Who knew an agriculture expo could be so much fun? If only we could all find this much joy in life! Notice the fantastic percussion instrument made out of saucers and thimbles.

It seems like so many of the best stories I have are of the disasters, the misadventures, the challenges that I've come across, so I'm very pleased to finally tell a story about something unexpected and pleasant.

Yesterday, while enjoying the gorgeous spring weather, I ran into an American colleague and his wife, who invited me to join them to see an art gallery where they were going to finish a payment and pick up an order. I'm not a huge art enthusiast, but having nothing else to do, I went along.

The art gallery turned out to be the private residence of the artist, who is well known and respected within Tajikistan. The home was easily the most beautiful I've seen in Central Asia. There are two rooms to the small gallery/studio that they showed us. The entry way is lined with the proudly framed work of children who take art lessons there. The main gallery is bright with natural light coming in through the skylight in the high ceiling. The walls are lined from ceiling to floor with brightly colored heirlooms--wall hangings passed down through the generations, grandmother's embroidered wedding dress, and, of course, the artist's work, which is stunning. The best part of this room was the grapevine, which the room was actually built around, so that the vine comes up through the floor and out through the wall onto an arbor outside, creating shade in the courtyard. The vine itself was another heirloom, having been planted by the grandfather.

As if this weren't surprising enough, the artist's family had laid out a full feast for their expected guests (making me feel guilty for tagging along, but Tajik people are always prepared for extra guests, and I think this family sincerely enjoys being hosts). This particular spread was in gratitude, I suppose, for the substantial purchase that my friends were making. The artist's life work, it seems, is reviving the Persian miniature style of painting. I thought that this meant little paintings, but most of them are quite large. It simply means that the subjects are miniature, which means that his work is rich with detail, and they are like illustrations--they tell a story. He also makes these beautiful chess sets, one of which is what my friends were there to pick up. These chess sets are also beautiful and richly detailed, and each set is specific to one region in Tajikistan.

After enjoying traditional Tajik food and chatting about the history of all the interesting things in the gallery and about the family's work, a huge amount of picture taking ensued. We were taking pictures of everything in the beautiful gallery, and the family was taking pictures of us enjoying the gallery. We all ended up laughing about it the situation was so funny--all of us taking pictures of each other. We even took a group photo on a timer.

Ironically, I actually didn't have my own camera at the time, so I don't actually have any pictures at the moment, but check out the artist's website at this address:

http://olim-kamalov.blogspot.com

So, if I remember correctly, today marks 2 years since I first came to Central Asia. How fitting that I should finally see an official game of Boz Kashi, known to the rest of the world as "a polo-like game played with a goat carcass."

I enjoyed the game about as much as I expected to; which is to say, I didn't. I mean no disrespect to this ancient and treasured tradition, but I just don't really like contact sports with incomprehensible rules and objectives, and I especially don't like standing in the mud and rain and cold watching such a sport.

Now that I'm home and warm and dry, I don't necessarily regret going. The attitude of the riders was impressive to me, and interesting, right down to their clothes, which gave me the impression that they couldn't decide whether they were in a rodeo, an American football game in 1920, or playing quidditch.

As far as I could tell, the game is something of a free-for-all with each rider competing individually for prizes donated by sponsors. The main riders are supported by a back up team that guards them once they get hold of the goat. The first winner was awarded with a prize of honey. The second winner received a car.

It's almost Navruz again--I can't believe it! The last year went by so incredibly quickly.

Navruz (in Kyrgyzstan, Nooruz) is the Central Asian New Year holiday celebrated on the Spring Equinox, March 21. I arrived in Kyrgyzstan right after this holiday two years ago, and spent the following year hearing about how awesome it is. By the time Nooruz finally came, there was a freak mid-spring blizzard and the electricity was out all day. I sat around being bored with my host family waiting for the power to come back on, but it never did, so we sat around in the dark eating cake. Bummer.

So, as you can imagine, I am totally pumped for Navruz in Tajikistan, especially because it seems like so much of the Tajik national identity is centered around its Navruz traditions.

They started decorating the city over a week ago. On Friday, I started seeing lots of kids of all ages on the streets in national dress, heading to and from school celebrations. This morning I ran out to the store and found that someone had decorated my building's stairwell and my door with spring-colored balloons. The checkout girls at the store across the street were all decked out in their national dresses and hats. The weather is great and everyone seems to be in a good mood, including me!

Today is Sunday, so I woke up late this morning. It had gotten colder overnight, so when I got up I turned on the air conditioner that heats my apartment. The strong smell of incense flooded in with the warm air. My next-door neighbor, an old Russian woman named Aleksandra, died of a heart attack two nights ago. Her funeral is being held in her apartment today.

News of her death came to me last night at precisely the moment the neighbor who lives in the apartment directly below Aleksandra and I were sharing complaints about her. “There's always people coming and going from her place early in the morning,” I complained. “Her doorbell is loud and plays annoying tunes like 'My Darling Clementine' and 'Happy Birthday. The chiming of her grandfather clock sometimes wakes me up at night.”

“She yelled at me about setting my garbage in the hallway for a minute,” added my friend. “And people were moving furniture around up there in the afternoon when I wanted my baby to sleep.”

Someone delivered the news to us while I was sitting in my friend's apartment, gossiping, and we felt terrible. We simultaneously looked to the ceiling, asking forgiveness, whether we were directing our prayers to the apartment above or further up, I don't know. I don't know why I was so ungracious toward this poor old woman. She always returned my greetings in the hallway when I saw her, but since the weather turned cold, I didn't see her very often. I was glad when she stopped coming out so much, because she whenever she did she would always talk to me, striking up a very one-sided conversation that always made me uncomfortable. Once she made me repeat her full name several times until she was satisfied with my pronunciation. A moment later, I didn't remember her last name. More than once she motioned to me that I should come in for tea, but looking past her into her dark and creepy apartment that emitted some strong unpleasant smells, I would say in my best broken Russian “nyet, sichas nyet.” (“no, now no”) and saying a word that I hoped best resembled the Russian for work, I pantomimed running in place, and left.

Today is a rare gloomy, damp, snowy day. It's cold, but not that cold, so the city is covered with muddy puddles. I preferred not to go out at all today, but I had a pile of garbage that needed to be taken out, and as all I had in my fridge was one egg, some ketchup, and mayonnaise, a trip to the bazaar was needed. As I readied to leave, I could hear several voices on the other side of my door. I looked through the peep hole to watch for the mourners to move out of the way. I felt guilty trying to avoid the whole funeral thing, and I wondered if I should offer to do something, or at least go in and pay my respects, but I'm a coward, and it seems more respectful to stay out of the way than to risk a cultural faux pas. When the mourners dispersed, I made my escape. The hallway was filled with smoke, not from the incense, but from Tajik women cooking over two open fires right in the stairwell. One woman is deep-frying potatoes, and the other is watching rice in a larger pot. A rare and out of place taste of community and local tradition in a building who's occupants are a mix of nationalities that all keep to ourselves. A red coffin lid is propped up against the wall of the stairwell opposite my door. On my way out and the way back home, I navigated past these obstacles—the large coffin lid, the two fires and two cooking pots, the mourners huddled around the building's entrance with umbrellas. And now I'm hiding in my apartment again, the TV on, but muted respectfully. Rest in peace, Aleksandra. I'm sorry I never took you up on that offer for a cup of tea.

The big New Year tree in my neighborhood. I have been thinking that Dushanbe is such a pretty, neat and well-kept city until they started decorating for New Years.

October 23, 2010Ack, the dust! I could probably get some pretty decent cement out of my mouth right now. After cleaning my apartment thoroughly, I have decided to keep my windows closed until it rains.

Today was the first day since my arrival that hasn't felt like summer. It was still beautiful and sunny (though dusty), just a little bit cooler. Love the sun, hate the dust.

I'm as busy as ever and still love my job, possibly even more so now that I have really begun to get to know my students.

Dushanbe never ceases to amaze me with the strange variety of things it offers. In the past week or so I attended an international film festival, saw a performance by Native American dancers from the States, saw a belly dancing show and a performance of the opera Aida. Tomorrow I plan to go on a hike to see dinosaur fossils.

Maybe it's because I so recently lived in rural Central Asia, or maybe it's because whenever I read a news article on Tajikistan, it almost is always referred to as “the poorest of the former Soviet republics” or something of that nature, but I was impressed with the interior of the Opera Ballet Theater that is situated just on the other side of a small park from my apartment building. Not only was the theater beautifully decorated, but the place had the most comfortable theater seats that I've ever sat in. I could have taken a nap in that seat, but the performance of Aida was actually quite entertaining. The number of empty seats in the place was depressing, however. With the huge cast, there could have hardly been more than two audience members to each performer. With tickets at only $4, I don't know how they managed to finance the performance.

November 6, 2010It's a holiday weekend! One great thing about the former Soviet Union is the multitude of holidays that are nicely spread out. I'm writing this while watching a concert on TV. Actually, its on EVERY Tajik channel (all four, that is). I have sputnik TV, so I have options, but I'm mesmerized by this concert. So far, it has mostly consisted of pretty girls in various varieties of national dress walking around in formations and occasionally dancing or braiding each other's hair in rhythm. There was one dance entirely choreographed around one woman's ridiculously amazing hair: it literally brushed the floor. In any case, it's not the most interesting thing I've ever seen, but there's so much sparkle and color, I just can't look away!

I spoke Tajik at the bazaar today! I can't believe how quickly I'm picking up the basics of this language. Only about half of the words I've learned so far are completely new. Many words are similar enough to Kyrgyz/Uzbek to be easily remembered, and all the borrowed Russian words are the same. Surprisingly, there are more than a few words that are related to English or Romantic languages. Mother is “modar,” father is “padar,” bad is “bad”. Awesome!

Also at the bazaar today, I realized I've been spending too much time in Central Asia. There were some women selling steaming-hot boiled sheep heads out of big tubs, and as I was walking by and caught a whiff of the boiled meat, my mouth started to water and I started thinking about what I was going to have for supper. Hard to believe that just a little over a year ago I would have forced back the urge to vomit at such a sight.

If you were wondering, I did NOT eat a sheep head. I had mac and cheese. Thank God Tajik people appreciate good cheese. Why it was so difficult to find edible cheese in Kyrgyzstan, I'll never know. I actually have big chunks of cheddar and swiss in my fridge right now.

November 14, 2010Reasons I know I've spent too much time in Central Asia:

At a party, I feel much more comfortable dancing in a Central Asian style than like an American.My kitchen perpetually smells like cumin. I've come to appreciate the beauty of a finely groomed uni-brow.After one month in Dushanbe, I've already bought two pairs of sparkly shoes.I'm more surprised to see a dog on a leash than I am to see a leashed goat, sheep, or even bear in the center of the city.I'm mesmerized by the weather girl on Tajik TV. I wish I could point at a weather map with as much grace as she does. After hearing that broccoli was sighted at the bazaar, I spent my whole lunch break searching for it with no success.I got really excited when a co-worker gave me an avocado.I know what persimmons and quince are. I haven't figured out the complex system of street crossing yet, but I do know that it helps to find the most formidable-looking middle aged woman with the glittery-est clothes and keep pace with her. I recognize that it is actually bad manners to buy something without bargaining for a lower price.

Reasons Dushanbe is an amazingly terrible / terribly amazing (depends on your opinion) place:

Fried Chicken. There are at least 3 different fast-food chains in the city: “SFC” (Southern Fried Chicken), “New York Fried Chicken,” and “Kantri Fried Chicken” (I think with this one they were going for “country,” but they decided to spell it in Russian letters). They all look almost exactly the same. “SFC” (called simply “Chicken,” in English, even by locals who don't speak English) is dangerously close to home for me. They actually have really good pizza, too.Sawdust on your head is apparently adequate warning that a tree branch is about to be cut above the sidewalk you are walking on.An equally adequate warning is a plastic bag on a stick next to an open man hole. Fountains everywhere!Hate the chore of sorting your recycling? No need to in my neighborhood. I just take all my trash to the dump, and some poor desperate person will, as soon as my back is turned, jump on the bag, collect all my plastic bottles, brush off the bag the trash was in, fold it up neatly, and presumably will be able to sell all these things. I can't tell whether it would be nicer for me to just hand them the things that they might want rather than making them have to tromp through the trash to collect it. Have I mentioned the bear on a leash? The routine for getting bread for lunch at my office is as follows: 1. Leave the office compound and walk a few yards down a narrow alley. 2. Knock on an unmarked blue door halfway down the alley. 3. Wait a few seconds and knock again. 4. I the door opens, you are in luck! You can buy fresh hot bread straight from the bakers at whole-sale price. 5. Run back to the office, tossing the bread back and forth so as not to burn your hands. 6. Enjoy.Living next to a kindergarten = happiness.Keeping my window open = a dusty apartment.A reincarnation of the WWII-era Red Army marched down the main street on a Saturday afternoon. I'm talking long coats, furry hats, shiny black boots, rifles slung across the back, the whole shebang. I looked around for movie cameras or something, but this was the real thing. Allegedly they are from the police academy. I knew they weren't much for investing in new uniforms if they still have old ones that will do, but these guys looked fresh off the time machine.

November 16, 2010Another holiday today. I was really looking forward to sleeping in this morning, but unfortunately I was awoken at 7 am by loud knocking at my door and children's voices yelling “do you have bread?” (At least this is what I think they were saying. I only just learned the verb “to have.” It took me only a peek out the peep hole to figure out that there was something of a trick-or-treat thing going on. I ignored the knocking until 9, but the kids were just so darn cute that I started giving out cookies. By 11, it was finished. Why didn't anyone tell me this would happen? And why do they do it so early in the morning?

December 3, 2010Everyone keeps saying, "winter is here" but there are still roses blooming in the garden, and I eat lunch outside everyday without a jacket. It is chilly in the morning and evening, but I'll take that in exchange for warm and sunny afternoons! My Tajik teacher predicts that it will "barf" this weekend. I can't say I'm looking forward to that.

Since Barf received something of a reprieve from me, I thought I would take the opportunity to highlight another wonderful product name that I came across in the store last night: a brand of baby food called "Plop."

Doesn't this product name entirely ensure you of the tastiness and nutritional value of the trusted brand? The best you could buy for your precious offspring.

