Last bell ceremony was today.
It is what it sounds like... a celebration of the supposed last bell of the year. I say "supposed," because this year it's no such thing... due to the extended winter holidays because of the electricity shortages, they're actually extending school until the middle of June. It makes sense (even though we're actually not making up all of the school we missed in January/February... we'd have to go through July to actually make everything up), but celebrating last bell and then having like fifty seven more bells just doesn't really compute with me. At the beginning of the year they have first bell ceremonies, which is, well, exactly what it sounds like.
May 25th is traditionally the last day of school, so it makes sense that the school system mandates that they all have their end-of-school ceremonies on the same day, generally speaking. However, now that we've had our last bell ceremony, I am very curious as to how many students are actually going to show up to the remaining classes. Supposedly this week is the last week of full-on teaching, with next week being exams for the eleventh-formers. The week after that is exams for everybody else... meaning that school will probably end on the 13th of June. But I've also heard the 17th. Basically: nobody knows.
The last bell ceremony itself was pretty simple, but overall quite enjoyable to watch. The only thing that kind of cheapened it was that, well, it's not actually the end of school yet. It would be like having high school graduation in the middle of May and then not finishing until June. But, you know, such is.
I got to the school by nine this morning, which was a nice respite from the usual 8am. I hung out in the teacher's room for about half hour, shooting the shit and finishing up Dante's Inferno before we all went outside. Nothing like reading about all the ways people could suffer in eternal damnation to gear up for end-of-year parties. Woot.
In the back of the school is a small courtyard. I'm moderately familiar with it since the English classroom makes up one wing of the courtyard's walls. I'd never really been in the courtyard, but had spent quite a bit of time gazing vacantly out it and cursing its existence since the courtyard blocks all the sunlight coming into my classroom, making it a friggin' meat locker even when it's relatively nice outside.
But the courtyard is also ringed by pavement, and painted with numbers saying where the classes should stand. They stand around the small path and the door from the school, which is leveled up off the pavement into stairs, acting as a stage.
The ceremony itself was pretty predictable... speeches, some singing, some certificate-giving, you know, the norm. I actually got some flowers... there was a part where the eleventh class got up on the stairs/stage and read little poems about their different classes, and my best English student gave me some white lilies. Very sweet.
The only thing about it really was that I (and everybody else) spent the entire time being cold as hell. The courtyard is shady to begin with, and the day had moderate cloudcover... not to mention a brisk wind and two tall pine trees blocking out most of the sun. I spent most of my time hovering around the back of the crowd, trying to chase the lone patch of sun across the courtyard. Brr. Damn you, unseasonably cold weather.
After the ceremonies had ended, I spent some time posing for pictures and congratulating the kids on... well, on not finishing school yet. But afterwards I ended up in the teacher's room, where for some reason the table was absolutely covered with flowers, and I ended up with some yellow irises and pink carnations to add to my lilies. Then we all voted on whether or not we wanted to go to a cafe tonight to celebrate the "end" of school... most teachers wanted to go, because, I mean, an excuse is an excuse. To be honest, I don't really have the money to blow on a heavy cafe excursion tonight, but I figure I should be social at least some of the time.
Which is part of the reason why I came into the city today... this has been an extremely expensive month. I went to Naryn at the beginning of it, bought an electric hot plate, bought some skirts and clothes, and I finally got around to closing that grant that the previous Volunteer in my old site had left for me. This ended up costing me money because the bastards who work at the Chinese bazaar forgot to write down the purchase of a television antenna I made on the reciept, thus I was short about 200 som and had no way to prove where the money went. Peace Corps suggested I go back to the bazaar and see if they had any other records, but, come on, they don't. Besides, 200 som is a little less than four dollars. In the grand scheme of things, that's nothing at all and it's certainly worth not getting a migrane over going to a bazaar and trying to speak in my third language to somebody who speaks Russian as a second language (Chinese as the first) to try and get some kind of documentation. Over four dollars.
But in the immediate scheme of things, it's all beggared me for this month. When I got to town today, I had sixty som left for the rest of this week, which is less than a dollar fifty. Fortunately I still had some money locked up in Tenge, or Kazakh currency, from when I was in Almaty. I had 4500 tenge, which seems like it would be a lot, but tenge is worth even less than som, and plus the woman wouldn’t accept my 500 tenge bill because she said it was dirty. Ugh. Whatever. It ended up netting me about 1100 som, which is fine for the week.
I’m still trying to save money, though, because next month is going to be pricey as well, from what I forsee. I need to get over to Karakol at some point so I can plan out the lessons we need to do for this FLEX PDO, which is probably going to cost in the realm of 2000 som, all things said and done and drunk. I also have plans to do some major gluttonizing and head over to the Hyatt Sunday brunch buffet. The Hyatt runs one of these every Sunday, and it’s about 30 USD, or roughly 1000 som. Expensive, even for the States. But it’s unlimited food, good food, imported food like salmon and caviar and all sorts of things. Unlimited real coffee. Possibly mimosas. It’s my I-made-it-through-one-year present to myself.
I figure that summer in general is going to be more expensive than not, which is fine. I’ve managed to stick to my Peace Corps-given budget almost eerily well: I’ve never had to dip into my personal reserves/ask good ol’ Mom and Dad to Western Union something to me. I’ve also only exchanged money in Central Asia three times: once from dollars to som during PST when I was buying a cell phone, once when I was in Almaty from dollars to tenge, and once today, from tenge to som.
I’ll likely afford myself some extra leeway over the summer, since I’ve done so well this past year. ...the only thing I’m moderately worried about is getting used to having the extra leeway, but I’m relatively frugal and I don’t travel too often during the school year, so I should be back on my short leash when the grind starts up again. (Maybe.)
But for the rest of this week, I’m looking to essentially be a recluse, and not come back into the city until Friday, when we (hopefully) get paid. I’m trying to save at least 500 som of the 1100 I have for the breakfast buffet next month. Today I bought some peanut butter, and I’m also going to pick up some eggs and bread. I’ve got some honey at home, as well as the requisite supplies of coffee, tea, and cocoa, and this will probably be my main source of repast for the next few days. I also lucked out and found a bag full of books in the resource center, from a K-15 who dropped off a bunch of random things after the COS conference.
The thing about the resource center is that it does have a library... of what is probably a motley collection of the world’s worst books. Or at least the most inexplicable ones. If you’re after some harlequin bodice-ripping romance novels from the 1980s, I suppose you’d be pleased with the collection. That or weird creepy “find your spiritualist self” manuals.
If you want actual good books, you have to talk to the other Volunteers. We all tend to hoard the good stuff. I have been lucky occasionally in the resource center... I did find a copy of The Satanic Verses, which I had been wanting to read out of its sheer notoriety. But most of the good books I’ve gotten here are direct from my friends... I’ve actually been on more of a French literature kick recently, since one of my friends here is hardcore into Balzac and Zola.
I had just finished Dante’s Inferno, so it’s nice that I was able to stumble on a bag of books. Some of it was just dross, but I got a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, Three Cups of Tea, and Mary, Called Magdalene. I’ve at least heard of all of these books, and had been actively looking to read The Brothers and Three Cups for a while. Wasn’t expecting to find the Magdalene book, but I’ve at least heard of it and it doesn’t have a picture of some bare-chested Nordic dude on the front with his long hair blowing in the romantic wind with some red-headed woman in a poorly-arranged dress draped over his arm. I’m sold. And it will give me something to do over my week of exile.
Moral of the story: the end of the school year can’t come fast enough, and I’m poor. Nothing new, I suppose.
Monday, May 25, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
.to make love to the angels of light
Fun times in the village. I actually spent the last four days in Naryn, for the combined reasons of talking to a Chinese-American Volunteer about teaching not-English as a foreign language and hanging out with some peeps for Cinco de Mayo. Whenever students figure out that I know Japanese, everybody’s all up on my nuts for a Japanese language club. I’d oblige them, but the issue is that I can’t speak Russian well enough to teach Japanese in it, and most of my students don’t speak English well enough to learn Japanese in it. Linguistical stalemate, as it were. There’s a Volunteer in Naryn who started the Chinese department at her university, so I was interested in learning how the hell she pulled it out. Turns out, it’s mostly because Chinese is one of her native languages, so she’s more comfortable with it than I am with Japanese. Not to mention, she teaches at a university so the English level is better than where I teach. Still don’t know if I’ll be able to pull it off.
