in country. This will be my fifth, and in none of them was I at fault. I am demanding. I've been bounced around this country like a well-worn basketball by this point, and I'm tired of it. Really tired.

If all else fails, I can always threaten to quit. And actually quit if Peace Corps gets too stubborn. I don't think it will come to that, though. Peace Corps is more likely to capitalize on my stubbornness and move me before they hand me the final plane ticket home. I know they're worried about the early termination rate here, and they'll probably attempt to appease me first. Secondly, they know me and how I've gotten the brunt end on housing pretty much my entire service, and I think they appreciate the fact that I haven't come storming in demanding my plane ticket. I'm also not a bad Volunteer. I've never been in trouble with the administration, I don't think I've ever gotten a complaint registered against me from either of the schools I've worked with, and I've done a lot of projects in many areas of the country with a lot of partnership organizations. I've put up with a lot. And I haven't given up yet. Hopefully, this gets rewarded.

There are a few good things that have come out of this, though. First, I'm very likely to get an apartment. Hopefully. Second, it's possible that this apartment may have amenities like a toilet, running water, and (if I strike gold) maybe even a hot water heater. The last is really only likely if I end up changing sites, since I don't think anybody in my village has a water heater, unless they're very rich. But hell, I'd just be happy with the toilet and sink. I haven't had either of these things, really, since I got to country.

Not to mention, moving means that I don't have to live with those stupid yappy dogs anymore. I'll definitely appreciate that, and my guests will too. Nobody likes my dogs.

I guess we'll see. For now, I'm just going to go home, and enjoy my vacation. There's not much I can do about it now, at any rate. I'll come back, and have six days to pack my things, and by that point some options will probably have come up, and I'll just have to see what I'm working with.

As per usual.

.i wanna be a pop star

And a-one and a-two and a-three…

Summer plans and I’m happily a woman in demand.

Two weeks just spent attempting to clue some high-school students into American culture before they go there. Good group of kids, brimming with questions and overflowing with enthusiasm I can’t remember the likes of dealing with since, oh, dealing with romantic-eyed Peace Corps Volunteers-to-be. America is rich, America is clean, America is McDonalds with Jessica Simpson smiling and serving fries on the side. America is MTV on high-definition TV shot from a smoking gun held by a cowboy with name-brand boots. Our job was to say, well, no, not exactly, but I figure they’ll dig up the truth themselves when they get there. Most of them are living in Iowa, not on the Sunset Strip, anyway.

But it was a good job. A nice shot in the arm after spending a year coaxing kids to some semblance of life with very little success. (No success.) I spent the fourth of July resting in an apartment gloriously furnished with electricity and a television and a washing machine. I celebrated America’s independence by declaring my own independence from hand-washing Carhartts. Live free from scrubbing with bar soap or die, I say.

Currently, a week off to breathe, run some paperwork around, and eat all the candy my mother just sent me in a fabulous package. And mustard. I think I seriously just ate a half-bottle of Dijon mustard on crackers. Crackers. They don’t really have crackers here.

Next week, the fun begins again.

First:

Negotiating a taxi ride alone to a part of the country I’ve never been before, to Jalalabad. JaLALALALALALAbad. Good thing I like living by my wits, rather than on my wits’ end. Driving down south to brave the heat and get my Uzbek culture on. But I’m looking forward to going south. I’m going to work on a camp and spend some time up in Arslanbob, the world’s largest walnut forest. No joke, cowpoke.

Second:

The day that camp ends I’ll negotiate another ride down to Osh, mostly for transportation purposes. You see, I’m heading over to the lake for another camp that starts two days after Jalalabad. If I drove from Jalalabad to Bishkek it would take seven-ish hours, which ain’t bad, but ain’t too great when you consider I’d have to do the five-hour leg to Karakol on top of it on the same day if I went by land. If I left super early in the morning it would be possible, but not at all pleasant. You can fly between Jalalabad and Bishkek, but the flights are only on Sundays and only at 2pm, which would put me in Bishkek at about 3ish. Sunday is the day I’d need to be in Karakol, so it would be possible for me to take that flight and then catch a ride to Karakol, but I’d get to Karakol at about the same time as if I’d driven, and I’d rather not get to Karakol that late. I love Karakol, but it’s been known to be somewhat crime ridden when it comes to Volunteers… one Volunteer got cracked on the back of the head last year by somebody and got robbed when he was knocked out (and thank God that’s all that happened to him), and just recently somebody got assaulted with sexual intent in mind, but the assailant was fortunately foiled. Call me Nervous Nelly but frankly I’d rather not arrive there alone at midnight. I mean, I actually know Karakol rather well and I’ve got lots of friends there and I speak Russian decently and I’m sure I could manage if I had to… but why put myself in that kind of situation if there’s other, more pleasant options?

So instead I’ll do the three-hour leg to Osh on the day camp ends, a city that is supposedly older than Rome. Maybe at one point all roads did lead to Osh, but that was probably before the Mongols came in and destroyed all the roads and all of Osh and all of everything else, really. But it’s older in theory, at least. But Osh is a bigger city than Jalalabad, and flights leave three times a day, rather than once a week. Plus, the earliest flight is at 8:30, which would put me back in Bishkek before 10am. So I’d spend the night with a Volunteer who lives there and take the early flight up the next day. Then I’d probably be able to get out of Bishkek and on my way to Karakol by 12, thus putting me on the lake by six or seven, which is immensely preferable to eleven or twelve at night.

So I’ll spend a night in Osh and take a hair-raising ride on a plane that supposedly flies through the mountains, rather than over them. But I’ve also heard it’s quite beautiful, and I’ve done dumber things for beauty in my day. Plus, a 45-minute plane ride is quite preferable to a 10-hour taxi ride, which is how long it takes to go from Osh to Bishkek, if you get a fast driver.

Third:

Same day I land in Bishkek I truck it over to the bus station and either charter a taxi or find a marshrutka out to Karakol, and bus it out there. One more camp +2 days to say goodbye to my friends who are COS-ing, since I’ll be in America when they leave. During those days I forsee waking up each morning on a pile of unwashed clothes covered in yesterday’s sweat and my head in somebody’s armpit in a confused tangle of limbs and body stank and an invisible icepick somehow lodged in the back of my head. The ride home will likely be one of those where every bump in the road is a goddamn personal insult and my ears buzz with the ungodly chorus of dehydration in the sun.

Fourth:

Roll back into Bishkek, bleary-eyed and headachy and sunburny and collapse at site into the holy blackness of exhausted unconsciousness for a couple of days. Then go buy a shitton of souvenirs, pack ‘em up, and get on that long plane ride (these will likely go over the mountains rather than through them) back to America. Well, first I’ll go to Istanbul, then to Paris, and then to America.

In Istanbul, they have a Starbucks in the international terminal. I know this. I am already planning my order. In America, they have Target. I am already planning my freak-out.