"Barf" (Барф) means "snow" in Tajik/Persian. A much more pleasant thing to compare a cleaning product to.

I wanted to take this opportunity to follow up on the story recorded in June's "Runaways and Runway Models" post. A comment from Gemma made me realize that I never resolved what happened.

After my account left off, the runaway followed me around for a few days, and I bought him a few lunches in exchange for helping me with my English club. As it turned out, he stopped hanging around me after I reprimanded him (maybe too harshly, considering that his views were no different from most other Kyrgyz teenage boys) for some strong racist language that he used against an Uzbek shopkeeper.

Somehow, in the coming days, he finally made it home. He told me that he had apologized and made peace with his parents, but I don't know if this was the truth or not.

Soon after this, all hell broke loose in the June violence, so I lost touch with most people. I can only hope that he decided to resume his studies.

Sorry about the delay, everyone. For some reason, I haven't been able to access this page for the past week or so. I don't know whether to blame the connection or government censorship. No doubt all 777 of you have been anxiously awaiting the next installment. True story: at this exact moment, precisely 777 people have viewed my blog since the first entry. Actually, that can't be true. 777 computers have viewed this blog.

Last night I succeeded in breaking the lock to my apartment door. This is the second lock I've broken in Central Asia. I don't know how I do these things. Luckily, this time I was neither locked in or out of my apartment. Also, it took only an hour before the lock was fixed, as opposed to a month last time.

While my landlady was standing around with me waiting for the guy to switch the lock, I took the opportunity to point out a water stain on the ceiling that had recently appeared. My plan had been to march upstairs and, in the combination of Russian caveman speech and hand gestures that has been serving me so well so far, inform my upstairs neighbors that they are rudely dripping water on my ceiling.

I asked my landlady, who speaks some basic English, "Who lives upstairs? Do you know?". "Yes," she replied. "Uh... gunmen. Afghan gunmen." Suddenly the water stain on my ceiling doesn't seem like such a big deal. I'll let the landlady deal with it whenever she gets around to it.

Once again, I must ask you to watch the dates of the entries. I am apparently incapable of doing anything in a linear fashion.

Sept. 28, 2010 Stockholm Airport I find airports to be at once fascinating and terribly sad. Fascinating for many obvious reasons including its value as a giant on-going social experiment, as in “lets lock thousands of people from all walks of life and different parts of the world into one building for hours when they are already cranky and sleep-deprived, and just DARE them tolerate each other.” Its the same effect as going to the zoo, watching all these people. In fact, I strategically positioned myself across from the “Smoking Capsule” which is exactly what it sounds like. A round, elevator-sized glass capsule intended to contain smokers. Its deliciously cruel, watching all these people cram themselves desperately into this tiny container with a bunch of strangers, exposed to amused gawkers like me. Well, its my lucky day. A man accompanied by a helper dog just sat down on the other end of the Ikea-ish bench I've sprawled out on for the time being. The dog was carrying the man's briefcase by the handle in his mouth. Adorable! Smokers in a capsule, cute helper dogs, this wait will go by in no time. Once I get tired of sitting here, I might move over to one of the red egg chairs on a circle of shag carpet behind me and look out the window, just because it seems like a fun place to sit. Oh, and there's also a kitchen gadget store here that I might go back and look through again. Kitchen gadgets have recently and inexplicably become an interest of mine. I never buy, just look. Its weird. I'm holding off on buying anything at all here because I have no idea what Swedish currency is called or what the exchange rate is. It makes me feel kind of guilty. Which brings me to the reason that airports are so sad. So here I am, looking at souvenirs from a city I've never seen and will not see anytime soon. The flight attendant, the guy that stamps my passport, and security people all say what I assume to be “thank you” or “good-bye” or “have a pleasant trip” in a language I don't know, and I never know if it is more polite to say “thank you” in English or stay silent. I feel bad for not have doing some research on Sweden before I got here, like it should be an expected courtesy to know a little bit about a country you are visiting before you get there. I know even less about Latvia, my next stop. Sept. 30, 2010 I'm here! My very LONG trip went smoothly, and although it took an irritatingly long time to get past the border control guys (there were three of them, but they kept switching booths for some reason, causing all of the travelers to run from one line to the other and back again, trying to predict which one would get them through the fastest. I did a bad job picking. If everyone weren't so cranky it would have been hilarious). I was met at the doors of the airport by my new office's driver and American director, and they quickly got me shuffled off to my temporary apartment, leaving me to sleep (it was about 5 a.m. at this point). Incidentally, I am writing this now at 4:30 a.m. today because I unfortunately have a messed-up internal clock. The apartment, which from the outside and stairwell looks exactly like every apartment building I saw in Kyrgyzstan (boxy, cold, gray, crumbling), is very nice and comfortable. Its pretty huge for just me, nicely decorated with new-looking furniture and fixtures (if you like Central Asian neo-baroque, or whatever you would call the style of home decorating that they prefer in this part of the world), comfortable, and spotless. Some perks: three big windows, big bed, new stove and oven that looks like its never been used, and satellite TV (BBC World and Aljazeera English!). I woke up around noon, cleaned up, and visited the supermarket across the street to change my money and get something to eat. As soon as I poked my head out of the building, I noticed a woman bent over a cooking pot propped on bricks in small fire. Hooray, I'm in Central Asia again! My apartment is in a quiet area near the central hub of the city. Two of the Americans who work at my office live on the same block, and besides the supermarket, there is also a Georgian restaurant that the thee of us ate at last night (leftover hachupuri—Georgian cheesy bread—is in the fridge for breakfast!) and, apparently, a small produce market that I haven't visited yet. The driver came to bring me to the office in late afternoon (its in walking distance, but I don't know the way yet), just in time for a quick tour and then a little award ceremony and reception for the Tajikistani lawyers who went on a professional development/study tour of America in the summer. I knew I would like working at the office as soon as I saw the ping-pong table directly inside the office's compound gates. On the other side of the courtyard, exquisitely ornate carved wood doors of the office's main building were thrown wide open to let in the sunshine and fresh air from the garden (by the way, the weather is absolutely perfect). Luckily, they decided to set up my work space in the bright reception area rather than the isolated classroom. My desk is set next to a large upper-level window that opens up into the garden, giving me the illusion of sitting among the branches of a persimmon tree now heavy with bright orange fruit. My new co-workers are being so nice already. As I went around meeting people in the office, a few showed me my date of arrival marked on their calendars with prominence. They kindly suggested that I sleep in tomorrow and come in to the office whenever I wake up (such a switch from PC where we arrived in the wee hours of the morning and started our first meeting a few hours later). My first impression of Dushanbe: in many ways it looks a lot like Bishkek, but with a completely different vibe. It has a certain vibrancy similar to southern Kyrgyzstan which I suppose comes from the bright sun, fruit trees, and colorful clothes. I didn't think it was possible, but there are even more shiny, sparkley clothes here than in Uzgen. At night the streets in this area are lit up with colored lights. This street has multicolored palm tree shapes.

October 10, 2010 Hey, happy 10-10-10! I'm finally feeling settled into my new apartment (my permanent place, not the first place). Somehow it only took a few touches to make it home-y. Sadly, I think that involved messing it up a bit. I've uncovered a few surprises since moving in. Only one is bad: I can't move couch out from in front of the window so to open it fully. Most are good: screens on the windows, a water filter, a few jugs of un-opened bottled water, lights in the stairwell, and satellite radio connected to my TV. That means I get NPR! I was actually happy when I heard Car Talk come out of the speakers. Technology is amazing. The best surprise is that one of my co-workers, a local who speaks fluent English. lives right downstairs from me, so he can help me with translation or whatever if I have any problems. This was a great coincidence, but wait for the crazy part: his wife, who also speaks English, studied abroad in Iowa. Even weirder, we realized that we were at the very same rally for Obama in Waterloo back in 2008. How do these things happen? “Small world” is far too cliché to apply to a situation like this.

This ex-pat thing is definitely an interesting experience, and I'm glad I'm getting a taste of it now. I'm in a weird kind of mindset now, torn between eating it all up and being a Peace Corps volunteer snob and turning up my nose at all the foreigners and their weaknesses for things like ice, diet coke, and indoor plumbing. In any case, this is a really great way for a mediocre, middle class, Midwestern girl to try out being fancy-shmancy once in a while. Like tonight—I attended a fashion show and dinner at the Hyatt to benefit victims of domestic violence in Tajikistan (incidentally, the government apparently censored the event, and the announcers were not allowed to talk about this problem at all. So strange.). In any case, it was a neat event, and I can't wait to get my hands on some Tajik silk—it is really some of the most beautiful fabric I've ever seen.

Really, its only been a week?

So much has happened so far it seems like its been twice as long. I've been very busy with work and everything else, and have almost literally spent every moment I have at home sleeping. But I love it! Right now I'm part of a project that is helping a small and very motivated group of young people to learn English well enough to be accepted into an American law school. They are a really wonderful group, and their enthusiasm makes me want to work extra hard to assist them.

In other news, I moved into a new apartment yesterday! Its a great little place close to work and closer to the bazaar. Its really small, but that's perfect for me and the time I'll be spending there. All the appliances and fixtures are really new and clean and work well. The only problem I have with the place is that there is quite a lot of furniture for such a small place.

Now all I have to do is figure out those essential details such as: do I brush my teeth in the shower or in the kitchen sink? How can I position the couch so that it doesn't block me from opening the window? Where can I stash the giant stuffed gorilla that is sitting on the dresser?

My Dear Readers,

If you look closely at the left side of this page, you might notice that all entries have been conveniently archived in chronological order (what a novel idea!)

Also on the left you will find a cute little poll that you may or may not choose to participate in. I thought I'd try it out for a while just for fun until I get sick of coming up with poll questions.

You might also notice that I have removed the pesky Peace Corps disclaimer, although all the entries I wrote during my time with Peace Corps will remain archived on this site until they are devoured by cyberspace.

Enough with the housekeeping.

Soon I will embark on a new journey and will once again resume writing Letters From A Faraway Land, although I suspect that for many of my American friends and family my new change of location will be no more perceivable than the change in format of this site.

In fact, my new home for the next 8 months or so will be not-so-very-faraway from my home in southern Kyrgyzstan: I have accepted a non-Peace Corps teaching position in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, and will most likely travel there before the end of the month. Hooray!

It has been a wonderful, relaxing summer here at home with my family and friends, but now that summer is over I am ready to get back to work and get back to Central Asia! Once again I feel torn between leaving behind loved ones and the comforts of American life and doing work that I feel a near magnetic pull towards.

While witnessing the tragedies in Osh from my safe bubble, I was reminded that life is precious and dangerous and unexpected all at once, and all at once it made me want to be with my family and be safe and be comfortable and seize the day. In the past few months I've spent lots of time feeling safe and comfortable and appreciating the importance of family. Now there's only one thing left to do.

June 28, 2010

I made it back home to Iowa, whew.

As for what my plan is now: no idea.

The posts below were written over the last few weeks. Check the dates before you read the entries, everything is kind of in a jumbled-up order.

June 13, 2010

Things are not looking good for southern Kyrgyzstan right now. At the moment, my site mate and I are sitting at her house, each on our own computers because we've run out of games to play with each other and stuff to talk about and we are way to antsy to watch more TV.

I won't go into details here, but yesterday was a very tense day for us. We were very, very worried about the safety of our fellow volunteers in Osh Oblast, as well as our local friends in various areas. Our village is very safe, but the same cannot be said many places in the surrounding region. We spent many hours yesterday waiting for word about when we would be evacuated and for news about how the other volunteers were faring, but could finally relax a bit after 9 p.m. when we heard news that all but one volunteer had been safely eveacuated, and that one had been moved to a safer location. Now there's just three of us waiting to get out of the south, and while we are all safe we are more or less trapped. On top of all this we are hearing terrible news of the violence in the city, and while it is comforting to know that all volunteers are safe, there are still many local friends still in Osh, and we are so scared for them. Its not fair that I should be so certain of my rescue, based only on the place of my birth.

In any case, I am not at all optomistic about coming back home to Osh once I leave. I hate to admit it, and the feelings of guilt are choking me, but I'm ready to leave the country once I am evacuated from the South. Maybe I'll change my mind later, but right now I'm just done. I love this country, and I feel like leaving willingly is a serious betrayal, but I can't shake the feeling that I just have to get out alltogether.

May 25, 2010

Today I had a revelation: being a grown-up is hard. I hope I can start to get the hang of it by the time I''m 80.

When you're a kid, you have this idea that all your problems can be easily solved by some person you perceive to be a "grown-up." Its great to be on the kid side, but I've only recently started to experience things from the grown-up side, and that's not so great.

Around two weeks ago I heard that one volunteer's 16-year-old host brother ran away from home. The volunteer was away for a training, so couldn't really do much about this. When the volunteer told me this over the phone, I said something along the lines of "hmmm, that's too bad,' and when he asked me for advice, I assured him that he shouldn't worry about it because it isn't his problem.

My apathy bit me in the butt when the runaway turned up at my front door Sunday night.

The self-proclaimed "fugitive" (he had to spend some time flipping through his Kyrgyz-English dictionary before arriving at this word) had been floating around southern Kyrgyzstan for the past two weeks, staying with friends and acquaintances and avoiding family before arriving in my village at the house of his friend. He then asked around until he found me, knowing that I was friends with the volunteer that lives in his house and hoping that I could help him.

So, the kid said he had a place to stay, food to eat, and a change of clothes, but nothing else. He said he'd grabbed 100 som (about $2) before he left home two weeks ago, but now he was broke. He was trying to play it cool, telling me he was looking for work, but I could tell he was getting desparate. He asked if he could come and help me teach at school the next day, and I told him that would be fine, but when he continued to stand around expectantly I didn't know what to tell him. He wanted me to promise not to call his American brother, but I wouldn't promise, even though I had the urge to be the cool grown-up as opposed to the responsible teacher type.

In my childhood, I read enough books about runaways to recognize this story. At this point in the plot the runaway is getting scared and feeling alone. The happy feeling that came with freedom has worn off and realityy has set in. He's broke and out of options. Everything is looking bleak; but wait! Enter a new character: the wise spiritual guide who will offer sage advice and point the young protagonist in the right direction, resolving the story and teaching the runaway and the youthfull reader a valuable life lesson or two.

