PCV in KGZ

.the beat goes on

2009-10-04T04:20:00.001-07:00

All right.

Peace Corps has three main goals. The first is to provide trained men and women to organizations and schools in the host country who ask for it. The second is to provide a real-life example of American culture to host country nationals. The third is to teach Americans at home about the host country.

The third goal was the reason why I decided on a public blog rather than an email list. As much as I have friends and family who would like to keep tags on my misadventures, the blog was more of a message in a bottle to whomever passed by. Maybe it's a future Peace Corps Volunteer who was wondering what it was all about, like I was in the months preceeding my service. Maybe it was somebody who was interested in Kyrgyzstan or teaching English abroad. Maybe it was somebody who clicked the "random" button on blogger.com and this came up. Whatever.

But unfortunately I seem to have made a bit of a target out of myself with my last post, for better or worse. I no longer feel comfortable writing here, and I think it might prove detrimental to the rest of my service if I continue to do so. It's too bad, but that's the way it is.

You usually don't have to tell me something twice. Usually.

Basically, if anybody is interested in getting occasional emails about what I'm up to and how I'm dealing with it, you can leave a message with your email in a comment, or you can get ahold of me on facebook, or you can send me an email saying you're interested.

It's my birthday. And I'll write if I want to.

.tell me how to stay strong

2009-09-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

I just got censured. I guess at least somewhere, somebody is reading my blog. And they thought it was too intense.

I'm going on hiatus. Thanks to the readers.

Good night, and good luck.

.russian roulette is not the same without a gun

2009-09-20T05:30:00.000-07:00

Housing search, the remix. (Bum-chicka-bum-chicka-uh-uh-uhhhhh.)

My counterpart texted me the other day to say that she had an apartment option for me to see. Her sister had found it. I was excited because this was actually the first option I've had that has worked out in a relatively concrete way. Not to mention, it's smack in the part of town that I wanted to live in - maybe a five minute walk from school.

The microrayons of the town I'm going to live in are actually pretty nice. Since training was there I'm very familiar with the town's center and all the "hot spots" (of which there are few, but enough to live very comfortably on), but the microrayons are much more towny. Most of them are courtyard-type clusters with broken down old Soviet-era playground equipment that is usually used to inadvertently hurt children or dry rugs on in the middle. Some even have well-tended flower gardens. The area of town I'm going to live in is populated mostly by old women living alone and children playing on the dangerous playground equipment. I rarely see people between the ages of twenty and fifty puttering around, but that's fine with me. It means that the area must be safe-ish if all these old women are living alone and the children are killing themselves on the jagged metal slides unsupervised.

Obviously, if I was looking at this through the untrained American eye, I'd think it looked like the projects. This is because Soviet-style apartment buildings are actually based off of the projects. Seriously. They're cheap and easy to build, mostly because all apartment complexes are the same. Unless the owner's done some serious remont (renovation), Kyrygz apartments have about five different styles, and the entire apartment complex has the same style of apartment. But now that I've eased into life here, I can recognize nice apartment buildings for what they are.

And the one that my counterpart had to show me was nice. It's a first-floor one-room (meaning that there's one main living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen) apartment that has a balcony opening straight onto a beautiful garden with tasteful tall grass, cornflowers, daisies, and some hollyhock. I have no idea who maintains the garden, because when I went in to see the place there was obviously a funeral party going on, and the owners said that the grandmother who lived in the apartment had died a couple months back. The garden was looking way too well pruned for that.

Another malady with most apartments in the area that I want to live is that none of them have been well-furnished. I don't know why, since in every single other area in Kyrgyzstan, even village apartments, they've come decently-equipped. One of my friends (who ultimately ended up moving to Bishkek) lived in a huge, new three-room apartment with a kitchen. His furniture count was thus: one kitchen table, two chairs, a small sofa table, a small cabinet, and a bed without legs. All of his furniture could have easily fit into one room. Half a room. My other friend has another newly-remonted apartment in the same town with two giant rooms that doesn't even have a bed. It has a kitchen table, two chairs, and one upholstered chair. She sleeps on piles of tushuks.

But the apartment that they showed me was definitely well-inhabited. There's a divan, a bed, a large table in the main room, a table in the kitchen, a clothespress, a free-standing shelving unit that takes up most of the wall, several small cabinets, and four kitchen chairs. There's two stoves: a gas and an electric. And a large refrigerator. And a washing machine. And all the plates I could shake one of my billions of forks at. (The washing machine is Kyrgyz-style, but hey. It means I can wash my sheets.) They said it came with all of the furniture. And it has hot water and a SHOWER and an INDOOR TOILET. And heat in the winter.

And it was only 3000 som a month. Usually you get reamed for apartments where I want to live. Sold, sold, and sold.

The only thing about it is that there aren't bars on the windows, and since it's first-floor apartment, Peace Corps will pay for it. I just have to get it done. The landladies said that they didn't mind if I put bars in as long as they didn't have to pay for it, so it's cool.

And I get to look out at a nice garden when it's the season for it. Quite idyllic. I'm within five minutes of both my work and a supermarket and a small bazaar. I'm a twenty-minute walk from the center of town where there's bigger supermarkets and bazaars. And there's constant transportation everywhere.

As good as my extended vacation in Bishkek has been, it'll be nice to have my own place. I don't want to impose on my host here too much longer. He's got dates to go on. And to be able to not have all my shit spread out all over the resource center will be a pleasant change.

Here's hoping that something stupid doesn't happen this winter and I end up losing it again. I've been on a semester-by-semester basis here in Kyrgyzstan: three semesters of school have eclipsed since I've been here, and I've had three sites. Very neatly divided, in my opinion. But it would be nice to break with tradition for this last year. I don't think I'm going to want to move again.

When I look back on my Peace Corps experience, at least I can say that I got a true understanding of the nomadic aspect of Kyrgyz culture. I'm more nomadic than most of them will ever be. For better or worse.

.oh, Canada

2009-09-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

I usually don't blog this much, but since I'm currently living in the capital and am basically surrounded by Internet constantly, might as well. Particularly when I have the brand of randomly awesome times that I had yesterday.

I was at the Peace Corps office when I ran into a Volunteer who was having mondo counterpart and site problems and was pretty down in the dumps. And by "down in the dumps," I mean, "pretty much going to Early Terminate." Part of this whole experience is being everybody else's damage control team. People have done it for me a number of times, when I was set to nuclear meltdown and other Volunteers have plyed me with entertainment, kindness, and the occasional day of substance abuse. When I'm in the position to do it for somebody else, I leap on it.

I ditched on some plans with other friends for lunch to take my woeful friend back to the apartment I'm staying at, after buying some cheeseburgers and chocolate and coffee for lunch and then having her partake in the shower facilities. Especially for Volunteers who live in the village, a chance to take a long, hot shower is the equal to going to a souped-up spa in the States and ordering the special without having to worry about cost. It's a big deal, and being properly clean without having to use buckets can be a great boost to the spirits.

Thus revitalized, my friend went back to Peace Corps to charge headfirst into more meetings about her situation, and I walked over to join my friends who I had ditched on lunch plans with.

That's when we met the Canadians.

We were at a place called Metro Pub, which is not an unusual place to meet foreigners. In fact, it's gotten rather dangerous to go there in certain respects, particularly at night. Lots of people who've walked out of there without taking a taxi have gotten followed and beaten up and robbed. It's not so notorious during the day, but it is pretty expensive, so I've only gone there maybe once or twice during the past six months or so, and never at night. Most of the time, I was living in the village anyway, which gave me a default curfew of 7pm, unless I wanted to fork out a ridiculous amount of cash for a taxi. Which I didn't.

When I walked in my two friends were playing cards at the table with these two other guys. They promptly ordered me a beer and invited me to sit down. Turns out they were playing poker - high stakes poker. 1000 som buy-in, which is about thirty bucks. In comparison, when Volunteers play poker with each other, it's usually a 50 som buy-in. Maybe 100 if it's near the beginning of the month and we've all just gotten paid. Yeah.

But the Canadians were doing all the buying. I wasn't going to play, not with that kind of a buy-in - I enjoy a spot of gambling every now and again, but not with nearly a fourth of my monthly salary. They rolled their eyes, threw a 1000 som note into the pile, and raked some chips at me.

So we played. I also met the head of the golf course in Bishkek, the owner of Metro Pub, and various other bigwig-types around town. The company was good, the beer constantly flowing. At the end of the game, I had made about 4000 som. That's like, 100 dollars. That's like, my entire monthly salary. And I didn't even have to do the buy-in. And they paid for our drinks.

As we were nearabouts falling over ourselves with gratitude, one of the guys says, "Well, next time it comes up say something nice about Canadians, eh?"

So, here it is. I LOVE CANADIANS. CANADA IS AMAZING. CANADA HAS PRETTY DECENT HOCKEY BUT I'M FROM DETROIT SO DETROIT IS STILL BETTER THAN THE CANADIAN TEAMS. SORRY. BUT CANADIANS ARE STILL EFFING COOL. PARTICULARLY WHEN THEY'RE IN KYRGYZSTAN AND FEELING GENEROUS.

Duty thus filled to my gracious partner Canada, we get back to the business of being homeless. And being motherfucking LOADED at the same time. Life is good.

.she's got an appetite for lighting dynamite

2009-09-15T21:41:00.000-07:00

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.

.it ain't no fun unless we all get some

2009-09-05T22:55:00.000-07:00

The journey back to Kyrgyzstan was fairly uneventful, just long. I had a nine-hour layover in Istanbul that was perfectly primed for me to go out and do some exploring, but I let exhaustion win over the adventuring spirit. I had to buy a visa to go and get my luggage, which was annoyance enough, but at least the airport staff were nice to me. After I grudgingly forked out the 20 dollars for the visa and went to fetch my bags, I was on my way to get one of those airport carts.

I took an obscene amount of luggage back with me – much more than I brought originally. Of course, it’s all full of food and supplies and the like, things that I either can’t get in Kyrgyzstan, like vanilla extract, or are just too expensive for me to buy, like olive oil. And, I mean, I definitely packed to the extreme. One of my bags was overweight, and the other one was pushing it.

But in order to rent the little airport carts in Istanbul, you need Euro coins. I managed to locate some staff that spoke reasonable English to ask what I should do. At first they were telling me that all I had to do was go to a change machine for coins, and I had to spend about five minutes patiently convincing them that even if I did put a dollar bill into a coin machine it would not give me euro coins. And if it did, I would put all my dollars into it, because that would increase my spending money by about twenty-five percent. Exchange rates and all that nonsense.

Eventually, I think they got tired of dealing with me. Or that or they saw the despair well in my eyes when I realized that I’d have to drag all 130 pounds of my luggage to an exchange booth to trade a large-ish denomination dollar bill in for some euro just so I could get one lousy euro to get the cart, and then I’d be stuck with all this euro that has no use in the foreseeable future. I’d have to change it back to dollars or into som, and then I’d lose a ridiculous amount of money in the transaction. They eventually just waved over some dude to unlock a cart for me for free. Score.

And then when I went to check my luggage through again, the check-in lady was unbelievably generous and didn’t charge me overages on my luggage again, even though I was nearly ten kilo over it. Whatever. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, is what I say. Or rather, when somebody cuts you a break you smile and thank them politely, then run as fast as you can in the other direction so they don’t have time to change their minds about it.

After all that, I was standing in front of another currency exchange booth, wondering if I actually wanted to exchange for lira to go out into Istanbul. I really do like Istanbul: I had a blast the few hours I was there when I came to Kyrgyzstan initially. But this time around I was by myself and not with a group of Peace Corps Volunteers, some of whom were bewilderingly well-informed about Istanbul, and others who spoke Turkish. Not to mention, I was exhausted and kept on leaning up against poles to keep myself upright. Not exactly prime shape to be in to go around exploring a city I’m unfamiliar with that speaks a language I don’t know.

While I was debating, this guy comes up and asks if I want to go to the city. He’s got some official airport decals on, but I figure he’s attached to a taxi company somehow. I have an automatic bias about anybody associated with a taxi in any way, shape, or form these days, but I just got my luggage checked through for free and was feeling charitable, so I struck up a conversation with the guy.

I said I wasn’t going to the city yet, and made up something about meeting a friend just so we could evade the whole pressure-sales schtick. He asked how long I was staying in Istanbul, and when my reply was “nine hours,” that got a raised eyebrow and we got into the whole American-working-in-Kyrgyzstan thing. He told me that it was, “quite unusual.”

I said that somebody had to do it.

After that, I decided to hell with it and just went back into the airport where I ate overpriced cheesecake and surfed the free wi-fi for a while. I even fell asleep in one of the large chairs they had at the café I was sitting at. Jet lag for me is a weird thing. I think I do worse when the change is between 6-9 hours, like in Istanbu, rather than when it’s 10-12, like Kyrgyzstan. It’s easier for me to change my internal clock, somehow, if day and night are flipped completely rather than shifted a few hours. Dunno why. At least none of my shit got stolen, but I was kind of sleeping on top of it.

Got back to Bishkek without incident, and I even managed to find a taxi driver that wasn’t a total jerk. He said he’d take me back for 500 som, and I said I’d pay him 400 and he said okay. Done, and done. (Technically, the fair price is 300, but it was four in the morning and raining and I was exhausted and 100 som is about two dollars and fifty cents. Usually I don’t think of som that way because comparing it to dollars is an excellent way to get poor real fast, but to hell with it.)

I got to the Peace Corps office at about 5:30, and then promptly passed out on the resource center couch for approximately four hours before some of my friends burst in to the room with intentions to use the internet and found me instead. Not that I particularly minded. I could have used more sleep, but it was nice to see my fellow batshit crazy Volunteers again.

At any rate, the most interesting thing going on is probably the homeless situation, which is getting more and more ridiculous as it goes. Like most things ‘round these parts.

After I had gone out to buy some minutes for my phone, I called my program manager. I felt a little bad since it’s Saturday, but since I had sent her two emails over my vacation asking questions and had received no answers my qualms with disturbing her weekend weren’t too severe.

When I got a hold of her, I got the surprising news that I didn’t have to move. According to her, she had called my counterpart, who talked to the director. They did a cursory search for some apartments but had come up empty-handed. When that happened, they talked to my host family and convinced them to let me stay until next August.

I greeted this statement with mixed feelings, really. It was nice that I wouldn’t have to move at all, not even within the village, but I didn’t know how I felt about my current host family being guilt tripped. I can only imagine the conversation about if-you-don’t-keep-her-we’re-gonna-lose-her. And while it’s to some extent true, especially if they couldn’t find me an apartment, still. I didn’t know if I wanted to live in a place where I was only there because of outside pressure. It wouldn’t be a comfortable living environment for any of us.

But, whatever. Again, the whole thing about gift horses and such. I figured I would talk to Peace Corps and see about throwing on another 500 som to my rent check, since I’m well under the housing allowance limit for where I live and it might make my host family happier about keeping me. Thus resolved, I went out to lunch with friends in an attempt to stave off the jet lag.

When I got back, I was dragging a heavy rice bag with me. I figured that instead of shelling out a crapton of money on a cab to bring back all of my goodies, I’d just bring them back a trip at a time, which is cheaper. I was struggling with the bag when one of the neighborhood kids walked up and took one end of it, which made it a lot easier to carry and was quite sweet of him.

When we got to my house, my host father came out and laughed at the sight of me and this kid dragging an enormous bag down the road, and then came out and carried the back the rest of the way into my house.

After some cursory talk about how was America and all that, I brought up the fact that my program manager told me that I could live in his house for another year. I wanted to make sure that he was really okay with it… I mean, it is his house. I’ve dealt with a myriad of unreasonable people in country, and my current host family is not one of their number. From what my host father told me when he said I had to move out they merely wanted their space back, which, I mean, is not an unreasonable request. I didn’t want them to be unhappy, both for their sake and mine.

But my host father frowned, and said, “You can stay here until the tenth, remember?”

To which I blinked, and relayed what my program manager had said to me (in likely extremely atrocious Russian; I’m tired and pretty rusty after not having spoken Russian for a month) and he was all like, uh, no.

And I figured that this was just a delightful pickle, that both my sponsoring agency and my school think that I’ve got a place to live when I don’t, so I called my program manager back again. She asked me to put my host father on the phone, which I did.

I understood the gist of the conversation, a part of which seemed to be my program manager saying, “If she moves out, where will she live?” And my host father was all like, “Uh, not really my problem.”

Which… it isn’t. I’ve had people pull that on me before, and I’m not sure if it’s a cultural thing specific to here or not, but I really do hate it when you say you want to have nothing to do with something that isn’t your responsibility, and then the other person gets all upset about it. My old landlady at the house I got kicked out of did the same thing with the monster dog on the premises of the house. She told me she’d get rid of it if I moved in, and then when I moved in she asked where the dog would go if it wasn’t at the house. Um… maybe you should have thought of that before you told me you’d move it?

But I also heard my host father say that the problem has nothing to do with me, which is major points in my favor, considering how the last two places I lived ended less than amicably. At least this way it’s going to be nearly impossible for Peace Corps to claim that there’s something wrong with my attitude, behavior, or lifestyle. The people just want their damn guesthouse back, and that’s all. Wouldn’t matter if I were the world’s gentlest soul or the antichrist.

Once my program manager got off the phone with him, she said she’d call my counterpart again and encouraged me to get in contact with her as well, since I “know the community better.” Well, that may be so, but it’s not going to change the fact that there don’t appear to be apartments available and I’m not going to live with a host family anymore.

Which means one of two things: site change or early termination. I’m not quite in the mood to make that long plane ride back yet, so it’ll likely be site change over ET, provided that Peace Corps doesn’t get their knickers in a twist over it. Not that I can blame Peace Corps for being a little bit exasperated with my tenure as a volunteer thus far, moving-wise. If I change sites it’ll be my third one, which is virtually unheard of. And by “virtually” I mean, “I’ve actually never heard of anybody getting three sites before.” So it would be quite unusual. But, as I said before, I don’t consider myself an unreasonable person, and wanting to live in my own apartment after living four other places closely connected with a host family that ended on terms not of my own volition is not an unreasonable request.

Not that I can fault my program manager for trying to make me feel more empowered about the situation by doing an independent housing search, I suppose. To be honest, I don’t care much either way about it. I need to find a new place to live, and I’ve got a list of demands. I’m definitely empowered about the list of demands. Whether I find the apartment under my own power is moot. I just have to have one. And it’s not really my job to be house-hunting.

But I’ll have to call my counterpart anyway, so I’ll likely bring it up then. As it stands, I’m still not going to work on Monday, since I’ll need to be packing on Monday.

I’m just perplexed as to how my program manager came to believe that I could stay in my house when it’s not the case. Obviously it didn’t have anything to do with her (I’m somewhat jaded with Peace Corps as an organization to be sure, but I can’t believe that my program manager would misle me like that on purpose because it makes no sense), so the confusion must have happened somewhere between my director, my host family, and my counterpart. But… I also have a difficult time believing that, assuming that my host family said that I definitely couldn’t live with them after September 10th, my counterpart/director interpreted that as “Laura can live with them until August!” Maybe there was some sort of ridiculous misunderstanding, but that just seems so unlikely since they were talking about such a simple subject with a yes or no answer attached to it. (“Can Laura still live with you?” “No.” Hell, I could probably still have that conversation in Japanese if I had to.) Either that that my counterpart/director lied to Peace Corps. Which to me is… well, dumb, when you take into consideration that it would all be unmasked after September 10th, when I was still living in the house that my host family expected me to be vacating.

The only other thing I can think of was that my director/counterpart lied to Peace Corps just to smooth things over, but if that's the case then there's a serious lack of forward-thinking. Things would have been all hunky-dory until, well, next Friday.

Wonders never cease. I’m just glad I asked, I guess. And that I didn’t end up spending a crapton of money on a taxi to take all my goodies from America back to a house that I have to be out of by this Friday.

My program manager told me that I shouldn’t think about it right now, in favor of some rest. Which, really, isn’t bad advice if taken as is, but the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be living come next Friday makes it a little more difficult to take entirely seriously. I’m just glad I’ve never been a highly-strung person. I’d’ve gone bonkers by now.

.there once was a note, listen

2009-08-09T00:51:00.000-07:00

There are two major events in my immediate future, one which is unquestionably good, the other which is more of a bummer.

The good: I am leaving tonight for a month's vacation in America. Yesss.

The bummer: I got kicked out of my house again. Noooo.

The housing thing just blows. I mean, seriously, how can my luck be so rotten with housing here? The good part, I guess, is that this time they said it had nothing to do with me. How true this is I can't fathom, but at least they're not going to rail at Peace Corps over it.

The host father came in to collect on the electric bill last night, and then told me that I had to be out of the house by September 10th. The official reason is that they just want the house back, and I think I heard something about the son (who is older, married, and lives in Bishkek) is coming back to live in the house for a while. Believable, but I also think I remember my program manager saying something about how the family I'm with didn't originally want another Volunteer. Understandable, I suppose, since they already hosted a Volunteer for two full years. I'm pretty sure that they mostly signed on for the extra income that was promised them, but they're probably just tired of sharing their living quarters.

Part of it is likely because I basically inhabit about half of their indoor living space. The compound house I'm in is bomb, and the main house isn't that much bigger. It's better equipped with an indoor toilet and a washing machine and television, but it's maybe about the size of my house plus half. Most compounds in this country have the guesthouse comprised of maybe a room and a half; my house has four, five if you count the banya. Maybe my house is smaller, but I definitely have more personal living space than the people living in the main house do. Particularly since it's summer and the younger daughter is living their over the school holiday.

I'm just kind of irritated at the prospect of having to move again. At least this time it's on reasonably good terms and they gave me about a month's notice, but it's too bad that that month I'm going to be out of the country. I called my program manager yesterday and told her about it, but she's also on vacation. (Normally I'd feel bad contacting somebody on vacation, but I figured the situation was important enough.)

This time around, though, I'm insisting on an apartment. I'm tired of living with host families: I've already lived with three. I'm done with being in somebody else's house. There actually are apartments in my village, but I know nothing about them, other than there's a block of 'em in front of the school. I don't know if any are vacant, and I don't know if they're up to Peace Corps' standards. The standards Peace Corps has aren't that ridiculous, but I don't even know if the apartments in my village have running water. This wouldn't be such a big deal, but one of the stipulations is that I at least have a private outhouse, which I don't know if the apartments do or not.

If I can't get an apartment in my village, there are a couple of options. One is that the adjacent village has apartments, lots more than my village has. However, there's a Peace Corps rule where you're not supposed to live outside of your community. I know of a couple of instances where Volunteers have lived separately, so I might be able to make a case for it if I fuss. Another option is just to change site completely, and move to a bigger town where there are more apartments.

I'm not wholly against the idea of changing sites again, mostly because my counterpart is planning on leaving after December, which puts second semester next year rather up for grabs. I'm worried that the school is going to want me to teach alone, which I'm not going to do. I would rather not have that fight if possible. Plus, in the unlucky event that I get booted yet again, I can find another apartment much easier in a town than I can in a village.

But I'd definitely rather move than live with another family. I just don't want to go through the whole process of getting used to a new family and their routines and quirks yet again. Not to mention, the compound that I'm living in now is by far the nicest compound I've seen in country. Unless there's some miracle hidden gem out there and I strike it lucky again, anything I get from a compound is going to be a step down in living conditions. At this point, I'm only willing to take a cut in luxury if I get complete freedom along with it. Not to mention, my current family was great to live with in the sense that they never bothered me. Ever. I would only tell them I was going somewhere if it was more than two nights. If I was just going out for the evening, I never said anything to them about it. I appreciated the freedom, and I don't want to have to deal with another overbearing host mother. I had one of those at my first site. Not again.

Reading all of this over makes me sound demanding, but let's face it. I've moved sites once and houses four times while in country. This will be my fifth, and in none of them was I at fault. I am demanding. I've been bounced around this country like a well-worn basketball by this point, and I'm tired of it. Really tired.

If all else fails, I can always threaten to quit. And actually quit if Peace Corps gets too stubborn. I don't think it will come to that, though. Peace Corps is more likely to capitalize on my stubbornness and move me before they hand me the final plane ticket home. I know they're worried about the early termination rate here, and they'll probably attempt to appease me first. Secondly, they know me and how I've gotten the brunt end on housing pretty much my entire service, and I think they appreciate the fact that I haven't come storming in demanding my plane ticket. I'm also not a bad Volunteer. I've never been in trouble with the administration, I don't think I've ever gotten a complaint registered against me from either of the schools I've worked with, and I've done a lot of projects in many areas of the country with a lot of partnership organizations. I've put up with a lot. And I haven't given up yet. Hopefully, this gets rewarded.

There are a few good things that have come out of this, though. First, I'm very likely to get an apartment. Hopefully. Second, it's possible that this apartment may have amenities like a toilet, running water, and (if I strike gold) maybe even a hot water heater. The last is really only likely if I end up changing sites, since I don't think anybody in my village has a water heater, unless they're very rich. But hell, I'd just be happy with the toilet and sink. I haven't had either of these things, really, since I got to country.

Not to mention, moving means that I don't have to live with those stupid yappy dogs anymore. I'll definitely appreciate that, and my guests will too. Nobody likes my dogs.

I guess we'll see. For now, I'm just going to go home, and enjoy my vacation. There's not much I can do about it now, at any rate. I'll come back, and have six days to pack my things, and by that point some options will probably have come up, and I'll just have to see what I'm working with.

As per usual.

.i wanna be a pop star

2009-07-17T23:54:00.000-07:00

And a-one and a-two and a-three…

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

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

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

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

Next week, the fun begins again.

First:

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

Second:

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

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

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

Third:

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

Fourth:

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

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

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

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

Thank you ma’am.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conundrum. Morals, or practicality?

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

sunset past noon;

2009-06-28T04:21:00.000-07:00

bring back the skies
of tumbleweeds and auburn
and sweet summer rain;
bring back the oceans
and rivers
small streams on the plain
carving past flowerbeds
and thunderheads
bring back the poetry of thistles.

in a moment of mental clarity
I want you to bring back the body
that curves with mine so well
in easy familiarity.
bring back the vines and tulips.
bring back the grass and wine
for I have mountain cathedrals
rock-set spires
snow-bound choirs
to wash it down with.

bring it back and then,
once again,
though the clouds are growing thin,
bring it back again.

in the mornings I haul my water
and get up again,
dirty fingers
tomatoes with salt.

.grimy faces were never seen

2009-05-25T01:37:00.000-07:00

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.

.to make love to the angels of light

2009-05-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

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.

.and there doesn't seem a way to be redeemed

2009-04-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

Life in the Peace Corps: the Good, the Bad, The Ugly, and the Just Plain Ridiculous.

As for the good, I just got back from a conference in Almaty this past week, marking my very first time out of Kyrgyzstan since I came in July. I was slightly disappointed since the conference took up more time than I was hoping for and the hotel was too far away from Almaty to make regular trips in. In fact, even the number of times I went outside during the conference was minimal as they had us at it so much.

But at least the conference was useful… I have to say that at all the Peace Corps trainings I’ve been to, probably at least a quarter of it we could have done without and another quarter was pretty much useless. The FLEX training was all relevant, and there was nothing I felt that they spent time on that didn’t need to be addressed. In fact, I suggested that next time they make the conference longer so everything wasn’t so goddamn rushed. But, I’m assuming there are budgetary concerns involved so another day added to the docket probably isn’t likely.

The way that the FLEX Pre Departure Orientation (hereafter PDO) works is that there’s a teacher (PCV) and an assistant teacher (an alum from the program) who work together to put on a total of eight forty-five minute to hour and a half long sessions. There are actually eleven sessions in total, but the Country Director teaches three of them, the ones about legal things and the history of FLEX and ACCELS. The teacher/TA get to do the fun sessions about culture in America, how schools work, and tips on how to make friends.

The nice part about it is that they give you a binder with your lessons basically planned out for you. In fact, they even have it sectioned out into “speech paragraphs,” so it’s entirely possible just to stand up there and read directly out of the binder. But, I mean, that’s no fun, and the teachers/TAs are expected to take the material and make it interesting somehow.

It sounds a hell of a lot better, though, than working in a school, because the students got through a rigorous testing process primarily in English to get there, so you’re virtually assured that the group is going to be smart and competent in English… basically a class comprised of all the most dedicated English students in local schools. From the school I teach at now, I can honestly say that only one of them has anywhere near the language skills to be chosen for FLEX. (Too bad that she’s an eleventh former and thus going to graduate, rendering her unable to participate.)

And plus, all of the kids involved likely do want this information, so they’re going to be attentive as a whole. Of course, this doesn’t preclude us from all behavioral problems, but it should be dramatically less than the insanity that happens at the schools.

Probably the most interesting part of the seminar, though, were the people on it. Peace Corps volunteers from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan were there as well, so we got to swap some stories from our experiences. As a whole, it does seem as though Kyrgyzstan is the roughest country to live in, materialistically speaking… none of the volunteers from other countries reported having issues with electricity or water, which has been the bane of my life since August. In fact, in Turkmenistan the electricity and gas are free for locals (and Peace Corps volunteers). Interestingly enough, since gas is free but matches aren’t, the PCVs report that most of the locals just keep their gas burning 24/7, since they don’t have to pay for it. Yeah. Oh boy.

Also at this conference were Country/Hub directors were there as well, the ones from Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Novosibirsk (Russia), and Moscow. Of course, ALL of them had been Peace Corps Volunteers before. It doesn’t surprise me, since if you happen to be an American who really wants to be in Central Asia, there are very few jobs really available here. I suppose that most universities are gagging for native English speakers, but beyond that, the options are limited. ACCELS is pretty well-known among Peace Corps Volunteers, so it’s not surprising that a lot of RPCVs turn to them for jobs in the area after their service.

It is always interesting being in the company of former Peace Corps Volunteers. First off, it seems that there’s a universal code against letting current PCVs pay for anything. This is a very nice little gesture, compounded by the fact that we’re all poor as hell anyway, and it creates a little bit of ongoing community spirit… I know that if I happen to find myself in some obscure corner of the world one day and happen to find the PCVs, dinner and drinks will be on me. Partially because, I mean, come on, we’re all the same brand of crazy, and also because the only real way to pay back the people who’ve done it for me is to pay it forward for others. I find it charming.

But they also have a lot of interesting stories, like the guy from Turkmenistan who literally starved for about four months because he was in this mountain holler that nobody could get to. He said he got rations of onions, flour, and bread, and that’s what they ate until the flour went rancid and the bread got too moldy to even consider eating. Then they ate onion-and-water soup. When Peace Corps finally contacted him about four months into this diet, he had zero percent body fat.

All I gotta say is that some people are an entirely different brand of hardcore.

But at the conference ended on Saturday and since we had the luxury of being able to drive back, the other PCV with me and I decided to extend our stay for another day, just to be able to enjoy a little taste of Almaty.

We also got to meet up with some of Almaty’s expat crowd, who, surprise surprise, were all former Peace Corps Volunteers. Small effing world. Almaty is a pretty cool city, in the fact that it’s a ridiculously schizophrenic blend of Central Asian and Western, due to the influx of oil money. The bones of the city are very similar to Bishkek in the feel of the street configuration and the makeup of apartment complexes, but it’s juxtaposed against soaring skyscrapers, enormous shopping malls, and business centers that could easily compete with New York City in their bulk. The Hyatt in Almaty is composed of two fifty-story buildings built of dark green glass with an LCD strip at the top that rotates ads and stock numbers. It makes the Hyatt in Bishkek, a modest five-story beige block, look like a slum.