The group gathering was fun, though. I did some serious cooking, particularly on Saturday when two other Volunteers and I put our combined efforts together to come up with a Mexican menu. Mexican food is not exactly the easiest thing to recreate in Kyrgyzstan, as you might imagine. The menu consisted of chicken enchiladas, salsa, nachos, and key lime pie. One of my friends had a box of key lime pie mix sent to her from America, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to pull the last bit off given that I’ve never seen limes here, even in Bishkek. The enchiladas were a day-long effort, considering that we had to make everything, including the tortillas, from scratch. I spent about two hours rolling out enough tortillas for eleven people to have two enchiladas each, and frying them. I also boiled the frozen chicken and shredded it. I now know where exactly the kidneys and other such innards are located in chickens, just in case anybody would like to know. Seasoned it with salt, pepper, garlic, lemon, and onion, and cooked it up. We boiled and mashed beans before refrying them, shredded enough cheese to make a Kraft factory proud, and completely winged a red enchilada sauce since the internet café was closed and we couldn’t get a recipe. Baked the pie, chopped red, green and white onion, more tomatoes, and sliced olives for the nachos. Threw together some salsa from tomatoes, corn, cilantro, garlic, and onions. The whole spread took about seven hours to come up with, but it was delicious. We also brought a few bottles of tequila down from Bishkek down with us, and good times were had by all.
I am a serious chef these days. My repertoire for the rest of the week included a chicken pot pie, a pear and vanilla butter pie, biscuits and gravy, omelets with olives, cheese, mushrooms, and green onions. We also cooked up some chicken chili, made bean dip with the leftovers, and another volunteer made a fabulous corn and crab chowder. Everything from scratch. I can craft butter or shortening crusts in about fifteen minutes without measuring cups from memory nowadays. I suppose that’s a fringe benefit from this experience. I’ll be able to cook like whoa, mostly because when you’re in a place that doesn’t have fast food or instant anything and you’d like to eat something other than fried eggs sometimes, scratch is your only option.
I love having gatherings with other Volunteers… it’s basically the only way I can maintain a semblance of sanity around these parts. Isolation in the village doesn’t really bother me that much, as I’m quite good at entertaining myself, but it’s just good to recreate a piece of America in somebody’s apartment sometimes. It’s also nice to have an excuse to do some serious cooking… not that I don’t make my own meals or anything, but the thing about it is that I’m only cooking for one, and usually it’s just not worth the effort or the money to throw down for a pot pie. When there’s ten of us, we can pool our cash, buy fabulous ingredients, and eat like kings for cheap.
There was also a randomly awesome encounter with a pair of older Korean tourists we stumbled into. One day we got tired of sitting around the apartment, and decided to go down the way to a red-roofed café which had outdoor seating, so we could take advantage of the nice day. We ordered a round of beers and were chilling when a pair of older dudes walked up who were clearly not Kyrgyz, and obviously tourists.
As I said before, they were from Korea, and both of them spoke decent English. We exchanged some pleasantries before they went inside, ostensibly to order their meal. There were about ten of us sitting at the café, and the outdoor seats were basically wooden benches that were bolted to the floor, so we couldn’t drag some extra ones up for more seating. We got tired of squishing, so I went off the terrace to intercept a waitress to ask for more chairs.
The waitress looked rather harried, and she asked me if I could speak English. Obviously I do, and she dragged me to the inside portion of the restaurant, where the Korean tourists waved a cheery hello. The problem was obvious: the menu was entirely in Russian, and the Koreans spoke no Russian, the waitress no English.
I spent about ten minutes trying to decipher the menu; the Koreans were good fellows and just told me to order some traditional Kyrgyz dishes for them. Unfortunately, the restaurant was basically out of all the basic Kyrgyz dishes that I know are good: pelmini, laghman, plov, shashlik, manty. This is a common problem at restaurants, particularly small, local-owned ones… their menu may be decently sized, but you can count on the fact that they won’t have at least half of it. Guaranteed. The only dishes they did have were things I hadn’t heard of before, so I spent about another fifteen minutes on translation before ordering a few dishes, a pot of green tea, and 100 grams of vodka. Again, I went outside, and the waitress brought an extra chair for us.
We drank some more beer, and decided to play some drinking games, in lieu of the fact we had nothing else to do. It was elected we would play a game called the “story game,” which seems to be something like twenty questions. One person leaves the group, the rest decide on a story, and the person has to come back and figure out what story it is. Pretty simple. I was the one who was elected to leave, given that I was closest to the stairs on the terrace.
I went back inside so I wouldn’t inadvertently eavesdrop, but this was a quasi-mistake as the waitress saw me again and waved me over for more translating. The Koreans dragged up another chair for me and we proceeded to get absolutely wasted on vodka. I was able to buff up and show off some of my knowledge about East Asia, and regale them with stories about how much fun I had in Seoul the time I went. They were well-traveled: one was a teacher who’d gone around Africa and the better part of Asia in his time, the other was an ex-sea merchant who had traveled all over the globe in shipping vessels. They were in Central Asia for about a year and a half, just traveling around and seeing what there was to see. Basically, my dream retirement.
It also came with the requisite “why did you learn Japanese when you could have learned Korean” spiel. I have come to the conclusion that no matter how languages I’ll be able to butcher by the time it’s all said and done, people will be insisting that I should be butchering other ones. It’s all in good fun, of course, but, oh man. I learned Japanese, and I should have learned Korean/Thai/Chinese. I learned Russian and I should have learned Kyrgyz. Can’t make anybody happy, man.
I was at the table for about two hours. The ex-shipping merchant gave me a sticker with his name and address in Seoul, and implored me to call him if I ever happened to be in that part of the world again, promising me a night of soju and good fun. I believe him.
Good times, except for this was the day where I made the pear and vanilla butter pie. The pie had been completed prior to going out, so all I had to do was pop it in the oven. Unfortunately, the unforeseen addition of the Korean tourists to the outing had gotten me a lot more drunk than I had planned on getting, so popping the pie in the oven turned out to be a bigger ordeal than I had originally counted on. I now have a lovely red crescent of scar tissue on my left forearm due to being drunk and trying simultaneously not to drop the pie and get it reasonably positioned on the rack. Oh well. At least the pie was good.
The only bad part about hanging out with other Volunteers and getting away from site is the comedown when you inevitably return to your village. Alone again, naturally, so it is. Going to class today was almost painful, particularly when I was left alone with the fifth graders again. My counterpart got the eleventh grader to help me out, but it didn’t stop the rain of spitwads and the general mayhem. Fortunately I have a loud enough voice so if I bark at the class it results in about thirty seconds of decent behavior before they start chewing paper again.
The class schedule also got jostled around again so I got to leave early, which was probably good since I likely would have gone absolutely postal if I had to deal with another class. However, the eleventh-grader who was helping with my class looked at me with puppy-eyes and asked if I was going to hold English club today, since I usually do it on Wednesday.
It was on the tip of my tongue to refuse since I was exhausted from the weekend and my first day back teaching and I just wanted to go home, slam back a couple cups of Nescafe, and go to sleep. But she’s actually a good student, and I haven’t held English club classes for about two weeks due to various other commitments. I’ve had quite a number of good teachers in my tenure as a student who put effort and extra time into me when I asked for it; I figure that I owe good, hard-working students at least as much as what my good teachers gave to me. Especially if they actually care about learning English. That’s… what I’m here for, after all.
So guilt took over, and I said that I’d return at the end of school to hold an English club for her. …all of the English clubs I’ve held had only had one attendee, namely, the eleventh-grader. This is probably mostly my fault, as I have done zero advertising for it. Some other students have asked about it, and while I’ve told everybody Wednesday after school, I’m glad that the attendance has been minimal. It would be damn near impossible to attempt to teach a group with two fifth graders, four seventh graders, a ninth grader, and an eleventh grader. I mean, what the hell can you really do with that which engages everybody but doesn’t confuse? But I figured I could handle a conversation with somebody who can actually speak English. I went home and had my Nescafe, picked up my photo album so we’d have something to talk about, and headed back over to the school.
