.she's got an appetite for lighting dynamite

I always have a hard time explaining to locals the logic behind a middle name.

I was at the bank today, picking up my money, when the lady who hands me the cash pointed to my ID card and frowned. “Laura?” she asked. “Or Elizabeth?”

I’ve had this conversation a few times in country. I told her that both were, indeed, my name, but usually I just go by the first one. I always say that the second one is only used when my mother wants to scold me, which usually gets a laugh and neatly diverts the conversation away from the subject. Not that I don’t like talking about names, but it’s kind of hard for me to explain why I’m stuck with a seemingly superfluous name that nobody ever really uses.

I suppose that in most respects, it is excessive to have two names. Practically speaking, it can be useful to have a middle name because it differentiates you from all the other people in the world that might happen to have the same first and last name. And I know that some people get middle names for religious purposes, but to me it just seems like a nice way to compromise between families when both sectors want to name the baby different things. You can name the baby both! Problem solved, and family dinners won’t be any more awkward than usual.

Also of interest is surnames. Russians have patronymic surnames, meaning that the child’s last name is derived from the father’s first name. Ivan to Ivonovich and so forth. In traditional Kyrgyz style, the child’s name would be (father’s name) uluu/kyzy (given name). Uluu means “son” and kyzy means “daughter,” so traditional Kyrgyz names are “so-and-so’s son/daughter so-and-so.” Though in the more Russified areas ethnically Kyrgyz people are likely to have the Russian-style last names. I always get a kick out of trying to explain my last name, which has no conceivable connection to a first name. I got into a conversation with a taxi driver about the practice of passing down names through the father’s side, as well as the more recent tradition of hyphenating names, married women keeping their maiden names, a husband taking the wife’s name, or even husband and wife taking on an entirely new name.

The taxi driver said it was confusing and I said that yeah, America can be pretty confusing sometimes. Whachagonnado.

So, more on the homelessness front, since I am now officially that way.

Last week was, to put it succinctly, a clusterfuck. My original move-out date was last Thursday, but on Wednesday my ex-director told my program manager that she was going to call my host family and ask for a couple more days to do the housing search. I get home Wednesday night to find that she hasn’t called. I tried to call my program manager back but she wouldn’t answer, so I just tidied up the house, woke up early on Thursday morning, and called my program manager to ask what the hell was going on.

My program manager said that she didn’t know. I would have asked my host family, but they had left the house for work at that point.

So I just said the hell with it and went to go stay with a friend for a couple of days. I needed a drink. And not to mention my entire kitchen had been packed away and I hadn’t actually been able to cook a semi-decent meal since I had gotten back to Kyrgyzstan - not even fried eggs. And while eating grapes out of a bag for a week is what all the cool kids are doing, it gets old pretty fast. And I needed a drink. Drinks. And I got them. There’s nothing classier than drinking Moldovan Merlot straight from the bottle and caterwauling along with Piano Man. Classy, and quite stress-relieving. We even had a plastic corkscrew, so I didn’t have to push the cork into the bottle and drink floaty bits along with it. It was a good night.

On Saturday my program manager called me again, and said that my ex-director had located a possible compound housing situation for me within the village. I said that I wasn’t going to live in a compound if it was the last standing building in Kyrgyzstan. She told me to humor the director and just go to the school to talk to her about it.

Fine. I went to the school... and the director wasn’t there. I was able to locate my counterpart, who said that the director was in the rayon center for paperwork reasons, and that she had no idea what was going on as much as I did. I had some nice conversation with her and a few other teachers who stopped by to say hello, before going outside, calling my program manager, and saying that if this shit kept on happening, they could book my flight.

To which my program manager said that she had another site to show me.

This second site was about thirty minutes north of Bishkek, in a village that is actually called “Grape Village.” They grow grapes. Obviously.

Grape village was actually quite nice. It was mostly Kyrgyz, but the director there spoke flawless Russian and seemed very motivated to work with a Volunteer. They even had an apartment to offer me. The only problem was that the apartment was actually in the school.

My married friends actually live at a school also, but it’s an orphanage and therefore more like a campus. This was actually a living unit in the school. It was a decent setup, though: a big main room, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a squat flusher and running water. It shared the school’s heat, which is electric and therefore susceptible to outages, but it also had a petchka in it for coal. There was little or no furniture in it when we looked at it, but the director assured me that the school could provide everything that was necessary for a comfortable living space.

To be honest, I felt kind of bad about saying no. But... I just didn’t want to live in the school. I would never be able to get away from where I worked. Not to mention, I don’t work on Saturdays but the kids are still in school, so even when I wasn’t working I’d be overrun with students. Also, it was a first-storey apartment and I’d have no place to hang my laundry.