Only the author of this novel did a shitty job because the runaway got me instead.

Anyway, after following me around for two days, we finally sat down and had a good talk about his options. It was hard for me to look at this kid who is directly asking me for help and telling him that I can't even offer a possible solution for him that is anything other than going back home, which I knew he didn't want to do.

At long last, I offered to go with him back to his village and stand by him while he apologizes to his parents. I expected him to turn this offer down flat, but his face kind of lit up and he promised to think about it tonight.

I guess it wasn't that grown-ups always knew the solution, but they knew a solution. Wisdom comes with age, yes, but even more so it comes with the opportunity to experience responsibility over the life of another human being. And the difference between a child and an adult is sometimes not a difference in years, but the difference between trusting and being trusted.

And that is my sage advice for the resolution of this novel.

May 31, 2010

Paris runway models in robot-like leggings looking like characters the sci-fi film.

Quiz: The above phrase is

a) the name of a champion racehorse

b) the title of a punk-rock song from the late 90's

c) the text printed on the back of a shirt worn by a middle-aged woman in front of me in line at the bank

The correct answer, of course, is "c"

Today I was walking through my village when I was met with the usual chorus of cheerful and overly enthusiastic "hello"s from the little boys playing in the street. As I walked away, they begain to shout at me, "I am a sexy guy! I am a sexy guy!" I was confused for a minute until I realized that they were reciting the lyrics of a popular dance song.

I would like to place all the blame on things like t-shirts and pop songs for confusing the hell out of my students, but I think I am often to blame. Once, a pair of sweek eighth-grade girls asked for my help in understanding the lyrics of an Enlish pop song. They had already done an excellent job of translating, but were stuck on the phrase "make love." Not knowing an eighth-grade appropriate Kyrgyz equivalent, I told them in Kyrgyz, "for example, kisses, and ..." and then acted out obnoxious, noisy kissing. The girls had a giggle fit and ran away, so I couldn't check their understanding. I forgot about the whole thing until the last day of school when one of these girls wrote me a note that said, "Dear Miss Audra. Thank you we learn English. Summer good. Make love!" I guess they didn't get it. Oh well.

Update on the runaway: after tagging along after me for a few more days, he finally went home to his parents. Hooray!

Peace Corps policy prevents me from voicing opinions on this blog, and I will find it hard to relate the events of the past week without doing so. I will say that I have just been moved from the South and am very safe. I don't know what will happen next.

However:

Please, please, read the news about the current situation in Kyrgyzstan. Please stay informed. Tell your friends, family, co-workers. Don't allow this story to be ignored by the rest of the world. And please keep my friends and neighbors in Southern Kyrgyzstan in your thoughts and prayers.

I have more blog entries saved on my computer, but I will post them later at a more appropriate time.

May 20, 2010

The political situation in southern K-stan has been giving me emotional whiplash (it's dangerous!—it's safe!--there's fighting!--no, just kidding!--so-and-so took control of the government!--nope, now it's so-and-so!--don't leave your house!--everything's fine!).

Although there has never been a moment when I have felt that my personal safety was at risk, all of this is still taking a toll on me. As I seem to always be reiterating in this journal, I NEVER HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON. The biggest problem is that all these happenings are very seriously slowing down the progress of this camp that I am planning. Thankfully, my wonderful site mate and I have been able to spend several pleasant days hiding out in our village together, whereas if I had been alone I might have torn all my hair out in frustration.

Anyway, all seems well now (although things have seemed well and then gotten iffy a few times in the last few weeks, so who knows) so I'm happy.

In the meantime, the school year has been winding down. Today was the last day of tests for my English classes, and I feel bad that I didn't even show up because I was waiting for a call from Peace Corps to tell me that things were all clear after the last “situation.” But not too bad, considering my day yesterday:

Since its spring, as I was walking down the road I ran into a lot of livestock traffic being herded along the main road up into the mountains. Now, seeing lots of large animals being driven towards me at a slow jog pace still makes me nervous, but I've gotten used to it and developed a strategy of moving through the herd in a way that I would imagine that it would make sense to a scary cow with big horns to NOT run over me. Utilizing this strategy every morning for the last few weeks has decreased my nervousness considerably, as well as my tendency to shield myself with as many third graders as I can hold onto. Which is one of the many reasons that would contribute to my being promptly fired if I were a teacher in the States.

Anyway, I realized yesterday morning that my strategy has a weakness: mixed herds. It works great with cows and okay with sheep (I'm not quite as scared of them, just mostly concerned about getting brushed up against. Their wool is really gross.), but when it's a mixed herd of cows AND sheep; or, (God forbid) cows, sheep, goats, and horses, as was the case this morning, I get thrown off. The trick to the strategy is predicting where the animal will go. Cows move with a certain predictability, and so do sheep, but it's a different kind of movement for both. When you throw four species together in one big group, you have to predict four kinds of movement. And that's hard.

I'll bet you all thought I was going somewhere with that, but I wasn't. I'll save it in my analogy/metaphor arsenal. That seems to be another strange side effect of teaching, along with learning how to draw really good stick figures. Coming up with ridiculous analogies that draw blank looks from students.

Anyway, I started off my morning by wading through a very large mixed herd. Shortly thereafter, a car that had just made its way slowly through the same herd abruptly sped up and rudely drove though a puddle, spraying me with water and the wet remains of the traffic that had just passed.

So, I was 10 minutes late to give my 10th graders their test since I had to spend some time at the canal washing the spray of manure off the lower half of my left pant leg (it's a good thing I wore the green-ish colored khakis). Of course, the kids complained about the loss of time to no end. I tried to convince them that the test was super-easy, and that we had gone over all the correct answers in the last lesson, but they were still whiny. Unwilling to give up my status as the “nice” teacher (I may put children between myself and scary animals, but I don't smack kids with rulers like the other teachers), I agreed to cut down the number of sentences they had to write for number 8 from six to three. One boy thanked me by writing no sentences at all, but graciously handing in a drawing of a penis. Ah, the joys of teaching teenagers.

Oh, and some kymys got spilled on my feet in a taxi. That's that fermented mare's milk drink. Not pleasant.

I love this mural in my school. It is one of the many examples of the fascinating juxtaposition of technology and the Kyrgyz pastoral lifestyle that I encounter every day. Plus, the post-Soviet world just really loves their cosmonauts.

Dear readers,

These last two weeks away from my site have been like a different life for me. For a number of reasons, it has seemed inappropriate to write anything on this journal, yet it seems like a waste of all this internet time to not write anything, so I'll throw some more pictures on for you.

I am so ready to get back to work! Right now there is a little bit of uncertainty regarding when I can get back to my site in the South, so I'll try to get southern stuff up here.

This is Uzgen city from above. Sometimes I forget that I live in a developing country until I see a view like this.

Some old architecture in Uzgen.

This is the pride of my photo collection. The boys are yelling "take a picture!" They are on their way to get water. Even little kids have responsibilities in the village. These two are lucky to have a ride!

Here are some cute posed pictures. First: my host family (without dad) with our little New Year tree. Second: a few of my students in their dance costumes, taking a break before they performed at an assembly celebrating the Tulip Revolution of 2005.

Wow, I wasn't expecting the blog to work. It hasn't been working lately for some reason.

Anyway, down to business. I am currently not at my home, but I am very safe and well fed with several other volunteers. I have every confidence that I will soon be able to return to my site and continue work.

In any case, keep watching the news. I can't discuss anything, but you all probably know just as much as I do. I'll update again when things get back to normal, but in the meantime don't worry about me.

March 8, 2010

Happy International Women's Day! Too bad America doesn't celebrate it. My host dad tried to convince me that Americans know about this day and celebrate it, they just don't get a day off work. I told him that I didn't know about it in America, but he says I must have, because the American ambassador said so on TV. But this is coming from the same man who tried to convince me that Abraham Lincoln was the second president after Washington (which he knows because he visited his house in Boston). He also told me that the American flag I have in my room is wrong because it only has 50 stars. He is a veritable expert in all things relating to America.

Today a large group of Osh volunteers celebrated the holiday with a picnic near a gorge about a half-hour ride away from the city. It was absolutely beautiful. The weather was perfect and sunny with a slight breeze. The river was bright blue and the rock formations were magnificent. It felt great. However, today, once again, I was reflecting on how unhealthy my lifestyle has become, despite all of the walking I do and the un-processed food I eat. Not all of these things are strictly a bi-product of living in Kyrgyzstan, so I have made a spring resolution to become healthier. Here is a list of the unhealthy things in my life.

1. On average, I eat about a loaf and a half of heavy Kyrgyz bread a day. It is a staple to the Kyrgyz diet and I am a carb-aholic anyway, but things are getting ridiculous.

2. The soft-serve ice cream stands have opened in Osh. I've had at least one cone for every day that I've been there.

3. Peanut-butter sent from home. I'm addicted. I eat it every day until it runs out.

4. Locally-made chocolate peanut-butter. I just bought some today for the first time to tide me over until the next peanut-butter-bearing package comes. This could be disastrous to me.

5. Some other volunteers were talking about how we're not supposed to swim in rivers because PC won't treat any diseases that you might pick up from the water, but guess where the water comes from that I use every day to wash my hands and face with?

6. Poverty cones. This is the name some volunteer gave to a very cheap kind of ice cream that is especially popular with kids. In warm weather, a lady sells them out of a baby carriage at my school's gates. It is a regular cake cone, filled with ice cream up to the rim, with a circle of paper over the top that doesn't entirely cover all the ice cream. There is no wrapper. Who knows how many snotty nosed kids have touched them, but I eat them anyway.

7. Kids. I don't care what country you're in, kids are gross. Now the winter and lack of vitamin C has caused disgusting open cold sores to pop up all over their faces. Yuck.

8. Poo. There are many very valid reasons why Central Asians never ever wear their shoes in the house. One of those reasons is the outhouse at my school. How much higher are they going to let these piles get above the pit before someone does something about it? In addition, it appears as though several little girls have abandoned the pits entirely in favor of taking a dump or a piss right in the middle of the floor. Its a pain to have to stop and roll up the hem of my pants before I walk in.

Last night we did yet more Osh volunteer bonding over a Kyrgyz pop concert. It was a surprisingly good time! Kyrgyz concerts always tend to be a little long and slow for our American attention spans, but this one was excellent. The singing and dancing was good, and the costumes were great. We were amazed to see the first number by the girl group done in matching traditional Kyrgyz dresses and hats, followed by a solo by one of the girls in a shiny black cat woman suit and stiletto boots. Kyrgyzstan will never cease to surprise me. Of course, one of the performers spotted our row and made some mention about the foreigners. We all stand out on our own, but when there are ten of us in any one place we become a huge disruption.

March 9, 2010

I just got a package in the mail with a few month-old magazines in it (thanks, Mom!) and once again, realized how out of touch with America I am. It gets worse and worse by the month. However, I feel like I have the unique opportunity to look at American pop culture almost from the point of view of an outsider. I figure that I won't have very many more opportunities to do this, even if I do spend more time out of the States, with the rate that globalization is increasing. I thought I would take a moment to comment on my observations:

1. Ellen Degeneres is a judge on American Idol? I am having a hard time just imagining how this is working out.

2. After all that fuss about Leno being replaced by Conan, the change was made and then they switched back again, all in the period of time I have been in K-stan. Who screwed up there?

3. A while ago I was looking through a Kyrgyz magazine and started to skim through an article that was underneath a strange picture of pointy-eared blue people. It was the summary of an American movie called Avatar. I had a vague memory of some people who had been in America over Christmas telling me that it was very popular, so I read on. From what I could tell with my crappy Kyrgyz reading skills, the story takes place in a forest on some planet and is about some guy that falls in love with the chief of the blue people's daughter. I figured I must have had it confused with a different, less-popular movie, but now I see that it is the most expensive and highest-grossing film of all time, in addition to being a nominee for a best picture Oscar. About blue people in space?

4. Who the heck are Taylor and Taylor? And why are there so many references to them?

5. I saw adds for two Love Actually wannabe's, one called Valentine's Day and the other simply called Love. Please tell me at least one of these is a joke. They both look absolutely terrible.

6. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland 3D? Sounds crazy.

7. A movie version of The Lovely Bones came out. The book was so painful to read, I can't imagine how they made a movie of it.

8. Lady Gaga. Need I say more? (This is one aspect of pop culture that we have been able to keep up with, hallelujah)

9. They recorded a new version of We Are The World. Please. Actually, just a few days ago I was watching a DVD with my host sister of Kyrgyz pop star Omar's performances. It included some scenes recorded from a Russian talent contest with singers from all over the world (mostly from Eastern Europe and Central Asia). There were about 20 or 30 singers in all, and they did quite a few group numbers. One of the numbers was (you guessed it) We Are The World. It was sad.

March 20, 2010

The weather is a bit crazy now. Yesterday I was very comfortable outside in just a t-shirt and now it is snowing. Ick. I had some things to do in Uzgen this morning and came home soaked and freezing. Now I am enjoying being all cozy inside the quiet house. My whole family is gone, but they left me a chunk of cold rotisserie chicken and some Russian pancakes with this tasty grass stuff that I forgot the name for. Yum! They also left me a big slice of fat and a piece of what I will call a “sausage” for lack of a better word, but it is really just a bunch of coarsely chopped up parts shoved into an intestine. I don't know why they continue to give these things to me—they know I won't eat it. On the subject of food (one of these days I should calculate the percent of words that talk about food in this blog) I recently tried a new strange food: basil jello. It actually tasted pretty good, but it was so strange to me with the texture and everything, so I didn't eat much. It made me wonder if they would think that our fruity jello is strange? It really makes more sense for it to be a savory dish since the gelatin is an animal product.

Anyway, I am assuming that the special food and the current absence of my family has to do with yet another March holiday—Nooruz, which is tomorrow. Apparently this is the biggie holiday of the year for this part of the world. This week Kyrgyz people have also been celebrating the 5-year anniversary of their revolution. On Tuesday, my school had an assembly to celebrate it, and there was a feature on the news that showed our assembly as well as several students reading essays about the revolution. It was very exciting for our whole community.