The walk from my house to the school is fairly straightforward and not that long: I actually live on the same street as the school, just a couple blocks down. It’s about a ten minute walk when I’m going at it leisurely, which is pretty much how I always go at it. I crossed the major intersection, and saw four cars turning off the main road and coming towards me.
This was somewhat notable, since there’s not that much traffic in and out of the village itself, and doubly so since the first car to drive up was militsia, and there were about seven uniformed officers crammed in the back. The next two cars were black Mercedes, and a flat bed truck followed up the entourage. They overtook me on the road and stopped in front of a house about ten feet down the road where I was walking. The militsia guys jimmied themselves from the backseat and clustered around the house. Somebody walking by shook the guy in charge by the hand. Some suited dudes climbed out of the two Mercedes, wearing sunglasses.
Weird, I thought, but didn’t stop walking. I’m more apt to avoid militsia these days than not, not because I’m doing anything worth hiding, but more because I just want to avoid the hassle of ID checks and pointed questions. I didn’t want to get tangled up with a large number of police officers all asking for my ID and wondering why I was hanging out in a village in the middle of nowhere, so I just kept my head down and continued walking.
When I left the school, about forty-five minutes later, the Mercedes had left, and now the flatbed truck was parked in front of the house. A rather scruffy-looking dude with a scraggly red beard and torn flannel shirt was walking back and forth between the house and the truck, tossing pillows and blankets into the back. The militsia were leaning up against the fence, and a crowd of gawkers had gathered in a half-circle around the vehicles. A old woman in a headscarf and long dress clutched weakly at the gate to the house, moaning something in Kyrgyz and crying.
Weirder, I thought, quickening my pace and praying that the chorus of “hello” wouldn’t start up from the children. Whatever was going on, I didn’t want to be involved. But the kids were too absorbed in the scene, whatever the hell the scene was.
I got back to my house and unlocked the gate to find my host father repairing a metal fence. He was taking a break, smoking a cigarette and flicking at a broken hinge.
I pointed down the street and asked him if he knew what the militsia were doing down there.
He looked at me, smiled, laughed and shook his head. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to tell me, then he sighed and pointed back down the way. “Somebody drank too much vodka and stabbed a person to death,” he said, sticking his cigarette back in his mouth.
“Seriously?” I asked, equal parts incredulous and shocked.
He hummed in affirmation, picking at the hinge again. “Don’t drink too much vodka!” he said cheerfully, grinning again.
I laughed and said that I wouldn’t, and went into my house. Drunken murder down the street. Awesome.
Just to defuse any alarm on the part of the reader, let me say that I really don’t think this affects my safety in the village in any way. I’m virtually never outside of the compound where I live after dark; I can count the number of times on a hand missing fingers, it’s so rare. And when I am out after dark, I’m in a taxi which drops me off right in front of my house. There’s just really no reason to be out after like, 8pm. The public transportation stops, shops close, and nothing’s going on in the village that late other than drunk people stumbling around, and it just seems wiser to avoid confrontations with drunk men at night. …case in point, see above.
At any rate, it seems more like a case of domestic violence, rather than something I should be alarmed about. Well, I guess I am somewhat alarmed… somebody just got axed, after all, but I’m not afraid for my safety. The gate is locked at night, and I lock my door as well. I’m about as safe here as I am at home, I wager.
So, welcome back home. Back to the insanity at school, back to alcohol-inspired homicide. Yeah.
In other news, I finally bought myself an electric plitka, or hotplate. I had been meaning to do this for a while… I do have a gas oven here, which saved my life during the winter months when we didn’t have electricity. I wouldn’t have been able to cook otherwise, particularly when my petchka ran out of coal. However, the issue with the gas stove is that gas is expensive, and plus only one part of the range works. Annoying when I want to have more than one pot cooking at once.
I had wanted an electric addition for a while, for the dual purpose of conserving gas and being able to cook one damn thing at a time, but had never gotten around to it. When it comes down to it, I’m a person driven by practicality at the heart of things; while it would have been nice to have the electric plitka, it wasn’t any real skin off my back to just keep using the gas. To the same (somewhat depressing) ends, I’m the same way about learning languages. People keep on asking me if I’m going to ever learn Kyrgyz, but the sad fact about it is that it’s just not practical for me. I can get anywhere in this country on Russian, and in fact, I can actually talk to more people with it, given that most Kyrgyz speakers over the age of five can speak Russian, but not that many native-Russian speakers can speak Kyrgyz. Not to mention, Russian is undoubtedly the more useful of the two to know after Peace Corps. There are some inherent advantages to Kyrgyz, namely in the street cred it gets you here… whenever we negotiate for taxis or whatever and I happen to be with a Kyrgyz speaker, we always seek out a Kyrgyz person and I always let the other Volunteer go at the negotiating. Kyrgyz people love it when foreigners can speak Kyrgyz. When you’re lucky, it can result in some mad crazy discounts.
I love traveling with Kyrgyz-speaking Volunteers. We get the advantage of being able to bargain in Kyrgyz, but I also understand Russian so we can cope with non-Kyrgyz speaking locals, as well. I’ve noticed that the locals here will oscillate between the two languages if they’re talking about something they don’t want you to hear, but having both a Kyrgyz-speaking Volunteer and a Russian-speaking Volunteer on the same team eliminates this. If I were in the south, Uzbek would have been added to the language salad, but a) I’m not in the south, and b) Uzbek is pretty similar to Kyrgyz. Native speakers of Kyrgyz and Uzbek can talk to each other and have a decent conversation, so most Volunteers who learn Kyrgyz can at least follow a conversation in Uzbek to some degree. The same is true with Kazakh as well – when I went there last month, I was listening to the Kazakh, and I understood some of it. The Kyrgyz “rahkmat,” or “thank you,” is “rahkmet” in Kazakh. Yeah. And then when we want to talk about something we don’t want locals to hear, we’ve got English.
It’s always kind of hilarious if I go over to a Volunteer who lives with a Kyrgyz family’s house… when we guest for dinner, we communicate in three language, but each person can only understand two languages each. Me, Russian and English. Volunteer friend, Kyrgyz and English. Host country national, Russian and Kyrgyz. I understand a little bit of Kyrgyz, and usually a Kyrgyz-speaking Volunteer knows at least a few words of Russian, and sometimes the country national knows a few English phrases, so we can kind of follow each other’s conversations, but not participate when it’s in the language we don’t know. It’s quite the process.
In a sense, just speaking about being a Peace Corps Volunteer, I think that Kyrgyz is the better language to know. I mean, it is the real local language, whereas Russian is rather the language of the conquerors. But, by whatever stroke of fortune, I got Russian dealt to me at the beginning of this madness, and that’s what it is. Russian is also infinitely more complicated, grammatically speaking, and it’s just a better use of my time to get better at Russian than it is to start all over again with Kyrgyz. If I had started out with Kyrgyz, yeah, Kyrgyz would have been the more practical of the two. But I didn’t.
Sometimes, I wish I were just more intellectually curious when it came to language. It would be pretty sweet to come back to the States with both Russian and Kyrgyz under my belt. But the cravat about language is that it’s goddamn fucking hard. It’s not just memorizing new words and grammar patterns, though that’s definitely a chunk of it, but it’s also finding an accent that you can reproduce naturally and native speakers can understand. My Russian accent is a little deeper than my English one, which is hilarious when taken with the fact that my voice shoots up an octave when I speak Japanese. The biggest part for me, though, is that in order to really learn a language, it means adopting an entirely new way of thinking. I can’t do translation, meaning that if I see an apple, I have to be able to connect the fruit directly to the world “yablika,” (or “ringo,” if we’re talking Japanese), and I can’t go “fruit,” then “apple,” then “yablika.” I suppose it would be feasible for simple nouns, but when it comes to forming complex thoughts in the madness that is Russian grammar and being able to do it in real conversation time while also understanding what somebody else is saying to you, if you have to muddle through the English translation first, you’re through. And don’t forget noun declension! Seriously, man, my brains are scrambled.
