.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.