From Barack Obama's Inaugural Address:
"America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words; with hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come; let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations."
Yes, yes, and yes. Amen, omin, so mote it be, yes, and again, yes. Fist pump, high-five, peace sign, funky chicken dance, and yes.
And that is all.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
.I've been too, too hard to find
Went to work today. For thirty minutes.
Yesterday I went into Bishkek, for the dual purpose of shopping and meeting up with my program manager, as she wanted to give me some paperwork and ask how the new site was going.
Next week is In Service Training, which means I get to go to a hotel in Bishkek with the other Volunteers, attend some seminars, and try not to be too hungover. Our counterparts will also be there for part of it, with the intended goal of assessing how our team teaching is going, and get some pointers on improvement.
Of course, this is a slightly skewed objective in my case, as I’ve moved and now have a new counterpart. When I was talking to my program manager yesterday, she gave me another copy of all the paperwork for the seminars. The load was considerably lessened for me, as all the work we were supposed to do regarding how our teaching experiences went doesn’t apply to me, since I haven’t taught with my new counterpart yet, and everything I did previously is moot.
She still wanted me to prepare a demo lesson with my new counterpart, though. Part of the program is that we’re going to be broken up into small groups with our counterparts and demo a lesson for other counterparts and volunteers to watch, so we can get feedback.
I admit I wasn’t particularly happy about this development, given that I had only met my counterpart for about five minutes previously, and had never team-taught with her. In addition, even though my new village has had a Volunteer before, the Volunteer taught alone, since the team-teaching aspect of the TEFL program was only introduced last year. On top of this, we would only have had today to work on it, so I was put in the position of having to explain team-teaching, get to know my counterpart, and come up with some sort of demo lesson to model next week in the span of a couple hours. In Russian.
But, you know, I was willing to give it the old college try, mostly because there was no alternative. I went into work this morning at nine, to drop off the bundles of paperwork to both the director and my counterpart, and give a whack at planning something.
The day wasn’t a total waste, because I hadn’t met the director yet. Turns out she’s a rather nice woman, and we had a pleasant chat about the weather and how I was liking the new village as I gave her my teaching contract and other sundry bureaucratic tidbits. We were in the director’s office cum teacher’s lounge, and I sat down to wait for my counterpart, who hadn’t showed.
In most respects, I’m pleased with the development in my Russian. I’m far from the most advanced Volunteer language-wise, but I’d estimate I’m somewhere above the median for the group. The best part about it is that I’m starting to be able to use humor again in a deliberate fashion, rather than blundering through conjugations and having people laugh due to my sheer ineptitude with the language.
Humor is one of those things that is a long time coming when learning a language. Most of my brand of humor is based off of observations; namely, I hold firm to the conviction that the world is an absolutely ridiculous place. In the past month, I got kicked out of a house, was homeless for a week, got bit by a dog, had a smackdown with another dog, and caught on fire. I couldn’t make this stuff up, and I’ve never been wanting for imagination. You can laugh about it or cry about it, I figure. Sometimes the crying is necessary, but laughing is overall more enjoyable and less messy.
But in order to make witty observations, you have to be able to first be able to say what you mean in a semi-coherent manner, and second be able to convey that you think it’s funny and not tragic. The latter is the harder part. But I was able to make some semi-snide comments today that the teachers found amusing and not upsetting, which is a mark in my favor, as far as I’m concerned.
Ten minutes into waiting for my counterpart she was still a no-show, so I called my program manager, as she had told me to give her a ring anyhow. Turns out my counterpart was at a seminar today, and everybody had forgotten. Oh well. I asked my program manager when the hell I was supposed to plan this demo lesson, as tomorrow’s Saturday and the teachers won’t be at school, and then Sunday’s the first day of IST. The program manager said she didn’t know; we’d probably have to try and wing it during the prep time we’d have before the presentations.
Sigh. A wing and a prayer, and that’s all I’ve got these days.
When I was having the conversation in English with my program manager, the rest of the teachers had fallen into silence and were staring at me. Sometimes, I think people forget that I actually do speak a language quite fluently, and I’m not just an overgrown three-year-old with a bad accent.
But the looking Russian thing is equal parts amusing and irritating. Before I went to the office yesterday to meet with my program manager, I stopped by the bazaar to pick up some groceries, one of the items being a crate of eggs. I was lugging my purchases back to the office, when this dude fell in step behind me, holding a bag of samsas and a coke.
He asked me if I was selling the eggs, and that he’d like to buy some. I was like… uh… no, I went to the bazaar for these. He was like, oh, that’s too bad, they would have been nice with my lunch. And then off he went.
It still sometimes amazes me that I can blend so well. I’m semi-accustomed to Japan, where wherever I went it felt like I had FOREIGNER branded on my head.
After I got to the office it was lunchtime, so I knew I couldn’t go talk to my program manager just then, and I decided to go rustle up some grub for myself. I got a gamburger, which is kind of like a cross between a hamburger and a doner kabab, and stopped in a store to pick up a Snickers bar.
Me: Hello. May I have a small Snickers, please?
Storekeeper: [squints for a moment] You’re not Russian.
Me: Nope. Lots of people think I am, though.
Storekeeper: Where are you from?
Me: I’m American.
Storekeeper: What! You’re not blonde!
Me: …no. Can I have a Snick-
Storekeeper: You speak Russian!
Me: Yeah. Not well, though. Can I-
Storekeeper: No, your Russian is really good! You’re American!
This went on for about five minutes before I actually got to conduct a transaction resulting in a candy bar. I told my program manager about it, and she laughed and congratulated me on integrating so well.
Frankly, I integrate perfectly, as long as I keep my damn mouth shut.
But anyway, I went home after the half hour detour at the school and got back to lounging. A couple hours later, I got a call on my phone from an unknown number.
I usually pick up whatever number calls me, even though the vast majority of the time it’s just random people who dialed the wrong number. Sometimes, though, it’s a call from the Peace Corps office or one of my friends who changed their SIM cards. I answered and there was a hesitant person speaking in Russian, and I almost hung up, before she identified herself as my counterpart.
Apparently she was back from the seminar, and wanted to meet up with me at my house to discuss the paperwork and the planning. I was thrilled, and agreed, but then realized that my house looked like a train wreck and I had just told somebody that I barely knew to come over in an hour and a half.
At first I was annoyed, but then I was like… wait. Something to do. A deadline. An actual deadline.
I had never really appreciated deadlines before. I’ve always been vaguely aware that in most circumstances, sans timed math tests, I love to work against the clock and come up with something awesome for my efforts. At college I was always under some kind of time limit, so I had just gotten used to it and was mostly annoyed that I never had any time to relax, but considering how I haven’t had an actual deadline for anything in a while…
I washed the dishes, put away my clothes, made the bed, and even did entirely unnecessary things like scrub some of the burned gunk off of the stove. (Which was there when I got here, by the way.) I even scrubbed the floors and rid the corners of the dust jungles that had accumulated there between myself and the previous Volunteer. I also managed to find an unused lamp in the corner, and used an extension cord to hook it up at my bedtable, making it the first bedside lamp I’ve had in country.
Then I remembered I should probably let the host family know I was expecting a guest. I figured it shouldn’t be a problem… when I moved in, the host father only said that I couldn’t invite students over (which I hadn’t been planning on), but made it perfectly clear it was fine if I had other Volunteers guest. I caught him when he was chopping some wood, but when I told him I was expecting to have my counterpart over, he frowned.
I’ve come to the conclusion that people are kind of weird about having guests here. It’s bizarre because they have people over all the time, but they’re extraordinarily picky about who it is. It’s hard to figure out the rules, because it’s not like in America where if friends want to see each other, they’ll call first. People just pop on by.
But he was pretty clear that he didn’t really want my counterpart over, for reasons that I still can’t discern. But like a million other things in life right now, it wasn’t worth arguing about. I called my counterpart back (no small feat because when the electricity goes out around here, which is daily, the cell phone towers go out as well), and told her we couldn’t meet at my house.
Then she stupefied me by asking where we should meet, then, if we couldn’t do it at my house. It was kind of an injured tone. (What I wanted to say was, “Why not your house?” But I’m still too American to go about inviting myself over to a non-friend’s house.) I was like, uh, I’ve lived here for two weeks. You’ve been here most of your life, if not all of it. Though, even in the short span of two weeks, I know that there’s no real place to go here that’s not somebody’s house, one of the general stores, or the school. Or, I guess, the fields, but that’s not exactly an arena productive for lesson planning. We don’t have any cafes or public meeting spaces, unlike my previous village that had at least five cafes and a town hall. The store closest to the school does have a couple of tables where people drink vodka, but I don’t know if that would be, you know, appropriate.
Then the phone cut out, due to the electric outage. I sighed, and geared myself up to try again when the power came back on, when she texted me. In perfect English. (Though she did spell my name “Lora,” which I find rather charming. All the country nationals spell my name as such, probably because it’s the direct transliteration from how you spell it in Russian. My last name would be “Hyankok.”)
My counterpart is one of the myriad examples, I’ve figured out, of somebody who has impeccable knowledge of English grammar and syntax, but can’t speak very well. At least, I’ve never heard her say more than a couple words in English, and all our phone conversations have been in Russian. I myself dislike talking on the phone in either Russian or Japanese – when you can’t see the person you’re talking with, it makes it a thousand times harder to understand what they’re saying. Sometimes, if I’m speaking with a person face-to-face in one of my auxiliary languages, even if I don’t know what they’re talking about, I can infer a lot by their gestures or facial expressions. Phone conversations deprive you of that. I used to have a near-phobia about it when I was in Japan, but I guess I’ve mostly gotten over it. Still don’t like it, however.
But she told me to meet her tomorrow at the school. We couldn’t meet there today because the school closes at noon. Alright, fine. I guess at least my house is clean. And I have a bedside lamp. And I’m glad I asked before my counterpart just showed up at my house. I’d really hate to have another row over whom I invited over to my living quarters. I just got here. (Though, I have to say, I was kind of annoyed by it, but in a distant way. If we start having issues about having friends over, then it’ll become a big enough thing to throw a stink about. But, he did say that the previous Volunteer had groups of friends over occasionally, so it shouldn't be a problem. Hopefully. Jesus, not again.)
Also finally got around to doing some laundry, but by hand. In addition to the electricity shortages, we’ve had water shortages these past few days. Generally speaking, the water works when the electricity works, but for some reason the water hasn’t been working recently (I suspect the pipes may be frozen), which precluded me from using the washing machine. I haven’t been having troubles with the shortages, though… the banya’s in my house, so there’s about a thirty gallon barrel in there, and I’ve been fine on the water front. Besides, the fact that I have a sink in my house that at least works some of the time is a huge luxury as it is. In my previous village when I lived on my own, I only had an outdoor pump. In some places, the water only runs once a week, so they have to drag out all their pots and barrels and anything that holds water and hoard. My married friends live on a compound where the host family doesn’t have a water pump period – they have to go ask the neighbors whenever they want some.
And that is just something I cannot comprehend: a life without access to water. Forget about access to clean water, but any water. It’s one thing to be a Peace Corps Volunteer and cope with it for a couple of years or whatnot and then go back to the magical land of water purification systems and hot water heaters… but could you imagine living your life and knowing that there was no access to water on your property and you couldn’t afford to have piping put in?
But I ended up doing a load of socks and underwear by hand. I also needed to clean some of my shirts and pants for IST, but even if I had access to the laundry machine, they wouldn’t have dried in time. So I just hung them up, rubbed out whatever looked too heinously disgusting with damp palms, and sprayed them with Febreeze. Febreeze. The stuff of the gods. That and beer.
Everything’s hanging in the kitchen, as that’s where it’s actually warm. Walking in there now is like walking into the underwear jungle, warm and damp. If they don’t dry by tomorrow, I’ll have to plug in my heater and fast-track that shizzle.
When I went to the school today, I also volunteered myself for teaching some English clubs over the break, if there were any interested students about. I mostly offered at the insistence of my program manager, who said that working would help me forget about all the crap that happened in my old village. I think she’s still moderately concerned that I’m going to throw in the towel, which at this point I’m probably not going to do. At least, not yet. The thing about this, and I can only assume this is the same for immigrants and expats everywhere, is that it’s an every day decision to stay. Every day you wake up, and decide that, for whatever reason there is, you’re gonna stick around. Or you decide you aren’t. Of course, you do a variant of this even when you’re on the homefront, but most people, if they have a crappy day at work or get evicted from their houses don’t throw up their hands and be all like, “To hell with this, I’m leaving the country.” Obviously, some people do decide to hell with it and leave the country, and those idiots are called Peace Corps Volunteers. Ergo, greetings from Kyrgyzstan.
And to a certain degree my program manager’s right, in the sense that I’m here to do work, not just sit around in my house and listen to the soundtrack from Mulan. I have to say that I’m hesitant to take on a workload, though, because I’ve been pretty content just existing for a while and not having anybody bother me. On the other hand, I am here to work, and teaching a couple hours of English a week is not going to cut in on my Disney sing-along time in a significant way. It would also help me get to know some students, likely interested ones if they’re willing to come learn English over the break, which is certainly not a bad thing.
However, I have to admit I am a little perturbed about her suggestion to “forget” the whole getting evicted and being homeless thing. I am not a forgetter. I’ve never been one to hold a grudge, and if I ran into my old landlady at this point I’d probably only spit at her feet and not into her face (and in a couple of months, I wouldn’t spit at her at all, probably just ignore her), but as somebody who writes like it’s a chronic disease and studies war monuments in her scholarly life, forgetting is just not in the fabric of my being.
I like keeping these little challenges that I’ve surmounted one way or another, like pearls I’ve formed in my belly or smooth river rocks in a pocket. They’re the things I worry at when times get tough, the things I take out and look at when I’m feeling like a lousy waste of respiration. It’s like, hey, come on, I did this. I managed. I’m here.
And I know that a lot of what I write is about me being upset or frustrated, but I can only hope that it doesn’t convey that I’m completely unhappy here, because I’m not. Writing is simply a coping mechanism for me, it’s nearly always the first thing I reach for when something weird, awesome, bad, or upsetting happens. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a version of talking to myself, in a way that doesn’t make me look loony. Especially now, when I spend most of my time either alone or surrounded by people who don’t speak my native tongue. It’s hard to express myself succinctly in Russian. I can communicate, I can operate, but I can’t talk with much precision about what I’m feeling or thinking. And as somebody who is, admittedly rather loquacious, not being able to express myself precisely is one of the biggest frustrations of being here.
There are several reasons why I’m here. The stars are gorgeous, and a lot of the time I’ll go stand outside at night and be awed at their beauty. The mountains are deep and raw. I’ll do a lot of stupid things for beauty, in words or touch or sight, and I’ve done much dumber things for it before than live across the world from my birthplace and not have electricity or running water. People can be astonishingly kind, anywhere, just as often as they’re frustrating and rude. The tomatoes here are out of this world. I’m trying to make some sort of difference, and I don’t know in what capacity or if it’s actually doing any good whatsoever, but I’m trying. And I stay.