But, anyway, electric hotplates. I ended up buying one yesterday because my gas balloon finally ran out. I was waiting for this, since I filled the balloon back in late December, when I arrived here, and I pretty much did all of my cooking on it from December through May. I’ve got an oven now, but it was in the middle of last month, so I haven’t done that much serious cooking in it as of yet.
Since the electricity situation has gotten leagues better – i.e. the power hasn’t gone off during the day since I got back from Almaty, the end of April – relying solely on electric means for cooking shouldn’t be as risky as it was during the bulk of my service. I’ll probably get the gas filled up again at some point, either when the electricity gets spotty again or when it starts getting cold. The problem with winter is that the strain on electricity goes up exponentially… people start using it to heat their homes, it gets darker earlier, there’s less to do outside so people start watching a lot of television, and so forth. But for now, I’m going to hold off on it. I’m in the process currently of making some Middle Eastern-inspired chickpeas… basically chickpeas baked with onions and carrots, dressed with honey, cinnamon, chicken broth, vinegar and parsley. Bake that shizzle up for an hour and you’ve got some good eatings, friends. I also found a happy new use for that cast-iron frying pan without a handle that was the bane of my life over the winter… I tried to use it for about a month and a half before breaking down and just buying a non-stick pan, as it was impossible to cook with. The stuff on the bottom would burn and cement to the pan, while the stuff on top never cooked. The lack of handle didn’t help. It got relegated to the back of the kitchenware cupboard. But now, I figured out that I could use it as a baking pan. It doesn’t have a handle, so it fits perfectly in the oven, and it has a cover, to boot. Sweet. I love being able to repurpose things. Particularly because it means I don’t have to shell out another 300 som to get an actual baking pan. I can even make bread, cake, and pies in it.
Speaking of bread, I might make some carrot or apple bread soon, so I can share it with my host family. They occasionally pop over with various breads or cookies to share with me, so I figure I should repay the favor.
The only problem with relying solely on electric means to cook is that it makes the electricity in the rest of my house go haywire. This is compounded because my host father does a lot of odd repair jobs… at first I figured he was just being handy around the house, but as soon as it got warm a lot of random metal objects, like fences, gates, and even metal tombstones started showing up at our house, like the gate he was fixing when he told me about the murder down the street. I figure they can’t all belong to us, so I think he fixes them for other people. So if he’s welding outside or whatever, and I’m trying to stirfry something and bake, the lights flicker like a low-class disco. I compensate by turning off the lights whenever I leave the kitchen and moving my electric teakettle to the bedroom in an attempt to even out the electricity distribution, but we’ll see. I just hope nothing blows out.
I love my house, but the only thing about it is that I wish it were better for entertaining. Basically the way the Volunteers tend to entertain is to throw dinner parties where we all cook, like we did in Naryn… however, my kitchen is an absolute closet. There’s literally enough room for one person to be in there, and I actually do most of my prep out in the living room. It works, and I suppose it’s convenient to a certain degree because I can reach all of my cooking supplies without even having to move, but if you’ve got more than one person attempting to cook, it’s damn near impossible.
Another thing I’m probably going to do now that it’s warmer is buy more skirts. I plan on spending the majority of the summer in skirts, firstly because it’s going to get hot as hell here and I can’t really wear shorts. Secondly, it means that I won’t have to wear my jeans, so they’ll last me longer when it’s cold and wearing skirts is stupid. My jeans have held up admirably well here… when I went to Japan I brought three pairs with me and wore holes the size of small countries in the crotch of all of them by the time it was all said and done. I figure this is probably because I actually put on weight in Japan, being that I loved the food and wasn’t playing rugby to counteract it. Here I actually lost a lot of weight at the beginning, which helped. Since I’ve been cooking for myself I’ve gained some of it back, but I definitely haven’t overtaken where I was when I got here. But it’ll still help if I can spend a couple of months not wearing them. Not to mention, the less I wear jeans, the less I have to wash jeans. Since I’ve more or less gotten accustomed to doing laundry by hand nowadays, the only articles I still truly dread washing are my jeans and Carhartts. It’s a nightmare, since denim is a heavy material anyway, and it soaks up water like a sponge. Anybody who’s ever fallen into a pool or something while wearing jeans knows how heavy they get. It sucks.
To a certain extent, class is getting more and more hilarious, as much as it frustrates me. Some days it’s basically the same old shit that it is any other day of the year, but with the weather getting warmer, the students (and the teachers!) are just getting less and less attentive. On Fridays, I only have one class, and it’s at 12:30. In a way I guess it’s nice, since it’s the only weekday where I don’t have to get up at seven, but it’s smack in the middle of the day, which makes it difficult to go into the city and run errands or whatever. Originally the class was second hour, which meant I would have been done by about 9:30, but of course they moved it.
Consequently, I don’t think I’ve been to that one Friday class in about a month. Things just keep coming up, and if there’s something important that I need to take care of in the city on a weekday, Friday’s the most likely day to get axed, since I’m only missing one class. Two weeks ago, I went to the Friday class for the first time in about three weeks, only to find my counterpart in the foyer with some paperwork, expressing surprise that I had showed up. I had conditioned the school to just assume that I wasn’t going to come into work on Fridays at all, despite the fact that each Friday I missed, I had an excuse. Two dentist appointments (I chipped a tooth on a rock in some rice, and then I had a cavity), the trip to Almaty, the trip to Naryn. My counterpart had already told the class to go home. Awesome.
This week, I was quasi-planning to skip Friday too, as I really need to get into Bishkek and spend a day at the Peace Corps office closing this grant I have. At my original site, the previous Volunteer had made an English language center… he had done the bulk of the work, all that needed to happen was buying a television, dvd player, console, and some other sundry electronics, like extension cords. He passed the grant to me, so I could buy the last things and close it. And, of course, the whole homeless debacle happened and I had to change sites, so the grant is still open. I’ve got all my receipts and whatever, but some of them are handwritten in extremely sloppy Russian, so I can’t friggin’ read ‘em. I need to talk to some of the local staff so they can translate, which means going in on a weekday.
But on Wednesday, the lone student who comes to my English clubs said she wanted some information about the American University in Central Asia, which is basically Kyrgyzstan’s Harvard. I promised I’d get her the information by Friday, and I figured I shouldn’t back out.
So I went into school today, to find my counterpart outside. My Friday class is eighth grade form b, and my counterpart said that most of the students had probably already gone home. She also said that she had to talk to some parents about something, and likely she’d be a little late to class. Par for the course.
I ask if we’re going to hold class at all today, and she said that if at least ten students showed up, we would. I ran into the eleventh-grader and gave her the application materials on AUCA she asked for, just in case I wouldn’t be there after class to meet with her, and walked into the classroom.
There were exactly ten students there. Not impressive, considering how the roster says there should be twenty-seven students. (There are never twenty-seven students. On a good day, you might get twenty.) All of them were girls, and they all wanted me to cancel the class so they could go home. I actually like eighth grade form b. They’re relatively well behaved, and at least nominally interested in English. Rather unlike eighth grade form a, which is friggin impossible.
I hate to say this, but it’s true… the classes that have higher ratios of girls to boys are the better ones. Girls are generally more interested in school on a whole, and even the ones who couldn’t care less are quiet about it. They’ll just sit in the back and pass notes, or text each other on their phones. Whatever. I’ve come to the point where I don’t really care, as long as they’re not being outright disruptive. If you want to come to class to sit in the back and do nothing, fine with me. You do your thing, I’ll do my job.
It’s the boys who are damn near impossible to deal with. Especially the eighth graders, because they’re just entering the age where it’s cool to be macho and friggin’ stupid. For some of them it’s just depressing, because I can recognize the ones who are actually somewhat interested in English, but they don’t show it because it’s more important to be able to front to the other dudes than pay attention. I want to throttle those kids… not the ones who don’t care at all, because I consider that a lost cause, but the ones that have the potential but just don’t put in any of the effort are just frustrating. I know they’re smart! Why the hell don’t they act like it?
I always hated the kids that were like that when I was in school, too. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the people who were acting out in class were, indeed, morons. But there were a few that I knew were smart. I’d talked to some of them privately – particularly a lot of my female peers. Some of them really knew what was up. But then they were more concerned with tanning beds or boys or Abercrombie or something else. The urge to throttle was high then, too. They were smart. Or at least, they could have been.
