.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.