Nowhere is perfect. There are things here that I think are wrong, but I’m not resigned to them. I accept them, I understand their existence and sometimes even the reason why they exist, but I’m not resigned. I never will be: I refuse. I go on believing everything is fixable, somehow, even if I’m not equipped or able to do it. So I stay, in the hopes that maybe someday, somebody will be able to. Most likely, if problems are solved it won’t have had anything to do with me being here or not, but there’s the chance that it might. I don’t just dwell in possibility: I build it, I tend it, I believe in it, I breathe life into it. I don’t hold that possibility is something that just exists; it’s a living, mutating entity, you have to want something for it to be. So I go on wanting. And I stay.
I’m learning. And I love to learn, I always have, and one of my main objectives in this was not just to teach but to learn, to absorb, to observe, to stand in the flames until I crumble to ashes and come out reborn, a phoenix of sorts. I loved college, and I’ll go back to scale the ivory tower again, but this is an entirely different kind of learning. In many ways, I learned as much on the rugby pitch during college as I did in the classroom, and I’ll learn just the same riding the wrong way on a matshruka for an hour with my head smashed in somebody else’s armpit. And I stay.
I just don’t want to put anybody off an international experience like this with my complaining. If you’ve ever been thinking about it, you should do it. There’s nothing particularly special or great about me, other than a willingness to give everything up over and over again. You’ll give up more than you ever thought possible, and it’ll be frustrating and you’ll get bit by dogs and burned by stoves and laughed at and ignored and scorned and you’ll be angry and despairing and hateful sometimes. You know, kind of like being in love. Kind of like anything that’s worth having, it’s worth fighting for. It’s worth staying for.
It’s a law of the universe that if you try and help somebody, you’re more likely to get kicked in the teeth for your troubles than thanked. But what you’ll give you’ll get back threefold, and you’ll get it back in the form of pearls and river rocks that you’ll never lose. I can only hope that makes some sort of sense.
Sometimes, I wish I were more of a poet or a scientist than a novelist. There must be a more succinct way to say that. Yeats is so much better at all of this than I am.
So, up until today, it’s been worth it. Tomorrow, of course, I’ll have to make the decision again. But for now, I’ll stay.
Written Saturday, January 10, 2009
Well, turns out my estimations about my counterpart were completely incorrect. I met her today to discuss what we were going to do for IST, and she speaks English quite well, much better than I mangle Russian. She also seems quite excited to work with me, which definitely makes the future look brighter than it had previously.
We got to talking, and when I gave her the brief synopsis of my background, she asked why I wasn’t scared of going so many different places.
I always find this an interesting question, mostly because even though I have a happy tendency to go random locations, I’m still positively coddled compared to actual adventurers. I mean, I have access to Western-standard medical care, I get a constant salary, I never have to worry about food, I have a semi-definite objective with a time frame and, confrontations with dogs aside, have never really felt that I’ve been in mortal peril.
I mean, John Adams taking his son on a cross-Atlantic journey when the British navy was on the prowl, that took guts. Lewis and Clark going to the President and being all like, “So, you bought all this land and there’s this river going through it… let’s see where it goes” was ballsy. The myriad of nameless people who turned to their families and said, “Well, we’re going to Oregon now, hopefully we won’t die in the mountains, have a nice life” were brave. The sailors who took to the seas for years on end, semi-believing that they’d fall off the edge of the earth but ended up stuck in the Atlantic circle were a whole different brand of crazy than mine. Hell, I get the internet. People who get blasted into space face the real possibility of dying in an endless vacuum. Me, I drink about nineteen billion cups of coffee a day. Hell, some of it’s real coffee I get sent from home.
Even the original Peace Corps Volunteers back in the sixties, before all the support systems and bureaucracy came to be should get more credit than I do. I have a laptop computer and a cell phone, for crying out loud.
Though the cell phone thing has gotten a little annoying, primarily because when the power goes out, the towers go out as well. I never had this problem during PST or at my old site, probably because I was either right next to the capital, or a direct suburb of a semi-major town. When the power cuts started there, my cell phone would still work, but here it doesn’t. I could actually remedy this problem by switching my service provider… I have Megacom, which is cheaper and more Volunteers have it, but also has less through coverage than does Bitel, the other major provider. There’s a third, even more expensive company called Fonex, which actually requires that you sign up for plans. Megacom and Bitel just require you to buy minutes, which frankly I consider superior, because it means I don’t have to go about figuring out and signing a contract in Russian. (When I had a cell phone in Japan I had to sign a contract that I couldn’t read. For all I know it said, “We get your first born child and we will use the Lincoln Memorial for tofu storage. Sign here.”) Fonex has the most complete coverage of all: there’s a Volunteer out by Lake Issyk-Kul who’s so far out both Bitel and Megacom don’t work, so he has to have Fonex. The biggest downfall I see for Fonex, aside from the cost, is that if you want to text him, for some bizarre reason you have to do it in all capital letters, or else it comes out as a salad of Cyrillic lettering. Texting him is like shouting up a mountain. The digital way.
I considered switching, as Peace Corps told me that Bitel probably works constantly where I am, but I’m likely not going to do it. I mean, the power generally goes out around these parts from one in the afternoon until five, and then again from eleven in the evening until six in the morning. Of course, there are exceptions, and there were even a couple of days this week where it didn’t go off at all, but that’s how things usually go.
But changing would require me getting a new number, and since most Volunteers are on the Megacom circuit, it would be more expensive for me in the long run. Besides, when people do call me, it’s usually not between the hours of one and five, when most of us are at least attempting to work in some capacity or other, and also usually not at night, when everybody likes to sleep. I figure that if I ever have a burning emergency, I can always use the host family’s phone. And if Peace Corps really needs to get a hold of me, they can just call the landline. Sure, it would be irritating for the family if they got a phone call at three in the morning from Peace Corps, but good god if Peace Corps is calling at three in the morning we’d better be breeching the antebellum of World War III, regardless.
Of course, the biggest problem would be if another Volunteer had to call me in an emergency and the power was out, but I figure the chances of that are (hopefully) slim. …and besides, if anybody was ever really having a life or death situation, I can’t conceive why they would need to call me first anyway.
And I’ve never been married to cell phones. As anybody who knows me and has tried to get in contact with me when I was in America, I tend to leave my cell phone at home. Next to the landline. I’ve gotten better about it since I went to Japan, but I’m still not exactly the easiest person to reach by phone. I don’t like being at everybody’s beck and call every minute of every day. Nyah. (Not that I don’t love you and don’t enjoy hearing from most people who DO call me, but it’s the principle of the thing. Nyah.)
See, these are my daily trials. Cell phone service. That, and what to have for dinner. Tonight it was sautéed pumpkin and onions over a bed of rice and topped with a fried egg. Mm. I do wish there were more vegetables available right now, though. Pretty much the only things on sale at the bazaar are pumpkins, turnips, cabbages, carrots, potatoes, garlic, and these big green vegetables that I don’t know the name of, but are kind of like a radish. Root vegetables. They do, of course, occasionally have tomatoes and peppers imported from Tashkent, but those tend to be astronomically expensive. And not that root vegetables can’t taste good or aren’t nutritious, but it would be nice to have a little more variety. I miss corn, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. In addition, a lot of the recipes in my cookbook rely heavily on tomatoes. I never directly want for anything, I suppose, but I do look forward to the day when tomatoes hit the shelves for five som a kilo again. (The imported ones are usually at least fifty som… I did see some once for thirty-five, but when I looked at them they all had rot-bottom. The peppers are even more ridiculous: a hundred som a kilo. Right. When I can afford that, I’ll get back to you.) Though, I guess I can’t really complain too much: I do most of my shopping at the best-known produce bazaar in the country. If anywhere’s got it, it’s going to be at Osh Bazaar. So, whatever choices I could possibly have at this point in the year, they’re available to me. Not to mention, I could go to one of the supermarkets in Bishkek and get canned vegetables. But I’m cheap and poor. Oh well. At least I really like pumpkin.
The good part about this time of year, though, is that the oranges are delicious and relatively cheap. I still haven’t managed to make it home with a bag, though. The first time, I bought a half-kilo and ate them all in the resource center. The second, I bought a kilo, but still ate them all before I got back. I have no self-control when it comes to oranges. It’s even worse, because oranges are good for you, so there’s no guilt involved in demolishing an entire kilo on my lonesome, other than disappointment that I don’t have any more when they’re gone . Maybe I’ll just hire a truck to come dump a metric ton off at my house, like they do with coal. Mm, vitamin C like you wouldn’t believe. It might last me a week or so.
I still have language issues. And I don’t just mean the fact that I can’t speak Russian all that well, but if I’m not consciously on it all the time, I still bust out with Japanese. And in some ways, it’s worse than it was when I first got here. When I first got here, I would just start talking in Japanese, as was my natural reaction when trying to speak in not-English, but now I do this blending thing. For example:
[at the bazaar]
Me: Zdrastvotsya. Sumimasen ga, u vas yest ringo?
Shopkeeper: …?
Me: Goddamn it. Yabliki
Translation: (Russian) Hello. (Japanese) Excuse me but, (Russian) do you have (Japanese) apples?
And sometimes when people ask me the day or the week or the date, I’ll tell them in Japanese. It’s just like I can’t stop. I’m pretty good with not responding in English, but I just can’t keep the Japanese out. If I ever go back to Japan, I’ll probably start talking to the Japanese with Russian, and they’ll be all like what the hell. It’s usually just what comes to mind first.
Basically, what this boils down to is that I need to go live in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. They have a big Russian population there, for some reason. I remember being in Sapporo for the snow festival, and while most signs in Honshu are in English, Japanese, and Korean, in Sapporo they were mostly in English, Japanese, and Russian. My life path is clear now. I must go work for Sapporo beer. That wouldn’t be a bad life. I could live off of shiroi koibito cookies and all I could eat jengis kahn. Not to mention, the Japanese really know how to live life. They sell beer and porn out of vending machines. All I can say is, some people have it all figured out.
Ugh, and they have onsen in Japan. Onsen, public bathing in hot springs under the snow. These were the benefits I reaped from sobbing through kanji tests for nigh on six years, but nooooo, I had to give it all up and go to Kyrgyzstan. Not that I’m particularly unhappy with this turn of events, and by the end of college and after six years of Japanese language, four of culture study, one year living in Japan, and two hundred pages of thesis about Japan, I kind of needed to do something else. But now that I’m doing something else, I dream in nikkuman. Nikkuman futatsu, in fact, which is the only way to properly go about nikkuman.
My main problem is that I really have no direction in life. Whereas some of my friends have been espousing since I met them that they’d like to be doctors, or writers, or politicians, I really have no idea. In my toolkit there is but a willingness to live anywhere, a fluent native tongue, two auxiliary languages (and I wouldn’t mind taking a stab at a third), and a love of writing. That’s it. Uhh, well, that narrows down the life choices. Time to join the Peace Corps.
Oh well. Sometimes I like to think I’m a partial reincarnation of one of those pioneers, the people who threw it all to the wind in the hopes that wherever else might be better, or at least point them in the right direction.
In the words of Roethke, “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow/I feel in my fate what I cannot fear/I learn by going where I have to go.”
In short, I read too much poetry, think too much, do too little, know too much and not enough at the same time, but I’m fine with it.
No sense fighting against the crux of all of this, I suppose.
Yesterday I went into Bishkek, for the dual purpose of shopping and meeting up with my program manager, as she wanted to give me some paperwork and ask how the new site was going.
Next week is In Service Training, which means I get to go to a hotel in Bishkek with the other Volunteers, attend some seminars, and try not to be too hungover. Our counterparts will also be there for part of it, with the intended goal of assessing how our team teaching is going, and get some pointers on improvement.
Of course, this is a slightly skewed objective in my case, as I’ve moved and now have a new counterpart. When I was talking to my program manager yesterday, she gave me another copy of all the paperwork for the seminars. The load was considerably lessened for me, as all the work we were supposed to do regarding how our teaching experiences went doesn’t apply to me, since I haven’t taught with my new counterpart yet, and everything I did previously is moot.
She still wanted me to prepare a demo lesson with my new counterpart, though. Part of the program is that we’re going to be broken up into small groups with our counterparts and demo a lesson for other counterparts and volunteers to watch, so we can get feedback.
I admit I wasn’t particularly happy about this development, given that I had only met my counterpart for about five minutes previously, and had never team-taught with her. In addition, even though my new village has had a Volunteer before, the Volunteer taught alone, since the team-teaching aspect of the TEFL program was only introduced last year. On top of this, we would only have had today to work on it, so I was put in the position of having to explain team-teaching, get to know my counterpart, and come up with some sort of demo lesson to model next week in the span of a couple hours. In Russian.
But, you know, I was willing to give it the old college try, mostly because there was no alternative. I went into work this morning at nine, to drop off the bundles of paperwork to both the director and my counterpart, and give a whack at planning something.
The day wasn’t a total waste, because I hadn’t met the director yet. Turns out she’s a rather nice woman, and we had a pleasant chat about the weather and how I was liking the new village as I gave her my teaching contract and other sundry bureaucratic tidbits. We were in the director’s office cum teacher’s lounge, and I sat down to wait for my counterpart, who hadn’t showed.
In most respects, I’m pleased with the development in my Russian. I’m far from the most advanced Volunteer language-wise, but I’d estimate I’m somewhere above the median for the group. The best part about it is that I’m starting to be able to use humor again in a deliberate fashion, rather than blundering through conjugations and having people laugh due to my sheer ineptitude with the language.
Humor is one of those things that is a long time coming when learning a language. Most of my brand of humor is based off of observations; namely, I hold firm to the conviction that the world is an absolutely ridiculous place. In the past month, I got kicked out of a house, was homeless for a week, got bit by a dog, had a smackdown with another dog, and caught on fire. I couldn’t make this stuff up, and I’ve never been wanting for imagination. You can laugh about it or cry about it, I figure. Sometimes the crying is necessary, but laughing is overall more enjoyable and less messy.
But in order to make witty observations, you have to be able to first be able to say what you mean in a semi-coherent manner, and second be able to convey that you think it’s funny and not tragic. The latter is the harder part. But I was able to make some semi-snide comments today that the teachers found amusing and not upsetting, which is a mark in my favor, as far as I’m concerned.
Ten minutes into waiting for my counterpart she was still a no-show, so I called my program manager, as she had told me to give her a ring anyhow. Turns out my counterpart was at a seminar today, and everybody had forgotten. Oh well. I asked my program manager when the hell I was supposed to plan this demo lesson, as tomorrow’s Saturday and the teachers won’t be at school, and then Sunday’s the first day of IST. The program manager said she didn’t know; we’d probably have to try and wing it during the prep time we’d have before the presentations.
Sigh. A wing and a prayer, and that’s all I’ve got these days.