One of the things I had a hard time wrapping my head around was the absolute absence of marshrutkas. There were none in the city; public transportation seems to be built around buses that actually have fixed stops, trolleys that run on wires strung above the street, and streetcars with tracks embedded in the asphalt. Amazing.

Almaty also made me realize what an absolute flipping mess I’m going to be when I get back to the States. Reverse culture shock was never something I took altogether too seriously… I mean, when I came back from Japan, I was basically fine. The only things I had to get used to were not saying “sumimasen” every five seconds or so, and bowing like a bobbing drinking-bird toy when I was speaking. (These habits took me about two months to drop.) But, I mean, I was able to settle back into the rhythm of life easily enough.

When we met up with the expats, we decided to go to a coffee shop. Like, a real coffee shop. One with dark paneled wood with pastel walls and funky artsy wall sconces with classical music in the background and wi-fi. With actual booth seating and bistro tables. With terracotta tiled floors and wrought-iron backed seats. With wide glass windows overlooking the street and an outdoor seating area. With iced drinks and coffee that wasn’t instant.

I didn’t exactly freak out or anything, but when I walked in and saw the menu (which was chalkboard with the offerings listed in Cyrillic and English), and I started laughing. I don’t know why. I couldn’t stop. I had to walk away from the coffee bar to go compose myself. Then I ordered an iced mocha that cost four dollars. And it was wonderful.

My little episode prompted reminiscences from the other former Volunteers with me… one said that when she got back home and went to a supermarket with her mother for the first time, she lost her mother and ended up walking up and down one aisle for an hour with the cart staring at the cream cheese selection. I remember another story rotating around a breakdown sparked by too many varieties of orange juice.

After the coffee bar, we all decided to walk over to an Indian restaurant, since I haven’t had anything of the sort since I left home ground. We walked through a mall so somebody could get some money from an ATM, and I couldn’t stop pointing at things – the supermarket, the fragrance stores, the clothing stores, more coffee shops and proclaiming “holy shit” about every five seconds. Yep. I’m going to be a hot mess if I ever see the inside of a Costco again.

It’s just so weird, really. You come here, and you actually adapt to the significant reduction in quality of life quite quickly. You get used to not bathing more than once a week, to not having electricity or water all the time, to traveling in an overpacked minivan that might actually be worth more as spare parts. You get used to your main shopping experiences happening in bazaars or tiny dry good stores that sell vodka and maybe a few loaves of bread. Not to say that it never annoys me, but whenever I have a severe beef with my life, it almost never has to do with the material aspects of my living situation. Sure, it would be nice if the electricity didn’t cut out every day, but, I mean, whatever.

But then you go somewhere and you have some aspects of what you used to do regularly and what you used to have at your fingertips thrust back at you and… I don’t know, at least to me, it’s just so funny. I used to frequent coffee shops all the time. I loved them. But I hadn’t been to one in over nine months, and my coffee consumption quota is met by Nescafe more often than not these days. And it’s not as though I feel this is a severe lacking in my life… but just to have it again just, I don’t know, it made me laugh.

Another weird thing is bathing. The hotel we stayed at was actually very nice… easily the nicest hotel I’ve been in since I got here. It’s an old Soviet sanatorium, but they actually pay attention to the upkeep. There’s even a very nice golf course, and I think they hold the Kazakh Open there.

And the rooms came equipped with brilliant showers, with unlimited hot water. Great! I took a shower the first morning, and the second morning… and on the third morning, I woke up with frizzy hair and dry skin. Didn’t take any more showers. I suppose as much as I’ve gotten used mentally to not bathing as often, my body has adjusted too.

But Almaty is a nice city overall, and now that I have some friends there, I wouldn’t mind spending an idle week enjoying some Western comforts and good company. We’ll see what I do with my annual leave. If, near the end of my service, I actually have some days left over and it’s nearing the cutoff for using annual leave, I might go up to Almaty for a few days.

As for Kazakhstan itself, it is surprising how different the landscape is from Kyrgyzstan, considering how they're border countries. But as soon as we passed through the checkpoint, the mountains got farther away and we spent about four hours driving through the steppe. The steppe is an interesting bit of natural phenomena... the closest thing I could really liken it to are rolling hills, but they're hills mixed in with occasional cliffs and rock crags. It's like a cross between fields and mountains, if you can imagine such a thing. Very beautiful, or so I thought.

In Kyrgyzstan news, things have taken a turn for the interesting. Again. Two events happened today, which could possibly alter my future, but we’ll see.

The first one is that my counterpart is officially not working at the school next year. I asked her about it today, and she gave me a definite no. Of course “definite” has a way of changing around here, but it does look as though she’s not going to be here. She doesn’t know if she’ll be in Bishkek or Russia, but the main point is that she’s not going to be here.

Overall I’m happy for her, since I’ve said many times, teaching here is a crappy job and with her skills she could do much better. But, I mean, I’m sad for me, since this makes the second year of my service look a lot bleaker than it did previously. One of three things will happen if my counterpart leaves. One, I teach with the other English teacher at the school. There are a few problems inherent with this, namely that the other English teacher seems to teach the younger classes currently (at least, I and my current counterpart appear to teach all the classes from fifth grade and up… the school isn’t that big, after all), and plus, she, uh, can’t speak English. At all. She actually used to be a German teacher, and went to university for German language, but in the current political climate German isn’t as useful in the global market as it used to be, and everybody wants to take English. Thus, she got shunted over to the English department, despite the fact that I haven’t heard her say more than three words in English the entire time I’ve been here.

To be honest I do feel sorry for her, since she obviously put a lot of stock into the German language, only to have it become virtually unmarketable when the Soviet Union collapsed. I suppose, if she’s good, she could feasibly get a decent-paying job at a university with it, but it’s a lot harder to pass in the secondary schools, which are English-oriented when it comes to foreign language.

Also, she has some truancy issues, which were apparently so bad that the zavouch and director had to have an intervention. Which, I mean, come on, this is Kyrgyzstan, and I didn’t even know it was possible to be too late here. The situation must be dire.

So, uh, overall that doesn’t seem too appealing. She might not even really want to work with me, as she can’t speak English and the times that I have spoken to her, she’s seemed embarrassed about it. At my old village, there was one teacher who was unwilling to be my counterpart for the exact same reason. (At my old school we had three English teachers, the one who didn’t want to work with me, one who was an absolute nutjob and only really wanted me to help her get an American work visa, and the third, who was amazing.) I don’t know her comprehension level with reading and writing, though, which might be surprisingly high. A lot of people who came out of the Soviet system can read and write fairly well in English, though they can’t speak. I’ll just spend a year communicating with my counterpart through letters. …awesome.

The second option is that the school hires a new teacher, and I end up working with the new person. I’m sure they’ll need a new teacher, as I doubt the one teacher left will be able to take on the whole load herself. I won’t be surprised if they attempt to get me to teach alone, which I am not doing. I told my program manager about my counterpart leaving today so that when it comes up it can be nipped in the bud. Teaching with an altogether new teacher is kind of a wild card option, as I could be pleasantly surprised or unpleasantly displeased, depending on the person they get for the job.

Either way, though, it’s going to be an uphill slog since whomever I end up with won’t have gone through any of the counterpart trainings, and it’ll be difficult to write a grant with somebody who hasn’t done the PDM seminar. At this rate, though, I don’t know if I’m even going to attempt to write one. I was planning on it, but if I don’t have the personnel resources to implement it, it’s not worth the headache. I think we’re technically supposed to do one, but, I mean, it’s not required. I do know volunteers who haven’t.

The third and final option is, of course, another site change. Another one. I am torn over wanting this, and I guess it’ll depend on if a) the school here still wants me, or b) if it’s really awful working with whatever new counterpart they manage to dig up. Obviously, if the school can’t find work for me, I’ll have to leave regardless. I do have a feeling that they’re going to be interested in keeping me around, at least on an administrative level, since volunteers do bring a bit of prestige to the school and I think most of the students do like me.

Likely, they’ll find a teacher who’s at least willing to have me in the room, and then it’ll depend on if I can stand it or not. Again, I might get really lucky and end up with somebody who’s awesome, or at least interested in trying to work with me. Though, to be honest, I’ve been having a run of shit luck with things since I swore in as a volunteer, so I’m not counting on it.

But moving again is just… ugh, man, the most frustrating part about all of this is that nobody else seems to be having these problems. Not that site changes haven’t happened, but all the ones that I know of happened when the Volunteer had some sort of problem with their site, reported it to Peace Corps, and then they got moved of their own volition. Nobody has gotten moved because they got kicked out of their house and then were homeless and had to move because they had no place to put their shit and it was January.

And now… I have a house, but no counterpart. I suppose the good part about this is that if I do end up having to move again, I’ve got until the end of August to worry about it. There’s no reason why I can’t keep living here over the summer, even if something happens and I’m definitely not working at the school next year.

I’m starting to think that Peace Corps really doesn’t do enough research or put enough thought into their site placements. I really think that these major problems that have riddled my service could have been avoided with a little more thought. For example, take my first site. During our PST, they give us a sheet to fill out with requests we have about our sites. Doesn’t mean that we’ll get them, but it’s our chance to put our wants down and submit them to Peace Corps, for better or worse.

My one single request was an independent living option. I was totally willing to accept a compound house, so it didn’t have to be an apartment, but I was really not willing to live in the same house with a host family for two years. Six months, fine, but not two years. Of course, there was always the chance that I’d really hit it off with my host family and not want to move, but I definitely was very clear that I needed the option.

So, they put me in my first site. I’ve mentioned before, but the previous Peace Corps volunteer in my first site also had housing issues… he had to move to Bishkek for the last six months of his service, since he experienced problems similar to mine. On top of this, I started having problems with my host family almost immediately after moving in, and I was very open with Peace Corps about it, so they knew I was on the prowl for new housing.

And since I was so desperate for housing, I had to take the first place that came along, which was the fateful house I ended up getting evicted from for having the gall to invite three people over one night. And we had been looking pretty steadily for threeish months for independent living… hell, we were even asking about an abandoned apartment that had busted in windows. I knew that nothing else was going to come up after I had lost the house.

I can’t help but think this entire thing could have been avoided if my advocated want for independent housing could have been connected with the first PCV’s problems with housing. Not to say that Peace Corps is a travel agency and they should cater to my every whim, but come on. My only request had to do with housing. And they put me in a place that had known housing issues. They should have put a volunteer there who was willing from the beginning to live with a host family for two years.

And then, with the place I’m at now… they originally hadn’t requested a new Volunteer, and in the defense of Peace Corps, they were in a huge hurry to find me a new site as, well, I was homeless. And this new site had a compound house, which both satisfied my want for independent living and Peace Corps’ rule about moving within your first year and another three-month mandatory homestay period. But, I mean, maybe the reason why they didn’t request another Volunteer was because the counterpart had plans to leave the school. That was basically the first thing my counterpart told me when I got to site… was that there was a chance she wouldn’t be there next year.

I mean, seriously.

So, I don’t know. We’ll see. Chances are probably relatively high that I’ll still get to stay here, though my quality of work life will likely flat line.

It’s just so irritating, because basically ever since swearing in, more of my energy has been dedicated to just trying to survive and have good mental health, rather than actually serving. I think that I’m kind of at the point where, barring an emergency at home or catastrophic injury or illness or something else that forces my hand, I’ll probably live out my two years here. Life isn’t horrible. It’s irritating and depressing and frustrating sometimes, but, I mean, life at home was irritating and depressing and frustrating sometimes too. I’m on a semi-even keel, and I can make it.

So I’ll finish my service and I’ll be happy as hell that I made it, I’ll get the nice gold bangle to decorate my resume, and I’ll be proud that I made a commitment and followed through. However, I won’t have actually done anything. No grants, and if I keep on being bounced around the place like a migrant worker, it’s difficult to make ties and get really involved in a community. Hell, even if you just stay in one place for two years, in the grand scheme of it all that’s not that long. I was only in my first site for three months, and I’ve been here for about four months, two of which I wasn’t working due to the extended winter break. Come on, that’s frustrating. I didn’t join Peace Corps for a two-year vacation where I was poor as hell so I couldn’t actually do anything. I honestly did want to work, but all this other shit just keeps getting in the way.

I guess we’ll see.

The other issue that came up today was, of course, having to do with housing. My host father came in and asked if he could talk to me, which immediately set off red lights in my head because, well, he never comes in to talk to me unless he needs money for the electric bill. I said of course, and he sat down at my table, which, well, set the alarm firing off in my head along with the lights, especially when he said there was a problem.

I immediately started spinning off lists in my head about what I could have possibly done to upset the family. I have had friends over occasionally, but that’s only happened a handful of times, and it was only one person each time. I rarely drink here, and I’ve never been drunk. Plus, they didn’t seem to care much about either the friends or the alcohol. I pay my rent almost obnoxiously on time, and I mostly keep to myself. Plus, I mean, I’m generally gone at least one week out of the month, if not more. I couldn’t possibly be annoying. I’m not here enough. And when I am here, I never ask the family for anything. I even use my own toilet paper, for crying out loud. I even feel weird calling my host father “a host father” in writing, as I act more like a boarder than anything else. I call the couple I rent from by their names, not “Mom and Dad.” I basically say “host parents” only because I don’t like using people’s names in my blog, and it’s just easier than typing “the people from whom I rent.” I suppose I could say “landlord,” but that sounds too authoritarian and distant. We are friendly and we see each other every day, but it’s definitely not a close relationship.

Yes, I am ridiculously fucking picky about nomenclature. What’s the point of writing if you can’t write precisely?

But, actually, this time the problem had nothing to do with me. He was holding some sort of bank flyer in his hand and started talking about money. He asked if I paid rent or if Peace Corps did. At first, I thought that maybe he wanted to raise my rent, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal… I actually do pay under the max limit for housing allowance in this region, so if he hiked it a bit it wouldn’t have mattered.

Apparently, though, there was something going on with his bank and he needed a large sum of money. He was asking if I could pay in advance for the next year right now. He even said that if for some reason I had to move again, he could pay the sum back, so I guess he’s got a debt or something that he needs to pay off. I know he’s a decent guy and pretty responsible, so I don’t doubt that he’d be able to give me the money back at some point in the future if he had to, but, well, I didn’t think that Peace Corps would be willing to pay housing in advance like that.

Plus, well, the possibility arose today that I might have to move over the summer if the counterpart situation isn’t resolved, so even if Peace Corps said it was okay, I don’t know if I’d realistically be able to do it. I ended up calling my program manager to talk to him, since her Russian skills are better and it’s just easier if the fact that I probably can’t give him thousands of som in advance is also coming from my boss, and not just from me.

Though, the good thing about it is that he did say that even if I couldn’t pay in advance there was no problem with me staying here for the rest of my service. So, it’s nice to get a bit of positive reinforcement about that. Of course, if I have to move it’s moot, but it’s nice to know that I’m not just utterly hopeless at living in Central Asia.

But for the rest of the school year, I’m just going to let it all slide. Originally my program manager was going to come out and observe a class with my counterpart and I, just to reinforce the importance of team teaching. Since my counterpart operates as a school official as well, she tends to leave the classroom a lot to go do other administrative things. Which, while this is a ton more legit than just leaving the class to go drink chai (not unusual with some counterparts), it still left me in the class alone. This happened at least five times a week, sometimes for an entire day, and it was annoying me. But at this point, I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I’ll just print off a shitton of word searches to hand out in the event where I have to manage a class myself. Whatever. I’m actually leaving again for Naryn in a week, and then I’ll probably take more program travel at the end of the month to go out to the lake so I can work more on doing FLEX PDO prep with the other volunteer who’s participating. All and all, I’ve only got about three more solid weeks of actual teaching until the end of the year.

I also hear that students essentially stop showing up in May… it’s a very holiday-heavy month, and not to mention there’s more work in the fields that needs to be done. And I’m curious to see how many students actually do show up in June. The school year usually ends on the 25th of May, but since we had the extended break, it got pushed back into June. We’ll see about that one.

I don’t know if the school knows about my counterpart leaving yet, so I’m afraid to make any direct inquiries to the director about next year, as I don’t want to inadvertently cause trouble for my counterpart. One thing about living here is that it’s definitely made me a lot more laid back about these sorts of things. Back in America, I would have already been making phone calls and preparations and whatever else. Here, it’s just a lot less hassle to lay back and let it happen. If I have to move, I’ll move. If I get a new counterpart, I’ll try and work with her. If I end up with the English teacher that’s already at the school, I’ll give it a shot. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll request a change. The good part about this is that the new volunteers came earlier than we did, so the COS date for the leaving Volunteers and the swearing-in for the new ones don’t synch up. The new Volunteers will be at site in June, while the old Volunteers don’t leave until August/September.

This will open up a lot of sites that won’t be immediately filled by new Volunteers. If I really do have to move, at least I’ll have some options. There is a Russian-speaking TEFL volunteer in Chui who’ll be COSing this year, and he’ll be vacating an apartment that I could move into. The problem is that he also doesn’t have a counterpart (last year they started the team-teaching thing, but it wasn’t mandatory), which presents virtually the same problem I’ll have here. The other possibility I have my eye on is a volunteer out in Karakol who actually works at some sort of lyceum, and he has a counterpart. His kids have to test to get into where he works, and he says he doesn’t really have the discipline problems that most other TEFLs are plagued with. The problem there is that he’s a Kyrgyz speaker, but Karakol is a pretty Russified city so the language shouldn’t be a problem. The other thing is that Karakol’s out in Issyk-kul, so that’ll be a major move to the other side of the country. But he’ll also be leaving an apartment open. So, I don’t know.

All this, and the dogs that live here have finally started getting used to me. Figures.

.amazon fail

2009-04-13T04:13:00.000-07:00

Important enough to pull my head out from my self-absorbed Peace Corps Volunteerin' behind and pretend I'm in a place to have a say about the first world...

Most people have likely already heard about the huge amazon.com fiasco by now. If not, basically all books having to do with lesbian/gay/transgendered themes have been deranked by Amazon. If you're not familiar with "book ranking," you should know that when you type in a book title or any search term into the Amazon search box, what comes up is based on the ranking of the book. If the book does not have a ranking, it either won't show up in the search or will only show up after a few pages. To prove my point, go to amazon.com and type in "homosexuality" and see what comes up. Take a look at the majority of the titles that come up. Yeah. Creepy, right?

In the official statement from Amazon on this, they claim it was just a glitch and was being fixed, but this is doubtful because certain authors have noticed their books being deranked since Feburary.

This came to light this past Sunday, when a self-published author noticed that some of his books had disappeared from Amazon's list, he emailed the company to ask what the deal was. The company's response to the author's query:

"In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature." [Source]

Interesting pattern of events, that... how something that was policy on Sunday becomes "a glitch" on Monday because Twitter lost its shit.

Bad move, Amazon. The utter senselessness of this censoring endeavor is brought even more starkly to light when you realize what books have been affected and which have not: Ellen DeGeneres' biography? Deranked. Heather Has Two Mommies? Deranked. Brokeback Mountain? Deranked. Lady Chatterly's Lover? Deranked.

Ron Jeremy's biography entitled "The Hardest (Working) Man In Showbiz?" Still ranked.. Autobiographies from porn stars from the 1980s? Amazon's still got 'em. An Orgy Of Playboys? You bet.

Oh, and if you'd like to learn how to "Tickle His Pickle," Amazon still has that book ranked too.

So, clearly, this "adult" labling of products on amazon.com is strangely slanted at best, and clearly biased at worst, considering how a lot of the deranked books are children's books, some are memoirs/autobiographies, and others are classics. Also quite strangely hit were books about disabled people and sex as books titled "The Sexual Politics of Disability" and "The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability" have also been deranked.

This is important on several levels, mainly for the issues with censorship it causes. Even if it doesn't bother you at all that the first book that comes up now when you search for "homosexuality" is A Parent's Guide To Preventing Homosexuality, you should be bothered at the completely arbitrary removal of certain titles as "adult" when they have nothing "adult" about them.

Besides, even if they only legit removed "adult" books regardless if they described homosexual or heterosexual sex with any level of disability, it should still bother you. Censorship sucks. Don't let media giants get away with it. One hopes that Amazon will either come up with one hell of a legit excuse or a beautifully worded apology, and I hope that until they do, you won't buy from them.

I say this because, well, I'm living in Kyrgyzstan and my online shopping is quite minimal these days, so I have to live vicariously through you. Get your books from Barnes & Nobel or Powells.

And, well, this is all. I'm going to Almaty tomorrow - see you in a week!

.but when i dream of london i can only see your face

2009-04-02T01:58:00.000-07:00

Author's note:

...not that this whole thing isn't an author's note, but whateves.

The sun is shining. I made bread last night and, wonder of wonders, my oven did not explode. Tonight I am making homemade macaroni and cheese with tomatoes. I have also bought a liter box of apricot nectar, and I am drinking all of it right now.

That's right. I care not for your values of "moderation" or "save it for later." Screw you guys. It is delicious and I am not stopping.

This is the dime at the bottom of the pool. I am focusing on it.

Return to your lives!

.and I am listening to the dial tone and getting nowhere with you

2009-03-31T01:43:00.001-07:00

Tiny bits of serendipity make me happy.

In other non-gag-order news, I got accepted to help train kids who are going off to America for a year. There's a non-profit government organization here called American Councils, or ACCELS, and they run a program known as FLEX, or the Future Leaders Exchange Program. (Er, Future Leaders EXchange, I guess.) The director of ACCELS came to speak with us during our In Service Training back in January, and in the little packet of information he gave us was a flyer advertising the training position.

FLEX is pretty well-known in schools here. It's essentially an exchange program - kids take tests in English language and go through the whole application process, and the lucky and qualified get to go to America for a school year. One of my first projects back at my original site was to help interested students prepare for the FLEX exams. The training that I applied for happens at some point in June, where the chosen students go to a retreat for cultural traning. Basically the reverse equal to our Pre Service Training, only it's in Kyrgyzstan and only for a couple of weeks, as opposed to three months.

I applied for the program because I thought it would be something interesting to do, and it would also convieniently give me something to do when school was out. But, turns out that there's a hell of a bonus that comes along with it: the trainers, of course, get to be trained themselves before taking on the job. And where is the training, do you ask? Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Almaty is like, a real city. Maybe this comes from having Bishkek at my fingertips constantly, but I've kind of gotten over it. It's a relatively nice city, as far as cities in Central Asia go, but there's not much to it. It's a luxury to be able to access it whenever I want, and being so close to Bishkek is useful because it means that I know Bishkek. Whatever this country can offer in ways of resources and creature comforts, I can access it. (Of course, this is also a double-edged sword, because a lot of the really nice things in this city I can't afford. It's one thing to be in the middle of nowhere and not have a shower or constant electricity or climate control when nobody else has it either, it's another to not have all those things and then be constantly in a place where other people do and not be able to get it.)

So for a week in April, I will be up in Almaty getting my training on, but probably also hitting up clubs and going on shopping sprees and maybe even drinking a latte or seven. Or twelve. Even better is that the hotel we're being put up in apparently has an indoor water park of some sort. Even better, my transportation, lodgings, and visa costs are all paid for, and we also get a per diem that's supposedly pretty good. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I can't be directly paid for the work I do, but there are other ways to be appropriately compensated. I've heard that the per diem is pretty generous, since we can't be handed a paycheck for the actual training itself.

But in order to do all of this, I have to get the Kazakh visa. This was very conveniently handled for me - I just had to provide ACCELS with my passport, some passport photos, and fill out the form. They took it to the embassy for me and did all the footwork. All I have to do today is go over to pick it up.

The problem with this is that the Kazakh embassy is pretty persnickety about giving out visas... you can only go on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6pm. ACCELS said all I had to do was show up at the office before six, and their driver would take me there. Great.

The problem with this is that the last public transportation to my village leaves at 6:30, which would either leave me stranded in Bishkek or forced to shell out around 400 som for a taxi ride. 400 som is like ten bucks, which is not too much for a forty-minute taxi ride, but to put it in perspective I went from Naryn City to Bishkek for 300 som, and that was a five hour taxi ride. Yeah.

So I called up ACCELS, and they were all like, "No problem. We'll just have one of our drivers take you back to your village after you're done at the embassy."

Sweet. Free taxi ride. This absolutely means I need to capitalize on this, so I went out and bought myself a second oven (hopefully this one will not explode...), since if I've got a free ride that is not on an overpacked minivan, might as well take advantage of it and haul some awkwardly-sized boxes with kitchen appliances, right?

.you've got to help me make a stand

2009-03-30T02:00:00.000-07:00

I've always loved to swim. When I was a kid, I'd play this game in the deep end of the pool with coins. Basically, the game was that I'd throw a coin into the water, dive after it, and go pick it up.

Not terribly inventive, I suppose, but I used to like to watch the little glint of silver tumble down for the twelve or fourteen feet, acertain its position, and jump down after it, so I could spend as much time down at the bottom of the pool as possible without having to waste time searching for it. I wouldn't pick up the coin immediately. I'd find it, rest my hands against the bumpy white floor and sunken bandaids, and examine the coin at every angle possible. The way the president's face would be magnified by the light refraction down fourteen feet. The ridged edges. Sometimes I'd pick the coin up and follow the watery circular shadow it would make against the wall. Sometimes I'd read the year, just to see if I was older than the coin or if it was older than me, and do some math to see how much older or younger it was. Sometimes I'd ponder the "In God We Trust" inscription, and why we had to have faith written on our currency. Just to give myself something to do at the bottom of the pool. After all, I couldn't stay down there for long, but underwater is a good place to think. Quiet. Nobody's going to swim up behind you at the bottom of the pool and ask to borrow a pencil or what the time is. You can look at a coin for as long as you damn well want at the bottom of the pool.

This is my game right now. I have tossed the coin, and I'm at the bottom of the pool simply looking at it from all angles. I am not picking it up. I am not looking upwards with dismay at all the depth of water I have to ascend before I can breathe again. There is nothing but the coin for however long I can manage to stay under. At some point I'm going to go hurtling back toward the surface again for air, but for now there's nothing but water pressure and a dime laying next to some lost hair elastics and drowned insects. Not bad. Not biologically comfortable, I suppose, it's not the place I was meant to be for all time, but there's something to be said for it. For whatever reason I've always liked the bottom of the pool.

Yes, I do spend all of my time thinking of esoteric things to relate my current situation to, thank you very much.

I'm also distracting myself with material things. Like, just yesterday, I bought myself a pepper. It was yellow, and delicious. I also managed to find some spinach at the bazaar, and I ate stir-fried spinach and pepper last night with onion, garlic, and rice with no remorse whatsoever. I also bought new sponges, which is exciting. And a second bucket, because we haven't had running water for about a month now, and rinsing out my garbage bucket so I could tote water back from the pump was a bit digusting, even for me. Today I am going to buy some more mixing bowls and cutting boards. Later this month I am getting a new stove, since my old one exploded. And probably a hot plate, as only one burner on my gas range works.

I wouldn't say I am not materialistic, but I am quite good with money, surprisingly. Mostly because I'm good at making do with what I've already got and being mostly content with it. I can eat reasonably well without a stove, and I've been making do with a single cutting board and a single burner, but it would just be nice to have these other things. I want some nice things right now. Like bowls and produce.

Today I am also paying my host family for another month's rent. This is important to a certain extent, because it means that I am staying for another month. I will pay for my living space, and thus I will live there. I am staying at the bottom of the pool for a little while longer. Breathing regularly above water is a definite luxury and something I enjoy, but there's a lot to be said about the bottom of the pool and it would be a shame to leave the coin without getting to know when it was produced just because it would be nice to breathe again.

The surface will always exist. I will return there soon enough. But if you've already dived fourteen feet deep, you might as well stay there as long as you can stand it.

.he brewed a song of love and hatred

2009-03-28T00:12:00.000-07:00

Story of my life at the moment.

I was sitting on a bench right outside the Peace Corps office, trying not to go from plain ol' depression to catastrophic nuclear meltdown, when a militsia car drives up.

One dude gets out. He says, "Hello."

I say, "Hi."

He tells me that I can't sit on the bench. I say, "What?" and he repeats himself.

So I get off the bench and stand next to it. He says, "Okay," and they get back on the car and drive off.

Jesus effing Christ. Somebody deliver me from this clusterfuck madness that has become my life before I fly off the handle entirely.

.i think i'll go home and mull this over

2009-03-24T03:30:00.000-07:00

It's too bad that I'm under a gag order currently, or I could write a blog entry that might be up for a Pulitzer Prize. It would at least give Days of Our Lives a run for its money.

But due to said gag order, I'm not at liberty to discuss the batshit craziness of the past couple of weeks. Fine. I'm good at being obtuse.

There's a lot to be said about learning to keep one's head down. There's even more to be said about keeping your head down but keeping your ears open. I've lived and been in many places, and while I don't exactly have the years behind me to claim wisdom or anything sensational like that, I know from my travels that each place, each city and village and farm, has its own rhythm. In my opinion, anybody from any country can live with a modicum of happiness anywhere, so long as they can figure out the rhythm and at least attempt to move with it. Doesn't have to be dancing. Foot tapping will often do the trick.

But a city rhythm can provide more than just a guide to style of life. There's information out there, in the way that people move down the street, the operation of liquor shops, and the angle of slouch the people drinking vodka on the street corners display at three in the afternoon. Kind of like watching a sundial's shadow tell the time.

Moral of the story: we shall see.

And I wish I could publish the truth, but I can't. One day, maybe. For now, though, the sun rises, the drinkers slouch on their corners, and life soldiers on.

.on a long and lonesome highway

2009-03-15T01:16:00.000-07:00

Somewhere in this darkness there's a life that I can't find.
Maybe it's too far away or maybe I'm just blind.

Maybe I'm just blind.

[B-52s, Love Me When I'm Gone]

the lake;

2009-03-08T23:06:00.001-07:00

he

vomits darkly into the basin

while I
crumble down the stairs possessed
by a demon of similar ilk

stars are in the sky.
not that I'm looking but
some primal part of me knows
that just like the cigarettes
and roads and bottles
they remain

or they're satallites.

she

laughs and it's a flash
of teeth and smoke
and I
push my fingers against my temples
and smile
for I only know this moment.

we

have our dues to pay

we

were purely built this way

we

tumble out the sidewalks
and breathe life into
ice with open hands

and closed eyes.

.just tell them we're survivors

2009-03-04T00:52:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.all those places I got found

2009-01-22T23:55:00.000-08:00

From Barack Obama's Inaugural Address:

"America, in the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words; with hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come; let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom and delivered it safely to future generations."

Yes, yes, and yes. Amen, omin, so mote it be, yes, and again, yes. Fist pump, high-five, peace sign, funky chicken dance, and yes.

And that is all.

.I've been too, too hard to find

2009-01-10T23:36:00.000-08:00

Went to work today. For thirty minutes.

Yesterday I went into Bishkek, for the dual purpose of shopping and meeting up with my program manager, as she wanted to give me some paperwork and ask how the new site was going.

Next week is In Service Training, which means I get to go to a hotel in Bishkek with the other Volunteers, attend some seminars, and try not to be too hungover. Our counterparts will also be there for part of it, with the intended goal of assessing how our team teaching is going, and get some pointers on improvement.

Of course, this is a slightly skewed objective in my case, as I’ve moved and now have a new counterpart. When I was talking to my program manager yesterday, she gave me another copy of all the paperwork for the seminars. The load was considerably lessened for me, as all the work we were supposed to do regarding how our teaching experiences went doesn’t apply to me, since I haven’t taught with my new counterpart yet, and everything I did previously is moot.

