Written October 16, 2008
Work has started to settle down somewhat.
They’ve finally solidified my teaching schedule down to eighteen hours a week, which is definitely an improvement on the ten-hour schedule they had me on before. Not that I necessarily minded the five-day weekend, but, I mean, I did come here for something to do.
As with many things here, the school day is different than in the States. The day is broken up into the morning and the afternoon; high-school age students go to school in the morning, and middle/elementary-age students go in the afternoon. There are six periods in each half of a day: the high schoolers go from 7:30 in the morning until 12:30 in the afternoon, periods one through six, and the younger kids go from 12:40 until 5:35, also periods one through six.
There is no lunch period, though there is a cafeteria that serves up basic fare like pelminis (sort of like Hot Pockets), cookies, a set lunch, juice, and, of course, chai. I can only assume that this is primarily for the teachers, as I figure that the older kids just eat lunch at home, and the younger set eat before they arrive. There is also a library (that I’ve never been in) and a gym that I’ve never seen used. They don’t have PE or art or any real electives. In fact, I think the only choice they get is if they want to study English or German. (In this, English is the clear preference, because I end up with classes of forty students while the German teacher has classes of six. Sometimes, I wish I taught German.)
Frankly, I’m of the opinion that the students don’t go to school nearly long enough. Of course, I’m a product of the seven-hour school day, and people look at me like I’ve got horns growing out of my head when I tell them that, in America, we go to school like it’s a job. But on the days when I don’t have to go into school until the afternoon, my younger host sister is always all up on me like white on rice, since her parents are at work and her older sister’s at school, whining that she’s bored. I’m always like, “You need to be at school, then!”
Anyway, the grades are divided into “classes,” for example there’s 11a, 11b, 11v, and 11g. I have no idea how they decide the divide-ups in grades, but I have heard rumors that the “a” classes are supposedly the most advanced, while the “g” classes are, well, the lowest on the rung. I have no idea if this is actually true or not, as this information comes from other volunteers rather than from my school, but I have noticed that my “a” classes tend to be easier to teach.
But, the kids are assigned these groups when they enter school, and they take all their classes with the same group for their entire school career. That is, unlike American schools, where students are assigned (or choose) different classes and thus each individual has a different schedule, in Kyrgyzstan class 11a has math first hour, and then English, and then Russian, and so on.
Additionally, as I think I mentioned before, school is only mandatory until ninth grade. However, unlike in America, a great percentage of students here don’t continue their education in the public schools, instead opting to go to “college,” where they finish a condensed version of secondary school in one year rather than two, and then start to learn a trade. It’s essentially vocational school. Students who stay in the secondary schools take classes for another two years, and then have the option of going to “institute,” or what Americans call college. This resulted in mass confusion when I first got here and was telling people that I went to college… people would raise an eyebrow and ask me if I had learned to be a hairdresser or a cook. I hate saying I went to “institute,” though. It makes me feel like I went to a mental asylum. (I did go to college very near an old, creepy abandoned mental asylum, though, which I guess is close enough.)
The vast majority of the classes I teach are in the mornings as I’m contractually only supposed to be a secondary school teacher. My main counterpart and I have rigged it so that she primarily teaches the first class of the week – high schoolers take two classes a week in each subject – and I primarily teach the second. This is nice because it means I can basically write my lesson plans during the first class, as my counterpart does most of the teaching, and I only step in to clarify something or answer a question occasionally. When I teach, she basically operates as translator, when the kids don’t know what the hell I’m asking them to do.
Most of my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, periods two through six. I get there for first period, though, because this is when I can discuss things with my counterpart, as she’s busy as hell the rest of the day and I can barely get a question in edgewise. It’s not bad, though, I only have to wake up at six in the morning twice a week, while the other five days I can essentially sleep as late as I want. Plus, as I’m not teaching, I can take my time getting to school, and I have a few minutes to prepare. On the days when I come in the middle of the school day to teach, I always feel a bit… well, rushed.
One of the other bizarre things about the school I teach at are the bells. Namely, the location of the switch that triggers them. The damn thing is just sitting out in the hallway, like a light switch. This means that anybody just walking down the hallway can set it off – including students. It’s not unusual for me to be in the middle of teaching a class when the bell will just randomly go off, likely because some student didn’t want to sit through the rest of his math class or whatever. Even weirder, the bell trumps the actual time, so even if it gets set off by an unauthorized person with twenty minutes left in the period, class is still considered “over.” And, of course, this screws up the schedule for the rest of the day. Who engineered that brilliance?
But, teaching as a whole isn’t bad. Working with the motivated students is definitely worthwhile. However, dealing with the unmotivated ones is ridiculously frustrating, as there’s really very little I can do with them. If students just aren’t working, I make rounds and ask in my angry Russian school-marm voice, “Why aren’t you writing? What are you doing?” I have become expert in these phrases. Usually, it’s enough to get a sheepish look and at least an attempted impression that they’re going to do work.
But with disruptive students that don’t care how much I yell at them or plead with them are another story altogether. As I mentioned earlier, my eighth grade class is just ridiculous because it’s so large, and it’s impossible for me to control it alone. Even with my counterpart, it’s rough going. There is a gang of boys who always sits in the back and basically ignores everything I or my counterpart do, and is generally disruptive.
Corporeal punishment is not unusual around these parts, but I don’t particularly want to employ it, and my counterpart doesn’t either. Unfortunately, there’s very little disciplinary support in schools, which is probably why so many teachers resort to smacking kids around. Beyond the fear of getting physically struck, there’s very little real motivation to behave, as teachers are technically not allowed to kick students out of class, getting sent “to the principal’s office” is unheard of, the school never calls home about students, and there’s a de facto rule against failing. In the case of the eighth graders, I would definitely assign seats to keep the troublemakers farther apart, but unfortunately there are not enough chairs for the students to sit in, making assigning seats impossible. Uhh.
I favor humiliation. Getting singled out is about one of the worst things that can happen here, collectivist culture and all. One day, I dragged one of the boys to the front of the class and basically proceeded to tell him he was stupid. Not exactly one of my most “encouraging students to learn” moments, but he had been in the back of the classroom playing with the ringtones on his cell phone until I took it away, and then he kept on pulling some girl’s hair who was actually trying to participate in the class.
Finally, I stopped the exercise I was trying to coax the rest of the class through, and asked him to complete a sentence. Of course, he hadn’t been paying attention the entire time, so he had no idea what in the hell was going on.
My Russian is still not all that great, but I have enough to be able to lecture at this point. “Why is my Russian better than your English even though I’ve only been studying it for three months? Because you don’t listen. Why don’t you listen?”
You could have heard a pin drop. I made him stand in the corner for the rest of the period. The thing about lecturing in Russian is that it’s usually extremely effective… provided that I don’t mess up the language. The word that really makes me nervous is “to write,” which, if you stress it incorrectly, turns into “to pee.” Yeah. I never say it in front of the class, because I’m just not willing to risk the mistake. Which, I mean, is kind of difficult, given that “to write” is a pretty common classroom word, but I just want to practice it until I get the pronunciation down to a science to save me the repercussions of telling a class to pee in their notebooks. Best case, it would send the class into hysterics, worst case somebody would actually listen to me for once.
Then there was the Hitler guy. You see, there actually used to be a huge population of Germans that lived here, many here during World War II. Their legacy looms about still, even though most of their descendants have repatriated themselves. There are towns here called “Luxemburg, Kant, Rotburt,” and other some such. Unfortunately, part of the legacy they left is that occasionally the Kyrgyz like to shout out “Hail Hitler” to anybody who happens to be of European decent. (Or, rather, “Hail Gitler.” I have no idea why the “H” got replaced with a “G.”)
One of the eighth grade hooligans decided to “Hail Hitler” me in front of the class, where I proceeded to storm over (probably with a very frightening look on my face, judging by the way the class shut up and the kids leaned away), grabbed him by the shirt, and walked him out of the classroom. No, I’m not supposed to kick kids out of class, but I’m not even going to put up with that shit. I told him that when he actually understood what the hell he was saying, he could come back.
Frankly, if I was teaching alone, I’d probably be kicking kids out left and right. See, another one of the oddities about the system here is that if kids don’t show up to class, it’s considered the teacher’s fault. The result of this is that some teachers, rather than actually teach the class, will instead roam the halls looking for errant students. My counterpart is awesome and doesn’t do this, but I think the school knows where their butter is, and she’s an amazing teacher, so they don’t nag on her as much.
But I have no real desire to teach kids who don’t want to learn, so if I didn’t have my counterpart to help me manage the unruly ones, I’d just kick ‘em out. To be honest, I think it’s a better arrangement for everybody; the students who want to learn get more attention because I don’t have to spend valuable class time screaming at miscreants, the miscreants get to go off and vandalize something, and it’s less stressful for me.
But one of the more annoying parts is that, in addition to being a conversational English teacher, I’m supposed to be teaching about English-speaking countries, as stated before. However, this week I just decided to hell with it, because it was damn near impossible to combine the two and have it be an actually efficient lesson. My counterpart, though, still urges me to teach the students about the countries, because apparently there are questions asked about them at the national exams.
Which, I mean, frustrates me, because all I get is 45 minutes a week with these kids. It is physically impossible for me to teach both a comprehensive English lesson AND a social studies class in this time. Especially because my Russian isn’t strong enough to teach a class about foreign countries in it, so I would have to teach the whole thing in English, with my counterpart translating, so it would be extremely slow. I mean, if it’s more important for the kids to know about Australia than conditional statements, I can dig it, but it means that the English lesson is gonna get shelved. And ANY Kyrgyz teacher can teach kids about Australia. I’m here because I speak English, not because I know a hell of a lot about England. (I don’t. I actually know more about Asia. Heh.) Plus, not to mention, there’s no guide to what the students need to know about these countries. My counterpart just told me to teach “the most important things,” but, I mean, what are “the most important things” about New Zealand? The capital is Auckland, my roommate from college studied there, there are a lot of sheep, they call themselves Kiwis, the Lord of the Rings was filmed there, they have a really good rug-
No, wait, this just became awesome. The most important thing about New Zealand is clearly the All Blacks. Most New Zealanders would probably agree.
Fuck yeah, teaching.
Written October 14, 2008
There are good days and there are bad ones.
On the bad days I lay in bed in my dark room devoid of direct sunlight or electricity and bemoan the fact that, despite the fact that I consider my life to have been at least moderately successful thus far, I don’t have a pot to piss in. Literally. On the good days, I think that at least I have a hole with a roof over it, when, at the bare minimum, all you really need is the ground.
When storm clouds gather and I just don’t think I can take it anymore – the flies, the heat, the cold, the endless flash-drag-breathe of gold teeth smoking lips forming words heavy and precious like Faberge eggs scattering away, untouchable, unknowable, always lost – I breathe and try to take solace in vices that aren’t quite mine. Vodka, and tea. This is post-Soviet country, and there’s nothing these things can’t cure, comrade. Clink the glasses, curse the government, down it all, take another round. (This is the ritual for both beverages.)
There is a certain curiousness to this experience, which I guess just comes with the territory, like angry natives. It’s just so lonely, and there’s no other word I can find in all the languages I know to describe it better or less petulantly.
I have definitely started to irrationally hate the word “hello.” While few students are willing to converse in English, most are more than happy to lob their single confident word at the lone foreigner, a two-syllable bomb that explodes on contact and then spreads like a cancer through the hallways or the street until every being with a voicebox is chanting it. It’s my daily collective greeting, an unholy symphony on my way to work, at work, during work, on my way home from work, and at home, where my family speaks Kyrgyz while I’m trying to learn Russian and each unfamiliar noise just beats sour because I don’t understand and God if there’s anything I hate it’s not understanding. And the word “hello.”
Sometimes, when the class is giggling over my mangled Russian or they’re trying to cheat me in the bazaar because they figured out I’m foreign, I just want to pick everybody up by the neck – the merchants, the choir of hello-ers – and scream, “Don’t you know how goddamn hard this is?”
But, I mean, it would be pointless because they don’t. Somehow, I don’t think most people do, because most of us aren’t harebrained enough to go gallivanting off to a country that most people haven’t even heard of without learning any of the native languages and just living with a family and trying to work at the school. It takes a special kind of person to be that variety of stupid.
And, well, that’s me.
It’s not all bad, either. Sometimes I’ll be teaching and somebody’s eyes will go from cloudy confusion to yes and I just want to punch the air in victory because, hey, that’s something. When I conduct transactions in Russian semi-successfully, or see the mountains looming over the city after a rain, or my neighbor’s three-year-old shrieks in joy when I come up the walk (he can’t speak Kyrgyz very well yet, so he hasn’t gotten to “hello”), it’s something, it’s a small thing, a button to tuck in my pocket to worry at when noun declension and the word “hello” threaten to make it all come undone.
Other volunteers are going home. They go back to America all the time; I remember a game I used to play when I was younger, with a large clear plastic tube. Halfway through the tube a bunch of holes were drilled, and you’d insert small plastic sticks perpendicularly through the plastic cylinder, and pour marbles in the top. One by one, you’d remove the plastic sticks and marbles would drop out as the supports lessened; finally, somebody would pull the last one and all the marbles would tumble down to the bottom of the shaft. Well, the supports are lessening and the marbles here are dropping; they have various reasons, too sick, too little structure, just fed up. Sometimes I wonder if the ground’s just going to fall out from under me, and I, too, will drop to the bottom and be on a plane back West, a casualty of so many things that could go wrong.
And if I did at some point, I don’t think that anybody would rightfully blame me for doing so. I mean, this is ridiculously difficult. I could just throw up my hands and be like, “Bitches, please.” But then… I know, for the rest of my life, there would be the small voice in my head, somewhere around my central fissure whispering, “Hey, you, quitter. Yeah, that’s you. Quit-terrrrrr. Who quit? Oh, that was you. Can you spell it? Q-U-I-T-T-E-R. What’s it in Russian? Oh, wait, you don’t know because you QU-“ …and I’d just as soon freeze to death in a Siberian winter with no electricity than deal with THAT.
But, if the quit urge has risen, now is not yet the time. Am I a hundred percent happy here? Well, no. But, to be fair, I’ve never been a hundred percent happy anywhere, so it’s unreasonable to hold this experience up to the bar of “completely satisfied.” Besides, I wasn’t exactly aiming for happy while doing this, because I don’t know what the hell I want. It’s hard to find happiness when you’re not even sure what you’re looking for. I do like being pleasantly surprised, though, and I figure that there’s a slim chance I might find it while knocking about. Maybe snowballs do have a chance in hell, if they end up in the Devil’s Frigidaire. You never know, and that’s my motto, my mantra, my reality.
.
I am an amalgam of homesickness; I long for random pieces and places of experience and thus miss them in mosaics. I am homesick for the rolling hills and college ivy of Massachusetts, the old stained couch that’s too big for my living room in Michigan, the random bump in the lawn I named “county hill” in Indiana, my grandmother’s red tool shed in Kentucky, and the bamboo fountain I walked by every day on my way to the train station in Kyoto. These all attack me at different times, and it irritates the hell out of me because, no matter what I do, I can never have all these things. Aren’t you supposed to be homesick for one goddamn place rather than a schizophrenic salad of misplaced nostalgia for random things?
What I do have is rogue gypsy nucleotides messing with my DNA, a job, and a hole in the ground to piss in. Which, despite all my complaining, ain’t all that awful.
I like to think about my (hopefully) dignified, respectable future. Mostly, what I want now is to smile behind my cocktail at those future respectable dinners, where there will be unquestioned electricity and less sheep fat than there is now, to smile beyond the rattle of dinnerware and moderated use of the word “hello,” when people tell me that they want to see the world.
I will smile because I will have lived it.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Saturday, October 11, 2008
.let me bring you love from the fields
Written October 7, 2008
Coffee is a precious, precious commodity here.
Tea, of course, is ubiquitous. I can barely walk three feet in this country without getting what me and some other volunteers have dubbed “chaied.” “Chai,” is, of course, the Russian and the Kyrgyz word for “tea.” In my training village, whenever we went over to each other’s houses, it always ended up with a lengthy chai-ing, or if we really had to get somewhere by a certain time, we would sneak into the compound and tap on windows, hoping not to alert the host mother on premises. There is no such thing as “eat and run” here. If you get roped into getting chaied, you’ll be there for about an hour, at least.
Not that I am really complaining, I guess. Sometimes it bothers me in a distant way, because, you know, I was raised with the maxim “time is money,” and it’s kind of difficult to slow down. Even when I have nothing in the world that I have to be doing, I always feel that I should be doing something with myself. Damn Protestant work ethic. But, on the other hand, it’s kind of nice/amusing to be in a place where drinking tea is a perfectly acceptable excuse for being late.
But anyway, it’s chai for breakfast, chai for lunch, chai for dinner, and chai for chai chisov, or “tea time.” It’s a good thing that I like tea. I probably drink, on average, at least twenty cups a day. When I lived with my Turkish host family, it was black tea with an inordinate amount of sugar (I’m still mildly surprised that my internal organs didn’t become candied), and with my Kyrgyz family it’s green tea with honey. Most of the time I forgo the honey in my tea, because I spent too much time in Japan and it always hurts me a little when people try to sweeten green tea. But, sometimes I partake in the abomination because the honey here is like God.
But coffee is still my hot drink of choice. Color me American. During PST, when the host family provided all three of my meals I mentioned to them that I liked coffee in the morning, and they promptly went out and bought me some instant. Now, all things considered, I loathe instant, but they were kind enough to go out and get it for me, so I drank it. Another perk is that it was essentially a couple scoops of fake coffee with a load of sugar and fresh milk, so it was actually pretty damn good. Not what I would consider real coffee, but good.
Since I cook my own breakfast and lunch now, I’ve broken out the supplies I brought with me from America. Two pounds of dark coffee, that have be laying in wait for me like the promised land ever since I got off the plane. Obviously, they’re not quite as fresh as I would like, considering that I had to have them ground before I left the States because grinders here cost like, a billion som, which is more som than I’ve got. But they’re real coffee beans, and every morning I get a fresh-brewed pot complements of my French press.
I like cream with my coffee, and I loved having fresh milk in the morning, but it’s just too much trouble to finagle it myself. You see, I’m actually very lucky in that I figured out that my host mother works at the bazaar, and sells dairy products. This means I can buy milk and other sundry dairy things direct from her, and I have full confidence that they won’t kill me. So, I have an endless supply of milk products, which, for a milkfat maven like myself, is heaven.
However, because they’re not pasteurized, that means I have to boil the milk before I can use it in anything, and most mornings I can’t be arsed to boil milk for my coffee when it’s six in the morning and there’s no electricity and it’s freezing and I just want my damn hot beverage.
So, I have joined the cult of Frima. Frima is a brand of non-dairy creamer, and for some reason, it has a cult following among quite a few Volunteers. I have no idea why, even though I’m a part of this cult, and that’s how good it is. It’s just in such a cheery red and white package, and it’s so damn useful. I use it in my coffee, when I need to thicken soups or porridge, and it’s cheap, too.
