Friday, July 17, 2009

.i wanna be a pop star

And a-one and a-two and a-three…

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

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

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

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

Next week, the fun begins again.

First:

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

Second:

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

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

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

Third:

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

Fourth:

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

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

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

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

Thank you ma’am.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conundrum. Morals, or practicality?

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