She still wanted me to prepare a demo lesson with my new counterpart, though. Part of the program is that we’re going to be broken up into small groups with our counterparts and demo a lesson for other counterparts and volunteers to watch, so we can get feedback.

I admit I wasn’t particularly happy about this development, given that I had only met my counterpart for about five minutes previously, and had never team-taught with her. In addition, even though my new village has had a Volunteer before, the Volunteer taught alone, since the team-teaching aspect of the TEFL program was only introduced last year. On top of this, we would only have had today to work on it, so I was put in the position of having to explain team-teaching, get to know my counterpart, and come up with some sort of demo lesson to model next week in the span of a couple hours. In Russian.

But, you know, I was willing to give it the old college try, mostly because there was no alternative. I went into work this morning at nine, to drop off the bundles of paperwork to both the director and my counterpart, and give a whack at planning something.

The day wasn’t a total waste, because I hadn’t met the director yet. Turns out she’s a rather nice woman, and we had a pleasant chat about the weather and how I was liking the new village as I gave her my teaching contract and other sundry bureaucratic tidbits. We were in the director’s office cum teacher’s lounge, and I sat down to wait for my counterpart, who hadn’t showed.

In most respects, I’m pleased with the development in my Russian. I’m far from the most advanced Volunteer language-wise, but I’d estimate I’m somewhere above the median for the group. The best part about it is that I’m starting to be able to use humor again in a deliberate fashion, rather than blundering through conjugations and having people laugh due to my sheer ineptitude with the language.

Humor is one of those things that is a long time coming when learning a language. Most of my brand of humor is based off of observations; namely, I hold firm to the conviction that the world is an absolutely ridiculous place. In the past month, I got kicked out of a house, was homeless for a week, got bit by a dog, had a smackdown with another dog, and caught on fire. I couldn’t make this stuff up, and I’ve never been wanting for imagination. You can laugh about it or cry about it, I figure. Sometimes the crying is necessary, but laughing is overall more enjoyable and less messy.

But in order to make witty observations, you have to be able to first be able to say what you mean in a semi-coherent manner, and second be able to convey that you think it’s funny and not tragic. The latter is the harder part. But I was able to make some semi-snide comments today that the teachers found amusing and not upsetting, which is a mark in my favor, as far as I’m concerned.

Ten minutes into waiting for my counterpart she was still a no-show, so I called my program manager, as she had told me to give her a ring anyhow. Turns out my counterpart was at a seminar today, and everybody had forgotten. Oh well. I asked my program manager when the hell I was supposed to plan this demo lesson, as tomorrow’s Saturday and the teachers won’t be at school, and then Sunday’s the first day of IST. The program manager said she didn’t know; we’d probably have to try and wing it during the prep time we’d have before the presentations.

Sigh. A wing and a prayer, and that’s all I’ve got these days.

When I was having the conversation in English with my program manager, the rest of the teachers had fallen into silence and were staring at me. Sometimes, I think people forget that I actually do speak a language quite fluently, and I’m not just an overgrown three-year-old with a bad accent.

But the looking Russian thing is equal parts amusing and irritating. Before I went to the office yesterday to meet with my program manager, I stopped by the bazaar to pick up some groceries, one of the items being a crate of eggs. I was lugging my purchases back to the office, when this dude fell in step behind me, holding a bag of samsas and a coke.

He asked me if I was selling the eggs, and that he’d like to buy some. I was like… uh… no, I went to the bazaar for these. He was like, oh, that’s too bad, they would have been nice with my lunch. And then off he went.

It still sometimes amazes me that I can blend so well. I’m semi-accustomed to Japan, where wherever I went it felt like I had FOREIGNER branded on my head.

After I got to the office it was lunchtime, so I knew I couldn’t go talk to my program manager just then, and I decided to go rustle up some grub for myself. I got a gamburger, which is kind of like a cross between a hamburger and a doner kabab, and stopped in a store to pick up a Snickers bar.

Me: Hello. May I have a small Snickers, please?

Storekeeper: [squints for a moment] You’re not Russian.

Me: Nope. Lots of people think I am, though.

Storekeeper: Where are you from?

Me: I’m American.

Storekeeper: What! You’re not blonde!

Me: …no. Can I have a Snick-

Storekeeper: You speak Russian!

Me: Yeah. Not well, though. Can I-

Storekeeper: No, your Russian is really good! You’re American!

This went on for about five minutes before I actually got to conduct a transaction resulting in a candy bar. I told my program manager about it, and she laughed and congratulated me on integrating so well.

Frankly, I integrate perfectly, as long as I keep my damn mouth shut.

But anyway, I went home after the half hour detour at the school and got back to lounging. A couple hours later, I got a call on my phone from an unknown number.

I usually pick up whatever number calls me, even though the vast majority of the time it’s just random people who dialed the wrong number. Sometimes, though, it’s a call from the Peace Corps office or one of my friends who changed their SIM cards. I answered and there was a hesitant person speaking in Russian, and I almost hung up, before she identified herself as my counterpart.

Apparently she was back from the seminar, and wanted to meet up with me at my house to discuss the paperwork and the planning. I was thrilled, and agreed, but then realized that my house looked like a train wreck and I had just told somebody that I barely knew to come over in an hour and a half.

At first I was annoyed, but then I was like… wait. Something to do. A deadline. An actual deadline.

I had never really appreciated deadlines before. I’ve always been vaguely aware that in most circumstances, sans timed math tests, I love to work against the clock and come up with something awesome for my efforts. At college I was always under some kind of time limit, so I had just gotten used to it and was mostly annoyed that I never had any time to relax, but considering how I haven’t had an actual deadline for anything in a while…

I washed the dishes, put away my clothes, made the bed, and even did entirely unnecessary things like scrub some of the burned gunk off of the stove. (Which was there when I got here, by the way.) I even scrubbed the floors and rid the corners of the dust jungles that had accumulated there between myself and the previous Volunteer. I also managed to find an unused lamp in the corner, and used an extension cord to hook it up at my bedtable, making it the first bedside lamp I’ve had in country.

Then I remembered I should probably let the host family know I was expecting a guest. I figured it shouldn’t be a problem… when I moved in, the host father only said that I couldn’t invite students over (which I hadn’t been planning on), but made it perfectly clear it was fine if I had other Volunteers guest. I caught him when he was chopping some wood, but when I told him I was expecting to have my counterpart over, he frowned.

I’ve come to the conclusion that people are kind of weird about having guests here. It’s bizarre because they have people over all the time, but they’re extraordinarily picky about who it is. It’s hard to figure out the rules, because it’s not like in America where if friends want to see each other, they’ll call first. People just pop on by.

But he was pretty clear that he didn’t really want my counterpart over, for reasons that I still can’t discern. But like a million other things in life right now, it wasn’t worth arguing about. I called my counterpart back (no small feat because when the electricity goes out around here, which is daily, the cell phone towers go out as well), and told her we couldn’t meet at my house.

Then she stupefied me by asking where we should meet, then, if we couldn’t do it at my house. It was kind of an injured tone. (What I wanted to say was, “Why not your house?” But I’m still too American to go about inviting myself over to a non-friend’s house.) I was like, uh, I’ve lived here for two weeks. You’ve been here most of your life, if not all of it. Though, even in the short span of two weeks, I know that there’s no real place to go here that’s not somebody’s house, one of the general stores, or the school. Or, I guess, the fields, but that’s not exactly an arena productive for lesson planning. We don’t have any cafes or public meeting spaces, unlike my previous village that had at least five cafes and a town hall. The store closest to the school does have a couple of tables where people drink vodka, but I don’t know if that would be, you know, appropriate.

Then the phone cut out, due to the electric outage. I sighed, and geared myself up to try again when the power came back on, when she texted me. In perfect English. (Though she did spell my name “Lora,” which I find rather charming. All the country nationals spell my name as such, probably because it’s the direct transliteration from how you spell it in Russian. My last name would be “Hyankok.”)

My counterpart is one of the myriad examples, I’ve figured out, of somebody who has impeccable knowledge of English grammar and syntax, but can’t speak very well. At least, I’ve never heard her say more than a couple words in English, and all our phone conversations have been in Russian. I myself dislike talking on the phone in either Russian or Japanese – when you can’t see the person you’re talking with, it makes it a thousand times harder to understand what they’re saying. Sometimes, if I’m speaking with a person face-to-face in one of my auxiliary languages, even if I don’t know what they’re talking about, I can infer a lot by their gestures or facial expressions. Phone conversations deprive you of that. I used to have a near-phobia about it when I was in Japan, but I guess I’ve mostly gotten over it. Still don’t like it, however.

But she told me to meet her tomorrow at the school. We couldn’t meet there today because the school closes at noon. Alright, fine. I guess at least my house is clean. And I have a bedside lamp. And I’m glad I asked before my counterpart just showed up at my house. I’d really hate to have another row over whom I invited over to my living quarters. I just got here. (Though, I have to say, I was kind of annoyed by it, but in a distant way. If we start having issues about having friends over, then it’ll become a big enough thing to throw a stink about. But, he did say that the previous Volunteer had groups of friends over occasionally, so it shouldn't be a problem. Hopefully. Jesus, not again.)

Also finally got around to doing some laundry, but by hand. In addition to the electricity shortages, we’ve had water shortages these past few days. Generally speaking, the water works when the electricity works, but for some reason the water hasn’t been working recently (I suspect the pipes may be frozen), which precluded me from using the washing machine. I haven’t been having troubles with the shortages, though… the banya’s in my house, so there’s about a thirty gallon barrel in there, and I’ve been fine on the water front. Besides, the fact that I have a sink in my house that at least works some of the time is a huge luxury as it is. In my previous village when I lived on my own, I only had an outdoor pump. In some places, the water only runs once a week, so they have to drag out all their pots and barrels and anything that holds water and hoard. My married friends live on a compound where the host family doesn’t have a water pump period – they have to go ask the neighbors whenever they want some.

And that is just something I cannot comprehend: a life without access to water. Forget about access to clean water, but any water. It’s one thing to be a Peace Corps Volunteer and cope with it for a couple of years or whatnot and then go back to the magical land of water purification systems and hot water heaters… but could you imagine living your life and knowing that there was no access to water on your property and you couldn’t afford to have piping put in?

But I ended up doing a load of socks and underwear by hand. I also needed to clean some of my shirts and pants for IST, but even if I had access to the laundry machine, they wouldn’t have dried in time. So I just hung them up, rubbed out whatever looked too heinously disgusting with damp palms, and sprayed them with Febreeze. Febreeze. The stuff of the gods. That and beer.

Everything’s hanging in the kitchen, as that’s where it’s actually warm. Walking in there now is like walking into the underwear jungle, warm and damp. If they don’t dry by tomorrow, I’ll have to plug in my heater and fast-track that shizzle.

When I went to the school today, I also volunteered myself for teaching some English clubs over the break, if there were any interested students about. I mostly offered at the insistence of my program manager, who said that working would help me forget about all the crap that happened in my old village. I think she’s still moderately concerned that I’m going to throw in the towel, which at this point I’m probably not going to do. At least, not yet. The thing about this, and I can only assume this is the same for immigrants and expats everywhere, is that it’s an every day decision to stay. Every day you wake up, and decide that, for whatever reason there is, you’re gonna stick around. Or you decide you aren’t. Of course, you do a variant of this even when you’re on the homefront, but most people, if they have a crappy day at work or get evicted from their houses don’t throw up their hands and be all like, “To hell with this, I’m leaving the country.” Obviously, some people do decide to hell with it and leave the country, and those idiots are called Peace Corps Volunteers. Ergo, greetings from Kyrgyzstan.

And to a certain degree my program manager’s right, in the sense that I’m here to do work, not just sit around in my house and listen to the soundtrack from Mulan. I have to say that I’m hesitant to take on a workload, though, because I’ve been pretty content just existing for a while and not having anybody bother me. On the other hand, I am here to work, and teaching a couple hours of English a week is not going to cut in on my Disney sing-along time in a significant way. It would also help me get to know some students, likely interested ones if they’re willing to come learn English over the break, which is certainly not a bad thing.

However, I have to admit I am a little perturbed about her suggestion to “forget” the whole getting evicted and being homeless thing. I am not a forgetter. I’ve never been one to hold a grudge, and if I ran into my old landlady at this point I’d probably only spit at her feet and not into her face (and in a couple of months, I wouldn’t spit at her at all, probably just ignore her), but as somebody who writes like it’s a chronic disease and studies war monuments in her scholarly life, forgetting is just not in the fabric of my being.

I like keeping these little challenges that I’ve surmounted one way or another, like pearls I’ve formed in my belly or smooth river rocks in a pocket. They’re the things I worry at when times get tough, the things I take out and look at when I’m feeling like a lousy waste of respiration. It’s like, hey, come on, I did this. I managed. I’m here.

And I know that a lot of what I write is about me being upset or frustrated, but I can only hope that it doesn’t convey that I’m completely unhappy here, because I’m not. Writing is simply a coping mechanism for me, it’s nearly always the first thing I reach for when something weird, awesome, bad, or upsetting happens. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a version of talking to myself, in a way that doesn’t make me look loony. Especially now, when I spend most of my time either alone or surrounded by people who don’t speak my native tongue. It’s hard to express myself succinctly in Russian. I can communicate, I can operate, but I can’t talk with much precision about what I’m feeling or thinking. And as somebody who is, admittedly rather loquacious, not being able to express myself precisely is one of the biggest frustrations of being here.

There are several reasons why I’m here. The stars are gorgeous, and a lot of the time I’ll go stand outside at night and be awed at their beauty. The mountains are deep and raw. I’ll do a lot of stupid things for beauty, in words or touch or sight, and I’ve done much dumber things for it before than live across the world from my birthplace and not have electricity or running water. People can be astonishingly kind, anywhere, just as often as they’re frustrating and rude. The tomatoes here are out of this world. I’m trying to make some sort of difference, and I don’t know in what capacity or if it’s actually doing any good whatsoever, but I’m trying. And I stay.

Nowhere is perfect. There are things here that I think are wrong, but I’m not resigned to them. I accept them, I understand their existence and sometimes even the reason why they exist, but I’m not resigned. I never will be: I refuse. I go on believing everything is fixable, somehow, even if I’m not equipped or able to do it. So I stay, in the hopes that maybe someday, somebody will be able to. Most likely, if problems are solved it won’t have had anything to do with me being here or not, but there’s the chance that it might. I don’t just dwell in possibility: I build it, I tend it, I believe in it, I breathe life into it. I don’t hold that possibility is something that just exists; it’s a living, mutating entity, you have to want something for it to be. So I go on wanting. And I stay.

I’m learning. And I love to learn, I always have, and one of my main objectives in this was not just to teach but to learn, to absorb, to observe, to stand in the flames until I crumble to ashes and come out reborn, a phoenix of sorts. I loved college, and I’ll go back to scale the ivory tower again, but this is an entirely different kind of learning. In many ways, I learned as much on the rugby pitch during college as I did in the classroom, and I’ll learn just the same riding the wrong way on a matshruka for an hour with my head smashed in somebody else’s armpit. And I stay.

I just don’t want to put anybody off an international experience like this with my complaining. If you’ve ever been thinking about it, you should do it. There’s nothing particularly special or great about me, other than a willingness to give everything up over and over again. You’ll give up more than you ever thought possible, and it’ll be frustrating and you’ll get bit by dogs and burned by stoves and laughed at and ignored and scorned and you’ll be angry and despairing and hateful sometimes. You know, kind of like being in love. Kind of like anything that’s worth having, it’s worth fighting for. It’s worth staying for.

It’s a law of the universe that if you try and help somebody, you’re more likely to get kicked in the teeth for your troubles than thanked. But what you’ll give you’ll get back threefold, and you’ll get it back in the form of pearls and river rocks that you’ll never lose. I can only hope that makes some sort of sense.

Sometimes, I wish I were more of a poet or a scientist than a novelist. There must be a more succinct way to say that. Yeats is so much better at all of this than I am.

So, up until today, it’s been worth it. Tomorrow, of course, I’ll have to make the decision again. But for now, I’ll stay.

Written Saturday, January 10, 2009

Well, turns out my estimations about my counterpart were completely incorrect. I met her today to discuss what we were going to do for IST, and she speaks English quite well, much better than I mangle Russian. She also seems quite excited to work with me, which definitely makes the future look brighter than it had previously.

We got to talking, and when I gave her the brief synopsis of my background, she asked why I wasn’t scared of going so many different places.

I always find this an interesting question, mostly because even though I have a happy tendency to go random locations, I’m still positively coddled compared to actual adventurers. I mean, I have access to Western-standard medical care, I get a constant salary, I never have to worry about food, I have a semi-definite objective with a time frame and, confrontations with dogs aside, have never really felt that I’ve been in mortal peril.

I mean, John Adams taking his son on a cross-Atlantic journey when the British navy was on the prowl, that took guts. Lewis and Clark going to the President and being all like, “So, you bought all this land and there’s this river going through it… let’s see where it goes” was ballsy. The myriad of nameless people who turned to their families and said, “Well, we’re going to Oregon now, hopefully we won’t die in the mountains, have a nice life” were brave. The sailors who took to the seas for years on end, semi-believing that they’d fall off the edge of the earth but ended up stuck in the Atlantic circle were a whole different brand of crazy than mine. Hell, I get the internet. People who get blasted into space face the real possibility of dying in an endless vacuum. Me, I drink about nineteen billion cups of coffee a day. Hell, some of it’s real coffee I get sent from home.

Even the original Peace Corps Volunteers back in the sixties, before all the support systems and bureaucracy came to be should get more credit than I do. I have a laptop computer and a cell phone, for crying out loud.

Though the cell phone thing has gotten a little annoying, primarily because when the power goes out, the towers go out as well. I never had this problem during PST or at my old site, probably because I was either right next to the capital, or a direct suburb of a semi-major town. When the power cuts started there, my cell phone would still work, but here it doesn’t. I could actually remedy this problem by switching my service provider… I have Megacom, which is cheaper and more Volunteers have it, but also has less through coverage than does Bitel, the other major provider. There’s a third, even more expensive company called Fonex, which actually requires that you sign up for plans. Megacom and Bitel just require you to buy minutes, which frankly I consider superior, because it means I don’t have to go about figuring out and signing a contract in Russian. (When I had a cell phone in Japan I had to sign a contract that I couldn’t read. For all I know it said, “We get your first born child and we will use the Lincoln Memorial for tofu storage. Sign here.”) Fonex has the most complete coverage of all: there’s a Volunteer out by Lake Issyk-Kul who’s so far out both Bitel and Megacom don’t work, so he has to have Fonex. The biggest downfall I see for Fonex, aside from the cost, is that if you want to text him, for some bizarre reason you have to do it in all capital letters, or else it comes out as a salad of Cyrillic lettering. Texting him is like shouting up a mountain. The digital way.

I considered switching, as Peace Corps told me that Bitel probably works constantly where I am, but I’m likely not going to do it. I mean, the power generally goes out around these parts from one in the afternoon until five, and then again from eleven in the evening until six in the morning. Of course, there are exceptions, and there were even a couple of days this week where it didn’t go off at all, but that’s how things usually go.

But changing would require me getting a new number, and since most Volunteers are on the Megacom circuit, it would be more expensive for me in the long run. Besides, when people do call me, it’s usually not between the hours of one and five, when most of us are at least attempting to work in some capacity or other, and also usually not at night, when everybody likes to sleep. I figure that if I ever have a burning emergency, I can always use the host family’s phone. And if Peace Corps really needs to get a hold of me, they can just call the landline. Sure, it would be irritating for the family if they got a phone call at three in the morning from Peace Corps, but good god if Peace Corps is calling at three in the morning we’d better be breeching the antebellum of World War III, regardless.

Of course, the biggest problem would be if another Volunteer had to call me in an emergency and the power was out, but I figure the chances of that are (hopefully) slim. …and besides, if anybody was ever really having a life or death situation, I can’t conceive why they would need to call me first anyway.

And I’ve never been married to cell phones. As anybody who knows me and has tried to get in contact with me when I was in America, I tend to leave my cell phone at home. Next to the landline. I’ve gotten better about it since I went to Japan, but I’m still not exactly the easiest person to reach by phone. I don’t like being at everybody’s beck and call every minute of every day. Nyah. (Not that I don’t love you and don’t enjoy hearing from most people who DO call me, but it’s the principle of the thing. Nyah.)

See, these are my daily trials. Cell phone service. That, and what to have for dinner. Tonight it was sautéed pumpkin and onions over a bed of rice and topped with a fried egg. Mm. I do wish there were more vegetables available right now, though. Pretty much the only things on sale at the bazaar are pumpkins, turnips, cabbages, carrots, potatoes, garlic, and these big green vegetables that I don’t know the name of, but are kind of like a radish. Root vegetables. They do, of course, occasionally have tomatoes and peppers imported from Tashkent, but those tend to be astronomically expensive. And not that root vegetables can’t taste good or aren’t nutritious, but it would be nice to have a little more variety. I miss corn, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatoes. In addition, a lot of the recipes in my cookbook rely heavily on tomatoes. I never directly want for anything, I suppose, but I do look forward to the day when tomatoes hit the shelves for five som a kilo again. (The imported ones are usually at least fifty som… I did see some once for thirty-five, but when I looked at them they all had rot-bottom. The peppers are even more ridiculous: a hundred som a kilo. Right. When I can afford that, I’ll get back to you.) Though, I guess I can’t really complain too much: I do most of my shopping at the best-known produce bazaar in the country. If anywhere’s got it, it’s going to be at Osh Bazaar. So, whatever choices I could possibly have at this point in the year, they’re available to me. Not to mention, I could go to one of the supermarkets in Bishkek and get canned vegetables. But I’m cheap and poor. Oh well. At least I really like pumpkin.

The good part about this time of year, though, is that the oranges are delicious and relatively cheap. I still haven’t managed to make it home with a bag, though. The first time, I bought a half-kilo and ate them all in the resource center. The second, I bought a kilo, but still ate them all before I got back. I have no self-control when it comes to oranges. It’s even worse, because oranges are good for you, so there’s no guilt involved in demolishing an entire kilo on my lonesome, other than disappointment that I don’t have any more when they’re gone . Maybe I’ll just hire a truck to come dump a metric ton off at my house, like they do with coal. Mm, vitamin C like you wouldn’t believe. It might last me a week or so.

I still have language issues. And I don’t just mean the fact that I can’t speak Russian all that well, but if I’m not consciously on it all the time, I still bust out with Japanese. And in some ways, it’s worse than it was when I first got here. When I first got here, I would just start talking in Japanese, as was my natural reaction when trying to speak in not-English, but now I do this blending thing. For example:

[at the bazaar]

Me: Zdrastvotsya. Sumimasen ga, u vas yest ringo?

Shopkeeper: …?

Me: Goddamn it. Yabliki

Translation: (Russian) Hello. (Japanese) Excuse me but, (Russian) do you have (Japanese) apples?

And sometimes when people ask me the day or the week or the date, I’ll tell them in Japanese. It’s just like I can’t stop. I’m pretty good with not responding in English, but I just can’t keep the Japanese out. If I ever go back to Japan, I’ll probably start talking to the Japanese with Russian, and they’ll be all like what the hell. It’s usually just what comes to mind first.

Basically, what this boils down to is that I need to go live in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. They have a big Russian population there, for some reason. I remember being in Sapporo for the snow festival, and while most signs in Honshu are in English, Japanese, and Korean, in Sapporo they were mostly in English, Japanese, and Russian. My life path is clear now. I must go work for Sapporo beer. That wouldn’t be a bad life. I could live off of shiroi koibito cookies and all I could eat jengis kahn. Not to mention, the Japanese really know how to live life. They sell beer and porn out of vending machines. All I can say is, some people have it all figured out.

Ugh, and they have onsen in Japan. Onsen, public bathing in hot springs under the snow. These were the benefits I reaped from sobbing through kanji tests for nigh on six years, but nooooo, I had to give it all up and go to Kyrgyzstan. Not that I’m particularly unhappy with this turn of events, and by the end of college and after six years of Japanese language, four of culture study, one year living in Japan, and two hundred pages of thesis about Japan, I kind of needed to do something else. But now that I’m doing something else, I dream in nikkuman. Nikkuman futatsu, in fact, which is the only way to properly go about nikkuman.

My main problem is that I really have no direction in life. Whereas some of my friends have been espousing since I met them that they’d like to be doctors, or writers, or politicians, I really have no idea. In my toolkit there is but a willingness to live anywhere, a fluent native tongue, two auxiliary languages (and I wouldn’t mind taking a stab at a third), and a love of writing. That’s it. Uhh, well, that narrows down the life choices. Time to join the Peace Corps.

Oh well. Sometimes I like to think I’m a partial reincarnation of one of those pioneers, the people who threw it all to the wind in the hopes that wherever else might be better, or at least point them in the right direction.

In the words of Roethke, “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow/I feel in my fate what I cannot fear/I learn by going where I have to go.”

In short, I read too much poetry, think too much, do too little, know too much and not enough at the same time, but I’m fine with it.

No sense fighting against the crux of all of this, I suppose.

.and you will make sense of this

2009-01-08T00:49:00.000-08:00

I went to a bookstore today. This was a mistake.

I actually went for a legit reason: I needed a calendar, and wasn't having any luck finding one at the bazaars. I had to go talk to my program manager today regarding my move and all of that, and I asked her where a good place to buy one would be. She suggested Raratet, which I suppose is a chain of bookstores across town. I only knew where the one by Ala-too square was, but she said there was another outlet closer to Peace Corps.

So, off I went on a hunt.

I admit to being something of a bibliophile. I love books, even when I'm not reading them. I never feel at home somewhere until I have a stack of books planted in my living quarters. In my new place, the books are all lined up on the mantel above my fireplace, and I love walking by and just looking at them. Even though the majority of them are things like "grammar games" and other sundry teaching aides, they're just so nice to look at. All colorful and full of words.

I had never been to the other Raratet, which was probably a good idea, since the first thing I noticed when I walked in was the smell. Oh, book-smell. Like dust and ink and wood and an eternity of patience and knowledge and mmm. My wallet made a little weeping sound, since it knew it was about to get pulverized.

I was the child whose parents would take her to Toys R Us, but never to Borders. Even before I left America, I remember going into the Borders outlet at Oakland Mall and having my mother go LAURA WE'RE NOT BUYING ANYTHING I MEAN IT THIS TIME.

I have a few specifications for my dream house. One, it has to have a porch. Preferably blue shutters, with some odd-shaped windows and maybe a turret. And it has to have a library. With a mahogany table and handsome leather-upholstered chair near the giant window in the back, as well as one of those one-and-a-half chairs with footstool upholstered in nubby chenille. And a dark wooded round table for my coffee.

I have Plans For Life.

But I did get my calendar. And a copy of Harry Potter in Russian, because, come on, what life-loving bibliophile could pass up "Garry Potter?" Even if I did spend more on it than all my groceries. Whatever. Shut up.

I mean it.

.we work the black seam together

2009-01-07T22:13:00.000-08:00

Written Monday, January 5, 2009

Kyrgyzstan has really made me hate dogs.

I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a dog person. I grew up in a coven of cats, essentially, and I can’t ever remember wanting a dog in a serious way. In America, I never really had anything against dogs, provided they were well-trained and we minded our respective businesses, but I’ve never been particularly warm to them. Small dogs annoy me; if I were going to have one, it would be a large one. But then large dogs, in my opinion, smell bad, even if you bathe them regularly. And they chew up all your shit.

I don’t understand why so many people seem to be head over heels for them. Cats are clearly the superior beings.

But I still remained mostly neutral towards them, until I came here. At my current living situation, I consider it nearabouts perfect, with the exception of the dogs. At all my old residences, it was generally the big dogs that were the real threat, and they were mostly chained up. The smaller dogs could be yappy and jumpy, but they didn’t bite.

Well, here they do. There’s about five or six small dogs that live here, and every time I step out of the house, they follow me around, snarling and barking. Today I went into Bishkek to make some purchases, and came back to the house, with the usual chorus of irritating yapping and false striking. They had come close enough before to nip my pantcuffs, but today I wasn’t able to get inside the house fast enough, and one of them actually bit my ankle. Usually I can outmaneuver them, but my hands were full and the ground is snow-covered, which makes me less nimble than I normally am. (Not that I’m particularly nimble to begin with, mind you, but I can generally avoid dog bite when there’s dry ground and I’m not weighted down with kilograms of vegetables.)

Thankfully, because I was wearing so many layers and was in mid-step, the bite didn’t break the skin. But still. Goddamn it, I hate dogs. The biggest problem is that I have to walk through a narrow hallway type area to get to the outhouse, and it’s right where the doghouse is, so it’s hard to avoid them. And then there’re five of the damn things, so they tend to surround me. Usually when that happens, a member of the family comes tearing out of the house and rescues me, but today they caught me on the stairs when my hands were full and the family was busy with something else.

The easiest way to distract dogs in general is with hunks of bread, but when I run out of that, they tend to come back to try and attack me again, and I’m not going to spend money on a ton of bread just so I don’t get mauled on the way to the bathroom and back. The urge to just kick the hell out of them has risen steadily (and the next bastard that tries to bite me is getting his jaw broken, I don’t care what it does to my relationship with the family), but the problem is that if you start getting hostile towards one of them, the other four close in.

Ugh. Jesus H. Christ, if it’s not one thing, it’s about a billion others. I’m waiting for the host father to come back over to tend the petchka, and then I’ll tell him one of the dogs bit me, and hopefully he’ll go put them up for the night.

I just don’t understand the usefulness of biting dogs. Sure, I guess maybe in a pinch they’d be good for security, but since dogs are pretty much constantly barking here, everybody ignores them. And frankly, with the frequency that people guest around these parts, violent dogs just seem counterproductive if they attack everything that isn’t a member of the immediate family who lives on the compound. I assume that the dogs on premises will get used to me eventually, but in the meantime it’s just irritating. What’s even more exasperating is that dogs are some of the easiest animals on the face of the planet to train, Christ on a pogo stick. It would even be different if they only really went after me at night, but at night when I go out, they’re all sleeping and leave me alone. It’s only in the middle of the day they want to kill me. Sometimes I just want to say, you know, most people who want to rob your house are probably not going to do so during the light of day, and if anybody with mal intent does come at night and your pack of mangy bastards are all sleeping it’s no friggin’ good. In the meantime, I just want to go piss in peace, and I risk dog attack doing so.

I guess on the whole it’s not so bad, or not as bad as it could be, considering that some Volunteers live with families that have giant attack dogs that are unleashed at night, confining the Volunteer to the house past a certain hour. I don’t know if I’d be able to live somewhere like that; what if there was an emergency and I had to leave the house for some reason? What if something absolutely ridiculous happened, like the house caught on fire? You’d have to choose between burning wreckage and being eaten by a giant beast.

At least the little dogs I can practice my soccer technique on if push came to shove over it. I’m still stronger than them. And while I feel vaguely bad writing about wanting to kick small dogs, I can’t deny the fact that, well, I do want to kick them. And they want to bite me, so it’s a mutually unhappy relationship.

Update: Well, since I reported the biting, they’ve only let one little dog out of the pen in the back. He still doesn’t like me, but appears to be frightened enough to stay about five feet away and bark incessantly. My morning coffee breaks aren’t nearly as relaxing as they were previously, as I basically squat outside and get serenaded by incessant yapping, but at least they’re no longer the foray into doom they once were.