I also like to have after-dinner coffee. For a couple of days I would use fresh coffee grounds for my second cup, and while this was fabulous, it was quickly depleting my supply. Ground coffee is pretty rare about these parts, and unless I wanted to resort to instant again, I had to stop. Now, I make fresh coffee in the morning, and then just keep the grounds for reuse again at night. The second brewing is considerably weaker, but I’ve found that if I mix it with a copious amount of condensed milk, it makes a decent beverage. Again, not quite the same as real coffee, but it’s not as though I’ve made a point at turning my nose up at sweetened Starbucks concoctions; this is essentially the poor man’s version of that. Or, rather, the "Peace Corps Volunteer" version, which means the VERY poor man's version.
Condensed milk is one of those things that I never really considered until I got here. Of course, I knew it existed and I’d used it a couple of times while baking, but I never ate it on its own or used it for a sweetener. They do it all the time here – at my first host family, I got served bread with a bowl of condensed milk for breakfast on numerous occasions. They also dip cookies in it, and use it to sweeten tea. It’s relatively cheap, about a dollar a can, and pretty good.
Of course, they don’t have a can opener here, so I open it the old-fashioned way: stabbing it with a knife. This always makes life a little more exciting. Will I get to enjoy tasty condensed milk, or will I have to go to the hospital to get my finger sewn back on? Who knows? Stay tuned!
I also love the cream here. Called smetana, it’s totally different than cream in the states, in that it’s spreadable rather than pourable. I smear it all over my bread and am a happy, happy expat. It’s kind of like cream cheese, with the exception that I don’t like cream cheese and I really like smetana. (Beta Stores does carry Philadelphia Cream Cheese, at about fifteen dollars a tub. Makes me happy that I don’t like the stuff; at least it’s not tempting.) Another thing that I love here is the cottage cheese. I’ve never been a huge fan of cottage cheese in the States, but here it’s absolutely divine. It’s a lot drier than the stuff in America, to the point of being crumbly. The Kyrgyz either eat it with bread or just from a spoon, but I like to mix it with cinnamon and sugar.
Cinnamon is, weirdly, kind of a foreign thing here, though they sell it at the bazaar. It’s cheap, too. The way they sell spices at the bazaar is out of large bags; you pick what you want and they dole it out in shot glass-sized measuring cups. I got two shot glasses of ground cinnamon for twenty som, or about sixty cents. However, my host family had no idea what it was, even when I told them the Russian name for it. I was like, who the hell buys the cinnamon? Maybe the Russians like it.
Anyway, in my last post, I got a couple of questions about how I deal with living in a more conservative country than America. It’s a good question.
The thing to remember is that most countries in the world are more conservative than America. Might be kind of hard to believe if you watch Fox News, but whatever the politics may be, Americans, in general, are pretty live and let live in personal matters, aside from a snide comment here and there. Now, obviously I wouldn’t tell Matthew Shepard that, and that’s not to say that bigotry and other dumb things and people don’t exist in spades at home. But, generally speaking, you can do what you want.
Kyrgyzstan is more socially conservative than America. But the ways in which it’s conservative don’t really affect me all that much in my everyday life. Now, another factor to keep in mind is that I live right outside of Bishkek, which is the biggest and most Westernized city the country can offer. There are certain strips in Bishkek where I walk down it and see bars and hair salons movie theaters and 24-hour grocery stores and think that, wow, this could be any city in America. …then oftentimes I turn the corner and there’s a herd of cows grazing in the median or a gigantic statue of Lenin and I’m instantly disabused of the notion, but the point is made. Most of the people my age dress the way that fashionable teenagers would dress in America.
The southern part of the country is Uzbek-dominated, and, as a whole, the Uzbeks take their Islam a little more to the letter than the Kyrgyz do, so it’s far more conservative. Headscarfs, long sleeves in the middle of a sweltering summer, and head-to-toe coverings are far more common in the south. In the north, a lot of the older women wear the hijab, but most of the younger women forgo it, particularly in the city. And most of the women who do bother with headcoverings only wrap their hair up; they don’t seem to mind about exposing their necks.
For me, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised that the way that I normally dress coincides quite well with Kyrgyz expectations of “appropriate” dress. The one major thing that I had to give up was wearing spaghetti-strap style tank tops with no bra, but I generally only did that around the house/dorm in America anyway, so it wasn’t a total loss. I should probably say, though, that I’ve never made any attempt to dress fashionably, by any standards. I actually have a maxim that I follow when I pick out clothes.
I’ll pick up an article, and then ask myself, “Would a ninja wear this?”
Ninjas, as a rule, do not wear anything sparkly, ruffly, skimpy, or restrictive. Ninjas eschew high heels. They like clothing that’s soft, comfortable, and allows for movement in all directions. They are very fond of hippie skirts and jeans. (The school where I studied ninjitsu was obviously a little unorthodox.)
Aside from me being weird in the head, I’ve never had any aspirations to be “pretty,” in the strict sense. If people are going to remember/like/be attracted to me, it’s going to be for something other than the cut of a skirt. Basically, this means that I wear nothing but jeans and t-shirts, and when I dress up it’s in plain t-shirts and black slacks. If I liked low cut tops and high-cut skirts, I might have more problems.
The other day, a friend of mine from PST came up to the city for some reason or another, and we met for drinks. As we were walking back to Peace Corps HQ, she was talking about the village she lives in, and how she missed being able to dress up and wear cute shoes, because they’re not appropriate where she lives and they’d get ruined by the dirt streets anyway. Then she looked at me, in Carhartt’s and a plain heather-gray shirt with sneakers, and exclaimed, “And you’re so close to all these things, and you couldn’t care less!”
Which isn’t entirely true. I’m extremely happy to be so close to the city, but I don’t feel the need to wear three-inch spikes on my shoes to showcase my pleasure. Different strokes, I guess.
But, the point is, nothing in my wardrobe is really offensive to the Kyrgyz. I get complimented on how “appropriate” it is all the time, actually. Remember that old yellow skirt that I wore basically like a second skin? They love it here. I walk around the house in it, and everybody gives me thumbs up and “good job”s.
As for conservative attitudes, especially towards women… well, this both works in my favor and against it. When I asked to cook my own meals it wasn’t considered unusual in the slightest, and if I need to do anything that has to do with housework, it isn’t questioned. As I mentioned earlier, if I wash some dishes it puts them on the moon.
It can be somewhat annoying, though, to be constantly barraged with “are you married?” and looks of wonder and awe when I answer in the negative. I’ve mostly made my peace with it, though – I’ve equated it with the Western “What’s your job?” If I didn’t have a job at 23, that would be weird and I’d probably get some looks. My Russian when I’m talking about why I’m not married is flawless, because I’ve had to give the explanation so many times.
But, the same thing here applies as when I lived in Japan: I have an automatic get-out-of-cultural-expectations-free card. Nobody here actually expects me to be a Kyrgyz woman, and I’m fortunate for that much understanding. It always amuses me when people list off men who would be over the moon to marry an American, since I’m pretty sure that most of them would be exceedingly unhappy with me as a wife. I can’t do most of the things that are expected from wives here nearly as well as Kyrgyz women can, and I really have no inclination to try.
But they mostly leave me to my own devices. I told my family that I used to drink beer with dinner all the time, and my younger sister said that it was shameful, but I just shrugged and said “America is different.”
And, well, it is.
Written October 8, 2008
Fire is such a finicky, difficult, rudimentary, and absolutely necessary thing.
I was in pretty dire need of doing some laundry. (I am actually considering renaming this blog “The Laundry Chronicles,” because it seems to be all I ever write about.) I was sitting around wondering when I was going to do it, and then realized that, actually, I was going to have to start the process entirely on my own. Now, I’ve been actually doing my own laundry since the start of this whole business, but I’ve never had to heat my own water. I had always timed it to be directly after meals when I lived with my PST host family, or when the rest of the family was doing laundry, and thus there was always hot water around.
My new host family does not have a petchka, or a wood/cowpat burning stove. Or rather, I suppose they do, but it’s in the guesthouse and never used. For normal cooking, they use a gas oven, and I have since become a master of being able to light it with matches. I’ve only burned myself a few dozen times, and no clothes have been casualties of the experience, which I consider to be a small miracle. But, as with the last family, it’s far too pricey to heat the amount of water needed for laundry on the gas stove. When it gets to be laundry day, they use a smaller contraption that actually is supposed to be used as a grill, though I think they use it for heating water for laundry more often. It’s shaped like a C, and is about three feet in diameter. There’s a slotted grill top that’s next to it, but it also happens to be able to hold a big kazan or giant cooking pot. They fill the pot with water, light the fire underneath, and eventually, you get some heated water.
Among the many things that I’ve managed to pass through life without knowing is how to light a fire. The closest thing I’ve ever come to it is a charcoal grill, but that only requires soaking the charcoal in flammable liquid, throwing in a match, and praying to God that you don’t light the electrical wires strung above the town on fire. Here, of course, it’s different, namely in that there’s not as many electrical wires to worry about.
In addition, there’s no charcoal and no lighter fluid. I spent about twenty minutes wandering about the property, collecting various items that looked flammable and appeared to be trash. I ended up with a small pile of cardboard egg cartons, some sticks, flattened cardboard boxes, and an old straw broom. I arranged the broom and the sticks in a neat pyramid, on top of some shredded egg cartons and trash.
Dad, if you’re reading this, I blame you for my compulsion to make geometric shapes before I burn things. He always piled the charcoal into a pyramid before he lit it, and for the longest time, I thought that it was an absolutely necessary part of lighting a grill. Logically, I have been disabused of the notion, but for some reason, I still do it. Long live the burning pyramid.
Anyway, I was squatting in front of the contraption, trying to figure out what to do next. I lit a couple of matches and tried to get the egg cartons to light, but the matches weren’t hot enough. After a few tries and a couple minutes of puzzling, I heard a throat clear softly behind me.
It was my host aunt (at least, I think she is… I can’t keep track of the people who rotate in and out of this house), and she had a familiar look in her eyes. After one year of life in Japan, and a few months here, I was well acquainted with the look.
She had the look of You’re Doing It Wrong, and she carried a ball of wadded-up newspaper in her hand. If nothing else, I have become both very good at Doing It Wrong, and very good at gracefully accepting it. I shuffled out of the way while she took my place, shoved the wadded newspaper into my pyramid, and lit it on fire.
It was enough to catch the egg cartons, and everything lit instantly. She smiled thinly at me and walked off, another person amazed at the things that I don’t know how to do.
Being here is a very different kind of Doing It Wrong than in Japan. In Japan, there are etiquette rules for damn near everything, and I could barely go a day without putting my foot in it somehow. Here, the looks have more to do with my inability to do every day things, such as light a fire to heat the water so I can wash my clothes by hand.
Oh well. In America, we have machines for these things. Think about that next time you’re too lazy to go do laundry. And then think of me, lighting my pyramid of trash on fire to heat water.
Almost as soon as the fire caught, I had to go find other things to feed it, since there weren’t really any substantial pieces of wood laying around. I did succeed fantastically at making the world’s smokiest fire, though, feeding the flames on trash and dried reeds and more egg cartons.
About a half an hour of poking and feeding and praying to fire gods later, the water finally got hot enough so I could haul it over to the outdoor sink, and then proceed to squat for an hour and a half as I washed my pile of dirty clothes.
I have started becoming smart, though, in regards to laundry. Now, whenever I take a bath, I always take some clothes that need to be washed in with me. Recently, they haven’t been firing up the banya much, so I’ve been bathing by boiling two teapots of water and just taking it in the unheated banya to bathe. This is really not all that pleasant, as it’s starting to edge into cooler weather and taking a bucket bath in a cold cement room isn’t exactly the same as a nice hot shower, but, hey. Clean is clean. I usually only do it once or twice a week, anyway. (On that note, it’s almost disturbing how adjusted to that I’ve become. One day, I didn’t have anything else to do, so I was laying on my bed and pondering life, when I realized that I could take a bath. I instantly dismissed it, since I had “already bathed the day before yesterday.” Then I laughed. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to such things.)
But when I’m in there, I always reserve at least a little bit of hot water to wash my underwear, since those are the only articles of clothing that really need to be washed before I wear them again. Things like socks or pants or shirts can go at least like, nine times. I’m serious. I used to wear my shirts twice before I washed them, but now I’ve graduated to about four times that number. When doing laundry is as big of a pain as it is here, you make allowances. Winter is going to be a riot, when it’s going to be too cold to either bathe or do laundry. Hooray!
But, on the other hand, I’m going to be amazing at the end of this. I’ll be able to cook from scratch, light fires with nothing but damp trash, plow fields, and jerryrig like MacGyver anything what needs jerryrigging. Maybe I’ll save money when I move into an apartment in the States, because I’ll be so accustomed to doing laundry by hand that I won’t need to go to the laundromat.
Hahahaha, just kidding, I’ll probably do a jig on the way to put quarters in the washing machine.
Written October 9, 2008
One of the happiest re-discoveries of the day was World Book 2004 on my computer.
I’ve always known it was there, in a latent sort of way. It came with the computer when my parents bought it, and whenever I came across it I was always like, “I should probably delete this,” but I never got around to it. And boy, am I ever glad I didn’t get rid of it.
When I had the internet (back in the day…), the entire program was pretty much obsolete, since I could access much more current and comprehensive information, so I never used it. After a day of browsing it, it’s obviously not a quality scholarly resource, as all of the articles have a semi-ridiculous bias, but it’s perfect for my needs, as they stand.
I’ve started writing lesson plans for classes. I’ve talked to my counterpart, and we’ve decided to go ahead and use the absolutely heinous course books provided to us, at least for now. Another challenge to teaching here – the books the officials demand us to use are ridiculous, not engaging for students, and downright dull. (Well, they’re pretty entertaining for me, as they contain sentences like, “America has the best roads in the capitalist world,” and other such Soviet tidbits that amuse the hell out of me.) The books are idiotic, but unfortunately officials come around every once in a while to check the teacher’s lesson planners (which are also official and have to be filled out in a certain way) to make sure that they’re following the national curriculum, and they can get in a lot of trouble if they don’t.
The way that my counterpart and I have decided to divide the classes is by twos. Each group of students has two classes a week, and she teaches the first one, on grammar, and I teach the second one, on conversational topics. This makes some areas of life easier for me, as I don’t have to decide what grammar points I want to teach. They’ve already been dictated to me.
Of course, this has its downsides, too. The course books aren’t just on language, after all, but they also teach about different English-speaking countries and culture. So this amounts to me having to write a conversational lesson that practices passive voice and also teaches the kids about Great Britain.
Uhh.
First off, nobody really SPEAKS in passive voice. Well, okay, they do, but nobody has an entire conversation in it. And secondly, they spent about five years of my education teaching us NOT to speak or write in passive voice. Third, the majority of these kids can barely handle anything above “Hello, my name is ___ and I like cake.”
And it has to be about England. Great. For God’s sake if you asked American high school students to have a conversation about England in passive voice, I’d love to see what the majority of them would come up with. And they (probably) speak (some form of) English!
But, whatever, I make do. The good part about the subject “America” or whatever is that it’s a pretty large topic area. When I had to make a lesson about infinitives that was also about Canada, I just was like, “I want to go hike. In… Alberta. I like to ride horses. In… Saskatchewan.” It worked. Kind of.
Another latent advantage of this is that it’s teaching me about grammar. Which… may sound sort of stupid, considering that I'm not all that bad with the English language, but I do have to admit that I know squat about grammar. I know when things are right and when they are wrong, of course, but that’s knowledge built from an assload of reading and writing. Whenever we had grammar in school, I always seemed to be in the English class that, for some reason or another, wasn’t covering it.
Thus, when my counterpart asks me how to use participle one, I’m always like, what the hell is participle one? Modal auxiliaries? Uh, yeah, right.
Generally, once I see a few examples, I get it. For example, I had no idea that “-ing” form was called a gerund. I only learned this when I had to teach about it and Canada at the same time.
But that’s where the World Book comes in handy, for when I’m like, “How in the fuck am I going to tie this grammar point in with a country?” The World Book, while I certainly wouldn’t use it to write a thesis, provides a handy little bouncing board for ideas. It basically amounts to a non-Internet based Wikipedia.
My first day of bonafied teaching didn’t go off too badly. There were some definite ups and downs, the major downer being the eighth grade class. For some unfathomable reason, they’ve combined two classes for my eighth grade session, which means that I’m teaching a class with about forty kids in it. My counterpart even has a hard time controlling them, and she speaks fluent Russian. What made it even worse was that there was some sort of teacher meeting during that class period, and as my Russian isn’t nearly good enough to go to one of those and follow what’s going on, she went and left me alone with forty fourteen year olds, who don’t speak my language, and I don’t really speak theirs.
It was forty five minutes of absolute chaos. I tried to do a warm-up of charades, but I couldn’t explain it to them to where they would understand, so that fell flat. The next activity went better, where I had a sentence broken up into two pieces, and they each had to find their partner. After that, though, I basically lost control of the class. After about ten minutes of pleading and shouting, I finally gave up, told them that I wasn’t going to teach them if they didn’t want to learn, and just sat down.
This was clearly a response they weren’t expecting. A few of them just continued on talking, completely nonplussed, a few were shocked into silence, and a few were even guilt tripped into practicing some English by asking me questions. This was the last fifteen minutes of the class.
My counterpart returned another class period later – it had been a long meeting – but the class after the eighth graders went much better. Classes of twenty or smaller I can do a pretty good job of keeping under control… and one of the double-edged sword things about teaching here is the ninth grade cutoff. After ninth grade, students don’t have to go to school anymore. It’s pretty much the same thing as in the US, but as far as I know very few students in America take the state up on it. A high school diploma/the equal is pretty much necessary nowadays in the States.
In Kyrgyzstan, large portions of the students don’t continue on in the school. Some of them continue on into “college,” which is kind of like vocational school. But this basically means that any students in tenth or eleventh grades (school only goes to eleventh here) are generally there because, at some level, they want to be there. This makes the classes much easier to teach, even for the students who don’t care so much about learning English. At least they’re not disruptive. Ninth grade is moderately hard, mostly because the students who just aren’t interested are plain unmotivated because they know they’re virtually done. Eighth is a nightmare, mostly because of the size of the class.
But, anyway, my counterpart came back and I told her that there was no way in hell I was doing that again. If I wasn’t doing team-teaching, I’d go to the director and flat out refuse to teach the eighth graders unless it was broken up into two hours. It’s just not a good learning environment for them, at all, and it’s certainly not good for my blood pressure. The best I can manage with a class that size is keeping them from killing each other. The only English they might pick up is what I yell at them in an attempt to stop the rain of spitwads. My counterpart smiled sympathetically. Like I said, even she has problems controlling them; I think she had a fair idea that she was leaving me to the hounds when she left me alone with them.