Then I boomerang back and go at it for round two. Round one was pretty rough, but no KO.

And I got it in me for another one. Wham, bam.

Thank you ma’am.

Today has been one of those nearly-nothing days, I say “nearly” because it’s not as if I didn’t do anything, but in fact got some needed cleaning accomplished. Since indulging in the washing machine at the apartment, I’m probably not going to have to do any actual laundry until the weather cools off again, given how I’m leaving for home in less than a month. Also, by that point one of my Volunteer friends who is COS-ing is actually staying to work in Bishkek for a few months, and he’s going to have a place with a washing machine. Hells yes, I’m willing to cart my laundry an hour and a half one way for a machine. Or at least the obnoxious things like jeans and towels. I don’t like doing laundry, but washing smaller articles ain’t so terrible. It’s just mildly obnoxious, but mildly obnoxious isn’t that big of a deal these days.

But I’ve starting cleaning up around the house because I’m basically going to be out of it for a month and a half total, and I have a sneaking feeling that as soon as I head out to Jalalabad, we’re going to hit light speed and I’ll be heading back to America before I realize what day it is. Things need to be in decent shape in my house. I swept and reorganized some of my books and cleaned out some shelves.

I’ve also finally gotten around to getting rid of some of my plastic bottles. You see, my main method of getting rid of trash is basically dumping it in my back yard. I have a trash bucket in the kitchen, and when it gets full there’s a place by the fence that the family just dumps all their garbage, so that’s where I dump mine. I sort of feel bad about it, since by some miracle of nature I always seem to be able to produce at least ten times as much garbage as they do. It’s sort of embarrassing. Every once in a while it gets hauled away by the host father, but I haven’t the faintest clue where. He might burn it.

So, I try to keep the garbage I dump out there limited mostly to burnables and biodegradables. Most of my garbage falls along those lines, with the major exception of plastic bottles. Plastic bottles actually get reused with complete impunity here… when I lived with my Kyrgyz host family, whenever I had leftover bottles from water or Coke or whatever, I’d just give them to the mother. The family had a dairy business, and they’d use the bottles for milk or kefir. When I buy dairy from the bazaar, it’s always in reused plastic bottles.

But my new family doesn’t run a business. They have cows, but only a couple. I assume that this produces enough milk for their personal usage, or maybe they sell some of it to the milk truck, though I’ve never seen them do it. The milk truck comes by every morning at about eightish – I used to see it on my walk to school. It looks like a big oil tankard, but says “MILK” on the side. (Obviously, in Russian.) People will run out with pails of milk, the guy jumps out of the truck, takes the milk, and dumps it down the hatch in the top. My Turkish host family from PST used to sell their milk like this, and I think they got about ten som a bucket for it, which seems ridiculously cheap since it goes at the bazaar for at least twenty som a liter. But, I guess, on the other hand if you just sell it to the truck you don’t have to sit at the bazaar all day. The milk in the truck probably goes to factories. You can buy tetra-pak pasteurized milk here, but I almost never get it, since it’s about four times the price of the bazaar milk. Obviously, the bazaar milk isn’t pasteurized, but if you boil it it’s all the same thing. I really only use milk for cooking here, anyway. And now, since it’s hot and I don’t have means of refrigeration, I don’t buy it at all. I use powdered creamer for all my milk-based needs, which is pretty much limited for cream in my coffee, anyway. The powdered stuff works fine. I can even cook with it in a pinch.

But, anyway, my current host family has no need for plastic bottles. I probably could throw them in with my other garbage, but then my host father would be responsible for burning them. Burning trash is pretty much the only way people get rid of trash here… the other method is just dumping it somewhere and leaving it. (The second method is pretty common, too.) The cities sometimes have trash pick-up, but it’s not particularly reliable.

Anyway, burning plastic is harder and more harmful than burning paper waste, so I feel bad dumping all of my bottles out there for the host father to deal with. Instead, I tend to bag my plastic bottles and take them with me to Bishkek, where I either dispose of them at Peace Corps or in a dumpster by an apartment complex. They probably still get burned, but at least I don’t know about it, and it saves my host father the trouble.

I used to do the same thing with my, ahem, feminine hygiene products. Some host families have a weird thing about this, and when I moved in with my Kyrgyz family, I didn’t have the vocabulary to ask questions, and plus my host mother was the type that seemed like she’d be very weird about it. On top of this, my outhouse was full to the point where it would be extremely obvious if I just tossed ‘em down the hatch.

So I used to wrap everything in plastic bags and just trash it in Bishkek when I went in. I felt kind of gross leaving all of that in my underwear drawer (and prayed that my younger sister didn’t bust into my room in one of her moods, root through my stuff and find it), but it was the only way I could think of disposing them that didn’t involve offending anybody that I had to deal with. Maybe some hapless city worker got the brunt end, but at least at that point it couldn’t be connected with me.

It was just so irritating. Every single healthy woman on the planet has a period. (Barring contraceptive methods, of course, but you know what I mean.) Why in the hell does everybody have to be so weird about it? (And I don’t just mean Kyrgyz citizens. Americans are weird about it too, just in different ways.) Not that I think you have to run around with a sign over your head, but you should at least be able to throw away your tampons in peace without worry of irrevocably fucking something up even by asking.

If you're at all curious about what the local women do, well... to be honest, I have no idea. They do sell disposable pads here in the bazaars, but those things are expensive. I have a sneaking suspicion that they may buy the disposables and wash them... I know they do that with disposable diapers. Mysteries never cease.

So, anyway, I’ve been bagging my bottles to Bishkek, sweeping, organizing, and making sure that I don’t have anything too disgusting laying around. To be honest I’ve done a pretty good job, since I haven’t really had any perishables lying around the house since before I went to FLEX, about two and a half weeks ago. Really, my house is already quite clean, since I’ve only been half-living in it since I went to Karakol mid-June.

The one thing that’s been kind of disappointing is the grant. My counterpart and I had planned to do some work on a grant this summer, but our schedules aren’t matching up. We met up around the end of the school year to discuss it. Of course, I had most of my summer laid out to the day, but she had no schedule. She knew that at some point she was going to “have rest” at Issyk-Kul and might possibly be going to Russia to visit her husband’s people, but she had no idea when it was going to happen. We agreed that I would call when I got done with FLEX, and see where we were.

Well, I called, and she’s off in Issyk-Kul. I suppose I should be happy she wasn’t in Russia yet… then her phone number wouldn’t have worked. She won’t be back for two weeks, and in two weeks I’ll be off doing some wild transiting between Jalalabad, Osh, Bishkek, and Karakol. Then I’ll be back in town for a little over a week, but I’m going to need that time to prep for returning to America.

At least I had the foresight to get all the signatures I needed on my annual leave form right at the end of school, before everybody went on their far-flung adventures. I’d be screwed otherwise, since I have to have the director’s signature saying it’s okay for me to take leave. It would be damn near impossible to get a hold of her at this point.