Other March celebrations included the Mr. and Ms. competitions that pitted a few boys and girls from each of the villages five schools against each other. I went to both, but my patience didn't last till the end of either show. For the boys' competition, the electricity went off minutes before they were ready to start (which was still an hour later than when it was supposed to start) and after a failed attempt at going on with the show without microphones, everyone waited for the electricity to come back on. My site mate and I were ready to give up and leave at several points, but kept getting convinced to stay. When we finally did leave after waiting for two hours, one student ran out to get us before we even reached the street to tell us that it had come back on. I was surprised to see that the competition included a push-up contest. The girls' show, which happened a few days later, started only 1 ½ hours late and did not include push-ups, but the girls seemed to change into a different traditional Kyrgyz costume every five minutes, so that was fun.

In other news, a new education center opened up in our village offering computer classes and English and Chinese language lessons. It looks like I'll be going there a few times a month to do conversation practice with the English class. We'll see how that goes. Also, I'm on spring break for the next week, or week and a half, or two weeks. Everyone keeps telling me something different. It is perfect timing for a break. I hope the weather gets nice again and this snow and rain goes away!

March 21, 2010

Crazy weather still. It snowed all night and its snowing still. Not flakes now, but light poofy clumps. For New Years, the students had made decorations by tying tiny pieces of cotton to strings and hanging them from the gym ceiling. Thats what it looks like now. I've never seen anything quite like it. It is awfully pretty, but its also warm enough that most of the snow on the ground is melting into slushy puddles, so I'm hanging out inside.

Its the first day of spring break and I'm pretty much bored to death right now. My Apa and sister went to the city yesterday when I was gone and must have decided to stay there because of the bad weather. I saw my Ata and brother outside shoveling a bit when I got up, but they gave up after a few minutes and have been sleeping ever since. The electricity has been out all day so far, and my phone and ipod are dead because I forgot to plug them in last night. I killed my computer's battery before 11 am after typing up some lesson plans and then watching a movie (I'm handwriting this now and will type it later). I can't find my watch, so unless I go into the room where my host dad and brother are sleeping, I can't even tell what time it is. I would just go and hang out with friends in the city, but the combo of the snow and dead phone makes me nervous.

I'm not seeing any of the fun Nooruz stuff that my students have been telling me about. There's a cake in a box sitting out, so I'm assuming there will be some cake-eating later on. And hopefully power too.

Update: the power came on at 7:20 pm! Until that time I managed to sort through all my paperwork and handouts from PC stuff, straighten up the books on my windowsill, clean out my closet, read the first 100 pages of “Absolom, Absolom,” and handwrite five more pages of a story I started writing months ago. Not too shabby! Much more productive than a typical day for me in the village. Also, since the ladies of my family were gone and I don't cook with Kyrgyz cooking equipment, my host dad and brother were forced to make their own food, something I have never seen before. I am still trying to rehydrate myself from the few bites of the extremely oily and salty fried potatoes they made.

March 24, 2010

Another holiday—Tulip Revolution Day! I love March in K-stan. If only it hadn’t suddenly become winter again.

March 8, 2010

Happy International Women's Day! Too bad America doesn't celebrate it. My host dad tried to convince me that Americans know about this day and celebrate it, they just don't get a day off work. I told him that I didn't know about it in America, but he says I must have, because the American ambassador said so on TV. But this is coming from the same man who tried to convince me that Abraham Lincoln was the second president after Washington (which he knows because he visited his house in Boston). He also told me that the American flag I have in my room is wrong because it only has 50 stars. He is a veritable expert in all things relating to America.

Today a large group of Osh volunteers celebrated the holiday with a picnic near a gorge about a half-hour ride away from the city. It was absolutely beautiful. The weather was perfect and sunny with a slight breeze. The river was bright blue and the rock formations were magnificent. It felt great. However, today, once again, I was reflecting on how unhealthy my lifestyle has become, despite all of the walking I do and the un-processed food I eat. Not all of these things are strictly a bi-product of living in Kyrgyzstan, so I have made a spring resolution to become healthier. Here is a list of the unhealthy things in my life.

1. On average, I eat about a loaf and a half of heavy Kyrgyz bread a day. It is a staple to the Kyrgyz diet and I am a carb-aholic anyway, but things are getting ridiculous.

2. The soft-serve ice cream stands have opened in Osh. I've had at least one cone for every day that I've been there.

3. Peanut-butter sent from home. I'm addicted. I eat it every day until it runs out.

4. Locally-made chocolate peanut-butter. I just bought some today for the first time to tide me over until the next peanut-butter-bearing package comes. This could be disastrous to me.

5. Some other volunteers were talking about how we're not supposed to swim in rivers because PC won't treat any diseases that you might pick up from the water, but guess where the water comes from that I use every day to wash my hands and face with?

6. Poverty cones. This is the name some volunteer gave to a very cheap kind of ice cream that is especially popular with kids. In warm weather, a lady sells them out of a baby carriage at my school's gates. It is a regular cake cone, filled with ice cream up to the rim, with a circle of paper over the top that doesn't entirely cover all the ice cream. There is no wrapper. Who knows how many snotty nosed kids have touched them, but I eat them anyway.

7. Kids. I don't care what country you're in, kids are gross. Now the winter and lack of vitamin C has caused disgusting open cold sores to pop up all over their faces. Yuck.

8. Poo. There are many very valid reasons why Central Asians never ever wear their shoes in the house. One of those reasons is the outhouse at my school. How much higher are they going to let these piles get above the pit before someone does something about it? In addition, it appears as though several little girls have abandoned the pits entirely in favor of taking a dump or a piss right in the middle of the floor. Its a pain to have to stop and roll up the hem of my pants before I walk in.

Last night we did yet more Osh volunteer bonding over a Kyrgyz pop concert. It was a surprisingly good time! Kyrgyz concerts always tend to be a little long and slow for our American attention spans, but this one was excellent. The singing and dancing was good, and the costumes were great. We were amazed to see the first number by the girl group done in matching traditional Kyrgyz dresses and hats, followed by a solo by one of the girls in a shiny black cat woman suit and stiletto boots. Kyrgyzstan will never cease to surprise me. Of course, one of the performers spotted our row and made some mention about the foreigners. We all stand out on our own, but when there are ten of us in any one place we become a huge disruption.

March 9, 2010

I just got a package in the mail with a few month-old magazines in it (thanks, Mom!) and once again, realized how out of touch with America I am. It gets worse and worse by the month. However, I feel like I have the unique opportunity to look at American pop culture almost from the point of view of an outsider. I figure that I won't have very many more opportunities to do this, even if I do spend more time out of the States, with the rate that globalization is increasing. I thought I would take a moment to comment on my observations:

1. Ellen Degeneres is a judge on American Idol? I am having a hard time just imagining how this is working out.

2. After all that fuss about Leno being replaced by Conan, the change was made and then they switched back again, all in the period of time I have been in K-stan. Who screwed up there?

3. A while ago I was looking through a Kyrgyz magazine and started to skim through an article that was underneath a strange picture of pointy-eared blue people. It was the summary of an American movie called Avatar. I had a vague memory of some people who had been in America over Christmas telling me that it was very popular, so I read on. From what I could tell with my crappy Kyrgyz reading skills, the story takes place in a forest on some planet and is about some guy that falls in love with the chief of the blue people's daughter. I figured I must have had it confused with a different, less-popular movie, but now I see that it is the most expensive and highest-grossing film of all time, in addition to being a nominee for a best picture Oscar. About blue people in space?

4. Who the heck are Taylor and Taylor? And why are there so many references to them?

5. I saw adds for two Love Actually wannabe's, one called Valentine's Day and the other simply called Love. Please tell me at least one of these is a joke. They both look absolutely terrible.

6. Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland 3D? Sounds crazy.

7. A movie version of The Lovely Bones came out. The book was so painful to read, I can't imagine how they made a movie of it.

8. Lady Gaga. Need I say more? (This is one aspect of pop culture that we have been able to keep up with, hallelujah)

9. They recorded a new version of We Are The World. Please. Actually, just a few days ago I was watching a DVD with my host sister of Kyrgyz pop star Omar's performances. It included some scenes recorded from a Russian talent contest with singers from all over the world (mostly from Eastern Europe and Central Asia). There were about 20 or 30 singers in all, and they did quite a few group numbers. One of the numbers was (you guessed it) We Are The World. It was sad.

March 20, 2010

The weather is a bit crazy now. Yesterday I was very comfortable outside in just a t-shirt and now it is snowing. Ick. I had some things to do in Uzgen this morning and came home soaked and freezing. Now I am enjoying being all cozy inside the quiet house. My whole family is gone, but they left me a chunk of cold rotisserie chicken and some Russian pancakes with this tasty grass stuff that I forgot the name for. Yum! They also left me a big slice of fat and a piece of what I will call a “sausage” for lack of a better word, but it is really just a bunch of coarsely chopped up parts shoved into an intestine. I don't know why they continue to give these things to me—they know I won't eat it. On the subject of food (one of these days I should calculate the percent of words that talk about food in this blog) I recently tried a new strange food: basil jello. It actually tasted pretty good, but it was so strange to me with the texture and everything, so I didn't eat much. It made me wonder if they would think that our fruity jello is strange? It really makes more sense for it to be a savory dish since the gelatin is an animal product.

Anyway, I am assuming that the special food and the current absence of my family has to do with yet another March holiday—Nooruz, which is tomorrow. Apparently this is the biggie holiday of the year for this part of the world. This week Kyrgyz people have also been celebrating the 5-year anniversary of their revolution. On Tuesday, my school had an assembly to celebrate it, and there was a feature on the news that showed our assembly as well as several students reading essays about the revolution. It was very exciting for our whole community.

Other March celebrations included the Mr. and Ms. competitions that pitted a few boys and girls from each of the villages five schools against each other. I went to both, but my patience didn't last till the end of either show. For the boys' competition, the electricity went off minutes before they were ready to start (which was still an hour later than when it was supposed to start) and after a failed attempt at going on with the show without microphones, everyone waited for the electricity to come back on. My site mate and I were ready to give up and leave at several points, but kept getting convinced to stay. When we finally did leave after waiting for two hours, one student ran out to get us before we even reached the street to tell us that it had come back on. I was surprised to see that the competition included a push-up contest. The girls' show, which happened a few days later, started only 1 ½ hours late and did not include push-ups, but the girls seemed to change into a different traditional Kyrgyz costume every five minutes, so that was fun.

In other news, a new education center opened up in our village offering computer classes and English and Chinese language lessons. It looks like I'll be going there a few times a month to do conversation practice with the English class. We'll see how that goes. Also, I'm on spring break for the next week, or week and a half, or two weeks. Everyone keeps telling me something different. It is perfect timing for a break. I hope the weather gets nice again and this snow and rain goes away!

March 21, 2010

Crazy weather still. It snowed all night and its snowing still. Not flakes now, but light poofy clumps. For New Years, the students had made decorations by tying tiny pieces of cotton to strings and hanging them from the gym ceiling. Thats what it looks like now. I've never seen anything quite like it. It is awfully pretty, but its also warm enough that most of the snow on the ground is melting into slushy puddles, so I'm hanging out inside.

Its the first day of spring break and I'm pretty much bored to death right now. My Apa and sister went to the city yesterday when I was gone and must have decided to stay there because of the bad weather. I saw my Ata and brother outside shoveling a bit when I got up, but they gave up after a few minutes and have been sleeping ever since. The electricity has been out all day so far, and my phone and ipod are dead because I forgot to plug them in last night. I killed my computer's battery before 11 am after typing up some lesson plans and then watching a movie (I'm handwriting this now and will type it later). I can't find my watch, so unless I go into the room where my host dad and brother are sleeping, I can't even tell what time it is. I would just go and hang out with friends in the city, but the combo of the snow and dead phone makes me nervous.

I'm not seeing any of the fun Nooruz stuff that my students have been telling me about. There's a cake in a box sitting out, so I'm assuming there will be some cake-eating later on. And hopefully power too.

Update: the power came on at 7:20 pm! Until that time I managed to sort through all my paperwork and handouts from PC stuff, straighten up the books on my windowsill, clean out my closet, read the first 100 pages of “Absolom, Absolom,” and handwrite five more pages of a story I started writing months ago. Not too shabby! Much more productive than a typical day for me in the village. Also, since the ladies of my family were gone and I don't cook with Kyrgyz cooking equipment, my host dad and brother were forced to make their own food, something I have never seen before. I am still trying to rehydrate myself from the few bites of the extremely oily and salty fried potatoes they made.

March 24, 2010

Another holiday—Tulip Revolution Day! I love March in K-stan. If only it hadn’t suddenly become winter again.

January 25, 2010

I will take the sunshine and warm weather as sign that my streak of bad luck is finally over! I'm still taking it easy, trying to get rid of this cold that seems to be draining all of my energy, so I hope the weather keeps up tomorrow so I can go for a nice long walk and get some exercise and fresh air.

I still can't believe that the electricity was out for my whole neighborhood for a full five days. I sometimes think that nobody really cares about these things all that much—or that they just don't want to be the person responsible for getting something done about it.

I have an analogy: there were a few times during my first few months with my host family when I would spot a mouse inside the house or out in the summer kitchen and point it out to whoever was there at the time. They would always be like, “What? I didn't see a mouse,” even though I thought they probably did. After a while, I realized that they would all look away and pretend not to see it, because if no one knows its there, no one has to do anything about it. If no one make a fuss about the electricity, no one has to do anything about it.

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Sometimes I wonder if Kyrgyz people get any kind of thrill out of slasher movies with the way they are always slaughtering sheep and horses. There just seems to be so much blood and severed heads and such, and even though I try to avoid all of the slaughtering and butchering (mostly, to be quite honest, because I am lazy) I still find myself having to move a dripping sheep's head from one side of the kitchen floor to the other because it is underfoot, or going to get a bucket for water only to find that it is full of steaming fresh blood (I try to tell myself that they have blood-specific buckets separate from water buckets and milk buckets, but its a hard lie to sell).