But the other classes didn’t go so badly. I have kind of a hard time engaging them; the vast majority of them don’t want to talk. Which is, well, frustrating when I’m trying to teach a conversational class.
I don’t know. It’s not bad, but I can’t say that I love it. To be honest, I’m only responsible for about five classes a week, so it’s not an overbearing amount of work. When my counterpart is in the room, I don’t have to really worry about behavioral problems, so my main thing is just figuring out how to teach about countries and grammar points and have it be at least moderately interesting.
I want to teach at a university. The PCV who was in my village previous to me taught at a university in Bishkek in addition to his work at the grammar school, and when I talked to him before he left, he said he found it much more stimulating than teaching grammar to kids, ninety percent of whom couldn’t give a hoot in hell about gerunds.
Written October 11, 2008
Well, my host sister is finally getting read the riot act. And while I feel somewhat guilty about it, I’m also relieved.
I have two host sisters: one sixteen, one thirteen. They’re both absolutely lovely, but the thirteen year old has some issues with the concept of personal space.
I admit that I am, by Kyrgyz standards, bewilderingly overprotective of my belongings and of my room. This is definitely a cultural thing; while I’m as friendly as can be under most circumstances, I need private space, and if I don’t get it, I become a bear. My younger host sister has a somewhat unfortunate tendency to do things like enter my room without knocking, or just walk in and start manhandling my personal belongings.
This wasn’t too bad at first; I decided to take the patient route, and told her that when the door was closed, she had to knock. This led to a series of events involving her knocking while she was opening the door, or knocking, pausing for a moment, and then opening the door anyway, without waiting for a response. A couple of times, she’s barged in on me when I was dressing. I’m not a particularly modest person, so I wasn’t bothered that she happened to see me in my underwear, but more that she just wasn’t listening when I was telling her to “wait, wait, WA-“
But still, I waited it out. Finally, after a while, I started getting more strict – if she was in my room and wasn’t listening to me, I would bodily force her out, which isn’t a hard thing, considering I can pick her up with one arm. But it was irritating, and a couple of times when I had to leave the house and was waiting to lock up my room, she was inside laying on the floor, positively refusing to budge until I did something drastic, like slam the bike lock that locks my door up against the wall in irritation, which would scare her out.
Today, she was in my room and mostly behaving, sans a couple of times when she started messing with my cell phone, but she stopped when I told her to do so. Finally, she asked to see my earring collection. I have them all pinned on one of my brother’s spare skate laces, and pulled them out for her to look.
I have a blue pair of earrings that she particularly liked, and tried on without asking. I made her take them out, which she did, but then she wouldn’t give them back. We got into a brief tussle about this, and she lost one of the backs to my earrings. Annoyed, I took the string of earrings from her, and demanded that she give me back the pair that she had. She refused.
I had threatened to tell her mother about her not listening to me several times before, and usually it had the desired effect. Sure enough, as I turned on my heel to go tell her mother, she said, “wait!”
This is usually the part where she corrects whatever she was doing, but when I asked for the earrings again she refused, so this time I actually went out, and didn’t stop when she said “wait!” again, and told my host mother.
My host mother said that she would talk to her, and as I turned back down the hallway with my room in it, my host sister appeared from nowhere, shoved the earrings in my hand, and promptly hid under her bed.
I kind of feel bad in a distant way about it, because her parents were none too pleased, but to be honest, I think I was a little more magnanimous with her than I should have been. It’s not as though she hasn’t been becoming increasingly more difficult as the weeks have passed and we’ve become more familiar. I had been considering just bypassing the whole telling the mother thing and going straight to my program manager, who in turn would tell the host mother for me. While going over the mother’s head would be just bizarre in America, it’s more or less par for the course here, but I was just tired of dancing around the subject and decided to just attack it head on. We’ll see if it works.
It’s just very strange to me, because I know that I live in her house and we’re “family” in the institutional sense, but I’m not actually family. I mean, I know that if we had a foreigner living in our house in the States, I wouldn’t have been allowed to just barge in and start drawing all over the poor person’s lesson plans. Especially not at age thirteen. Hell, I don’t think the thought would have even crossed my mind. I understand that there’s a major difference in the way that the Kyrgyz conceptualize personal space (namely, on a whole they don’t at all), but I still have a hard time believing that, well, what she was doing was okay, even by Kyrgyz standards.
Though, on the other hand, the fact that she ran and hid after I went to tell her mother, probably means that she was aware that she was doing something that she shouldn't have. Or, well, it could just be the whole guests-are-honored thing kicking in, and the bad part was that she was doing something that I didn’t want, rather than she was invading my personal space.
Again, we’ll see. Apparently, though, I’ve just been informed that I’m getting a new lock on my door, but I’m not sure if this was precipitated by the host sister or not. I have to say that I’m semi-relieved, since the way I lock my door now is kind of a joke: instead of the normal single door in the frame, I have basically half-sized French doors. I dislike them, because it’s damn near impossible to have the door actually closed. They lock (from the inside) with pole-style locks, which slide into holes drilled into the top of the doorframe. I have to have one of the two doors locked permanently, or else the doors won’t close at all, because there’s no latch between the doors. In addition, I can’t lock both doors at the same time from the inside, because the holes aren’t quite lined up correctly with the pole locks. I could feasibly hammer it in, but hammering my door every time I want it locked is just ridiculous. And then I probably wouldn’t be able to open it, and I'd be stuck in my room like a dumbass until my host family removed the doors from the hinges.
The way I lock my door from the outside, when I leave the house, is with a bike cable coated in thick green plastic. There are two doorknobs, so I wind it around the knobs and lock it. It’s as bad of security as it sounds; it’s very easy to just pull the lock out from around the knobs, even if you don’t have the key. (I do it myself when I’m lazy and don’t feel like digging in my bag for my keys.)
But, I mean, to be honest, I’m not actually worried about theft. There’s nearly always somebody home, and besides, a thief would have to get past the locked compound gate and the locked house in the event that nobody was home, before they got to my poorly locked room. I’m more concerned about the younger host sister coming in and molesting my possessions, which could result in things getting lost or accidentally broken. And I know that she’d be very sorry if she, say, broke my laptop, but very sorry isn’t going to bring back a thousand dollars worth of electronic investment.
I oscillate wildly on whether I want to move out or not. I like this family a lot: they’re very kind to me. I like the host mother’s cooking, and my room is extremely nice. But, oh man do I miss living independently. Another major perk to living with the host family is that my living expenditures are far less than they would be if I had an apartment, which gives me more money for travel. What almost makes it worse is that I’m living in an area where apartments do exist, so it’s a very distinct possibility. If I was somewhere where it was just not feasible, I might not want it as badly (or, I would, but I would have reconciled myself with the fact that I couldn’t get it).
My current plan is to stay with the host family until next summer, but that’ll also depend on the amenities of the apartments offered to me. It would be foolish to move into an apartment heated by electric means; most of the volunteers who have apartments that aren’t heated by coal have to move back in with host families during the winter, or risk not having any heat/water, due to the foreseen electric shortages. At any rate, I’m starting to put out some feelers, and we’ll see what comes back.
Coffee is a precious, precious commodity here.
Tea, of course, is ubiquitous. I can barely walk three feet in this country without getting what me and some other volunteers have dubbed “chaied.” “Chai,” is, of course, the Russian and the Kyrgyz word for “tea.” In my training village, whenever we went over to each other’s houses, it always ended up with a lengthy chai-ing, or if we really had to get somewhere by a certain time, we would sneak into the compound and tap on windows, hoping not to alert the host mother on premises. There is no such thing as “eat and run” here. If you get roped into getting chaied, you’ll be there for about an hour, at least.
Not that I am really complaining, I guess. Sometimes it bothers me in a distant way, because, you know, I was raised with the maxim “time is money,” and it’s kind of difficult to slow down. Even when I have nothing in the world that I have to be doing, I always feel that I should be doing something with myself. Damn Protestant work ethic. But, on the other hand, it’s kind of nice/amusing to be in a place where drinking tea is a perfectly acceptable excuse for being late.
But anyway, it’s chai for breakfast, chai for lunch, chai for dinner, and chai for chai chisov, or “tea time.” It’s a good thing that I like tea. I probably drink, on average, at least twenty cups a day. When I lived with my Turkish host family, it was black tea with an inordinate amount of sugar (I’m still mildly surprised that my internal organs didn’t become candied), and with my Kyrgyz family it’s green tea with honey. Most of the time I forgo the honey in my tea, because I spent too much time in Japan and it always hurts me a little when people try to sweeten green tea. But, sometimes I partake in the abomination because the honey here is like God.
But coffee is still my hot drink of choice. Color me American. During PST, when the host family provided all three of my meals I mentioned to them that I liked coffee in the morning, and they promptly went out and bought me some instant. Now, all things considered, I loathe instant, but they were kind enough to go out and get it for me, so I drank it. Another perk is that it was essentially a couple scoops of fake coffee with a load of sugar and fresh milk, so it was actually pretty damn good. Not what I would consider real coffee, but good.
Since I cook my own breakfast and lunch now, I’ve broken out the supplies I brought with me from America. Two pounds of dark coffee, that have be laying in wait for me like the promised land ever since I got off the plane. Obviously, they’re not quite as fresh as I would like, considering that I had to have them ground before I left the States because grinders here cost like, a billion som, which is more som than I’ve got. But they’re real coffee beans, and every morning I get a fresh-brewed pot complements of my French press.
I like cream with my coffee, and I loved having fresh milk in the morning, but it’s just too much trouble to finagle it myself. You see, I’m actually very lucky in that I figured out that my host mother works at the bazaar, and sells dairy products. This means I can buy milk and other sundry dairy things direct from her, and I have full confidence that they won’t kill me. So, I have an endless supply of milk products, which, for a milkfat maven like myself, is heaven.
However, because they’re not pasteurized, that means I have to boil the milk before I can use it in anything, and most mornings I can’t be arsed to boil milk for my coffee when it’s six in the morning and there’s no electricity and it’s freezing and I just want my damn hot beverage.
So, I have joined the cult of Frima. Frima is a brand of non-dairy creamer, and for some reason, it has a cult following among quite a few Volunteers. I have no idea why, even though I’m a part of this cult, and that’s how good it is. It’s just in such a cheery red and white package, and it’s so damn useful. I use it in my coffee, when I need to thicken soups or porridge, and it’s cheap, too.
I also like to have after-dinner coffee. For a couple of days I would use fresh coffee grounds for my second cup, and while this was fabulous, it was quickly depleting my supply. Ground coffee is pretty rare about these parts, and unless I wanted to resort to instant again, I had to stop. Now, I make fresh coffee in the morning, and then just keep the grounds for reuse again at night. The second brewing is considerably weaker, but I’ve found that if I mix it with a copious amount of condensed milk, it makes a decent beverage. Again, not quite the same as real coffee, but it’s not as though I’ve made a point at turning my nose up at sweetened Starbucks concoctions; this is essentially the poor man’s version of that. Or, rather, the "Peace Corps Volunteer" version, which means the VERY poor man's version.
Condensed milk is one of those things that I never really considered until I got here. Of course, I knew it existed and I’d used it a couple of times while baking, but I never ate it on its own or used it for a sweetener. They do it all the time here – at my first host family, I got served bread with a bowl of condensed milk for breakfast on numerous occasions. They also dip cookies in it, and use it to sweeten tea. It’s relatively cheap, about a dollar a can, and pretty good.
Of course, they don’t have a can opener here, so I open it the old-fashioned way: stabbing it with a knife. This always makes life a little more exciting. Will I get to enjoy tasty condensed milk, or will I have to go to the hospital to get my finger sewn back on? Who knows? Stay tuned!
I also love the cream here. Called smetana, it’s totally different than cream in the states, in that it’s spreadable rather than pourable. I smear it all over my bread and am a happy, happy expat. It’s kind of like cream cheese, with the exception that I don’t like cream cheese and I really like smetana. (Beta Stores does carry Philadelphia Cream Cheese, at about fifteen dollars a tub. Makes me happy that I don’t like the stuff; at least it’s not tempting.) Another thing that I love here is the cottage cheese. I’ve never been a huge fan of cottage cheese in the States, but here it’s absolutely divine. It’s a lot drier than the stuff in America, to the point of being crumbly. The Kyrgyz either eat it with bread or just from a spoon, but I like to mix it with cinnamon and sugar.
Cinnamon is, weirdly, kind of a foreign thing here, though they sell it at the bazaar. It’s cheap, too. The way they sell spices at the bazaar is out of large bags; you pick what you want and they dole it out in shot glass-sized measuring cups. I got two shot glasses of ground cinnamon for twenty som, or about sixty cents. However, my host family had no idea what it was, even when I told them the Russian name for it. I was like, who the hell buys the cinnamon? Maybe the Russians like it.
Anyway, in my last post, I got a couple of questions about how I deal with living in a more conservative country than America. It’s a good question.
The thing to remember is that most countries in the world are more conservative than America. Might be kind of hard to believe if you watch Fox News, but whatever the politics may be, Americans, in general, are pretty live and let live in personal matters, aside from a snide comment here and there. Now, obviously I wouldn’t tell Matthew Shepard that, and that’s not to say that bigotry and other dumb things and people don’t exist in spades at home. But, generally speaking, you can do what you want.
Kyrgyzstan is more socially conservative than America. But the ways in which it’s conservative don’t really affect me all that much in my everyday life. Now, another factor to keep in mind is that I live right outside of Bishkek, which is the biggest and most Westernized city the country can offer. There are certain strips in Bishkek where I walk down it and see bars and hair salons movie theaters and 24-hour grocery stores and think that, wow, this could be any city in America. …then oftentimes I turn the corner and there’s a herd of cows grazing in the median or a gigantic statue of Lenin and I’m instantly disabused of the notion, but the point is made. Most of the people my age dress the way that fashionable teenagers would dress in America.
The southern part of the country is Uzbek-dominated, and, as a whole, the Uzbeks take their Islam a little more to the letter than the Kyrgyz do, so it’s far more conservative. Headscarfs, long sleeves in the middle of a sweltering summer, and head-to-toe coverings are far more common in the south. In the north, a lot of the older women wear the hijab, but most of the younger women forgo it, particularly in the city. And most of the women who do bother with headcoverings only wrap their hair up; they don’t seem to mind about exposing their necks.
For me, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised that the way that I normally dress coincides quite well with Kyrgyz expectations of “appropriate” dress. The one major thing that I had to give up was wearing spaghetti-strap style tank tops with no bra, but I generally only did that around the house/dorm in America anyway, so it wasn’t a total loss. I should probably say, though, that I’ve never made any attempt to dress fashionably, by any standards. I actually have a maxim that I follow when I pick out clothes.
I’ll pick up an article, and then ask myself, “Would a ninja wear this?”
Ninjas, as a rule, do not wear anything sparkly, ruffly, skimpy, or restrictive. Ninjas eschew high heels. They like clothing that’s soft, comfortable, and allows for movement in all directions. They are very fond of hippie skirts and jeans. (The school where I studied ninjitsu was obviously a little unorthodox.)
Aside from me being weird in the head, I’ve never had any aspirations to be “pretty,” in the strict sense. If people are going to remember/like/be attracted to me, it’s going to be for something other than the cut of a skirt. Basically, this means that I wear nothing but jeans and t-shirts, and when I dress up it’s in plain t-shirts and black slacks. If I liked low cut tops and high-cut skirts, I might have more problems.
The other day, a friend of mine from PST came up to the city for some reason or another, and we met for drinks. As we were walking back to Peace Corps HQ, she was talking about the village she lives in, and how she missed being able to dress up and wear cute shoes, because they’re not appropriate where she lives and they’d get ruined by the dirt streets anyway. Then she looked at me, in Carhartt’s and a plain heather-gray shirt with sneakers, and exclaimed, “And you’re so close to all these things, and you couldn’t care less!”
Which isn’t entirely true. I’m extremely happy to be so close to the city, but I don’t feel the need to wear three-inch spikes on my shoes to showcase my pleasure. Different strokes, I guess.
But, the point is, nothing in my wardrobe is really offensive to the Kyrgyz. I get complimented on how “appropriate” it is all the time, actually. Remember that old yellow skirt that I wore basically like a second skin? They love it here. I walk around the house in it, and everybody gives me thumbs up and “good job”s.
As for conservative attitudes, especially towards women… well, this both works in my favor and against it. When I asked to cook my own meals it wasn’t considered unusual in the slightest, and if I need to do anything that has to do with housework, it isn’t questioned. As I mentioned earlier, if I wash some dishes it puts them on the moon.
It can be somewhat annoying, though, to be constantly barraged with “are you married?” and looks of wonder and awe when I answer in the negative. I’ve mostly made my peace with it, though – I’ve equated it with the Western “What’s your job?” If I didn’t have a job at 23, that would be weird and I’d probably get some looks. My Russian when I’m talking about why I’m not married is flawless, because I’ve had to give the explanation so many times.
But, the same thing here applies as when I lived in Japan: I have an automatic get-out-of-cultural-expectations-free card. Nobody here actually expects me to be a Kyrgyz woman, and I’m fortunate for that much understanding. It always amuses me when people list off men who would be over the moon to marry an American, since I’m pretty sure that most of them would be exceedingly unhappy with me as a wife. I can’t do most of the things that are expected from wives here nearly as well as Kyrgyz women can, and I really have no inclination to try.
But they mostly leave me to my own devices. I told my family that I used to drink beer with dinner all the time, and my younger sister said that it was shameful, but I just shrugged and said “America is different.”
And, well, it is.
Written October 8, 2008
Fire is such a finicky, difficult, rudimentary, and absolutely necessary thing.
I was in pretty dire need of doing some laundry. (I am actually considering renaming this blog “The Laundry Chronicles,” because it seems to be all I ever write about.) I was sitting around wondering when I was going to do it, and then realized that, actually, I was going to have to start the process entirely on my own. Now, I’ve been actually doing my own laundry since the start of this whole business, but I’ve never had to heat my own water. I had always timed it to be directly after meals when I lived with my PST host family, or when the rest of the family was doing laundry, and thus there was always hot water around.
My new host family does not have a petchka, or a wood/cowpat burning stove. Or rather, I suppose they do, but it’s in the guesthouse and never used. For normal cooking, they use a gas oven, and I have since become a master of being able to light it with matches. I’ve only burned myself a few dozen times, and no clothes have been casualties of the experience, which I consider to be a small miracle. But, as with the last family, it’s far too pricey to heat the amount of water needed for laundry on the gas stove. When it gets to be laundry day, they use a smaller contraption that actually is supposed to be used as a grill, though I think they use it for heating water for laundry more often. It’s shaped like a C, and is about three feet in diameter. There’s a slotted grill top that’s next to it, but it also happens to be able to hold a big kazan or giant cooking pot. They fill the pot with water, light the fire underneath, and eventually, you get some heated water.