Since there’s only one out, I’ve taken the bread approach to dealing with him. He only gets up the guts to do anything remotely akin to an attack when I’m on the stairs into my house, so I throw a chunk of bread at him when I leave and when I return. This confuses him. He stops to eat it, and then just kind of looks at me for about five minutes before remembering he’s supposed to try and intimidate me, and returns to his barking. I throw another piece before I reenter the house, to lure him away from the stairs.

Hopefully, he’ll make his peace with me in a couple of weeks, before they let the rest of the dogs out. Maybe I can win them over one at a time. Argh. Still irritating, but at least not dangerous.

Maybe part of the problem is that I smell like other dogs. Considering the frequency with which I do laundry around these parts, I probably still smell like the myriad of dogs I used to live with.

In other, non dog-related news, I have absolutely nothing to do with my life at the moment. At my old school we only had January off, and since I was well-settled in that community, I had been planning on continuing – or extending, if there had been interest – my English clubs there, as well as maybe picking up a few more hours at work in the capital. Since I had to move, I’ve got no real ties to this community other than my host family, so starting up something like an English club right now would be difficult, to say the least. I theoretically could go to the capital more often, but it takes about five times as long these days, particularly with the roads in the shape they’re in, and I don’t want to die in a fiery car wreck involving a matshruka and a snow ditch.

So, I’ve started studying for the GRE. To what end I know not, as I have no direct aspirations for grad school at the moment, but I figure I’ve got nothing else to do. In typical fashion, I have completely ignored the math part, and have been perusing the verbals. Even though, really, I need more help on the math than anything, but whatever. I had always thought my vocabulary was fairly ostentatious as it was, but then I was presented with words like “exculpate,” “pusillanimous,” and “perfidy.” Turns out, my vocabulary’s poorer than a Peace Corps Volunteer the night before payday. Or, dare I say, it is impecunious like a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I do plan on eventually working these words into my everyday vocabulary, though. I yearn for the day I can say, “I find your conduct quite perfidious.” Or maybe, “It is exigent that I go to Tim Hortons and get an iced capp!” (Ohhhh, Tim Hortons. Somebody go buy some coffee from there and drink it for me.) Eventually, my English will get to the point where nobody will be able to understand me. Except for other GRE takers, who will tell me to stop being such a pedant jerkoff.

Then, the Kaplan book tells me to “use my knowledge of Romance languages” to help me figure out the words I don’t know. Romance languages. Riiiight. You know, all that Spanish and Italian I use. Nowhere in the book does it say to “use your knowledge of Slavic and Asian languages” to help you ace the GRE. So all those hours spent beating my head against honorifics and noun declension have come to naught. Eat me, Kaplan. Ugh.

I found a word I like, though. “Peripatetic.” According to my dictionary, it describes somebody who “travels from place to place, especially working in several establishments and traveling between them, particularly a teacher.”

I, my friends, am peripatetic. I’m going to put that on my resume. “eXtreme peripatetic-ness.” It’ll go between the “why I am awesome” part and the “look at all this cool shit I did” part, and next to the “why I am not afraid of dog bite” addendum.

Written Tuesday, January 6, 2009

I caught on fire today. It was great.

As I may have mentioned previously, I have virtually nothing to do with myself these days. I hang around the house, cook, clean, and eat, while spending my days not cold. I say “not cold” instead of “warm,” because I figure it’s a better description of my normal state.

The heating in this house is a petchka, a coal-burning stove. I’ve actually started doing most of my cooking over the petchka, because it’s already lit, I’ve paid for the coal, and I figure it’ll help me conserve my gas for the other stove. The top of the petchka is outfitted with interlocking rings that you can remove, depending on the size of the pot you want to use. I use a short metal pole (that I actually think is the top of a flat-head screwdriver without the grip) to lever out the rings so I can fit my pots in.

But there’s no real heating system in the rest of the house; that is, there aren’t any pipes that help distribute the warmth. There actually is a tiled wall in the living room area that conducts heat, and there’s a cut-through window between the kitchen and the bedroom, but the warmest room in the house is definitely the kitchen. I spend a lot of time just standing in there, because there’s not enough room to put a chair, but at least it’s warm.

But the petchka does a good enough job at cooking, with the exception that I can’t really regulate the heat. Today I was levering off some of the metal top to do some cooking, but the coal hadn’t burnt down far enough, which sent flames shooting through the top of it.

I backed off, and then realized that my sweatshirt was smoking, and little flames were eating their way up to the Smith Rugby emblem in the corner. So I did what any sane, well-educated person would do.

I screamed “ARRRRRGH” and ran out of the kitchen.

Then, a vision from third grade appeared in the form of STOP, DROP AND ROLL. You know, basically, don’t run around like a dipshit when you’re on fire.

So I did a magnificent belly flop in the foyer, but by then the flames had already beaten themselves out anyway.

Stupid third grade. Failed me again. That was also the year of timed multiplication tables, which I blame for my inability to do math. I’m pretty sure the only reason why I passed was because I knew what the word “conundrum” meant, and it shocked the teacher into not failing me despite my lousy math grades. Fire safety apparently didn’t stick, either.

Surprisingly, my sweatshirt is still in decent shape. There’s a burned brown supernova right below the rugby emblem and one of the strings to the hoodie is kind of charred, but it didn’t burn through. That’s right, Smith Rugby: it’s that hardcore.

Between the dog attacks and the bursting into flame, I’d say I’m getting right along in my new home.

No, no, seriously, I love the death out of this family. They’ve kept the dogs shut up since the biting episode, which I am beyond grateful for. Just today, the host father helped me buy some more wood for my petchka, dry wood, and he’s been beyond helpful.

Though, I almost got mauled by another dog getting the wood. I bought it from the people across the street, and when I went over to pay for it, I made the mistake of walking by a shed-type building. This huge brown and black dog darted out of it, scaring the bejesus out of me.

I dropped to a squat, partially because Peace Corps told us that the best way to ward off a hostile dog is by pretending to pick up a rock, mostly because after five years of rugby, my natural battle position when something is running at me is to squat, anyway. I was only about three feet away from the thing in mid-charge, though, so pretending to pick up a rock wasn’t going to do me much good.

The guy selling me the wood shouted something that I didn’t understand, but the dog kept coming, so I threw my weight back, landed on my hands, and roundhouse kicked the dog’s front feet from under it. The dog went down on the ice with a whimper, and then was jerked back from the chain I didn’t see around its neck.

I skittered backwards on my hands, breathing hard, feeling my pulse hammer in my throat, and staring at the absolutely infuriated animal as it got up and tried to lunge again, held back by the chain. The wood-seller, laughing, unruffled by it all, told me “good job.”

Then I went home, curled up in a ball, and cried forever. At least I have dry wood, now.

But, I can tell this is a good family by the amount of blankets they’ve offered me. My PST host family was also good in this vein; my original bed came equipped with far too many blankets, given that it was July and about fifty degrees centigrade in the shade. My next host family at my original site did not offer me any blankets other than the thin coverlet. Now, in their defense I never asked, but by that time I had my sleeping bag and it wasn’t necessary.

My landlady did give me one blanket, but kept the rest locked up in one of the rooms that was shut off to me. At the time I thought this was a little miserly, but kept on using my sleeping bag and didn’t say anything, as I could tell she was a little crochety and didn’t want to upset her. Turns out maybe I should have said something, as it all ended up a wash in the end.

But this host family has offered a plethora of blankets. As I mentioned, the first night here I slept in the main house, and the mother insisted I take the bedding she gave me back to my house the next day. Plus, there are already about fifty blankets on the bed. For the first time since October, I’m not using my sleeping bag, even though this is arguably the coldest it’s been since I’ve been here.

They also keep bringing me food. The first couple of days I was here it was over New Year’s, so I spent a lot of time in the main house to celebrate, and ate enough salads, plov, shashlik, and bread to kill a small animal. But now that the holidays are mostly done, sans Orthodox Christmas, the host father still occasionally pops over with something for me to snack on. Today it was fried dumplings stuffed with potato.

We get along pretty well, though it’s quite arguable that our interaction has been minimal since the holidays. They really liked the last Volunteer – the host mother is actually knitting some socks for her as I write this, and they still occasionally call each other. They admitted to me that they hadn’t originally wanted another tenant, but when Peace Corps called and asked, the offer of extra income was too tempting, given that the host father seems to be out of work at the moment. And, I mean, considering how nobody would have been living in the guesthouse, they figured it was worth their while to make some extra cash off it.

And, to be honest, I think it is far more of a leap of faith to invite a foreigner to live in your house than it is to have them live in the guesthouse, particularly if the guesthouse has its own kitchen. Whatever I may say about my first host family at my original site, I have to admire them for at least having the guts to take a shot at having me there. (Of course, I also think there was a modicum of ignorance about my different set of priorities and values involved in said decision, but you can’t really fault them for that. I don’t think they had dealt much with non-Kyrgyz grown stock before, at least not in such an intimate setting.) I had a great time with my PST family, but I wasn’t cooking there, so there were fewer opportunities for me to become a problem. Particularly given the importance that most people seem to place on having things in a certain order here… I think that the cardinal sign of a good woman in Kyrgyzstan is the way in which they keep their household in order, and it drove my host mother up the wall that I was doing things differently, and messing up the order of things. I also admit that I’m not the cleanest person in the world, mostly because I’ve never measured my worth against the cleanliness of my surroundings. I remember one of our arguments about the state of my room, and she kept on repeating, “But you’re a girl!” and I was all like, “Yeah? So what?” Clash of the cultural titans, that.

But, back to my current situation… I also think that the original Volunteer probably put more effort into bolstering her relationship with the host family, as she got here immediately after PST, when we were still all guns-a-blazin’ to integrate. Not that I have no interest in having a good relationship with them, as I like this family a lot, but I’ve had kind of a rough month and I’m friggin’ exhausted. I’ve been mostly content to sleep eleven hours a day, wake up, piddle around with my computer, read, cook, and eat. I finally have that solitude I’ve been craving since about mid-September, and I’m virtually marinating in it.

And it’s a good thing I like solitude, as I’m now pretty far from the next closest Volunteer. Geographically speaking, I’m probably only about twenty or thirty minutes from my married friends, but due to the tribulations of public transportation and my inability to afford taxis, it would take me a couple of hours to get there. There’s only one matshruka that comes here, and it goes to Bishkek. From there I can get anywhere, but even from Bishkek the next closest Volunteer is about an hour away.

But, since where I see most Volunteers is in Bishkek, anyway, it’s no big thang. And I am far from the most isolated Volunteer in the country. Some people live places where public transport doesn’t even go, so they have to hitchhike if they want to leave their village.

Sometimes I admit I get a little bored, but then I think, whoa now, the world’s off rassling somebody else for a bit. Go listen to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” on repeat for two hours and sing until your voice cracks like a thirteen-year-old boy. And then I do. Or I’ll rock out to “Don’t Stop Believing” for a day. Or two. Or peruse my extensive collection of Sting. I love Sting. Anybody who can work the word “Mephistopheles” into a song deserves to be adored unconditionally.

And, sometimes, it’s nice just to exist and be domestic for a while. Obviously, in the grand scheme of things I need a little more than that to keep me occupied, but once in a while it’s therapeutic to contribute nothing to the world other than dinner for one, clean dishes, and not being pissed off. Occasionally I’m Laura, conqueror of all that dares challenge, and other times, I’m Laura, drinker of cognac and watcher of The Office season four.

You know, we get by.

.only blue talk and love

2009-01-02T22:03:00.000-08:00

Written December 31, 2008

This has been one of the craziest weeks of my life. I mean, I’ve definitely had worse ones in the grand scheme of it all, considering that this week had no mishaps involving alcohol, drugs, or suicide. But still. Crazy.

The Saturday after I got evicted from my apartment, I ended up on a grand couch surfing tour of Chui oblast. While being homeless in a third-world country sounds like a pretty crappy situation at best (and not that it was fabulous, mind you), all things considered I got well taken care of. The hospitality of my fellow volunteers proved boundless, and I easily could have had my pick of about twenty different places to stay, and probably the worst part of it was all the moving around. I didn’t have to worry about money or food or anything on the primal needs side of things. While everybody was more than understanding, our living spaces are small, and I didn’t want to encroach on anybody’s privacy for more than a few days. Consequently, I slept in five different places last week.

Through it all, I was barraging my program manager with calls, to get updates on the living situation. As I expected, nothing came up in my village during the week I was floating about the oblast. The house I got kicked out of only turned up after about three month’s worth of reasonably intense looking. I wasn’t holding my breath for something to magically pop up on the week of the biggest holiday of the year. (Which, by the way, is New Year’s, not Christmas. There is a large population of Russian Orthodox here, but their Christmas is on January 7th, not December 25th.)

So, I moved sites. My new village is about forty minutes out of the capital, which is a little farther away than I’d like to be, but I got spoiled being in a direct suburb. I can suck it up, and it’s not that bad of a commute.

The living situation here is looking okay, so far. There actually is a rule in PC Kyrgyzstan where if you move during your first year of service, you need to go through the three month mandatory homestay period again. The conversation about this rule I had with my program manager went something like this:

PM: Well, it’s not looking as though anything is going to turn up in your old village, so you’ll probably need to change sites. You do know that there is a second homestay period with this-

Me: No.

[five second pause]

PM: I’ll talk to the Country Director.

But, anyway, Peace Corps did manage to get me pretty cleverly with the housing situation, despite my abject refusal to live with another family. My new digs are technically a homestay situation: a compound housing. But it’s the nicest damn compound house I’ve ever been in. Most of the guesthouses I’ve seen consist of one room, maybe two rooms tops. The one at my old host family at my old site had a slug infestation. But this one is srz biz. It has four rooms, a large bedroom with two beds, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bath. It’s nice to have the banya in my house, though, because it means I get to bathe without doing the ten-second dash outside in the snow. Of course, there’s no toilet, but that’s not a big deal. The main house actually does have an indoor toilet, but, I mean, I’d have to go outside to use it anyway, so six of one, half-dozen of the other between the toilet and the outhouse. I suppose this shows how far I’ve come in life, where I have both an indoor toilet and an outhouse available to me, and I go for the outhouse. I’ve been too well-trained: a couple of times I was in the main house, watching some TV or whatever, and actually left the house to use the outhouse, because I forgot there was a toilet inside. But the outhouse is actually relatively nice in the grand scheme of outhouses, and plus I’m the only one that really uses it, so it’s clean.

My new house also has the first actual fireplace I’ve seen in Kyrgyzstan. (There doesn’t appear to be a flue, so I don’t know if it’s actually usable or not, but it’s a hearth with a mantle and everything.) I actually think it’s bigger than the house I was living in at my old village, since they had two rooms locked off to me there and I only had three rooms available to me.

The family that owns the house is an older Russian couple, and their kids have all moved out and live in Bishkek, and they’re pretty chill. Most of the interaction I’ve had is with the father, and he’s helped me fill the gas balloon for the kitchen, and ran off the dogs when they started attacking me. (First time in my life I’ve ever had to legit kick a dog.) I can only assume the canines will either get used to me or learn to fear me, and either way I’m fine with it. The only thing I really miss from the old house is the small dog there, which actually turned out to be rather likeable after the first couple of days living there.

But the father actually said to me, “You can cook for yourself, can’t you? We’re not going to cook for you.” And I was like, fucking sweet, we’re going to get along just fine, as it seems as though you want to mind your own business, and I mine. He’s actually a really nice guy, though… I was asking him where I could go to find some matches, as I had forgotten to buy some before I came up and I don’t want to light the gas stove with a lighter and have it explode in my face, and he just gave me a bag with six boxes of matches in it.

The host mother came in while I was unpacking/sleeping/eating a box of Raisin Bran Crunch, and she’s really sweet. The house I’m in now is heated by coal, and since we didn’t have enough time to dedicate to getting the petchka fired up last night, she all but insisted I sleep in their house because it was warmer. Frankly, at the time I was in favor of staying in my house, as it wasn’t that cold and I’m actually kind of used to sleeping in places without heat by this point. But they insisted, and I wasn’t in any sort of mood to argue with them on my first night here. I moseyed on over to the main house, where they gave me the requisite dose of tea and started talking with me. I think I’ll really like them, actually. Basically, this is kind of like living in an apartment with really helpful neighbors. They’re all like, “Come, watch TV and drink tea with us!” and I’m completely down with that. In addition, since I live in close proximity to another family, it means that my Russian will see far more use than if I was living completely on my own, which is a perk for the language skills.

In addition, this place is criminally cheap. I was paying 2500 a month plus utilities in the house I got kicked out of, which was 500 over the amount that Peace Corps was willing to shell out for housing in this part of the country, so I had to fork out the extra 500 in addition to utilities. I get to live here for 1500 som, which is fine with me because the housing limit is 2000. Also, that’s only 300 more som than I was paying to get yelled at by my Kyrgyz host mother and tormented by my younger sister. Worth. Every. Som.

There’s a gas balloon for the stove I’ll have to pay to fill, which costs about 450 som, but I don’t know how often I’ll be needing to fill it yet, because all the other places I’ve lived had gas lines. The heating is coal, which I dropped about 2000 som on, wood included. Of course, the wood I bought was wet, and it basically does nothing but hiss at me when I try to light it. The host father actually got it to produce fire, but it took him about a liter of car oil to make it so. Whatever. I wanted to get around to learning how to light and maintain coal heating by myself, but because the batch of wood I got was so wet, it’s too much of a pain in the ass. I actually burned the hell out of myself today, as I forgot that the metal knob to the petchka would, you know, actually be hot. Between the petchka and the lack of pilot lights on the stoves, my hands are going to be impervious to heat when it’s all said and done. The father said that the previous volunteer just paid him the equal to ten bucks a month to maintain the heat, and that’s just such a good deal and so much less work that I’ll pay it. Assuming I’m here next year, I’ll be able to buy drier wood earlier in the season and give a whack at it myself.

This is the homestay experience I wanted, and it seems like it might be very similar to the one I had in Japan. In all honesty, I’m not really looking to be adopted, here. Part of the thing that drove me up the friggin’ wall at my last homestay was that the mother treated me almost exactly like I was her daughter, and I just wasn’t in the market to be yelled at because my room was cluttered. Of course, not that I don’t want to build a good, deep relationship with the people I live with, but I already have parents. I don’t need another set. I’d rather just make good friends here. Plus, the problem with simulating a parent/child relationship is that, by default, it’s an unequal setting. Obviously, the people I live with know more about life and living here than I ever will, and being put into a new culture with a different language is, in some ways, pretty similar to being a child again in that you can’t express yourself all that well or understand much of what’s going on at first. However, I’m a fast learner, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not five. I don’t need to be treated like it. Sometimes I need help, but I don’t need another mother. The one I have at home does a pretty good job, and she doesn’t need a counterpart.

Plus, and this is the kicker… WASHING MACHINE. It only took me four moves to find one, but here it is, like the promised land. And it’s an actual washing machine, like, Western-style, and not the old-fashioned shaped-like-a-can variety. I saw it when I was in the kitchen and pretty much started foaming at the mouth. They said I could use it whenever I wanted, basically. (Of course, if I just have a small load, like underwear and socks, those I’ll still do by hand. But good God, my Carhartts seriously haven’t been washed since October. It’s time to get down to business.) I was originally planning on seeking out a laundromat this month, as they do exist in Bishkek (…somewhere), but now I don’t think I’ll need to. Of course, they don’t have a dryer here, but whatever.

Turns out, though, that the previous volunteer here actually bought them the washing machine. I was like… erm, well, hopefully I’m charming enough to make up for the fact that I can’t provide you with expensive appliances. To be technical about it, it was her parents that bought the family the machine. If nothing else, though, at least I get to reap the benefits.

I guess we’ll see how it works out. Frankly, even though everything’s been coming up roses thus far, I’m a little bit hesitant to say that everything will be great, because the experience of the last three months turned out to be kind of shitty. I have to say I’m a little bit disappointed with the whole moving thing, because it essentially means that all the work and integrating I did in my previous community has turned out to be a wash. I have to start over entirely with getting to know people, getting to know the lay of the village and how everything works, where the good stores are, where the drunks harass passersby, everything. It would be different if I had serious problems with my previous community, but the only real issue I had was housing. And, well, that’s a pretty big issue, especially when you’re homeless. But my life in the community was fine.

Not that it won’t eventually be just fine here too, of course, but moving happened at a crappy time, as school just got out here, and due to the electric situation, it won’t be back in session for two months, so real integration here is going to have to wait. This sort of frustrates my original winter plans, as in the old village we were only going to be out for a month, and one of those weeks was going to be taken up by IST. Now, suddenly, I have two months to deal with, and I’m farther away from the capital so I just can’t go and fart around as easily as I had been able to before.

Oh well. There actually are some volunteers here who are putting on winter camps in February, so I can probably just jump on the bandwagon for some of those when they end up happening. And do a lot of reading.

I also got to go check out the school today, and from what I got to see of it (which wasn’t much) it seems like an all right place. My counterpart’s English is not nearly as good as my former one’s, but I was all but expecting that, considering how my other counterpart was, for all intents and purposes, fluent. But she can string together sentences, and between that and whatever Russian skills I possess, we can communicate. The school itself is actually a lot nicer than my old one… I have no idea why this is, but every single other school I’ve seen is nicer than my original one. What’s also vaguely amazing is that they actually have two separate schools here, an elementary and a secondary. In my old village, everybody just went to the same building and the overcrowding was ridiculous. My new counterpart also said that the classes here don’t get any bigger than about twenty people, which is vastly preferable to the forty-person mess that was my previous eighth grade class.

But I got introduced to what I think is most of the staff. If nothing else, living here has taught me that most of my genes seem to come from the Slavic end of things, because nearly everybody here thinks I’m Russian somehow. And not just in the, “You’re white, so you’re obviously not Kyrgyz and thus must be Russian,” way, but in the, “Hello, I was born to Ivan Ivonovitch in the Kremlin,” version of Russian. The teachers all seem to be very kind. I think I’ll get along.

The good part about moving, I guess, is that I get to do the second time around more informed. Plus, my Russian is a lot better than it was in September, so I can communicate with my colleagues with a lot less difficulty, and I’ll feel less like I’m just being led by the nose into things. When I met the teachers, they were actually convinced I had studied Russian before I came to Kyrgyzstan, because my Russian was better than the other Volunteer’s when she first got here. Of course, this is only because she came here right after PST, and I’ve had an extra three months behind me before I moved, but that’s a good sign. I know how schools here work in general, so I can spend more of my time figuring out the politics of this particular school and less time on trying to get my head around how the education system works.

So, well, here’s hoping that round two of Peace Corps volunteerism works out better than round one. And, uh, happy new year.

Written Friday, January 2, 2009

Whelp, I’m a douchebag.

Because the new years is a big holiday, and the first was my new host father’s birthday, today was the first day I actually did any real cooking in my new digs.

I did some foraging around the cupboards, since the host mother told me I could use basically anything in there. She went on at some length about this, and a lot of it I didn’t understand, but the general gist was that I could go about my business at will, which made me happy.

So I was looking around, and found some really nice kitchenware in some of the drawers. I mean really nice. Like, new cutting boards, a European-made vegetable peeler, and all sorts of china. I didn’t really have a burning need for most of it, as my lifestyle at the moment doesn’t exactly include throwing fancy dinner parties, but I was pleased about the peeler and the boards.

As a side note, I’m beginning to really like my new place. Everybody here says hello to me on the street, which is definitely different from my old village. When I first got here and the host father walked me out to the school, everybody was exceptionally friendly, but I had assumed it was mostly because I was with him, and since this is small-town Kyrgyzstan, everybody knows each other. Whenever my host father stopped to talk (which was often), people were quite pleasant to me, other than their constant dismay over my lack of hat. I do actually have a hat, but it wasn’t all that cold on that day, so I didn’t feel the pressing need for one. But, you know, I thanked them for their concern, and on we went.

Today I went out on my own, a foraging trip for some spices and bread. A family was selling apples for twenty som a kilo, so I picked up some of those, as well. And… everybody still said hello to me. Amazing.

But, anyway, I was back at home getting my cook on. I actually cooked over the petchka today, as it was burning for heat and it means I don’t have to use the gas. Look at me, I’m so Little House on the Prairie.

The host mother came in, asked me how I was doing, and said that she was going to clean out a couple more of the cabinets, as she hadn’t had time to do so before I moved in. I told her to go ahead, and kept cooking.

Then she came into the kitchen, and asked where the cutting boards and vegetable peeler were. I showed them to her, and she raised an eyebrow at me and said that they were supposed to be wedding gifts for her daughter.

Crap. No wonder they were so nice and new.

She originally said just to clean them off and put them back in their boxes, but, come on, you can’t give used kitchenware to somebody at their wedding. Instead, I’m just going to suck it up and go buy some new things. The vegetable peeler was actually from the previous Volunteer from America (no wonder it’s so good). I figure I’ll just ask my mother to throw in another one with her next shipment of love, and maybe a couple of nice knives as well. I can replace the cutting board easily enough here: I’ll just go to one of the department stores that are usually out of my price range and pick up another.

The mother took me violating her daughter’s presents pretty well, all things considering. I apologized about fifty times, and she just flapped her hand at me and said that she should have moved them before I moved in. The daughter herself isn’t even engaged yet, so at least I’m not on a working time limit to replace things. I was planning on going into Bishkek tomorrow, anyway, as I need to get a few more things to outfit this place as I’d like it, anyway. I need a bucket for my slops, as there actually is a big slop bucket outside, but it’s annoying to have to run out there every time I need to dump my coffee grounds or onion peels. I also want a large cutting board, as my gas stove actually has four burners, but only one of them works. I figure I can put a large cutting board over the three that don’t work and get another working space for the kitchen, as it’s basically a closet in there as it is. You know, things like that.

I guess on the good side of things, I have some nice new cutting boards and an awesome vegetable peeler. On the bad side of things, I’m still a douchebag, but at least I didn’t get kicked out of the house over it.

On another note, I figured out that if you fry up some apples with some cinnamon, sugar, lemon, cognac, and cloves and then top it with toasted oats, it’s pretty tasty.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

From you I want more than I’ve ever asked,
all of it – the newscasts’ terrible stories
of life in my time, the knowing it’s worse than that,
much worse – the knowing what it means to be lied to.

Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity,
coffee and bread with sour plum jam.
Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods.
Lives ticking on as if.

A typewriter’s torrent, suddenly still.
Blue soaking through fog, two dragonflies wheeling.
Acceptable levels of cruelty, steadily rising.
Whatever you bring in your hands, I need to see it.

Suddenly I understand the verb without tenses.
To smell another woman’s hair, to taste her skin.
To know the bodies drifting underwater.
To be human, said Rosa – I can’t teach you that.

A cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds – his moment.
Surely the live of life is never-ending,
the failure of nerve, a charred fuse?
I want more from you than I ever knew to ask.

Wild pink lilies erupting, tasseled stalks of corn
in the Mexican gardens, corn and roses.
Shortening days, strawberry fields in ferment
with tossed-aside, bruised fruit.

[To the Days, Adrienne Rich]

Note: I have another entry that I wrote around the time when I was homeless that, for several reasons, I will not post here. If there are interested parties, I would be willing to email it out... just leave a comment with your contact info or email me.

.out from behind the bitter ache

2008-12-23T20:02:00.000-08:00

Written Saturday, December 20, 2008

Oh, Kyrgyzstan. The land of many firsts. First time learning Russian, for instance. First time in an apartment. First time my oven exploded. First time getting evicted from an apartment. You know. The glory of firsts.

Yesterday, I had three friends over at my place. Two of ‘em were a married couple that lives about an hour away from the city; I had been extolling the virtues of my new pad and they wanted to come check it out. That and my friend is good at haircutting, and my hair was getting long enough in the back to grease it up into a duck’s ass, so I figured I should take advantage of her skills.

The third was another volunteer out from Talas. He needed to be in Osh, the south of the country, by late today. He left Talas yesterday, but it’s virtually impossible to get a taxi to go straight to Osh from Talas, so he made a pit stop in Bishkek first. As it’s about a six hour ride from Talas to Bishkek, completing the ten to twelve hour Bishkek-Osh route would have been a lot in one day. So I said he could crash at my place.

We all got back to my apartment around sixish. We had picked up some fixin’s for dinner at the bazaar, as all I really had at my place were carrots, potatoes, radishes, and some rice and eggs. (I eat stir fry more often than not these days, as it’s a filling meal that’s got quite the vegetable content and is easy to cook. Add an egg for protein and it’s as well-rounded as it’s ever going to get. However, I didn’t have enough on hand for four people, and it was worth getting something a bit fancier.)

The married couple offered to haul some of their coal over. You see, the house had a banya, but I had never fired it up for myself because a) it was too much friggin’ trouble to go through the process of firing it up just for one person, and b) the house was gas heated, so I didn’t have any coal. But there was gonna be four of us in residence that night, so we all figured that it might be worth our while, to get a nice warm place to bathe.

So, we started dinner (a tasty pre-prepared laghman, which is basically noodles with spices and vegetables), poured a couple of glasses of beer, and got the banya lit up. All and all, a pretty tame evening. We had plans to watch some movies after we bathed.

Except, in the middle of the banya-firing, my landlady came by. Now, I hadn’t seen hide nor tail of her in a while, so I was pretty surprised when she showed up. And she was pissed. (I can only assume that she had the neighbors call if it looked like I had any guests over… we weren’t being loud by any stretch of the imagination. In addition, the nights when I was alone, I was up until the electricity went out, about 11pm, blasting my music. So it couldn’t have been a noise thing.)

First, she started lecturing me about having too many people over. We actually had a discussion about this when I moved in; initially, she wanted me to ask before I had anybody over, but when I was definitely not agreeing to that, she said that I could have one or two people over occasionally. I wasn’t planning on throwing a beer blast, so I didn’t think this was unreasonable. Sure, I had three people over that night, but we weren’t doing anything rowdy or loud, so I didn’t figure it would be a problem. Well, apparently, I was wrong.

Also, she was spitting mad about the fact that I was using the banya. When I moved in, I said that I probably wouldn’t be using it much since I was living alone and it was too much trouble. But, I didn’t think that precluded me from using it entirely. Plus, the banya was located in a separate building, which I actually had the key to. There were certain parts and separate buildings of the house that were locked off to me, and most of them I didn’t care much about, but the banya rooms were unlocked. She was pissed off because the banya room was dirty, which bewildered me because I said I didn’t care. Besides, if she was so pissed off about it, maybe she should have cleaned it before I moved in. It’s not as though she didn’t have a week’s notice to do anything about it.

But after tearing into me in front of my guests, she stormed out of the house, saying she’d be back tomorrow. I was a little unsettled, but we went on with our evening.

The next morning, the friend from Talas left early, as he had to go wrangle a taxi to the south. My other two friends and I slowly got up, washed the dishes, cleaned up the house and rearranged the furniture back, as we had moved some things in order to get all the beds I had into my room, which was the warmest room in the house.

The landlady comes back at about nine, still pissed off as all hell. She got on my case about having so many people over again, and I tried to explain that I had the one person over because he was from Talas and needed a place to stay, and she said, and I quote, “That’s your problem.”

Then, she demanded my keys to the house, which I gave her. And she went outside and started storming around, dismantling the table I had set up in front of the outdoor couch I had used for my morning coffee breaks, and yelling about how I needed to find a new place to live. At this point, I realized I was out of my league here with my own Russian, and tried to call my program manager to talk to her. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a hold of her, so I called the program manager for the NGO workers instead, as one of my friends had her number. I got a hold of her, and handed the phone to my landlady.