I’ve been considering just writing up a draft of the grant myself. By the strictest measures of protocol, I’m supposed to be doing everything with my counterpart. If I write it by myself, then I deprive the people who I’m writing the grant for of the learning experience of writing the grant. It makes sense.

However, I do feel like I haven’t been a good Volunteer in terms of the work I’ve done at site. Looking at what I’ve done in country I don’t think I’ve done too badly. I’ve helped with bilingual teacher trainings, I worked with FLEX kids, I’ve done a winter camp on HIV/AIDS and life skills (though, to be honest I didn’t do all that much at that camp, but I was there), I helped some village kids get information about Bishkek colleges, I’ve worked at universities, I’ve worked at TOEFL centers, I helped during a cultural exchange week in Naryn. I’m about ready to go on a mad roadtrip adventure around the country that centers on two more camps. I’ve been reasonably productive, considering all the disruptions that have happened in my service regarding housing issues and changing sites.

But in terms of my actual site, I feel as though I haven’t done anything worthy of writing home about. I mean, I showed up for class and occasionally ran an English club that one student occasionally came to, but that’s about it. I don’t think the school is particularly unhappy with my performance, but I also haven’t done anything as memorable as the Volunteer they had before, who was apparently a teaching goddess. I believe it, since she left behind a lot of games and got a bunch of posters and things sent from America for the classroom. She was obviously dedicated.

The other thing about the previous Volunteer is that apparently she got packages from home quite frequently, since students had been asking me why I didn’t give out candy and pens and stickers like the other Volunteer did. At first I was kind of confused, then figured that the bribing must have come from the same packages as the posters. Frankly, I don’t think any less of the previous Volunteer for it… she had to teach by herself and good God I don’t envy that position. Bribery was probably an effective way to at least get a semblance of behavior in the classroom, and if she had the means to get packages sent to her monthly, why not? I think it was rather a clever decision. (And I know she had the means because her family actually bought my host family a washing machine. I have never used it because of the stupid water situation we have in this village, but the point is that we have it.)

I am not a teaching goddess, nor a candy-dispensing machine. But the previous Volunteer did not get a grant off the ground, so I think that if I can manage that, it’s another way to curry favor and make the people I work with happy.

Granted, my ability to be effective was kind of crippled by the homelessness debacle at my first site… I do think that I would be way far ahead of where I am now in productivity had I gotten to stay at my original site. But, I mean, it happened, I had to move, and I’ve got to deal with what I’ve got now. It’s not entirely a bad lot.

However, it still means I haven’t done much, or at least I haven’t worked up to what I know my potential is. I could probably write this grant primarily by myself, and have it ready for my counterpart to go over with by the end of the summer. This would work better time-wise, since I could have the thing ready probably by the time I went to Jalalabad if I really put my head in it, then pass the draft off to my counterpart at the beginning of August (if she’s home), and then get her opinion on it in September, when I came back. It would probably be ready for presentation by the middle or end of September.

And, I mean, my counterpart is leaving at the end of this next semester, so it’s not as though I’m denying the school of a long-term worker who understands how to write grants. It would be a boon for my counterpart to understand the process, I suppose, but it wouldn’t be as advantageous for my school as it would be if she stayed. Not to mention, my director is entirely jazzed up about me writing a grant. She doesn’t seem too concerned about the particulars.

Conundrum. Morals, or practicality?

Bah. Neither. I choose “junk food.” I’ve almost eaten an entire bag of Rollos in a day. Mm, caramel-y goodness.

sunset past noon;

bring back the skies
of tumbleweeds and auburn
and sweet summer rain;
bring back the oceans
and rivers
small streams on the plain
carving past flowerbeds
and thunderheads
bring back the poetry of thistles.

in a moment of mental clarity
I want you to bring back the body
that curves with mine so well
in easy familiarity.
bring back the vines and tulips.
bring back the grass and wine
for I have mountain cathedrals
rock-set spires
snow-bound choirs
to wash it down with.

bring it back and then,
once again,
though the clouds are growing thin,
bring it back again.

in the mornings I haul my water
and get up again,
dirty fingers
tomatoes with salt.

.grimy faces were never seen

Last bell ceremony was today.

It is what it sounds like... a celebration of the supposed last bell of the year. I say "supposed," because this year it's no such thing... due to the extended winter holidays because of the electricity shortages, they're actually extending school until the middle of June. It makes sense (even though we're actually not making up all of the school we missed in January/February... we'd have to go through July to actually make everything up), but celebrating last bell and then having like fifty seven more bells just doesn't really compute with me. At the beginning of the year they have first bell ceremonies, which is, well, exactly what it sounds like.

May 25th is traditionally the last day of school, so it makes sense that the school system mandates that they all have their end-of-school ceremonies on the same day, generally speaking. However, now that we've had our last bell ceremony, I am very curious as to how many students are actually going to show up to the remaining classes. Supposedly this week is the last week of full-on teaching, with next week being exams for the eleventh-formers. The week after that is exams for everybody else... meaning that school will probably end on the 13th of June. But I've also heard the 17th. Basically: nobody knows.

The last bell ceremony itself was pretty simple, but overall quite enjoyable to watch. The only thing that kind of cheapened it was that, well, it's not actually the end of school yet. It would be like having high school graduation in the middle of May and then not finishing until June. But, you know, such is.

I got to the school by nine this morning, which was a nice respite from the usual 8am. I hung out in the teacher's room for about half hour, shooting the shit and finishing up Dante's Inferno before we all went outside. Nothing like reading about all the ways people could suffer in eternal damnation to gear up for end-of-year parties. Woot.

In the back of the school is a small courtyard. I'm moderately familiar with it since the English classroom makes up one wing of the courtyard's walls. I'd never really been in the courtyard, but had spent quite a bit of time gazing vacantly out it and cursing its existence since the courtyard blocks all the sunlight coming into my classroom, making it a friggin' meat locker even when it's relatively nice outside.

But the courtyard is also ringed by pavement, and painted with numbers saying where the classes should stand. They stand around the small path and the door from the school, which is leveled up off the pavement into stairs, acting as a stage.

The ceremony itself was pretty predictable... speeches, some singing, some certificate-giving, you know, the norm. I actually got some flowers... there was a part where the eleventh class got up on the stairs/stage and read little poems about their different classes, and my best English student gave me some white lilies. Very sweet.

The only thing about it really was that I (and everybody else) spent the entire time being cold as hell. The courtyard is shady to begin with, and the day had moderate cloudcover... not to mention a brisk wind and two tall pine trees blocking out most of the sun. I spent most of my time hovering around the back of the crowd, trying to chase the lone patch of sun across the courtyard. Brr. Damn you, unseasonably cold weather.