Among the many things that I’ve managed to pass through life without knowing is how to light a fire. The closest thing I’ve ever come to it is a charcoal grill, but that only requires soaking the charcoal in flammable liquid, throwing in a match, and praying to God that you don’t light the electrical wires strung above the town on fire. Here, of course, it’s different, namely in that there’s not as many electrical wires to worry about.
In addition, there’s no charcoal and no lighter fluid. I spent about twenty minutes wandering about the property, collecting various items that looked flammable and appeared to be trash. I ended up with a small pile of cardboard egg cartons, some sticks, flattened cardboard boxes, and an old straw broom. I arranged the broom and the sticks in a neat pyramid, on top of some shredded egg cartons and trash.
Dad, if you’re reading this, I blame you for my compulsion to make geometric shapes before I burn things. He always piled the charcoal into a pyramid before he lit it, and for the longest time, I thought that it was an absolutely necessary part of lighting a grill. Logically, I have been disabused of the notion, but for some reason, I still do it. Long live the burning pyramid.
Anyway, I was squatting in front of the contraption, trying to figure out what to do next. I lit a couple of matches and tried to get the egg cartons to light, but the matches weren’t hot enough. After a few tries and a couple minutes of puzzling, I heard a throat clear softly behind me.
It was my host aunt (at least, I think she is… I can’t keep track of the people who rotate in and out of this house), and she had a familiar look in her eyes. After one year of life in Japan, and a few months here, I was well acquainted with the look.
She had the look of You’re Doing It Wrong, and she carried a ball of wadded-up newspaper in her hand. If nothing else, I have become both very good at Doing It Wrong, and very good at gracefully accepting it. I shuffled out of the way while she took my place, shoved the wadded newspaper into my pyramid, and lit it on fire.
It was enough to catch the egg cartons, and everything lit instantly. She smiled thinly at me and walked off, another person amazed at the things that I don’t know how to do.
Being here is a very different kind of Doing It Wrong than in Japan. In Japan, there are etiquette rules for damn near everything, and I could barely go a day without putting my foot in it somehow. Here, the looks have more to do with my inability to do every day things, such as light a fire to heat the water so I can wash my clothes by hand.
Oh well. In America, we have machines for these things. Think about that next time you’re too lazy to go do laundry. And then think of me, lighting my pyramid of trash on fire to heat water.
Almost as soon as the fire caught, I had to go find other things to feed it, since there weren’t really any substantial pieces of wood laying around. I did succeed fantastically at making the world’s smokiest fire, though, feeding the flames on trash and dried reeds and more egg cartons.
About a half an hour of poking and feeding and praying to fire gods later, the water finally got hot enough so I could haul it over to the outdoor sink, and then proceed to squat for an hour and a half as I washed my pile of dirty clothes.
I have started becoming smart, though, in regards to laundry. Now, whenever I take a bath, I always take some clothes that need to be washed in with me. Recently, they haven’t been firing up the banya much, so I’ve been bathing by boiling two teapots of water and just taking it in the unheated banya to bathe. This is really not all that pleasant, as it’s starting to edge into cooler weather and taking a bucket bath in a cold cement room isn’t exactly the same as a nice hot shower, but, hey. Clean is clean. I usually only do it once or twice a week, anyway. (On that note, it’s almost disturbing how adjusted to that I’ve become. One day, I didn’t have anything else to do, so I was laying on my bed and pondering life, when I realized that I could take a bath. I instantly dismissed it, since I had “already bathed the day before yesterday.” Then I laughed. It’s amazing how quickly you get used to such things.)
But when I’m in there, I always reserve at least a little bit of hot water to wash my underwear, since those are the only articles of clothing that really need to be washed before I wear them again. Things like socks or pants or shirts can go at least like, nine times. I’m serious. I used to wear my shirts twice before I washed them, but now I’ve graduated to about four times that number. When doing laundry is as big of a pain as it is here, you make allowances. Winter is going to be a riot, when it’s going to be too cold to either bathe or do laundry. Hooray!
But, on the other hand, I’m going to be amazing at the end of this. I’ll be able to cook from scratch, light fires with nothing but damp trash, plow fields, and jerryrig like MacGyver anything what needs jerryrigging. Maybe I’ll save money when I move into an apartment in the States, because I’ll be so accustomed to doing laundry by hand that I won’t need to go to the laundromat.
Hahahaha, just kidding, I’ll probably do a jig on the way to put quarters in the washing machine.
Written October 9, 2008
One of the happiest re-discoveries of the day was World Book 2004 on my computer.
I’ve always known it was there, in a latent sort of way. It came with the computer when my parents bought it, and whenever I came across it I was always like, “I should probably delete this,” but I never got around to it. And boy, am I ever glad I didn’t get rid of it.
When I had the internet (back in the day…), the entire program was pretty much obsolete, since I could access much more current and comprehensive information, so I never used it. After a day of browsing it, it’s obviously not a quality scholarly resource, as all of the articles have a semi-ridiculous bias, but it’s perfect for my needs, as they stand.
I’ve started writing lesson plans for classes. I’ve talked to my counterpart, and we’ve decided to go ahead and use the absolutely heinous course books provided to us, at least for now. Another challenge to teaching here – the books the officials demand us to use are ridiculous, not engaging for students, and downright dull. (Well, they’re pretty entertaining for me, as they contain sentences like, “America has the best roads in the capitalist world,” and other such Soviet tidbits that amuse the hell out of me.) The books are idiotic, but unfortunately officials come around every once in a while to check the teacher’s lesson planners (which are also official and have to be filled out in a certain way) to make sure that they’re following the national curriculum, and they can get in a lot of trouble if they don’t.
The way that my counterpart and I have decided to divide the classes is by twos. Each group of students has two classes a week, and she teaches the first one, on grammar, and I teach the second one, on conversational topics. This makes some areas of life easier for me, as I don’t have to decide what grammar points I want to teach. They’ve already been dictated to me.
Of course, this has its downsides, too. The course books aren’t just on language, after all, but they also teach about different English-speaking countries and culture. So this amounts to me having to write a conversational lesson that practices passive voice and also teaches the kids about Great Britain.
Uhh.
First off, nobody really SPEAKS in passive voice. Well, okay, they do, but nobody has an entire conversation in it. And secondly, they spent about five years of my education teaching us NOT to speak or write in passive voice. Third, the majority of these kids can barely handle anything above “Hello, my name is ___ and I like cake.”
And it has to be about England. Great. For God’s sake if you asked American high school students to have a conversation about England in passive voice, I’d love to see what the majority of them would come up with. And they (probably) speak (some form of) English!
But, whatever, I make do. The good part about the subject “America” or whatever is that it’s a pretty large topic area. When I had to make a lesson about infinitives that was also about Canada, I just was like, “I want to go hike. In… Alberta. I like to ride horses. In… Saskatchewan.” It worked. Kind of.
Another latent advantage of this is that it’s teaching me about grammar. Which… may sound sort of stupid, considering that I'm not all that bad with the English language, but I do have to admit that I know squat about grammar. I know when things are right and when they are wrong, of course, but that’s knowledge built from an assload of reading and writing. Whenever we had grammar in school, I always seemed to be in the English class that, for some reason or another, wasn’t covering it.
Thus, when my counterpart asks me how to use participle one, I’m always like, what the hell is participle one? Modal auxiliaries? Uh, yeah, right.
Generally, once I see a few examples, I get it. For example, I had no idea that “-ing” form was called a gerund. I only learned this when I had to teach about it and Canada at the same time.
But that’s where the World Book comes in handy, for when I’m like, “How in the fuck am I going to tie this grammar point in with a country?” The World Book, while I certainly wouldn’t use it to write a thesis, provides a handy little bouncing board for ideas. It basically amounts to a non-Internet based Wikipedia.
My first day of bonafied teaching didn’t go off too badly. There were some definite ups and downs, the major downer being the eighth grade class. For some unfathomable reason, they’ve combined two classes for my eighth grade session, which means that I’m teaching a class with about forty kids in it. My counterpart even has a hard time controlling them, and she speaks fluent Russian. What made it even worse was that there was some sort of teacher meeting during that class period, and as my Russian isn’t nearly good enough to go to one of those and follow what’s going on, she went and left me alone with forty fourteen year olds, who don’t speak my language, and I don’t really speak theirs.
It was forty five minutes of absolute chaos. I tried to do a warm-up of charades, but I couldn’t explain it to them to where they would understand, so that fell flat. The next activity went better, where I had a sentence broken up into two pieces, and they each had to find their partner. After that, though, I basically lost control of the class. After about ten minutes of pleading and shouting, I finally gave up, told them that I wasn’t going to teach them if they didn’t want to learn, and just sat down.
This was clearly a response they weren’t expecting. A few of them just continued on talking, completely nonplussed, a few were shocked into silence, and a few were even guilt tripped into practicing some English by asking me questions. This was the last fifteen minutes of the class.
My counterpart returned another class period later – it had been a long meeting – but the class after the eighth graders went much better. Classes of twenty or smaller I can do a pretty good job of keeping under control… and one of the double-edged sword things about teaching here is the ninth grade cutoff. After ninth grade, students don’t have to go to school anymore. It’s pretty much the same thing as in the US, but as far as I know very few students in America take the state up on it. A high school diploma/the equal is pretty much necessary nowadays in the States.
In Kyrgyzstan, large portions of the students don’t continue on in the school. Some of them continue on into “college,” which is kind of like vocational school. But this basically means that any students in tenth or eleventh grades (school only goes to eleventh here) are generally there because, at some level, they want to be there. This makes the classes much easier to teach, even for the students who don’t care so much about learning English. At least they’re not disruptive. Ninth grade is moderately hard, mostly because the students who just aren’t interested are plain unmotivated because they know they’re virtually done. Eighth is a nightmare, mostly because of the size of the class.
But, anyway, my counterpart came back and I told her that there was no way in hell I was doing that again. If I wasn’t doing team-teaching, I’d go to the director and flat out refuse to teach the eighth graders unless it was broken up into two hours. It’s just not a good learning environment for them, at all, and it’s certainly not good for my blood pressure. The best I can manage with a class that size is keeping them from killing each other. The only English they might pick up is what I yell at them in an attempt to stop the rain of spitwads. My counterpart smiled sympathetically. Like I said, even she has problems controlling them; I think she had a fair idea that she was leaving me to the hounds when she left me alone with them.
But the other classes didn’t go so badly. I have kind of a hard time engaging them; the vast majority of them don’t want to talk. Which is, well, frustrating when I’m trying to teach a conversational class.
I don’t know. It’s not bad, but I can’t say that I love it. To be honest, I’m only responsible for about five classes a week, so it’s not an overbearing amount of work. When my counterpart is in the room, I don’t have to really worry about behavioral problems, so my main thing is just figuring out how to teach about countries and grammar points and have it be at least moderately interesting.
I want to teach at a university. The PCV who was in my village previous to me taught at a university in Bishkek in addition to his work at the grammar school, and when I talked to him before he left, he said he found it much more stimulating than teaching grammar to kids, ninety percent of whom couldn’t give a hoot in hell about gerunds.
Written October 11, 2008
Well, my host sister is finally getting read the riot act. And while I feel somewhat guilty about it, I’m also relieved.
I have two host sisters: one sixteen, one thirteen. They’re both absolutely lovely, but the thirteen year old has some issues with the concept of personal space.
I admit that I am, by Kyrgyz standards, bewilderingly overprotective of my belongings and of my room. This is definitely a cultural thing; while I’m as friendly as can be under most circumstances, I need private space, and if I don’t get it, I become a bear. My younger host sister has a somewhat unfortunate tendency to do things like enter my room without knocking, or just walk in and start manhandling my personal belongings.
This wasn’t too bad at first; I decided to take the patient route, and told her that when the door was closed, she had to knock. This led to a series of events involving her knocking while she was opening the door, or knocking, pausing for a moment, and then opening the door anyway, without waiting for a response. A couple of times, she’s barged in on me when I was dressing. I’m not a particularly modest person, so I wasn’t bothered that she happened to see me in my underwear, but more that she just wasn’t listening when I was telling her to “wait, wait, WA-“
But still, I waited it out. Finally, after a while, I started getting more strict – if she was in my room and wasn’t listening to me, I would bodily force her out, which isn’t a hard thing, considering I can pick her up with one arm. But it was irritating, and a couple of times when I had to leave the house and was waiting to lock up my room, she was inside laying on the floor, positively refusing to budge until I did something drastic, like slam the bike lock that locks my door up against the wall in irritation, which would scare her out.
Today, she was in my room and mostly behaving, sans a couple of times when she started messing with my cell phone, but she stopped when I told her to do so. Finally, she asked to see my earring collection. I have them all pinned on one of my brother’s spare skate laces, and pulled them out for her to look.
I have a blue pair of earrings that she particularly liked, and tried on without asking. I made her take them out, which she did, but then she wouldn’t give them back. We got into a brief tussle about this, and she lost one of the backs to my earrings. Annoyed, I took the string of earrings from her, and demanded that she give me back the pair that she had. She refused.
I had threatened to tell her mother about her not listening to me several times before, and usually it had the desired effect. Sure enough, as I turned on my heel to go tell her mother, she said, “wait!”
This is usually the part where she corrects whatever she was doing, but when I asked for the earrings again she refused, so this time I actually went out, and didn’t stop when she said “wait!” again, and told my host mother.
My host mother said that she would talk to her, and as I turned back down the hallway with my room in it, my host sister appeared from nowhere, shoved the earrings in my hand, and promptly hid under her bed.
I kind of feel bad in a distant way about it, because her parents were none too pleased, but to be honest, I think I was a little more magnanimous with her than I should have been. It’s not as though she hasn’t been becoming increasingly more difficult as the weeks have passed and we’ve become more familiar. I had been considering just bypassing the whole telling the mother thing and going straight to my program manager, who in turn would tell the host mother for me. While going over the mother’s head would be just bizarre in America, it’s more or less par for the course here, but I was just tired of dancing around the subject and decided to just attack it head on. We’ll see if it works.
It’s just very strange to me, because I know that I live in her house and we’re “family” in the institutional sense, but I’m not actually family. I mean, I know that if we had a foreigner living in our house in the States, I wouldn’t have been allowed to just barge in and start drawing all over the poor person’s lesson plans. Especially not at age thirteen. Hell, I don’t think the thought would have even crossed my mind. I understand that there’s a major difference in the way that the Kyrgyz conceptualize personal space (namely, on a whole they don’t at all), but I still have a hard time believing that, well, what she was doing was okay, even by Kyrgyz standards.
Though, on the other hand, the fact that she ran and hid after I went to tell her mother, probably means that she was aware that she was doing something that she shouldn't have. Or, well, it could just be the whole guests-are-honored thing kicking in, and the bad part was that she was doing something that I didn’t want, rather than she was invading my personal space.
Again, we’ll see. Apparently, though, I’ve just been informed that I’m getting a new lock on my door, but I’m not sure if this was precipitated by the host sister or not. I have to say that I’m semi-relieved, since the way I lock my door now is kind of a joke: instead of the normal single door in the frame, I have basically half-sized French doors. I dislike them, because it’s damn near impossible to have the door actually closed. They lock (from the inside) with pole-style locks, which slide into holes drilled into the top of the doorframe. I have to have one of the two doors locked permanently, or else the doors won’t close at all, because there’s no latch between the doors. In addition, I can’t lock both doors at the same time from the inside, because the holes aren’t quite lined up correctly with the pole locks. I could feasibly hammer it in, but hammering my door every time I want it locked is just ridiculous. And then I probably wouldn’t be able to open it, and I'd be stuck in my room like a dumbass until my host family removed the doors from the hinges.
The way I lock my door from the outside, when I leave the house, is with a bike cable coated in thick green plastic. There are two doorknobs, so I wind it around the knobs and lock it. It’s as bad of security as it sounds; it’s very easy to just pull the lock out from around the knobs, even if you don’t have the key. (I do it myself when I’m lazy and don’t feel like digging in my bag for my keys.)
But, I mean, to be honest, I’m not actually worried about theft. There’s nearly always somebody home, and besides, a thief would have to get past the locked compound gate and the locked house in the event that nobody was home, before they got to my poorly locked room. I’m more concerned about the younger host sister coming in and molesting my possessions, which could result in things getting lost or accidentally broken. And I know that she’d be very sorry if she, say, broke my laptop, but very sorry isn’t going to bring back a thousand dollars worth of electronic investment.
I oscillate wildly on whether I want to move out or not. I like this family a lot: they’re very kind to me. I like the host mother’s cooking, and my room is extremely nice. But, oh man do I miss living independently. Another major perk to living with the host family is that my living expenditures are far less than they would be if I had an apartment, which gives me more money for travel. What almost makes it worse is that I’m living in an area where apartments do exist, so it’s a very distinct possibility. If I was somewhere where it was just not feasible, I might not want it as badly (or, I would, but I would have reconciled myself with the fact that I couldn’t get it).
My current plan is to stay with the host family until next summer, but that’ll also depend on the amenities of the apartments offered to me. It would be foolish to move into an apartment heated by electric means; most of the volunteers who have apartments that aren’t heated by coal have to move back in with host families during the winter, or risk not having any heat/water, due to the foreseen electric shortages. At any rate, I’m starting to put out some feelers, and we’ll see what comes back.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
.damn city slickers
Blogger’s Note: Since I now have access to the computers at Peace Corps, which I am reasonably sure will not riddle my USB drive with viruses, I may be able to actually update this thing more often than I have been. (Namely, more than “once a year.”) These are a random assortment of writings that I’ve been amusing myself with since I got here. They’re in chronological order, but they do jump around a hell of a lot, so… well, at any rate, enjoy!
Written Sunday, August 31, 2008
I could probably talk for hours about culture shock – I’ve had it in Japan, and I’ve had tastes of it here, though I’m willing to bet that it’ll hit in a more full-frontal capacity after training and I’m not surrounded by Americans all day. But, in both Japan and the rest of Asia, one of the most interesting (and frustrating) juxtapositions of culture is American independence and Asian hospitality.
Let me first start out by assuring you that it’s not all bad. They treat guests like royalty in Asia, no matter what the family’s social or monetary status. In fact, one of the things they warn about while traveling through this region is to make sure that, if you happen to visit a family, they don’t do too much in your honor, like slaughter their only sheep or fix a feast when it’s clear that they can barely feed their own children. As an American in a part of the world where foreigners rarely go, this essentially assures two years of being a constant guest.
Which definitely has its downfalls, especially with the American propensity to do things for oneself. I had never realized how base this urge is until now, and my current family isn’t even particularly patriarchal. In some families, the volunteer there isn’t even allowed to boil water for themselves, but they have to ask one of the women of the family to do it for them.
I’m not sure how prevalent this is in the rest of Asia, but the one fate that all women want to avoid here is being the kalin. I’m not sure how the hell that translates, because it’s Kyrgyz and not Russian, but essentially the kalin is the wife of the youngest son. Here, it’s the youngest son’s duty to live with the parents as an adult and care for them. However, though the duty technically falls to the son, it’s the wife that ends up doing most of the caring, and most of everything else. In very traditional Kyrgyz families, it's the woman in the role of kalin that cooks the food, serves everybody, cleans up after the meal, milks the cows, does the laundry, works the fields, fetches whatever needs fetching… think a Kyrgyz-speaking Cinderella.