I remember something pretty distinctly when I was in seventh grade… I was at my assistant soccer coach’s house. My father was the coach of my soccer team, and for a time we had a couple of assistants. This assistant was the only female assistant coach we ever had, and she had a daughter that was a grade up from me. She was talking with my mother about something, don’t remember what, when school came up. I always did well in school, namely because I had figured out that if I wanted to go somewhere far away for college, I needed to have a good enough track record for somewhere far away to want me. The assistant soccer coach just shook her head and said, “Well, wait until she discovers boys.”
Pissed me the hell off. Still does. Boys are an acceptable excuse not to accomplish anything and have your grades fall off a cliff? Jesus Christ, no wonder men think they’re supposed to rule the world if that’s how it’s supposed to be.
Anyway, it was a beautiful day outside, and since even the best English students were asking for the day off, it was going to be like holding corks underwater to get them to concentrate. Plus, I had no lesson plan and didn’t know if my counterpart was actually going to show up at all. These “parent meetings” have a way of going on for entire class periods. I would know. Why insist that the students attend and be attentive, when I have nothing actually worthwhile for them to attend to?
The general fallback for English teachers who don’t have a plan seems to be translation. I get it, mostly because it’s easy and doesn’t require much effort on the part of the teacher, especially if she can speak English pretty well. I don’t have much against translation in general, as long as it’s not what is taught all the time. However, I’m bad at this fallback, because, uh, half of the time my Russian isn’t good enough to translate. Embarrassing, right? Though, in my defense, my crash course in Russian was dedicated to learning how to talk… we did do a little bit of translation work, but because being able to communicate orally was a hell of a lot more important, that’s what I put my effort into. I’m still only moderately literate at best. I mean, I can read signs and the like, but I can’t do anything literary. Not to mention, if I’m going to do translation work at all, I’m much better at Russian to English than English to Russian. I can barely write at all. For me, it’s easiest to understand, then to talk, then reading, then writing.
Finally, I told them that I was going to go get the journal (basically the class attendance/grade book), and said very clearly that if there were five or fewer students in the room when I got back, there would be no class. And I left. When I came back about five minutes later, guess what, only five students remained. I told them to go home. I figure this satisfies all parties. Class doesn’t technically start until I have the journal, and there had to be ten students there by the start of class for us to actually conduct it.
I don’t even know why I bothered, really. Nobody would have cared either way if I had just told the ten students there to go home. Whatever. The Central Asian penchant for doing everything by the book even if you have to fudge everything to make it so is getting to me, I suppose. When in Rome. Or Bishkek.
May is already shaping up to be an awesome month for teaching. Everybody’s attention span is completely shot, and it’s riddled with holidays. And I can’t wait until June. School here usually ends on May 25th, but because of the extended winter holidays due to the electricity shortages, they’ve extended the school year until June 13th. …if you’ve noticed, the math doesn’t quite match up, since we didn’t start school until March and usually it starts in January, but whatever. I’m happy that I don’t have to be at this until July.
The only thing about this that I think is just ridiculously stupid is that they’re still holding the last bell ceremonies on May 25th. Last bell is basically what it sounds like… a celebration of the last bell of the year. Dancing, eating, the whole nine yards. The eleventh form usually does some sort of skit to express appreciation to the teachers, and so forth. However, school is scheduled to continue after the last bell ceremonies. Apparently this is because it’s the mandated day for last bell for all schools around Kyrgyzstan, considering how not all of the schools had the extended break. The schools that did, though, are expected to do the extra twoish weeks after the final ceremony.
This just seems absolutely asinine. Even before I knew this, I figured that getting students to come to school after the official last day of school was going to be mostly fruitless, but now? I’ll be impressed if we get five students a class.
Whateves. Ain’t no skin off my neb. I just do what they tell me to do.
I should have done laundry today, but I just wasn’t feeling it. That’s the deal with me and cleaning… I have to be in the mood for a chore to do it, otherwise I’m lazy about it and do a crappy job. Today was a cooking day, a tidying up day, and a rearranging day. I built a new nightstand out of a pile of boxes, some carpet, and a picture frame. Not a bad day, as a whole. And, I guess, a writing day.
But, for me at least, every damn day’s a writing day. For better or worse, I suppose.
The group gathering was fun, though. I did some serious cooking, particularly on Saturday when two other Volunteers and I put our combined efforts together to come up with a Mexican menu. Mexican food is not exactly the easiest thing to recreate in Kyrgyzstan, as you might imagine. The menu consisted of chicken enchiladas, salsa, nachos, and key lime pie. One of my friends had a box of key lime pie mix sent to her from America, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to pull the last bit off given that I’ve never seen limes here, even in Bishkek. The enchiladas were a day-long effort, considering that we had to make everything, including the tortillas, from scratch. I spent about two hours rolling out enough tortillas for eleven people to have two enchiladas each, and frying them. I also boiled the frozen chicken and shredded it. I now know where exactly the kidneys and other such innards are located in chickens, just in case anybody would like to know. Seasoned it with salt, pepper, garlic, lemon, and onion, and cooked it up. We boiled and mashed beans before refrying them, shredded enough cheese to make a Kraft factory proud, and completely winged a red enchilada sauce since the internet café was closed and we couldn’t get a recipe. Baked the pie, chopped red, green and white onion, more tomatoes, and sliced olives for the nachos. Threw together some salsa from tomatoes, corn, cilantro, garlic, and onions. The whole spread took about seven hours to come up with, but it was delicious. We also brought a few bottles of tequila down from Bishkek down with us, and good times were had by all.
I am a serious chef these days. My repertoire for the rest of the week included a chicken pot pie, a pear and vanilla butter pie, biscuits and gravy, omelets with olives, cheese, mushrooms, and green onions. We also cooked up some chicken chili, made bean dip with the leftovers, and another volunteer made a fabulous corn and crab chowder. Everything from scratch. I can craft butter or shortening crusts in about fifteen minutes without measuring cups from memory nowadays. I suppose that’s a fringe benefit from this experience. I’ll be able to cook like whoa, mostly because when you’re in a place that doesn’t have fast food or instant anything and you’d like to eat something other than fried eggs sometimes, scratch is your only option.
I love having gatherings with other Volunteers… it’s basically the only way I can maintain a semblance of sanity around these parts. Isolation in the village doesn’t really bother me that much, as I’m quite good at entertaining myself, but it’s just good to recreate a piece of America in somebody’s apartment sometimes. It’s also nice to have an excuse to do some serious cooking… not that I don’t make my own meals or anything, but the thing about it is that I’m only cooking for one, and usually it’s just not worth the effort or the money to throw down for a pot pie. When there’s ten of us, we can pool our cash, buy fabulous ingredients, and eat like kings for cheap.
There was also a randomly awesome encounter with a pair of older Korean tourists we stumbled into. One day we got tired of sitting around the apartment, and decided to go down the way to a red-roofed café which had outdoor seating, so we could take advantage of the nice day. We ordered a round of beers and were chilling when a pair of older dudes walked up who were clearly not Kyrgyz, and obviously tourists.
As I said before, they were from Korea, and both of them spoke decent English. We exchanged some pleasantries before they went inside, ostensibly to order their meal. There were about ten of us sitting at the café, and the outdoor seats were basically wooden benches that were bolted to the floor, so we couldn’t drag some extra ones up for more seating. We got tired of squishing, so I went off the terrace to intercept a waitress to ask for more chairs.
The waitress looked rather harried, and she asked me if I could speak English. Obviously I do, and she dragged me to the inside portion of the restaurant, where the Korean tourists waved a cheery hello. The problem was obvious: the menu was entirely in Russian, and the Koreans spoke no Russian, the waitress no English.
I spent about ten minutes trying to decipher the menu; the Koreans were good fellows and just told me to order some traditional Kyrgyz dishes for them. Unfortunately, the restaurant was basically out of all the basic Kyrgyz dishes that I know are good: pelmini, laghman, plov, shashlik, manty. This is a common problem at restaurants, particularly small, local-owned ones… their menu may be decently sized, but you can count on the fact that they won’t have at least half of it. Guaranteed. The only dishes they did have were things I hadn’t heard of before, so I spent about another fifteen minutes on translation before ordering a few dishes, a pot of green tea, and 100 grams of vodka. Again, I went outside, and the waitress brought an extra chair for us.