After the ceremonies had ended, I spent some time posing for pictures and congratulating the kids on... well, on not finishing school yet. But afterwards I ended up in the teacher's room, where for some reason the table was absolutely covered with flowers, and I ended up with some yellow irises and pink carnations to add to my lilies. Then we all voted on whether or not we wanted to go to a cafe tonight to celebrate the "end" of school... most teachers wanted to go, because, I mean, an excuse is an excuse. To be honest, I don't really have the money to blow on a heavy cafe excursion tonight, but I figure I should be social at least some of the time.

Which is part of the reason why I came into the city today... this has been an extremely expensive month. I went to Naryn at the beginning of it, bought an electric hot plate, bought some skirts and clothes, and I finally got around to closing that grant that the previous Volunteer in my old site had left for me. This ended up costing me money because the bastards who work at the Chinese bazaar forgot to write down the purchase of a television antenna I made on the reciept, thus I was short about 200 som and had no way to prove where the money went. Peace Corps suggested I go back to the bazaar and see if they had any other records, but, come on, they don't. Besides, 200 som is a little less than four dollars. In the grand scheme of things, that's nothing at all and it's certainly worth not getting a migrane over going to a bazaar and trying to speak in my third language to somebody who speaks Russian as a second language (Chinese as the first) to try and get some kind of documentation. Over four dollars.

But in the immediate scheme of things, it's all beggared me for this month. When I got to town today, I had sixty som left for the rest of this week, which is less than a dollar fifty. Fortunately I still had some money locked up in Tenge, or Kazakh currency, from when I was in Almaty. I had 4500 tenge, which seems like it would be a lot, but tenge is worth even less than som, and plus the woman wouldn’t accept my 500 tenge bill because she said it was dirty. Ugh. Whatever. It ended up netting me about 1100 som, which is fine for the week.

I’m still trying to save money, though, because next month is going to be pricey as well, from what I forsee. I need to get over to Karakol at some point so I can plan out the lessons we need to do for this FLEX PDO, which is probably going to cost in the realm of 2000 som, all things said and done and drunk. I also have plans to do some major gluttonizing and head over to the Hyatt Sunday brunch buffet. The Hyatt runs one of these every Sunday, and it’s about 30 USD, or roughly 1000 som. Expensive, even for the States. But it’s unlimited food, good food, imported food like salmon and caviar and all sorts of things. Unlimited real coffee. Possibly mimosas. It’s my I-made-it-through-one-year present to myself.

I figure that summer in general is going to be more expensive than not, which is fine. I’ve managed to stick to my Peace Corps-given budget almost eerily well: I’ve never had to dip into my personal reserves/ask good ol’ Mom and Dad to Western Union something to me. I’ve also only exchanged money in Central Asia three times: once from dollars to som during PST when I was buying a cell phone, once when I was in Almaty from dollars to tenge, and once today, from tenge to som.

I’ll likely afford myself some extra leeway over the summer, since I’ve done so well this past year. ...the only thing I’m moderately worried about is getting used to having the extra leeway, but I’m relatively frugal and I don’t travel too often during the school year, so I should be back on my short leash when the grind starts up again. (Maybe.)

But for the rest of this week, I’m looking to essentially be a recluse, and not come back into the city until Friday, when we (hopefully) get paid. I’m trying to save at least 500 som of the 1100 I have for the breakfast buffet next month. Today I bought some peanut butter, and I’m also going to pick up some eggs and bread. I’ve got some honey at home, as well as the requisite supplies of coffee, tea, and cocoa, and this will probably be my main source of repast for the next few days. I also lucked out and found a bag full of books in the resource center, from a K-15 who dropped off a bunch of random things after the COS conference.

The thing about the resource center is that it does have a library... of what is probably a motley collection of the world’s worst books. Or at least the most inexplicable ones. If you’re after some harlequin bodice-ripping romance novels from the 1980s, I suppose you’d be pleased with the collection. That or weird creepy “find your spiritualist self” manuals.

If you want actual good books, you have to talk to the other Volunteers. We all tend to hoard the good stuff. I have been lucky occasionally in the resource center... I did find a copy of The Satanic Verses, which I had been wanting to read out of its sheer notoriety. But most of the good books I’ve gotten here are direct from my friends... I’ve actually been on more of a French literature kick recently, since one of my friends here is hardcore into Balzac and Zola.

I had just finished Dante’s Inferno, so it’s nice that I was able to stumble on a bag of books. Some of it was just dross, but I got a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, Three Cups of Tea, and Mary, Called Magdalene. I’ve at least heard of all of these books, and had been actively looking to read The Brothers and Three Cups for a while. Wasn’t expecting to find the Magdalene book, but I’ve at least heard of it and it doesn’t have a picture of some bare-chested Nordic dude on the front with his long hair blowing in the romantic wind with some red-headed woman in a poorly-arranged dress draped over his arm. I’m sold. And it will give me something to do over my week of exile.

Moral of the story: the end of the school year can’t come fast enough, and I’m poor. Nothing new, I suppose.

.to make love to the angels of light

Fun times in the village. I actually spent the last four days in Naryn, for the combined reasons of talking to a Chinese-American Volunteer about teaching not-English as a foreign language and hanging out with some peeps for Cinco de Mayo. Whenever students figure out that I know Japanese, everybody’s all up on my nuts for a Japanese language club. I’d oblige them, but the issue is that I can’t speak Russian well enough to teach Japanese in it, and most of my students don’t speak English well enough to learn Japanese in it. Linguistical stalemate, as it were. There’s a Volunteer in Naryn who started the Chinese department at her university, so I was interested in learning how the hell she pulled it out. Turns out, it’s mostly because Chinese is one of her native languages, so she’s more comfortable with it than I am with Japanese. Not to mention, she teaches at a university so the English level is better than where I teach. Still don’t know if I’ll be able to pull it off.

The group gathering was fun, though. I did some serious cooking, particularly on Saturday when two other Volunteers and I put our combined efforts together to come up with a Mexican menu. Mexican food is not exactly the easiest thing to recreate in Kyrgyzstan, as you might imagine. The menu consisted of chicken enchiladas, salsa, nachos, and key lime pie. One of my friends had a box of key lime pie mix sent to her from America, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to pull the last bit off given that I’ve never seen limes here, even in Bishkek. The enchiladas were a day-long effort, considering that we had to make everything, including the tortillas, from scratch. I spent about two hours rolling out enough tortillas for eleven people to have two enchiladas each, and frying them. I also boiled the frozen chicken and shredded it. I now know where exactly the kidneys and other such innards are located in chickens, just in case anybody would like to know. Seasoned it with salt, pepper, garlic, lemon, and onion, and cooked it up. We boiled and mashed beans before refrying them, shredded enough cheese to make a Kraft factory proud, and completely winged a red enchilada sauce since the internet café was closed and we couldn’t get a recipe. Baked the pie, chopped red, green and white onion, more tomatoes, and sliced olives for the nachos. Threw together some salsa from tomatoes, corn, cilantro, garlic, and onions. The whole spread took about seven hours to come up with, but it was delicious. We also brought a few bottles of tequila down from Bishkek down with us, and good times were had by all.