And, I mean, it’s normal here. It does, however, make a lot of the other volunteers uncomfortable, because our general reaction is I can boil water for my goddamn self, and I don’t need this woman who has permanent list of chores longer than the Nile to take care of me on top of it.
My host family currently is Turkish, so I don’t think they really enforce the kalin thing as much. Of course, my host family has grandparents, and my host mother does a hell of a lot of work, but the grandmother probably puts in about equally as much. Even so, I had to fight to get the right to do some chores. Now, don't get me wrong, I’m not so motivated that I’ll wrestle with them to do things like wash dishes or work in the fields. I am, after all, paying a handsome amount to live with them, and I don’t feel any pressing need to account for as many chores as a host country national of my age and status would do. However, it’s entirely within my own means to do things like fetch the occasional bucket of water, or refill the sugar bowl, peel fruit, or do my own laundry.
On a side note, another hilarious/disconcerting thing here is my status. There is no such thing as an unmarried 22-year-old female here. Or at least, I’ve never met one, and whenever I proclaim my lack of husband people look at me like they don’t know what to do with me. And, really, they don’t. There are three words for female here – “girl,” which is a child, “young girl,” which is generally somebody between the ages of 12 and 18, and then “woman, which is supposedly anybody older. However, a prerequisite to being a “woman” is a husband, which I don’t have. (Woman = zhjenshina, wife = zhjna, so the word “woman” kind of translates to “wife-person.”) Generally, they call me “young girl,” but everybody involved knows that it’s not quite correct. Plus, it screws up the whole general arrangement for seating, since most of the time the men hang around, smoke, and talk before the meal while the women are preparing it, but since I have no idea how the hell to cook Kyrgyz food, and I’m also a guest who’s not supposed to be working, and I’m not technically a woman anyway, sometimes they put me with the men. This also messes everybody up, but nobody knows what else to do otherwise.
Anyway, with my current host family, I managed to get in with the water thing. At first, they wouldn’t let me do anything, but I noticed that the cooking area is far from the one pump for water on our property. They have two water buckets that they keep full next to the outdoor stove. If I hung around while they were cooking for long enough, a bucket would go empty and I could grab it. By the time they noticed and were all like, “NO LAURA DON’T,” I was like, “TOO LATE AND YOU’RE GETTING SOME WATER.”
Eventually, they got used to it, and even occasionally ask me to go get some water if I happen to be loafing around and they need it.
Just today, I pretty desperately needed a bath. The weather is just starting to swing into cold here, which renders the sun shower more or less out of service, because the day isn’t hot enough to heat the water, and bathing with a chill wind in cold water outside doesn’t sound like a pleasant time. However, our banya is also out of commission because the tub that heats the water needs to be repaired.
I hadn’t actually bathed in a week. I was able to stave off being too ripe by taking foot and face baths every day and I even did a quick rinse of my hair under the cold water pipe during a warmer day, but it was getting to be about that time. It’s a Sunday, so I didn’t have anywhere in particular to be, and I set out for a proper wash.
The women were both working out in the fields, so I didn’t want to bother them. There are three ways of getting hot water here – cowpat/wood burning stove, gas stove, and electric teakettle. Unfortunately there was no hot water on the wood burner since we hadn’t eaten lunch yet and they don’t fire it up for breakfast. I don’t particularly like using the gas, since I know it’s expensive, not to mention the latent risk of death by explosion that lurks nearby. The easiest is the electric teakettle, provided there’s electricity. You know, fill ‘er up, plug er’ in, and in about three to twenty minutes (depending on the electric flow) a liter of hot water, just for you!
Since the electricity usually doesn’t get shut off until three in the afternoon, I boiled a liter of water (eight minutes), poured it in a bucket, took it to the banya where there’s a working cold-water pump, and got my bath on. It was fabulous.
For the record, I never thought that I’d ever say that bathing in a small, dark, damp, unheated room full of spiders and centipedes with a single liter of hot water would be fabulous, but there you have it. Clean is clean, and it doesn’t matter if I have to pick daddy longlegs out of my hair to get that way.
I came out, and the women of the house were assembling to make lunch, and they saw me with my soap and the like, and they all came like RUNNING at me being all like, “HOW DID YOU BATHE OH GOD YOU DIDN’T USE COLD WATER DID YOU?”
They have a Thing about cold here. They even think it’s really bizarre (and unhealthy) that I have a penchant for drinking cold water. (For the record, it’s not even actually cold. I keep my supply in my room, so it’s more tepid than anything else. I might actually consider doing murder for hire for some ice cubes, if anybody’s interested.) I have no idea how they subsist imbibing nothing but hot tea and the occasional Fanta, but I suppose they’re used to it. Me, I love hot tea, but I end up painfully dehydrated if I don’t consume at least a liter of cold water a day on top of the bazillion trillion cups of tea, but to each our own methods of hydration.
Due to the fact that I drink “cold” water and I don’t wear socks and a sweater every time the temperature dips below eighty degrees, they have deduced that “Americans like cold.” I always agree, but what I wish I could say is that Americans just don’t like sweating balls. Or, at least, this American doesn’t.
After I assured them that I did not take a bath using nothing but cold water, they asked how in the world I had managed to heat it, and when I told them I used the electric teakettle, they looked at me like I had managed to compute pi using an abacus.
I frequently get looks of awe when I say that I do things alone. A couple weeks ago when I went to Bishkek to meet up with the volunteer that worked at my site before I did (he’s since closed his service after two years and is now traveling around Iran and India before returning to the States for law school) and when I got back the family asked who went with me to Bishkek. When I told them I went alone, I got more pi-computing stares.
People don’t do things alone very often here. We’re not all that far from Bishkek (which, by the way, is the capital city of Kyrgyzstan) here, maybe about 45 minutes total by public transport, but nobody from my family has ever gone alone. They just don’t.
Similarly, with my host family at my permanent site, I explained to them that my college was very far away from where my family lived – about thirteen hours by car. At first they thought that I somehow managed to commute every day. I assured them that I did not have time-travel powers nor a private jet, and that I had actually lived at school. Then they were convinced that my mother had gone with me. When I denied that, they asked if my brother had come.
Eventually, I managed to convince them that I had indeed gone alone, and that, in America, this is normal. In Kyrgyzstan, the kids tend to live with the parents until they get married (and if the one getting married is the youngest son, he stays at home regardless). It took me a while to explain that leaving home at seventeen or eighteen is normal in America, and even expected, but for a long time they didn’t believe me. And I don’t think it had anything to do with my language skills. Wide-eyed, my sixteen-year-old sister asked if anybody stayed with their families, and I just shrugged and said “sometimes.” If I had the language skills, I would have said that if somebody is past the age of twenty in America and still lives at home with no immediate plans to leave, it’s a little weird, but if they’re past 25, people begin to think that something is seriously wrong. Of course, I had never questioned this, and I myself had pretty much been gunning to leave home since I hit puberty, but the fish is ill equipped to judge it’s own cultural pond, I guess. I just knew that what I wanted – and what I was pretty much expected to do – was leave.
Now, maybe most Americans don’t leave in quite the same radical fashion that I did – go across the country to college, go across the world during college, go even farther across the world after college – but that’s what we’re programmed to do. The vast majority of my friends after high school had some sort of plan to get out from under their parents’ roofs, be it by virtue of college or a job. Some even got kicked out, but even this isn’t unusual.
My new host mother even asked me if my parents actually loved me. I laughed. Of course they do. But if they had made me stay at home, I would have considered it stifling. Some things, I guess, just don’t culturally compute, but that’s why I’m doing this. If it all made sense and nothing offended anybody’s sensibilities, this wouldn’t be as educational and as fun as it is.
Anyway, after the bath episode, my host aunt had deduced that the way I had been able to figure out how to heat water and take a bath by myself was that heating water by electric teakettle and sponge baths were the way that things were done in America.
Ah, the beauty of cross-cultural exchanges. Now, I have to go do my laundry by hand before my host mother tries to do it for me.
Written Friday, September 12, 2008
Laundry instructions on clothes kind of make me giggle. Directives like “tumble dry low” or “wash with like colors” or even “dry clean only” are almost as foreign to me as pronoun declensions these days.
We actually do have a laundry machine here, but from what I’ve seen it’s been used as little more than a laundry hamper. Washing machines here look like giant open cans with a dial and a wringer on the side. You fill the can with water, plug it in, twist the dial to start the agitator, and add the soap. You still need to rinse by hand. I’ve only seen it been used once, and it was extremely noisy. It did, however, mean that I didn’t have to wash my sheets by hand as well as rinse, so I can’t complain.
The rest of the laundry is done by hand. This is accomplished with the following steps:
1.Retrieve metal laundry basin from its place in the banya building. (The basin only moonlights as a laundry basin. It’s also used for bathing.)
2.Procure hot water. This can be done on the gas stove or the wood/cowpat burning stove, but because gas is so expensive, and the amount of hot water needed is so great, we’ve never used the gas stove to heat water for laundry. Using the wood-burning stove requires going to chop wood or retrieve cowpats if there aren’t any about. Generally, though, I tend to time my laundry sessions to be right after meals, and they always keep pots of water on the wood burning stove to heat along with the food, since hot water is used for washing dishes, and, of course, tea. I can always obtain water for laundry using this method as long as I ask for it.
3.Pour hot water into basin. Also add some powdered laundry detergent – which is amusingly named “Barf,” and no I’m not kidding – and find a bar of laundry soap.
4. You will also need a second basin to drop clothes in after you’ve washed them. I prefer to do my laundry standing, rather than squatting on the ground, so I also get a chair to put the laundry basin on.
5. Get washing! Pick up article of clothing and bar of soap, and rub together in the water until article is suitably sudsy. Then swish around in water, and rescrub.
6. Check article for any visible marks, If there are some, then repeat step five. If not, dunk article in soapy water a few times to remove as much suds as possible, then wring out.
7. Drop article in second, empty bucket.
8. Repeat steps five through seven until all laundry is washed.
9. Now it’s time for rinsing! While it’s possible to go fill up buckets of water and bring them back, I find it’s easier to just carry the laundry (and the other bucket, and the chair) over to the spigot.
10. Put all laundry on chair. Rinse out laundry basin, and auxiliary basin, and fill laundry basin with water.
11. Rinse all clothing by taking it from the chair, dunking it in the clean water, wringing it out again, and putting it back into auxiliary basin.
12. You’ll want to dump out the water a few times, as it gets rather cloudy. This is why it’s easier to do all the laundry rinsing near the spigot.
13. Rinse out laundry basin, return it to banya. Return chair to its place.
14. Walk back to the other side of the compound with laundry. Pick up clothespins.
15. Hang all laundry on line. Turn all shirts inside out.
16. For God’s sake don’t drop any of it on the dusty ground or you’ll have to go all the way back to step one. (Or, if you’re me, you’re more likely to just go rinse it off because, seriously, man, I’m not going back to step one. I didn’t get to be where I am today by being a neat freak.) Put back auxiliary basin.
I’d say the whole process takes maybe an hour, depending on how much and what kind of laundry I need to do. It takes longer if a fire needs to be started for hot water. Generally I try and do it once a week, because doing less laundry more often means I take up less space on the laundry lines, and it makes doing the laundry itself less exhausting. I also learned my lesson to never wash my jeans AND my Carhartt’s at the same time, because getting thick denim material appropriately sudsy, then wringing it out, then getting all the suds out, then wringing them out again, is ridiculously tiring. Those fuckers aren’t getting washed more than once a month, and I don’t care if I basically wear them every day.
This time of year, depending on what time I do my laundry, most things will dry within the day, because the sun is so brutal.
It’s not a ridiculously unpleasant chore, I guess, and if all else fails, it’ll probably give me some killer triceps. I have no idea how this works in the winter, though, other than it’s the same story, just outside in subzero temperatures, which might make things considerably more difficult. But I suppose I also won’t be sweating as much in the winter, so it’ll take longer for B.O. in clothes to become as heinously offensive.
It is the one chore that I’m solely responsible for, though, and considering how much work I see my host mother and grandmother doing just to keep the domestic side of things afloat here in Kyrgyzstan, I’m pretty zealous about it. They’ve offered a couple of times just to throw my own things in with the rest of the family’s, but they’ve already got enough laundry to surmount. Besides, while I’m just fine with people doing my laundry when it’s in the Western sense of “throw all of it in the machine,” I don’t know how I feel about my host mother scrubbing at the crotches of my underwear by hand.
I mean, there’s very few processed foods here, so they have to make all the meals by hand. They do buy packaged kasha and macaroni noodles, but they also make noodles themselves a lot of the time, and all the dough for manty and other dumplings has to be made. Water needs to be hauled from one corner of the complex to the food preparation area on the other side. All the vegetables have to be picked from the garden, and the meat has to be killed and cleaned before preparation. After every meal, the dishes have to be washed by hand. Cleaning the house, again, requires elbow grease, as there aren’t vacuums here. Or, at least, this family doesn't have one.
And my host mother has two young children, of eight and ten, so she’s got enough on her plate. Overall, I’m relatively sure that I’m not that much of an added expense – I eat the same foods the family eats, and there’s always an abundance of everything, and other than that, whatever electricity I consume is probably more than covered by the extremely generous stipend that the Peace Corps pays them – and probably the biggest drain I’ve put on them is the fact that I inhabit one of their rooms alone. Despite this, I’d still like to keep the other work that the family does down to a minimum. And doing laundry isn’t THAT bad.
Written Friday, September 19, 2008
If nothing else, my new host family is definitely not as shy as my old one regarding me and chores. While I had to pull espionage-inspired maneuvers to get my old family to let me haul a couple buckets of water from the pump across the compound, today I cooked, swatted flies, and washed about a million dishes with my new one. My new host mother is very gung-ho about cleaning, and thus quite eager to work the newcomer into the (very clean) fold of her family. I can see this possibly becoming an issue, as I tend to be a bit of a clutterbug by nature, but I guess we’ll deal with that when and if it comes up. She has come into my room a couple of times, and I definitely see her check out the state of cleanliness. She’s even commented on it. (“Not bad,” she says, giving me a thumbs-up.)
Even though I did quite a load of housework today, I can’t say I really minded. As I haven’t started work yet, I didn’t really have much else to be doing with myself, anyway. Now, if they start expecting me to do the amount of cooking and cleaning that I did today on a regular basis, well, that’ll be a problem when I actually start working. However, I know that they don’t even do that amount of preparing on a regular day, as they had friends over tonight and thus made the requisite ridiculous amount of food to commemorate the event. They also fed me incredibly well – whenever we made a dish, we ate part of it. And then I had dinner, which was all the food we made over the course of the day at once.
Plus, this is a hilariously easy way to win major brownie points. I don’t mind doing dishes; in fact, it’s one of my preferred cleaning chores in general. It’s not a hard chore, but they laud me like a god due to my apparent washing prowess. In addition, it’s an action that requires very little language skill. After the first couple loads, when it became obvious that it wasn’t off-putting and I was okay with it, they even started calling me “smart” because I could sort the good silver from the everyday. I also developed the monikers “a good woman,” and the ever valued “hard-working.”
Though I think I possess other skills and accomplishments that are probably more impressive than dishwashing, I have to admit that what limited housewifery I can dole out is greeted by such genuine enthusiasm that it can’t be ignored. People here know that I can speak Japanese, and a few even know that I’ve written a thesis (as well as I could explain it, that is), and they know that I’ve only been studying Russian for about two months, yet can hold a semi-decent conversation… but the thing that really gets ‘em is that I actually do know how to use a broom. They get giddy. Holy crap, the American is holding a sponge.
Another advantage to doing dishes and kitchen work is that it means that they’re not adverse to having me in there. At my old host family, the first time I ever touched a kettle (and it was even one of the plug-in electric ones) I had about five people rushing in my direction shouting at me to be careful. I wished that I could have said, “Dude, do you think that the American government would have picked me to come across the world and represent America if I couldn’t boil water?” Here I’ve handled hot oil, so at least they assume I have a minimal degree of culinary competency. This bodes well for when I want to cook for myself. In addition, having to put away plates and utensils also teaches me where such things are when I might want them.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Kyrgyz cooking, but it's very heavy on the starches and fats. It’s not unusual for me to finish a meal and leave a centimeter of oil floating in the plate. Some other volunteers have gotten soup that was nothing else but some mutton stock with a huge cube of sheep’s fat swimming in it. Probably the most unappetizing thing I’ve been served was at my first host family’s, when they had cow’s legs one day. I admit pretty much total ignorance when it comes to meat: yeah, I buy it from the store, but by the time it gets to me, it’s already in the Styrofoam plate and wrapped in plastic. I thought that “cow’s legs” would just be meat. After all, chicken legs are meat, right?
Wrong. Turns out that cows legs are basically gelatin. I got served a big pile of warm wobbly clear jelly. I tried it, of course, and found that it tasted like meat-flavored Jello. While I can’t say that it was outright bad, the entire thing was just too weird for me, so after the taste, I turned it down. While I think I’m more adventurous than not with food, I did get saddled with the quintessentially American aversion to eating non-muscle based animal matter. I’m not a huge fan of offal, either, though I will choke down heart or liver when it’s served to me, provided it’s not the main course.
And it’s not all bad; borsook, or fried dough, is pretty darn tasty, I love plov, a conglomeration of rice, carrots and meat that’s kind of like chicken-fried rice, the produce here is absolutely to die for, and anything Uzbek or Uzgen inspired also pleases my taste buds. It’s just that I wouldn’t mind reclaiming some control over part of my diet. And while I don’t actively dislike the cuisine here, it’s not like, say, oh, Japan, where part of the reason why I learned the language in the first place was because I liked the food. There, I lived with a host family and the mother did all my cooking with no complaint from me, because I was getting served curry udon, braised fish with red miso sauce, and soba noodles every night. Hell, I even liked breaking open shrimp and sucking out the brains after a while.
In addition, my host mother here works at the bazaar, which means that she leaves the house at about five in the morning and doesn’t get back until threeish. This did not make me incredibly happy when I was here during my site visit, as I ate my breakfast of tea, bread and jam at about seven in the morning, and then didn’t get lunch until around three thirty. With her and the host father at work and the two daughters at school and me also working, I think it would just be easier on all of us if I had a bit of independence in my eating schedule. Ideally, I’d like to have breakfast and lunch on my own, and then eat dinner with the family. Dinner is the main meal anyway, and I know we’ll all be home for it.
