.just tell them we're survivors

Work started again yesterday. I suppose overall I’m more happy about it than not, considering how I haven’t done any real work in about two and a half months. That’s the main reason why I haven’t posted anything here… seriously, y’all, I’ve been doing absolutely nothing worth writing about. I know how everybody probably loves reading about how I haven’t had heat and I nap about ten hours a day and then sleep for twelve more at night, but even I can’t make that into a non-coma inducing blog entry.

Of note was this past weekend, however. I and seriously about a third of Peace Corps made a weekend trip over to Karakol on the lake, for another PCV’s birthday. It was mostly driven from boredom, but also out of the sheer fact that, every once in a while, you really do need a weekend of hedonism and vice and English-speaking. Especially with this job. Peace Corps got a little freaked out about it, actually, just because of the amount of Volunteers who made this seemingly random migration. I went up on Friday and we all went to a café… I counted about twenty five Volunteers. I think the total number in country is in the high seventies by this point, so that’s a pretty good chunk of our population. A highlight of the weekend was the group viewing of Debbie Does Dallas, and my introduction to the music video for “Tip Drill.” It must be your money ‘cause it ain’t your face, and that’s tru fax.

I had a blast, but the haul out to Karakol and back is a lot to do in a weekend. On the way over me and one other Volunteer took a matshruka, which ended up taking us about seven hours. On the way back there were enough of us to fill a taxi, so we ended up spending the extra fifty som for private transportation. Of course, if you take a taxi it’s not a guarantee of a straight-shot ride… in fact, the taxi driver stopped about five times to do errands on the way to Bishkek. Once, he picked up a bag of milk bottles from his sister. He stopped again to pick up some tushuks and laundry soap. He stopped again in Bishkek to drop off the tushuks and laundry soap at some apartments. Oh well.

Of course, by the time I got back to Bishkek on Sunday I was exhausted… just in time for my first day of work at my new site on Monday. Sweet and totally responsible planning on my part, I know. I woke up Sunday morning pretty totaled from Saturday night, and if I had been working under any other circumstances, I probably would have said to hell with it and stayed in Karakol the extra day to recuperate. But I figured it might not look so good to miss the first day of work after a two and a half month break.

But teaching at the new school is basically almost identical to teaching at my old site. The major bonus to it is that none of the classes appear to be any bigger than twenty five students, which is a definite improvement on the forty person catastrophe that was my former eighth grade class. The biggest negative is the lack of teacher bathrooms at the school. At my old school the teachers had their own outhouse… and while it was pretty foul, it was a single-person entity with a door that had a lock.

If anybody ever bitches to me about public bathrooms in America ever again, I’ll probably flat out punch them in the face. Rest stop bathrooms here are a pretty group experience… basically, there’s a line of holes in the ground, separated by waist-high partitions. No doors. No toilet paper. You just step into one, squat, and do your business. It doesn’t particularly bother me, I guess, but it’s just slightly unnerving to be doing your thing and watching twenty other people who are waiting for a stall mill around in front of you, all like, “What’s up?”

The ones at the school are even worse. It’s the same line of holes in the ground, but sans the partitions. Yeah. I’m not a particularly modest person, and I’ve definitely pissed in a variety of exotic locales with varying amounts of people about in my time, but just popping a squat in the open with six of my students on either side of me doing the same thing is a little much, even for me.

This basically consigns me to not drinking coffee in the morning, or at least not drinking coffee the way I like to drink coffee, which is a copious amount of it. If I go through my usual twoish cups when I wake up at seven, I usually have to piss like a racehorse by about ten. And while I do live close enough to the school to walk back to my house if we have an open hour in the schedule, I’m still too far to make the trek between classes. Oh well. I guess there are worse things.

But teaching in and of itself isn’t so horrible. It’s something to do, at any rate. Probably the most excitement I had today was kicking students out of a class for the first time. I teach fifth graders now, even though technically I’m only supposed to be teaching seven through eleven. I didn’t mind so much because I’d be with my counterpart, and because the fifth graders aren’t advanced enough in any capacity to communicate with me in English, she said that she’d just lead the lesson and I could help out.

However (of course there’s a “however”), my counterpart is actually really heavily involved in organizing events at the school… her side job is essentially to be the school’s secretary. She gets called out of class a lot, but it’s usually for no more than ten minutes and I can handle things for that long. But for whatever reason, somebody came and talked to her during the interterm between classes, and she came and told me that she was going to be gone for most of the period.