Last night, after dark, I went in search of water to distill because I was out. The water buckets in the house were empty, so I went out to the summer kitchen where there is sometimes a big barrel of water. I couldn't remember where the light switch was in the kitchen, so I was feeling around on the walls. In the dark, I noticed that a low table had been put in the middle of the floor and there were some large piles of something silhouetted on it. I figured it would be some big chunks of meat (they don't heat the summer kitchen in the winter, so they use it like a fridge). I found the light and switched it on. I found myself being stared down by a glassy eye rolled slightly backwards in the disembodied head of a beautiful brown horse. It shot a frozen frantic look right at me backwards over it's ears. It was strange how much more unsettling this horse head was from a sheep head. The eye seemed to have so much life behind it, and so much intelligence, it seemed irreverent for it to be sitting there, uncovered and alone in the dark, grimy kitchen. I stepped around the head and got my water and left, and congratulated myself for not jumping when I saw it. Six or seven months ago I certainly would have.

February 8, 2010

The horse head has finally been removed from the summer kitchen after staring at me through the window for a full two weeks.

Its snowing again—seems like just as soon as the snow melts we get another covering. I won't complain because its so pretty. I just hope we don't get so much that the power lines get knocked out again.

Well, there's not much else to report. I thought I had something else to say, but I guess not.

February 15, 2010

Brrr. We're all waiting for this cold snap to end. Apparently it usually starts getting warmer down here in February, but we've been having temperatures and snowstorms closer to February weather in Iowa. Thankfully we don't have to worry about the windy blizzards like back home or the avalanches I've heard about in the villages a few more kilometers up the mountains. And to be quite honest I actually prefer the below freezing temperatures to the melting snow and slush. Yuck.

Right now the main paved road that I walk down to get to school looks like an impossibly straight frozen river. Kids zoom past me by alternately running and sliding down a trampled smooth strip of packed snow in the middle of the road. Resembling skateboarders, the kids actually have been getting to school earlier than usual. After school they race home again to get their sleds. Besides being a fun toy for kids, the small sleds with runners are very useful for hauling heavy water cans to the canal or spigot. With the surface of the roads made even for once by the packed snow, the heavy cans can be pulled almost effortlessly.

Kids without sleds make do with what they have. As I was walking home one afternoon I witnessed a small boy squatting on a square of aluminum roofing and propelling himself forward on the frozen road with two short sticks. He was making surprisingly good time, but looked so silly, like a cross between cross-country skiing and row boating.

February 18, 2010

Valentine's Day was almost a week ago, but love is still in the air at my school. According to my counterpart, most people around here had never heard of Valentine's Day before two or three years ago, which is hard to believe, looking at the enthusiasm with which my students embraced it. Last week a huge red box sat in the school lobby, steadily filling up with valentines. In our English lessons we assigned all our classes to make valentines in English, and we had the highest number of completed homework assignments of the year. I was amazed. I was also surprised at how bold so many of the kids were in writing to a classmate of the opposite sex and writing “I love you” and such.

The other day in my 10th grade lesson, a boy slipped me a small piece of folded pink paper when my counterpart left the room for a minute. It had “to my Valentine” written in impossibly tiny letters on the front. Inside was a twenty line poem in Kyrgyz. I thanked him, but had no idea what the poem said without looking at it closely. My counterpart came in and I stood up to show it to her, but the boy was shaking his head desperately behind her back, so I kept it to myself. I've been trying to decipher it, but Kyrgyz cursive still just looks like a bunch of “m”s and “n”s to me. As far as I can tell the first lines are something along the lines of “you are the light from the sun” and “I have fallen in love with you,” etc., etc. I showed it to the girls in my advanced club, without saying who it was from (he didn't sign it) but we didn't get much further with the translation. I don't really know what this kid was going for with this.

In a completely unrelated topic, I'm still waiting for the new, indoor bio-toilets to be finished at my school. They were supposed to be done by September 1st. The school's outhouses are worse than ever now as the shit-cicles have grown so that they come out of the hole, and kids have taken to not even trying to hit the hole. I can't tell if things will be better or worse once everything starts to thaw. At least the smell isn't so bad when everything is frozen. However, I am conscious of the fact that I don't smell so great myself. I haven't been in the city for two weeks, and it has been way too cold to take a bucket bath. My host mom and sister either haven't made a trip to the public banya or they haven't offered to take me with, and I am not brave enough to venture to it myself. I'm very much looking forward to a shower tomorrow!

I hate to be Debbie Downer again, but I need to give some excuse for not posting in a few weeks.

Sunday night we had a huge snowstorm. Knee-high snow. A lot of power lines went down, and as of when I left on Friday afternoon, the electricity still hadn't come back on in my end of the village. I was sick with a nasty cough that was not improved by the cold dry air in the house and the dust from the fire that was constantly going. My cell, computer, and ipod were all dead by Tuesday afternoon. The school schedule changed so that classes were shortened to 30 minutes and we got out at noon (I guess because they couldn't cook in the kitchen) but I had to get ready in the dark every morning that I went to school.

On top of all this, my counterpart teacher quit to take a better job at a bank, completely abandoning the teaching career that she has attended Peace Corps conferences to improve, and leaving me high and dry for the moment.

Well, 2010 can only get better, I guess.

December 22, 2009

I'm having a terrible day and need to vent. First of all, dinner last night was a plate of plain boiled intestines. Thats it. Just intestines boiled in a pot. This is the first time that I have downright refused to eat something without even tasting it.

Second of all, I have a terrible cold with all the symptoms. This morning I woke everyone in my host family up before dawn with my terrible cough. Luckily, I didn't have class today until late in the morning, so I was able to drink a lot of hot water with jam and get my cough to calm down a bit.

As I got about halfway to school it started to half rain half snow, and of course I hadn't brought my umbrella. I got to school just in time for the weekly teacher meeting that I always attend but never understand, and everyone was asking me where my counterpart was. After the meeting, my counterpart still hadn't shown up, but it was a test day, so I figured that rather than waste time looking for her, I should just get the test started. I walked in the 8th grade classroom, and before I even got past the door a boy told me that all the girls had gone to a meeting, for the whole hour, so we can't have the test. I went to the vice principle to confirm the story, which she did, and also said that she had been trying to call my counterpart, but with no success. Her phone was off. I asked her what I should do, and she just kind of shrugged and said that maybe the girls would be back in time to take the test. I went back to the eighth grade boys and played hangman with them for a while, until it seemed obvious that the girls weren't coming back. To make it worse, my cough came back and I didn't have any cough drops left in my pocket. In the end, I just left. It says in my contract that if my counterpart doesn't teach, I don't teach, and vice versa, so I was in the right, I guess. I still felt bad about it. It was only two classes. I guess thats not that bad.

December 24, 2009

The “where the hell am I” moments that I used to have with such frequency have slowed up a bit, and sometimes I don't have them until someone points out to me how strange something is. Last weekend another volunteer and I were heading out from her apartment to go to a second-hand store in the bazaar to shop for ugly sweaters for our volunteer Christmas party. We had to make a stealthy escape from the building because the pimp who runs the brothel downstairs had been bugging us all weekend to go to his wedding that day, and the train of wedding-bound cars were right outside the door, making it all the easier for someone to kidnap us and drag us there—something that happens to us a lot (I've been to about five weddings of strangers so far, and was dragged to three of them without any advance warning). Luckily neither he nor anyone else we knew happened to be outside at the moment, so we made it through safely.

I honestly didn't think that there was anything strange or even interesting about this at the moment, and wouldn't have even thought to mention it here at all if my friend, once we reached a safe distance from the wedding goers, hadn't mentioned how funny it was that we had just sneaked out the door and run out of sight to avoid going to a pimp's wedding, which we might have agreed to go to (he has actually been a really good neighbor and friend to us volunteers) if we hadn't already made very important plans to go ugly-sweater shopping, which will take all afternoon anyway because we are going to a store that is in the middle of one of the largest bazaars in Central Asia. She's right. Its completely ridiculous.

I had another moment today that I arrived at while I was watching fifth graders wearing kalpaks, tiaras, and tinsel garland ballroom dancing to “My Heart Will Go On” during the New Year's concert. The music was a little bit too quiet because someone was playing the music from their phone plugged into a little portable speaker as the electricity was out, so an 11th grader who was playing Santa helped out by stamping out the beat with his walking stick.

January 2, 2010

Happy New Year!

I'm in Osh now, but I spent New Year's Eve with my family in the village. I'm glad I did, it was a good time. First, the director and vice-directors of my school came over in the morning to bring me a cake and a bottle of champagne and wish me a happy new year. I guess it is a tradition. Apa left for a bit, but made sure that I was prepared to greet my guests with a table full of salads, cookies, and candy and a tea pot all set up to serve them when they came. In the end they only stayed ten minutes, only long enough to kill a small bottle of wine, before they left to go to the next house.

At night, my family celebrated with a kind of progressive dinner, starting at grandma's house for one course, then on to some aunts and uncles' house, before ending up at our house for (ta da!) turkey and some small and tasty quail-like bird, the name of which I have forgotten, but my host dad said it comes from the mountains and costs 150 som at the bazaar. We also had a very small and expensive pineapple that I did the honors of cutting up because no one there had ever cut up a whole pineapple before. At every house we also had a large slice of cake, so by midnight my head and teeth hurt from the sugar and all the kids were bouncing off the walls. At midnight we toasted with my champagne, most of which exploded from the bottle (not a big loss, because it was pretty terrible) and then moved outside to shoot off some fireworks. Kyrgyz fireworks seem to have very loose safety standards, so paired with the five male relatives all in their teens and early twenties, I tried to steer clear. It was still a lot of fun.

Ok, to clear up some confusion regarding the title of the last blog. It was not the date, and it was not a mistake. It only said "Kyrgyz kyz" -- Kyrgyz girl. Nothing too exciting. I just like the way it sounds, and it seemed appropriate, but I forgot to explain it.

I have a new nickname - "Borsok." Borsok is a Kyrgyz donut. I earned this name last night during a dinner with one volunteer's host family in which several bottles of vodka were polished off. I had just come in from the village a little later than usual because I had to help my Apa with a borsok emergency. She had to make a bunch of it for Ata's birthday party the next day, but she threw out her back, so she was having difficulty. So, I rolled out the dough, built the fire, and fried up the borsok. Of course, I brought a huge bag of it to Osh, which I bragged to the family about making myself. Therefore, I was dubbed "Borsok" by the father and I think it will stick forever.

Its almost Christmas! Crazy! Time is going by so fast!

December 3, 2005

Ask and ye shall receive. My school's one and only electric heater has been installed in Informatsia/English room, also now known as Miss Audra's Kabinet. Yay! It still isn't warm enough to take off your hat and coat, but at least my hands won't freeze when I'm writing on the board. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I remembered to turn off the heater when I left the room this afternoon. Ooops. I'd better make sure I get there first tomorrow to check or they might take it away from me.

Today nobody showed up at my club because there was a concert at my school that all my students went to. I actually knew about the concert because they made an announcement during one of my classes yesterday, but so many kids asked me if I was going to have club that I assumed they would come. They didn't. So, there was nothing left but to check out the concert. It was terrible.

They had hung up a big poster above the stage in the little auditorium featuring over-sized glamor shots of the star, a handsome Kyrgyz jigit and “super star” (the poster's words, not mine). He probably sings at weddings on the weekends. When I came in, a young man was singing a popular Kyrgyz pop song, but he was most definitely not the guy from the poster: he happened to be a four foot tall dwarf. He started doing some crazy comic dances and it became apparent that he wasn't singing at all, but lip syncing. To his credit, he did sing a little later (karaoke style, of course, like the rest of the concert). Besides the guy from the poster and the dwarf, there were also two not-so-good-looking guys with mediocre karaoke skills. In between musical numbers there were some comedy routines, almost entirely centered around the dwarf's height. I can't imagine that I would have found the jokes nearly as funny as everyone else even if I did understand them in their entirety.

There was one good part of the concert that was nearly ruined by the shitty sound system that was being used (I don't think it could have made anyone sound good): a song that the poster guy and the dwarf guy did together. It was in Kyrgzy, but it had some Middle Eastern or maybe Uzbek flair to it. If I drowned out the static and feedback I really liked it a lot. During the whole song they did all their movements in unison, including this crazy little dance that I was a little bit obsessed with. I can't explain it, but I have never seen anything quite like it.

Anyway, it was exactly like I should have expected an after-school matinée concert. in the auditorium of a freezing cold Soviet-built school featuring a C-list pop star in a developing country to be like, so I don't know why I'm complaining. They even let me in for free (tickets for the students cost 20 com. Thats about 85 cents and the cost of four ice cream cones for these kids).

December 6, 2009

I'm taking a break from reading a book that I started this morning and haven't been able to put down since. I've never been so sucked into a non-fiction book before. Its called Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, and it is excellent. I've got a full free day ahead of me with nothing to do, so I'll probably just plow through and finish it.

I stayed in the village this weekend at the repeated insistence of my host family. They hosted a guesting last night and really wanted to show me off to their friends. Also, I am sure they were happy to have an extra pair of hands to help out. My host mom asked me to make few pizzas for the guests, and although the sauce was amazing (if I do say so myself), the dough was pretty bad (I'm blaming the yeast) and the cheese that Apa picked out at the bazaar was not the best for pizza, although I'm not sure if there is a good pizza cheese to be found at all in Uzgen.

To prepare for the meal, Apa started baking bread on Friday morning. After I came home from work some neighbor ladies came over to help fry borsok (Kyrgyz donuts), which they always make in ridiculously huge quantities for any occasion and is at least a three-woman job. They showed me how to make and roll out the dough and fry it, insisting that I need to learn these skills just in case I marry a Kyrgyz boy and have to cook for my in-laws. Fresh, hot borsok is the absolute best Kyrgyz tradition, hands down. It also clears up the mystery of why I'm not losing any weight with as little food as I eat. Whenever there's fresh borsok around I gorge myself on it, eating probably the equivalent of six American-sized donuts in one sitting. Its a really bad habit. It was a really good time until they force-fed me bozo (a pinkish-colored milk drink that tastes like sour cream mixed with club soda) insisting that if I drink more of it I will start to like it, and even if I don't, it is good for my health and I should drink it to keep my blood warm during the winter. Bleh.