We drank some more beer, and decided to play some drinking games, in lieu of the fact we had nothing else to do. It was elected we would play a game called the “story game,” which seems to be something like twenty questions. One person leaves the group, the rest decide on a story, and the person has to come back and figure out what story it is. Pretty simple. I was the one who was elected to leave, given that I was closest to the stairs on the terrace.
I went back inside so I wouldn’t inadvertently eavesdrop, but this was a quasi-mistake as the waitress saw me again and waved me over for more translating. The Koreans dragged up another chair for me and we proceeded to get absolutely wasted on vodka. I was able to buff up and show off some of my knowledge about East Asia, and regale them with stories about how much fun I had in Seoul the time I went. They were well-traveled: one was a teacher who’d gone around Africa and the better part of Asia in his time, the other was an ex-sea merchant who had traveled all over the globe in shipping vessels. They were in Central Asia for about a year and a half, just traveling around and seeing what there was to see. Basically, my dream retirement.
It also came with the requisite “why did you learn Japanese when you could have learned Korean” spiel. I have come to the conclusion that no matter how languages I’ll be able to butcher by the time it’s all said and done, people will be insisting that I should be butchering other ones. It’s all in good fun, of course, but, oh man. I learned Japanese, and I should have learned Korean/Thai/Chinese. I learned Russian and I should have learned Kyrgyz. Can’t make anybody happy, man.
I was at the table for about two hours. The ex-shipping merchant gave me a sticker with his name and address in Seoul, and implored me to call him if I ever happened to be in that part of the world again, promising me a night of soju and good fun. I believe him.
Good times, except for this was the day where I made the pear and vanilla butter pie. The pie had been completed prior to going out, so all I had to do was pop it in the oven. Unfortunately, the unforeseen addition of the Korean tourists to the outing had gotten me a lot more drunk than I had planned on getting, so popping the pie in the oven turned out to be a bigger ordeal than I had originally counted on. I now have a lovely red crescent of scar tissue on my left forearm due to being drunk and trying simultaneously not to drop the pie and get it reasonably positioned on the rack. Oh well. At least the pie was good.
The only bad part about hanging out with other Volunteers and getting away from site is the comedown when you inevitably return to your village. Alone again, naturally, so it is. Going to class today was almost painful, particularly when I was left alone with the fifth graders again. My counterpart got the eleventh grader to help me out, but it didn’t stop the rain of spitwads and the general mayhem. Fortunately I have a loud enough voice so if I bark at the class it results in about thirty seconds of decent behavior before they start chewing paper again.
The class schedule also got jostled around again so I got to leave early, which was probably good since I likely would have gone absolutely postal if I had to deal with another class. However, the eleventh-grader who was helping with my class looked at me with puppy-eyes and asked if I was going to hold English club today, since I usually do it on Wednesday.
It was on the tip of my tongue to refuse since I was exhausted from the weekend and my first day back teaching and I just wanted to go home, slam back a couple cups of Nescafe, and go to sleep. But she’s actually a good student, and I haven’t held English club classes for about two weeks due to various other commitments. I’ve had quite a number of good teachers in my tenure as a student who put effort and extra time into me when I asked for it; I figure that I owe good, hard-working students at least as much as what my good teachers gave to me. Especially if they actually care about learning English. That’s… what I’m here for, after all.
So guilt took over, and I said that I’d return at the end of school to hold an English club for her. …all of the English clubs I’ve held had only had one attendee, namely, the eleventh-grader. This is probably mostly my fault, as I have done zero advertising for it. Some other students have asked about it, and while I’ve told everybody Wednesday after school, I’m glad that the attendance has been minimal. It would be damn near impossible to attempt to teach a group with two fifth graders, four seventh graders, a ninth grader, and an eleventh grader. I mean, what the hell can you really do with that which engages everybody but doesn’t confuse? But I figured I could handle a conversation with somebody who can actually speak English. I went home and had my Nescafe, picked up my photo album so we’d have something to talk about, and headed back over to the school.
The walk from my house to the school is fairly straightforward and not that long: I actually live on the same street as the school, just a couple blocks down. It’s about a ten minute walk when I’m going at it leisurely, which is pretty much how I always go at it. I crossed the major intersection, and saw four cars turning off the main road and coming towards me.
This was somewhat notable, since there’s not that much traffic in and out of the village itself, and doubly so since the first car to drive up was militsia, and there were about seven uniformed officers crammed in the back. The next two cars were black Mercedes, and a flat bed truck followed up the entourage. They overtook me on the road and stopped in front of a house about ten feet down the road where I was walking. The militsia guys jimmied themselves from the backseat and clustered around the house. Somebody walking by shook the guy in charge by the hand. Some suited dudes climbed out of the two Mercedes, wearing sunglasses.
Weird, I thought, but didn’t stop walking. I’m more apt to avoid militsia these days than not, not because I’m doing anything worth hiding, but more because I just want to avoid the hassle of ID checks and pointed questions. I didn’t want to get tangled up with a large number of police officers all asking for my ID and wondering why I was hanging out in a village in the middle of nowhere, so I just kept my head down and continued walking.
When I left the school, about forty-five minutes later, the Mercedes had left, and now the flatbed truck was parked in front of the house. A rather scruffy-looking dude with a scraggly red beard and torn flannel shirt was walking back and forth between the house and the truck, tossing pillows and blankets into the back. The militsia were leaning up against the fence, and a crowd of gawkers had gathered in a half-circle around the vehicles. A old woman in a headscarf and long dress clutched weakly at the gate to the house, moaning something in Kyrgyz and crying.
Weirder, I thought, quickening my pace and praying that the chorus of “hello” wouldn’t start up from the children. Whatever was going on, I didn’t want to be involved. But the kids were too absorbed in the scene, whatever the hell the scene was.
I got back to my house and unlocked the gate to find my host father repairing a metal fence. He was taking a break, smoking a cigarette and flicking at a broken hinge.
I pointed down the street and asked him if he knew what the militsia were doing down there.
He looked at me, smiled, laughed and shook his head. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to tell me, then he sighed and pointed back down the way. “Somebody drank too much vodka and stabbed a person to death,” he said, sticking his cigarette back in his mouth.
“Seriously?” I asked, equal parts incredulous and shocked.
He hummed in affirmation, picking at the hinge again. “Don’t drink too much vodka!” he said cheerfully, grinning again.
I laughed and said that I wouldn’t, and went into my house. Drunken murder down the street. Awesome.
Just to defuse any alarm on the part of the reader, let me say that I really don’t think this affects my safety in the village in any way. I’m virtually never outside of the compound where I live after dark; I can count the number of times on a hand missing fingers, it’s so rare. And when I am out after dark, I’m in a taxi which drops me off right in front of my house. There’s just really no reason to be out after like, 8pm. The public transportation stops, shops close, and nothing’s going on in the village that late other than drunk people stumbling around, and it just seems wiser to avoid confrontations with drunk men at night. …case in point, see above.
At any rate, it seems more like a case of domestic violence, rather than something I should be alarmed about. Well, I guess I am somewhat alarmed… somebody just got axed, after all, but I’m not afraid for my safety. The gate is locked at night, and I lock my door as well. I’m about as safe here as I am at home, I wager.
So, welcome back home. Back to the insanity at school, back to alcohol-inspired homicide. Yeah.
In other news, I finally bought myself an electric plitka, or hotplate. I had been meaning to do this for a while… I do have a gas oven here, which saved my life during the winter months when we didn’t have electricity. I wouldn’t have been able to cook otherwise, particularly when my petchka ran out of coal. However, the issue with the gas stove is that gas is expensive, and plus only one part of the range works. Annoying when I want to have more than one pot cooking at once.