Counterparts leaving the classroom is rather an epidemic around these parts. Just like Volunteers have different levels of dedication to their jobs, the same is with the counterparts. I’ve been extremely fortunate with counterparts (unlike my hopelessly poor luck with housing up until this point), since both of mine have been very highly dedicated and motivated. In fact, I’d rank both of the counterparts I’ve had in the top five teaching counterparts I’ve heard about overall. Peace Corps has had to do interventions with some counterparts who see the Volunteer more as a substitute teacher than anything else, and a few counterparts didn’t show up to class or would just show up for the first five minutes of class and leave for the next thirty five. Not only does having a disappearing counterpart completely thwart the skills transfer goal of us being here (it’s hard to pass on skills when the recipient isn’t there), but it also sucks on a practical level. Teaching here is nothing like teaching at home. There is zero discipline support and barely any way to enforce rules. Grades don’t matter. Virtually the only tool you’ve got to employ is corporal punishment, but most of us Yanks are not comfortable with that. In sum, being left alone to manage a class here blows pretty hardcore. I’d also like to say it’s not that every single kid here is an absolute terror, and in fact a lot of the ones who are pretty disruptive are not at heart bad kids and most of them are actually very sweet. They’re just kids, and it’s hard to control twenty five of them when there’s only one of you and you don’t speak their native language all that well and there’s a very poor discipline support network in place.

So when my counterpart told me she wasn’t going to be there for most of the class I basically went “hell no,” since I had no lesson plan, the kids could barely speak English, and I knew that my Russian wasn’t going to be good enough to contain twenty ten-year-olds for forty five minutes. One of the things I have gotten good at while here is just saying “no” and canceling classes if I get left alone. I still feel a little sorry for the kids who are genuinely interested in English when I cancel, considering that we only teach each class twice a week so when there is no class, they lose out on half that week’s English instruction, but I’m not a substitute teacher. It says so in my contract with the school. Technically, I have every right to not teach a class if I don’t have a counterpart. So, my counterpart went and got one of the eleventh formers, a very responsible girl who can actually speak English quite well. Apparently my counterpart uses her a lot as a substitute teacher.

Still no lesson plan, but at least I had a translator, so I was willing to give it a go. The good part about the fifth graders is that most of them were super-eager, which is a refreshing change from most of my older classes, where trying to get them to speak in English at all is like pulling teeth half the time. We went through most of the numbers, and played a game where I split the class into two, and had a member of each team come to the board. I would shout a number and the first person to write it on the board correctly got a point. Went rather well, all things considering. Then we played Simon Says, and we still had some time left over, so I just told them to do their homework.

The problem was a couple of boys in the back, who were basically goofing off without any sort of remorse. I’m pretty immune at this point… I can conduct entire classes, it seems, where all the students are texting on their cell phones and talking to each other. Whatever. It started getting out of hand, though, when they literally started body slamming each other into the bookshelves at the back of the class and almost knocking over a couple of desks.

Finally I kicked them out. It definitely helped control the rest of the class, though. I think it shocked them. The boys I kicked out opened the door a couple of times, but I glared and they ran. Funnily enough, one of the students from my tenth form class actually came back with both of the boys by the ears… he thought they were playing hooky. One of the other students asked me if kids in America just sat quietly during class, and I said, “No, but they don’t knock over desks from wrestling, either!”

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, kicking students out of class just doesn’t happen here, as the teachers can get in trouble for it. For some reason. I know in some places the teachers get paid more if they have more students in their classes, so half of them spend the majority of class corralling errant students in the halls rather than, you know, teach. I, on the other hand, am removed from this problem, so I have no issues with kicking kids out. In fact, if I taught by myself, I think I’d be doing it all the time. Though, to be honest, I wonder if I’d actually have the authority to kick out some of the older boys. At least with the fifth formers, I’ve still got a definite size advantage. It’s not as though I’m particularly tiny, but I don’t necessarily have the physical advantage and there’s not a big enough age difference between us to garner me significantly higher status when it comes to the tenth and eleventh formers. If they refused to leave, I’d basically have no way to make them, other than leaving the room and attempting to get the zavouch to come yell at them. And then because kicking students out of class is unorthodox behavior, I wouldn’t even be guaranteed that the zavouch would come help. My ultimate trump card is just to simply refuse to teach a class, but I hate employing it as all it really does is punish the motivated students.

Since I teach with a counterpart, though, I mostly let her take the lead on disciplining students. Or, rather, not disciplining them, as is the case most of the time. It’s really not worth the risk of usurping her position or getting in a tiff with her so I just don’t say anything. (Not that I think I would easily upset her, but it’s more just the fact that my life is a hell of a lot easier if the relationship with my counterpart is unquestionably good.) I find the wildly disruptive students just bizarre, though, honestly. It is impossible to fail on attendance here. Hell, it’s pretty impossible to fail classes at all here, as a teacher who fails students has her job at risk, since it makes the school look bad. Why in the name of all things holy would you go to English class if you had no interest in it and didn’t have to worry about failing and your parents would never know either way? Go smoke cigarettes behind the outhouse or something.