When I was having the conversation in English with my program manager, the rest of the teachers had fallen into silence and were staring at me. Sometimes, I think people forget that I actually do speak a language quite fluently, and I’m not just an overgrown three-year-old with a bad accent.
But the looking Russian thing is equal parts amusing and irritating. Before I went to the office yesterday to meet with my program manager, I stopped by the bazaar to pick up some groceries, one of the items being a crate of eggs. I was lugging my purchases back to the office, when this dude fell in step behind me, holding a bag of samsas and a coke.
He asked me if I was selling the eggs, and that he’d like to buy some. I was like… uh… no, I went to the bazaar for these. He was like, oh, that’s too bad, they would have been nice with my lunch. And then off he went.
It still sometimes amazes me that I can blend so well. I’m semi-accustomed to Japan, where wherever I went it felt like I had FOREIGNER branded on my head.
After I got to the office it was lunchtime, so I knew I couldn’t go talk to my program manager just then, and I decided to go rustle up some grub for myself. I got a gamburger, which is kind of like a cross between a hamburger and a doner kabab, and stopped in a store to pick up a Snickers bar.
Me: Hello. May I have a small Snickers, please?
Storekeeper: [squints for a moment] You’re not Russian.
Me: Nope. Lots of people think I am, though.
Storekeeper: Where are you from?
Me: I’m American.
Storekeeper: What! You’re not blonde!
Me: …no. Can I have a Snick-
Storekeeper: You speak Russian!
Me: Yeah. Not well, though. Can I-
Storekeeper: No, your Russian is really good! You’re American!
This went on for about five minutes before I actually got to conduct a transaction resulting in a candy bar. I told my program manager about it, and she laughed and congratulated me on integrating so well.
Frankly, I integrate perfectly, as long as I keep my damn mouth shut.
But anyway, I went home after the half hour detour at the school and got back to lounging. A couple hours later, I got a call on my phone from an unknown number.
I usually pick up whatever number calls me, even though the vast majority of the time it’s just random people who dialed the wrong number. Sometimes, though, it’s a call from the Peace Corps office or one of my friends who changed their SIM cards. I answered and there was a hesitant person speaking in Russian, and I almost hung up, before she identified herself as my counterpart.
Apparently she was back from the seminar, and wanted to meet up with me at my house to discuss the paperwork and the planning. I was thrilled, and agreed, but then realized that my house looked like a train wreck and I had just told somebody that I barely knew to come over in an hour and a half.
At first I was annoyed, but then I was like… wait. Something to do. A deadline. An actual deadline.
I had never really appreciated deadlines before. I’ve always been vaguely aware that in most circumstances, sans timed math tests, I love to work against the clock and come up with something awesome for my efforts. At college I was always under some kind of time limit, so I had just gotten used to it and was mostly annoyed that I never had any time to relax, but considering how I haven’t had an actual deadline for anything in a while…
I washed the dishes, put away my clothes, made the bed, and even did entirely unnecessary things like scrub some of the burned gunk off of the stove. (Which was there when I got here, by the way.) I even scrubbed the floors and rid the corners of the dust jungles that had accumulated there between myself and the previous Volunteer. I also managed to find an unused lamp in the corner, and used an extension cord to hook it up at my bedtable, making it the first bedside lamp I’ve had in country.
Then I remembered I should probably let the host family know I was expecting a guest. I figured it shouldn’t be a problem… when I moved in, the host father only said that I couldn’t invite students over (which I hadn’t been planning on), but made it perfectly clear it was fine if I had other Volunteers guest. I caught him when he was chopping some wood, but when I told him I was expecting to have my counterpart over, he frowned.
I’ve come to the conclusion that people are kind of weird about having guests here. It’s bizarre because they have people over all the time, but they’re extraordinarily picky about who it is. It’s hard to figure out the rules, because it’s not like in America where if friends want to see each other, they’ll call first. People just pop on by.
But he was pretty clear that he didn’t really want my counterpart over, for reasons that I still can’t discern. But like a million other things in life right now, it wasn’t worth arguing about. I called my counterpart back (no small feat because when the electricity goes out around here, which is daily, the cell phone towers go out as well), and told her we couldn’t meet at my house.
Then she stupefied me by asking where we should meet, then, if we couldn’t do it at my house. It was kind of an injured tone. (What I wanted to say was, “Why not your house?” But I’m still too American to go about inviting myself over to a non-friend’s house.) I was like, uh, I’ve lived here for two weeks. You’ve been here most of your life, if not all of it. Though, even in the short span of two weeks, I know that there’s no real place to go here that’s not somebody’s house, one of the general stores, or the school. Or, I guess, the fields, but that’s not exactly an arena productive for lesson planning. We don’t have any cafes or public meeting spaces, unlike my previous village that had at least five cafes and a town hall. The store closest to the school does have a couple of tables where people drink vodka, but I don’t know if that would be, you know, appropriate.
Then the phone cut out, due to the electric outage. I sighed, and geared myself up to try again when the power came back on, when she texted me. In perfect English. (Though she did spell my name “Lora,” which I find rather charming. All the country nationals spell my name as such, probably because it’s the direct transliteration from how you spell it in Russian. My last name would be “Hyankok.”)
My counterpart is one of the myriad examples, I’ve figured out, of somebody who has impeccable knowledge of English grammar and syntax, but can’t speak very well. At least, I’ve never heard her say more than a couple words in English, and all our phone conversations have been in Russian. I myself dislike talking on the phone in either Russian or Japanese – when you can’t see the person you’re talking with, it makes it a thousand times harder to understand what they’re saying. Sometimes, if I’m speaking with a person face-to-face in one of my auxiliary languages, even if I don’t know what they’re talking about, I can infer a lot by their gestures or facial expressions. Phone conversations deprive you of that. I used to have a near-phobia about it when I was in Japan, but I guess I’ve mostly gotten over it. Still don’t like it, however.
But she told me to meet her tomorrow at the school. We couldn’t meet there today because the school closes at noon. Alright, fine. I guess at least my house is clean. And I have a bedside lamp. And I’m glad I asked before my counterpart just showed up at my house. I’d really hate to have another row over whom I invited over to my living quarters. I just got here. (Though, I have to say, I was kind of annoyed by it, but in a distant way. If we start having issues about having friends over, then it’ll become a big enough thing to throw a stink about. But, he did say that the previous Volunteer had groups of friends over occasionally, so it shouldn't be a problem. Hopefully. Jesus, not again.)
Also finally got around to doing some laundry, but by hand. In addition to the electricity shortages, we’ve had water shortages these past few days. Generally speaking, the water works when the electricity works, but for some reason the water hasn’t been working recently (I suspect the pipes may be frozen), which precluded me from using the washing machine. I haven’t been having troubles with the shortages, though… the banya’s in my house, so there’s about a thirty gallon barrel in there, and I’ve been fine on the water front. Besides, the fact that I have a sink in my house that at least works some of the time is a huge luxury as it is. In my previous village when I lived on my own, I only had an outdoor pump. In some places, the water only runs once a week, so they have to drag out all their pots and barrels and anything that holds water and hoard. My married friends live on a compound where the host family doesn’t have a water pump period – they have to go ask the neighbors whenever they want some.
And that is just something I cannot comprehend: a life without access to water. Forget about access to clean water, but any water. It’s one thing to be a Peace Corps Volunteer and cope with it for a couple of years or whatnot and then go back to the magical land of water purification systems and hot water heaters… but could you imagine living your life and knowing that there was no access to water on your property and you couldn’t afford to have piping put in?
But I ended up doing a load of socks and underwear by hand. I also needed to clean some of my shirts and pants for IST, but even if I had access to the laundry machine, they wouldn’t have dried in time. So I just hung them up, rubbed out whatever looked too heinously disgusting with damp palms, and sprayed them with Febreeze. Febreeze. The stuff of the gods. That and beer.
Everything’s hanging in the kitchen, as that’s where it’s actually warm. Walking in there now is like walking into the underwear jungle, warm and damp. If they don’t dry by tomorrow, I’ll have to plug in my heater and fast-track that shizzle.
When I went to the school today, I also volunteered myself for teaching some English clubs over the break, if there were any interested students about. I mostly offered at the insistence of my program manager, who said that working would help me forget about all the crap that happened in my old village. I think she’s still moderately concerned that I’m going to throw in the towel, which at this point I’m probably not going to do. At least, not yet. The thing about this, and I can only assume this is the same for immigrants and expats everywhere, is that it’s an every day decision to stay. Every day you wake up, and decide that, for whatever reason there is, you’re gonna stick around. Or you decide you aren’t. Of course, you do a variant of this even when you’re on the homefront, but most people, if they have a crappy day at work or get evicted from their houses don’t throw up their hands and be all like, “To hell with this, I’m leaving the country.” Obviously, some people do decide to hell with it and leave the country, and those idiots are called Peace Corps Volunteers. Ergo, greetings from Kyrgyzstan.
And to a certain degree my program manager’s right, in the sense that I’m here to do work, not just sit around in my house and listen to the soundtrack from Mulan. I have to say that I’m hesitant to take on a workload, though, because I’ve been pretty content just existing for a while and not having anybody bother me. On the other hand, I am here to work, and teaching a couple hours of English a week is not going to cut in on my Disney sing-along time in a significant way. It would also help me get to know some students, likely interested ones if they’re willing to come learn English over the break, which is certainly not a bad thing.
However, I have to admit I am a little perturbed about her suggestion to “forget” the whole getting evicted and being homeless thing. I am not a forgetter. I’ve never been one to hold a grudge, and if I ran into my old landlady at this point I’d probably only spit at her feet and not into her face (and in a couple of months, I wouldn’t spit at her at all, probably just ignore her), but as somebody who writes like it’s a chronic disease and studies war monuments in her scholarly life, forgetting is just not in the fabric of my being.
I like keeping these little challenges that I’ve surmounted one way or another, like pearls I’ve formed in my belly or smooth river rocks in a pocket. They’re the things I worry at when times get tough, the things I take out and look at when I’m feeling like a lousy waste of respiration. It’s like, hey, come on, I did this. I managed. I’m here.
And I know that a lot of what I write is about me being upset or frustrated, but I can only hope that it doesn’t convey that I’m completely unhappy here, because I’m not. Writing is simply a coping mechanism for me, it’s nearly always the first thing I reach for when something weird, awesome, bad, or upsetting happens. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a version of talking to myself, in a way that doesn’t make me look loony. Especially now, when I spend most of my time either alone or surrounded by people who don’t speak my native tongue. It’s hard to express myself succinctly in Russian. I can communicate, I can operate, but I can’t talk with much precision about what I’m feeling or thinking. And as somebody who is, admittedly rather loquacious, not being able to express myself precisely is one of the biggest frustrations of being here.
There are several reasons why I’m here. The stars are gorgeous, and a lot of the time I’ll go stand outside at night and be awed at their beauty. The mountains are deep and raw. I’ll do a lot of stupid things for beauty, in words or touch or sight, and I’ve done much dumber things for it before than live across the world from my birthplace and not have electricity or running water. People can be astonishingly kind, anywhere, just as often as they’re frustrating and rude. The tomatoes here are out of this world. I’m trying to make some sort of difference, and I don’t know in what capacity or if it’s actually doing any good whatsoever, but I’m trying. And I stay.
Nowhere is perfect. There are things here that I think are wrong, but I’m not resigned to them. I accept them, I understand their existence and sometimes even the reason why they exist, but I’m not resigned. I never will be: I refuse. I go on believing everything is fixable, somehow, even if I’m not equipped or able to do it. So I stay, in the hopes that maybe someday, somebody will be able to. Most likely, if problems are solved it won’t have had anything to do with me being here or not, but there’s the chance that it might. I don’t just dwell in possibility: I build it, I tend it, I believe in it, I breathe life into it. I don’t hold that possibility is something that just exists; it’s a living, mutating entity, you have to want something for it to be. So I go on wanting. And I stay.
I’m learning. And I love to learn, I always have, and one of my main objectives in this was not just to teach but to learn, to absorb, to observe, to stand in the flames until I crumble to ashes and come out reborn, a phoenix of sorts. I loved college, and I’ll go back to scale the ivory tower again, but this is an entirely different kind of learning. In many ways, I learned as much on the rugby pitch during college as I did in the classroom, and I’ll learn just the same riding the wrong way on a matshruka for an hour with my head smashed in somebody else’s armpit. And I stay.
I just don’t want to put anybody off an international experience like this with my complaining. If you’ve ever been thinking about it, you should do it. There’s nothing particularly special or great about me, other than a willingness to give everything up over and over again. You’ll give up more than you ever thought possible, and it’ll be frustrating and you’ll get bit by dogs and burned by stoves and laughed at and ignored and scorned and you’ll be angry and despairing and hateful sometimes. You know, kind of like being in love. Kind of like anything that’s worth having, it’s worth fighting for. It’s worth staying for.
It’s a law of the universe that if you try and help somebody, you’re more likely to get kicked in the teeth for your troubles than thanked. But what you’ll give you’ll get back threefold, and you’ll get it back in the form of pearls and river rocks that you’ll never lose. I can only hope that makes some sort of sense.
Sometimes, I wish I were more of a poet or a scientist than a novelist. There must be a more succinct way to say that. Yeats is so much better at all of this than I am.
So, up until today, it’s been worth it. Tomorrow, of course, I’ll have to make the decision again. But for now, I’ll stay.
Written Saturday, January 10, 2009
Well, turns out my estimations about my counterpart were completely incorrect. I met her today to discuss what we were going to do for IST, and she speaks English quite well, much better than I mangle Russian. She also seems quite excited to work with me, which definitely makes the future look brighter than it had previously.
We got to talking, and when I gave her the brief synopsis of my background, she asked why I wasn’t scared of going so many different places.
I always find this an interesting question, mostly because even though I have a happy tendency to go random locations, I’m still positively coddled compared to actual adventurers. I mean, I have access to Western-standard medical care, I get a constant salary, I never have to worry about food, I have a semi-definite objective with a time frame and, confrontations with dogs aside, have never really felt that I’ve been in mortal peril.
I mean, John Adams taking his son on a cross-Atlantic journey when the British navy was on the prowl, that took guts. Lewis and Clark going to the President and being all like, “So, you bought all this land and there’s this river going through it… let’s see where it goes” was ballsy. The myriad of nameless people who turned to their families and said, “Well, we’re going to Oregon now, hopefully we won’t die in the mountains, have a nice life” were brave. The sailors who took to the seas for years on end, semi-believing that they’d fall off the edge of the earth but ended up stuck in the Atlantic circle were a whole different brand of crazy than mine. Hell, I get the internet. People who get blasted into space face the real possibility of dying in an endless vacuum. Me, I drink about nineteen billion cups of coffee a day. Hell, some of it’s real coffee I get sent from home.
Even the original Peace Corps Volunteers back in the sixties, before all the support systems and bureaucracy came to be should get more credit than I do. I have a laptop computer and a cell phone, for crying out loud.