Everyone went to bed early that night and by the time I got up at 8 in the morning, Apa had already put out two huge piles of ingredients for me to peel and cut up for two different salads. I was also given my usual assignment to peel onions and potatoes. Even though I basically spent five hours cutting vegetables, the whole family was sitting and working and talking together, and there was a nice warm fire going in the stove, so I'll admit that I had a surprisingly pleasant time. I spent the afternoon making pizza by myself and helping set up the table and such. The guests finally came at 6, and my host dad effectively kept me hidden from sight until everyone was there and I could make my dramatic appearance to a chorus of “oooh, beautiful girl!” like he had just unveiled a new work of art. So awkward. Anyway, after the guests were all served I went and hid in my room “babysitting” my little host niece because I knew that my host dad had wanted me to give a toast and sing a song, and I hoped that if he went through enough vodka toasts and I was out of sight he might forget. He didn't, but I told him I would only sing if he sang first, which got a good laugh and let me off the hook.

December 8, 2009

I just want to continue my thoughts on that book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. In a nutshell, it talks about how geography and the layout of the continents, as opposed to physiological differences between the people themselves, led to the differences in when people in different parts of the world had advancements in the areas of food production, tool making, etc. which led to developing the diseases, weapons, etc. that allowed them to conquer other groups in other areas of the world.

Anyway, like I said, I breezed through it, even though it was a pretty big book. It was one of those books where you are reading it and think, “ok, thats great, but what about....?” and then your question is answered in the next paragraph. However, now after I have finished the book, I thought of something that he neglected to touch on. I was walking home from work when I saw a familiar sight, even for three in the afternoon: a man passed out in the mud on the side of the road. I got to thinking, what role did Russia's vodka play in expanding its empire back in the day? I can only assume that its pretty easy to get people to do what you want after a few vodka toasts, especially if you are a big Russian man who has been drinking vodka all his life and you are up some Central Asians who are half your size. Had Kyrgyzstan been swallowed up by China instead, would we still see this problem here? I don't know. Maybe I'm putting the blame on Russia unfairly. Maybe the toasting culture goes back further than that. Maybe if they had some wine and beer that wasn't absolute shit they would drink that instead of nasty cheap vodka. My host dad and I have been engaged in an endless argument over which is better: expensive American beer or cheap Uzgen beer. He'll bring home a half empty bottle once in a while for us to share (most of the beer here comes in plastic bottles—what does that tell you about the quality?), insisting that it is a good bottle this time (the fact that the taste changes noticeably from bottle to bottle should also indicate the quality of beer we're talking about. It ranges from watery, stale-tasting beer to watery, stale-tasting piss). His argument is that Uzgen beer is better because it is so much cheaper: 20 som, compared to the $4 he paid in the states—100 som.

Really, me and my host dad only have had about four conversations since I have been here, and they just keep continuing. The others revolve around pigs, swine flu, and why Christians should take it as a hint to follow the example of Muslims and stop keeping pigs and eating pork; the fact that everything is made in China; and some mystery monument he saw when he visited what he keeps calling “Square Times” in New York (he keeps thinking that if he talks about it enough I'll figure out what he is talking about).

November 24, 2009

On Tuesdays I don't have class until 11:00, but I usually go in at 8:30 anyway because more often than not there has been a change in the schedule anyway, and if not, I use the time to talk to other teachers, make visual aids, and whatever else. Today, I woke up at my usual time, but when I went to dip my hand into the water can to wash my face, my knuckles hit a half inch of ice floating on top. I decided that was as good an excuse as any to crawl back into my sleeping bag for another few hours, which is where I am now. There's no point in hanging around an unheated school for any longer than is necessary, right?

November 25, 2009

Its snowing again today. The school was colder than ever, and there wasn't any sun to run out and stand in during the breaks. I walked around all day with my new wool coat (thank God I went out and bought one!) buttoned up to my eyes and the hood up. All the teachers laughed at me, asking mockingly, “are you cold, Audra? I thought it was cold in your state.” I think I may have struck some nerves when I told them a little testily that my state gives the schools enough money so that the schools are warm and people can take off their hats and coats inside. I don't want to insult their country, but seriously...

So, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which doesn't make any difference to me, really, except for that I am doing the same Thanksgiving-themed lesson in all the grades today and tomorrow. I think my counterpart and I are regretting this, because even though it was easy to plan one lesson rather than four, it is difficult to do the same thing over and over again (six down today, three tomorrow!). I explained the holiday and our traditions to the kids and then they wrote five things that they are thankful for. I thought they would need some help with this assignment since, chances are, they've never answered this question specifically like American students do every year, but they did a great job of it. I ended up being a little embarrassed by my list, which included wool socks and peanut butter from America and was probably the silliest of all the lists. I was surprised that most of my kids in all the classes included God on their lists, since, in my village at least, religiousness is not terribly visible. Most of the kids also wrote “I am thankful for Miss Audra comes to Kyrgyzstan,” which made me feel good, even though I know they are just a bunch of little suck-ups.

After school the snow was really coming down. I had a little bit of shopping to do, so I figured if I was going to wave down a car anyway, I might as well go all the way to the Uzgen bazaar. Bad idea. I am now wet and miserable. I wondered how the bazaar operates in bad weather, and the answer is exactly like it always does. The difference is that you have to watch out above you from the occasional flood of rain water getting knocked off the tarp awning of a stall and below you for the occasional puddle that is a lot deeper than it looks. In my quest to navigate the driest path between the sections I needed to visit, I came across a part of the bazaar that I had never seen before, and I was surprised at how similar it looked to Best Buy. Sometime when it is dryer I will have to investigate. I can't let today ruin my love of the Uzgen bazaar, which I appreciate so much more after doing some shopping last weekend in the Osh bazaar, which is way too stinking big for me to handle.

November 29, 2009

Yesterday we Oshian volunteers and some friends enjoyed our own little Thanksgiving feast. It was fantastic and included almost all of the essentials, with the exception that the turkey was substituted for three rotisserie chickens. The triumph of the evening, in my opinion, was a fantastic green bean casserole made almost completely from scratch. Amazing. I hope everyone’s American Thanksgiving was wonderful too.

October 28, 2009

This winter is gonna suck.

It was chilly, rainy, and miserable today. Really, it was pretty average October weather for Iowa, but in Iowa I wouldn't have to walk everywhere and the heat would be on inside and I wouldn't be carrying buckets of icy canal water around. Oh yeah, and at the moment, cvet jok. That means the electricity is out, but the Kyrgyz way of saying it is so much more appropriate to the situation, somehow. It's too dark to read or do lesson planning, but not dark enough to break out a candle or flashlight yet, so I will bask in the glow of the computer screen and try to draw some of the warmth into my fingers from its gently humming mechanisms under the keyboard.

Okay, so its not all bad. Actually, it has been quite pleasant and sunny lately, and I have been enjoying the harvest season atmosphere without actually having to take part in any of the harvest activities, which is nice. The fruit and vegetable section of the bazaar has undertaken yet another transformation, acquiring the most beautiful and brightly colored collection of fruits yet. There are tall heaps of deep scarlet pomegranates and an oranger-than-an-orange fruit that I have been told is a persimmon. To me, these fruits seem so new and exotic, but they are cheap and common here. I told my host family that I had never seen a pomegranate until a few years ago and that they are expensive in America, and they thought I was making mistakes in my Kyrgyz. I have been eating at least one pomegranate a day. Yum. Watermelons and white melon are still being sold here and there, but they aren't that good anymore and are slowly becoming replaced with pumpkins and squashes.

I'm a little bit behind on my lesson planning and such, after spending the first part of the week at the camp in Osh. For being what seemed to me to be a last minute operation (it was run by a local organization, so of course), it was an excellent camp. There were 35 high school-aged participants from the south of Kyrgyzstan that were chosen from a pool of 200 applicants. The participants were from a variety of ethnic backgrounds (the theme of the camp was diversity) and overall, they were a very bright group. There were a few concepts that we tried to introduce that they had some trouble understanding, but they definitely came away from the camp with some useful skills and a better understanding of how to interact with people belonging to different nationalities. The kids gave me a very Uzbek name, Odina opa, and in addition to facilitating a few sessions, I was somehow put in charge of “Arts and Crafts” in the evenings, which consisted of two nights of making friendship bracelets, which (surprisingly) they loved, and (even more surprisingly) broke down some of the very rigid gender barriers that are in place here. Even the locals in charge of the camp assumed that none of the boys would want to make bracelets, but because I am so awesome, I got at least eight to make and even wear their own bracelets. Me and one other PCV spent a few nights at the camp and entertained the kids with seemingly endless running around games and some very multicultural/multilingual sing-alongs with the other PCV's guitar. Best of all, a lot of the kids spoke really excellent English, which was a nice break for me. Although there were still quite a few who insisted on yelling at me in Russian the whole time. By the end of the camp, they had written and printed a great little newsletter in Russian, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and English about what they did at the camp, and even though I could only understand bits and pieces, I can tell they did an excellent job on it. I made my host sister translate all of the Russian sentences that contained Odina opa because I don't like being talked about when I can't understand!

November 3, 2009

Halloween in Kyrgyzstan was interesting, to say the least. I had a little party planned for my 9-11th graders, and I hauled a pretty good-sized pumpkin all the way from the center of the village back to school so that we could make a jack o' lantern, but no one showed up! It was very sad. Especially because the other volunteer in my village put on a considerably more planned out party and had a huge turnout and it was a huge success. But then, she has students that she can actually have conversations with in English. Not so with me. Still, I was invited and it was way fun, even though the disco party at the end got cut short when the electricity went out.

As for us Americans, we were able to enjoy our holiday by celebrating at a great party put on by a cafe in Osh. We all dressed up and had a lot of fun, though our taxi drivers were probably confused and terrified.

Now, I am enjoying a week off from school (our end of the first quarter break). I stayed in Osh yesterday and I thought that the rest of the week might be a good chance to get ahead on lesson planning and whatever else. So far, no luck. My host family had guests over today, and after sleeping in much longer than the rest of my family (but not that long, because the neighbors are having their wedding party part II with loud music that started at 8 a.m. My host mom told me I should sleep in a different room on the other side of the house for the next few days, because they will be playing loud music all night for a few days. This is worse than living next door to a frat house) I helped prepare only a little bit, and then escaped because I had to go to the bank in Uzgen. I am lazy, so I didn't want to go back home and do more guesting work, so another volunteer and I wasted time by checking out the park on top of the hill in Uzgen. For you Dubuquers out there reading this, imagine a park that is a combination of Eagle Point and Storybook Hill, and then let it fall into disrepair for about 30 years. Then you will have the park in Uzgen. It is on top of a hill and offers a view of the river that is similar to Eagle Point, only with more Central Asian terrain. It also has the remains of some strange playground structures and rickety bridges and what me and the other volunteer think might be an abandoned bumper-car rink. There is also a really dangerous looking ferris wheel that apparently still operates on holidays. In other words, it is an awesome park and I am in love with it. You can guarantee that I will be using that as a time-wasting location in the future when I need to escape the family.

I timed things out well, because when I got home I just had to pass out some rib bones for the guests to gnaw on which signals the end of the meal, and then they left. Apa was mad that I took so long, but then I paid her rent, which shut her up. I thought I might be left alone to chill in my room and listen to the loud music from the wedding next door, but no, I had to actually go to the wedding. Not only did I have to go to the wedding, I had to give a toast into the microphone. And that's not all. The musical entertainment that was going on at the time that I arrived is something that I would find funny if it wasn't so pathetic. It consisted of a guy sitting at a cheap keyboard and playing accompaniment for various guests that consisted of pushing a button to play one of those pre-recorded back-up beats and then playing a few chords here and there. Very classy, to say the least. Anyway, of course, I was forced to sing the one Kyrgyz song I know the words to, and then they held me hostage until I agreed to sing a song in English. I asked the keyboard guy if he knew any English songs, and he said no, but that I should just start singing and he can follow me. I highly doubted that, but I agreed. I sang “L-O-V-E” because someone suggested that I sing a song about love in honor of the wedding and it seemed appropriate. It was the strangest rendition of that song that the world has ever heard. I can't even begin to describe how ridiculous it was. It was all I could to to keep myself from laughing as I kept singing (the keyboardist kept signaling me to sing again and again) and it was more difficult as the neighbor ladies were stuffing money into the waistband of my pants and throwing scarves on my head. Fortunately for me, the whole incident was caught on video by one of my wonderful 11th grade students. Thanks so much for that. That little performance is exactly how I want the people of Kyrgyzstan to remember me.

November 9, 2009

So, I am back in Bishkek for a Peace Corps conference. Back in the same hotel we came to for orientation. It is as creepy as ever, and even more like the hotel in The Shining because now it is snowing! It has been snowing all day and there is a nice white blanket all over the broken down Soviet sculpture garden and the weird Eye of Sauron tower out back that I am admiring from the balcony. Down in the south last week I was walking around in short sleeves, so I wasn't quite as prepared for this kind of weather as I would have liked to be, but I'll be okay.

It is so great to see the whole group of volunteers again, most of whom I haven't seen at all for five months, and hear about the work they are doing and all that. It is like a class reunion. I also realize how lucky I am to be in the site I am in. The south really is the best place to be—no contest. And not only that, but I am able to make it to the coolest city in Kyrgyzstan every weekend, which is a lot more than a lot of other volunteers can say. I will never complain again! (haha, yeah, right).

Anyway, the conference is good, but there's not much to report.

November 16, 2009

Well, I am back at my site. Sadly, winter has come down here as well, and it is darn cold, but at least it is sunny and not quite as cold as it was in Bishkek last week. As a consequence of being stuck in a hotel for a week with a bunch of other Americans with weakened immune systems, I caught the flu. I took the day off today, but I hope I should be back to normal by tomorrow. I am just really glad that I was able to fly back home and I didn't have a long taxi ride. That would have been miserable. The 1 ½ hour marshrutka ride back from Osh was miserable enough.

Besides being sick, I am so glad to be back down in the south! It is just so much more interesting and pleasant here. It was great to be in Bishkek and eat my first real cheeseburger in six months, but it felt just as nice to come back to Osh city and wake up to the call to prayer and the milk ladies' sing-song calls. I wasn't even that upset that the marshrutka back to Uzgen took almost an hour to fill up because I love to hear the drivers calling our their destinations. There is such a rhythm and melody to it that is fascinating to me. Also, it was one of the nicest marshrutkas I have seen that is not owned by the Peace Corps, and I had a seat to myself because no one wanted to sit next to the sick American, so I was pretty comfortable.