But, so it goes. Back to the grind. Another thing that the beginning of school has heralded is the fact that my relative anonymous status has finally been cracked. Since I don’t look particularly foreign in these parts, my first two months of living here meant that I got to enjoy wandering around the village in relative peace, but that’s no longer going to be the case. Not that I particularly mind that people are going to know who I am, but the chorus of “hello” is starting up again, and it’s really making me appreciate living in my own house. It’s easier to deal with being a quasi-celebrity when I can walk into my compound and not have to worry about offending my host family. Again, not that I don’t want a good relationship, but the family that shares this compound with me are used to having me around and we don’t get up in each other’s grills. I appreciate the peace.

In another non-school note, another funny thing about living here is the concept of nationality. This came up today because of the style I have of writing the number five. The way I’ve always written it (and the way that most Americans seem to) is more like the letter S with more angles. Every Kyrgyz person I’ve encountered writes the bottom part first, and then caps it off with the straight line forming the top of the number. I mentioned this to my counterpart today, just because I thought it was an interesting little quirk.

What I said, exactly, was that, “Americans and Kyrgyz people write this differently!” and then I demonstrated the different style. She smiled, and then said, “But I’m Ukrainian.”

Nationality is a big thing here. And by “nationality” I technically mean ethnicity. They even have it in Kyrgyz passports. Like, obviously a Kyrgyz passport holder is a citizen of Kyrgyzstan, but on the front page with all your vital information, it’ll say “Nationality: Uzbek.” Or whatever. Russians are Russian, the Kyrgyz are Kyrgyz, and the Turks are Turkish. Despite the fact that all of them were born in Kyrgyzstan. There’s actually a requirement for the office of President… you have to be of Kyrgyz nationality, and speak Kyrgyz. There was a big revolution here back in 2005, and the leader of said revolution ended up being barred from office in the aftermath because he couldn’t speak Kyrgyz.

It’s just interesting to me, since in America, people generally don’t give a second thought to their heritage, unless we’re just talking about ourselves and then it’s more of a trivia topic than anything. I’ve been asked countless times about my nationality here, and the first few times I was confused by the question and was just like, “Uh, American?” Then they were like, “No, no, no, your nationality.” And then I was still confused. I ended up asking somebody at Peace Corps about it, and then found out that people were actually asking about my ethnicity.

And, of course, my answer is this muddled Heinz 57 brand of countries. “I’m Hungarian-German-Irish-English-Scottish-Native American.” Yeah. Put THAT on my passport, why dontcha. And I don’t feel any particular attachment to any of those ethnic groups. Now, I know there are Americans who are intensely proud of their various ethnicities, but most of them identify primarily as American. Or at least, if somebody told them that all Americans wrote the number five a certain way, it’s unlikely they’d say, “But I’m Hungarian-German-Irish-English-Scottish-Native American.” When my counterpart told me she was Ukrainian, I was like, “Uh, I meant all the people who were born in Kyrgyzstan.”

On another note, my life is weird right now because it is four o’clock in the afternoon, and I have electricity. The electricity has not gone off all day in my village. This has, quite seriously, been the first day I’ve been in a village without a daily blackout since August. Seriously. Since I got finished with teaching around 1:30 today, I originally had plans to come home and nap until five, when the electricity came back on. But I came home and it hasn’t gone off yet. I’m too paranoid to take a nap because I’m afraid that the fact that I have electricity in the middle of the day means that I won’t have it at night and then I won’t be able to get anything done.

You can tell I’ve been here too long. I have a day where I get a normal amount of electricity by Western standards, and I’m paranoid and wary about it rather than happy. Yesterday I was upset because the electricity got cut at ten PM rather than the normal eleven, and now I can’t help but think it’ll get shut off at, like, seven. Or I sit around and list off the reasons why the electricity hasn’t gone off… and all the of them upset me. It’s a holiday I don’t know about. There’s a revolution going on the capital. Somebody’s invading. That’s it, we’re done for. All because I have electricity at four PM.

Follow Up: Yesterday I was right about being paranoid about the electricity. It went out at nine-thirty, and then didn’t come back on until eleven this morning. I can’t tell you how much it sucks to get up at seven and not have light. Goddamn it, I just want to go up to the person in charge of rationing and be all like look, I really do enjoy having electricity in the afternoon, but if it means I have to forsake it when it’s dark outside, I’d rather just nap at four. Oy.