I had wanted an electric addition for a while, for the dual purpose of conserving gas and being able to cook one damn thing at a time, but had never gotten around to it. When it comes down to it, I’m a person driven by practicality at the heart of things; while it would have been nice to have the electric plitka, it wasn’t any real skin off my back to just keep using the gas. To the same (somewhat depressing) ends, I’m the same way about learning languages. People keep on asking me if I’m going to ever learn Kyrgyz, but the sad fact about it is that it’s just not practical for me. I can get anywhere in this country on Russian, and in fact, I can actually talk to more people with it, given that most Kyrgyz speakers over the age of five can speak Russian, but not that many native-Russian speakers can speak Kyrgyz. Not to mention, Russian is undoubtedly the more useful of the two to know after Peace Corps. There are some inherent advantages to Kyrgyz, namely in the street cred it gets you here… whenever we negotiate for taxis or whatever and I happen to be with a Kyrgyz speaker, we always seek out a Kyrgyz person and I always let the other Volunteer go at the negotiating. Kyrgyz people love it when foreigners can speak Kyrgyz. When you’re lucky, it can result in some mad crazy discounts.
I love traveling with Kyrgyz-speaking Volunteers. We get the advantage of being able to bargain in Kyrgyz, but I also understand Russian so we can cope with non-Kyrgyz speaking locals, as well. I’ve noticed that the locals here will oscillate between the two languages if they’re talking about something they don’t want you to hear, but having both a Kyrgyz-speaking Volunteer and a Russian-speaking Volunteer on the same team eliminates this. If I were in the south, Uzbek would have been added to the language salad, but a) I’m not in the south, and b) Uzbek is pretty similar to Kyrgyz. Native speakers of Kyrgyz and Uzbek can talk to each other and have a decent conversation, so most Volunteers who learn Kyrgyz can at least follow a conversation in Uzbek to some degree. The same is true with Kazakh as well – when I went there last month, I was listening to the Kazakh, and I understood some of it. The Kyrgyz “rahkmat,” or “thank you,” is “rahkmet” in Kazakh. Yeah. And then when we want to talk about something we don’t want locals to hear, we’ve got English.
It’s always kind of hilarious if I go over to a Volunteer who lives with a Kyrgyz family’s house… when we guest for dinner, we communicate in three language, but each person can only understand two languages each. Me, Russian and English. Volunteer friend, Kyrgyz and English. Host country national, Russian and Kyrgyz. I understand a little bit of Kyrgyz, and usually a Kyrgyz-speaking Volunteer knows at least a few words of Russian, and sometimes the country national knows a few English phrases, so we can kind of follow each other’s conversations, but not participate when it’s in the language we don’t know. It’s quite the process.
In a sense, just speaking about being a Peace Corps Volunteer, I think that Kyrgyz is the better language to know. I mean, it is the real local language, whereas Russian is rather the language of the conquerors. But, by whatever stroke of fortune, I got Russian dealt to me at the beginning of this madness, and that’s what it is. Russian is also infinitely more complicated, grammatically speaking, and it’s just a better use of my time to get better at Russian than it is to start all over again with Kyrgyz. If I had started out with Kyrgyz, yeah, Kyrgyz would have been the more practical of the two. But I didn’t.
Sometimes, I wish I were just more intellectually curious when it came to language. It would be pretty sweet to come back to the States with both Russian and Kyrgyz under my belt. But the cravat about language is that it’s goddamn fucking hard. It’s not just memorizing new words and grammar patterns, though that’s definitely a chunk of it, but it’s also finding an accent that you can reproduce naturally and native speakers can understand. My Russian accent is a little deeper than my English one, which is hilarious when taken with the fact that my voice shoots up an octave when I speak Japanese. The biggest part for me, though, is that in order to really learn a language, it means adopting an entirely new way of thinking. I can’t do translation, meaning that if I see an apple, I have to be able to connect the fruit directly to the world “yablika,” (or “ringo,” if we’re talking Japanese), and I can’t go “fruit,” then “apple,” then “yablika.” I suppose it would be feasible for simple nouns, but when it comes to forming complex thoughts in the madness that is Russian grammar and being able to do it in real conversation time while also understanding what somebody else is saying to you, if you have to muddle through the English translation first, you’re through. And don’t forget noun declension! Seriously, man, my brains are scrambled.
But, anyway, electric hotplates. I ended up buying one yesterday because my gas balloon finally ran out. I was waiting for this, since I filled the balloon back in late December, when I arrived here, and I pretty much did all of my cooking on it from December through May. I’ve got an oven now, but it was in the middle of last month, so I haven’t done that much serious cooking in it as of yet.
Since the electricity situation has gotten leagues better – i.e. the power hasn’t gone off during the day since I got back from Almaty, the end of April – relying solely on electric means for cooking shouldn’t be as risky as it was during the bulk of my service. I’ll probably get the gas filled up again at some point, either when the electricity gets spotty again or when it starts getting cold. The problem with winter is that the strain on electricity goes up exponentially… people start using it to heat their homes, it gets darker earlier, there’s less to do outside so people start watching a lot of television, and so forth. But for now, I’m going to hold off on it. I’m in the process currently of making some Middle Eastern-inspired chickpeas… basically chickpeas baked with onions and carrots, dressed with honey, cinnamon, chicken broth, vinegar and parsley. Bake that shizzle up for an hour and you’ve got some good eatings, friends. I also found a happy new use for that cast-iron frying pan without a handle that was the bane of my life over the winter… I tried to use it for about a month and a half before breaking down and just buying a non-stick pan, as it was impossible to cook with. The stuff on the bottom would burn and cement to the pan, while the stuff on top never cooked. The lack of handle didn’t help. It got relegated to the back of the kitchenware cupboard. But now, I figured out that I could use it as a baking pan. It doesn’t have a handle, so it fits perfectly in the oven, and it has a cover, to boot. Sweet. I love being able to repurpose things. Particularly because it means I don’t have to shell out another 300 som to get an actual baking pan. I can even make bread, cake, and pies in it.
Speaking of bread, I might make some carrot or apple bread soon, so I can share it with my host family. They occasionally pop over with various breads or cookies to share with me, so I figure I should repay the favor.
The only problem with relying solely on electric means to cook is that it makes the electricity in the rest of my house go haywire. This is compounded because my host father does a lot of odd repair jobs… at first I figured he was just being handy around the house, but as soon as it got warm a lot of random metal objects, like fences, gates, and even metal tombstones started showing up at our house, like the gate he was fixing when he told me about the murder down the street. I figure they can’t all belong to us, so I think he fixes them for other people. So if he’s welding outside or whatever, and I’m trying to stirfry something and bake, the lights flicker like a low-class disco. I compensate by turning off the lights whenever I leave the kitchen and moving my electric teakettle to the bedroom in an attempt to even out the electricity distribution, but we’ll see. I just hope nothing blows out.
I love my house, but the only thing about it is that I wish it were better for entertaining. Basically the way the Volunteers tend to entertain is to throw dinner parties where we all cook, like we did in Naryn… however, my kitchen is an absolute closet. There’s literally enough room for one person to be in there, and I actually do most of my prep out in the living room. It works, and I suppose it’s convenient to a certain degree because I can reach all of my cooking supplies without even having to move, but if you’ve got more than one person attempting to cook, it’s damn near impossible.
Another thing I’m probably going to do now that it’s warmer is buy more skirts. I plan on spending the majority of the summer in skirts, firstly because it’s going to get hot as hell here and I can’t really wear shorts. Secondly, it means that I won’t have to wear my jeans, so they’ll last me longer when it’s cold and wearing skirts is stupid. My jeans have held up admirably well here… when I went to Japan I brought three pairs with me and wore holes the size of small countries in the crotch of all of them by the time it was all said and done. I figure this is probably because I actually put on weight in Japan, being that I loved the food and wasn’t playing rugby to counteract it. Here I actually lost a lot of weight at the beginning, which helped. Since I’ve been cooking for myself I’ve gained some of it back, but I definitely haven’t overtaken where I was when I got here. But it’ll still help if I can spend a couple of months not wearing them. Not to mention, the less I wear jeans, the less I have to wash jeans. Since I’ve more or less gotten accustomed to doing laundry by hand nowadays, the only articles I still truly dread washing are my jeans and Carhartts. It’s a nightmare, since denim is a heavy material anyway, and it soaks up water like a sponge. Anybody who’s ever fallen into a pool or something while wearing jeans knows how heavy they get. It sucks.