November 18, 2009

It is amazing how a little sunshine and recently restored health can change a person's perspective on things. The flu was terrible, but I am feeling completely back to normal already. I have accepted that I am just going to have to put up with being constantly cold for the next few months, and really, it is just a matter of wearing enough layers all the time and drinking a lot of hot tea.

At school, the dress code has been completely abandoned. It is actually colder inside the school than it is outside, and in between classes everyone runs outside to stand in the sun. It is actually kind of pathetic, but no one has the money, time, or interest to properly heat the school, from the sound of things. I seem to distinctly remember that Laura Ingalls had a stove for her school house. How come we've got nothing? My counterpart came to school today looking fabulous with this long purple coat with a fluffy fur collar and cuffs that she might have borrowed from a 1st class passenger on the Titanic and a wool hat in the traditional Kyrgyz style that looks like something the girl in the movie “A Knight's Tale” wore. This was paired with skinny jeans and shiny black stiletto heeled boots. I thought I had on a pretty nice coat and boots, but I looked positively frumpy beside her. I don't think I can properly express the fabulousness of her outfit. You would never find anything like it in America.

Anyway, I am on a successful lesson high right now. Today I was not at all prepared for my lessons because they had a substitute last week and I didn't know what they did. Turns out they all copied down completely incomprehensible texts about the history of the Silk Road and the biography of some Kyrgyz poet, but none of the students could tell me in English or Kyrgyz what the texts were about. So me and my counterpart had to make up a bunch of lessons on the spot. My counterpart disappeared after the morning break like she does sometimes, so I taught the 10th grade classes by myself. A while ago we had done a lesson about professions, so I decided it would be a good idea to talk about which professions use a foreign language. I thought it might be kind of motivating to make a big list, since it would be very easy for a Kyrgyz village kid to think that they would never need to speak English.

As usual, 10b were a bunch of duds and didn't do much but sit and stare at me, but 10a (my very favorite class) did a great job with this and we had an awesome discussion. It was pretty much all in Kyrgyz, but I didn't even mind very much because they had such smart things to say. They went way beyond the list of careers that I had in mind to have some heated debates over whether knowing English could make you a better farmer, taxi driver, doctor, or lawyer in Kyrgyzstan. I was SO proud of them! They really are a bright group of kids. I am glad that I will get to teach them next year, too.

A few hours later:

If sunlight and good health can cause optimism, then cold and darkness can destroy it, and more quickly. When I wrote the above entry, the electricity was out, but there was plenty of sunlight coming in through the window and my room was still warm since my space heater had been on. I also had a giant thermos full of hot water for tea and a belly full of cheap village cafe food. A few hours later it started to get dark and really, really cold, and I came to the conclusion that I will, in fact, die this winter.

Now the power is back on, my thermos is re-filled, and my cold feet in their three layers of socks plus these funny wool slipper things I bought at the bazaar are wedged underneath my space heater waiting for it to get hot. My back and shoulders are all sore and tense from being hunched over in the cold, but as I start to thaw out, I am feeling much better. I suppose this is what I can expect from the rest of the winter, lots of ups and downs.

Hooray! My host mom lit the coal-burning stove in the next room. I love being warm.

October 15, 2009

Today was an interesting day for me. It seemed like a normal morning, except for that it was really cold. (I can't figure out how to dress in this country! It is always freezing when I walk to school and hot when I walk home. I can't win.) First of all, I only taught one lesson because there was some guest speaker that came, so I sat around and did some planning with my counterpart and then headed home at about 10:30. I started to worry when I saw the good rug spread out in front of the door--indicating that my family would be having guests. If there were any doubts of the seriousness of this guesting, I only had to turn the corner to see my host dad and brother skinning a sheep. I didn't really want to be around the smell of said sheep-skinning since I had been kind of sick on Tuesday after eating what I suspect was a bad melon, so I hid in my room.

Later, I could hear my host mom running around frantically, so I went to help her the best I could. This really was quite the guesting. One of the neighbor ladies was in the kitchen helping to cook, and the table was really set to impress. Once Apa stopped panicking a bit, I finally figured out that my host brother's bride-to-be's family would be coming over to finalize the engagement.

Now, I wasn't quite sure that Nurgaze was actually getting married, even though there had been a lot of talk about it lately. This is just more evidence of how little I understand of my everyday life. Later, after all the guests had gone, I had a nice chat with my host mom about Kyrgyz customs while we cleaned up the table. I guess that when a couple becomes engaged, the bride's family typically comes over to the grooms house where the grooms family kills a sheep, feeds them, and basically grovels at their feet in the hopes that they won't suddenly decide to give their daughter away to someone else. Apa complained about how tired she was and how much work she did that day to make and serve the in-laws food, but she says that it is all good in the long run because now Nurgaze's wife will do all of the work and she can have more time to rest. Lovely.

Anyway, I'm glad I didn't know about this trying to impress the in-laws thing before, because I would have worried that I scared them away. I had been helping in the kitchen, and when there was a lull, I grabbed a bowl of soup and took it to my room for lunch. As I was eating, I could hear the in-laws in the next room finishing up their soup, and then moving around a bit before the next course comes. I knew that they must have been poking around a bit, because, really, who wouldn't? Also, they are Kyrgyz, so they have no concept of privacy. For this reason, they shamelessly opened up my bedroom door to come face to face with this strange white girl sitting at a table by herself, playing sudoku. Talk about a skeleton in the closet.

They very confusedly said hello in Russian, and I smiled, stood up, and said, “Hello, my name is Audra” in Kyrgyz, and left it at that. Serves you right for poking around, I thought. They kind of slowly backed away from the door. Apa came in and said simply, “thats the American who lives with us,” and left it at that. Awesome.

Anyway, I was glad that I had changed my club to an earlier time so that I had an excuse to get out of there. I even brought a book along, planning to sit around in the schoolyard afterward since it was a nice day, to delay my return home a bit. Anyway, there was no need for that because my students invited invited me to what they called a concert, but what I would call a 9th grade dance. Ignoring the fact that the kids set up a typical Kyrgyz feast for themselves and did some traditional dancing at the beginning of the evening, this was pretty much exactly like an American 9th grade dance, which I found to be so surprising. If anything, it was a bit racier, with games like this one where two boys held apples in their mouths and two girls had to race to eat the most out of the apple before time was called. It was really fun to watch, but I can't imagine an American high school allowing their 9th graders to do the same thing.

I left during the slow dance, as the couples were awkwardly shuffling back and forth in what must be the international 9th grade style, wondering how these girls who eat apples out of boys' mouths and dance with them and joke around with them, how do they come to be the girls whose parents decide their future over a dead sheep, signing them up for about thirty years of slavery? And are they ok with this? I just don't know. I can't wait to meet Nurgaze's wife-to-be. I hope we can be friends and I can learn Kyrgyz well enough to ask her.

October 20, 2009

I am trying to figure out how I am still able to stand. Yesterday, the next-door neighbors' son got married and they had a huge party. They dragged in a big sound system and the music started at about three in the afternoon. It continued until 7:30 a.m.

Since my bedroom has a window facing the neighbors' yard, my host mom made up a bed in the dining room for me (she is a master at folding the cushions just right and I can't figure out exactly how she does it), but it didn't make all that much difference as I didn't sleep a bit. This morning when I got up, my host mom asked if I had slept, and I said no, did you? She didn't, but didn't seem the least bit upset by it.

Just as I left for school, a car passed me with the huge sound speakers piled in the trunk. Once I got to school, I told my counterpart why I hadn't slept, and she showed no reaction. “Is that normal for Kyrgyz people?” I asked. “Yes,” she answered in a tone of voice that suggested that it was a stupid question. I told her that in America someone would have called the police. To that she answered, “I think we like weddings in Kyrgyzstan more than Americans do.”

Real time update:

My host mom just came in to get me to go “see the neighbors' new kalin.” Kalin means daughter-in-law, but the position of kalin involves so much more than is associated with a typical western daughter-in-law. In fact, during my first day with my training host family I was under the impression that their kalin was hired help. Anyway, the way my host mom said this, it was like she was inviting me to see their new car. And she was obviously not under the impression that she was going to have to explain all of these traditions to me. She told me to bring my camera, and then as we were heading out the door, she looked at me and said, “What, didn't you bring a joluk (headscarf)? You must bring a joluk to give to the kalin.” Well, how was I supposed to know that?

When we got over to the neighbors' house, the proud mother of the groom told us that the bride was sleeping and she would go wake her up. I waited outside the bedroom door, but my host mom dragged me in and explained that the kalin must stay in the room all day today. The room was divided in half with a curtain hung from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. The mother of the groom called the kalin's name and a girl wearing a white headscarf emerged with her head bowed. She wore sweatpants and ratty old green slippers that had “LOVE” printed on them in English. She held a large white veil over her head and shoulders and bowed repeatedly before us. My host mom motioned that I should drape the headscarf I brought over her shoulders, and I did so. Then I took a few pictures of her and the family. All the time while everyone else was laughing and smiling, the kalin kept her head bowed and her expression serious. As we walked back to the house, my host mom asked, “Did you like her? Wasn't she beautiful?” and I agreed, though I wanted badly to say “well, I never got a good look at her. She kept her head bowed and didn't smile at all, and I find it difficult to decide if I like someone when they don't speak and don't show any expression at all.” But even if I had the language skills to say that, I should recognize that this is simply their tradition and I should respect it.

Ok, on to other things. I might have said this before, but I so often feel like I am doing one of those activities where you have to explain an everyday concept to a Martian, but with some extra complications. Sometimes I am the Earthling and sometimes I am the Martian. My vocabulary is always cut at least in half, and the grammar structures at my disposal are extremely limited. It is a difficult game that my counterpart and I, even though she speaks pretty good English, find ourselves caught in a lot. One time I mentioned “roasting marshmallows” in passing, and she stopped me to explain what both words mean. Try explaining what a marshmallow is, even to a fluent English speaker. Then try explaining why you would roast it. I simply had to give up. We are even though, because at a party I was offered to try a bowl of this dip that was the color and consistency of refried beans, but tasted like cream cheese that has gone bad. I asked my counterpart what it was, and she only got as far as telling me that there is milk and sugar in it before she had to give up.

Today in my 7-8th grade club I wanted to do some Halloween vocabulary. I assumed that they would be at least slightly familiar with Halloween because my host sister and the girls on my street know quite a bit about it and even asked me if we could all make Jack O' Lanterns together. I neglected to remember that these girls go to a different school that has had volunteers for quite a few years. My kids had no idea, other than a vague acknowledgement that they might have seen a carved pumpkin before. Now, try explaining Halloween when your vocabulary is quartered. Poor kids. They were so confused.

October 24, 2009

Right now I am in Osh for a few days helping out with a camp for high school aged kids. Yesterday was the first day, and I just helped with leading some games and team-builders and stuff. On Sunday and Monday I am apparently facilitating some sessions on communication skills and cross-cultural friendship, and at some point I will help them make friendship bracelets. I love the kids at my school, but it is such a nice change to hang out with kids whose English is more advanced. It is a group of mixed nationalities, too, which is a switch from my almost entirely Kyrgyz school. More on this later, I suppose.

September 27, 2009 Yesterday morning I woke up in the early hours to go the the bathroom. As I stumbled through the hall, I smelled something strange that reminded me of the bazaar. The door to the room next to mine was open, and I glanced into it as I walked by. This room is fairly small and just had a low square table sitting in the middle of it. In the middle of the table was a large mixing bowl full of raw, bloody meat. That explained the bazaar smell. I was reminded of a scene in a movie (I forget what the movie it), where the character has a hallucination that he sees his own brain sitting on the ground in front of him. I stood there and looked at it for a while, trying to figure out why the meat was there and who put it there. It was awfully early for someone to have gotten up and put it there, and I didn't remember hearing anyone coming in the night before. And why in that room? I have only seen them use that room for eating once when they had a huge guesting, and they never prepare food in there. So odd. I wanted to do some laundry today, but with all of the dust that the house builders kick up, I think it would be counterproductive. Apa brought out the “washing machine” and asked me if I wanted to use it, but I hate that thing, and I would rather take the time to scrub my stuff by hand and get it more clean and not wrecked. Oh well, I have enough clothes left behind by other volunteers that I can just do some underwear and let the rest of it keep piling up for a while. The builders have been here for at least three weeks now, and I wonder if they are getting sick of being here. They all sleep in the room connected to the kitchen that Apa usually uses as a dough-rolling surface and storage shed for dusty junk. When the place was first built, it must have been intended as a dining room, because it has a built in platform for eating on, which is typical of a lot of Kyrgyz houses. It is kind of gross and dusty, I think, and it has to be chilly at night. The platform has just enough room for the four men to sleep side by side, and they also eat all their meals there. They keep to themselves all the time and I never even see them talking with my host dad or brother, which seems strange to me since we have all been living in close quarters for the past few weeks. The compound isn't that big, and plus, there is only one outhouse, so there is a bit of a mad rush in the morning when everyone wakes up. I would like to just sit and watch them work sometimes because it is absolutely fascinating, but that is kind of weird, and I always feel uncomfortable when I walk past them and they all stare, probably still trying to figure out why a random American is living here. I wonder if anyone has explained it to them? Anyway, they have been building this house completely by hand, and it is a very interesting process. I love watching them throw the mud bricks from the ground up to the scaffolding. They have a very practiced rhythm to it, and they make it look like the bricks are nothing more than bean bags. I am excited to see how this house will turn out. October 8, 2009 I have realized that making frequent trips to the city is essential for my mental health. It’s not like I am completely isolated. I meet up with the two other volunteers in my region during the week occasionally, I have a phone, and then there are the two English-speaking teachers at my school that I can talk to, but there are always these little things that wear me down and make me a little bit on edge. Just now, I was watching an episode of “The Office” on my computer. It was the last episode of season 2, where Jim finally tells Pam he is in love with her. I got choked up. I'm not kidding. I actually cried while watching “The Office.” Another example: last night I was reading a book of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne that I inherited from past volunteers. To be honest, Hawthorne drives me nuts, but I always feel like I should give him another chance, so I am making my way through this book a little at a time. There was this horrible story about a minister who wears a black veil, symbolic of some past sin or something stupid like that. Now, I need to say a bit about this really unreasonable fear that I have. In this area, many women wear full, burka-like garments. At first I could always feel myself be a stupid westerner and stare with my mouth open while these women walked past. Now I hardly notice it anymore. However, there are other women that cover themselves in another manner, with one scarf covering their entire face with another scarf tied over that in the typical Muslim fashion. This never fails to creep me out, and I have had three or four nightmares since I have been here that feature these covered women. Anyway, I was reading this story last night, and I couldn't finish it because I was scared. How ridiculous is that? OK, now on to these little things that wear me down to the point that I become this nut case. Last week I was in Uzgen to run some errands and hang out with some volunteers for a bit. I ended up heading back to the village in a rush because I spent about a half hour at the post office trying to get an envelope mailed, and I was going to be late for my club. I climbed in a taxi at the taxi stand and hoped that it would fill up quickly so we could go. It did fill up quickly, but unfortunately one of the passengers was a very, very drunk older man, who was deposited into the seat next to me, leaving me squashed in the middle seat of the Tico, probably the smallest car ever made. Anyway, long story short, the man was bothering me so much that I made the driver pull over and I switched seats with the young man in the front, even though the ride is only about 20 minutes and I was in a hurry. I usually don't let things like that get to me, but I realized that I wouldn't put up with that kind of treatment in the states, so why should I let it fly here? Last Saturday was Teacher's Day, and the other teachers at my school convinced me to stay in town for the festivities. I wasn't too excited about this because there had just been another teacher's party in honor of the director's son's wedding (they find every excuse for a party here, I swear) and it wasn't a lot of fun for me. There were two tables in two different rooms and I found myself sitting at the one with no English teachers, but with the young male teacher that all the women are trying to set me up with. It was a very long afternoon for me. They managed to get me to drink enough so that I participated in their little singing bowl game, and now that they have heard me sing, I am going to have to do it all the time. Great. However, the Teacher's Day party was great. All the teachers gathered together in the cafeteria, the grounds keeper-janitor guy cut up some brush from behind the outhouse and started a big fire on the playground, and a few moms cooked a ton of food on it. Beside the food, there were games and dancing, and a lot of toasts, which I usually hate, but for some reason it was really fun this time. It might have had something to do with the fact that this party happened to have wine in addition to vodka and cognac, and although Central Asian wine is really horrible and, according to custom, must be drunk in shots out of a tea cup, it is definitely preferable to vodka.