Though the cell phone thing has gotten a little annoying, primarily because when the power goes out, the towers go out as well. I never had this problem during PST or at my old site, probably because I was either right next to the capital, or a direct suburb of a semi-major town. When the power cuts started there, my cell phone would still work, but here it doesn’t. I could actually remedy this problem by switching my service provider… I have Megacom, which is cheaper and more Volunteers have it, but also has less through coverage than does Bitel, the other major provider. There’s a third, even more expensive company called Fonex, which actually requires that you sign up for plans. Megacom and Bitel just require you to buy minutes, which frankly I consider superior, because it means I don’t have to go about figuring out and signing a contract in Russian. (When I had a cell phone in Japan I had to sign a contract that I couldn’t read. For all I know it said, “We get your first born child and we will use the Lincoln Memorial for tofu storage. Sign here.”) Fonex has the most complete coverage of all: there’s a Volunteer out by Lake Issyk-Kul who’s so far out both Bitel and Megacom don’t work, so he has to have Fonex. The biggest downfall I see for Fonex, aside from the cost, is that if you want to text him, for some bizarre reason you have to do it in all capital letters, or else it comes out as a salad of Cyrillic lettering. Texting him is like shouting up a mountain. The digital way.
I considered switching, as Peace Corps told me that Bitel probably works constantly where I am, but I’m likely not going to do it. I mean, the power generally goes out around these parts from one in the afternoon until five, and then again from eleven in the evening until six in the morning. Of course, there are exceptions, and there were even a couple of days this week where it didn’t go off at all, but that’s how things usually go.
But changing would require me getting a new number, and since most Volunteers are on the Megacom circuit, it would be more expensive for me in the long run. Besides, when people do call me, it’s usually not between the hours of one and five, when most of us are at least attempting to work in some capacity or other, and also usually not at night, when everybody likes to sleep. I figure that if I ever have a burning emergency, I can always use the host family’s phone. And if Peace Corps really needs to get a hold of me, they can just call the landline. Sure, it would be irritating for the family if they got a phone call at three in the morning from Peace Corps, but good god if Peace Corps is calling at three in the morning we’d better be breeching the antebellum of World War III, regardless.
Of course, the biggest problem would be if another Volunteer had to call me in an emergency and the power was out, but I figure the chances of that are (hopefully) slim. …and besides, if anybody was ever really having a life or death situation, I can’t conceive why they would need to call me first anyway.
And I’ve never been married to cell phones. As anybody who knows me and has tried to get in contact with me when I was in America, I tend to leave my cell phone at home. Next to the landline. I’ve gotten better about it since I went to Japan, but I’m still not exactly the easiest person to reach by phone. I don’t like being at everybody’s beck and call every minute of every day. Nyah. (Not that I don’t love you and don’t enjoy hearing from most people who DO call me, but it’s the principle of the thing. Nyah.)
See, these are my daily trials. Cell phone service. That, and what to have for dinner. Tonight it was sautéed pumpkin and onions over a bed of rice and topped with a fried egg. Mm. I do wish there were more vegetables available right now, though. Pretty much the only things on sale at the bazaar are pumpkins, turnips, cabbages, carrots, potatoes, garlic, and these big green vegetables that I don’t know the name of, but are kind of like a radish. Root vegetables. They do, of course, occasionally have tomatoes and peppers imported from Tashkent, but those tend to be astronomically expensive. And not that root vegetables can’t taste good or aren’t nutritious, but it would be nice to have a little more variety. I miss corn, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. In addition, a lot of the recipes in my cookbook rely heavily on tomatoes. I never directly want for anything, I suppose, but I do look forward to the day when tomatoes hit the shelves for five som a kilo again. (The imported ones are usually at least fifty som… I did see some once for thirty-five, but when I looked at them they all had rot-bottom. The peppers are even more ridiculous: a hundred som a kilo. Right. When I can afford that, I’ll get back to you.) Though, I guess I can’t really complain too much: I do most of my shopping at the best-known produce bazaar in the country. If anywhere’s got it, it’s going to be at Osh Bazaar. So, whatever choices I could possibly have at this point in the year, they’re available to me. Not to mention, I could go to one of the supermarkets in Bishkek and get canned vegetables. But I’m cheap and poor. Oh well. At least I really like pumpkin.
The good part about this time of year, though, is that the oranges are delicious and relatively cheap. I still haven’t managed to make it home with a bag, though. The first time, I bought a half-kilo and ate them all in the resource center. The second, I bought a kilo, but still ate them all before I got back. I have no self-control when it comes to oranges. It’s even worse, because oranges are good for you, so there’s no guilt involved in demolishing an entire kilo on my lonesome, other than disappointment that I don’t have any more when they’re gone . Maybe I’ll just hire a truck to come dump a metric ton off at my house, like they do with coal. Mm, vitamin C like you wouldn’t believe. It might last me a week or so.
I still have language issues. And I don’t just mean the fact that I can’t speak Russian all that well, but if I’m not consciously on it all the time, I still bust out with Japanese. And in some ways, it’s worse than it was when I first got here. When I first got here, I would just start talking in Japanese, as was my natural reaction when trying to speak in not-English, but now I do this blending thing. For example:
[at the bazaar]
Me: Zdrastvotsya. Sumimasen ga, u vas yest ringo?
Shopkeeper: …?
Me: Goddamn it. Yabliki
Translation: (Russian) Hello. (Japanese) Excuse me but, (Russian) do you have (Japanese) apples?
And sometimes when people ask me the day or the week or the date, I’ll tell them in Japanese. It’s just like I can’t stop. I’m pretty good with not responding in English, but I just can’t keep the Japanese out. If I ever go back to Japan, I’ll probably start talking to the Japanese with Russian, and they’ll be all like what the hell. It’s usually just what comes to mind first.
Basically, what this boils down to is that I need to go live in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. They have a big Russian population there, for some reason. I remember being in Sapporo for the snow festival, and while most signs in Honshu are in English, Japanese, and Korean, in Sapporo they were mostly in English, Japanese, and Russian. My life path is clear now. I must go work for Sapporo beer. That wouldn’t be a bad life. I could live off of shiroi koibito cookies and all I could eat jengis kahn. Not to mention, the Japanese really know how to live life. They sell beer and porn out of vending machines. All I can say is, some people have it all figured out.
Ugh, and they have onsen in Japan. Onsen, public bathing in hot springs under the snow. These were the benefits I reaped from sobbing through kanji tests for nigh on six years, but nooooo, I had to give it all up and go to Kyrgyzstan. Not that I’m particularly unhappy with this turn of events, and by the end of college and after six years of Japanese language, four of culture study, one year living in Japan, and two hundred pages of thesis about Japan, I kind of needed to do something else. But now that I’m doing something else, I dream in nikkuman. Nikkuman futatsu, in fact, which is the only way to properly go about nikkuman.
My main problem is that I really have no direction in life. Whereas some of my friends have been espousing since I met them that they’d like to be doctors, or writers, or politicians, I really have no idea. In my toolkit there is but a willingness to live anywhere, a fluent native tongue, two auxiliary languages (and I wouldn’t mind taking a stab at a third), and a love of writing. That’s it. Uhh, well, that narrows down the life choices. Time to join the Peace Corps.
Oh well. Sometimes I like to think I’m a partial reincarnation of one of those pioneers, the people who threw it all to the wind in the hopes that wherever else might be better, or at least point them in the right direction.
In the words of Roethke, “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow/I feel in my fate what I cannot fear/I learn by going where I have to go.”
In short, I read too much poetry, think too much, do too little, know too much and not enough at the same time, but I’m fine with it.
No sense fighting against the crux of all of this, I suppose.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
.and you will make sense of this
I went to a bookstore today. This was a mistake.
I actually went for a legit reason: I needed a calendar, and wasn't having any luck finding one at the bazaars. I had to go talk to my program manager today regarding my move and all of that, and I asked her where a good place to buy one would be. She suggested Raratet, which I suppose is a chain of bookstores across town. I only knew where the one by Ala-too square was, but she said there was another outlet closer to Peace Corps.
So, off I went on a hunt.
I admit to being something of a bibliophile. I love books, even when I'm not reading them. I never feel at home somewhere until I have a stack of books planted in my living quarters. In my new place, the books are all lined up on the mantel above my fireplace, and I love walking by and just looking at them. Even though the majority of them are things like "grammar games" and other sundry teaching aides, they're just so nice to look at. All colorful and full of words.
I had never been to the other Raratet, which was probably a good idea, since the first thing I noticed when I walked in was the smell. Oh, book-smell. Like dust and ink and wood and an eternity of patience and knowledge and mmm. My wallet made a little weeping sound, since it knew it was about to get pulverized.
I was the child whose parents would take her to Toys R Us, but never to Borders. Even before I left America, I remember going into the Borders outlet at Oakland Mall and having my mother go LAURA WE'RE NOT BUYING ANYTHING I MEAN IT THIS TIME.
I have a few specifications for my dream house. One, it has to have a porch. Preferably blue shutters, with some odd-shaped windows and maybe a turret. And it has to have a library. With a mahogany table and handsome leather-upholstered chair near the giant window in the back, as well as one of those one-and-a-half chairs with footstool upholstered in nubby chenille. And a dark wooded round table for my coffee.
I have Plans For Life.
But I did get my calendar. And a copy of Harry Potter in Russian, because, come on, what life-loving bibliophile could pass up "Garry Potter?" Even if I did spend more on it than all my groceries. Whatever. Shut up.
I mean it.
I actually went for a legit reason: I needed a calendar, and wasn't having any luck finding one at the bazaars. I had to go talk to my program manager today regarding my move and all of that, and I asked her where a good place to buy one would be. She suggested Raratet, which I suppose is a chain of bookstores across town. I only knew where the one by Ala-too square was, but she said there was another outlet closer to Peace Corps.
So, off I went on a hunt.
I admit to being something of a bibliophile. I love books, even when I'm not reading them. I never feel at home somewhere until I have a stack of books planted in my living quarters. In my new place, the books are all lined up on the mantel above my fireplace, and I love walking by and just looking at them. Even though the majority of them are things like "grammar games" and other sundry teaching aides, they're just so nice to look at. All colorful and full of words.
I had never been to the other Raratet, which was probably a good idea, since the first thing I noticed when I walked in was the smell. Oh, book-smell. Like dust and ink and wood and an eternity of patience and knowledge and mmm. My wallet made a little weeping sound, since it knew it was about to get pulverized.
I was the child whose parents would take her to Toys R Us, but never to Borders. Even before I left America, I remember going into the Borders outlet at Oakland Mall and having my mother go LAURA WE'RE NOT BUYING ANYTHING I MEAN IT THIS TIME.
I have a few specifications for my dream house. One, it has to have a porch. Preferably blue shutters, with some odd-shaped windows and maybe a turret. And it has to have a library. With a mahogany table and handsome leather-upholstered chair near the giant window in the back, as well as one of those one-and-a-half chairs with footstool upholstered in nubby chenille. And a dark wooded round table for my coffee.
I have Plans For Life.
But I did get my calendar. And a copy of Harry Potter in Russian, because, come on, what life-loving bibliophile could pass up "Garry Potter?" Even if I did spend more on it than all my groceries. Whatever. Shut up.
I mean it.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
.we work the black seam together
Written Monday, January 5, 2009
Kyrgyzstan has really made me hate dogs.
I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a dog person. I grew up in a coven of cats, essentially, and I can’t ever remember wanting a dog in a serious way. In America, I never really had anything against dogs, provided they were well-trained and we minded our respective businesses, but I’ve never been particularly warm to them. Small dogs annoy me; if I were going to have one, it would be a large one. But then large dogs, in my opinion, smell bad, even if you bathe them regularly. And they chew up all your shit.
I don’t understand why so many people seem to be head over heels for them. Cats are clearly the superior beings.
But I still remained mostly neutral towards them, until I came here. At my current living situation, I consider it nearabouts perfect, with the exception of the dogs. At all my old residences, it was generally the big dogs that were the real threat, and they were mostly chained up. The smaller dogs could be yappy and jumpy, but they didn’t bite.
Well, here they do. There’s about five or six small dogs that live here, and every time I step out of the house, they follow me around, snarling and barking. Today I went into Bishkek to make some purchases, and came back to the house, with the usual chorus of irritating yapping and false striking. They had come close enough before to nip my pantcuffs, but today I wasn’t able to get inside the house fast enough, and one of them actually bit my ankle. Usually I can outmaneuver them, but my hands were full and the ground is snow-covered, which makes me less nimble than I normally am. (Not that I’m particularly nimble to begin with, mind you, but I can generally avoid dog bite when there’s dry ground and I’m not weighted down with kilograms of vegetables.)
Thankfully, because I was wearing so many layers and was in mid-step, the bite didn’t break the skin. But still. Goddamn it, I hate dogs. The biggest problem is that I have to walk through a narrow hallway type area to get to the outhouse, and it’s right where the doghouse is, so it’s hard to avoid them. And then there’re five of the damn things, so they tend to surround me. Usually when that happens, a member of the family comes tearing out of the house and rescues me, but today they caught me on the stairs when my hands were full and the family was busy with something else.
The easiest way to distract dogs in general is with hunks of bread, but when I run out of that, they tend to come back to try and attack me again, and I’m not going to spend money on a ton of bread just so I don’t get mauled on the way to the bathroom and back. The urge to just kick the hell out of them has risen steadily (and the next bastard that tries to bite me is getting his jaw broken, I don’t care what it does to my relationship with the family), but the problem is that if you start getting hostile towards one of them, the other four close in.
Ugh. Jesus H. Christ, if it’s not one thing, it’s about a billion others. I’m waiting for the host father to come back over to tend the petchka, and then I’ll tell him one of the dogs bit me, and hopefully he’ll go put them up for the night.
I just don’t understand the usefulness of biting dogs. Sure, I guess maybe in a pinch they’d be good for security, but since dogs are pretty much constantly barking here, everybody ignores them. And frankly, with the frequency that people guest around these parts, violent dogs just seem counterproductive if they attack everything that isn’t a member of the immediate family who lives on the compound. I assume that the dogs on premises will get used to me eventually, but in the meantime it’s just irritating. What’s even more exasperating is that dogs are some of the easiest animals on the face of the planet to train, Christ on a pogo stick. It would even be different if they only really went after me at night, but at night when I go out, they’re all sleeping and leave me alone. It’s only in the middle of the day they want to kill me. Sometimes I just want to say, you know, most people who want to rob your house are probably not going to do so during the light of day, and if anybody with mal intent does come at night and your pack of mangy bastards are all sleeping it’s no friggin’ good. In the meantime, I just want to go piss in peace, and I risk dog attack doing so.
I guess on the whole it’s not so bad, or not as bad as it could be, considering that some Volunteers live with families that have giant attack dogs that are unleashed at night, confining the Volunteer to the house past a certain hour. I don’t know if I’d be able to live somewhere like that; what if there was an emergency and I had to leave the house for some reason? What if something absolutely ridiculous happened, like the house caught on fire? You’d have to choose between burning wreckage and being eaten by a giant beast.