There was much yelling going on outside, so we waited for it to end, and the landlady came back and handed the phone to me. The program manager told me that the landlady was pissed off because of the people I had over, and the use of the banya, which I knew about, but was also complaining that the house was dirty and I was living “like a homeless person.”

This I cannot comprehend, as I swept and mopped the house pretty regularly, did a couple loads of laundry, always made sure to empty the slop bucket from the gravity sink when it was full, and did dishes virtually the second I was done using them. (And, frankly, the house wasn’t all that clean when I got it, anyway.) The program manager also told me that the landlady had initially wanted me out of the house that day, but the program manager told her that that was an unreasonable amount of time, and that I at least needed a week.

When I heard all of this I was pissed, namely because the landlady was gone at that point, and she had taken the keys, so I had no way to lock the house. There was no way I was going to leave all my worldly belongings around in an unlocked house, so I just started packing up immediately. I called my counterpart and told her what happened (she was shocked), but she wasn’t in the village at the moment, but she said she’d try to talk to the landlady when she got back.

To which I told her not to bother, because there was no way in hell I was staying in that house. Frankly, if it was the last friggin’ house in Kyrgyzstan, I’d erect a yurt in the schoolyard. We packed up all my stuff, and my friends stayed in the house with it all so I could go to the closest bazaar and pick up a taxi to help me haul it.

Once I got the taxi, we loaded all my things into the car and drove it over to the village English center, as the only people who have keys to it are myself and my counterpart, and just dropped it all off there. I’m currently at my friends’ village, staying with them, as I am now essentially homeless.

My counterpart called me when I was waiting for the matshruka to go to my friends’ village, and she said that the landlady had agreed to let me stay in the house for the rest of the week, to which I said, “piss on that.”

Frankly, it’s infuriating. I am not a child. I understand that if I am living in a place where I’m renting, if I break or destroy something, it is my responsibility to fix or replace it. If I have guests over and they break or destroy something, it’s my responsibility to replace it. Now, if I was having twenty people over at a time for nightly keg stands, then, yeah, I could see how she might be slightly perturbed about my lifestyle. However, if I have three people over for dinner, a movie, and bathing for crying out loud, it’s not her business. If I’m paying her rent, an amount that she agreed to, then I get to live my life the way I want to live it, provided it’s not destructive to her property.

But my counterpart then asked how I was going to get to work next week, as the village where I’m staying now is about an hour outside the city, which is a difficult commute, to say the least. I said that I don’t know. Because I don’t. In all likelihood I won’t be at work this week, because I have no place to live this week. Today I actually had three classes to teach and a Russian lesson, but I didn’t get to do any of that because I had to pack and move at the drop of a hat.

This presents several problems, though. The main one being, I have no place to live. My friends here said I could crash with them as long as I needed to, and when I got to the Peace Corps office today I told my tale of woe to the volunteers there I got offered a couple other apartments to stay in, due to my compatriots’ generosity. Secondly, I have no way to get to work or go about my routine. This will essentially be solved by itself in less than a week, though, as it’s basically the end of the year and break starts soon.

I finally got a hold of my program manager, and she suggested a site change. Again. Which, really, is looking more and more appealing. I’d really hate to leave my village, as, despite it all, I like it there. I’m comfortable. I really love working at the school, and my counterpart is amazing. I love the proximity to Bishkek, and all the opportunities that affords me. However, she said that she’d put me in a place that has actual apartments, and the fact that, well, I have no place to live in my village now kind of puts a damper on things.

If there’s any silver lining to all of this, it’s that I actually hadn’t paid rent on the house yet. I made a couple of overtures towards it, but I think that people generally pay towards the end of the month here, rather than the beginning. Another plus was that I didn’t sign a housing agreement with the landlady. People don’t really get into contracts about housing here, but Peace Corps has housing contracts that we sign, mostly so there’s an official record of how much we pay a month so our housing allowances can be adjusted accordingly. However, I never signed one… I was going to, but considering how I only lived in the place for two weeks, I didn’t have enough time to get my marbles about me to do it.

The point there is that landlady bitch ain’t getting a single som from my ass. She can try, but then I’ll point out that she treated me like shit and then took the keys from me so I couldn’t lock the house. If she complains, I’ll just say the same thing she told me when I said I had a friend from Talas that needed a place to stay. Namely, “that’s your problem.”

In fact, I hope she wants money. I really do. I even already have my speech planned out. In English, of course, because I assume that either my counterpart or program manager will be there for this conversation. It will go something like this: “Oh, really? Well, listen, bitch, because you’re not getting a single som from me. And, furthermore, for all the times you yelled at me because you were speaking in rapid fire Russian and I didn’t understand, fuck you. My Russian isn’t that good. I know that. I’ve lived in this country for five months. I’d like to see you go to America, and see how good your English is after five months, because I bet it’d be worse than my Russian. You don’t understand how hard this is. And that’s fine, because you’ll never see the world beyond your goddamn front door. And that’s fine too, because you can have your front door, and you can have your mother’s front door, all of it. But you treated me awfully. And I never signed a contract with you, so you can’t even prove I lived in that house short of DNA testing, and if you want to fork out the cash for that, go ahead. And go to hell, while you’re at it. And sit on a dick.” [insert flipping the bird here]

This has all really made me take stock of what I’m doing here, and if it’s worth it. Is it? To be honest, I don’t really know. I’m mostly just waiting to see how the chips fall out at this point. But this won’t beat me, goddamn it, because… well, just because. I won’t let it. Something will work out. It has to. I don’t want to go back home yet. …now, to be honest, I can’t say exactly why I don’t want to go back, because between the exploding ovens and landlady issues and whatever the hell else has been going on, life’s been kind of bad recently. But for whatever reason, for the moment I want to stick it out. Maybe it’s nothing but a combination of pride and stubbornness, but it’s keeping me here for now.

Of course, if everything goes absolutely to hell, I’ll go back. At the moment, I don’t see how much worse it can get, though, considering how I’m homeless. If I can put up with this, I figure I can deal with just about anything else that comes at me.

Though, I guess I actually am living like a homeless person at the moment. Maybe the landlady was right.

Or maybe she can go suck a fat one.

Written Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Hey guys!

It’s… Christmas carol time!

Oh, you’ve got to be homeless for the holidays…
in Russian you’d say that I’m “bez dom”
If you want to be awesome in a million ways…
Spend a Kyrgyz De-cem-ber without a home!

Though, technically, I’m actually “bez doma,” but grammar don’t count when you’re singing. Or blogging.

Sweet. As Charles Dickens once made a child say, “God bless us, everyone except my stupid landlady. What a twat.”

Merry Christmas!

.there will still be love in the world

2008-12-17T01:01:00.000-08:00

Written Monday, December 15, 2008

It’s amazing how difficult it is to not get paid.

My landlady’s son comes over every day to feed the dogs. At first I was a little perturbed by this, as it means that essentially I’m going to have a checking-up-on daily, but then I got over it. He’s not intrusive, and the dogs get fed a hell of a lot better than if I had to do it on my own dime. Furthermore, it’s one less thing I have to worry about.

But the son is actually a nice guy, and tries to exercise his limited English vocabulary every chance he gets. For about three days straight when he came by in the evening to feed the dogs and I was sitting outside, he greeted me with a cheery “good morning.” While this was cute, I felt bad about letting the clear mix-up in greetings slide, and corrected him.

So, he wants English lessons. As mentioned previously, I’ve tried to stay out of the individual tutoring business, but he’s a nice guy and it won’t kill me. The hardest part about it was getting around the conversation about me being paid.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I’m forbidden from taking on gainful employment of any sort. The school doesn’t pay me – Peace Corps does. I’m more than welcome (and in fact, actively encouraged) to take on as many side activities from my main job as is my fancy, but I can’t get paid for them. Of course, when I go into Bishkek to teach they reimburse me my travel funds, but I’m not paid for teaching itself. (Though, to be honest, they do over reimburse me a little bit… it costs me sixteen som to get from the school and back, but they just give me a twenty som bill, as it’s easier to do the math. So I guess I am getting paid. A nickel.)

So, I said I’d give the guy English lessons, and he asked me how much I charged. I told him that I was a Volunteer, and thus couldn’t be paid. He at first thought I just didn’t understand what he was saying, but after assuring him that I did understand he was offering payment but was turning it down, he was all like, “But I won’t tell anybody!”

Which I guess could work. Though I’m on paper forbidden to do a lot of things, it’s not as though Peace Corps is hanging all over my back 24/7. Theoretically he could pay me for it, and nobody would ever know. But, I mean, seriously, I took an oath for this shit, and “not being paid” is one of the key parts of all of this. I’d made peace with the fact that I wasn’t going to be making anything akin to actual money for the two years I’m here. In reality it really wasn’t that much of a problem for me in the first place, because as far as I’m concerned what I’m lacking in pay I’m making up for in experience. (…and my loans are on deferral and I’m getting health insurance. So…) I’m learning a new language, becoming accustomed to living abroad in far less luxurious conditions than I’m used to having at my disposal, proving that I can exist in a vastly different cultural arena than that which I grew up in… not to mention, having “Peace Corps” on the resume is a pretty big bang in and of itself.

But I was like, no, no, no, you can’t pay me. (Though, if I was smart, I might have asked him to get his mother to lower my rent. It’s not pay if I don’t see money!) I told him that, if he wanted to repay me, I wanted to learn how to speak Russian better. He laughed and said that he wasn’t a teacher, but he does have a lot of books and he could teach me rhetoric.

Right. Rhetoric. In Russian. I was like, “Dude, you know I’m not all that good at TALKING in Russian. You seriously think it’s time to break out the Socrates?”

Maybe I’ll ask him about Russian music. I like to collect music from the places I go, and I know diddly squat about the music here. About the only time I hear Russian music is when I’m in the matshrukas, and then there’s virtually no way to tell who’s singing the song.

To be honest, though, all he would really have to do is talk to me. That’s the best kind of practice there is. I’m first and foremost concerned with learning to speak well, and then I’ll get more into the semantics and the grammar later. I’m moderately literate as it is, mostly because I spend all my time in matshrukas squinting out the windows and trying to read things. I’m not very good with writing, though. My spelling is atrocious, and I only have the alphabet half-memorized. (Of course, I know all the letters, just not necessarily in order.)

When he comes over to feed the dogs tomorrow night, we’re going to have our first lesson. We’ll see how it goes.

But, another shift in my lifestyle recently has to do with feeding the dogs. The dogs here are actually extremely well-fed by Kyrgyz standards: twice a day. And not only are they fed often, they actually get their own kind of food, as opposed to straight table slops. There’s a meal they make for the dogs out of gretchka, potatoes, and water, and this is usually ladled on top of some bread and whatever meat bones the family happens to have.

But coming over twice a day to feed the dogs is a lot of work on their part, and they asked if I would be willing to take over the chore. They’d pay for the food, I’d just have to be the one to feed them. I said that I’d be willing to do it in the mornings, because I’ll definitely be home, but because my schedule here is so unpredictable, I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it every night. Now, to be honest, I am home by the nighttime feeding of the dogs more often than not. It’s just that occasionally I’m out later, either on business or just with friends, and I’d feel bad having to worry about the dogs not getting fed.

Of course, the big thing about feeding the dogs was me getting close enough to the beastie dog. It has gotten used to me: it doesn’t bark its head off and strain at its chain anymore when I walk in the yard. However, I’d never actually approached it where it would be in potential striking distance.

The little dog and I have made good friends, though. I like to sit on the couch out back and watch the birds and drink my coffee in the morning. At first, the little dog would keep its distance, but after a couple of days, it started getting closer. Finally, it got within petting distance one day, and I mean, come on, I’m a sap, and gave it scratches. Now, whenever I go to sit on the couch, it pretty much jumps in my lap.

On a side note, I have become very good at pet-talk. You know, “Who’s a good girl? Who’s a good dog? It’s you, it’s you!” I can now do this in Russian. Every day, I get a little closer to the dream, I tell you.

But today I had to go retrieve the food bowl from the beastie’s pen, and so I walked up to its circle of chain. The dog started jumping a little, and I was like, “Look. I’m going to feed you. You can’t bite me.”

So, with a prayer to all the gods I could think of, I stepped in the pen. The beastie didn’t seem interested in more than licking at me, though. Just in case I happened to be a giant loaf of bread. You never know. The little dog helped. Whenever I bent down to the food bowl and the beastie would play-lunge and I would get freaked out, the little one would start barking. Like, “Dude, stop messing around, I want breakfast.”

So, operation feed the dogs was a success. I didn’t get mauled. I did feel a little bad, though, because there was only a heel’s worth of bread leftover from last night, so the bowl was mostly meal. And hot water. (They always pour hot water over the dish before serving it… I guess it makes it easier for the dogs to eat.) Oh well.

Look at me! I haul water, light trash fires, wash laundry by hand, feed dogs, and light the gas furnace! I’m like a little old Russian lady! I should get one of those babushka head scarves. It would be sweet.

I actually did go for the triple-point score and attempt to make my own bread. I bought a stove the other day, managed to haul it back (which was an adventure in and of itself), and got to work happily pounding out some bread dough. I love baking.

Unfortunately, my oven blew up. Yep. I had let the dough rise twice and put it in the preheated oven to bake, and was in the other room getting my Nintendo on, when suddenly there was a giant explosion. I at first thought it might have been the gas, so I leapt out of my bed and sprinted to the kitchen.

…where I promptly slipped on glass shards and took a magnificent fall, reminiscent of my rugby days where getting laid out by a woman twice my size was life’s greatest pleasure and reward. Sigh.

Except for the fact that rugby fields aren’t usually made of linoleum and covered with glass. Usually. So I scratched the fuck out of myself and my oven blew up.

Fortunately, I did not buy the oven from the bazaar. I actually bought it from Beta Stores, because after some price comparison, they were far cheaper there than at the bazaar. Maybe it’s because they explode, but this is just a guess.

I do still have the receipt, though. My program manager is coming over today to check out the house, as she wasn’t able to do so before due to the beastie being on too long of a chain. I’ll ask her about Beta’s return policy. And maybe she’ll help me out there, as I don’t know how to say in Russian, “Dude, your oven blew up all over my kitchen the day after I bought it. There had better either be an exchange or a return involved in this story.”

I figure my chances are better getting a return at a store than at the bazaar. Hopefully. We’ll see.

But, you know what they say. If ever your oven explodes, bake, bake again. Or something like that.

Written Wednesday, December 17, 2008

I really can’t believe it’s already into the latter half of December. Time flies, when you’re eating sheep fat.

They’re already making preparations for the new group of Volunteers to come, which is weird. Now, they’ve actually changed the Pre Service Training date for this country… I came ‘round these parts in July, but the new Volunteers are coming in March. This is being done for a bevy of reasons, but mainly for the problem that the administration is having with the TEFL volunteers. You see, in our second year of service, our COS (close of service) date is technically in September of 2010, but most people go for the one-month early COS date and leave sometime near the middle or end of August.

But the school year here ends in May. Which means that the TEFL volunteers are looking at a whole summer’s worth of no real work with nothing but leaving the country at the end of it. Compounding this problem is the rule that PCVs can’t take annual leave during the first three months or their last three months of service. Now, you can do program travel, which means you can go about the country, but you can’t take annual leave and go anywhere else. Most TEFL volunteers, during their first summer, do a combination of travel and summer camps or do a Habitat for Humanity stint over by the lake, but the second summer is mostly consumed by wrapping up whatever projects are still on the table and getting ready to leave the country to go do your next big thing.

However, this usually doesn’t take a whole three months, and a lot of people get stuck in the country with no work, an inability to travel, and about two months left to do absolutely nothing with. Consequently, a lot of Volunteers early terminate during the last summer, mostly due to boredom and a readiness to get on with things. The other problem is graduate school: some of us have plans on yet more book-learning after this, and if you’re planning on entering graduate school, which starts in September, you’re going to need to be back in America before the last days of August. For some dumb reason, Peace Corps will give people the three-month early COS date if you have a job waiting somewhere, but not for graduate school. Ergo, more ETs.

So they’re moving the PST date to March, which would make the COS date for the new volunteers in May of 2008, the end of the school year. This would also solve the problem of people going to graduate school in September, as three months would be enough time to decompress and get your affairs in order to start studying.

Though, I do see some other problems inherent with this new date, namely that the Trainees would swear in as Volunteers in May… which, for us TEFL, is the end of the school year. So the new kids on the block would be in their villages, knowing nobody, and doing nothing for three months. It’s entirely possible that Peace Corps has some sort of plan to get the new Volunteers involved in camps or something of the ilk, but if they’ve got no plans, I have no idea what they’re thinking. Sure, it was a bit fast to drop straight into teaching classes the weekend after swearing in, but it gave me something to do other than sit at home and stare at the ceiling. Community integration is also bolstered incredibly by work, particularly work at a school: virtually every child between the ages of six and seventeen in this village knows who I am, now. I’ve got a routine (of sorts) and I’m comfortable with it.

To be fair, I guess there’s no real prime time to have people come in. A few years back they actually had people coming to country in, like, November, which drops everybody off in the middle of a frigid Central Asian winter, which probably didn’t do much for the ET rate during PST. In spring, you run up against the end of the school year. Summer, the problems I described above. Middle of winter would just be filled with all kinds of stupid. Kyrgyzstan apparently has the highest ET rate out of all the Central Asian countries and Eastern Europe, so I guess whatever they do to change it can’t make it any worse. (For the curious, I’ve been told that the country with the highest rate period is Jordan, due to the very strict Muslim culture. I’ve actually heard that they’ve had entire groups ET. They’re mostly Muslim here, to be sure, but they also slug vodka straight from the bottle so most people are more casual about it than anything else.)

But, anyway, in the realm of teaching, I’m actually done for the year at the school, all things considered. See, I mostly teach on Thursdays, and because last week was the mysterious Olympiad that I couldn’t attend, there was no class. This week is the term exam, so I don’t do anything but show up and practice the math section of the GRE. (Not that I have any plans on taking that in the very near future, but, uh, I can use all the help I can get when it comes to numbers. It’s… been a while.) Next week the students are going to be taking oral exams, so while I will have to listen and evaluate, no teaching. And then, uh, it’s the end of the year.

Wow.

I don’t really have any concrete plans for my winter break: because my school is heated by coal and not electricity, I only have a month off. And In Service Training, which I have to attend, bisects that month. I had been considering going somewhere for two weeks, but I figure I can save some money and keep myself entertained well enough around these parts, considering my proximity to the capital. Maybe I’ll take in a ballet or a play… or see the circus, if it’s in town. (They actually have a permanent building for the circus, here. Lonely Planet describes the architecture of it as a crash-landed UFO from the 1950s, and I can’t come up with anything more astute than that for it.) I’ll go hang out in the foyer of the Hyatt and pretend I have money. I’m not sure about my classes at the TOEFL center, but if they’re in session, I’ll keep teaching there. Maybe I can pick up a few extra classes in exchange for some more Russian lessons.

This summer, I’ll travel. I’ve heard tickets to Prague are relatively cheap, or maybe Emma will come and visit and we’ll do us some China. I don’t think I’ll be wanting to hit up Thailand or India in July, so I’ll head for somewhat cooler locales.

But for now, winter.

.listen, children, all is not lost

2008-12-11T22:57:00.000-08:00

Written Thursday, December 4, 2008

I measure my life in toothbrushes.

One new toothbrush when I came to country. Another when I left my PST host family in September. And yet another when I move tomorrow into my new digs. Ah, dental hygiene. How you so succinctly number my days.

There was a slight blip in the plan, though, mostly owing to the fact that my landlord hasn’t yet removed the monstrous dog guarding the grounds. She said that her son didn’t come by last Saturday to remove the beastie, and that I should wait to move in until Sunday. However, I was all like, “dude, you told me last week I could move in on Friday, I told everybody else that I was moving in on Friday, and come hell or high water, that’s what I’m going to do.”

And so it is.

On another not-moving, note, my brains are becoming absolutely scrambled by all the languages I’m attempting to pack into them. Sometimes, these days, people will talk to me and I don’t know what language they’re trying to use. Oh, sure, I realize that the Americans I know are generally using English, and most of the host country nationals I interact with are using Russian and virtually nobody speaks to me in Japanese, but it’s just all mooshed together these days.

It’s kind of unnerving, really. I still outburst in Japanese occasionally, or answer in Russian or English when I should be using the opposite. Just today when I was lecturing in my classes in English, I could not, for the life of me, remember the word “pepper.” I was talking, and then a strange look crossed my counterpart’s face when I just busted out with “perez” in the middle of an English sentence. She had to supplement the English word when I completely blanked. And I still have a problem with “choot choot,” which means “a little,” as the Japanese “chotto” is just too similar and goddamnit I can’t keep anything straight anymore.

Even weirder is when somebody speaks to me, and I’m only half-listening, and for a couple of moments, I have no idea what language they’re using. Like, I can’t even identify it. Weirder yet is when I understand what they want, but I just don’t know the words. This has even happened to me on the occasions when my current host family was speaking to me in Kyrgyz (which I don’t know why they do, because everybody here knows I don’t speak that language worth a heap of Talas beans). Somebody will say something to me, in any language, and I’ll know exactly what they want, but not which language they’re wanting it in.

I think a lot of it is due to the simplicity of most communication. Having done the whole “dropped in a country where you don’t speak the language” thing twice now, I’ve found it’s amazing how much you can get accomplished by not speaking, or even just using a couple of incorrectly conjugated words. Oh, sure, it’s like the difference between using surgical instruments to get your point across and just beating something with a rock until you get something like what you wanted, but it’s doable. My first two weeks here the only things I could really say with any regularity were “hello” and “good,” but I got by.

Sometimes, I like to think about how well I could express myself if I lived somewhere where everybody spoke English/Russian/Japanese. I mean, that’s three languages worth of talking. Of course, most things I can say best in English, but there are certain turns of phrase that just work better in either Russian or Japanese. Not to mention, there are enough swear words in Russian to fill a dictionary, so I can express my displeasure so much more fluidly these days. I am no longer limited to “shit,” and “fuck,” and “damn,” but I can now tell somebody to go fuck off and sit on a dick. And I suppose it’s not as though I can’t say that in English, but it’s just so much more… emphatic in the Russian.

Which I suppose is a perk to all of this. Japanese is a beautiful language, but the swearing in it is rather limited. Unless you want to sound like a yakusa (which, I mean, everybody probably does) and speak in straight Osaka-ben, but that’s kind of hard to pull off. I’m just not cool enough for those designer shades.

Oh, life. Five years ago, who would have thought I’d be living in Kyrgyzstan, hopelessly screwing up the Russian language with errant Japanese vocabulary? Let’s hope the adventure never ceases.

Funnily enough, I did have a chance to exercise some Japanese the other day. December fifth was International Volunteer’s Day (I know it’s a huge holiday in the States, so bear with me on this), and we celebrated by doing a little performance at a local orphanage. There were American, Japanese, and Spanish volunteers there. The performance went relatively well, considering that we had done zero planning beforehand. Basically, I ended up leading everybody in the YMCA, which I had to make up on the spot. Oh, sure, the REFRAIN of the song is pretty famous, but, you know, there’s the rest of it, too. There was a lot of jumping. And some Macarena. (The Spaniards actually did present the Macarena, and I was like, dude, that’s Mexican.)

But I managed to get into a conversation with some of the Japanese volunteers. It was probably the most fragmented conversation I’ve ever had the grace to be a part of, considering that we were speaking in an equal mix of Japanese and English with Russian thrown in on my part, and Kyrgyz on the Japanese’s part.

One of my directors was watching the whole exchange with a bemused look on his face. After, he asked, “So, how many languages were you speaking in again?” And I was like, “Four. DON’T MOCK ME BECAUSE I CAN’T HAVE A CONVERSATION IN ONE LANGAGE ANYMORE GEEZ THIS IS YOUR FAULT.” He seemed to think it was hilarious. I, on the other hand, was bemoaning the fact that I can’t speak coherently anymore. Lesson learned: Never Be An Expat.

Though, due to that spectacular mess of a conversation I was invited to come to the Japanese Corner in Bishkek. I’ve never heard of these before, but Kyrgyzstan has a Japanese Corner, and American Corners in nearly all major towns. There are also Russian Corners. They’re like little language centers, full of books and usually computer resources. I’m interested in going to the Japanese Corner because perhaps I might get some Japanese lessons if I smile prettily enough. …maybe even for free, because God knows I can’t afford to pay for anything these days. I could offer English lessons in return, I suppose. That’s an arrangement I have with a language school in Bishkek; they got my number through the previous volunteer that lived in my village. I now teach two hours worth of talk classes a week and help out with TOEFL classes occasionally, and in return I get an hour’s worth of Russian tutoring. This is bomb diggity, because it’s actually a language school where they teach expats Russian, so knowledgeable teachers who know how to deal with dumb Americans will be teaching me. I’d be more than happy to make a similar arrangement at the Japanese Corner.

Though, the funny thing about languages, I’ve discovered, is that they’re rather like amoebas in the way they develop in peoples’ brains. They stretch and grow in jelly-like formation, rather than linearly. Let me explain.

In theory, my Japanese is better than my Russian. However, I’ve come to discover that, in many respects, there are certain things that I can describe quite aptly in Russian that I have no idea how to say in Japanese. Now, this is undoubtedly somewhat due to the fact that I haven’t had to use Japanese in any real sense, other than academic, for at least two years. I didn’t take Japanese language classes my last year at college. However, I’ve just gone through a ridiculously rigorous crash course in Russian for three months, and now I use it every day.

But even beyond that, the ways in which I use Russian are vastly different from the ways I used Japanese, even when I was living in Japan. I can still speak remarkably well about studying, and theses, and World War II in Japanese, which are things that I’m clumsy with in Russian at best. However, I’ve become remarkably quick with numbers in Russian, no doubt to all the foraging I do at the bazaar. Also, my vocabulary in terms of foodstuffs in Russian is vastly superior to my Japanese: when I lived in Japan, I was with a host family who provided all my meals (to great excess, in fact), so most of my food vocabulary is limited to restaurant dishes and snack foods. I have no idea how to say “cinnamon” in Japanese. However, I can basically have a native-level conversation about spices in Russian, because I had to know what the hell I wanted to buy before I asked for it.

It’s just interesting because I never really considered the many angles to which you can “know” a language. Obviously, because I can speak every which way in English, I had always thought to be able to speak a language, well, it meant you can speak broadly, about anything. And I suppose that’s the nature of “fluency,” and I am certainly not fluent in either Japanese or Russian, but if certain topics come up in those languages, I can speak on them with a good amount of precision. Obviously, in all three languages I’m good with talking about myself, my history, what I’m doing/going to at any point in time, the basics.

But when it comes down to slightly out-of-the-ordinary topics, a lot of what I can and can’t say in Russian or Japanese is dictated by my lifestyle at the time. I remember a lot of Japanese being incredibly impressed when I told them I was studying the history of Yasukuni shrine and World War II and how it relates to Japanese and world politics today. I friggin’ had that down to a science.

But if they had tried to talk to me about cinnamon, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything but flubber my way through a few sentences. In Russian, I’m all like, “Oh, hells yes, cinnamon. I’m going to bake myself a pie; do you have any baking powder? I need it for the crust.”

“Crust” is another thing I have no idea how to say in Japanese. In Russian it’s “tecsta.” I can, however, say “small electoral district proportional representative parallel system” in Japanese. No joke. It’s “shousenkyoku hireidaihyou heiritsusei.” (For the burningly curious, it’s what Japan’s current voting system is called after the reforms in 1994.) I cannot say this in Russian. I can barely say it in English.

My head: welcome to it.

Written December 6, 2008

Oh sweet, sweet freedom.

So it’s happened. The first time I’ve ever lived alone in non-college-based housing is in Kyrgyzstan. I suppose that’s another mark in the “my life is bizarro” book.

There were some further blips in the plan before it happened, though. Turns out that they locked half the house off to me. The way this place is set up is with a three-season-esque porch in the back, which leads into a hallway area. Four rooms branch off of this hallway: a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms. They all have doors, and they locked off the living room and one of the bedrooms. The reasoning behind this is that the mother (woman who actually lives here but is in Russia) would be pissed if she realized there was a stranger in there tromping through all her stuff. I can respect that, but why two rooms? Why not just put everything precious in one room? Sheesh.

When I realized that that’s how shit was going down, I was pissed, because (and I still maintain this) I was never told that the two rooms were going to be closed off. They claim that they did tell me, but if they did it must have been in rapid spitfire Russian.

Once I got over that, though, it’s not so bad. I mean, I’m only one person, so I don’t really need all that much room. And, to be completely honest about it, even with half the house inaccessible, it’s still the most living space I’ve ever had to myself before. In all the other living situations I’ve been in, I only had one room.

I’ve made do, though. Because the two rooms that are closed off are next to each other in the back of the house, I put my large table with the drop leaf in front of them, and I stole a cabinet from the porch area to be a bookshelf. The back of the hallway is now a dining room/work area.

The bedroom has two beds in it, and it turns out one of them is a convertible sofa. Of course, the supports that keep it in sofa position are nonexistent, so I had to go out and find a stool to wedge between the back of the couch and the wall, but goddamn it, it works. I had a second smaller table and a vanity thing in there that I arranged a bit, and a closet that’s mostly full of random old broken radios, but has enough room for my clothes. There was no place to hang clothes, so I removed a shelf from the closet, found some bent nails in the yard, and made a bar by driving some nails into the shelf supports, and putting two more nails into a stick I found. Then, I tied the nails on the stick to the nails in the closet with dental floss. That’s right. I’m the MacGuyver of home decorating. Wben I leave, I can just remove it and replace the shelf.

The extremely nice thing about having a house, though, is inheriting all the things that come with it: namely, cookware. I’m virtually drowning in pots and pans and rolling pins and jars and whatnot. Especially rolling pins: I’ve found seven of them. Why the hell you’d need seven rolling pins is beyond me, but, hey, I don’t hate on the way grandmas roll. (lololololololololo…)

I will have to buy a stove, though. The ranges here work (there’s actually an indoor and an outdoor stove, which is probably more useful during summer than right now), but the stoves don’t. To be honest, I’ve never been in a house here where the stove works. They all use the oversized toaster ovens.

Whatever. I don’t have to buy cookware or utensils, so it won’t be that big of a deal. Peace Corps did give us a settling in allowance, which is plenty to cover a stove. …and a couple of mugs. Not that I don’t dig on the handleless teacups, but sometimes you just need a big heavy mug to wrap your hands around. One of my wiser last-minute purchases back in the States was a travel mug, which has been what I’ve been using almost exclusively since I’ve been here. It’s perfectly fine, but, still, Laura want mug. They’re only like, a dollar apiece anyway.

And I have a rice cooker. That’s right. It’s RICE TIME. And I can cook beans again. Which makes it RICE AND BEAN TIME.

I also appreciate having a yard. There’s an overhang in the back made out of corrugated metal. I like to call it my “lanai.” You know, like they have in Hawaii. Just… more… Kyrgyz.

They’re still trying to get me to keep the huge monster dog. I’m not as freaked out by it as I originally was, but that doesn’t mean I still don’t want it here. (Namely, I’m afraid that if I have some friends over and somebody gets drunk and just decides to go wandering… yeah, could end badly if somebody gets mauled.) The landlord was all like, “Well, if it can’t stay here, where can it go?” And I basically said, “Dude, not my problem. You told me you’d take the dog away if I moved in. If you’ve got no place to put the damn thing, you’d better come up with something.” Of course, my Russian isn’t nearly as good as to come up with something as assholish, so in actuality, I just smiled and shrugged.