This took a little bit of explaining to the mother, since Peace Corps leaves it up to us to decide our eating arrangements. When we meet our host families, there’s a housing contract that’s already been drawn up: you and the host family just sit down, negotiate a price for your lodgings, and sign it. In my case, the mother wrote the price down and I just agreed to it, as it’s ridiculously cheap. I’m paying about thirty dollars a month to live in a fully-furnished room, utilities (well, when there are utilities) included. Not to mention, as I had no idea what my lodgings actually consisted of (whether it was in a house, or an apartment, whether I was getting a room or a guesthouse or multiple rooms or what), I wasn’t in much of a position to bargain. I ended up with a room that’s actually quite nicely furnished. Thirty dollars is pretty much scandalously inexpensive for this.
But I had to explain why I didn’t want to eat the family’s food all the time, and I threw in copious assurances that it was because of my schedule, not because I didn’t love the hell out of Kyrgyz cooking. I still have no idea what I’m paying her… she’s never hosted before, and I don't really have a handle on how much food costs here, as during training the host families provided all meals, and they got a very generous stipend straight from Peace Corps for it. I guess we’ll figure it out.
Anyway, thanks to the spectacular events of today, my new chore is now dishwashing. Apparently I’m taking turns with the oldest daughter on this – she’ll do it for a day, and then I’ll do it. Because today had so much dishwashing involved, she volunteered to take the next two nights. Again, I don’t really mind. If it integrates me in more with the family, it’s worth it.
Written Saturday, September 20, 2008
Had a moderately successful day shopping. I met up with Alex today at about eleven, since he and I live equidistant to Bishkek, only I’m on the west side and he’s east side. Hey, I love having cross-cultural exchanges, but sometimes it’s nice to spend time with people who understand where you’re coming from, right? We first hit up the Peace Corps office for some free internet, and then we meandered over to Osh bazaar, since the two are within walking distance of each other.
There are definite advantages to being so close to Peace Corps HQ. Namely, the free internet and constant access to the library. And while the library seems to be made up mostly of bodice-ripping romance novels and other such sundry nonsense, it’s free material to read in English, and it’s available to me. Furthermore, to Alex and mine’s delight, there is an actual Western-style laundry machine in the resource center. I have no idea how to use it (of course, it would have to be all in German), but I assume that since it’s in the resource center that it’s open for volunteers to use. Of course, there is no dryer, but it wouldn’t be a ridiculous hardship to just carry the damp clothes home and dry them here on the lines. I might take advantage of it during the winter months, when doing laundry will be a total bitch, but I guess we’ll see.
In addition (as if it could get any better) Alex and I found two sleeping bags. A sleeping bag had been an investment I’d been considering before I came here… both for the obvious benefit of being able to travel with one, and because having one during the winter might be nice if it turns out to be freezing ass cold all the time. I had eventually decided against it, because any sleeping bag that appeared to be actually worth having was a several hundred dollar investment.
I was beginning to rethink it, given that the warnings I’m getting about this upcoming winter are just getting more and more dire, but I was leery of having one shipped to me due to the rate of pilferage that occurs in packages. The other option would be just to buy one here, as there are a few retail outlets around Bishkek that sell them, but they’re way out of my Peace Corps budget, about two hundred USD.
We found them under the table, and they were unmarked, so as far as I’m concerned they’re ours. There’s a slight bit of confusion, though, as the free box also unfortunately happens to be the area where people leave stuff to be stored while they’re off doing whatever. Frankly, though, if you leave your shit laying around the freebox area without a label then you’re just asking for it. Besides, who the hell stores nothing but a sleeping bag? Anyway, if I hear tell of anybody bitching about having their sleeping bag taken, I’ll certainly return it, but in the meantime, it’s mine.
Whatever. But the one I picked up is ridiculously nice… it’s from LL Bean, has down feathers, and claims to be good down to twenty degrees. It’s not a real heavy-duty number for sure, but it’ll definitely help out, it came with a compression sack, and it was free. Good enough. I also fished out a few hangers (which I needed) and a clip lamp that I was hoping to use for my bed, as the lighting in my room leaves a bit to be desired, but the thing shorted out when I plugged it in. Oh well. At least I didn’t pay for it.
On the side where I actually paid for things, I picked up a pair of scissors and a pair of slippers. I actually bought a pair of scissors about two weeks ago, but unfortunately set the bag containing them and a couple pairs of socks down in Osh bazaar while I was distracted by bargaining, and they were lost. The slippers were mainly for the sake of my host mother, who is convinced that if I go around barefoot in the house I’m going to die. The ones I picked up aren’t particularly nice – probably their main function is simply elevating my feet off the ground, they’re not very warm, but they were cheap, and at least they’re not completely blinged out. It’s really hard to find clothes or accessories here that lack bling. I heard from another volunteer who said that the locals think that American women dress extremely plainly, and from seeing what most stylish girls here wear, I see why they think that. Everything “for girls” is either glitzy like the 80s had stomach indigestion or frilly like a lacy layer cake. I even think that I dress plainly for the United States… I don’t like ruffles or lace or anything of the ilk, and tend to gravitate towards solid jewel tones and neutrals. Which, well, there aren’t many of here. Or, if they do have them, you bet your bottom som they’ve been bedazzled up.
At any rate, the slippers I picked up are a dark navy blue with a single multicolored butterfly embroidered on the outside of each one. I actually rather like them, which I wasn’t expecting. I figure that I probably will be buying clothes here, so I need to compromise with a little bling. When I was still living at my training site, I bought a long dark “wool” skirt that fit me perfectly and is plain… except for a little diamond broach-like apparatus on the bottom, with four clear rhinestones accenting the points. I could probably easily take it off, but it’s not that offensive and I figure it’s my compromise with the fashion here. You give me straight lines and handsome colors, and I’ll let you bling it out a touch. Fine? Fine. I would never wear it at home, but what passes for “professional” here is also considerably different.
Came home and did an assload of laundry, because I really needed to and they were boiling the water. I will never take a laundry machine for granted again. Doing laundry by hand isn’t all that awful, though, and while it’s extremely time consuming, people also budget out time for it here. When I lived in the States, I most certainly would not have had an entire day to dedicate to doing laundry, as I have to do here, but here people also expect that you’ll need to take the time to do the laundry, so it’s not as much of an inconvenience. I also had an unusually large load this time, as I didn’t do any laundry before I left my training site, and had spilled beer and vodka over an outfit or two when I got sworn in as a volunteer. I even washed the sleeping bag, at the insistence of my host mother.
Written Monday, September 21, 2008
Another day, more shopping. This time I did it alone, since it was mostly for groceries.
I’ve been working out my eating schedule here, and have decided that while I want to have dinner with the family, it’s easier to (and I’d rather) cook for myself for breakfast and lunch. My host mother and father work at the bazaar, so they leave the house about five in the morning and don’t get back until three at the earliest, and then the two daughters and I are all on different school schedules, so attempting to rely on the family to produce lunch at a regular time seems… well, unlikely. Not that they wouldn’t try, of course. But I actually do like to cook, and I appreciate a bit of flexibility in my schedule.
Anyway, I went down to Osh Bazaar, which is an enormous mostly-farmer’s market on the far west side of Bishkek. There’s a matshruka that picks me up straight from my house and goes down to the bazaar, so I hopped it and went down to mingle with the merchants.
Overall, it’s pretty cheap, and there’s quite a bit of variety. We’ll see what it can deliver come winter, but for now it’s a veritable smorgasbord. Nuts, fruit dried and fresh, all kinds of meat, candy, grains, baked breads, oils, spices, dairy products, juice, colas, live chickens… anything, really. There’s also a part that sells hardware and housing goods, as well as a wing that has handbags and clothing. There’s a section with furniture for any room in the house, and one with school and office supplies. On the perimeter of the bazaar are buildings that sell electronics, the best knock-off brands that China can invent. It’s a pretty big place, suffice to say.
After a bit of browsing, I came out of it with a kilo of oats, some golden raisins, vegetable oil, cinnamon, powdered creamer, a roll of plastic bags, Tupperware-esque containers, two flatbreads, and shelled walnuts.
Kind of an eclectic mix, but I had my reasons. My plans for making my own breakfast include homemade granola. That’s right, homemade granola. I’ve realized that since college and coming here, I am becoming more and more of a hippie. I wash my hair with baking soda, don’t wear deodorant, and make my own granola. Uh-huh, what of it? Oh, and I joined the Peace Corps. Funny, that.
Anyway, Peace Corps provided us with a very useful cookbook that is chock full of recipes that can be made with ingredients found here. This is a godsend for multiple reasons, namely that I’ve never cooked in Kyrgyzstan before, and also because, really, I haven’t done that much cooking on my own. Plus, it’s also a guide to what is available in Kyrgyzstan and what is not. Overall, it seems like most of the things I’m used to working with are available here. The big exceptions are condiments like peanut butter and chocolate sauce. In reality, those can be found here and they’re easily available to me due to my proximity to Bishkek, but more on that later.
I suppose one of the latent advantages to this is that I’ll know how to cook any variety of meals from scratch by the time it’s all said and done, because packaged food is virtually unheard of here. I mean, of course they have it (again, more on this later), but it’s expensive and pretty much out of my budget. The cookbook also has instructions on things like how to prepare dried beans, and even how to do self-canning.
Anyway, the oats, walnuts, raisins, oil, and cinnamon were primarily for the purpose of granola. The recipe called for all of these except for the cinnamon, but I like cinnamon and it goes well with honey… which I wasn’t able to purchase at the bazaar.
I was able to find most of the ingredients easily, but for a long while I couldn’t find either honey or oats. After about an hour of canvassing, I left for the Peace Corps office, which is about a twenty minute walk from the bazaar. I needed to get papers proving that I’m a volunteer in order to defer my loans, but I also wanted to take advantage of the internet there.
Sadly, the internet was down, but my program manager found me when I was waiting for my papers and while we were talking, I asked her where the hell I could get oats and honey, as they’re pretty basic ingredients. She said that they should have oats where they sold the other grains, but they were likely in a smaller bag that might have been beyond the counter, so I probably had to ask.
She also told me that the honey at the bazaar was not likely to be good, and that most people bought honey from people they knew in the villages.
I went back to the bazaar to pick up the oats (which I found instantly once I asked… the program manager gave me the word for oats in Russian), and then I headed back out of the bazaar to pick up a streetcar.
I really like the streetcars in Bishkek. The main mode of transport around these parts is the matshrukas, which are kind of like vans that they cram as many people into as possible. If you see a matshruka that’s going where you want to go – there are numbers on the windows and usually a sign that extols the major places it’ll stop by – you wave it down and climb in. There are no stops for matshrukas – you just have to yell at the driver to stop when he nears your destination. This makes for somewhat nervous driving when you’re in a matshruka in an unfamiliar area and you can’t see out the windows because there’s so many damn people in one. Oh, and matshrukas are also kind of notorious for pickpockets, so you also have to be semi-paranoid about your belongings, especially if they’re crowded. And in Bishkek they’re crowded like nowhere else – I’ve sat on the dashboard in one because there was no place to put my feet, and I’ve also ridden one with my torso hanging out the window, canine-style, because I couldn’t pull it in the automobile.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’m more comfortable on them than I used to be, but I have no idea how the hell even the Kyrgyz travel efficiently in unfamiliar places when they don’t know the matshruka routes. Even if a matshruka says it’s going to a major landmark, there’s always the chance that it might actually be making a gigantic loop through a residential area before it gets there. (This, by the way, has happened to me more times than I’d like to admit, where I ended up sitting on the damn thing for like an hour before I got to where I needed to go.)
The streetcars suffer from a similar problem, in that there’s never a schedule posted and there’s no map with their routes anywhere, as far as I know. I only know to ride the ones I ride because somebody told me where they go. (And even then, I had to ride them a couple of times through their loop before I knew when to get off them.) Consequently, you almost never see other foreigners taking the public transportation, because if you’re only here for a short period of time, it’s impossible to figure out and not worth the time to attempt. Also, if you’re on a Western budget, the taxis are criminally cheap. Of course, if you’re on a Peace Corps budget, they’re not, but then again, I (kind of) know how to use the public transportation, so I guess it’s a trade off. If anybody ever needs to know how to get around Bishkek for pennies, I’m your woman. Sort of.
Anyway, I like the streetcars because they’re cheaper than the matshrukas (five instead of eight som), and tend to be less crowded. I always get a seat on one, which is unlike my usual experience on a matshruka, because even if there’s a seat, I usually only get it for about five minutes until an elderly person gets on and I have to give it up. Not that I’m going to begrudge a seventy-year-old woman a seat, but it’s just the principle of the thing. Plus, the streetcars run on a fixed route… they’re actually powered by electric wires that are strung above the streets they run on, and they also stop at fixed bus stops, which means that they don’t stop every five seconds to pick up whoever waves at them from the side of the road. Of course, I got on one once and it caught on fire, but, I mean, that’s what you get for riding a Soviet relic. (The fire got put out, and the streetcar kept running; you know, business as usual.)
So, I hopped the streetcar to travel uptown to the center of Bishkek, where the main attraction is a large department store called TsUM, which is pretty much ridiculously overpriced compared to the bazaars. It does, however, have a far more comprehensive electronics section than the bazaar, and is probably at least marginally more trustworthy quality-wise than at the bazaar, which is its main redeeming point. You can still bargain at it, though, so it’s not 100% Westernized. It’s also the center of town, and happens to be across the street from Bishkek’s, and thus Kyrgyzstan’s, central post office.
There’s not door-to-door mail delivery here like there is in the States (or Japan). Basically, if you want mail, you need to rent a postal box. My village actually does have a post office, but I figure I’ll be going into Bishkek at least weekly, if not biweekly, and I won’t be getting such a large amount of mail that it’ll be busting out of my box if I happen to miss a week. Plus, since all the international mail comes here first before being diverted out around the country, I figure that it’s just easier to go to the source.
It was a bit of an event getting a postal box, considering they spoke no English and my Russian still leaves a bit to be desired. But through pantomime and a lot of patience on both sides, I managed to rent a box for six months. I didn’t have enough money on me to pay out for the full two years, but I assume I can just go in and extend my contract when it gets to be that time. When it had finally all been figured out, the woman went to the back, and came to the counter with a box, which she upended. Out came a huge pile of keys, some with tags, others without. We sorted through the pile, but none produced a key with my box number attached. I can only assume it was one of the many un-tagged keys floating about the pile. She told me to come back Friday, when she’d have a key for it. …we’ll see, I guess.
I’m also planning on opening a bank account next to TsUM, which means I can take care of all of my banking and postal needs in one fell swoop. But I figured I had enough adventure with attempting to do official business in a language I’ve studied for about two months, so I left that for another time.
Anyway, after quasi-setting up my new postal box, I took the walk down to Beta Stores, about thirty minutes. Beta Stores is a huge supermarket, and very expensive compared to the bazaar. It stocks American imports like Hershey’s chocolate sauce, Heinz ketchup, Tabasco sauce, and, of course, peanut butter. (The peanut butter is ShopRite brand, but beggars can’t be choosers. Weirdly, there’s a lot of ShopRite things at Beta, including maple syrup and ketchup. And they all cost about a billion dollars, which is kind of funny, considering it’s the cheap brand in the States.)
All the aforementioned items go for about ten dollars US, which is outrageous by both Kyrgyzstani and American standards. But, I mean, if you’re desperate… fortunately, my mother’s love came through for me in the form of a gigantic container of Jif, so I’m set for a while.
I use Beta Stores when I can’t find what I need at the bazaars, and for things like dairy products, when I don’t trust the bazaars. I don’t want to buy milk at three in the afternoon that’s been sitting in the sun since six in the morning. Refrigeration standards here aren’t exactly up to the par that I was raised with. Namely, at the bazaars, the standard is “none.” I don’t mind paying an extra fifty som for yogurt that won’t kill me.
Plus, I have to admit that it’s nice to spend some time in a Western-style supermarket. I genuinely do like the bazaar – it’s cheap, colorful, and fun. However, I was raised to shop in a place where people don’t shout what they’re selling at you and may or may not be attempting to haggle. In Beta Stores everything is nice and organized on the metal shelves with the bin numbers and firmly priced with stickers. You can get a metal shopping cart with the child’s seat. The fluorescent lights flicker gloomily above – just like home! They have coolers that run on generators when the power goes out. They even have a bakery that stocks Kyrgyz- and Western-style baked goods.
I admit that Beta Stores is kind of relaxing. For about a half hour, I could be in America. And I mean, while I like Kyrgyzstan so far and I clearly love being expatriated… it’s certainly not because I don’t like America. I did get that question a lot when I said that I was going abroad again and was probably going to continue the trend after my service, was whether or not I liked living in America, or even if I didn’t like America at all. I always found that kind of bizarre, given that I’m actually here serving my country. I took the same oath that soldiers, foreign service workers, and the President takes. If I didn’t like America, I wouldn’t be doing Peace Corps. That would be… rather counterintuitive. In reality, I actually think that my experience abroad has made me like my home country more. Before, it was all just “normal.” Now, I know that America is actually a ridiculously weird place, and I kind of like being part of that weirdness.
Anyway, I picked up a container of yogurt and a bottle of honey here, and then left America to hop my matshruka back home.
Back home, they were hauling about a metric ton of coal out back, because we’re not going to have much electricity this winter, and nobody’s interested in freezing to death. I said hello and then went to work making my granola.
It’s surprisingly easy to make. You just mix the honey and oil together and put it in a saucepan to heat, and then mix the nuts and cinnamon and oats in the other. Then, when the oil/honey mixure is warm enough to pour easily, you mix it together.
Then I would have put it in the oven, but the oven ran on electricity and the electricity went out. …oh well. I took a nap instead. No sense getting pissed off at the government because they shut the electricity off because there might not be enough this winter. Uh, right?
The family is extraordinarily interested in everything I do in the kitchen. I’ve wowed them with my dishwashing skills, and when I was making the granola I had an audience. Once the electricity went back on (five hours later, after dinner), I managed to finish toasting my granola, and then I mixed it with the golden raisins.
And all I have to say is… motherfucking success. That’s right, this granola is so tasty that it needs a “motherfucking” to describe it. Adding the cinnamon was a good decision. Tomorrow for breakfast, I am having some COFFEE (not Nescafe, oh no, we’re talking COFFEE), with creamer, and plain yogurt with my Granola Of Victory And Fruitful Life.
Tomorrow is also my first day at work. Hopefully, that’ll go as well as breakfast.
Written Sunday, August 31, 2008
I could probably talk for hours about culture shock – I’ve had it in Japan, and I’ve had tastes of it here, though I’m willing to bet that it’ll hit in a more full-frontal capacity after training and I’m not surrounded by Americans all day. But, in both Japan and the rest of Asia, one of the most interesting (and frustrating) juxtapositions of culture is American independence and Asian hospitality.
Let me first start out by assuring you that it’s not all bad. They treat guests like royalty in Asia, no matter what the family’s social or monetary status. In fact, one of the things they warn about while traveling through this region is to make sure that, if you happen to visit a family, they don’t do too much in your honor, like slaughter their only sheep or fix a feast when it’s clear that they can barely feed their own children. As an American in a part of the world where foreigners rarely go, this essentially assures two years of being a constant guest.