At least the little dogs I can practice my soccer technique on if push came to shove over it. I’m still stronger than them. And while I feel vaguely bad writing about wanting to kick small dogs, I can’t deny the fact that, well, I do want to kick them. And they want to bite me, so it’s a mutually unhappy relationship.
Update: Well, since I reported the biting, they’ve only let one little dog out of the pen in the back. He still doesn’t like me, but appears to be frightened enough to stay about five feet away and bark incessantly. My morning coffee breaks aren’t nearly as relaxing as they were previously, as I basically squat outside and get serenaded by incessant yapping, but at least they’re no longer the foray into doom they once were.
Since there’s only one out, I’ve taken the bread approach to dealing with him. He only gets up the guts to do anything remotely akin to an attack when I’m on the stairs into my house, so I throw a chunk of bread at him when I leave and when I return. This confuses him. He stops to eat it, and then just kind of looks at me for about five minutes before remembering he’s supposed to try and intimidate me, and returns to his barking. I throw another piece before I reenter the house, to lure him away from the stairs.
Hopefully, he’ll make his peace with me in a couple of weeks, before they let the rest of the dogs out. Maybe I can win them over one at a time. Argh. Still irritating, but at least not dangerous.
Maybe part of the problem is that I smell like other dogs. Considering the frequency with which I do laundry around these parts, I probably still smell like the myriad of dogs I used to live with.
In other, non dog-related news, I have absolutely nothing to do with my life at the moment. At my old school we only had January off, and since I was well-settled in that community, I had been planning on continuing – or extending, if there had been interest – my English clubs there, as well as maybe picking up a few more hours at work in the capital. Since I had to move, I’ve got no real ties to this community other than my host family, so starting up something like an English club right now would be difficult, to say the least. I theoretically could go to the capital more often, but it takes about five times as long these days, particularly with the roads in the shape they’re in, and I don’t want to die in a fiery car wreck involving a matshruka and a snow ditch.
So, I’ve started studying for the GRE. To what end I know not, as I have no direct aspirations for grad school at the moment, but I figure I’ve got nothing else to do. In typical fashion, I have completely ignored the math part, and have been perusing the verbals. Even though, really, I need more help on the math than anything, but whatever. I had always thought my vocabulary was fairly ostentatious as it was, but then I was presented with words like “exculpate,” “pusillanimous,” and “perfidy.” Turns out, my vocabulary’s poorer than a Peace Corps Volunteer the night before payday. Or, dare I say, it is impecunious like a Peace Corps Volunteer.
I do plan on eventually working these words into my everyday vocabulary, though. I yearn for the day I can say, “I find your conduct quite perfidious.” Or maybe, “It is exigent that I go to Tim Hortons and get an iced capp!” (Ohhhh, Tim Hortons. Somebody go buy some coffee from there and drink it for me.) Eventually, my English will get to the point where nobody will be able to understand me. Except for other GRE takers, who will tell me to stop being such a pedant jerkoff.
Then, the Kaplan book tells me to “use my knowledge of Romance languages” to help me figure out the words I don’t know. Romance languages. Riiiight. You know, all that Spanish and Italian I use. Nowhere in the book does it say to “use your knowledge of Slavic and Asian languages” to help you ace the GRE. So all those hours spent beating my head against honorifics and noun declension have come to naught. Eat me, Kaplan. Ugh.
I found a word I like, though. “Peripatetic.” According to my dictionary, it describes somebody who “travels from place to place, especially working in several establishments and traveling between them, particularly a teacher.”
I, my friends, am peripatetic. I’m going to put that on my resume. “eXtreme peripatetic-ness.” It’ll go between the “why I am awesome” part and the “look at all this cool shit I did” part, and next to the “why I am not afraid of dog bite” addendum.
Written Tuesday, January 6, 2009
I caught on fire today. It was great.
As I may have mentioned previously, I have virtually nothing to do with myself these days. I hang around the house, cook, clean, and eat, while spending my days not cold. I say “not cold” instead of “warm,” because I figure it’s a better description of my normal state.
The heating in this house is a petchka, a coal-burning stove. I’ve actually started doing most of my cooking over the petchka, because it’s already lit, I’ve paid for the coal, and I figure it’ll help me conserve my gas for the other stove. The top of the petchka is outfitted with interlocking rings that you can remove, depending on the size of the pot you want to use. I use a short metal pole (that I actually think is the top of a flat-head screwdriver without the grip) to lever out the rings so I can fit my pots in.
But there’s no real heating system in the rest of the house; that is, there aren’t any pipes that help distribute the warmth. There actually is a tiled wall in the living room area that conducts heat, and there’s a cut-through window between the kitchen and the bedroom, but the warmest room in the house is definitely the kitchen. I spend a lot of time just standing in there, because there’s not enough room to put a chair, but at least it’s warm.
But the petchka does a good enough job at cooking, with the exception that I can’t really regulate the heat. Today I was levering off some of the metal top to do some cooking, but the coal hadn’t burnt down far enough, which sent flames shooting through the top of it.
I backed off, and then realized that my sweatshirt was smoking, and little flames were eating their way up to the Smith Rugby emblem in the corner. So I did what any sane, well-educated person would do.
I screamed “ARRRRRGH” and ran out of the kitchen.
Then, a vision from third grade appeared in the form of STOP, DROP AND ROLL. You know, basically, don’t run around like a dipshit when you’re on fire.
So I did a magnificent belly flop in the foyer, but by then the flames had already beaten themselves out anyway.
Stupid third grade. Failed me again. That was also the year of timed multiplication tables, which I blame for my inability to do math. I’m pretty sure the only reason why I passed was because I knew what the word “conundrum” meant, and it shocked the teacher into not failing me despite my lousy math grades. Fire safety apparently didn’t stick, either.
Surprisingly, my sweatshirt is still in decent shape. There’s a burned brown supernova right below the rugby emblem and one of the strings to the hoodie is kind of charred, but it didn’t burn through. That’s right, Smith Rugby: it’s that hardcore.
Between the dog attacks and the bursting into flame, I’d say I’m getting right along in my new home.
No, no, seriously, I love the death out of this family. They’ve kept the dogs shut up since the biting episode, which I am beyond grateful for. Just today, the host father helped me buy some more wood for my petchka, dry wood, and he’s been beyond helpful.
Though, I almost got mauled by another dog getting the wood. I bought it from the people across the street, and when I went over to pay for it, I made the mistake of walking by a shed-type building. This huge brown and black dog darted out of it, scaring the bejesus out of me.
I dropped to a squat, partially because Peace Corps told us that the best way to ward off a hostile dog is by pretending to pick up a rock, mostly because after five years of rugby, my natural battle position when something is running at me is to squat, anyway. I was only about three feet away from the thing in mid-charge, though, so pretending to pick up a rock wasn’t going to do me much good.
The guy selling me the wood shouted something that I didn’t understand, but the dog kept coming, so I threw my weight back, landed on my hands, and roundhouse kicked the dog’s front feet from under it. The dog went down on the ice with a whimper, and then was jerked back from the chain I didn’t see around its neck.
I skittered backwards on my hands, breathing hard, feeling my pulse hammer in my throat, and staring at the absolutely infuriated animal as it got up and tried to lunge again, held back by the chain. The wood-seller, laughing, unruffled by it all, told me “good job.”
Then I went home, curled up in a ball, and cried forever. At least I have dry wood, now.
But, I can tell this is a good family by the amount of blankets they’ve offered me. My PST host family was also good in this vein; my original bed came equipped with far too many blankets, given that it was July and about fifty degrees centigrade in the shade. My next host family at my original site did not offer me any blankets other than the thin coverlet. Now, in their defense I never asked, but by that time I had my sleeping bag and it wasn’t necessary.
My landlady did give me one blanket, but kept the rest locked up in one of the rooms that was shut off to me. At the time I thought this was a little miserly, but kept on using my sleeping bag and didn’t say anything, as I could tell she was a little crochety and didn’t want to upset her. Turns out maybe I should have said something, as it all ended up a wash in the end.
But this host family has offered a plethora of blankets. As I mentioned, the first night here I slept in the main house, and the mother insisted I take the bedding she gave me back to my house the next day. Plus, there are already about fifty blankets on the bed. For the first time since October, I’m not using my sleeping bag, even though this is arguably the coldest it’s been since I’ve been here.
They also keep bringing me food. The first couple of days I was here it was over New Year’s, so I spent a lot of time in the main house to celebrate, and ate enough salads, plov, shashlik, and bread to kill a small animal. But now that the holidays are mostly done, sans Orthodox Christmas, the host father still occasionally pops over with something for me to snack on. Today it was fried dumplings stuffed with potato.
We get along pretty well, though it’s quite arguable that our interaction has been minimal since the holidays. They really liked the last Volunteer – the host mother is actually knitting some socks for her as I write this, and they still occasionally call each other. They admitted to me that they hadn’t originally wanted another tenant, but when Peace Corps called and asked, the offer of extra income was too tempting, given that the host father seems to be out of work at the moment. And, I mean, considering how nobody would have been living in the guesthouse, they figured it was worth their while to make some extra cash off it.
And, to be honest, I think it is far more of a leap of faith to invite a foreigner to live in your house than it is to have them live in the guesthouse, particularly if the guesthouse has its own kitchen. Whatever I may say about my first host family at my original site, I have to admire them for at least having the guts to take a shot at having me there. (Of course, I also think there was a modicum of ignorance about my different set of priorities and values involved in said decision, but you can’t really fault them for that. I don’t think they had dealt much with non-Kyrgyz grown stock before, at least not in such an intimate setting.) I had a great time with my PST family, but I wasn’t cooking there, so there were fewer opportunities for me to become a problem. Particularly given the importance that most people seem to place on having things in a certain order here… I think that the cardinal sign of a good woman in Kyrgyzstan is the way in which they keep their household in order, and it drove my host mother up the wall that I was doing things differently, and messing up the order of things. I also admit that I’m not the cleanest person in the world, mostly because I’ve never measured my worth against the cleanliness of my surroundings. I remember one of our arguments about the state of my room, and she kept on repeating, “But you’re a girl!” and I was all like, “Yeah? So what?” Clash of the cultural titans, that.
But, back to my current situation… I also think that the original Volunteer probably put more effort into bolstering her relationship with the host family, as she got here immediately after PST, when we were still all guns-a-blazin’ to integrate. Not that I have no interest in having a good relationship with them, as I like this family a lot, but I’ve had kind of a rough month and I’m friggin’ exhausted. I’ve been mostly content to sleep eleven hours a day, wake up, piddle around with my computer, read, cook, and eat. I finally have that solitude I’ve been craving since about mid-September, and I’m virtually marinating in it.
And it’s a good thing I like solitude, as I’m now pretty far from the next closest Volunteer. Geographically speaking, I’m probably only about twenty or thirty minutes from my married friends, but due to the tribulations of public transportation and my inability to afford taxis, it would take me a couple of hours to get there. There’s only one matshruka that comes here, and it goes to Bishkek. From there I can get anywhere, but even from Bishkek the next closest Volunteer is about an hour away.
But, since where I see most Volunteers is in Bishkek, anyway, it’s no big thang. And I am far from the most isolated Volunteer in the country. Some people live places where public transport doesn’t even go, so they have to hitchhike if they want to leave their village.
Sometimes I admit I get a little bored, but then I think, whoa now, the world’s off rassling somebody else for a bit. Go listen to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on repeat for two hours and sing until your voice cracks like a thirteen-year-old boy. And then I do. Or I’ll rock out to “Don’t Stop Believing” for a day. Or two. Or peruse my extensive collection of Sting. I love Sting. Anybody who can work the word “Mephistopheles” into a song deserves to be adored unconditionally.
And, sometimes, it’s nice just to exist and be domestic for a while. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things I need a little more than that to keep me occupied, but once in a while it’s therapeutic to contribute nothing to the world other than dinner for one, clean dishes, and not being pissed off. Occasionally I’m Laura, conqueror of all that dares challenge, and other times, I’m Laura, drinker of cognac and watcher of The Office season four.
You know, we get by.
Kyrgyzstan has really made me hate dogs.
I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a dog person. I grew up in a coven of cats, essentially, and I can’t ever remember wanting a dog in a serious way. In America, I never really had anything against dogs, provided they were well-trained and we minded our respective businesses, but I’ve never been particularly warm to them. Small dogs annoy me; if I were going to have one, it would be a large one. But then large dogs, in my opinion, smell bad, even if you bathe them regularly. And they chew up all your shit.
I don’t understand why so many people seem to be head over heels for them. Cats are clearly the superior beings.
But I still remained mostly neutral towards them, until I came here. At my current living situation, I consider it nearabouts perfect, with the exception of the dogs. At all my old residences, it was generally the big dogs that were the real threat, and they were mostly chained up. The smaller dogs could be yappy and jumpy, but they didn’t bite.
Well, here they do. There’s about five or six small dogs that live here, and every time I step out of the house, they follow me around, snarling and barking. Today I went into Bishkek to make some purchases, and came back to the house, with the usual chorus of irritating yapping and false striking. They had come close enough before to nip my pantcuffs, but today I wasn’t able to get inside the house fast enough, and one of them actually bit my ankle. Usually I can outmaneuver them, but my hands were full and the ground is snow-covered, which makes me less nimble than I normally am. (Not that I’m particularly nimble to begin with, mind you, but I can generally avoid dog bite when there’s dry ground and I’m not weighted down with kilograms of vegetables.)
Thankfully, because I was wearing so many layers and was in mid-step, the bite didn’t break the skin. But still. Goddamn it, I hate dogs. The biggest problem is that I have to walk through a narrow hallway type area to get to the outhouse, and it’s right where the doghouse is, so it’s hard to avoid them. And then there’re five of the damn things, so they tend to surround me. Usually when that happens, a member of the family comes tearing out of the house and rescues me, but today they caught me on the stairs when my hands were full and the family was busy with something else.
The easiest way to distract dogs in general is with hunks of bread, but when I run out of that, they tend to come back to try and attack me again, and I’m not going to spend money on a ton of bread just so I don’t get mauled on the way to the bathroom and back. The urge to just kick the hell out of them has risen steadily (and the next bastard that tries to bite me is getting his jaw broken, I don’t care what it does to my relationship with the family), but the problem is that if you start getting hostile towards one of them, the other four close in.
Ugh. Jesus H. Christ, if it’s not one thing, it’s about a billion others. I’m waiting for the host father to come back over to tend the petchka, and then I’ll tell him one of the dogs bit me, and hopefully he’ll go put them up for the night.