I am a serious chef these days. My repertoire for the rest of the week included a chicken pot pie, a pear and vanilla butter pie, biscuits and gravy, omelets with olives, cheese, mushrooms, and green onions. We also cooked up some chicken chili, made bean dip with the leftovers, and another volunteer made a fabulous corn and crab chowder. Everything from scratch. I can craft butter or shortening crusts in about fifteen minutes without measuring cups from memory nowadays. I suppose that’s a fringe benefit from this experience. I’ll be able to cook like whoa, mostly because when you’re in a place that doesn’t have fast food or instant anything and you’d like to eat something other than fried eggs sometimes, scratch is your only option.

I love having gatherings with other Volunteers… it’s basically the only way I can maintain a semblance of sanity around these parts. Isolation in the village doesn’t really bother me that much, as I’m quite good at entertaining myself, but it’s just good to recreate a piece of America in somebody’s apartment sometimes. It’s also nice to have an excuse to do some serious cooking… not that I don’t make my own meals or anything, but the thing about it is that I’m only cooking for one, and usually it’s just not worth the effort or the money to throw down for a pot pie. When there’s ten of us, we can pool our cash, buy fabulous ingredients, and eat like kings for cheap.

There was also a randomly awesome encounter with a pair of older Korean tourists we stumbled into. One day we got tired of sitting around the apartment, and decided to go down the way to a red-roofed café which had outdoor seating, so we could take advantage of the nice day. We ordered a round of beers and were chilling when a pair of older dudes walked up who were clearly not Kyrgyz, and obviously tourists.

As I said before, they were from Korea, and both of them spoke decent English. We exchanged some pleasantries before they went inside, ostensibly to order their meal. There were about ten of us sitting at the café, and the outdoor seats were basically wooden benches that were bolted to the floor, so we couldn’t drag some extra ones up for more seating. We got tired of squishing, so I went off the terrace to intercept a waitress to ask for more chairs.

The waitress looked rather harried, and she asked me if I could speak English. Obviously I do, and she dragged me to the inside portion of the restaurant, where the Korean tourists waved a cheery hello. The problem was obvious: the menu was entirely in Russian, and the Koreans spoke no Russian, the waitress no English.

I spent about ten minutes trying to decipher the menu; the Koreans were good fellows and just told me to order some traditional Kyrgyz dishes for them. Unfortunately, the restaurant was basically out of all the basic Kyrgyz dishes that I know are good: pelmini, laghman, plov, shashlik, manty. This is a common problem at restaurants, particularly small, local-owned ones… their menu may be decently sized, but you can count on the fact that they won’t have at least half of it. Guaranteed. The only dishes they did have were things I hadn’t heard of before, so I spent about another fifteen minutes on translation before ordering a few dishes, a pot of green tea, and 100 grams of vodka. Again, I went outside, and the waitress brought an extra chair for us.

We drank some more beer, and decided to play some drinking games, in lieu of the fact we had nothing else to do. It was elected we would play a game called the “story game,” which seems to be something like twenty questions. One person leaves the group, the rest decide on a story, and the person has to come back and figure out what story it is. Pretty simple. I was the one who was elected to leave, given that I was closest to the stairs on the terrace.

I went back inside so I wouldn’t inadvertently eavesdrop, but this was a quasi-mistake as the waitress saw me again and waved me over for more translating. The Koreans dragged up another chair for me and we proceeded to get absolutely wasted on vodka. I was able to buff up and show off some of my knowledge about East Asia, and regale them with stories about how much fun I had in Seoul the time I went. They were well-traveled: one was a teacher who’d gone around Africa and the better part of Asia in his time, the other was an ex-sea merchant who had traveled all over the globe in shipping vessels. They were in Central Asia for about a year and a half, just traveling around and seeing what there was to see. Basically, my dream retirement.

It also came with the requisite “why did you learn Japanese when you could have learned Korean” spiel. I have come to the conclusion that no matter how languages I’ll be able to butcher by the time it’s all said and done, people will be insisting that I should be butchering other ones. It’s all in good fun, of course, but, oh man. I learned Japanese, and I should have learned Korean/Thai/Chinese. I learned Russian and I should have learned Kyrgyz. Can’t make anybody happy, man.

I was at the table for about two hours. The ex-shipping merchant gave me a sticker with his name and address in Seoul, and implored me to call him if I ever happened to be in that part of the world again, promising me a night of soju and good fun. I believe him.

Good times, except for this was the day where I made the pear and vanilla butter pie. The pie had been completed prior to going out, so all I had to do was pop it in the oven. Unfortunately, the unforeseen addition of the Korean tourists to the outing had gotten me a lot more drunk than I had planned on getting, so popping the pie in the oven turned out to be a bigger ordeal than I had originally counted on. I now have a lovely red crescent of scar tissue on my left forearm due to being drunk and trying simultaneously not to drop the pie and get it reasonably positioned on the rack. Oh well. At least the pie was good.

The only bad part about hanging out with other Volunteers and getting away from site is the comedown when you inevitably return to your village. Alone again, naturally, so it is. Going to class today was almost painful, particularly when I was left alone with the fifth graders again. My counterpart got the eleventh grader to help me out, but it didn’t stop the rain of spitwads and the general mayhem. Fortunately I have a loud enough voice so if I bark at the class it results in about thirty seconds of decent behavior before they start chewing paper again.

The class schedule also got jostled around again so I got to leave early, which was probably good since I likely would have gone absolutely postal if I had to deal with another class. However, the eleventh-grader who was helping with my class looked at me with puppy-eyes and asked if I was going to hold English club today, since I usually do it on Wednesday.

It was on the tip of my tongue to refuse since I was exhausted from the weekend and my first day back teaching and I just wanted to go home, slam back a couple cups of Nescafe, and go to sleep. But she’s actually a good student, and I haven’t held English club classes for about two weeks due to various other commitments. I’ve had quite a number of good teachers in my tenure as a student who put effort and extra time into me when I asked for it; I figure that I owe good, hard-working students at least as much as what my good teachers gave to me. Especially if they actually care about learning English. That’s… what I’m here for, after all.

So guilt took over, and I said that I’d return at the end of school to hold an English club for her. …all of the English clubs I’ve held had only had one attendee, namely, the eleventh-grader. This is probably mostly my fault, as I have done zero advertising for it. Some other students have asked about it, and while I’ve told everybody Wednesday after school, I’m glad that the attendance has been minimal. It would be damn near impossible to attempt to teach a group with two fifth graders, four seventh graders, a ninth grader, and an eleventh grader. I mean, what the hell can you really do with that which engages everybody but doesn’t confuse? But I figured I could handle a conversation with somebody who can actually speak English. I went home and had my Nescafe, picked up my photo album so we’d have something to talk about, and headed back over to the school.

