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

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

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;

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

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

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

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

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.