I just don’t understand the usefulness of biting dogs. Sure, I guess maybe in a pinch they’d be good for security, but since dogs are pretty much constantly barking here, everybody ignores them. And frankly, with the frequency that people guest around these parts, violent dogs just seem counterproductive if they attack everything that isn’t a member of the immediate family who lives on the compound. I assume that the dogs on premises will get used to me eventually, but in the meantime it’s just irritating. What’s even more exasperating is that dogs are some of the easiest animals on the face of the planet to train, Christ on a pogo stick. It would even be different if they only really went after me at night, but at night when I go out, they’re all sleeping and leave me alone. It’s only in the middle of the day they want to kill me. Sometimes I just want to say, you know, most people who want to rob your house are probably not going to do so during the light of day, and if anybody with mal intent does come at night and your pack of mangy bastards are all sleeping it’s no friggin’ good. In the meantime, I just want to go piss in peace, and I risk dog attack doing so.
I guess on the whole it’s not so bad, or not as bad as it could be, considering that some Volunteers live with families that have giant attack dogs that are unleashed at night, confining the Volunteer to the house past a certain hour. I don’t know if I’d be able to live somewhere like that; what if there was an emergency and I had to leave the house for some reason? What if something absolutely ridiculous happened, like the house caught on fire? You’d have to choose between burning wreckage and being eaten by a giant beast.
At least the little dogs I can practice my soccer technique on if push came to shove over it. I’m still stronger than them. And while I feel vaguely bad writing about wanting to kick small dogs, I can’t deny the fact that, well, I do want to kick them. And they want to bite me, so it’s a mutually unhappy relationship.
Update: Well, since I reported the biting, they’ve only let one little dog out of the pen in the back. He still doesn’t like me, but appears to be frightened enough to stay about five feet away and bark incessantly. My morning coffee breaks aren’t nearly as relaxing as they were previously, as I basically squat outside and get serenaded by incessant yapping, but at least they’re no longer the foray into doom they once were.
Since there’s only one out, I’ve taken the bread approach to dealing with him. He only gets up the guts to do anything remotely akin to an attack when I’m on the stairs into my house, so I throw a chunk of bread at him when I leave and when I return. This confuses him. He stops to eat it, and then just kind of looks at me for about five minutes before remembering he’s supposed to try and intimidate me, and returns to his barking. I throw another piece before I reenter the house, to lure him away from the stairs.
Hopefully, he’ll make his peace with me in a couple of weeks, before they let the rest of the dogs out. Maybe I can win them over one at a time. Argh. Still irritating, but at least not dangerous.
Maybe part of the problem is that I smell like other dogs. Considering the frequency with which I do laundry around these parts, I probably still smell like the myriad of dogs I used to live with.
In other, non dog-related news, I have absolutely nothing to do with my life at the moment. At my old school we only had January off, and since I was well-settled in that community, I had been planning on continuing – or extending, if there had been interest – my English clubs there, as well as maybe picking up a few more hours at work in the capital. Since I had to move, I’ve got no real ties to this community other than my host family, so starting up something like an English club right now would be difficult, to say the least. I theoretically could go to the capital more often, but it takes about five times as long these days, particularly with the roads in the shape they’re in, and I don’t want to die in a fiery car wreck involving a matshruka and a snow ditch.
So, I’ve started studying for the GRE. To what end I know not, as I have no direct aspirations for grad school at the moment, but I figure I’ve got nothing else to do. In typical fashion, I have completely ignored the math part, and have been perusing the verbals. Even though, really, I need more help on the math than anything, but whatever. I had always thought my vocabulary was fairly ostentatious as it was, but then I was presented with words like “exculpate,” “pusillanimous,” and “perfidy.” Turns out, my vocabulary’s poorer than a Peace Corps Volunteer the night before payday. Or, dare I say, it is impecunious like a Peace Corps Volunteer.
I do plan on eventually working these words into my everyday vocabulary, though. I yearn for the day I can say, “I find your conduct quite perfidious.” Or maybe, “It is exigent that I go to Tim Hortons and get an iced capp!” (Ohhhh, Tim Hortons. Somebody go buy some coffee from there and drink it for me.) Eventually, my English will get to the point where nobody will be able to understand me. Except for other GRE takers, who will tell me to stop being such a pedant jerkoff.
Then, the Kaplan book tells me to “use my knowledge of Romance languages” to help me figure out the words I don’t know. Romance languages. Riiiight. You know, all that Spanish and Italian I use. Nowhere in the book does it say to “use your knowledge of Slavic and Asian languages” to help you ace the GRE. So all those hours spent beating my head against honorifics and noun declension have come to naught. Eat me, Kaplan. Ugh.
I found a word I like, though. “Peripatetic.” According to my dictionary, it describes somebody who “travels from place to place, especially working in several establishments and traveling between them, particularly a teacher.”
I, my friends, am peripatetic. I’m going to put that on my resume. “eXtreme peripatetic-ness.” It’ll go between the “why I am awesome” part and the “look at all this cool shit I did” part, and next to the “why I am not afraid of dog bite” addendum.
Written Tuesday, January 6, 2009
I caught on fire today. It was great.
As I may have mentioned previously, I have virtually nothing to do with myself these days. I hang around the house, cook, clean, and eat, while spending my days not cold. I say “not cold” instead of “warm,” because I figure it’s a better description of my normal state.
The heating in this house is a petchka, a coal-burning stove. I’ve actually started doing most of my cooking over the petchka, because it’s already lit, I’ve paid for the coal, and I figure it’ll help me conserve my gas for the other stove. The top of the petchka is outfitted with interlocking rings that you can remove, depending on the size of the pot you want to use. I use a short metal pole (that I actually think is the top of a flat-head screwdriver without the grip) to lever out the rings so I can fit my pots in.
But there’s no real heating system in the rest of the house; that is, there aren’t any pipes that help distribute the warmth. There actually is a tiled wall in the living room area that conducts heat, and there’s a cut-through window between the kitchen and the bedroom, but the warmest room in the house is definitely the kitchen. I spend a lot of time just standing in there, because there’s not enough room to put a chair, but at least it’s warm.
But the petchka does a good enough job at cooking, with the exception that I can’t really regulate the heat. Today I was levering off some of the metal top to do some cooking, but the coal hadn’t burnt down far enough, which sent flames shooting through the top of it.
I backed off, and then realized that my sweatshirt was smoking, and little flames were eating their way up to the Smith Rugby emblem in the corner. So I did what any sane, well-educated person would do.
I screamed “ARRRRRGH” and ran out of the kitchen.
Then, a vision from third grade appeared in the form of STOP, DROP AND ROLL. You know, basically, don’t run around like a dipshit when you’re on fire.
So I did a magnificent belly flop in the foyer, but by then the flames had already beaten themselves out anyway.
Stupid third grade. Failed me again. That was also the year of timed multiplication tables, which I blame for my inability to do math. I’m pretty sure the only reason why I passed was because I knew what the word “conundrum” meant, and it shocked the teacher into not failing me despite my lousy math grades. Fire safety apparently didn’t stick, either.
Surprisingly, my sweatshirt is still in decent shape. There’s a burned brown supernova right below the rugby emblem and one of the strings to the hoodie is kind of charred, but it didn’t burn through. That’s right, Smith Rugby: it’s that hardcore.
Between the dog attacks and the bursting into flame, I’d say I’m getting right along in my new home.
No, no, seriously, I love the death out of this family. They’ve kept the dogs shut up since the biting episode, which I am beyond grateful for. Just today, the host father helped me buy some more wood for my petchka, dry wood, and he’s been beyond helpful.
Though, I almost got mauled by another dog getting the wood. I bought it from the people across the street, and when I went over to pay for it, I made the mistake of walking by a shed-type building. This huge brown and black dog darted out of it, scaring the bejesus out of me.
I dropped to a squat, partially because Peace Corps told us that the best way to ward off a hostile dog is by pretending to pick up a rock, mostly because after five years of rugby, my natural battle position when something is running at me is to squat, anyway. I was only about three feet away from the thing in mid-charge, though, so pretending to pick up a rock wasn’t going to do me much good.
The guy selling me the wood shouted something that I didn’t understand, but the dog kept coming, so I threw my weight back, landed on my hands, and roundhouse kicked the dog’s front feet from under it. The dog went down on the ice with a whimper, and then was jerked back from the chain I didn’t see around its neck.
I skittered backwards on my hands, breathing hard, feeling my pulse hammer in my throat, and staring at the absolutely infuriated animal as it got up and tried to lunge again, held back by the chain. The wood-seller, laughing, unruffled by it all, told me “good job.”
Then I went home, curled up in a ball, and cried forever. At least I have dry wood, now.
But, I can tell this is a good family by the amount of blankets they’ve offered me. My PST host family was also good in this vein; my original bed came equipped with far too many blankets, given that it was July and about fifty degrees centigrade in the shade. My next host family at my original site did not offer me any blankets other than the thin coverlet. Now, in their defense I never asked, but by that time I had my sleeping bag and it wasn’t necessary.
My landlady did give me one blanket, but kept the rest locked up in one of the rooms that was shut off to me. At the time I thought this was a little miserly, but kept on using my sleeping bag and didn’t say anything, as I could tell she was a little crochety and didn’t want to upset her. Turns out maybe I should have said something, as it all ended up a wash in the end.
But this host family has offered a plethora of blankets. As I mentioned, the first night here I slept in the main house, and the mother insisted I take the bedding she gave me back to my house the next day. Plus, there are already about fifty blankets on the bed. For the first time since October, I’m not using my sleeping bag, even though this is arguably the coldest it’s been since I’ve been here.
They also keep bringing me food. The first couple of days I was here it was over New Year’s, so I spent a lot of time in the main house to celebrate, and ate enough salads, plov, shashlik, and bread to kill a small animal. But now that the holidays are mostly done, sans Orthodox Christmas, the host father still occasionally pops over with something for me to snack on. Today it was fried dumplings stuffed with potato.
We get along pretty well, though it’s quite arguable that our interaction has been minimal since the holidays. They really liked the last Volunteer – the host mother is actually knitting some socks for her as I write this, and they still occasionally call each other. They admitted to me that they hadn’t originally wanted another tenant, but when Peace Corps called and asked, the offer of extra income was too tempting, given that the host father seems to be out of work at the moment. And, I mean, considering how nobody would have been living in the guesthouse, they figured it was worth their while to make some extra cash off it.
And, to be honest, I think it is far more of a leap of faith to invite a foreigner to live in your house than it is to have them live in the guesthouse, particularly if the guesthouse has its own kitchen. Whatever I may say about my first host family at my original site, I have to admire them for at least having the guts to take a shot at having me there. (Of course, I also think there was a modicum of ignorance about my different set of priorities and values involved in said decision, but you can’t really fault them for that. I don’t think they had dealt much with non-Kyrgyz grown stock before, at least not in such an intimate setting.) I had a great time with my PST family, but I wasn’t cooking there, so there were fewer opportunities for me to become a problem. Particularly given the importance that most people seem to place on having things in a certain order here… I think that the cardinal sign of a good woman in Kyrgyzstan is the way in which they keep their household in order, and it drove my host mother up the wall that I was doing things differently, and messing up the order of things. I also admit that I’m not the cleanest person in the world, mostly because I’ve never measured my worth against the cleanliness of my surroundings. I remember one of our arguments about the state of my room, and she kept on repeating, “But you’re a girl!” and I was all like, “Yeah? So what?” Clash of the cultural titans, that.
But, back to my current situation… I also think that the original Volunteer probably put more effort into bolstering her relationship with the host family, as she got here immediately after PST, when we were still all guns-a-blazin’ to integrate. Not that I have no interest in having a good relationship with them, as I like this family a lot, but I’ve had kind of a rough month and I’m friggin’ exhausted. I’ve been mostly content to sleep eleven hours a day, wake up, piddle around with my computer, read, cook, and eat. I finally have that solitude I’ve been craving since about mid-September, and I’m virtually marinating in it.
And it’s a good thing I like solitude, as I’m now pretty far from the next closest Volunteer. Geographically speaking, I’m probably only about twenty or thirty minutes from my married friends, but due to the tribulations of public transportation and my inability to afford taxis, it would take me a couple of hours to get there. There’s only one matshruka that comes here, and it goes to Bishkek. From there I can get anywhere, but even from Bishkek the next closest Volunteer is about an hour away.
But, since where I see most Volunteers is in Bishkek, anyway, it’s no big thang. And I am far from the most isolated Volunteer in the country. Some people live places where public transport doesn’t even go, so they have to hitchhike if they want to leave their village.
Sometimes I admit I get a little bored, but then I think, whoa now, the world’s off rassling somebody else for a bit. Go listen to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on repeat for two hours and sing until your voice cracks like a thirteen-year-old boy. And then I do. Or I’ll rock out to “Don’t Stop Believing” for a day. Or two. Or peruse my extensive collection of Sting. I love Sting. Anybody who can work the word “Mephistopheles” into a song deserves to be adored unconditionally.
And, sometimes, it’s nice just to exist and be domestic for a while. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things I need a little more than that to keep me occupied, but once in a while it’s therapeutic to contribute nothing to the world other than dinner for one, clean dishes, and not being pissed off. Occasionally I’m Laura, conqueror of all that dares challenge, and other times, I’m Laura, drinker of cognac and watcher of The Office season four.
You know, we get by.
Friday, January 2, 2009
.only blue talk and love
Written December 31, 2008
This has been one of the craziest weeks of my life. I mean, I’ve definitely had worse ones in the grand scheme of it all, considering that this week had no mishaps involving alcohol, drugs, or suicide. But still. Crazy.
The Saturday after I got evicted from my apartment, I ended up on a grand couch surfing tour of Chui oblast. While being homeless in a third-world country sounds like a pretty crappy situation at best (and not that it was fabulous, mind you), all things considered I got well taken care of. The hospitality of my fellow volunteers proved boundless, and I easily could have had my pick of about twenty different places to stay, and probably the worst part of it was all the moving around. I didn’t have to worry about money or food or anything on the primal needs side of things. While everybody was more than understanding, our living spaces are small, and I didn’t want to encroach on anybody’s privacy for more than a few days. Consequently, I slept in five different places last week.
Through it all, I was barraging my program manager with calls, to get updates on the living situation. As I expected, nothing came up in my village during the week I was floating about the oblast. The house I got kicked out of only turned up after about three month’s worth of reasonably intense looking. I wasn’t holding my breath for something to magically pop up on the week of the biggest holiday of the year. (Which, by the way, is New Year’s, not Christmas. There is a large population of Russian Orthodox here, but their Christmas is on January 7th, not December 25th.)
So, I moved sites. My new village is about forty minutes out of the capital, which is a little farther away than I’d like to be, but I got spoiled being in a direct suburb. I can suck it up, and it’s not that bad of a commute.
The living situation here is looking okay, so far. There actually is a rule in PC Kyrgyzstan where if you move during your first year of service, you need to go through the three month mandatory homestay period again. The conversation about this rule I had with my program manager went something like this:
PM: Well, it’s not looking as though anything is going to turn up in your old village, so you’ll probably need to change sites. You do know that there is a second homestay period with this-
Me: No.
[five second pause]
PM: I’ll talk to the Country Director.