In addition, the director said that it would probably be better if the school’s Volunteer spoke Kyrgyz, which, well, I don’t. I do think it would be a nice site for somebody, though, like a brand-new starry-eyed Volunteer who has the energy to be really thrown in with the culture of the school.

I hate to sound like a total curmudgeon, but I mostly just want to be left alone at this point. I want to do good work at my school and with my secondary projects, and then I just want to go home to an apartment and lock the door and decompress. I would also like to be more within a town center, so I can do things like walk to a bazaar. I don’t hate village life: the things that were uncomfortable about it for me weren’t bad enough to really be worth raising a stink about. I mean, water goes out sometimes, I had to travel an hour for groceries, there was nothing to do. None of those things were horrible.

But since I’m being thrust out into the world again, if I’ve got the choice, it would be nice to live in a place that has cafes, lots of reliable transportation, internet, and a bazaar.

When we were coming back from Grape Village, my program manager asked what we were going to do now, and I said I had no idea.

This was resolved when I walked into the resource center. Everybody here knows that I’m homeless by this point. Word travels fast. One of my friends who lives in a town in my oblast said that she knew a teacher in her apartment building that had wanted to work with a Volunteer but didn’t get one this year for some reason. The teacher spoke fluent English, and was very motivated. I got in contact with her immediately, and we met up this past Saturday.

And she seems like she’d be a dream to work with. Whatever my shitty luck with housing has been, my counterparts have all been a definite cut above the norm. Also, funnily enough, the school that my counterpart works at is right behind the place where we had our training last year. Haha.

But it’s nice because I’m already familiar with the area, it’s not too far outside of Bishkek, and there’s even other Volunteers in the direct area, which will be a nice change from my usual status of isolation.

Now the issue is finding an apartment. I’m actually heading out there today to do some cold-calls... basically knocking on people’s doors, seeing if they’re home, and asking about their landlord. Sometimes, if you want something done right, you’ve got to get to the source of it, I suppose.

And in the meantime, I’m living in Bishkek with my Volunteer-cum-expat friend who now works for American Councils as a recruiter for the FLEX program (that student-exchange program with the US that I did the pre-departure orientation program for this summer).

So there are two ways to look at this. The wrong way is that I got jacked around again and lost my house and had to move and it’s September and I don’t really have a job or a place of my own and all my belongings are in a heap in the Resource Center.

The right way is that I’m essentially on extended vacation at the moment, I don’t have to answer to anybody, and I get to live in Bishkek for free in a nice apartment. It’s been kind of surreal, actually. The past few days have been filled with delicious restaurant dinners, beer garden-sampling, and being able to leave the apartment at 10pm to go to the 24-hour grocery store on the corner for yogurt. The apartment also has a washing machine, Internet, and unlimited hot water. It’s also very well-located, so I can walk basically anywhere I’d want to go in the city. And my friend gave me a set of keys, so I can come and go at my leisure. And since he’s out around the country for at least four days of the week doing testing, I even get the run of the place to myself for a while. When he’s in, he’s a very nice roommate who offers good company and also happens to know a lot of good places to go in Bishkek for a drink or a dinner.

In addition, I was helping a K-15 go through her Close of Service measures (actually, I was helping her get all the papers she needed to get her cat back to America), and since she was leaving she went out in a bonanza of good food and beer and taxi rides, and I got to ride the coattails of that.

My routine right now consists of getting up at around eightish when my friend does, talking with him for a while over a cup of coffee, and then heading out later to pick up some more coffee and go to the Peace Corps office to hang out with who’s there, check in with the staff, and pick up some gossip. Then I go run my errands: I’ve been back to my old village to do an official goodbye, and networking with people to try and find housing in my new site. Then I usually go out to a meal with friends at some point, and my last few evenings have been spent carousing pleasantly around the city, checking out restaurants and bars that I haven’t had the chance to yet and hobnobbing with the city’s expats.

Also, they’re installing a shower in the Peace Corps office for Volunteers, which will be a nice upgrade to my life after I move out of the Bishkek apartment which has unlimited hot water.

So all and all, I’m sitting pretty right now. It’s not a bad life. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to sustain it for, as I don’t think that Peace Corps really wants me to be living in a friend’s apartment indefinitely and it’s not a cheap way to live, but I think I’m good for at least another week. Especially because, you know, I actually am trying to find an apartment.

Knock on wood. Knock, knock, knock on wood.