Which definitely has its downfalls, especially with the American propensity to do things for oneself. I had never realized how base this urge is until now, and my current family isn’t even particularly patriarchal. In some families, the volunteer there isn’t even allowed to boil water for themselves, but they have to ask one of the women of the family to do it for them.
I’m not sure how prevalent this is in the rest of Asia, but the one fate that all women want to avoid here is being the kalin. I’m not sure how the hell that translates, because it’s Kyrgyz and not Russian, but essentially the kalin is the wife of the youngest son. Here, it’s the youngest son’s duty to live with the parents as an adult and care for them. However, though the duty technically falls to the son, it’s the wife that ends up doing most of the caring, and most of everything else. In very traditional Kyrgyz families, it's the woman in the role of kalin that cooks the food, serves everybody, cleans up after the meal, milks the cows, does the laundry, works the fields, fetches whatever needs fetching… think a Kyrgyz-speaking Cinderella.
And, I mean, it’s normal here. It does, however, make a lot of the other volunteers uncomfortable, because our general reaction is I can boil water for my goddamn self, and I don’t need this woman who has permanent list of chores longer than the Nile to take care of me on top of it.
My host family currently is Turkish, so I don’t think they really enforce the kalin thing as much. Of course, my host family has grandparents, and my host mother does a hell of a lot of work, but the grandmother probably puts in about equally as much. Even so, I had to fight to get the right to do some chores. Now, don't get me wrong, I’m not so motivated that I’ll wrestle with them to do things like wash dishes or work in the fields. I am, after all, paying a handsome amount to live with them, and I don’t feel any pressing need to account for as many chores as a host country national of my age and status would do. However, it’s entirely within my own means to do things like fetch the occasional bucket of water, or refill the sugar bowl, peel fruit, or do my own laundry.
On a side note, another hilarious/disconcerting thing here is my status. There is no such thing as an unmarried 22-year-old female here. Or at least, I’ve never met one, and whenever I proclaim my lack of husband people look at me like they don’t know what to do with me. And, really, they don’t. There are three words for female here – “girl,” which is a child, “young girl,” which is generally somebody between the ages of 12 and 18, and then “woman, which is supposedly anybody older. However, a prerequisite to being a “woman” is a husband, which I don’t have. (Woman = zhjenshina, wife = zhjna, so the word “woman” kind of translates to “wife-person.”) Generally, they call me “young girl,” but everybody involved knows that it’s not quite correct. Plus, it screws up the whole general arrangement for seating, since most of the time the men hang around, smoke, and talk before the meal while the women are preparing it, but since I have no idea how the hell to cook Kyrgyz food, and I’m also a guest who’s not supposed to be working, and I’m not technically a woman anyway, sometimes they put me with the men. This also messes everybody up, but nobody knows what else to do otherwise.
Anyway, with my current host family, I managed to get in with the water thing. At first, they wouldn’t let me do anything, but I noticed that the cooking area is far from the one pump for water on our property. They have two water buckets that they keep full next to the outdoor stove. If I hung around while they were cooking for long enough, a bucket would go empty and I could grab it. By the time they noticed and were all like, “NO LAURA DON’T,” I was like, “TOO LATE AND YOU’RE GETTING SOME WATER.”
Eventually, they got used to it, and even occasionally ask me to go get some water if I happen to be loafing around and they need it.
Just today, I pretty desperately needed a bath. The weather is just starting to swing into cold here, which renders the sun shower more or less out of service, because the day isn’t hot enough to heat the water, and bathing with a chill wind in cold water outside doesn’t sound like a pleasant time. However, our banya is also out of commission because the tub that heats the water needs to be repaired.
I hadn’t actually bathed in a week. I was able to stave off being too ripe by taking foot and face baths every day and I even did a quick rinse of my hair under the cold water pipe during a warmer day, but it was getting to be about that time. It’s a Sunday, so I didn’t have anywhere in particular to be, and I set out for a proper wash.
The women were both working out in the fields, so I didn’t want to bother them. There are three ways of getting hot water here – cowpat/wood burning stove, gas stove, and electric teakettle. Unfortunately there was no hot water on the wood burner since we hadn’t eaten lunch yet and they don’t fire it up for breakfast. I don’t particularly like using the gas, since I know it’s expensive, not to mention the latent risk of death by explosion that lurks nearby. The easiest is the electric teakettle, provided there’s electricity. You know, fill ‘er up, plug er’ in, and in about three to twenty minutes (depending on the electric flow) a liter of hot water, just for you!
Since the electricity usually doesn’t get shut off until three in the afternoon, I boiled a liter of water (eight minutes), poured it in a bucket, took it to the banya where there’s a working cold-water pump, and got my bath on. It was fabulous.
For the record, I never thought that I’d ever say that bathing in a small, dark, damp, unheated room full of spiders and centipedes with a single liter of hot water would be fabulous, but there you have it. Clean is clean, and it doesn’t matter if I have to pick daddy longlegs out of my hair to get that way.
I came out, and the women of the house were assembling to make lunch, and they saw me with my soap and the like, and they all came like RUNNING at me being all like, “HOW DID YOU BATHE OH GOD YOU DIDN’T USE COLD WATER DID YOU?”
They have a Thing about cold here. They even think it’s really bizarre (and unhealthy) that I have a penchant for drinking cold water. (For the record, it’s not even actually cold. I keep my supply in my room, so it’s more tepid than anything else. I might actually consider doing murder for hire for some ice cubes, if anybody’s interested.) I have no idea how they subsist imbibing nothing but hot tea and the occasional Fanta, but I suppose they’re used to it. Me, I love hot tea, but I end up painfully dehydrated if I don’t consume at least a liter of cold water a day on top of the bazillion trillion cups of tea, but to each our own methods of hydration.
Due to the fact that I drink “cold” water and I don’t wear socks and a sweater every time the temperature dips below eighty degrees, they have deduced that “Americans like cold.” I always agree, but what I wish I could say is that Americans just don’t like sweating balls. Or, at least, this American doesn’t.
After I assured them that I did not take a bath using nothing but cold water, they asked how in the world I had managed to heat it, and when I told them I used the electric teakettle, they looked at me like I had managed to compute pi using an abacus.
I frequently get looks of awe when I say that I do things alone. A couple weeks ago when I went to Bishkek to meet up with the volunteer that worked at my site before I did (he’s since closed his service after two years and is now traveling around Iran and India before returning to the States for law school) and when I got back the family asked who went with me to Bishkek. When I told them I went alone, I got more pi-computing stares.
People don’t do things alone very often here. We’re not all that far from Bishkek (which, by the way, is the capital city of Kyrgyzstan) here, maybe about 45 minutes total by public transport, but nobody from my family has ever gone alone. They just don’t.
Similarly, with my host family at my permanent site, I explained to them that my college was very far away from where my family lived – about thirteen hours by car. At first they thought that I somehow managed to commute every day. I assured them that I did not have time-travel powers nor a private jet, and that I had actually lived at school. Then they were convinced that my mother had gone with me. When I denied that, they asked if my brother had come.
Eventually, I managed to convince them that I had indeed gone alone, and that, in America, this is normal. In Kyrgyzstan, the kids tend to live with the parents until they get married (and if the one getting married is the youngest son, he stays at home regardless). It took me a while to explain that leaving home at seventeen or eighteen is normal in America, and even expected, but for a long time they didn’t believe me. And I don’t think it had anything to do with my language skills. Wide-eyed, my sixteen-year-old sister asked if anybody stayed with their families, and I just shrugged and said “sometimes.” If I had the language skills, I would have said that if somebody is past the age of twenty in America and still lives at home with no immediate plans to leave, it’s a little weird, but if they’re past 25, people begin to think that something is seriously wrong. Of course, I had never questioned this, and I myself had pretty much been gunning to leave home since I hit puberty, but the fish is ill equipped to judge it’s own cultural pond, I guess. I just knew that what I wanted – and what I was pretty much expected to do – was leave.
Now, maybe most Americans don’t leave in quite the same radical fashion that I did – go across the country to college, go across the world during college, go even farther across the world after college – but that’s what we’re programmed to do. The vast majority of my friends after high school had some sort of plan to get out from under their parents’ roofs, be it by virtue of college or a job. Some even got kicked out, but even this isn’t unusual.
My new host mother even asked me if my parents actually loved me. I laughed. Of course they do. But if they had made me stay at home, I would have considered it stifling. Some things, I guess, just don’t culturally compute, but that’s why I’m doing this. If it all made sense and nothing offended anybody’s sensibilities, this wouldn’t be as educational and as fun as it is.
Anyway, after the bath episode, my host aunt had deduced that the way I had been able to figure out how to heat water and take a bath by myself was that heating water by electric teakettle and sponge baths were the way that things were done in America.
Ah, the beauty of cross-cultural exchanges. Now, I have to go do my laundry by hand before my host mother tries to do it for me.
Written Friday, September 12, 2008
Laundry instructions on clothes kind of make me giggle. Directives like “tumble dry low” or “wash with like colors” or even “dry clean only” are almost as foreign to me as pronoun declensions these days.
We actually do have a laundry machine here, but from what I’ve seen it’s been used as little more than a laundry hamper. Washing machines here look like giant open cans with a dial and a wringer on the side. You fill the can with water, plug it in, twist the dial to start the agitator, and add the soap. You still need to rinse by hand. I’ve only seen it been used once, and it was extremely noisy. It did, however, mean that I didn’t have to wash my sheets by hand as well as rinse, so I can’t complain.
The rest of the laundry is done by hand. This is accomplished with the following steps:
1.Retrieve metal laundry basin from its place in the banya building. (The basin only moonlights as a laundry basin. It’s also used for bathing.)
2.Procure hot water. This can be done on the gas stove or the wood/cowpat burning stove, but because gas is so expensive, and the amount of hot water needed is so great, we’ve never used the gas stove to heat water for laundry. Using the wood-burning stove requires going to chop wood or retrieve cowpats if there aren’t any about. Generally, though, I tend to time my laundry sessions to be right after meals, and they always keep pots of water on the wood burning stove to heat along with the food, since hot water is used for washing dishes, and, of course, tea. I can always obtain water for laundry using this method as long as I ask for it.
3.Pour hot water into basin. Also add some powdered laundry detergent – which is amusingly named “Barf,” and no I’m not kidding – and find a bar of laundry soap.
4. You will also need a second basin to drop clothes in after you’ve washed them. I prefer to do my laundry standing, rather than squatting on the ground, so I also get a chair to put the laundry basin on.
5. Get washing! Pick up article of clothing and bar of soap, and rub together in the water until article is suitably sudsy. Then swish around in water, and rescrub.
6. Check article for any visible marks, If there are some, then repeat step five. If not, dunk article in soapy water a few times to remove as much suds as possible, then wring out.
7. Drop article in second, empty bucket.
8. Repeat steps five through seven until all laundry is washed.
9. Now it’s time for rinsing! While it’s possible to go fill up buckets of water and bring them back, I find it’s easier to just carry the laundry (and the other bucket, and the chair) over to the spigot.
10. Put all laundry on chair. Rinse out laundry basin, and auxiliary basin, and fill laundry basin with water.
11. Rinse all clothing by taking it from the chair, dunking it in the clean water, wringing it out again, and putting it back into auxiliary basin.
12. You’ll want to dump out the water a few times, as it gets rather cloudy. This is why it’s easier to do all the laundry rinsing near the spigot.
13. Rinse out laundry basin, return it to banya. Return chair to its place.
14. Walk back to the other side of the compound with laundry. Pick up clothespins.
15. Hang all laundry on line. Turn all shirts inside out.
16. For God’s sake don’t drop any of it on the dusty ground or you’ll have to go all the way back to step one. (Or, if you’re me, you’re more likely to just go rinse it off because, seriously, man, I’m not going back to step one. I didn’t get to be where I am today by being a neat freak.) Put back auxiliary basin.
I’d say the whole process takes maybe an hour, depending on how much and what kind of laundry I need to do. It takes longer if a fire needs to be started for hot water. Generally I try and do it once a week, because doing less laundry more often means I take up less space on the laundry lines, and it makes doing the laundry itself less exhausting. I also learned my lesson to never wash my jeans AND my Carhartt’s at the same time, because getting thick denim material appropriately sudsy, then wringing it out, then getting all the suds out, then wringing them out again, is ridiculously tiring. Those fuckers aren’t getting washed more than once a month, and I don’t care if I basically wear them every day.
This time of year, depending on what time I do my laundry, most things will dry within the day, because the sun is so brutal.
It’s not a ridiculously unpleasant chore, I guess, and if all else fails, it’ll probably give me some killer triceps. I have no idea how this works in the winter, though, other than it’s the same story, just outside in subzero temperatures, which might make things considerably more difficult. But I suppose I also won’t be sweating as much in the winter, so it’ll take longer for B.O. in clothes to become as heinously offensive.
It is the one chore that I’m solely responsible for, though, and considering how much work I see my host mother and grandmother doing just to keep the domestic side of things afloat here in Kyrgyzstan, I’m pretty zealous about it. They’ve offered a couple of times just to throw my own things in with the rest of the family’s, but they’ve already got enough laundry to surmount. Besides, while I’m just fine with people doing my laundry when it’s in the Western sense of “throw all of it in the machine,” I don’t know how I feel about my host mother scrubbing at the crotches of my underwear by hand.
I mean, there’s very few processed foods here, so they have to make all the meals by hand. They do buy packaged kasha and macaroni noodles, but they also make noodles themselves a lot of the time, and all the dough for manty and other dumplings has to be made. Water needs to be hauled from one corner of the complex to the food preparation area on the other side. All the vegetables have to be picked from the garden, and the meat has to be killed and cleaned before preparation. After every meal, the dishes have to be washed by hand. Cleaning the house, again, requires elbow grease, as there aren’t vacuums here. Or, at least, this family doesn't have one.
And my host mother has two young children, of eight and ten, so she’s got enough on her plate. Overall, I’m relatively sure that I’m not that much of an added expense – I eat the same foods the family eats, and there’s always an abundance of everything, and other than that, whatever electricity I consume is probably more than covered by the extremely generous stipend that the Peace Corps pays them – and probably the biggest drain I’ve put on them is the fact that I inhabit one of their rooms alone. Despite this, I’d still like to keep the other work that the family does down to a minimum. And doing laundry isn’t THAT bad.
Written Friday, September 19, 2008
If nothing else, my new host family is definitely not as shy as my old one regarding me and chores. While I had to pull espionage-inspired maneuvers to get my old family to let me haul a couple buckets of water from the pump across the compound, today I cooked, swatted flies, and washed about a million dishes with my new one. My new host mother is very gung-ho about cleaning, and thus quite eager to work the newcomer into the (very clean) fold of her family. I can see this possibly becoming an issue, as I tend to be a bit of a clutterbug by nature, but I guess we’ll deal with that when and if it comes up. She has come into my room a couple of times, and I definitely see her check out the state of cleanliness. She’s even commented on it. (“Not bad,” she says, giving me a thumbs-up.)
Even though I did quite a load of housework today, I can’t say I really minded. As I haven’t started work yet, I didn’t really have much else to be doing with myself, anyway. Now, if they start expecting me to do the amount of cooking and cleaning that I did today on a regular basis, well, that’ll be a problem when I actually start working. However, I know that they don’t even do that amount of preparing on a regular day, as they had friends over tonight and thus made the requisite ridiculous amount of food to commemorate the event. They also fed me incredibly well – whenever we made a dish, we ate part of it. And then I had dinner, which was all the food we made over the course of the day at once.
Plus, this is a hilariously easy way to win major brownie points. I don’t mind doing dishes; in fact, it’s one of my preferred cleaning chores in general. It’s not a hard chore, but they laud me like a god due to my apparent washing prowess. In addition, it’s an action that requires very little language skill. After the first couple loads, when it became obvious that it wasn’t off-putting and I was okay with it, they even started calling me “smart” because I could sort the good silver from the everyday. I also developed the monikers “a good woman,” and the ever valued “hard-working.”
Though I think I possess other skills and accomplishments that are probably more impressive than dishwashing, I have to admit that what limited housewifery I can dole out is greeted by such genuine enthusiasm that it can’t be ignored. People here know that I can speak Japanese, and a few even know that I’ve written a thesis (as well as I could explain it, that is), and they know that I’ve only been studying Russian for about two months, yet can hold a semi-decent conversation… but the thing that really gets ‘em is that I actually do know how to use a broom. They get giddy. Holy crap, the American is holding a sponge.
Another advantage to doing dishes and kitchen work is that it means that they’re not adverse to having me in there. At my old host family, the first time I ever touched a kettle (and it was even one of the plug-in electric ones) I had about five people rushing in my direction shouting at me to be careful. I wished that I could have said, “Dude, do you think that the American government would have picked me to come across the world and represent America if I couldn’t boil water?” Here I’ve handled hot oil, so at least they assume I have a minimal degree of culinary competency. This bodes well for when I want to cook for myself. In addition, having to put away plates and utensils also teaches me where such things are when I might want them.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Kyrgyz cooking, but it's very heavy on the starches and fats. It’s not unusual for me to finish a meal and leave a centimeter of oil floating in the plate. Some other volunteers have gotten soup that was nothing else but some mutton stock with a huge cube of sheep’s fat swimming in it. Probably the most unappetizing thing I’ve been served was at my first host family’s, when they had cow’s legs one day. I admit pretty much total ignorance when it comes to meat: yeah, I buy it from the store, but by the time it gets to me, it’s already in the Styrofoam plate and wrapped in plastic. I thought that “cow’s legs” would just be meat. After all, chicken legs are meat, right?
Wrong. Turns out that cows legs are basically gelatin. I got served a big pile of warm wobbly clear jelly. I tried it, of course, and found that it tasted like meat-flavored Jello. While I can’t say that it was outright bad, the entire thing was just too weird for me, so after the taste, I turned it down. While I think I’m more adventurous than not with food, I did get saddled with the quintessentially American aversion to eating non-muscle based animal matter. I’m not a huge fan of offal, either, though I will choke down heart or liver when it’s served to me, provided it’s not the main course.
And it’s not all bad; borsook, or fried dough, is pretty darn tasty, I love plov, a conglomeration of rice, carrots and meat that’s kind of like chicken-fried rice, the produce here is absolutely to die for, and anything Uzbek or Uzgen inspired also pleases my taste buds. It’s just that I wouldn’t mind reclaiming some control over part of my diet. And while I don’t actively dislike the cuisine here, it’s not like, say, oh, Japan, where part of the reason why I learned the language in the first place was because I liked the food. There, I lived with a host family and the mother did all my cooking with no complaint from me, because I was getting served curry udon, braised fish with red miso sauce, and soba noodles every night. Hell, I even liked breaking open shrimp and sucking out the brains after a while.