But, anyway, Peace Corps did manage to get me pretty cleverly with the housing situation, despite my abject refusal to live with another family. My new digs are technically a homestay situation: a compound housing. But it’s the nicest damn compound house I’ve ever been in. Most of the guesthouses I’ve seen consist of one room, maybe two rooms tops. The one at my old host family at my old site had a slug infestation. But this one is srz biz. It has four rooms, a large bedroom with two beds, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bath. It’s nice to have the banya in my house, though, because it means I get to bathe without doing the ten-second dash outside in the snow. Of course, there’s no toilet, but that’s not a big deal. The main house actually does have an indoor toilet, but, I mean, I’d have to go outside to use it anyway, so six of one, half-dozen of the other between the toilet and the outhouse. I suppose this shows how far I’ve come in life, where I have both an indoor toilet and an outhouse available to me, and I go for the outhouse. I’ve been too well-trained: a couple of times I was in the main house, watching some TV or whatever, and actually left the house to use the outhouse, because I forgot there was a toilet inside. But the outhouse is actually relatively nice in the grand scheme of outhouses, and plus I’m the only one that really uses it, so it’s clean.
My new house also has the first actual fireplace I’ve seen in Kyrgyzstan. (There doesn’t appear to be a flue, so I don’t know if it’s actually usable or not, but it’s a hearth with a mantle and everything.) I actually think it’s bigger than the house I was living in at my old village, since they had two rooms locked off to me there and I only had three rooms available to me.
The family that owns the house is an older Russian couple, and their kids have all moved out and live in Bishkek, and they’re pretty chill. Most of the interaction I’ve had is with the father, and he’s helped me fill the gas balloon for the kitchen, and ran off the dogs when they started attacking me. (First time in my life I’ve ever had to legit kick a dog.) I can only assume the canines will either get used to me or learn to fear me, and either way I’m fine with it. The only thing I really miss from the old house is the small dog there, which actually turned out to be rather likeable after the first couple of days living there.
But the father actually said to me, “You can cook for yourself, can’t you? We’re not going to cook for you.” And I was like, fucking sweet, we’re going to get along just fine, as it seems as though you want to mind your own business, and I mine. He’s actually a really nice guy, though… I was asking him where I could go to find some matches, as I had forgotten to buy some before I came up and I don’t want to light the gas stove with a lighter and have it explode in my face, and he just gave me a bag with six boxes of matches in it.
The host mother came in while I was unpacking/sleeping/eating a box of Raisin Bran Crunch, and she’s really sweet. The house I’m in now is heated by coal, and since we didn’t have enough time to dedicate to getting the petchka fired up last night, she all but insisted I sleep in their house because it was warmer. Frankly, at the time I was in favor of staying in my house, as it wasn’t that cold and I’m actually kind of used to sleeping in places without heat by this point. But they insisted, and I wasn’t in any sort of mood to argue with them on my first night here. I moseyed on over to the main house, where they gave me the requisite dose of tea and started talking with me. I think I’ll really like them, actually. Basically, this is kind of like living in an apartment with really helpful neighbors. They’re all like, “Come, watch TV and drink tea with us!” and I’m completely down with that. In addition, since I live in close proximity to another family, it means that my Russian will see far more use than if I was living completely on my own, which is a perk for the language skills.
In addition, this place is criminally cheap. I was paying 2500 a month plus utilities in the house I got kicked out of, which was 500 over the amount that Peace Corps was willing to shell out for housing in this part of the country, so I had to fork out the extra 500 in addition to utilities. I get to live here for 1500 som, which is fine with me because the housing limit is 2000. Also, that’s only 300 more som than I was paying to get yelled at by my Kyrgyz host mother and tormented by my younger sister. Worth. Every. Som.
There’s a gas balloon for the stove I’ll have to pay to fill, which costs about 450 som, but I don’t know how often I’ll be needing to fill it yet, because all the other places I’ve lived had gas lines. The heating is coal, which I dropped about 2000 som on, wood included. Of course, the wood I bought was wet, and it basically does nothing but hiss at me when I try to light it. The host father actually got it to produce fire, but it took him about a liter of car oil to make it so. Whatever. I wanted to get around to learning how to light and maintain coal heating by myself, but because the batch of wood I got was so wet, it’s too much of a pain in the ass. I actually burned the hell out of myself today, as I forgot that the metal knob to the petchka would, you know, actually be hot. Between the petchka and the lack of pilot lights on the stoves, my hands are going to be impervious to heat when it’s all said and done. The father said that the previous volunteer just paid him the equal to ten bucks a month to maintain the heat, and that’s just such a good deal and so much less work that I’ll pay it. Assuming I’m here next year, I’ll be able to buy drier wood earlier in the season and give a whack at it myself.
This is the homestay experience I wanted, and it seems like it might be very similar to the one I had in Japan. In all honesty, I’m not really looking to be adopted, here. Part of the thing that drove me up the friggin’ wall at my last homestay was that the mother treated me almost exactly like I was her daughter, and I just wasn’t in the market to be yelled at because my room was cluttered. Of course, not that I don’t want to build a good, deep relationship with the people I live with, but I already have parents. I don’t need another set. I’d rather just make good friends here. Plus, the problem with simulating a parent/child relationship is that, by default, it’s an unequal setting. Obviously, the people I live with know more about life and living here than I ever will, and being put into a new culture with a different language is, in some ways, pretty similar to being a child again in that you can’t express yourself all that well or understand much of what’s going on at first. However, I’m a fast learner, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not five. I don’t need to be treated like it. Sometimes I need help, but I don’t need another mother. The one I have at home does a pretty good job, and she doesn’t need a counterpart.
Plus, and this is the kicker… WASHING MACHINE. It only took me four moves to find one, but here it is, like the promised land. And it’s an actual washing machine, like, Western-style, and not the old-fashioned shaped-like-a-can variety. I saw it when I was in the kitchen and pretty much started foaming at the mouth. They said I could use it whenever I wanted, basically. (Of course, if I just have a small load, like underwear and socks, those I’ll still do by hand. But good God, my Carhartts seriously haven’t been washed since October. It’s time to get down to business.) I was originally planning on seeking out a laundromat this month, as they do exist in Bishkek (…somewhere), but now I don’t think I’ll need to. Of course, they don’t have a dryer here, but whatever.
Turns out, though, that the previous volunteer here actually bought them the washing machine. I was like… erm, well, hopefully I’m charming enough to make up for the fact that I can’t provide you with expensive appliances. To be technical about it, it was her parents that bought the family the machine. If nothing else, though, at least I get to reap the benefits.
I guess we’ll see how it works out. Frankly, even though everything’s been coming up roses thus far, I’m a little bit hesitant to say that everything will be great, because the experience of the last three months turned out to be kind of shitty. I have to say I’m a little bit disappointed with the whole moving thing, because it essentially means that all the work and integrating I did in my previous community has turned out to be a wash. I have to start over entirely with getting to know people, getting to know the lay of the village and how everything works, where the good stores are, where the drunks harass passersby, everything. It would be different if I had serious problems with my previous community, but the only real issue I had was housing. And, well, that’s a pretty big issue, especially when you’re homeless. But my life in the community was fine.
Not that it won’t eventually be just fine here too, of course, but moving happened at a crappy time, as school just got out here, and due to the electric situation, it won’t be back in session for two months, so real integration here is going to have to wait. This sort of frustrates my original winter plans, as in the old village we were only going to be out for a month, and one of those weeks was going to be taken up by IST. Now, suddenly, I have two months to deal with, and I’m farther away from the capital so I just can’t go and fart around as easily as I had been able to before.
Oh well. There actually are some volunteers here who are putting on winter camps in February, so I can probably just jump on the bandwagon for some of those when they end up happening. And do a lot of reading.
I also got to go check out the school today, and from what I got to see of it (which wasn’t much) it seems like an all right place. My counterpart’s English is not nearly as good as my former one’s, but I was all but expecting that, considering how my other counterpart was, for all intents and purposes, fluent. But she can string together sentences, and between that and whatever Russian skills I possess, we can communicate. The school itself is actually a lot nicer than my old one… I have no idea why this is, but every single other school I’ve seen is nicer than my original one. What’s also vaguely amazing is that they actually have two separate schools here, an elementary and a secondary. In my old village, everybody just went to the same building and the overcrowding was ridiculous. My new counterpart also said that the classes here don’t get any bigger than about twenty people, which is vastly preferable to the forty-person mess that was my previous eighth grade class.
But I got introduced to what I think is most of the staff. If nothing else, living here has taught me that most of my genes seem to come from the Slavic end of things, because nearly everybody here thinks I’m Russian somehow. And not just in the, “You’re white, so you’re obviously not Kyrgyz and thus must be Russian,” way, but in the, “Hello, I was born to Ivan Ivonovitch in the Kremlin,” version of Russian. The teachers all seem to be very kind. I think I’ll get along.
The good part about moving, I guess, is that I get to do the second time around more informed. Plus, my Russian is a lot better than it was in September, so I can communicate with my colleagues with a lot less difficulty, and I’ll feel less like I’m just being led by the nose into things. When I met the teachers, they were actually convinced I had studied Russian before I came to Kyrgyzstan, because my Russian was better than the other Volunteer’s when she first got here. Of course, this is only because she came here right after PST, and I’ve had an extra three months behind me before I moved, but that’s a good sign. I know how schools here work in general, so I can spend more of my time figuring out the politics of this particular school and less time on trying to get my head around how the education system works.
So, well, here’s hoping that round two of Peace Corps volunteerism works out better than round one. And, uh, happy new year.
Written Friday, January 2, 2009
Whelp, I’m a douchebag.
Because the new years is a big holiday, and the first was my new host father’s birthday, today was the first day I actually did any real cooking in my new digs.
I did some foraging around the cupboards, since the host mother told me I could use basically anything in there. She went on at some length about this, and a lot of it I didn’t understand, but the general gist was that I could go about my business at will, which made me happy.
So I was looking around, and found some really nice kitchenware in some of the drawers. I mean really nice. Like, new cutting boards, a European-made vegetable peeler, and all sorts of china. I didn’t really have a burning need for most of it, as my lifestyle at the moment doesn’t exactly include throwing fancy dinner parties, but I was pleased about the peeler and the boards.
As a side note, I’m beginning to really like my new place. Everybody here says hello to me on the street, which is definitely different from my old village. When I first got here and the host father walked me out to the school, everybody was exceptionally friendly, but I had assumed it was mostly because I was with him, and since this is small-town Kyrgyzstan, everybody knows each other. Whenever my host father stopped to talk (which was often), people were quite pleasant to me, other than their constant dismay over my lack of hat. I do actually have a hat, but it wasn’t all that cold on that day, so I didn’t feel the pressing need for one. But, you know, I thanked them for their concern, and on we went.
Today I went out on my own, a foraging trip for some spices and bread. A family was selling apples for twenty som a kilo, so I picked up some of those, as well. And… everybody still said hello to me. Amazing.
But, anyway, I was back at home getting my cook on. I actually cooked over the petchka today, as it was burning for heat and it means I don’t have to use the gas. Look at me, I’m so Little House on the Prairie.
The host mother came in, asked me how I was doing, and said that she was going to clean out a couple more of the cabinets, as she hadn’t had time to do so before I moved in. I told her to go ahead, and kept cooking.
Then she came into the kitchen, and asked where the cutting boards and vegetable peeler were. I showed them to her, and she raised an eyebrow at me and said that they were supposed to be wedding gifts for her daughter.
Crap. No wonder they were so nice and new.
She originally said just to clean them off and put them back in their boxes, but, come on, you can’t give used kitchenware to somebody at their wedding. Instead, I’m just going to suck it up and go buy some new things. The vegetable peeler was actually from the previous Volunteer from America (no wonder it’s so good). I figure I’ll just ask my mother to throw in another one with her next shipment of love, and maybe a couple of nice knives as well. I can replace the cutting board easily enough here: I’ll just go to one of the department stores that are usually out of my price range and pick up another.
The mother took me violating her daughter’s presents pretty well, all things considering. I apologized about fifty times, and she just flapped her hand at me and said that she should have moved them before I moved in. The daughter herself isn’t even engaged yet, so at least I’m not on a working time limit to replace things. I was planning on going into Bishkek tomorrow, anyway, as I need to get a few more things to outfit this place as I’d like it, anyway. I need a bucket for my slops, as there actually is a big slop bucket outside, but it’s annoying to have to run out there every time I need to dump my coffee grounds or onion peels. I also want a large cutting board, as my gas stove actually has four burners, but only one of them works. I figure I can put a large cutting board over the three that don’t work and get another working space for the kitchen, as it’s basically a closet in there as it is. You know, things like that.
I guess on the good side of things, I have some nice new cutting boards and an awesome vegetable peeler. On the bad side of things, I’m still a douchebag, but at least I didn’t get kicked out of the house over it.
On another note, I figured out that if you fry up some apples with some cinnamon, sugar, lemon, cognac, and cloves and then top it with toasted oats, it’s pretty tasty.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
From you I want more than I’ve ever asked,
all of it – the newscasts’ terrible stories
of life in my time, the knowing it’s worse than that,
much worse – the knowing what it means to be lied to.
Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity,
coffee and bread with sour plum jam.
Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods.
Lives ticking on as if.
A typewriter’s torrent, suddenly still.
Blue soaking through fog, two dragonflies wheeling.
Acceptable levels of cruelty, steadily rising.
Whatever you bring in your hands, I need to see it.
Suddenly I understand the verb without tenses.
To smell another woman’s hair, to taste her skin.
To know the bodies drifting underwater.
To be human, said Rosa – I can’t teach you that.
A cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds – his moment.
Surely the live of life is never-ending,
the failure of nerve, a charred fuse?
I want more from you than I ever knew to ask.
Wild pink lilies erupting, tasseled stalks of corn
in the Mexican gardens, corn and roses.
Shortening days, strawberry fields in ferment
with tossed-aside, bruised fruit.
[To the Days, Adrienne Rich]
Note: I have another entry that I wrote around the time when I was homeless that, for several reasons, I will not post here. If there are interested parties, I would be willing to email it out... just leave a comment with your contact info or email me.
This has been one of the craziest weeks of my life. I mean, I’ve definitely had worse ones in the grand scheme of it all, considering that this week had no mishaps involving alcohol, drugs, or suicide. But still. Crazy.
The Saturday after I got evicted from my apartment, I ended up on a grand couch surfing tour of Chui oblast. While being homeless in a third-world country sounds like a pretty crappy situation at best (and not that it was fabulous, mind you), all things considered I got well taken care of. The hospitality of my fellow volunteers proved boundless, and I easily could have had my pick of about twenty different places to stay, and probably the worst part of it was all the moving around. I didn’t have to worry about money or food or anything on the primal needs side of things. While everybody was more than understanding, our living spaces are small, and I didn’t want to encroach on anybody’s privacy for more than a few days. Consequently, I slept in five different places last week.