To a certain extent, class is getting more and more hilarious, as much as it frustrates me. Some days it’s basically the same old shit that it is any other day of the year, but with the weather getting warmer, the students (and the teachers!) are just getting less and less attentive. On Fridays, I only have one class, and it’s at 12:30. In a way I guess it’s nice, since it’s the only weekday where I don’t have to get up at seven, but it’s smack in the middle of the day, which makes it difficult to go into the city and run errands or whatever. Originally the class was second hour, which meant I would have been done by about 9:30, but of course they moved it.
Consequently, I don’t think I’ve been to that one Friday class in about a month. Things just keep coming up, and if there’s something important that I need to take care of in the city on a weekday, Friday’s the most likely day to get axed, since I’m only missing one class. Two weeks ago, I went to the Friday class for the first time in about three weeks, only to find my counterpart in the foyer with some paperwork, expressing surprise that I had showed up. I had conditioned the school to just assume that I wasn’t going to come into work on Fridays at all, despite the fact that each Friday I missed, I had an excuse. Two dentist appointments (I chipped a tooth on a rock in some rice, and then I had a cavity), the trip to Almaty, the trip to Naryn. My counterpart had already told the class to go home. Awesome.
This week, I was quasi-planning to skip Friday too, as I really need to get into Bishkek and spend a day at the Peace Corps office closing this grant I have. At my original site, the previous Volunteer had made an English language center… he had done the bulk of the work, all that needed to happen was buying a television, dvd player, console, and some other sundry electronics, like extension cords. He passed the grant to me, so I could buy the last things and close it. And, of course, the whole homeless debacle happened and I had to change sites, so the grant is still open. I’ve got all my receipts and whatever, but some of them are handwritten in extremely sloppy Russian, so I can’t friggin’ read ‘em. I need to talk to some of the local staff so they can translate, which means going in on a weekday.
But on Wednesday, the lone student who comes to my English clubs said she wanted some information about the American University in Central Asia, which is basically Kyrgyzstan’s Harvard. I promised I’d get her the information by Friday, and I figured I shouldn’t back out.
So I went into school today, to find my counterpart outside. My Friday class is eighth grade form b, and my counterpart said that most of the students had probably already gone home. She also said that she had to talk to some parents about something, and likely she’d be a little late to class. Par for the course.
I ask if we’re going to hold class at all today, and she said that if at least ten students showed up, we would. I ran into the eleventh-grader and gave her the application materials on AUCA she asked for, just in case I wouldn’t be there after class to meet with her, and walked into the classroom.
There were exactly ten students there. Not impressive, considering how the roster says there should be twenty-seven students. (There are never twenty-seven students. On a good day, you might get twenty.) All of them were girls, and they all wanted me to cancel the class so they could go home. I actually like eighth grade form b. They’re relatively well behaved, and at least nominally interested in English. Rather unlike eighth grade form a, which is friggin impossible.
I hate to say this, but it’s true… the classes that have higher ratios of girls to boys are the better ones. Girls are generally more interested in school on a whole, and even the ones who couldn’t care less are quiet about it. They’ll just sit in the back and pass notes, or text each other on their phones. Whatever. I’ve come to the point where I don’t really care, as long as they’re not being outright disruptive. If you want to come to class to sit in the back and do nothing, fine with me. You do your thing, I’ll do my job.
It’s the boys who are damn near impossible to deal with. Especially the eighth graders, because they’re just entering the age where it’s cool to be macho and friggin’ stupid. For some of them it’s just depressing, because I can recognize the ones who are actually somewhat interested in English, but they don’t show it because it’s more important to be able to front to the other dudes than pay attention. I want to throttle those kids… not the ones who don’t care at all, because I consider that a lost cause, but the ones that have the potential but just don’t put in any of the effort are just frustrating. I know they’re smart! Why the hell don’t they act like it?
I always hated the kids that were like that when I was in school, too. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the people who were acting out in class were, indeed, morons. But there were a few that I knew were smart. I’d talked to some of them privately – particularly a lot of my female peers. Some of them really knew what was up. But then they were more concerned with tanning beds or boys or Abercrombie or something else. The urge to throttle was high then, too. They were smart. Or at least, they could have been.
I remember something pretty distinctly when I was in seventh grade… I was at my assistant soccer coach’s house. My father was the coach of my soccer team, and for a time we had a couple of assistants. This assistant was the only female assistant coach we ever had, and she had a daughter that was a grade up from me. She was talking with my mother about something, don’t remember what, when school came up. I always did well in school, namely because I had figured out that if I wanted to go somewhere far away for college, I needed to have a good enough track record for somewhere far away to want me. The assistant soccer coach just shook her head and said, “Well, wait until she discovers boys.”
Pissed me the hell off. Still does. Boys are an acceptable excuse not to accomplish anything and have your grades fall off a cliff? Jesus Christ, no wonder men think they’re supposed to rule the world if that’s how it’s supposed to be.
Anyway, it was a beautiful day outside, and since even the best English students were asking for the day off, it was going to be like holding corks underwater to get them to concentrate. Plus, I had no lesson plan and didn’t know if my counterpart was actually going to show up at all. These “parent meetings” have a way of going on for entire class periods. I would know. Why insist that the students attend and be attentive, when I have nothing actually worthwhile for them to attend to?
The general fallback for English teachers who don’t have a plan seems to be translation. I get it, mostly because it’s easy and doesn’t require much effort on the part of the teacher, especially if she can speak English pretty well. I don’t have much against translation in general, as long as it’s not what is taught all the time. However, I’m bad at this fallback, because, uh, half of the time my Russian isn’t good enough to translate. Embarrassing, right? Though, in my defense, my crash course in Russian was dedicated to learning how to talk… we did do a little bit of translation work, but because being able to communicate orally was a hell of a lot more important, that’s what I put my effort into. I’m still only moderately literate at best. I mean, I can read signs and the like, but I can’t do anything literary. Not to mention, if I’m going to do translation work at all, I’m much better at Russian to English than English to Russian. I can barely write at all. For me, it’s easiest to understand, then to talk, then reading, then writing.
Finally, I told them that I was going to go get the journal (basically the class attendance/grade book), and said very clearly that if there were five or fewer students in the room when I got back, there would be no class. And I left. When I came back about five minutes later, guess what, only five students remained. I told them to go home. I figure this satisfies all parties. Class doesn’t technically start until I have the journal, and there had to be ten students there by the start of class for us to actually conduct it.
I don’t even know why I bothered, really. Nobody would have cared either way if I had just told the ten students there to go home. Whatever. The Central Asian penchant for doing everything by the book even if you have to fudge everything to make it so is getting to me, I suppose. When in Rome. Or Bishkek.
May is already shaping up to be an awesome month for teaching. Everybody’s attention span is completely shot, and it’s riddled with holidays. And I can’t wait until June. School here usually ends on May 25th, but because of the extended winter holidays due to the electricity shortages, they’ve extended the school year until June 13th. …if you’ve noticed, the math doesn’t quite match up, since we didn’t start school until March and usually it starts in January, but whatever. I’m happy that I don’t have to be at this until July.
The only thing about this that I think is just ridiculously stupid is that they’re still holding the last bell ceremonies on May 25th. Last bell is basically what it sounds like… a celebration of the last bell of the year. Dancing, eating, the whole nine yards. The eleventh form usually does some sort of skit to express appreciation to the teachers, and so forth. However, school is scheduled to continue after the last bell ceremonies. Apparently this is because it’s the mandated day for last bell for all schools around Kyrgyzstan, considering how not all of the schools had the extended break. The schools that did, though, are expected to do the extra twoish weeks after the final ceremony.
This just seems absolutely asinine. Even before I knew this, I figured that getting students to come to school after the official last day of school was going to be mostly fruitless, but now? I’ll be impressed if we get five students a class.
Whateves. Ain’t no skin off my neb. I just do what they tell me to do.
I should have done laundry today, but I just wasn’t feeling it. That’s the deal with me and cleaning… I have to be in the mood for a chore to do it, otherwise I’m lazy about it and do a crappy job. Today was a cooking day, a tidying up day, and a rearranging day. I built a new nightstand out of a pile of boxes, some carpet, and a picture frame. Not a bad day, as a whole. And, I guess, a writing day.
But, for me at least, every damn day’s a writing day. For better or worse, I suppose.
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