The walk from my house to the school is fairly straightforward and not that long: I actually live on the same street as the school, just a couple blocks down. It’s about a ten minute walk when I’m going at it leisurely, which is pretty much how I always go at it. I crossed the major intersection, and saw four cars turning off the main road and coming towards me.

This was somewhat notable, since there’s not that much traffic in and out of the village itself, and doubly so since the first car to drive up was militsia, and there were about seven uniformed officers crammed in the back. The next two cars were black Mercedes, and a flat bed truck followed up the entourage. They overtook me on the road and stopped in front of a house about ten feet down the road where I was walking. The militsia guys jimmied themselves from the backseat and clustered around the house. Somebody walking by shook the guy in charge by the hand. Some suited dudes climbed out of the two Mercedes, wearing sunglasses.

Weird, I thought, but didn’t stop walking. I’m more apt to avoid militsia these days than not, not because I’m doing anything worth hiding, but more because I just want to avoid the hassle of ID checks and pointed questions. I didn’t want to get tangled up with a large number of police officers all asking for my ID and wondering why I was hanging out in a village in the middle of nowhere, so I just kept my head down and continued walking.

When I left the school, about forty-five minutes later, the Mercedes had left, and now the flatbed truck was parked in front of the house. A rather scruffy-looking dude with a scraggly red beard and torn flannel shirt was walking back and forth between the house and the truck, tossing pillows and blankets into the back. The militsia were leaning up against the fence, and a crowd of gawkers had gathered in a half-circle around the vehicles. A old woman in a headscarf and long dress clutched weakly at the gate to the house, moaning something in Kyrgyz and crying.

Weirder, I thought, quickening my pace and praying that the chorus of “hello” wouldn’t start up from the children. Whatever was going on, I didn’t want to be involved. But the kids were too absorbed in the scene, whatever the hell the scene was.

I got back to my house and unlocked the gate to find my host father repairing a metal fence. He was taking a break, smoking a cigarette and flicking at a broken hinge.

I pointed down the street and asked him if he knew what the militsia were doing down there.

He looked at me, smiled, laughed and shook his head. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to tell me, then he sighed and pointed back down the way. “Somebody drank too much vodka and stabbed a person to death,” he said, sticking his cigarette back in his mouth.

“Seriously?” I asked, equal parts incredulous and shocked.

He hummed in affirmation, picking at the hinge again. “Don’t drink too much vodka!” he said cheerfully, grinning again.

I laughed and said that I wouldn’t, and went into my house. Drunken murder down the street. Awesome.

Just to defuse any alarm on the part of the reader, let me say that I really don’t think this affects my safety in the village in any way. I’m virtually never outside of the compound where I live after dark; I can count the number of times on a hand missing fingers, it’s so rare. And when I am out after dark, I’m in a taxi which drops me off right in front of my house. There’s just really no reason to be out after like, 8pm. The public transportation stops, shops close, and nothing’s going on in the village that late other than drunk people stumbling around, and it just seems wiser to avoid confrontations with drunk men at night. …case in point, see above.

At any rate, it seems more like a case of domestic violence, rather than something I should be alarmed about. Well, I guess I am somewhat alarmed… somebody just got axed, after all, but I’m not afraid for my safety. The gate is locked at night, and I lock my door as well. I’m about as safe here as I am at home, I wager.

So, welcome back home. Back to the insanity at school, back to alcohol-inspired homicide. Yeah.

In other news, I finally bought myself an electric plitka, or hotplate. I had been meaning to do this for a while… I do have a gas oven here, which saved my life during the winter months when we didn’t have electricity. I wouldn’t have been able to cook otherwise, particularly when my petchka ran out of coal. However, the issue with the gas stove is that gas is expensive, and plus only one part of the range works. Annoying when I want to have more than one pot cooking at once.

I had wanted an electric addition for a while, for the dual purpose of conserving gas and being able to cook one damn thing at a time, but had never gotten around to it. When it comes down to it, I’m a person driven by practicality at the heart of things; while it would have been nice to have the electric plitka, it wasn’t any real skin off my back to just keep using the gas. To the same (somewhat depressing) ends, I’m the same way about learning languages. People keep on asking me if I’m going to ever learn Kyrgyz, but the sad fact about it is that it’s just not practical for me. I can get anywhere in this country on Russian, and in fact, I can actually talk to more people with it, given that most Kyrgyz speakers over the age of five can speak Russian, but not that many native-Russian speakers can speak Kyrgyz. Not to mention, Russian is undoubtedly the more useful of the two to know after Peace Corps. There are some inherent advantages to Kyrgyz, namely in the street cred it gets you here… whenever we negotiate for taxis or whatever and I happen to be with a Kyrgyz speaker, we always seek out a Kyrgyz person and I always let the other Volunteer go at the negotiating. Kyrgyz people love it when foreigners can speak Kyrgyz. When you’re lucky, it can result in some mad crazy discounts.

I love traveling with Kyrgyz-speaking Volunteers. We get the advantage of being able to bargain in Kyrgyz, but I also understand Russian so we can cope with non-Kyrgyz speaking locals, as well. I’ve noticed that the locals here will oscillate between the two languages if they’re talking about something they don’t want you to hear, but having both a Kyrgyz-speaking Volunteer and a Russian-speaking Volunteer on the same team eliminates this. If I were in the south, Uzbek would have been added to the language salad, but a) I’m not in the south, and b) Uzbek is pretty similar to Kyrgyz. Native speakers of Kyrgyz and Uzbek can talk to each other and have a decent conversation, so most Volunteers who learn Kyrgyz can at least follow a conversation in Uzbek to some degree. The same is true with Kazakh as well – when I went there last month, I was listening to the Kazakh, and I understood some of it. The Kyrgyz “rahkmat,” or “thank you,” is “rahkmet” in Kazakh. Yeah. And then when we want to talk about something we don’t want locals to hear, we’ve got English.

It’s always kind of hilarious if I go over to a Volunteer who lives with a Kyrgyz family’s house… when we guest for dinner, we communicate in three language, but each person can only understand two languages each. Me, Russian and English. Volunteer friend, Kyrgyz and English. Host country national, Russian and Kyrgyz. I understand a little bit of Kyrgyz, and usually a Kyrgyz-speaking Volunteer knows at least a few words of Russian, and sometimes the country national knows a few English phrases, so we can kind of follow each other’s conversations, but not participate when it’s in the language we don’t know. It’s quite the process.

In a sense, just speaking about being a Peace Corps Volunteer, I think that Kyrgyz is the better language to know. I mean, it is the real local language, whereas Russian is rather the language of the conquerors. But, by whatever stroke of fortune, I got Russian dealt to me at the beginning of this madness, and that’s what it is. Russian is also infinitely more complicated, grammatically speaking, and it’s just a better use of my time to get better at Russian than it is to start all over again with Kyrgyz. If I had started out with Kyrgyz, yeah, Kyrgyz would have been the more practical of the two. But I didn’t.