Through it all, I was barraging my program manager with calls, to get updates on the living situation. As I expected, nothing came up in my village during the week I was floating about the oblast. The house I got kicked out of only turned up after about three month’s worth of reasonably intense looking. I wasn’t holding my breath for something to magically pop up on the week of the biggest holiday of the year. (Which, by the way, is New Year’s, not Christmas. There is a large population of Russian Orthodox here, but their Christmas is on January 7th, not December 25th.)
So, I moved sites. My new village is about forty minutes out of the capital, which is a little farther away than I’d like to be, but I got spoiled being in a direct suburb. I can suck it up, and it’s not that bad of a commute.
The living situation here is looking okay, so far. There actually is a rule in PC Kyrgyzstan where if you move during your first year of service, you need to go through the three month mandatory homestay period again. The conversation about this rule I had with my program manager went something like this:
PM: Well, it’s not looking as though anything is going to turn up in your old village, so you’ll probably need to change sites. You do know that there is a second homestay period with this-
Me: No.
[five second pause]
PM: I’ll talk to the Country Director.
But, anyway, Peace Corps did manage to get me pretty cleverly with the housing situation, despite my abject refusal to live with another family. My new digs are technically a homestay situation: a compound housing. But it’s the nicest damn compound house I’ve ever been in. Most of the guesthouses I’ve seen consist of one room, maybe two rooms tops. The one at my old host family at my old site had a slug infestation. But this one is srz biz. It has four rooms, a large bedroom with two beds, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bath. It’s nice to have the banya in my house, though, because it means I get to bathe without doing the ten-second dash outside in the snow. Of course, there’s no toilet, but that’s not a big deal. The main house actually does have an indoor toilet, but, I mean, I’d have to go outside to use it anyway, so six of one, half-dozen of the other between the toilet and the outhouse. I suppose this shows how far I’ve come in life, where I have both an indoor toilet and an outhouse available to me, and I go for the outhouse. I’ve been too well-trained: a couple of times I was in the main house, watching some TV or whatever, and actually left the house to use the outhouse, because I forgot there was a toilet inside. But the outhouse is actually relatively nice in the grand scheme of outhouses, and plus I’m the only one that really uses it, so it’s clean.
My new house also has the first actual fireplace I’ve seen in Kyrgyzstan. (There doesn’t appear to be a flue, so I don’t know if it’s actually usable or not, but it’s a hearth with a mantle and everything.) I actually think it’s bigger than the house I was living in at my old village, since they had two rooms locked off to me there and I only had three rooms available to me.
The family that owns the house is an older Russian couple, and their kids have all moved out and live in Bishkek, and they’re pretty chill. Most of the interaction I’ve had is with the father, and he’s helped me fill the gas balloon for the kitchen, and ran off the dogs when they started attacking me. (First time in my life I’ve ever had to legit kick a dog.) I can only assume the canines will either get used to me or learn to fear me, and either way I’m fine with it. The only thing I really miss from the old house is the small dog there, which actually turned out to be rather likeable after the first couple of days living there.
But the father actually said to me, “You can cook for yourself, can’t you? We’re not going to cook for you.” And I was like, fucking sweet, we’re going to get along just fine, as it seems as though you want to mind your own business, and I mine. He’s actually a really nice guy, though… I was asking him where I could go to find some matches, as I had forgotten to buy some before I came up and I don’t want to light the gas stove with a lighter and have it explode in my face, and he just gave me a bag with six boxes of matches in it.
The host mother came in while I was unpacking/sleeping/eating a box of Raisin Bran Crunch, and she’s really sweet. The house I’m in now is heated by coal, and since we didn’t have enough time to dedicate to getting the petchka fired up last night, she all but insisted I sleep in their house because it was warmer. Frankly, at the time I was in favor of staying in my house, as it wasn’t that cold and I’m actually kind of used to sleeping in places without heat by this point. But they insisted, and I wasn’t in any sort of mood to argue with them on my first night here. I moseyed on over to the main house, where they gave me the requisite dose of tea and started talking with me. I think I’ll really like them, actually. Basically, this is kind of like living in an apartment with really helpful neighbors. They’re all like, “Come, watch TV and drink tea with us!” and I’m completely down with that. In addition, since I live in close proximity to another family, it means that my Russian will see far more use than if I was living completely on my own, which is a perk for the language skills.
In addition, this place is criminally cheap. I was paying 2500 a month plus utilities in the house I got kicked out of, which was 500 over the amount that Peace Corps was willing to shell out for housing in this part of the country, so I had to fork out the extra 500 in addition to utilities. I get to live here for 1500 som, which is fine with me because the housing limit is 2000. Also, that’s only 300 more som than I was paying to get yelled at by my Kyrgyz host mother and tormented by my younger sister. Worth. Every. Som.
There’s a gas balloon for the stove I’ll have to pay to fill, which costs about 450 som, but I don’t know how often I’ll be needing to fill it yet, because all the other places I’ve lived had gas lines. The heating is coal, which I dropped about 2000 som on, wood included. Of course, the wood I bought was wet, and it basically does nothing but hiss at me when I try to light it. The host father actually got it to produce fire, but it took him about a liter of car oil to make it so. Whatever. I wanted to get around to learning how to light and maintain coal heating by myself, but because the batch of wood I got was so wet, it’s too much of a pain in the ass. I actually burned the hell out of myself today, as I forgot that the metal knob to the petchka would, you know, actually be hot. Between the petchka and the lack of pilot lights on the stoves, my hands are going to be impervious to heat when it’s all said and done. The father said that the previous volunteer just paid him the equal to ten bucks a month to maintain the heat, and that’s just such a good deal and so much less work that I’ll pay it. Assuming I’m here next year, I’ll be able to buy drier wood earlier in the season and give a whack at it myself.
This is the homestay experience I wanted, and it seems like it might be very similar to the one I had in Japan. In all honesty, I’m not really looking to be adopted, here. Part of the thing that drove me up the friggin’ wall at my last homestay was that the mother treated me almost exactly like I was her daughter, and I just wasn’t in the market to be yelled at because my room was cluttered. Of course, not that I don’t want to build a good, deep relationship with the people I live with, but I already have parents. I don’t need another set. I’d rather just make good friends here. Plus, the problem with simulating a parent/child relationship is that, by default, it’s an unequal setting. Obviously, the people I live with know more about life and living here than I ever will, and being put into a new culture with a different language is, in some ways, pretty similar to being a child again in that you can’t express yourself all that well or understand much of what’s going on at first. However, I’m a fast learner, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not five. I don’t need to be treated like it. Sometimes I need help, but I don’t need another mother. The one I have at home does a pretty good job, and she doesn’t need a counterpart.
Plus, and this is the kicker… WASHING MACHINE. It only took me four moves to find one, but here it is, like the promised land. And it’s an actual washing machine, like, Western-style, and not the old-fashioned shaped-like-a-can variety. I saw it when I was in the kitchen and pretty much started foaming at the mouth. They said I could use it whenever I wanted, basically. (Of course, if I just have a small load, like underwear and socks, those I’ll still do by hand. But good God, my Carhartts seriously haven’t been washed since October. It’s time to get down to business.) I was originally planning on seeking out a laundromat this month, as they do exist in Bishkek (…somewhere), but now I don’t think I’ll need to. Of course, they don’t have a dryer here, but whatever.
Turns out, though, that the previous volunteer here actually bought them the washing machine. I was like… erm, well, hopefully I’m charming enough to make up for the fact that I can’t provide you with expensive appliances. To be technical about it, it was her parents that bought the family the machine. If nothing else, though, at least I get to reap the benefits.
I guess we’ll see how it works out. Frankly, even though everything’s been coming up roses thus far, I’m a little bit hesitant to say that everything will be great, because the experience of the last three months turned out to be kind of shitty. I have to say I’m a little bit disappointed with the whole moving thing, because it essentially means that all the work and integrating I did in my previous community has turned out to be a wash. I have to start over entirely with getting to know people, getting to know the lay of the village and how everything works, where the good stores are, where the drunks harass passersby, everything. It would be different if I had serious problems with my previous community, but the only real issue I had was housing. And, well, that’s a pretty big issue, especially when you’re homeless. But my life in the community was fine.
Not that it won’t eventually be just fine here too, of course, but moving happened at a crappy time, as school just got out here, and due to the electric situation, it won’t be back in session for two months, so real integration here is going to have to wait. This sort of frustrates my original winter plans, as in the old village we were only going to be out for a month, and one of those weeks was going to be taken up by IST. Now, suddenly, I have two months to deal with, and I’m farther away from the capital so I just can’t go and fart around as easily as I had been able to before.
Oh well. There actually are some volunteers here who are putting on winter camps in February, so I can probably just jump on the bandwagon for some of those when they end up happening. And do a lot of reading.
I also got to go check out the school today, and from what I got to see of it (which wasn’t much) it seems like an all right place. My counterpart’s English is not nearly as good as my former one’s, but I was all but expecting that, considering how my other counterpart was, for all intents and purposes, fluent. But she can string together sentences, and between that and whatever Russian skills I possess, we can communicate. The school itself is actually a lot nicer than my old one… I have no idea why this is, but every single other school I’ve seen is nicer than my original one. What’s also vaguely amazing is that they actually have two separate schools here, an elementary and a secondary. In my old village, everybody just went to the same building and the overcrowding was ridiculous. My new counterpart also said that the classes here don’t get any bigger than about twenty people, which is vastly preferable to the forty-person mess that was my previous eighth grade class.
But I got introduced to what I think is most of the staff. If nothing else, living here has taught me that most of my genes seem to come from the Slavic end of things, because nearly everybody here thinks I’m Russian somehow. And not just in the, “You’re white, so you’re obviously not Kyrgyz and thus must be Russian,” way, but in the, “Hello, I was born to Ivan Ivonovitch in the Kremlin,” version of Russian. The teachers all seem to be very kind. I think I’ll get along.
The good part about moving, I guess, is that I get to do the second time around more informed. Plus, my Russian is a lot better than it was in September, so I can communicate with my colleagues with a lot less difficulty, and I’ll feel less like I’m just being led by the nose into things. When I met the teachers, they were actually convinced I had studied Russian before I came to Kyrgyzstan, because my Russian was better than the other Volunteer’s when she first got here. Of course, this is only because she came here right after PST, and I’ve had an extra three months behind me before I moved, but that’s a good sign. I know how schools here work in general, so I can spend more of my time figuring out the politics of this particular school and less time on trying to get my head around how the education system works.
So, well, here’s hoping that round two of Peace Corps volunteerism works out better than round one. And, uh, happy new year.
Written Friday, January 2, 2009
Whelp, I’m a douchebag.
Because the new years is a big holiday, and the first was my new host father’s birthday, today was the first day I actually did any real cooking in my new digs.
I did some foraging around the cupboards, since the host mother told me I could use basically anything in there. She went on at some length about this, and a lot of it I didn’t understand, but the general gist was that I could go about my business at will, which made me happy.
So I was looking around, and found some really nice kitchenware in some of the drawers. I mean really nice. Like, new cutting boards, a European-made vegetable peeler, and all sorts of china. I didn’t really have a burning need for most of it, as my lifestyle at the moment doesn’t exactly include throwing fancy dinner parties, but I was pleased about the peeler and the boards.
As a side note, I’m beginning to really like my new place. Everybody here says hello to me on the street, which is definitely different from my old village. When I first got here and the host father walked me out to the school, everybody was exceptionally friendly, but I had assumed it was mostly because I was with him, and since this is small-town Kyrgyzstan, everybody knows each other. Whenever my host father stopped to talk (which was often), people were quite pleasant to me, other than their constant dismay over my lack of hat. I do actually have a hat, but it wasn’t all that cold on that day, so I didn’t feel the pressing need for one. But, you know, I thanked them for their concern, and on we went.
Today I went out on my own, a foraging trip for some spices and bread. A family was selling apples for twenty som a kilo, so I picked up some of those, as well. And… everybody still said hello to me. Amazing.
But, anyway, I was back at home getting my cook on. I actually cooked over the petchka today, as it was burning for heat and it means I don’t have to use the gas. Look at me, I’m so Little House on the Prairie.
The host mother came in, asked me how I was doing, and said that she was going to clean out a couple more of the cabinets, as she hadn’t had time to do so before I moved in. I told her to go ahead, and kept cooking.
Then she came into the kitchen, and asked where the cutting boards and vegetable peeler were. I showed them to her, and she raised an eyebrow at me and said that they were supposed to be wedding gifts for her daughter.
Crap. No wonder they were so nice and new.
She originally said just to clean them off and put them back in their boxes, but, come on, you can’t give used kitchenware to somebody at their wedding. Instead, I’m just going to suck it up and go buy some new things. The vegetable peeler was actually from the previous Volunteer from America (no wonder it’s so good). I figure I’ll just ask my mother to throw in another one with her next shipment of love, and maybe a couple of nice knives as well. I can replace the cutting board easily enough here: I’ll just go to one of the department stores that are usually out of my price range and pick up another.
The mother took me violating her daughter’s presents pretty well, all things considering. I apologized about fifty times, and she just flapped her hand at me and said that she should have moved them before I moved in. The daughter herself isn’t even engaged yet, so at least I’m not on a working time limit to replace things. I was planning on going into Bishkek tomorrow, anyway, as I need to get a few more things to outfit this place as I’d like it, anyway. I need a bucket for my slops, as there actually is a big slop bucket outside, but it’s annoying to have to run out there every time I need to dump my coffee grounds or onion peels. I also want a large cutting board, as my gas stove actually has four burners, but only one of them works. I figure I can put a large cutting board over the three that don’t work and get another working space for the kitchen, as it’s basically a closet in there as it is. You know, things like that.
I guess on the good side of things, I have some nice new cutting boards and an awesome vegetable peeler. On the bad side of things, I’m still a douchebag, but at least I didn’t get kicked out of the house over it.
On another note, I figured out that if you fry up some apples with some cinnamon, sugar, lemon, cognac, and cloves and then top it with toasted oats, it’s pretty tasty.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
From you I want more than I’ve ever asked,
all of it – the newscasts’ terrible stories
of life in my time, the knowing it’s worse than that,
much worse – the knowing what it means to be lied to.
Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity,
coffee and bread with sour plum jam.
Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods.
Lives ticking on as if.
A typewriter’s torrent, suddenly still.
Blue soaking through fog, two dragonflies wheeling.
Acceptable levels of cruelty, steadily rising.
Whatever you bring in your hands, I need to see it.
Suddenly I understand the verb without tenses.
To smell another woman’s hair, to taste her skin.
To know the bodies drifting underwater.
To be human, said Rosa – I can’t teach you that.
A cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds – his moment.
Surely the live of life is never-ending,
the failure of nerve, a charred fuse?
I want more from you than I ever knew to ask.
Wild pink lilies erupting, tasseled stalks of corn
in the Mexican gardens, corn and roses.
Shortening days, strawberry fields in ferment
with tossed-aside, bruised fruit.
[To the Days, Adrienne Rich]
Note: I have another entry that I wrote around the time when I was homeless that, for several reasons, I will not post here. If there are interested parties, I would be willing to email it out... just leave a comment with your contact info or email me.
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