I’ve warmed to the little dog, though. It’s not as jumpy or yappy as the ones at my old residence. I do, in theory, know her name, but the problem is that it sounds exactly like “chainik,” meaning “teapot,” which means I can’t remember its actual name.

So I’m just going to call the dog “teapot.” Teapot the dog. Sweet.

But now, instead of a host family, I’ve inherited a landlord family. They’ve been over every day since I’ve been here, mostly to feed the dog and do various repair jobs. Namely, currently, the stove inside doesn’t work. Well, it works, but the rubber tubing connecting the gas to the stove is leaky. I turned it on once and it started hissing at me and then the room smelled like a gas station, so I figured it would be a bad idea to do something like strike a match and attempt to cook.

The son has been the one coming over most often. We had a nice conversation yesterday, which I think finally proved to the family that I actually am not completely hopeless with Russian. It’s just that all the times they were trying to talk to me prior, they were talking about how the gas meter worked and other things that I have absolutely zip vocabulary for. The somewhat downside to this is now that the son kind of knows me, I think he’s worried about me living alone. He came over to light the gas heating today, and even though I was like, “Dude, that’s expensive,” he was like, “But it’s cold and you’ll get sick!”

Oy. One family for another, I suppose. But whenever somebody from the family comes over, they always attempt to turn on the heat, and I’ve found it’s nearly impossible to stop them. Now, basically, I let them turn it on, and whenever they leave, I turn it off again. It seems that they don’t understand that I can’t afford to friggin heat the house all the time. Yes, I know it’s cold in here. However, the rent alone is above and beyond what Peace Corps will pay for housing (which I think is asinine to begin with; the most they’ll give for this area of the country is 2000 som, and it is bonafied IMPOSSIBLE to have an independent living option for so little money here), so paying for heat above it is just not on, particularly because it’s gas heat, which is the most expensive kind there is. Now, for the purposes of winter Peace Corps will give us advance for our living allowances to pay for heating, but the thing is that the money there comes out of my salary for later months, which I need to pay for the friggin’ HOUSE in later months, so it’s more like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. So, I just wear a coat and sleep with a hot water bottle. It works. Fortunately I’ve always had a relatively high tolerance for cold, much higher than my tolerance for heat.

But the landlady is actually a shopowner. She owns a little store that she runs out of the front of her house. I went there today to buy some bread and chocolate condensed milk (mostly because I had never seen it before… it actually tastes remarkably similar to hot fudge). I think it made her happy, because she was probably thinking I had come to complain about something. It’s more expensive to buy things in the small stores than from the bazaar, but it’s a lot closer to where I live, and, hey, it’s worth the five extra som to make the landlady happy.

If nothing else, my living exploits have made me good connections. My old host family is all about the dairy products, and now I’ve got a dry goods store at my disposal. Good times.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about recently is chickens. There actually is a chicken pen here, and I’ve been rolling around the idea of maybe buying a couple of hens for it. I mean, the egg output alone would be worth it, as I tend to go through quite a few eggs. It would also be useful for my vegetable matter refuse. At my old house, they just fed all things like carrot and onion shavings to the dogs, but here I was told that the dogs don’t really eat that sort of thing, so I’ve taken to just throwing it out in the yard.

Obviously, I’d have to do some research on this first, because I don’t really know much about raising chickens. Furthermore, there would be the issue of what to do with them when I had to move, since the person who lives in this house is due back in about a year. The options would be a) leave them here, if the family is willing to have them, b) take them with me, if I end up somewhere where I can have chickens, or c) eat them. And, uh, I don’t know how much I’m up for killing my own chickens.

If I ever have kids, they’re going to be so messed up. Like, “Mooooom, why do you keep everything in jars? Why can’t we have Tupperware like normal people? And whyyyyy do we have to have chickens? And can’t we get indoor plumbing it’s like 2020-“

And I’ll be all like, “NO IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE STOP BITCHING IT’S TIME FOR THE DAILY FIVE HOUR NO ELECTRICITY TIME AND GO HAUL SOME WATER WE HAVE TO WASH THE LAUNDRY BY HAND AND LIGHT THE TRASH FIRE.”

All of which I did today, by the way.

And then for dinner we’ll have umiboshi onigiri and red miso fish with milk tea and matcha soft cream. Because, mmm, that shit’s the stuff. God, I miss Japanese food. And National Coney Island.

Written December 11, 2008

Working here is a trip sometimes, I tell you.

Today was the rayon-wide Olympiad. Rayons here are kind of like counties, I guess, and Olympiad is kind of like quiz bowl, at least as much as it was explained to me. I was assigned to help the students prepare for it, as well as come up with something for the speaking and listening parts.

For speaking, I came up with fifteen talking topics, that each of the students would choose, have a couple of minutes to prepare for, and give a two-minute speech on. Basically, impromptu, just like the things I used to love the hell out of in speech class. This is actually harder than it would seem to come up with, since you have to think of a topic that is broad enough to talk about for two minutes, is easily understandable, and yet requires no prior knowledge on the part of the speaker. After all, it’s mainly to judge the English abilities of the student, not their knowledge of geography or history or whatever.

Listening, I originally suggested maybe some books on CD, as I burned copies from a bunch of different level books before I came here. However, my counterpart said that it should probably have something to do with the national curriculum on at least a nominal level, so that meant English-speaking countries. No problem, I just wrote little blurbs and was planning on reading them aloud. For America, I wrote about the Civil Rights movement, for England the Beatles, and for Canada a selection about Quebec wanting to succeed. Then, six or seven questions about the content.

Not too difficult, really. Weirdly, though, yesterday the zavouch (assistant principal, kind of) said that they were just going to use the material from last year, and that I didn’t need to go because there would be other volunteers going. (Not Peace Corps Volunteers… there actually is a Volunteer close to where the Olympiad was held, but his grandfather just died, so he’s in the States at the moment for the funeral.) It hadn’t been too much work to come up with the prompts or anything, but I still wanted to go just so I could see what it was like, even if I wasn’t going to be directly involved. I mean, next year I’ll be able to prepare students better if I know exactly what they’re going to be up against, right?

So I went this morning to the school, but the director told me again that I couldn’t go, because there would be other volunteers there and that they would protest if I showed up, apparently even if I just watched. These things are just not worth arguing about, so I went home. I suppose if somebody is thrusting a day off in my face, I’ll take it. Uncle, uncle.

I still think the whole thing is weird, though. If I were organizing something like an Olympiad, and other volunteers showed up, no matter whom they were, I’d be thrilled. Particularly if they were native English speakers: it’s more people to help me out, after all. And even if I had no use for them, I don’t think I’d be in any form bothered by their presence. I’ll just ask my counterpart about it on Monday. Namely, about whom these “volunteers” are and what their beef is. Tomorrow I don’t have class anyway, due to the schedule, and then there’s the weekend, so it gave me a four-day holiday from teaching at the school. I also didn’t do any real teaching this week, as Tuesday I was preparing the listening and speaking sections that didn’t end up getting used, and Thursday is my main day of teaching, and classes were canceled due to the Olympiad.

Whenever I get too frustrated with work, I like to watch The Office. It could always be worse.

In lieu of teaching today, I hopped over to the bazaar and bought about thirty eggs, a half-kilo of green tea, some butter, and some bread.

Thirty eggs is kind of a lot, but that’s how they sell them here in cartons. You can buy any amount of eggs you’d like, of course, but it’s cheaper to buy them in bulk. To be honest, though, I do go through a lot of eggs as it is, considering that they’re a great protein source and cheaper and easier to cook than meat. Also, a lot of the meat here is absolutely riddled with fat and gristle (not marbled like a beautiful cut, we’re talking globs and blobs), which isn’t exactly the way I like my beef pot pie. However, I have been told that if you ask for “black meat,” butchers usually have some on hand: these are the leaner cuts. And supposedly they’re cheaper than the regular stuff, as most Kyrgyz really enjoy eating fat. So, I suppose we’ll see.

Another thing I need to bite the bullet and buy is a stove. Then I will make some pot pie. And bread pudding. And roasted vegetables. And mm.

Today I attempted to make bean burgers, since I already had most of the ingredients on hand, and I wanted to celebrate my regained ability to cook beans. The recipe is fairly straightforward: cook the beans until soft but not mushy, and sauté some onions, carrots, and bell peppers until soft. Mash and mix together with an egg and some breadcrumbs, season with cumin, salt, and black and red pepper. Form patties, and cook on a griddle until done.

Unfortunately I didn’t have enough breadcrumbs on hand, and was too lazy to make more, so the patties were too wet to hold form. I ended up just scrambling it up and eating it with a fork on the plate. Still good.

Had minor landlady issues yesterday. She came over and basically started criticizing the way I had the house set up, insisting that I should put my clothes there or the table here or whatever else. This has happened to me at all three places I’ve lived here, and I have to say it’s equal parts mystifying and annoying. Look, it’s my shit, why do you care what shelf I have it on in the closet? And if I want the table in that corner, what difference does it make? I’m the one that lives here, goddamnit.

She also got upset with me because I didn’t understand half the things she was saying, and then she started yelling at me because of it. This is endlessly frustrating. Russian is a hard language, okay? I only studied it for about three months, have been speaking it for six, and I’m obviously doing the best I can. Maybe if you spoke a little slower or used less difficult vocabulary, I might understand it more. I understand even less when you start yelling, because not only are you speaking faster, I’m wondering how the hell I made you so upset, and still can’t understand what you’re saying.

I suppose a lot of it is being used to dealing with foreigners. Whenever I speak to somebody who knows English as a second language here, I always make sure to enunciate clearly, remove the idioms from my speech, and speak at a slower clip than I normally do. Not because I think people here are stupid, but I know that operating in a second language can be difficult and unless you’ve lived in an English-speaking country for a long period of time, most idioms aren’t going to make any sense. Man, I’ve been there. To be completely honest, I am there.

I also have to re-prove my competence at doing household tasks. The landlady likes to tell me things like, “wash dishes when you’re done with them,” and “make your bed.” I’m like… dude, all the dishes are washed and the bed is made. The hell?

I’ve started using the gas heat, because she said that if I don’t, it could cause damage to the heating system. Fine, fine. Today I had a little adventure in lighting the furnace, though. The son had showed me how to do it – turn on the gas pipe, cover the button on the furnace with the latch, light the end of the metal stick on fire, and stick it so the gas catches. Well, today I did just that, but it turns out the gas was on too high, and it kind of blew fire halfway across the kitchen. It’s all right; I didn’t need those eyebrows.

When the son came over the feed the dogs, he offered to light the furnace for me, and when I told him I had already done it he got a mild look of panic in his eyes, but he came and checked it out and said everything was fine. Boo-yah. …I’m just glad he wasn’t there when I actually lit it, but I’ll get better with practice. Hopefully. Maybe I’ll just get crispier with practice.

Thank God I have a sense of humor, I guess. It’s been the most useful thing I’ve brought. Well, that or the duct tape.

.it's no better to be safe than sorry

2008-11-28T00:24:00.000-08:00

Written Tuesday, November 25, 2008

I almost killed my host sister today. Over butter.

Thanksgiving is this Thursday, but since us Volunteers don’t get the day off (it’s not exactly a Kyrgyz holiday), we’re postponing the celebration for Saturday. All the Chui Volunteers are getting together in Bishkek, renting an apartment, and eating ourselves stupid. It’s a potluck, but we’re also going out and buying some of the rotisserie chickens they sell on the street in lieu of cooking a turkey. Cooking a turkey would be ridiculously difficult here, given that most of us who have access to ovens are constrained by the fact that ovens here are essentially oversized toaster ovens, which would be difficult to fit a twelve-pound bird in. That, and we’d probably have to buy a live turkey, which would be a little more adventurous than most of us (myself included) are willing to get.

But anyway, for my part in the potluck, I’m making pies. One apple, one pumpkin. This’ll be exciting, because it’s the first year I’ve ever attempted making pumpkin pie on my lonesome, and also the first time I’ve ever had to start with the actual pumpkin. They don’t really have “pie filling” here. Whatever, I’ll give it a whirl. As long as it comes out reasonably edible, everybody’ll be happy.

But in preparation for such an undertaking as pie, one has to be ready to make some pie crusts. Now, making pie crust is actually one of the easier cooking endeavors to embark upon, considering that a pie crust is essentially flour and butter and an egg mashed together. My host mother sells butter, but as it’s homemade, it’s usually served out of a teacup. I figured that a block of butter would be easier to “measure” with. (When I cook, I don’t actually measure anything. There are no such things as measuring cups here.)

But, anyway, yesterday I went on a shopping adventure for pie. I got some pumpkin and, condensed milk for the pumpkin pie, and apples and lemon for the apple pie. I’ve already been well stocked with cinnamon at home, and I also have supplies of sugar, baking soda, cloves, salt, and eggs. Happy and ready to go on a cooking adventure, I brought everything home.

As one would expect, I put the butter in the refrigerator. Now, I admit that the following row was partially my fault, as I didn’t alert the family to the fact that I had put butter in the refrigerator, and it was not to be eaten. In my defense, though, the family never buys butter, as the host mother makes it. I figured that on that merit alone, my butter was safe.

I have had problems with putting things in the refrigerator in the past. For dry-store items, the family has provided me with a special shelf in the china hutch, so I’ve never had issues there. But occasionally, when I bought eggs, I would poke in the refrigerator for some, and find none left, because they had been used.

Today, I go to school, you know, whatever, and come back. I opened the refrigerator to get some fixings for lunch, and… a huge corner of the block of butter I had bought had been hacked away. I opened the jar of natural peanut butter I had, and there was a noticeable dent made in it, as well.

I may as well mention that my host family (primarily the younger sister, and to a lesser extent the mother) have been driving me up the wall in the past few weeks. If I wear the wrong pair of slippers into the kitchen, it’s dirty. If I use the wrong bowl for washing dishes or clothes, it’s dirty. If I put my sweatshirt in the wrong place, it’s dirty. The younger host sister just will not leave me alone, and the constant assaults on my locked door continue. The frustrations with finding a new place to live and being stonewalled hadn’t helped.

On that note, there’s a small block of apartments, right next to the school. There can’t be more than ten units in it; I figured it was nearly a waste of time to ask about it, but I did anyway. Turns out, my director (principal, basically) owns one of the apartments, and there’s nobody living in it currently. But my counterpart said that she had asked about the apartment and the director had said no. Mystified, I had went to the Peace Corps office and asked about it… turns out the major reason that the director doesn’t want to rent the apartment to me is because the director has a beef with my counterpart. Yep. Here I am, basically homeless in a couple of weeks, and the director won’t rent her empty apartment to me because of my counterpart. Make sense? That’s Kyrgyzstan, sometimes.

So when I picked up the mangled block of butter, the gold wrapper peeled away where the thief had gouged out the corner, I was livid. I mean, like, swirling red spots and instant blood-pressure-spike infuriated.

The only other person at home at the time was the younger sister, and she was obviously the culprit, as the parents hadn’t been at home all day, and neither had the older sister. I called out her name, and she ran and hid. I don’t know, maybe the near-visible waves of blazing fury radiating from my persona tipped her off.

I slammed my way out of the house, cursed my way across town in a matshruka, and pretty much plowed through the throng of people blocking my way to the Peace Corps center. Literally. A guy holding a box ran into me and bounced off.

I was all but ready to descend on my program manager’s office in a storm of hellfire and sulfur, but she was at lunch. This was probably a good thing, as I likely would have yelled fit to bust the windows. For better or worse, I’ve been blessed with a loud voice even when I’m chatting, but if I'm pissed, they’ll hear me in Uzbekistan.

Went around to the Volunteer’s center, where the other people there helped me take the nonproductive edge off my anger. I went back to the program manager’s office to find her still not there, so I set about lurking.

The head program coordinator (my program manager’s boss, basically) saw me skulking, and asked what was up. I gave him an earful.

And, frankly, I know that it’s stupid to get so ridiculously upset over butter, I mean, Christ. I’m not normally the type to fly off the handle as such, but it’s just been a building result of pressure these past couple of weeks. I’m just not comfortable where I live, at all, and it’s starting to affect other areas of my life. I mean, in my last year of college, I went to school full-time, worked part-time, played a sport that took up six days a week, administratively ran said sport, and wrote a thesis. I was extremely stressed at times, and I was always busy, but I was never as… well, angry about things as I am now. I am sure that, even at my most stressed out last year, if somebody had taken some butter from me, I would not have gone off on a murderous rampage.

And I’ve been thinking about that recently, that if that’s going to be the person I’m becoming – somebody who can’t handle a little butter theft – then I shouldn’t be here. Not that I’m seriously considering throwing in the towel at the moment, but where I am right now is obviously not healthy or productive. Things need to change, and they don’t need to be changed in a couple of weeks, they need to be changed now.

So, I told him as such, and my program manager came up the hall, and I repeated it all to her.

The threat of ET (early termination) is always effective. I don’t think it’s something that should be made lightly, of course, but basically, I said that if I don’t get a new place to live where I can be comfortable and happy, I’m not going to stick around to the detriment of my mental health. But after I got finished talking with my program director, I got overwhelmed with a bout of tears, and unfortunately didn’t make it out of the office without becoming too obvious about it.

This attracted the attention of the Country Director (everybody’s boss), and she came out and sat with me while I tried to gain control over what remained of my marbles. She, the head program coordinator, and my program manager all had a meeting, because I was clearly a mess, to the point where even the government had to stand up and take notice.

So, there are a couple of housing options on the table: my counterpart asked a fruit seller in town (who apparently knows everybody) about possible housing options, and it turns out she has a mother who lives by herself. They’ve wanted somebody else to live there for a while. This would likely afford me more space and privacy than I have now, but I admit I’m still not entirely thrilled about it: call me slightly jaded, but I kind of just don’t want to deal with host families anymore, even if the family is only one person.

The other possible option is a house. My counterpart’s friend is moving to Russia soon, and her husband is already there. I could live in the house while they were gone, which is good for me, because, hell, I’ll have a house to myself, and also good for them, as I’d keep the house in order while they were gone. The one cravat is that they’d also be trying to sell the house at the same time, so there’s the chance that it’d get sold while I was living there, and then I’d be out of a place to live again.

Tomorrow, I’m going to go see at least the first option, to see what it’s like. The homestay period has also been cut for me: my program manager said I can move out of my current living situation as soon as possible, as opposed to waiting until December 18, which is when the three-month mandatory homestay period is over.

My program manager also asked if I’d like her to talk to my family about the stolen butter, but I was deflated by that time and just said it probably wasn’t worth it. I just wanted to move.

The day did get better, though: some other volunteer friends and I went out to Beta Stores, the Western supermarket, and I bought two pie plates and another container of peanut butter, to replace my stores that “mysteriously” disappeared.

I was happy about the pie plates, though. As Western-style pie isn’t exactly a common article to be cooked around here (they do have pirogh, which are actually kind of like pirogies – wonder where they got their name – where the filling is put into a circle of dough and then folded over like a Hot Pocket), my host family didn’t have any pans I could borrow, and I was worried that they’d be expensive as an import item. I had been planning on splurging on one for the pumpkin pie, and then just making the apple pie into a tart, by rolling out the dough, piling the filling in the center, and just folding the edges over it and baking it flat on a cookie sheet. But they had cheap non-stick pie plates for a little over a dollar apiece, which is affordable, even on my current budget.

So, happily, I get to make an actual apple pie, with a lattice crust topping. I went home, considerably happier than when I went out.

When I got home, I went through the confrontation about the butter. Though, I do have to wonder if my program manager went ahead and called them anyway, despite me telling her not to do so: the host family had bought a small tub of butter, and my host mother offered it to me, saying that, “When children want to eat, they eat,” in excuse for the younger host sister.

Whatever. I wasn’t in the mood to make a scene about it anymore.

Cooking is therapeutic. I went through and made three piecrusts, and it was satisfying to crumble the butter with the flour, and then punch it into dough with the egg. (Or, maybe just punching things is therapeutic.) I now have three nice rounds of pie dough chilling in the refrigerator, one for the pumpkin, two for the double-crust apple.

And I hope like hell I’ll be out of this house within the week. That’ll be something to have a real thanksgiving for.

Written Wednesday, November 26, 2008

I may actually have a serious option.

Today I went to see the fruit-seller’s house. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about it, because I had been told I would have to live with the fruit seller’s mother, and I didn’t know how I would feel about that. However, it was an option, it was ready for me to see it, and I’m not in much of a position to be too picky.

So, after class, my counterpart, my program manager, and I went over to collect the fruit seller, and then see the house.

My initial impressions weren’t too great, especially because we had to wait outside the premises for about five minutes while the fruit seller went in and wrangled with the absolutely enormous feral dog living there. It was chained up, but basically right next to the walk, so it wouldn’t have been difficult for the thing to just lunge across the walkway and take a chunk out of somebody. Eventually the fruit seller poked her head out and said that only one of us could come in to see the house, because that’s how long she could hold back the dog for.

Dubious, I was the one who went in, as it would be me living there. I pushed back the gate, and ran past the chained behemoth, who was distracted by the fruit-seller tossing hunks of bread into its enormous jaws.

The house itself is a definite step down, luxury-wise, from the one I’m in right now. It’s a lot smaller: there’s a three-season porch-esque room, a bedroom, a living room with a bed in it, and a kitchen. There is no running water inside, but there is a spigot in the yard, and a gravity sink in the kitchen. (A gravity sink looks kind of like a small china hutch. There’s a tank on the top, which you fill from a bucket, which is attached to a spigot. The water from the spigot runs into a basin, which empties into a second bucket. The second bucket you have to manually dump outside.) The outside has a small plot of land (mud at this time of year), an outdoor cooking area, and a never-used banya. It kind of smells a bit musty, like old ladies and pink baby powder.

I wandered around and poked into some of the cabinets, and then took the requisite look at the outhouse, which, was, well, an outhouse.

The fruit-seller distracted the enormous beast with more bread while I ran back outside.

My counterpart and program manager asked me what I thought. I was clearly unimpressed. Despite the step down in living conditions, the thing I was most turned out about, I told them, was that I needed more space. Even with one other person in the house, we’d basically be on top of each other.

This earned me some weird looks, and my program manager asked me how I could need more than an entire house to myself. Then I was like, wait, “to myself?”

I don’t know if I misunderstood what they said to me at the beginning (though I am positive I didn’t), but it turns out that the fruit-seller’s mother is in Russia, and there’s nobody living in the house currently.

This made me change my entire tune, basically from a flat “no,” to “I’ll take it and move in tomorrow.” It’s within walking distance of the school, it’s heated by gas (so I won’t have to finagle with coal), it’s space for me.

They also agreed to move out the gigantic beast guarding the front walk, but this leaves me with a smaller, yappy dog on the premises. Oh well. I guess you can’t have everything.

The only thing still up for grabs basically was the price. When they were discussing it in front of me, the fruit-seller said that she wanted a hundred dollars a month, which, in the grand scheme of things, ain’t a bad price for an entire house. However, in the Peace Corps scheme of things, a) I don’t get paid in dollars, and b) I make the equal of a hundred and fifty dollars a month. A hundred dollars is like, two thirds of my budget.

After some negotiating, the fruit-seller wanted 3000 som a month, which is about seventy-five dollars. My program manager called me later that day, and said that if I went to talk to the fruit-seller tomorrow, I could probably get it down to 2500, or about sixty USD. On top of this I’d have to pay for utilities. Gas is kind of expensive, and the fruit-seller says it costs about 1000 som a month in gas to heat and cook. Of course, this will vary greatly, and I’m not sure if that’s 1000 som to heat the house all day every day, or 1000 som just to get a little kick of warmth at night. At any rate, I’ll probably opt to be a little colder in order to save some som, and rely mostly on my electric heater, because electricity is cheaper than gas. The electricity bill will be by default low, considering that it gets shut off here for at least five hours out of the day.

I suppose the good part about this is that it’ll give me a slight raise: I only pay 1200 for my housing currently, and they can give me up to 2000 for it. The extra 1500ish I’ll have to foot on my own. Holistically it’s not that much of a jump, because I currently pay another 900 som on top of the 1200 for dinner. I provide my own breakfast and lunch right now, so also making dinner won’t be that much of an extra financial burden. (Plus, I’ve gotten to the point where complete freedom over my diet seems like manna from heaven. I’ve had my fair share of soups consisting of mutton stock, sheep fat, a few slices of carrot and cubed potatoes, and while that was fine for a while, it’s… getting a bit old. In addition, my own kitchen would be a haven, where I wouldn’t have to dance around other people while I was cooking and be constantly paranoid that I was going to use the wrong bowl for something.)

Basically, we’ll see about talking down the fruit seller the extra 500 som, but right now I need an option and this is definitely the best one I have so far, and the first one to actually be somewhat concrete. Not to mention… dude, how many 23 year olds do you know with their own house? In Kyrgyzstan? I bet the answer is “one.”

Ballin’. That’s me. High living, on one fifty a month. I know, I know. You see me rollin’. You hatin’.

So, tomorrow I’m going to try and talk to the fruit seller. I’d like to move in as soon as possible, basically after they move the yeti guarding the walk and give the place a bit of a cleaning, so it’s not so musty. After that, I’m in like Flynn.

The only snag is that they’re only really looking to rent the place out for a year, as the mother’s due back from Russia next fall. I figure that a million things could happen between now and then (I could go home, the mother could get delayed in Russia, whatever), so this is a good, solid option until then. If it comes down to it, this time next year I’ll be closer to the end of my service, so if it’s an option, I might live with the mother for about a month, until it’s winter vacation. During next year’s winter vacation, I was half-planning on traveling somewhere (I can’t really go anywhere this year because we have In-Service Training smack in the middle of break), and when school starts up again it’ll be February (or even March, depending on the electric situation), and then it might be feasible for me to supplement for an apartment in Bishkek if there’s nothing available in my village, because I’ll only have about six months left of my service. I can’t afford to do it for nigh on two years, but a handful of months might not be as big of a burden.

Though, today almost made me a little sad, in terms of the good parts about having a host family. I made my apple pie today (which, by the way, turned out pretty good). I had woven the lattice topping and was cutting away the excess, when my younger host sister – who had been watching with almost scientific intent the entire time - asked me what I was going to do with the extra crust. I shrugged, and said I’d probably just throw it out.

The older host sister suggested making cookies with the leftover, which was a pretty damn good idea, considering that the pie crust was basically just butter dough. I rolled out the rest and the sisters made round cookies by using teacups and shot glasses to carve circles out of the dough. I kept on rolling it out until there wasn’t any left, and then we sprinkled the tops with cinnamon and sugar, and pressed Hershey’s Kisses into a couple of them.

It was actually enjoyable. It basically cements my conviction that we’ll all be a lot happier if I just come by to visit every once in a while. …it also makes me feel good about the fact that my host mother requested me to be out of the house, so then the onus of leaving isn’t entirely on me. I’m doing what’s going to make us both happy.

So, here’s hoping.

Written Thursday, November 27, 2008

Thanksgiving was more or less a normal day of work for me, since they don’t exactly celebrate it here. But, in lieu of the big feast, I now have a new place to live, which is like a breath of fresh air after breathing through an LA summer smog.

I went through my teaching stint (Thursday is actually my heavy day; I teach five classes straight), and it turned out that my counterpart was also done with work at the same time. (My counterpart works more than I do, because she also teaches fifth, sixth, seventh, and fourth graders in the afternoon. I also teach sixth grade occasionally, but it’s with a different teacher, and I’m technically only a secondary teacher, which is seventh grade and up.) As such, she graciously volunteered to go with me to talk to the fruit-seller about the house, since it was on her way home anyhow.

This was great, because I had been rehearsing ways to bargain for a house in Russian and not cock it up too horribly. Now, I didn’t have to worry about it. We went to the fruit seller’s, and she tried again with the hundred-dollar thing, but we got her down to 2500 pretty quick. To be honest, I think that she was as desperate to have somebody live in the house was I was to find a place to be; this way, it’s one less building she has to keep from going into decay. She said that she’d move the monster-dog by Saturday, and then clean up the house a bit.

The only thing the landlord had reservations about was having guests over – she was concerned about wreck and ruin, I guess. But I’m not exactly planning on throwing frat parties. I probably will have a considerable number of guests, considering that I have, oh, three extra beds in my house (my house, holy crap) and I’m ten minutes from the capital, but I figure that as long as everything’s relatively low-key, it shouldn’t be a problem. At least, I hope not.

My purported day for moving is next Friday, which I originally picked because I don’t work on Fridays (unless they change the schedule again). However, I forgot that Friday is also International Volunteer Day, and in commemoration of the event, I volunteered to go put on a little performance at a homeless children’s shelter that day. I suppose that I could always back out of it, as there’s going to be at least four or five other volunteers going, but I’d feel bad and I’m genuinely interested in attending. I’m hoping that they finish cleaning the house maybe before Friday, and that way I can get the keys a bit earlier and start ferrying things over there on Wednesday or Thursday.

The new place is almost equidistant from the school as I am right now, which is ballin’, because it’s only about a five to ten minute walk from school as it is. However, currently I live directly on the main drag through town, while my new house is set slightly farther back in the community.

Telling the host family that I was moving went off pretty well. The only minor snag was that when the younger sister asked me why I was moving, the mother cut in and said it was because I wanted to live alone. I said yes, but it was also because the mother told Peace Corps that she wanted the room back. Which was true. The mother kind of harrumphed her way out of the room after that, but I was like, dude, you can’t push all this off on me.

And in a certain way I feel kind of bad about the failing of this host family experience, as the past two I’ve done have been so enriching and really helped me learn culture and language. I suppose I could have been more flexible and patient on certain matters, but you can spend all day berating yourself about that, and it won’t get you too far. I also think that part of it might not have anything to do at all with homestay, but more with me just needing to actually live on my own. I think that, if I was in America, I could handle a roommate situation pretty well, but that’s not feasible or allowed here.

And, well, I’m not in America, so now I have a house. Which is probably going to bring a whole host of other issues with it: I’ve never had to take care of a house in an independent sense before, and, while I think I could probably handle it well enough in America, the houses here aren’t equipped like the ones back home. Basically, I’m going to learn how to burn trash and light gas flues and all sorts of things. At least they don’t have farm animals or a serious garden.

But, I mean, maybe I could plant a garden. Haha.

But I’m already planning all the cooking. Roasted vegetables, pot pie, stews, pizza, homemade macaroni and cheese, pasta, sautéed squash with basil and oregano, ohh. You know, cooking was one of those things that I always assumed that I wouldn’t like and wouldn’t be good at it, but I’m not half bad.

My host family did ask who else was living in the house, and they expressed deep concern when I said I would be there alone, and asked if I needed a dog. Which I recognize as a sweet gesture, as dogs here are more of a security device if anything. I assured them that the place did come with its own built-in yappy little terror, so they didn't need to worry. Of course, if I had my way entirely I would not have a dog, but whatevs.

They also invited me to come back and guest whenever I felt like it, which is extremely nice of them. I’ll probably at least do it once every other month or something. If nothing else, I’ll come back to buy eggs and dairy products from the host mother, as it’ll make her happy and I’ll need those things anyway.