Sometimes, I wish I were just more intellectually curious when it came to language. It would be pretty sweet to come back to the States with both Russian and Kyrgyz under my belt. But the cravat about language is that it’s goddamn fucking hard. It’s not just memorizing new words and grammar patterns, though that’s definitely a chunk of it, but it’s also finding an accent that you can reproduce naturally and native speakers can understand. My Russian accent is a little deeper than my English one, which is hilarious when taken with the fact that my voice shoots up an octave when I speak Japanese. The biggest part for me, though, is that in order to really learn a language, it means adopting an entirely new way of thinking. I can’t do translation, meaning that if I see an apple, I have to be able to connect the fruit directly to the world “yablika,” (or “ringo,” if we’re talking Japanese), and I can’t go “fruit,” then “apple,” then “yablika.” I suppose it would be feasible for simple nouns, but when it comes to forming complex thoughts in the madness that is Russian grammar and being able to do it in real conversation time while also understanding what somebody else is saying to you, if you have to muddle through the English translation first, you’re through. And don’t forget noun declension! Seriously, man, my brains are scrambled.

But, anyway, electric hotplates. I ended up buying one yesterday because my gas balloon finally ran out. I was waiting for this, since I filled the balloon back in late December, when I arrived here, and I pretty much did all of my cooking on it from December through May. I’ve got an oven now, but it was in the middle of last month, so I haven’t done that much serious cooking in it as of yet.

Since the electricity situation has gotten leagues better – i.e. the power hasn’t gone off during the day since I got back from Almaty, the end of April – relying solely on electric means for cooking shouldn’t be as risky as it was during the bulk of my service. I’ll probably get the gas filled up again at some point, either when the electricity gets spotty again or when it starts getting cold. The problem with winter is that the strain on electricity goes up exponentially… people start using it to heat their homes, it gets darker earlier, there’s less to do outside so people start watching a lot of television, and so forth. But for now, I’m going to hold off on it. I’m in the process currently of making some Middle Eastern-inspired chickpeas… basically chickpeas baked with onions and carrots, dressed with honey, cinnamon, chicken broth, vinegar and parsley. Bake that shizzle up for an hour and you’ve got some good eatings, friends. I also found a happy new use for that cast-iron frying pan without a handle that was the bane of my life over the winter… I tried to use it for about a month and a half before breaking down and just buying a non-stick pan, as it was impossible to cook with. The stuff on the bottom would burn and cement to the pan, while the stuff on top never cooked. The lack of handle didn’t help. It got relegated to the back of the kitchenware cupboard. But now, I figured out that I could use it as a baking pan. It doesn’t have a handle, so it fits perfectly in the oven, and it has a cover, to boot. Sweet. I love being able to repurpose things. Particularly because it means I don’t have to shell out another 300 som to get an actual baking pan. I can even make bread, cake, and pies in it.

Speaking of bread, I might make some carrot or apple bread soon, so I can share it with my host family. They occasionally pop over with various breads or cookies to share with me, so I figure I should repay the favor.

The only problem with relying solely on electric means to cook is that it makes the electricity in the rest of my house go haywire. This is compounded because my host father does a lot of odd repair jobs… at first I figured he was just being handy around the house, but as soon as it got warm a lot of random metal objects, like fences, gates, and even metal tombstones started showing up at our house, like the gate he was fixing when he told me about the murder down the street. I figure they can’t all belong to us, so I think he fixes them for other people. So if he’s welding outside or whatever, and I’m trying to stirfry something and bake, the lights flicker like a low-class disco. I compensate by turning off the lights whenever I leave the kitchen and moving my electric teakettle to the bedroom in an attempt to even out the electricity distribution, but we’ll see. I just hope nothing blows out.

I love my house, but the only thing about it is that I wish it were better for entertaining. Basically the way the Volunteers tend to entertain is to throw dinner parties where we all cook, like we did in Naryn… however, my kitchen is an absolute closet. There’s literally enough room for one person to be in there, and I actually do most of my prep out in the living room. It works, and I suppose it’s convenient to a certain degree because I can reach all of my cooking supplies without even having to move, but if you’ve got more than one person attempting to cook, it’s damn near impossible.

Another thing I’m probably going to do now that it’s warmer is buy more skirts. I plan on spending the majority of the summer in skirts, firstly because it’s going to get hot as hell here and I can’t really wear shorts. Secondly, it means that I won’t have to wear my jeans, so they’ll last me longer when it’s cold and wearing skirts is stupid. My jeans have held up admirably well here… when I went to Japan I brought three pairs with me and wore holes the size of small countries in the crotch of all of them by the time it was all said and done. I figure this is probably because I actually put on weight in Japan, being that I loved the food and wasn’t playing rugby to counteract it. Here I actually lost a lot of weight at the beginning, which helped. Since I’ve been cooking for myself I’ve gained some of it back, but I definitely haven’t overtaken where I was when I got here. But it’ll still help if I can spend a couple of months not wearing them. Not to mention, the less I wear jeans, the less I have to wash jeans. Since I’ve more or less gotten accustomed to doing laundry by hand nowadays, the only articles I still truly dread washing are my jeans and Carhartts. It’s a nightmare, since denim is a heavy material anyway, and it soaks up water like a sponge. Anybody who’s ever fallen into a pool or something while wearing jeans knows how heavy they get. It sucks.

To a certain extent, class is getting more and more hilarious, as much as it frustrates me. Some days it’s basically the same old shit that it is any other day of the year, but with the weather getting warmer, the students (and the teachers!) are just getting less and less attentive. On Fridays, I only have one class, and it’s at 12:30. In a way I guess it’s nice, since it’s the only weekday where I don’t have to get up at seven, but it’s smack in the middle of the day, which makes it difficult to go into the city and run errands or whatever. Originally the class was second hour, which meant I would have been done by about 9:30, but of course they moved it.

Consequently, I don’t think I’ve been to that one Friday class in about a month. Things just keep coming up, and if there’s something important that I need to take care of in the city on a weekday, Friday’s the most likely day to get axed, since I’m only missing one class. Two weeks ago, I went to the Friday class for the first time in about three weeks, only to find my counterpart in the foyer with some paperwork, expressing surprise that I had showed up. I had conditioned the school to just assume that I wasn’t going to come into work on Fridays at all, despite the fact that each Friday I missed, I had an excuse. Two dentist appointments (I chipped a tooth on a rock in some rice, and then I had a cavity), the trip to Almaty, the trip to Naryn. My counterpart had already told the class to go home. Awesome.