In addition, my host mother here works at the bazaar, which means that she leaves the house at about five in the morning and doesn’t get back until threeish. This did not make me incredibly happy when I was here during my site visit, as I ate my breakfast of tea, bread and jam at about seven in the morning, and then didn’t get lunch until around three thirty. With her and the host father at work and the two daughters at school and me also working, I think it would just be easier on all of us if I had a bit of independence in my eating schedule. Ideally, I’d like to have breakfast and lunch on my own, and then eat dinner with the family. Dinner is the main meal anyway, and I know we’ll all be home for it.
This took a little bit of explaining to the mother, since Peace Corps leaves it up to us to decide our eating arrangements. When we meet our host families, there’s a housing contract that’s already been drawn up: you and the host family just sit down, negotiate a price for your lodgings, and sign it. In my case, the mother wrote the price down and I just agreed to it, as it’s ridiculously cheap. I’m paying about thirty dollars a month to live in a fully-furnished room, utilities (well, when there are utilities) included. Not to mention, as I had no idea what my lodgings actually consisted of (whether it was in a house, or an apartment, whether I was getting a room or a guesthouse or multiple rooms or what), I wasn’t in much of a position to bargain. I ended up with a room that’s actually quite nicely furnished. Thirty dollars is pretty much scandalously inexpensive for this.
But I had to explain why I didn’t want to eat the family’s food all the time, and I threw in copious assurances that it was because of my schedule, not because I didn’t love the hell out of Kyrgyz cooking. I still have no idea what I’m paying her… she’s never hosted before, and I don't really have a handle on how much food costs here, as during training the host families provided all meals, and they got a very generous stipend straight from Peace Corps for it. I guess we’ll figure it out.
Anyway, thanks to the spectacular events of today, my new chore is now dishwashing. Apparently I’m taking turns with the oldest daughter on this – she’ll do it for a day, and then I’ll do it. Because today had so much dishwashing involved, she volunteered to take the next two nights. Again, I don’t really mind. If it integrates me in more with the family, it’s worth it.
Written Saturday, September 20, 2008
Had a moderately successful day shopping. I met up with Alex today at about eleven, since he and I live equidistant to Bishkek, only I’m on the west side and he’s east side. Hey, I love having cross-cultural exchanges, but sometimes it’s nice to spend time with people who understand where you’re coming from, right? We first hit up the Peace Corps office for some free internet, and then we meandered over to Osh bazaar, since the two are within walking distance of each other.
There are definite advantages to being so close to Peace Corps HQ. Namely, the free internet and constant access to the library. And while the library seems to be made up mostly of bodice-ripping romance novels and other such sundry nonsense, it’s free material to read in English, and it’s available to me. Furthermore, to Alex and mine’s delight, there is an actual Western-style laundry machine in the resource center. I have no idea how to use it (of course, it would have to be all in German), but I assume that since it’s in the resource center that it’s open for volunteers to use. Of course, there is no dryer, but it wouldn’t be a ridiculous hardship to just carry the damp clothes home and dry them here on the lines. I might take advantage of it during the winter months, when doing laundry will be a total bitch, but I guess we’ll see.
In addition (as if it could get any better) Alex and I found two sleeping bags. A sleeping bag had been an investment I’d been considering before I came here… both for the obvious benefit of being able to travel with one, and because having one during the winter might be nice if it turns out to be freezing ass cold all the time. I had eventually decided against it, because any sleeping bag that appeared to be actually worth having was a several hundred dollar investment.
I was beginning to rethink it, given that the warnings I’m getting about this upcoming winter are just getting more and more dire, but I was leery of having one shipped to me due to the rate of pilferage that occurs in packages. The other option would be just to buy one here, as there are a few retail outlets around Bishkek that sell them, but they’re way out of my Peace Corps budget, about two hundred USD.
We found them under the table, and they were unmarked, so as far as I’m concerned they’re ours. There’s a slight bit of confusion, though, as the free box also unfortunately happens to be the area where people leave stuff to be stored while they’re off doing whatever. Frankly, though, if you leave your shit laying around the freebox area without a label then you’re just asking for it. Besides, who the hell stores nothing but a sleeping bag? Anyway, if I hear tell of anybody bitching about having their sleeping bag taken, I’ll certainly return it, but in the meantime, it’s mine.
Whatever. But the one I picked up is ridiculously nice… it’s from LL Bean, has down feathers, and claims to be good down to twenty degrees. It’s not a real heavy-duty number for sure, but it’ll definitely help out, it came with a compression sack, and it was free. Good enough. I also fished out a few hangers (which I needed) and a clip lamp that I was hoping to use for my bed, as the lighting in my room leaves a bit to be desired, but the thing shorted out when I plugged it in. Oh well. At least I didn’t pay for it.
On the side where I actually paid for things, I picked up a pair of scissors and a pair of slippers. I actually bought a pair of scissors about two weeks ago, but unfortunately set the bag containing them and a couple pairs of socks down in Osh bazaar while I was distracted by bargaining, and they were lost. The slippers were mainly for the sake of my host mother, who is convinced that if I go around barefoot in the house I’m going to die. The ones I picked up aren’t particularly nice – probably their main function is simply elevating my feet off the ground, they’re not very warm, but they were cheap, and at least they’re not completely blinged out. It’s really hard to find clothes or accessories here that lack bling. I heard from another volunteer who said that the locals think that American women dress extremely plainly, and from seeing what most stylish girls here wear, I see why they think that. Everything “for girls” is either glitzy like the 80s had stomach indigestion or frilly like a lacy layer cake. I even think that I dress plainly for the United States… I don’t like ruffles or lace or anything of the ilk, and tend to gravitate towards solid jewel tones and neutrals. Which, well, there aren’t many of here. Or, if they do have them, you bet your bottom som they’ve been bedazzled up.
At any rate, the slippers I picked up are a dark navy blue with a single multicolored butterfly embroidered on the outside of each one. I actually rather like them, which I wasn’t expecting. I figure that I probably will be buying clothes here, so I need to compromise with a little bling. When I was still living at my training site, I bought a long dark “wool” skirt that fit me perfectly and is plain… except for a little diamond broach-like apparatus on the bottom, with four clear rhinestones accenting the points. I could probably easily take it off, but it’s not that offensive and I figure it’s my compromise with the fashion here. You give me straight lines and handsome colors, and I’ll let you bling it out a touch. Fine? Fine. I would never wear it at home, but what passes for “professional” here is also considerably different.
Came home and did an assload of laundry, because I really needed to and they were boiling the water. I will never take a laundry machine for granted again. Doing laundry by hand isn’t all that awful, though, and while it’s extremely time consuming, people also budget out time for it here. When I lived in the States, I most certainly would not have had an entire day to dedicate to doing laundry, as I have to do here, but here people also expect that you’ll need to take the time to do the laundry, so it’s not as much of an inconvenience. I also had an unusually large load this time, as I didn’t do any laundry before I left my training site, and had spilled beer and vodka over an outfit or two when I got sworn in as a volunteer. I even washed the sleeping bag, at the insistence of my host mother.
Written Monday, September 21, 2008
Another day, more shopping. This time I did it alone, since it was mostly for groceries.
I’ve been working out my eating schedule here, and have decided that while I want to have dinner with the family, it’s easier to (and I’d rather) cook for myself for breakfast and lunch. My host mother and father work at the bazaar, so they leave the house about five in the morning and don’t get back until three at the earliest, and then the two daughters and I are all on different school schedules, so attempting to rely on the family to produce lunch at a regular time seems… well, unlikely. Not that they wouldn’t try, of course. But I actually do like to cook, and I appreciate a bit of flexibility in my schedule.
Anyway, I went down to Osh Bazaar, which is an enormous mostly-farmer’s market on the far west side of Bishkek. There’s a matshruka that picks me up straight from my house and goes down to the bazaar, so I hopped it and went down to mingle with the merchants.
Overall, it’s pretty cheap, and there’s quite a bit of variety. We’ll see what it can deliver come winter, but for now it’s a veritable smorgasbord. Nuts, fruit dried and fresh, all kinds of meat, candy, grains, baked breads, oils, spices, dairy products, juice, colas, live chickens… anything, really. There’s also a part that sells hardware and housing goods, as well as a wing that has handbags and clothing. There’s a section with furniture for any room in the house, and one with school and office supplies. On the perimeter of the bazaar are buildings that sell electronics, the best knock-off brands that China can invent. It’s a pretty big place, suffice to say.
After a bit of browsing, I came out of it with a kilo of oats, some golden raisins, vegetable oil, cinnamon, powdered creamer, a roll of plastic bags, Tupperware-esque containers, two flatbreads, and shelled walnuts.
Kind of an eclectic mix, but I had my reasons. My plans for making my own breakfast include homemade granola. That’s right, homemade granola. I’ve realized that since college and coming here, I am becoming more and more of a hippie. I wash my hair with baking soda, don’t wear deodorant, and make my own granola. Uh-huh, what of it? Oh, and I joined the Peace Corps. Funny, that.
Anyway, Peace Corps provided us with a very useful cookbook that is chock full of recipes that can be made with ingredients found here. This is a godsend for multiple reasons, namely that I’ve never cooked in Kyrgyzstan before, and also because, really, I haven’t done that much cooking on my own. Plus, it’s also a guide to what is available in Kyrgyzstan and what is not. Overall, it seems like most of the things I’m used to working with are available here. The big exceptions are condiments like peanut butter and chocolate sauce. In reality, those can be found here and they’re easily available to me due to my proximity to Bishkek, but more on that later.
I suppose one of the latent advantages to this is that I’ll know how to cook any variety of meals from scratch by the time it’s all said and done, because packaged food is virtually unheard of here. I mean, of course they have it (again, more on this later), but it’s expensive and pretty much out of my budget. The cookbook also has instructions on things like how to prepare dried beans, and even how to do self-canning.
Anyway, the oats, walnuts, raisins, oil, and cinnamon were primarily for the purpose of granola. The recipe called for all of these except for the cinnamon, but I like cinnamon and it goes well with honey… which I wasn’t able to purchase at the bazaar.
I was able to find most of the ingredients easily, but for a long while I couldn’t find either honey or oats. After about an hour of canvassing, I left for the Peace Corps office, which is about a twenty minute walk from the bazaar. I needed to get papers proving that I’m a volunteer in order to defer my loans, but I also wanted to take advantage of the internet there.
Sadly, the internet was down, but my program manager found me when I was waiting for my papers and while we were talking, I asked her where the hell I could get oats and honey, as they’re pretty basic ingredients. She said that they should have oats where they sold the other grains, but they were likely in a smaller bag that might have been beyond the counter, so I probably had to ask.
She also told me that the honey at the bazaar was not likely to be good, and that most people bought honey from people they knew in the villages.
I went back to the bazaar to pick up the oats (which I found instantly once I asked… the program manager gave me the word for oats in Russian), and then I headed back out of the bazaar to pick up a streetcar.
I really like the streetcars in Bishkek. The main mode of transport around these parts is the matshrukas, which are kind of like vans that they cram as many people into as possible. If you see a matshruka that’s going where you want to go – there are numbers on the windows and usually a sign that extols the major places it’ll stop by – you wave it down and climb in. There are no stops for matshrukas – you just have to yell at the driver to stop when he nears your destination. This makes for somewhat nervous driving when you’re in a matshruka in an unfamiliar area and you can’t see out the windows because there’s so many damn people in one. Oh, and matshrukas are also kind of notorious for pickpockets, so you also have to be semi-paranoid about your belongings, especially if they’re crowded. And in Bishkek they’re crowded like nowhere else – I’ve sat on the dashboard in one because there was no place to put my feet, and I’ve also ridden one with my torso hanging out the window, canine-style, because I couldn’t pull it in the automobile.
I’ve gotten to the point where I’m more comfortable on them than I used to be, but I have no idea how the hell even the Kyrgyz travel efficiently in unfamiliar places when they don’t know the matshruka routes. Even if a matshruka says it’s going to a major landmark, there’s always the chance that it might actually be making a gigantic loop through a residential area before it gets there. (This, by the way, has happened to me more times than I’d like to admit, where I ended up sitting on the damn thing for like an hour before I got to where I needed to go.)
The streetcars suffer from a similar problem, in that there’s never a schedule posted and there’s no map with their routes anywhere, as far as I know. I only know to ride the ones I ride because somebody told me where they go. (And even then, I had to ride them a couple of times through their loop before I knew when to get off them.) Consequently, you almost never see other foreigners taking the public transportation, because if you’re only here for a short period of time, it’s impossible to figure out and not worth the time to attempt. Also, if you’re on a Western budget, the taxis are criminally cheap. Of course, if you’re on a Peace Corps budget, they’re not, but then again, I (kind of) know how to use the public transportation, so I guess it’s a trade off. If anybody ever needs to know how to get around Bishkek for pennies, I’m your woman. Sort of.
Anyway, I like the streetcars because they’re cheaper than the matshrukas (five instead of eight som), and tend to be less crowded. I always get a seat on one, which is unlike my usual experience on a matshruka, because even if there’s a seat, I usually only get it for about five minutes until an elderly person gets on and I have to give it up. Not that I’m going to begrudge a seventy-year-old woman a seat, but it’s just the principle of the thing. Plus, the streetcars run on a fixed route… they’re actually powered by electric wires that are strung above the streets they run on, and they also stop at fixed bus stops, which means that they don’t stop every five seconds to pick up whoever waves at them from the side of the road. Of course, I got on one once and it caught on fire, but, I mean, that’s what you get for riding a Soviet relic. (The fire got put out, and the streetcar kept running; you know, business as usual.)
So, I hopped the streetcar to travel uptown to the center of Bishkek, where the main attraction is a large department store called TsUM, which is pretty much ridiculously overpriced compared to the bazaars. It does, however, have a far more comprehensive electronics section than the bazaar, and is probably at least marginally more trustworthy quality-wise than at the bazaar, which is its main redeeming point. You can still bargain at it, though, so it’s not 100% Westernized. It’s also the center of town, and happens to be across the street from Bishkek’s, and thus Kyrgyzstan’s, central post office.
There’s not door-to-door mail delivery here like there is in the States (or Japan). Basically, if you want mail, you need to rent a postal box. My village actually does have a post office, but I figure I’ll be going into Bishkek at least weekly, if not biweekly, and I won’t be getting such a large amount of mail that it’ll be busting out of my box if I happen to miss a week. Plus, since all the international mail comes here first before being diverted out around the country, I figure that it’s just easier to go to the source.
It was a bit of an event getting a postal box, considering they spoke no English and my Russian still leaves a bit to be desired. But through pantomime and a lot of patience on both sides, I managed to rent a box for six months. I didn’t have enough money on me to pay out for the full two years, but I assume I can just go in and extend my contract when it gets to be that time. When it had finally all been figured out, the woman went to the back, and came to the counter with a box, which she upended. Out came a huge pile of keys, some with tags, others without. We sorted through the pile, but none produced a key with my box number attached. I can only assume it was one of the many un-tagged keys floating about the pile. She told me to come back Friday, when she’d have a key for it. …we’ll see, I guess.
I’m also planning on opening a bank account next to TsUM, which means I can take care of all of my banking and postal needs in one fell swoop. But I figured I had enough adventure with attempting to do official business in a language I’ve studied for about two months, so I left that for another time.
Anyway, after quasi-setting up my new postal box, I took the walk down to Beta Stores, about thirty minutes. Beta Stores is a huge supermarket, and very expensive compared to the bazaar. It stocks American imports like Hershey’s chocolate sauce, Heinz ketchup, Tabasco sauce, and, of course, peanut butter. (The peanut butter is ShopRite brand, but beggars can’t be choosers. Weirdly, there’s a lot of ShopRite things at Beta, including maple syrup and ketchup. And they all cost about a billion dollars, which is kind of funny, considering it’s the cheap brand in the States.)
All the aforementioned items go for about ten dollars US, which is outrageous by both Kyrgyzstani and American standards. But, I mean, if you’re desperate… fortunately, my mother’s love came through for me in the form of a gigantic container of Jif, so I’m set for a while.
I use Beta Stores when I can’t find what I need at the bazaars, and for things like dairy products, when I don’t trust the bazaars. I don’t want to buy milk at three in the afternoon that’s been sitting in the sun since six in the morning. Refrigeration standards here aren’t exactly up to the par that I was raised with. Namely, at the bazaars, the standard is “none.” I don’t mind paying an extra fifty som for yogurt that won’t kill me.
Plus, I have to admit that it’s nice to spend some time in a Western-style supermarket. I genuinely do like the bazaar – it’s cheap, colorful, and fun. However, I was raised to shop in a place where people don’t shout what they’re selling at you and may or may not be attempting to haggle. In Beta Stores everything is nice and organized on the metal shelves with the bin numbers and firmly priced with stickers. You can get a metal shopping cart with the child’s seat. The fluorescent lights flicker gloomily above – just like home! They have coolers that run on generators when the power goes out. They even have a bakery that stocks Kyrgyz- and Western-style baked goods.
I admit that Beta Stores is kind of relaxing. For about a half hour, I could be in America. And I mean, while I like Kyrgyzstan so far and I clearly love being expatriated… it’s certainly not because I don’t like America. I did get that question a lot when I said that I was going abroad again and was probably going to continue the trend after my service, was whether or not I liked living in America, or even if I didn’t like America at all. I always found that kind of bizarre, given that I’m actually here serving my country. I took the same oath that soldiers, foreign service workers, and the President takes. If I didn’t like America, I wouldn’t be doing Peace Corps. That would be… rather counterintuitive. In reality, I actually think that my experience abroad has made me like my home country more. Before, it was all just “normal.” Now, I know that America is actually a ridiculously weird place, and I kind of like being part of that weirdness.
Anyway, I picked up a container of yogurt and a bottle of honey here, and then left America to hop my matshruka back home.
Back home, they were hauling about a metric ton of coal out back, because we’re not going to have much electricity this winter, and nobody’s interested in freezing to death. I said hello and then went to work making my granola.
It’s surprisingly easy to make. You just mix the honey and oil together and put it in a saucepan to heat, and then mix the nuts and cinnamon and oats in the other. Then, when the oil/honey mixure is warm enough to pour easily, you mix it together.
Then I would have put it in the oven, but the oven ran on electricity and the electricity went out. …oh well. I took a nap instead. No sense getting pissed off at the government because they shut the electricity off because there might not be enough this winter. Uh, right?
The family is extraordinarily interested in everything I do in the kitchen. I’ve wowed them with my dishwashing skills, and when I was making the granola I had an audience. Once the electricity went back on (five hours later, after dinner), I managed to finish toasting my granola, and then I mixed it with the golden raisins.
And all I have to say is… motherfucking success. That’s right, this granola is so tasty that it needs a “motherfucking” to describe it. Adding the cinnamon was a good decision. Tomorrow for breakfast, I am having some COFFEE (not Nescafe, oh no, we’re talking COFFEE), with creamer, and plain yogurt with my Granola Of Victory And Fruitful Life.
Tomorrow is also my first day at work. Hopefully, that’ll go as well as breakfast.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