So I suppose the whole thing wasn’t bust. I made my pumpkin pie today, which went off pretty well, I suppose. It smells and looks like a pumpkin pie, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, literally. Making a pumpkin pie from scratch requires a lot less pumpkin than I originally thought, only a half-kilogram. You have to gut it, chop off the skin (which is a task in and of itself) and then steam the pumpkin until it’s soft enough for mashing. Then, you mix in a can of condensed milk and a half-cup of sour cream, a couple of eggs, and cinnamon. I also added some ground cloves, because I’m a fan. You whip it all together, and pour it in the crust.

I had more leftover crust, and was feeling up to it, so I went and got the younger host sister and let her make cookies from the leftovers. She was genuinely excited, as she got to roll out the dough herself, make the round cookies, sprinkle the sugar on top, and grease the pan. I also helped her to cut some of the circles in half and make a flower-shape.

She was working while I was washing the other dishes, and she said that, “Laura, sometimes you’re mean, but sometimes you’re really nice.”

Which is, well, pretty astute, but she laughed when I told her so.

.an endless turning stairway climbs

2008-11-15T21:23:00.000-08:00

Written today

Argh, I am such a bleeding heart for kittens.

I was walking to the Peace Corps center, when I heard some persistant meowing. I looked down, and there was a tiny grey-and-black kitten wandering amongst the throng, meowing at everybody that passed. Me, being a complete and total sap, reached down and gave its head a scratch.

This was a mistake, because then it followed me the five-block walk to the Peace Corps center. I let it into the compound, because I figured I might be able to give it some creamer or the like.

I gave it some food and put an old shirt from the freebox for it to sit in, but it just stood at the door to the resource center and meowed and meowed until I went back out, and then it sat between my legs.

This is just endlessly depressing, because I can't take it home with me; my host family would have a conniption and a half over it, and I can't keep it at the center. I went back inside to do some business on the computer, but it just kept crying at the door until I couldn't take it anymore.

I eventually put it back outside the Peace Corps office, because I figure it would at least have a better chance at food in the world at large. Then, I got a call on the phone from the front desk, because the guard said the cat wouldn't stop meowing at the door. I said I didn't know what to do, and the guards didn't know what to do with it either.

Goddamn it. Lesson #1: you can't save everything.

Written Saturday, November 2, 2008

Halloween, Kyrgyz-style.

Being that the students need to learn about Western culture for the national exams, and I’m the resident layabout American, the whole Halloween shindig started about two weeks ago; I was charged with teaching about the holiday. How Americans celebrate it, the history of it, etc.

I was actually quite thrilled with this, as holidays make great easy fodder for lesson plans. For one week of classes I gave a small lecture about the holiday (with my counterpart translating) and then passed out crossword puzzles with Halloween words for them to fill in. I even brought some candy to hand out when I taught about trick-or-treating. The next week, I started off with a game called “I’m going to the moon,” to see if they actually remembered any of the words I had given them the week prior.

This particular game consists of the leader (in this case, it was me) saying something like, “I’m going to the moon, and I’m going to bring a Jack ‘o lantern.” Then, you ask one of the kids what they’d like to bring to the moon. The students have to figure out the theme of things they can bring to the moon; in this case, I was looking for words like “ghost,” or “witch,” or “candy.” Then, I handed out a word search.

One of the more challenging things in general about teaching is attempting to be able to rope in all the levels of the class. In each class I teach, there are always a couple hotshots who are genuinely good at English, some that are only really paying attention to try to get a good grade, a few kids who couldn’t care less, and the majority fall somewhere in between. The nice thing about word searches is that you can specify how many words the students have to find, and when the faster ones finish, either assign more words or have them look up the words in the dictionary and compose sentences. Thus, it can be expanded or contracted as needed.

It’s always a little bit frustrating when one of the faster kids finishes the exercise about ten minutes before everybody else and gives me that half-lidded bored stare and says, “I’m done.” It frustrates me because I was that kid a lot of the time and I know what it’s like to have finished already and just sit there getting increasingly bored while the teacher’s just like, “Uh, go take this note to the office for me.”

But, I mean, what can you do? If I taught specifically to the level of the faster students, I’d lose three fourths of the class.

But, anyway, Halloween took up about half of October, teaching-wise. I have a feeling that Thanksgiving will eat up a bunch of November, and then there’s Christmas in December, and maybe even Chanukah. God bless holidays.

Turns out though, that while the Kyrgyz don’t celebrate Halloween, they do have a couple of Halloween-esque holidays. The day Ramadan ends – which was October first, this year – lots of young children apparently go around town soliciting for candy and cakes. I didn’t see any of this, but I assume it’s probably just a branch off of visiting families; supposedly, the day after Ramadan, it’s good luck to visit and eat at seven different houses. At least. My host family didn’t participate in this, for reasons that I don’t know (I think they were just tired), but lots of other volunteers’ families did.

For the Christians, they have a Halloween-like ritual during Orthodox Christmas, which is sometime at the beginning of January. Teaching about American holidays is cool in this sense; I get to learn more about the traditions and holidays around these parts at the same time.

Us Americans, though, decided that we wanted to have our own celebration of Halloween, out here on the other side of the planet. All the volunteers in my oblast (and then some) rented out an apartment for the night in downtown Bishkek, and spent the evening drinking a good amount of liquor, making and eating some apple crisp, watching movies, and going to the infamous Golden Bull nightclub. Some of us dressed up in costumes; I was too lazy and too cheap to go out and think of something, so I went as my fabulous self, but good times were had by all.

A highlight of the evening was the random Dutch guy that some of my friends managed to dig up; he’s in the country for six months, working with a program that helps develop programming for street children. This was his first Halloween party, but he was pretty much just happy as hell to be able to speak with people who understood English well, as he didn’t know any Russian and only a few phrases in Kyrgyz. Good man. Also had some Cuban cigars, which I got to help enjoy out on the balcony. First time I’ve ever had a Cuban; have to say that I never thought my inauguration to the legend would happen in Kyrgyzstan, but that’s just the nature of the beast, I suppose. Reminded me of that summer I spent in D.C., where my fellow poor interns and I would forsake such paltry things as “food” to go smoke cigars with the old boys in the bars, since we hadn’t reached drinking age yet.

Though I drank a fair amount, it was just one of those nights where I wasn’t able to get drunk; weirdly, my body exhibits ridiculous tolerance sometimes, but I was in a good mood anyway and didn’t feel it was absolutely necessary to get my crunk on. Went to the club and danced to an interesting mix of trance, Russian pop, and hip hop until about four in the morning. I was exhausted, and went back to crash for a somewhat uncomfortable night on the floor.

But the apartment was worth it 100%, because it meant that I got a hot shower. The volunteers know a lady who rents out apartments by the night in the heart of the city, for about 1000 som. After this was split up by all the attendees, I ended up paying about the equal of 2.50 USD. For a hot shower, and a fully-furnished apartment in center city. Not bad. Not even by Kyrgyz standards.

Unfortunately, the morning was cut rather short, as I was off almost immediately from the apartment back to my village, because we were having a Halloween party. My counterpart, having lived in America for two years and also having already had a two-year tenure with another volunteer, already knows about the general gist of Halloween, and thus didn’t solicit me too heavily for planning this party. In fact, the only thing she asked me to do was come up with a couple of games for children to play: I suggested bobbing for apples and “pin the tail on the black cat,” but that was about as far as my actual involvement in the planning of this event.

Consequently, I didn’t know much about what was going on. I had rigged up the pin-the-tail game and my counterpart had told the attendees to bring some apples for bobbing, but beyond that, all I knew was that I was supposed to show up at noon. In maybe a costume.

Somewhat unfortunately, though, I got a relatively slow start out of Bishkek, had to wait an inordinate amount of time for the matshruka, which then decided to pit for gas about a fifteen minute walk away from where I lived, so I had to shelp back to my house with all my shit in the rain, before ditching it, gathering the Halloween materials, and then making my way back over to where the party was.

This is the downfall to travel by matshruka. They’re ridiculously cheap, and it’s nice that you can just wave them up from the side of the road to stop, and then just let the driver know where you want to get off, because it saves you from having to know a schedule and the stops of more traditional buses. Unfortunately, this also puts you at the whim of the matshruka driver; if he doesn’t want to drive that day, he doesn’t, so the number of matshrukas on your route fluxuates daily. On top of that, how fast the matshruka gets to where you want to go depends heavily on how many people want to wave it down, on top of traffic or an obstinate herd of cows or whatever else could possibly stop a van full of people from moving. I’ve gotten familiar enough with the matshrukas I usually take to know how popular they are and how long they generally take to go to my usual haunts, but my expectations are thwarted about as often as they’re correct. Plus, stops for gas are absolutely at random and can happen whether the matshruka is full of people or not; I had the unfortunate experience of being on a matshruka that was absolutely crammed full of people that then decided to take a fifteen-minute long detour for gas. At least it wasn’t summer, I guess.

Ended up being late. To be honest, this isn’t really that much of a big deal here; when I showed up about ten minutes into it, nobody said anything except for genuine excitement that I was there, but I still felt bad. I was supposed to give some sort of short speech about Halloween, but as my counterpart wanted to do the explanation at the beginning of the party, she went ahead and did it without me when I didn’t show up on time. I got called up in front of the crowd anyway to make a few remarks, but I don’t think I said anything that my counterpart hadn’t already told them.

But I have to say that my general non-involvement in it did make it really entertaining to watch, as it was a total Kyrgyz remake of the holiday, without direct American-led input. It wasn’t even so much of a party as a stage show. I got there when a bunch of children along with my counterpart were acting out some children’s stories about Halloween in Russian infused with occasional English phrases; a group of preteen girls did a dance number to the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get Retarded,” some older men with guitars played some acoustic.

The most entertaining (and actually rather clever) one, though, was by far the chicken dance. They had three girls who were, well, dressed up as chickens, along with two roosters. This thing was epic, man; it was a dance number of about six parts that lasted for about a half hour, detailing the main rooster having a confrontation with a dog, and then the hens doting over the second rooster, until the main rooster came and chased him off. Then there was a part where one of the hens laid a golden egg. The main rooster was also some sort of break dancer; he was doing flips and twists and all sorts of things on stage.

I have no idea what this had to do with Halloween, or even how they came up with such a thing, but the overall effect was indeed impressive. I was glad to watch, especially because I was tired from the night previous. When it was over, I talked to my counterpart, who said that the kids were tired from acting and didn’t really want to play games, so the effort I put into making the poster was for naught.

That’s one of the more frustrating aspects of this job; it demands a great deal worth of flexibility. And not just the general flexibility that was wanted from me in the States, as this is more of a “maybe you’ll do all this work and then nothing will come of it and that’s just cool” sort of flexibility. I’ve planned for lessons that were canceled, showed up to meetings that got moved to a different location without being told, planned for seminars that people didn’t show up to, dealt with teaching classes on my own without a plan because my counterpart had to go off and do something or other. Times get randomly changed, people show up late or not at all, you’ll talk to a superior who won’t give you an answer one way or another. (And, of course, they’re doing it in Russian, which just makes it more confusing.)

And it’s not that these things haven’t happened to me ever at home, but it’s almost amazing with what frequency they happen here. Out of five days of work, in at least three of them, the schedule is mutated somehow. This never happened when I went to school. There were always the same four classes a day (block scheduling) and if there was some blip in the game plan – teacher sick, teacher’s meeting, pep rally, whatever the hell – there were always substitute teachers who had lesson plans written by the regular teacher, or everything was accounted for. I can’t recall ever having a class period where there was no teacher. But that’s how it happens here: generally, whenever my counterpart goes off to a teacher’s meeting or whatever, I teach the class. I asked her what the other teachers do, as none of them have a handy Peace Corps volunteer about. Turns out, they just leave the class to fend for itself; sometimes they give tasks in an attempt to give the kids something to do, but as there’s no real accountability for grading here, it usually doesn’t get done.

In reality, I no longer look at the schedule as a guide to classes that need to be taught at a certain time, it’s more like a suggestion. So far it hasn’t really gotten to me, because doing work for no or little end doesn’t bother me much, provided I don’t have other things I need to be doing. Back when I was juggling about a million things, I would have been infuriated if I had made room in my schedule to plan a class or a meeting and showed up and then nobody who said they would be there was there. Here, I’m just like, “Well, I wasn’t doing much else anyway, and I guess now I can go read another book or something.”

The only thing that really concerns me is the effect it has on my work ethic. For the first couple of weeks I really worked hard at my job, spending lots of time crafting lesson plans that were interesting yet attempted to cover all the bases I needed to cover. But now… it’s not that I don’t put any effort at all into it, but it’s considerably less. If chances are extremely high that class is going to get canceled because the students have to clean the school, or there’s going to be a meeting, or class will get randomly cut off in the middle due to some kid ringing the bell prematurely, what’s the point in really busting my ass? I’ll just get unduly frustrated; the things that constantly throw monkey wrenches into my carefully laid out plans are simply beyond my control.

Basically, I don’t need to work harder, I need to work smarter. I’m going to put my real effort into things like grant-writing, where I’m more in control of facilitating things, and in the kids who genuinely want to learn English. This isn’t going to stop the class cancellations or anything else, but it definitely lessens the blow of having something I worked hard on come to nothing.

But, anyway, to be honest I was a little bit grateful that the gaming portion of the festivities was canceled, because after five hours of sleep on a floor following nearly six hours of dancing, I was probably more tired than the kids. I offered a few times to help clean up, but I eventually got shooed out from underfoot, so I just went home, where I promptly collapsed for about four hours. Which was good, because it meant I slept through the period in the middle of the day where there’s no electricity and I can’t do much. The days are getting darker earlier now, and the lights generally don’t work between three and six-thirtyish. Usually, I make this naptime, because, well, it’s dark, and there’s not much else I can do.

I guess in a way it’s kind of nice to have a prescribed naptime, when it’s not irritating me. It’s Kyrgyz siesta. I hook my iPod up to the travel speakers and lay in the dark, wondering when the lights are gonna come back on. I’m considering buying one of those miner headlamp things, so it’s easier to read.

Written Tuesday, November 11, 2008

My mother is probably going to hate this story. Or at least this part of it.

This past week, I went out to Issyk-Kul. First off, a little primer on Kyrgyzstan geography, because I’d be willing to put up some money on the fact that most reading this wouldn’t know the difference between a jailoo and Jalalabad.

Kyrgyzstan is broken up into seven oblasts, which are kind of like states, only far less autonomous. The one I live in is called Chui (pronounced like “chewy”), and has the capital city, Bishkek. Chui is located in the northern center of the country. To the west of Chui is Talas, famous for being the birthplace of the Kyrgyz legend Manas, and for growing beans. To the east of Chui is Issyk-Kul, named after the gigantic saline lake that dominates the area. Directly south of Chui is Naryn, which is mostly famous for being cold as hell and having a lot of mountains. Southwest of Chui is Jalalabad, known for having the largest walnut forest in the world. Bordering south of Jalalabad and Naryn is Osh, home of the second largest city in the country after Bishkek, and a whole lotta Uzbeks. Batken is in the far southwest part of the country, and probably most notable because Peace Corps Volunteers aren’t allowed to serve there, due to possible terrorist activity. Yep. Home sweet home away from home.

But I had a week off from school due to fall break, and though I like my village and Bishkek well enough, decided that it was getting to be about time to slake the wanderlust again and go somewhere. Beats me how I happen to have wanderlust still when I managed to get myself on the opposite side of the world from my birthplace, but there it is.

Decided on Issyk-Kul because there’s not too much of burning interest in Talas, Naryn is ridiculously cold at this time of year, and Jalalabad and Osh are too far away, Of course, I have plans to make sojourns to all the oblasts (that, uh, I’m not forbidden by the government from visiting) at some point during my tenure here – I’d be a fool not to – but for my first excursion I figured I wanted something relatively close and predictable. Plus, I spent too many of my formative years in Michigan and thus have a fetish for large lakes.

Struck out on my own; there were some other Chui volunteers heading out to Issyk-Kul as well, but I didn’t know that until I had already made my own plans. Hopped a matshruka from Bishkek to a town called Cholpon-Ata; Cholpon is basically a quintessential beach town, famous for gorgeous vistas and being taken over by Kazakh tourists during the high season. The name means “father of the sheep god” in Kyrgyz; Cholpon is actually a relatively popular girl’s name. “Ata” is dad in Kyrgyz, “apa” is mom.

The matshruka ride itself was about three and a half hours, and since it was a nicer brand of matshruka than the city-bound variety, wasn’t all that horrible. I dozed, listened to my iPod, occasionally paid attention to the kung-fu movie playing on the mounted television set, and stared out the window. The road that winds its way through the mountains at the border of Chui and Issyk-Kul goes through a pass called “Shoestring Gorge,” which showcases cloud-combing peaks at some of their finest. Of course, it was absolutely freezing when we pitted for a rest there, as a howling wind born from mountain air funnels up through the valley, but, still, quite picturesque. I also saw what was probably the most complete rainbow I’ve ever seen in my life about an hour outside of a town called Tamachy; it was wide and straight, sinking into the horizon with authority, possessing clear borders between the prism of colors.

Unfortunately, given how famous Cholpon-Ata is throughout the country (and this region of the world, even), I was under the delusion that it would be… bigger than it was. Or that there would be, you know, at least a sign. Or, barring that, surely the matshruka would stop at the bus stop.

…of course, none of these things happened, and the sky was rapidly darkening and people were slowly trickling off the matshruka, and it dawned on me that I probably overshot where I wanted to go.

Finally I was the last person on the matshruka, and the driver turned around and asked me where I was actually going, and when I told him Cholpon-Ata, he raised an eyebrow and jerked his thumb back the way we had came.

“About forty minutes that way,” he said, pulling into a small frontier post called Ananiwah.

“Damn it,” I said, fumbling in my pocket for my cell phone.

The great thing about being a Peace Corps Volunteer is that it makes traveling within country very, very easy and cheap. Virtually anywhere you would want to go there’s at least one Volunteer, who can offer free lodging in the form of an apartment or a host family. I had made arrangements to stay with a friend of mine, and I called her and asked her where I was in relationship to Cholpon-Ata and how the hell to get back there.

By now it was pitch dark and pouring wet snow, and I got the glum news that my best option was probably a taxi, which would likely be prohibitively expensive, given that it was past nightfall. I was wondering if it would be cheaper just to see if I could get somebody to rent me a room in Ananiwah, when the matshruka driver waved me over.

He was actually a pretty cool guy, and helped me wave down a late-night matshruka going back the other way. With relief, I thanked the guy and hopped into the second matshruka.

This time I paid more attention, and managed to get out in the center of Cholpon-Ata. Of course, it’s dark as hell because Kyrgyzstan doesn’t believe in streetlights and I have no idea where I am, so I phoned my friend again.

She told me that she actually lived on the other side of town, and that I’d have to walk to where the museum was, and there’d be taxis. So, I get on my walkin’ shoes and start carefully picking my way down the dark roads, trying to avoid broken pavement or open manholes. We’ve already had a volunteer fall down a manhole this year; I’d like not to make a copycat scenario. (The volunteer in question was fine other than a twisted ankle… though, I did see the manhole when I visited Karakol, and holy hell the girl is lucky she didn’t break something. It was about a ten-foot drop down onto concrete rubble and pipes.)

But, anyway, I walk the deserted streets until I find the museum. Of course, there are no taxis. I whip out my phone to call my friend and ask her what to do, but unfortunately, it won’t connect. I ran out of minutes.

So, middle of the night, wet snow-sleet, unfamiliar town, phone out of minutes, no goddamn idea where I am.

“Fuck,” I said.

She had told me before that her street was situated across from a billboard for a mobile phone company, so I resolved to keep walking until I saw the billboard. Even though I was unable to call out due to my lack of minutes, I was still able to receive calls, so I figured that if my friend didn’t hear from me for long enough, she’d get nervous and give me a ring. I kept walking, because I figured that I definitely hadn’t gone far enough yet, and walking would at least keep me warm.

About five minutes up past the museum, I see the glare of headlights reflecting against the road, and hear the tired rumble of an old Soviet dino-car behind me. I instantly move off to the side. I had been walking in the road, because the roads are in marginally better shape than the sidewalks, and not to mention the sidewalks kept on veering off into extremely ill-lit spaces. Unfortunately, walking in the road put me at risk for being plowed over by a drunk driver, and drivers at night here (or at any time, really) tend to be not-so-sober quite often.

So I stepped off into a median to wait for the car to pass and kept walking. Suddenly, I hear a chorus of male voices shouting, “Bikay! Bikay!”

“Bikay,” is Kyrgyz for “older brother,” and is a common term of semi-respect for other men. It’s kind of like saying “sir,” but less formal, or maybe “dude,” but less… surfer bum. Even though I’m a Russian speaker, I use “bikay” all the time, as the Russian equivalent is “molodoy chilovek,” or “young person/man,” and it’s just more awkward and I never hear it. Everybody’s always “bikay.” For the record, for women it’s the opposite – everybody’s “devushka,” or “young woman,” unless they’re clearly a babushka, and then they’re babushka. The Kyrgyz equal is “aijey,” or “older sister,” and though I hear it more than I hear “molodoy chilovek,” it’s still rare. Though, to be honest, most people call me “devushka,” because my heritage errs more on the side of Russian than Kyrgyz. If I looked more Asian, I might hear “aijey” more.

But, anyway, I ignore them and keep slogging through the median, waiting patiently for them to pass so I can reclaim my space on the road. Finally, I realize that the yelling hasn’t stopped and that I’m, actually, the only other person they could possibly be trying to talk to.

I’ve taken to wearing a windbreaker that I picked up at the Peace Corps office one day; a volunteer closed his service and left a windfall of winter wear that he couldn’t fit in his suitcase. The windbreaker is black, sports the Barcelona Football Club emblem (ye-ah), and basically makes me shapeless. I was wearing a dark cap that covered my hair; and besides, I have sort of a masculine haircut as it is. I get mistaken for a dude quite often here, mostly because the native girls tend to dress extremely feminine, and I tend to not dress like a bedazzler mugged me.

So, apparently, I was the bikay they were talking about. I turned around and the car pulled up, packed with about eight people in it, a few shaking half-empty vodka bottles by their necks like baby rattles. The driver was ridiculously plastered, and when he leaned out the window to talk to me, at first I thought it was because he needed to puke.

He asked where I was going and if I needed a ride. This is not nearly as creepy as it would be in the States; of course, Peace Corps doesn’t advocate hitchhiking as a rule, but nearly all of us do it anyway. Many of the “taxis” around town anyway are actually private cars that went to the bazaar and picked up a taxi sign to glue to the roof. There are actual taxi companies in the bigger cities, but there’s no medallion system here. Furthermore, even if you’re just standing on a street with your hand out for a matshruka, sometimes a private car will stop, taxi sign or no, and ask where you’re going. Some volunteers in the more remote villages where public transport doesn’t go are basically required to hitchhike if they want to leave their sites.

I’m close enough to a big city so it’s not a requirement, but I have caught a ride with a car once, when I was trying to get to the Dordoy bazaar on a Sunday (which was a major mistake). I had tried to flag down five or six matshrukas heading that way, but none would stop because they were full. Finally, after about twenty minutes and an attempt to hail the seventh matshruka, a small tan car skidded to a stop. A middle-aged woman opened the door, asked if I was going to Dordoy, and said that she and her son would take me there for twenty som.

More expensive than the matshruka, which is ten som. However, the car was nice and clean, the lady and her son seemed about as legit as can be, and it would be a far more comfortable ride than standing packed on a matshruka, assuming I could ever get one to stop for me. I agreed, and hopped in. Of course, when they passed by the main entrance to the bazaar, I was all like, “Great, this is the part where they rob me,” but it turns out the lady actually worked at the bazaar, and they were going in the back. She even helped me find the main entrance to the bazaar, after it had been made clear that I had no idea where I was going.

But I was definitely not getting in a car at night packed with drunk male twenty-somethings. declined the ride, assuring the driver (who was literally hanging out of the window by this point) that I was only walking home and was almost there. I managed to convince him, and watched somewhat warily as the car swerved around the bend in front of me, out of sight.

Finally, I found the billboard that my friend had described, and rested up against a rock ledge on the side of the road. Eventually my friend called, wondering what the hell had happened, and as it turns out, I had managed to locate her street.

I told her I’d never been so happy to see somebody in my life, and there’s a pretty good chance that it was true.

Ate a bowl of soup that the host mother offered, drank some chai, and all but collapsed into bed.

Cholpon-Ata, as I have learned, is a pretty damn small town, despite all the tourist hype it gets. I got a lot of flack from my host family and other Bishkekers about going to Issyk-Kul during the fall, as it’s far too cold to swim now, but not being able to swim didn’t bother me much. The next day my friend and I walked through town to the public beach, which was essentially deserted, and sat on the edge of the pier to shoot the shit. The lake was actually a remarkably pretty shade of blue, and the wind coming off it wasn’t unpleasantly cool. Mountains surround Issyk-Kul at all sides, so it’s not like the larger Great Lakes, where the water recedes directly into the horizon, but it’s still a damn big body of water.

Stayed another night, to the barely-concealed chagrin of the host mother. You see, me staying a second night means she had to feed me. This is one of the more frustrating things about the high respect given for guests here; in America, I could have just been like, “don’t feed me: I’ll either just go grab something or cook for myself,” but that doesn’t exactly work as well here. I’m the guest; ergo, I must be fed. She did make a particularly delicious laghman, though, which is kind of like noodle stir-fry soup. It’s a Dungan dish, and I hadn’t had it since training, since my new host family doesn’t seem to cook many Chinese-inspired dishes.

During the meal, she kept on mentioning how expensive food was and how loud Americans talked. Sigh. At least the food was good. She also had homemade thick crusty bread that was almost like a baguette.

Took a leisurely start the next morning, off to Karakol and Kyzl-Suu. Karakol is Kyrgyz for “black wrist,” and I’ve heard it’s probably a reference to the fertile valley’s soil and the people who worked it. It’s located on the far eastern side of the lake, and actually a little inland, and is Issyk-Kul’s administrative center. Kyzl-Suu is south from Karakol, on the southern side of the lake, and means “red water/river.” This has been a cause of merriment for those that live there, as one of the training villages is called “Krasneya Retchka,” which happens to be Russian for “red river.” So some of us moved from “red river” during training, to “red river” after training. C’mon, you know that makes you wanna lol.

The most remarkable part about my ride into Karakol was probably the fact that it was there I learned that Obama had won the election. I was about halfway through it when my phone was deluged with text messages, and I admit I grinned the rest of the trip. I still remain more cynical than not, but if he turns out to be half as good as he says he is, then it’s an extraordinary leap up from the last eight years. Hooray, my vote counted for something other than dissention this time! (Well, not actually, as they only count the absentee ballots when the state in question is close, but in theory I made a difference, dammit.) It was also refreshing to have an election that actually ended decisively and didn’t drag on and on and on for months.

But I met my friend in Karakol, and we pitted at another volunteer’s apartment where the host graciously hooked up the hot water heater for me to take a shower, and fired up a bowl of banana hookah for us to pass.

Showers are one of those rare things that just make me unbelievably happy when I can get them. Most families (who are rich enough to have them; several volunteers live in houses that have no bathing facilities) bathe by banya. I don’t mind banya, because, frankly, it gets the job done, and it also makes it easier to wash clothes than if I were living in a house with a shower. However, banya can never compete with a nice firm-pressured hot shower, or a deep tub. I still remain convinced that the Japanese have gotten bathing down to a wonderful science with onsen, but I do admit a strong liking for showers.

But the water heated up in about an hour, so after I had smoked my fill of hookah, I took my shower and we headed out to Kyzl-Suu.

Kyzl-Suu is about a half-hour outside of Karakol, and we got there and immediately went to an NGO where a JICA volunteer worked.

JICA is the Japanese version of the Peace Corps, and when we were originally given sites, I thought I was going to be in Issyk-Kul, since most JICAs are there and I had requested to be put near some. My Japanese is fuck-all rusty, though. We chilled at the JICA’s place for a bit, drank green tea, and she was generous enough to share some of her Japanese provisions with me. Red miso soup, here I come.

The evening was spent in the company of other Peace Corps volunteers and the JICA; we went to my friend’s house and cooked up some ash, or the southern version of plov. Plov is probably my favorite “Kyrgyz” dish, and it’s in quotations because I actually think it was originally Uzbek. It’s basically rice, garlic, carrots and meat cooked up with half a bottle of oil, but it’s really good. I like it best when mixed with fresh tomatoes, but since tomatoes are going out of season and becoming really expensive, a couple of fried eggs mounted on the top ain’t so bad either. Or with homemade pickles. Apparently you can also make a sweet fruit plov, with fruit juice, fruit pieces, and cinnamon as opposed to carrots, meat and garlic, but I’ve never had it.

Ash is the southern version of plov. One of the volunteers had come up from Jalalabad for the week, and had brought a bag of Uzgen rice with him. Uzgen is a region of Kyrgyzstan most prominently known for the rice it produces: brown and rich with a hint of nuttiness. I’m hoping they have some at the bazaar near me in Bishkek. It was fabulous; our ash was meatless, and also sported raisins. We also made a batch of banana bread to round out the feast.

After a heavenly night on my friend’s sofa (I had been sleeping on the floor prior), I packed up and headed out to Karakol since he was going to Bishkek. A bunch of volunteers headed out to Bishkek for the weekend to coincide with the fall break the majority of the teachers had. My friend invited me to travel back with him on Thursday, but the ride from Karakol to Bishkek is about six or seven hours, and I wanted the extra day in Karakol before I sat on a matshruka to get my teeth rattled out for that long.

My friend with the apartment in Karakol had work that day, so when I got back to the apartment, I basically had the run of the place to myself. Which I admit, was absolutely fabulous.

I’m a relatively social person, but like most Americans I crave privacy, which is pretty hard to come by in this part of the world. I hadn’t had a morning in a building by myself to just cook, watch movies, listen to music, and read books in a long time. I went to the bazaar and picked up some squash and made squash and oregano soup, which turned out to be pretty good, though it would have been better if I had a food processor.

I had half a mind to go out and see Karakol, but I admit that the lure of an empty apartment tempted me out of exploring. Besides, I’m sure I’ll be back in Karakol again at some point before I give up the ship here, so I’m not too concerned.

When it was edging into evening, a bunch of volunteers descended on the apartment like a time bomb, since the folk who didn’t leave for Bishkek on Thursday were all leaving on Friday, and my friend’s apartment was a close walk to the bus station.

The ride back to Bishkek was mostly uneventful, sans the beginning. I and two other volunteers got a somewhat later start, so we were heading to the bus station when a matshruka, heading for Bishkek, skidded to a stop in front of us. Of course, we were in the midst of hopping on when we saw that there were a bunch of other volunteers on the same matshruka.

Naturally, we were pleased, but it turned out that one of the group had valiantly offered to stay behind at the bus station and wait for the newcomers. Long story short, I was guilt tripped into staying behind so that the last volunteer didn’t have to make the sojourn alone. This wasn’t really a huge deal, as I was in no particular hurry anyway.

It takes about six hours to get from Karakol to Bishkek, and I don't think I was ever so happy to leave a vehicle as I was to get out of that matshruka. Matshruka isn’t necessarily a horrible way to travel, but it’s definitely not a comfortable way.

Back in Bishkek, I got talked into staying at the apartment with all the volunteers that came into the city to see each other (not that it was a hard sell, mind you), and shenanigans and good times were had by all.

And then I came home and promptly slept for about three days. And that, my friends, is the magic of break.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Well, it’s finally happened. I got the formal eviction from my host family.

That’s probably a bit overstated, but the short of it is that I have a month to get all of my things out of this house and hit the road.