This week, I was quasi-planning to skip Friday too, as I really need to get into Bishkek and spend a day at the Peace Corps office closing this grant I have. At my original site, the previous Volunteer had made an English language center… he had done the bulk of the work, all that needed to happen was buying a television, dvd player, console, and some other sundry electronics, like extension cords. He passed the grant to me, so I could buy the last things and close it. And, of course, the whole homeless debacle happened and I had to change sites, so the grant is still open. I’ve got all my receipts and whatever, but some of them are handwritten in extremely sloppy Russian, so I can’t friggin’ read ‘em. I need to talk to some of the local staff so they can translate, which means going in on a weekday.

But on Wednesday, the lone student who comes to my English clubs said she wanted some information about the American University in Central Asia, which is basically Kyrgyzstan’s Harvard. I promised I’d get her the information by Friday, and I figured I shouldn’t back out.

So I went into school today, to find my counterpart outside. My Friday class is eighth grade form b, and my counterpart said that most of the students had probably already gone home. She also said that she had to talk to some parents about something, and likely she’d be a little late to class. Par for the course.

I ask if we’re going to hold class at all today, and she said that if at least ten students showed up, we would. I ran into the eleventh-grader and gave her the application materials on AUCA she asked for, just in case I wouldn’t be there after class to meet with her, and walked into the classroom.

There were exactly ten students there. Not impressive, considering how the roster says there should be twenty-seven students. (There are never twenty-seven students. On a good day, you might get twenty.) All of them were girls, and they all wanted me to cancel the class so they could go home. I actually like eighth grade form b. They’re relatively well behaved, and at least nominally interested in English. Rather unlike eighth grade form a, which is friggin impossible.

I hate to say this, but it’s true… the classes that have higher ratios of girls to boys are the better ones. Girls are generally more interested in school on a whole, and even the ones who couldn’t care less are quiet about it. They’ll just sit in the back and pass notes, or text each other on their phones. Whatever. I’ve come to the point where I don’t really care, as long as they’re not being outright disruptive. If you want to come to class to sit in the back and do nothing, fine with me. You do your thing, I’ll do my job.

It’s the boys who are damn near impossible to deal with. Especially the eighth graders, because they’re just entering the age where it’s cool to be macho and friggin’ stupid. For some of them it’s just depressing, because I can recognize the ones who are actually somewhat interested in English, but they don’t show it because it’s more important to be able to front to the other dudes than pay attention. I want to throttle those kids… not the ones who don’t care at all, because I consider that a lost cause, but the ones that have the potential but just don’t put in any of the effort are just frustrating. I know they’re smart! Why the hell don’t they act like it?

I always hated the kids that were like that when I was in school, too. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the people who were acting out in class were, indeed, morons. But there were a few that I knew were smart. I’d talked to some of them privately – particularly a lot of my female peers. Some of them really knew what was up. But then they were more concerned with tanning beds or boys or Abercrombie or something else. The urge to throttle was high then, too. They were smart. Or at least, they could have been.

I remember something pretty distinctly when I was in seventh grade… I was at my assistant soccer coach’s house. My father was the coach of my soccer team, and for a time we had a couple of assistants. This assistant was the only female assistant coach we ever had, and she had a daughter that was a grade up from me. She was talking with my mother about something, don’t remember what, when school came up. I always did well in school, namely because I had figured out that if I wanted to go somewhere far away for college, I needed to have a good enough track record for somewhere far away to want me. The assistant soccer coach just shook her head and said, “Well, wait until she discovers boys.”

Pissed me the hell off. Still does. Boys are an acceptable excuse not to accomplish anything and have your grades fall off a cliff? Jesus Christ, no wonder men think they’re supposed to rule the world if that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Anyway, it was a beautiful day outside, and since even the best English students were asking for the day off, it was going to be like holding corks underwater to get them to concentrate. Plus, I had no lesson plan and didn’t know if my counterpart was actually going to show up at all. These “parent meetings” have a way of going on for entire class periods. I would know. Why insist that the students attend and be attentive, when I have nothing actually worthwhile for them to attend to?

The general fallback for English teachers who don’t have a plan seems to be translation. I get it, mostly because it’s easy and doesn’t require much effort on the part of the teacher, especially if she can speak English pretty well. I don’t have much against translation in general, as long as it’s not what is taught all the time. However, I’m bad at this fallback, because, uh, half of the time my Russian isn’t good enough to translate. Embarrassing, right? Though, in my defense, my crash course in Russian was dedicated to learning how to talk… we did do a little bit of translation work, but because being able to communicate orally was a hell of a lot more important, that’s what I put my effort into. I’m still only moderately literate at best. I mean, I can read signs and the like, but I can’t do anything literary. Not to mention, if I’m going to do translation work at all, I’m much better at Russian to English than English to Russian. I can barely write at all. For me, it’s easiest to understand, then to talk, then reading, then writing.

Finally, I told them that I was going to go get the journal (basically the class attendance/grade book), and said very clearly that if there were five or fewer students in the room when I got back, there would be no class. And I left. When I came back about five minutes later, guess what, only five students remained. I told them to go home. I figure this satisfies all parties. Class doesn’t technically start until I have the journal, and there had to be ten students there by the start of class for us to actually conduct it.

I don’t even know why I bothered, really. Nobody would have cared either way if I had just told the ten students there to go home. Whatever. The Central Asian penchant for doing everything by the book even if you have to fudge everything to make it so is getting to me, I suppose. When in Rome. Or Bishkek.

May is already shaping up to be an awesome month for teaching. Everybody’s attention span is completely shot, and it’s riddled with holidays. And I can’t wait until June. School here usually ends on May 25th, but because of the extended winter holidays due to the electricity shortages, they’ve extended the school year until June 13th. …if you’ve noticed, the math doesn’t quite match up, since we didn’t start school until March and usually it starts in January, but whatever. I’m happy that I don’t have to be at this until July.

The only thing about this that I think is just ridiculously stupid is that they’re still holding the last bell ceremonies on May 25th. Last bell is basically what it sounds like… a celebration of the last bell of the year. Dancing, eating, the whole nine yards. The eleventh form usually does some sort of skit to express appreciation to the teachers, and so forth. However, school is scheduled to continue after the last bell ceremonies. Apparently this is because it’s the mandated day for last bell for all schools around Kyrgyzstan, considering how not all of the schools had the extended break. The schools that did, though, are expected to do the extra twoish weeks after the final ceremony.

This just seems absolutely asinine. Even before I knew this, I figured that getting students to come to school after the official last day of school was going to be mostly fruitless, but now? I’ll be impressed if we get five students a class.

Whateves. Ain’t no skin off my neb. I just do what they tell me to do.

I should have done laundry today, but I just wasn’t feeling it. That’s the deal with me and cleaning… I have to be in the mood for a chore to do it, otherwise I’m lazy about it and do a crappy job. Today was a cooking day, a tidying up day, and a rearranging day. I built a new nightstand out of a pile of boxes, some carpet, and a picture frame. Not a bad day, as a whole. And, I guess, a writing day.

But, for me at least, every damn day’s a writing day. For better or worse, I suppose.