.grimy faces were never seen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.