I learned about it yesterday, when my program manager came by my school to observe my counterpart and I teaching a class. I kind of felt bad that she came on this particular week: the first two days I was out with plague, and the heater in the school’s been broken, so the classes have been shortened from their usual forty minutes down to a paltry twenty five. I don’t even know why they bother; twenty five minutes is NOT enough to conduct a decent class in. When I was in high school, we only had twenty-five minute classes on “speed days,” at the beginning of each semester when we had all eight classes in one day. (At the time, my school was on block scheduling, so a normal day consisted of four, hour and a half long classes. Frankly, I think this is much preferable to the traditional seven-hour day with fifty-minute classes, as it gives the teachers more time to work with and it preps students for college classes, most of which are at least an hour and a half long.) We did nothing on speed days except for receive syllabi. But I digress.

The overall evaluation by my program manager was favorable, mostly because my counterpart is just this side of amazing and taught most of the class. I did a little game with the students at the end to bolster the “team-teaching” part of the drill, though that’s not how our classes are usually run. Typically, she primarily teaches the classes on Monday/Tuesday and the lesson is grammar-based, and I primarily teach the second class on Thursday/Friday, which uses the grammar points but leans towards the conversational. But due to my brush with plague, and the fact that it’s the week after break, and considering class time was halved, things were a little jacked up.

No matter. The program manager basically had nothing but good things to say… and then at the end, added a curious little addendum about stepping up the search for new housing for me. My counterpart assured her that we were already well on our way in the search, though not much of actual suitability had cropped up so far. I’m looking for a more independent option, either an apartment or a guesthouse. (Nearly everybody here has a guesthouse, it’s not a hallmark of the rich like it is in the States. Of course, they’re in varying states of repair – the one at my current house had an unfortunate slug infestation, as we found out during my birthday party – but the vast majority of people have compound housing. Usually the guesthouse is a one or two room building, sometimes with cooking facilities.) The guesthouse at my current family, aside from having more slugs than I’d like, is frequently used by other guests, plus has no real heating system, which is why I’ve got a room rather than the other house.

Most of what people had been offering was a room in a house, which is what I have now. The experience here hasn’t been entirely unsatisfactory; I’d say about eighty percent of the time, things are just fine. It’s the other twenty percent that gets me. I can’t be too upset about it, though: this is my third time in the homestay lottery (first time Japan, second time during PST), and the first two times were great. I figure it’s about my time to get one that’s more along the lines of a dud.

And, as stated before, it’s not all bad. In whole, I like my community and my workplace is about as good as it can get around these parts. The house is pretty darn nice by Kyrgyz standards: they’re certainly a lot richer than my PST host family. They don’t have vicious dogs. The older daughter speaks a modicum of English: probably around as much as I speak Russian.

The major downsides are the fact that my host mother is an incredible neatnik, to the point where it actively intrudes on my life. As I think I mentioned before, she was pissed off because I wasn’t vacuuming my room every single day, and that I had piles of books on the floor. I also can’t cook beans anymore because of the smell, and was almost forbidden from cooking with cinnamon until I threw a big enough fit about it. Now I just have to time my cooking with cinnamon with when she’s out of the house. (The problem with beans is that the prep cooking time with them is at least three hours, and usually I don’t get more than a couple hours of the day with the house to myself.) I also can’t cook in the kitchen if the family is eating in there; this usually doesn’t affect me much, but on the off days when the parents get back from the bazaar early enough to have lunch at the regular time, it does. A couple of times I had to wait an hour or two to start cooking lunch, and dammit, I was hungry. The younger host daughter can be teeth-gratingly obnoxious: just today, I had to deal with about an hour of her banging at the door and pulling at the knobs trying to get into my room after I had locked it. For a while, I was wondering if the groaning doors were simply going to give and bust out of the frame, which would be a fine piece of work to explain to the family. When that didn’t go in her favor, she went outside and banged on my window. It took her the better part of an hour to get bored and try to find something else to do. She also has a penchant for walking into my room whenever she feels like it, unless I lock it, and then she just stands outside wailing until either I let her in or her mother finally yells at her. If I do open the door to demand what she wants, she usually just says, “I’m bored.” When I do let her in, she tends to manhandle all my belongings without asking.

And I realize that some of this is due to a difference in culture: here, they don’t really ask before borrowing things, and it’s not like America where I would always knock before entering my parents’ or brother’s rooms, even if the door was wide open. The Kyrgyz have more of a what’s-yours-is-mine culture, especially among family. But I’m not actually family, and my laptop is an expensive piece of equipment. She doesn’t know how to use it, and I don’t want her to break it because she’s banging on all the keys like a deranged piano composer. It’s not a toy.

And it’s not as though she’s five: she’s nearly twelve.

But, anyway, my counterpart assured my program manager that we were on the hunt. My program manager then told us that we had about a month, because my host mother had called and said that I needed to be out by then.

I was mildly surprised, and asked my program manager why I had been ousted. A couple of weeks ago, the PM came over and had a mediation talk with my host family, after a major blowup regarding the cleanliness of my room. The subject of me moving out came up – my host mother wanted to know what happened after the three-month mandatory homestay period. My PM told her that it was up to the Volunteer and the family; some Volunteers stay with host families for the entire two-year duration, and others move out as soon as possible. (Though, I have noticed that virtually all the Volunteers who have the option to move into an apartment take it. None of the close-to-city Volunteers that I know still live with a host family, unless they’re like me and still under the three-month mandatory stay.)

I decided to be honest and admitted I was looking into moving out, and asked if there was a certain time I needed to be out by. At the time, my host mother said no. Now, though, I apparently need to be out because they want the room back, since lots of their family members pass through.

This is true, since the family is from down south, and they’re the only branch of it to be near Bishkek. Thus, when anybody comes up to the big city, they stay with my host family. There has been considerable traffic in and out of the house, but I have a hard time believing that they took on a Volunteer without taking that into account. Originally, my host sisters were asking me if I was going to stay the full two years, and were very much in favor of it.

In fact, I’m still getting asked that, primarily by the younger sister. She even asked me yesterday, the same day I found out that I had a month to be out of the house. I cocked my head and was like, “Uh, maybe.”

In some ways, I wonder if this is just a graceful way out for all of us. It sets a definite time limit for me to be out so my host mother gets her room back at a concrete date, and it also forces Peace Corps to seriously start putting pressure on the school to find me a place to live, rather than me just wanting to move out but be on an indefinite time schedule to do so. After the whole your-room-is-messy explosion, I had been planning to move out as soon as the three-month interterm was up. But then, I had pause, because all things considered, my room is very warm. It has a huge heater on one side of the room, and a long heating pipe on the other, and when they fire it up with coal, it’s warm enough for me to sleep comfortably in shorts and a t-shirt. I had been in the middle of that debate for a couple of weeks – freedom or not freezing to death? Freedom or not freezing to death? – but I guess this did me the favor of choosing for me. Freedom and freezing to death it is.

But the weird part about it is that my host mother hasn’t said anything to me. My program manager, when telling me, said that the host mother wanted her to break the news to me so she wouldn’t have to do it, which made sense, indirect culture and all. But now that everybody involved knows what’s going on… it’s just weird to not have had a conversation about it with my host mother. You know, ignoring the elephant in the room and all. I’m not sure if I should be the one to initiate it or not, or even what the hell I should say to even start that conversation. “So, you’re kicking me out in a month, huh?” seems a little… well, abrupt. But, I mean, we have to talk about it at some point, unless they’re just gonna wake up one day and I won’t be there anymore. I mean, if that’s how everybody wants it to roll, that’s cool, but it just seems a little too Jack Kerouac for me.

But I have to say that while the news was somewhat, well, shocking at first, I admit that I’ve never been so happy to be kicked out of something in my life. I went home and started packing away my summer clothes, and began sorting through things that I could throw away. Moving is going to be more of a bitch this time, as I’ve accumulated more things than when I arrived – work papers, groceries, a rice cooker, yet more books - but it’ll be doable. I could probably just call a taxi on the slated day, shove everything in it, and have ‘em drive to the new place. That’s the beauty of not owning furniture. If my current host family is feeling generous, they might even volunteer to drive me themselves, as they have one of those SUV/station wagon things.

I’m hoping that I can move someplace permanent this time, for two years. In the past six months I’ve moved four times, and am looking at my fifth in another month. Two of those times have been pretty major moves: first out of college permanently, then out of the country. It’s getting a bit tiresome.

Of course, this brings up the issue of where, exactly, I’m going to go. Despite how close it is to the capital (or maybe because of it) there aren’t many apartments in my village. The one real option I have right now that’s appealing to me is a shared house. There’s a family here, and the mother apparently used to work at the school I teach at. She now lives and works in Moscow, but still has a house here, where her daughter lives. The daughter is about my age, and currently lives there alone. From what I hear of the house, it’s extremely nice, and I’ve even heard rumors of an indoor toilet, which is quite enticing. I would live in the guesthouse and share the bathroom and the kitchen.

Doesn’t sound like a bad arrangement to me. I’d get a house, which means some kind of yard and more space to move around in, but have the privacy of an apartment. I could possibly become good friends with the daughter, or at the bare minimum she probably wouldn’t be banging on my window and trying to break down my door. The one big wrench in the plan was that the same arrangement was offered to the previous volunteer, but Peace Corps refused it because it was too much like a roommate situation.

One of the rules about housing is that Volunteers can’t live with anybody, be it another Volunteer or a host country national, in a roommate-type arrangement. It’s either living with a host family or living alone in an apartment. While I can sort of understand why they wouldn’t want Volunteers living together, I admit that I can’t quite wrap my head around why we can’t be roommates with (trustworthy) HCNs. Frankly, in many ways I think it’s preferable to living alone: there would at least be somebody there who spoke the native language (and in this case, it’s a genuine native Russian speaker, as opposed to a Kyrgyz family who speaks Russian on the side), and it would be a little less lonely, and probably more secure.

But my bigger argument is that this arrangement isn’t like a roommate situation at all. To me, having a “roommate” implies that you’re sharing an assigned living unit, usually an apartment, and splitting rent. Which… is not the case here, as the daughter owns the house and I’d be paying her rent. Furthermore, I know that some Volunteers live in a “family” with only one other person, and I know that other Volunteers live with families but eat no meals with them, and I even know of a Volunteer currently who lives in a straight up roommate situation. So, uh, I’m hoping that I can convince them, because I really do not want to have to live with another host family. I’m ready for some more space.

In addition, the previous volunteer in my village actually ended up living in Bishkek. Now, it’s been stated over and over that he was an exception, and I’ve heard varying stories as to how, exactly, he managed to be such a one. I would be over the moon to live in Bishkek and commute, but the problem there is that he had to supplement his income to support himself there, and all the other Volunteers that lived in Bishkek had to do the same. I don’t think I can afford to do that on my own dime. I would feel bad asking my parents to pay for me to live here; they’ve already footed a considerable amount of the bill for college. Besides, it just seems asinine to have to pay to be a Peace Corps Volunteer.

So, option one is to try and talk Peace Corps into letting me into the shared housing situation. Of course, I’d want to see the place first and meet the daughter, but to be entirely honest, it’s looking more and more like that or bust. And by “bust,” I mean living with another family in the same situation I’m in now. If it came down to it, though, I think I’d rather take a chance with another family than live with this one for the duration of my service (not that I have the choice now, but in theory). I’m just not comfortable here.

It’s just so frustrating, because I know I’m not a difficult person to get along with. In the past five years I’ve had two other host families, and four roommates. None of the major disagreements we’ve had have rotated around living styles. Not that there was never any “get your underwear off my side of the room,” rebukes, but nothing like this.

But, to a certain extent, I can see where the conflict is coming from, at least where the mother is concerned. In Kyrgyzstan, the house is the mother’s domain, where she reigns supreme and all is done to her specifications. In comes the American, with her own ways of doing things, and mode of cooking. One of the minor tiffs we had was over the cooking of garlic. Here, garlic is one of the last things you add to a dish. Whereas I vastly prefer the method of having it be one of the first things, sautéed with some onions and a bit of oil. The first time she saw me doing it, she bodily stopped me from adding the garlic, all like, “What are you doing? You don’t put in the garlic yet!” And I kind of looked at her strangely, before saying something along the lines of, “American cooking is different.” Once I was making a vegetable stew, and we had an argument over how many tomatoes I should add. I was putting in six, and she was absolutely adamant that I only needed two.

It still kind of weirds me out, because if there was a foreigner in my house, cooking a meal that only she herself was eating, I don’t think I’d try and stop her putting in the garlic whenever the hell she wanted. Hell, even if she was cooking a meal that I was going to eat, I think I’d just assume that she knew what she was doing. I would never tell my host mother not to put so many carrots in a plov or whatever. If I were attempting to cook manty, I would welcome her help, because she’s a pro. However, when I’m building a stir-fry, I’ll flatter myself by thinking I’ve got more experience in that arena.

It was explained to me during the intervention talk I had with my host mother that getting all up in my business is viewed as the mother’s job, especially because I’m female. She’s trying to better me in some ways, make me more fastidious about being clean and to know the proper usage of garlic. I know that she’s not singling me out: she’s always yelling at the two daughters about something or other, usually having something to do with how dirty the room is.

I suppose I can respect that method of parenting, at any rate it’s not really my business, but it just stresses me out. The day after she stormed into my room like hellfire and started yelling about how unacceptably dirty my entire life was, I had splitting headaches so bad that I couldn’t do anything else but curl up in front of my heater and listen to my blood pound in my ears. My current lifestyle is, by default, extremely stressful, and it makes it worse when the place where I live is a major source of the stress.

The younger sister, though, I simply can’t wrap my head around. I mean, I understand that twelve-year-olds can have a tendency to be hyperactive, but sometimes it just goes to an extreme. The whole hour-long battering at my door thing is an example: I had shut my door and told her I was going to get dressed for class, and not two minutes later she came back knocking. I opened the door to see what she wanted, just to make sure that there wasn’t something valid going on, and she said she was bored. I closed the door again, and immediately she knocked. I ignored her, because I had already explained what I was doing and clearly two minutes was not enough time for me to be dressed and ready again, especially because I was dressing business casual. As she stood outside for about a half hour, straining at the door, I just couldn’t understand. Clearly, I didn’t want her in there. What did she think was going to happen if she managed to break down the door? I was going to be pissed.

Part of the problem here is scheduling. As I think I mentioned before, on the mornings when I don’t have class until later, I’m the only other person in the house with the younger sister, since both parents are at work and the older sister has school in the morning. She typically doesn’t get that outlandish when the parents are around, because if I get too upset the mother will hear and that’ll be the end of it. I have talked to the parents about her occasionally, and they just tell me to smack her if she gets too obnoxious. Which, I’m sorry, but I’m not comfortable with doing. Besides, I don’t think I should have to hit a twelve-year-old to get the point across that the door is closed and she can’t be in my room at the moment. She’s not four, she’s not stupid or slow, and she’s not a dog. And it’s not as though my room is consistently barred; I do tend to keep the door closed most of the time, generally because I’m listening to music and I don’t want to disturb anybody, but when people knock, I nearly always let them in. I’ve also started keeping the door locked most of the time, which is unfortunate, but since the younger host sister almost never knocks, I keep it locked to make a point. And, also, to keep her from walking in on me naked, which has happened a couple of times. Her seeing me naked doesn’t really bother me all that much, but the lack of knocking does. Sometimes, the younger sister is just fine and it’s not a problem having her in my room. Sometimes, I have to bodily remove her from the premises and hold the door closed while she tries to force it open from the outside.

In my previous host family, I had a younger host sister at eight, and an younger host brother at ten. I never had issues with them. They always knocked when they wanted to come in, asked before they touched things, and so forth. I do know that the PST host families get considerably more training than the permanent site host families, and they’re also paid a lot more, but I also think that the children at my previous host family were simply better behaved as a whole.

So, hopefully this time next month I will have moved or be on my way to moving somewhere that won’t be so upsetting. The mother can have her room back to vacuum every hour on the hour, and maybe I can get some peace.

.like the pine trees lining the winding road

2008-10-17T03:47:00.000-07:00

Written October 16, 2008

Work has started to settle down somewhat.

They’ve finally solidified my teaching schedule down to eighteen hours a week, which is definitely an improvement on the ten-hour schedule they had me on before. Not that I necessarily minded the five-day weekend, but, I mean, I did come here for something to do.

As with many things here, the school day is different than in the States. The day is broken up into the morning and the afternoon; high-school age students go to school in the morning, and middle/elementary-age students go in the afternoon. There are six periods in each half of a day: the high schoolers go from 7:30 in the morning until 12:30 in the afternoon, periods one through six, and the younger kids go from 12:40 until 5:35, also periods one through six.

There is no lunch period, though there is a cafeteria that serves up basic fare like pelminis (sort of like Hot Pockets), cookies, a set lunch, juice, and, of course, chai. I can only assume that this is primarily for the teachers, as I figure that the older kids just eat lunch at home, and the younger set eat before they arrive. There is also a library (that I’ve never been in) and a gym that I’ve never seen used. They don’t have PE or art or any real electives. In fact, I think the only choice they get is if they want to study English or German. (In this, English is the clear preference, because I end up with classes of forty students while the German teacher has classes of six. Sometimes, I wish I taught German.)

Frankly, I’m of the opinion that the students don’t go to school nearly long enough. Of course, I’m a product of the seven-hour school day, and people look at me like I’ve got horns growing out of my head when I tell them that, in America, we go to school like it’s a job. But on the days when I don’t have to go into school until the afternoon, my younger host sister is always all up on me like white on rice, since her parents are at work and her older sister’s at school, whining that she’s bored. I’m always like, “You need to be at school, then!”

Anyway, the grades are divided into “classes,” for example there’s 11a, 11b, 11v, and 11g. I have no idea how they decide the divide-ups in grades, but I have heard rumors that the “a” classes are supposedly the most advanced, while the “g” classes are, well, the lowest on the rung. I have no idea if this is actually true or not, as this information comes from other volunteers rather than from my school, but I have noticed that my “a” classes tend to be easier to teach.

But, the kids are assigned these groups when they enter school, and they take all their classes with the same group for their entire school career. That is, unlike American schools, where students are assigned (or choose) different classes and thus each individual has a different schedule, in Kyrgyzstan class 11a has math first hour, and then English, and then Russian, and so on.

Additionally, as I think I mentioned before, school is only mandatory until ninth grade. However, unlike in America, a great percentage of students here don’t continue their education in the public schools, instead opting to go to “college,” where they finish a condensed version of secondary school in one year rather than two, and then start to learn a trade. It’s essentially vocational school. Students who stay in the secondary schools take classes for another two years, and then have the option of going to “institute,” or what Americans call college. This resulted in mass confusion when I first got here and was telling people that I went to college… people would raise an eyebrow and ask me if I had learned to be a hairdresser or a cook. I hate saying I went to “institute,” though. It makes me feel like I went to a mental asylum. (I did go to college very near an old, creepy abandoned mental asylum, though, which I guess is close enough.)

The vast majority of the classes I teach are in the mornings as I’m contractually only supposed to be a secondary school teacher. My main counterpart and I have rigged it so that she primarily teaches the first class of the week – high schoolers take two classes a week in each subject – and I primarily teach the second. This is nice because it means I can basically write my lesson plans during the first class, as my counterpart does most of the teaching, and I only step in to clarify something or answer a question occasionally. When I teach, she basically operates as translator, when the kids don’t know what the hell I’m asking them to do.

Most of my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, periods two through six. I get there for first period, though, because this is when I can discuss things with my counterpart, as she’s busy as hell the rest of the day and I can barely get a question in edgewise. It’s not bad, though, I only have to wake up at six in the morning twice a week, while the other five days I can essentially sleep as late as I want. Plus, as I’m not teaching, I can take my time getting to school, and I have a few minutes to prepare. On the days when I come in the middle of the school day to teach, I always feel a bit… well, rushed.

One of the other bizarre things about the school I teach at are the bells. Namely, the location of the switch that triggers them. The damn thing is just sitting out in the hallway, like a light switch. This means that anybody just walking down the hallway can set it off – including students. It’s not unusual for me to be in the middle of teaching a class when the bell will just randomly go off, likely because some student didn’t want to sit through the rest of his math class or whatever. Even weirder, the bell trumps the actual time, so even if it gets set off by an unauthorized person with twenty minutes left in the period, class is still considered “over.” And, of course, this screws up the schedule for the rest of the day. Who engineered that brilliance?

But, teaching as a whole isn’t bad. Working with the motivated students is definitely worthwhile. However, dealing with the unmotivated ones is ridiculously frustrating, as there’s really very little I can do with them. If students just aren’t working, I make rounds and ask in my angry Russian school-marm voice, “Why aren’t you writing? What are you doing?” I have become expert in these phrases. Usually, it’s enough to get a sheepish look and at least an attempted impression that they’re going to do work.

But with disruptive students that don’t care how much I yell at them or plead with them are another story altogether. As I mentioned earlier, my eighth grade class is just ridiculous because it’s so large, and it’s impossible for me to control it alone. Even with my counterpart, it’s rough going. There is a gang of boys who always sits in the back and basically ignores everything I or my counterpart do, and is generally disruptive.

Corporeal punishment is not unusual around these parts, but I don’t particularly want to employ it, and my counterpart doesn’t either. Unfortunately, there’s very little disciplinary support in schools, which is probably why so many teachers resort to smacking kids around. Beyond the fear of getting physically struck, there’s very little real motivation to behave, as teachers are technically not allowed to kick students out of class, getting sent “to the principal’s office” is unheard of, the school never calls home about students, and there’s a de facto rule against failing. In the case of the eighth graders, I would definitely assign seats to keep the troublemakers farther apart, but unfortunately there are not enough chairs for the students to sit in, making assigning seats impossible. Uhh.

I favor humiliation. Getting singled out is about one of the worst things that can happen here, collectivist culture and all. One day, I dragged one of the boys to the front of the class and basically proceeded to tell him he was stupid. Not exactly one of my most “encouraging students to learn” moments, but he had been in the back of the classroom playing with the ringtones on his cell phone until I took it away, and then he kept on pulling some girl’s hair who was actually trying to participate in the class.

Finally, I stopped the exercise I was trying to coax the rest of the class through, and asked him to complete a sentence. Of course, he hadn’t been paying attention the entire time, so he had no idea what in the hell was going on.

My Russian is still not all that great, but I have enough to be able to lecture at this point. “Why is my Russian better than your English even though I’ve only been studying it for three months? Because you don’t listen. Why don’t you listen?”

You could have heard a pin drop. I made him stand in the corner for the rest of the period. The thing about lecturing in Russian is that it’s usually extremely effective… provided that I don’t mess up the language. The word that really makes me nervous is “to write,” which, if you stress it incorrectly, turns into “to pee.” Yeah. I never say it in front of the class, because I’m just not willing to risk the mistake. Which, I mean, is kind of difficult, given that “to write” is a pretty common classroom word, but I just want to practice it until I get the pronunciation down to a science to save me the repercussions of telling a class to pee in their notebooks. Best case, it would send the class into hysterics, worst case somebody would actually listen to me for once.

Then there was the Hitler guy. You see, there actually used to be a huge population of Germans that lived here, many here during World War II. Their legacy looms about still, even though most of their descendants have repatriated themselves. There are towns here called “Luxemburg, Kant, Rotburt,” and other some such. Unfortunately, part of the legacy they left is that occasionally the Kyrgyz like to shout out “Hail Hitler” to anybody who happens to be of European decent. (Or, rather, “Hail Gitler.” I have no idea why the “H” got replaced with a “G.”)

One of the eighth grade hooligans decided to “Hail Hitler” me in front of the class, where I proceeded to storm over (probably with a very frightening look on my face, judging by the way the class shut up and the kids leaned away), grabbed him by the shirt, and walked him out of the classroom. No, I’m not supposed to kick kids out of class, but I’m not even going to put up with that shit. I told him that when he actually understood what the hell he was saying, he could come back.

Frankly, if I was teaching alone, I’d probably be kicking kids out left and right. See, another one of the oddities about the system here is that if kids don’t show up to class, it’s considered the teacher’s fault. The result of this is that some teachers, rather than actually teach the class, will instead roam the halls looking for errant students. My counterpart is awesome and doesn’t do this, but I think the school knows where their butter is, and she’s an amazing teacher, so they don’t nag on her as much.

But I have no real desire to teach kids who don’t want to learn, so if I didn’t have my counterpart to help me manage the unruly ones, I’d just kick ‘em out. To be honest, I think it’s a better arrangement for everybody; the students who want to learn get more attention because I don’t have to spend valuable class time screaming at miscreants, the miscreants get to go off and vandalize something, and it’s less stressful for me.

But one of the more annoying parts is that, in addition to being a conversational English teacher, I’m supposed to be teaching about English-speaking countries, as stated before. However, this week I just decided to hell with it, because it was damn near impossible to combine the two and have it be an actually efficient lesson. My counterpart, though, still urges me to teach the students about the countries, because apparently there are questions asked about them at the national exams.

Which, I mean, frustrates me, because all I get is 45 minutes a week with these kids. It is physically impossible for me to teach both a comprehensive English lesson AND a social studies class in this time. Especially because my Russian isn’t strong enough to teach a class about foreign countries in it, so I would have to teach the whole thing in English, with my counterpart translating, so it would be extremely slow. I mean, if it’s more important for the kids to know about Australia than conditional statements, I can dig it, but it means that the English lesson is gonna get shelved. And ANY Kyrgyz teacher can teach kids about Australia. I’m here because I speak English, not because I know a hell of a lot about England. (I don’t. I actually know more about Asia. Heh.) Plus, not to mention, there’s no guide to what the students need to know about these countries. My counterpart just told me to teach “the most important things,” but, I mean, what are “the most important things” about New Zealand? The capital is Auckland, my roommate from college studied there, there are a lot of sheep, they call themselves Kiwis, the Lord of the Rings was filmed there, they have a really good rug-

No, wait, this just became awesome. The most important thing about New Zealand is clearly the All Blacks. Most New Zealanders would probably agree.

Fuck yeah, teaching.

Written October 14, 2008

There are good days and there are bad ones.

On the bad days I lay in bed in my dark room devoid of direct sunlight or electricity and bemoan the fact that, despite the fact that I consider my life to have been at least moderately successful thus far, I don’t have a pot to piss in. Literally. On the good days, I think that at least I have a hole with a roof over it, when, at the bare minimum, all you really need is the ground.

When storm clouds gather and I just don’t think I can take it anymore – the flies, the heat, the cold, the endless flash-drag-breathe of gold teeth smoking lips forming words heavy and precious like Faberge eggs scattering away, untouchable, unknowable, always lost – I breathe and try to take solace in vices that aren’t quite mine. Vodka, and tea. This is post-Soviet country, and there’s nothing these things can’t cure, comrade. Clink the glasses, curse the government, down it all, take another round. (This is the ritual for both beverages.)

There is a certain curiousness to this experience, which I guess just comes with the territory, like angry natives. It’s just so lonely, and there’s no other word I can find in all the languages I know to describe it better or less petulantly.

I have definitely started to irrationally hate the word “hello.” While few students are willing to converse in English, most are more than happy to lob their single confident word at the lone foreigner, a two-syllable bomb that explodes on contact and then spreads like a cancer through the hallways or the street until every being with a voicebox is chanting it. It’s my daily collective greeting, an unholy symphony on my way to work, at work, during work, on my way home from work, and at home, where my family speaks Kyrgyz while I’m trying to learn Russian and each unfamiliar noise just beats sour because I don’t understand and God if there’s anything I hate it’s not understanding. And the word “hello.”

Sometimes, when the class is giggling over my mangled Russian or they’re trying to cheat me in the bazaar because they figured out I’m foreign, I just want to pick everybody up by the neck – the merchants, the choir of hello-ers – and scream, “Don’t you know how goddamn hard this is?”

But, I mean, it would be pointless because they don’t. Somehow, I don’t think most people do, because most of us aren’t harebrained enough to go gallivanting off to a country that most people haven’t even heard of without learning any of the native languages and just living with a family and trying to work at the school. It takes a special kind of person to be that variety of stupid.

And, well, that’s me.

It’s not all bad, either. Sometimes I’ll be teaching and somebody’s eyes will go from cloudy confusion to yes and I just want to punch the air in victory because, hey, that’s something. When I conduct transactions in Russian semi-successfully, or see the mountains looming over the city after a rain, or my neighbor’s three-year-old shrieks in joy when I come up the walk (he can’t speak Kyrgyz very well yet, so he hasn’t gotten to “hello”), it’s something, it’s a small thing, a button to tuck in my pocket to worry at when noun declension and the word “hello” threaten to make it all come undone.

Other volunteers are going home. They go back to America all the time; I remember a game I used to play when I was younger, with a large clear plastic tube. Halfway through the tube a bunch of holes were drilled, and you’d insert small plastic sticks perpendicularly through the plastic cylinder, and pour marbles in the top. One by one, you’d remove the plastic sticks and marbles would drop out as the supports lessened; finally, somebody would pull the last one and all the marbles would tumble down to the bottom of the shaft. Well, the supports are lessening and the marbles here are dropping; they have various reasons, too sick, too little structure, just fed up. Sometimes I wonder if the ground’s just going to fall out from under me, and I, too, will drop to the bottom and be on a plane back West, a casualty of so many things that could go wrong.

And if I did at some point, I don’t think that anybody would rightfully blame me for doing so. I mean, this is ridiculously difficult. I could just throw up my hands and be like, “Bitches, please.” But then… I know, for the rest of my life, there would be the small voice in my head, somewhere around my central fissure whispering, “Hey, you, quitter. Yeah, that’s you. Quit-terrrrrr. Who quit? Oh, that was you. Can you spell it? Q-U-I-T-T-E-R. What’s it in Russian? Oh, wait, you don’t know because you QU-“ …and I’d just as soon freeze to death in a Siberian winter with no electricity than deal with THAT.

But, if the quit urge has risen, now is not yet the time. Am I a hundred percent happy here? Well, no. But, to be fair, I’ve never been a hundred percent happy anywhere, so it’s unreasonable to hold this experience up to the bar of “completely satisfied.” Besides, I wasn’t exactly aiming for happy while doing this, because I don’t know what the hell I want. It’s hard to find happiness when you’re not even sure what you’re looking for. I do like being pleasantly surprised, though, and I figure that there’s a slim chance I might find it while knocking about. Maybe snowballs do have a chance in hell, if they end up in the Devil’s Frigidaire. You never know, and that’s my motto, my mantra, my reality.
.
I am an amalgam of homesickness; I long for random pieces and places of experience and thus miss them in mosaics. I am homesick for the rolling hills and college ivy of Massachusetts, the old stained couch that’s too big for my living room in Michigan, the random bump in the lawn I named “county hill” in Indiana, my grandmother’s red tool shed in Kentucky, and the bamboo fountain I walked by every day on my way to the train station in Kyoto. These all attack me at different times, and it irritates the hell out of me because, no matter what I do, I can never have all these things. Aren’t you supposed to be homesick for one goddamn place rather than a schizophrenic salad of misplaced nostalgia for random things?

What I do have is rogue gypsy nucleotides messing with my DNA, a job, and a hole in the ground to piss in. Which, despite all my complaining, ain’t all that awful.

I like to think about my (hopefully) dignified, respectable future. Mostly, what I want now is to smile behind my cocktail at those future respectable dinners, where there will be unquestioned electricity and less sheep fat than there is now, to smile beyond the rattle of dinnerware and moderated use of the word “hello,” when people tell me that they want to see the world.

I will smile because I will have lived it.