September 25, 2009

My six-month anniversary is fast approaching (I left the US on the March 28th, I believe). My language learning, which has been at a steady climb since I started has started to level off a bit without my tutor. I have been getting really lazy with my speaking (the side effect of having a really chatty host mom, I think), but I understand quite a bit. Now one of the teachers at my school has a plan to teach me one Russian word a day in exchange for one English word a day. Sounds like a good plan to me. Also, Peace Corps informed me that I could begin taking Uzbek lessons if I wanted to. Maybe I will take up that offer later, but right now I think learning two languages at once is enough, don't you? Anyway, my fake bazaar Uzbek has served me well so far, so I can just work on perfecting that.

School is still going well. It gets easier every day, but it is so different from American schools that I sometimes feel like I am on a different planet. Things that I would consider universal school practices completely baffle my students. I sprang a vocabulary quiz on my 10th graders, and the concept was completely foreign to them. The idea that copying work is bad is also completely foreign. Students do their classmates' work for them right in front of me and expect to be rewarded for their kindness, and are baffled when I scold them for it. I have yet to have a class where more than four students out of 25 have done their homework. I see this as a lack of interest and motivation, but this doesn't seem to be the case during the actual lesson. In all my classes, hands always shoot up into the air when I ask a question. Today I had my 10th graders write sentences about magazine pictures, and the ones that finished early asked if they could take another picture and write more sentences. It is all one big mystery to me.

Wednesday was a very mysterious day for me. It was National Kyrgyz Language Day, so there was an all-school assembly. There were a few soviet-style processions, and then some kids and teachers read poems and sang songs and there was some dancing. There was a group of kids who sang as a choir and did a choral reading. These kids, who I guess are part of some club or something, all wear these red scarves tied around their collars (the uniform requires a white collared shirt and black skirt or pants), but during their performance they had the scarf draped over their arm held in front of them like a waiter's towel. At some point in the assembly, someone called the teachers to do something and they shuffled me along with them while I asked what we were doing. One teacher just said something about “galstuk” (Russian for neck tie). It turns out that the teachers were supposed to tie the scarves around the kids' necks as part of the ceremony. I didn't get it at all. One of the performances in the assembly was a solo dance by a 4th grade girl. She did a belly dance routine complete with a fringe-y belly dancer outfit that is not age appropriate by American standards. I had seen this kind of dancing by little girls before during training, but I hadn't seen it in the south yet. It is very strange and makes me very uncomfortable. The old teacher next to me, who I had been chatting with in Kyrgyz, asked me if I liked the dancing, and I answered honestly, saying that she is a very good dancer, and American girls don't know how to dance like that. “But is it good?” she asked. “Yes, good,” I said. “Bad.” she said, and I could see she had set me up. She explained that it is ooyat (shameful), and good Kyrgyz girls should cover their bellies. I tried to ask why it is allowed in school if it is ooyat, but my Kyrgyz doesn't reach that far.

Now that I have been here for a while, I feel myself getting teased a lot more. The Kyrgyz sense of humor is completely beyond me, but then I think that my sense of humor is beyond everyone, so we are even. My host dad teases me the most. The other night he pulled a cooked sheep head out of nowhere (this was the third one in two weeks. I don't know where they keep coming from) while I was eating my soup, and carved it up. Cooked sheep heads are pretty gross looking anyway, but they are even worse when they are getting cut up. He wrenched off one of the ears and handed it across the table to me. I politely refused, but as usual, polite refusal doesn't work. Like always, I said I would taste it, so I did (barely) and put it aside. After a few minutes, he cut off the top lip and did the same. After that, he cut out the roof of the mouth and handed the wobbly flap of flesh over to me. I must have looked like I was going to puke, because he said, “tamasha!” (joke!) and took it back. He cut the piece of skin in half and handed part of it back to me. “This is the good part,” he said. I told a tiny white lie here and said that in my religion, we don't eat meat from the head. It was okay, because my host sister came by and devoured the whole pile in seconds.

August 30, 2009

I have another reason that I can't get married in Kyrgyzstan. In addition to not being able to cut carrots thin enough for ash, , not having pierced ears (they give earrings instead of rings to get engaged. The word for “to be engaged” literally means “to put on earrings) and making my real mother very sad, I can't get a joluk (headscarf) to stay on my head.

Today I won a nice pink paisley scarf for losing a footrace at a neighborhood get-together, and one woman made a big to-do about tying the scarf on my head, and then calling everyone over to feel how soft my hair is and how the scarf just slides off it. Thanks lady. Once the scarf was on, I asked “Do I look Kyrgyz?” Some people laughed, and one person said, “No, Russian.”

The race was part of the tradition that honors a baby taking his or her first steps. At my host niece's party only the little kids took part in the race. (Actually I got a kick out of how my host family was deciding who would run. The discussion was almost identical to the one that takes place almost every year with my real family at Easter, deciding who should participate in the egg hunt. At the end it was settled by Aijamal and me insisting that we really, really didn't want to run.) This party was much larger and included the whole street. The little kids ran first, and then the older girls were supposed to run. Again, I said I didn't want to participate, mostly because I knew they were giving out cash for prizes, and I didn't want them to press money on me. I asked if I could run with the married women, because I assumed that they wouldn't be given cash. In the end, I was dragged to the starting line with the girls, and it was a good thing too, because while we girls each got a scarf and some money (I refused to take it, but they stuffed 20 com into the waistband of my pants. Gotta love these people.) the married women got much bigger prizes. The winner got a big rug, and my apa, who came in next to last, got a more expensive scarf and 100 com. When the men ran, they all got kalpaks, and also things like new dress shirts, bottles of vodka, and pocket knives.

August 31, 2009

First of all an update on yesterday's post:

My hair was the topic of conversation again later yesterday afternoon. My Kyrgyz tutor was telling me about a new business that his family opened up. It is a Uiger medicine store (I hear about these Uiger people all the time, but I know absolutely nothing about them. No offense to them, but its another one of those words that sounds like it comes from Star Wars or Lord of the Rings) that sells natural Halal alternative medicines. My tutor was giving me a sales pitch, and suggested that I could take a medicine that would make my hair grow, since I have few hairs on my head. Nice of him to bring it up.

Anyway,

Today is a Kyrgyz holiday – Independence Day, I guess. Everyone in my house is celebrating by taking naps and watching movies. Nice. We went to a party last night and didn't get home until about 2 a.m., and my poor host mom and sister, who are still observing the fast, had to get up before dawn if they wanted to eat breakfast, so they deserve a nap.

I am getting better at cooking breakfast and lunch for myself in my family's kitchen. My savior is the egg. Eggs are a fabulous food, and they taste the same in any country. Without Apa breathing down my neck in the kitchen, I have been able to come up with some tasty creations, all with eggs, and usually adapting Kyrgyz recipes to my own tastes, like making this Kyrgyz French toast stuff and eating it with jam instead of salt (Apa has already told me she thinks this is very strange), or frying up some leftover ash with an egg and some onions and spicing it up with some hot sauce from home.

Here's a really awesome easy Kyrgyz recipe that is great even without alteration if you have some eggplants laying around (sadly they are out of season here. Too bad, because this was one of my favorite foods, and I have to wait until next year). All you do is dip round slices of eggplant in egg with a little salt and pepper and fry the slices in oil and slices of garlic. Then make a little sandwich with two slices of eggplant and a slice of tomato and some of the garlic in between. Yum! They are best when they are hot, but they are pretty good cold too.

September 1, 2009

Well, I survived the first day of school. At first I was terrified, but once I found out that the first day of school only consists of an all-school assembly followed by homeroom meetings and that I wouldn't be having any lessons, I was relieved. However, somehow it slipped everyone's mind that I was expected to give a speech in front of the whole school. The girl at the podium was making some announcements, and I was kind of tuning out like I usually do when people aren't speaking directly to me, but I picked “...volunteer from America...” out of the Kyrgyz (easy to do because “volunteer” and “America” sound about the same as they do in English. Makes my life a little easier. Just like how I send silent “thank you”s to my real parents all the time for being a “sekretariat” and an “ingeneer” who makes “traktor”s. I love cognates.). The English teacher beside me nudged me and told me I should go up to the microphone and make a speech. “What should I say?” I asked her a bit too angrily as I got up.

“You can congratulate them a happy holiday,” she answered.

“Uhh..., what's the holdiay?”

“It is the National Day of Education.” Her English is very good, but she speaks slowly, and I was already standing there kind of stupidly while the whole school waited for me to move up to the podium. There was some Enrique Englaisias music playing. My grand entrance music, you know. I asked her how to wish a happy holiday in Kyrgyz (luckily it is short) and I ran up to the podium, trying to figure out what else to say. In the end, it went something like this:

“Hello, now I am learning Kyrgyz, and lots I understand, but few words I can speak. For that reason, happy holiday! Okay, that's it.”

I have to say, I was pretty proud of myself for pulling out the present progressive tense and a phrase using “can” under such high-pressure circumstances. I sat back down and asked the teacher on the other side of me, who teaches Kyrgyz class, if I spoke correctly. She said yes, but I think she might have been just being nice.

Really, I just love translating Kyrgyz literally into English. Sometimes the phrases sound like they should have “Confucius says:” in front of them, and sometimes they sound completely idiotic. Like what my host sister said to me just a bit ago to call me to supper: “Walk. Food we eat.” While I was eating, I glanced at a celebrity gossip magazine laying around that had an article about Barack Obama. When my family is done with it, I want to snag it and make a project out of translating it literally into English. I have a feeling it will be very funny, since the information that I picked out of it so far is already ridiculously mundane, such as the fact that Barack is 187 centimeters tall and 7 centimeters taller than Michelle. Wow.

Ugg, I just tried again to wash the fish smell out of my hands from dinner and was unsuccessful. Ata brought home a big smoked fish as a treat (yesterday's treat was roasted horse meat, which was actually delicious!) and the way my family dug into it was a little bit disgusting to me. I don't want to be a snob, but sometimes I wish that my family wouldn't eat things like cavemen. The fish itself wasn't all that bad, but it was so salty it made my eyes water. I set myself up for eating a big chunk though, because when Ata asked if I like fish, I said that I really, really like fish in America, but I haven't had good fish in Kyrgyzstan. He said that he got a really good fish today, and brought out the salty smoked thing. Bleh. I bet Apa will expect me to eat some for breakfast tomorrow, too.

September 3, 2009

Teaching is hard.

Yesterday, I taught all six periods of the school day from 8:30-1:30. They kind of figure out schedules as they go, I gather, so this will not be the norm. It looks like I will end up teaching four periods a day Monday-Friday – much more manageable. But now the assistant director, who is making the schedule, is concerned that it will still be too much for me if I am doing clubs too, but I think it will be okay, as long as I schedule myself a nice break to go home and eat lunch.

Damn it! I just had to chase a chicken out of my room AGAIN, and stepped on a fresh present it left me on the rug in the process. As much as I love having fresh eggs all the time, I HATE chickens.

Anyway, back to school. We (me and my counterpart teacher) started out by giving the kids Anglo-American names. I was going to have them pick for themselves, but the names they came up with were along the lines of Beyonce and Madonna. So, I wrote up a bunch of names on cards and had them draw them out of a hat. It went pretty well, but I never realized how much irregular spelling goes on in English names. I know that more than a few were confused with the pronunciation of their names. One poor girl's real name is Kanekei, and was given the name Christina. The students all wrote their real names on the back of their English name cards, and Kanekei/Christina made a valiant effort to spell hers out in Latin letters like this: Ka Chanekei. Why didn't I just do Kristina and leave it at that? No one would ever know that one spelling is more common than the other.

Its fun for the kids, and it works out for me, too, since Kyrgyz names can be ridiculously difficult. And it seems like if there are easy names, like Eliza or Muhammad, there happen to be two or three in one class, which makes things difficult anyway. I think I did a pretty good job of eliminating doubles, but I had to rack my brains to come up with the huge list I came up with.

Again, my ego is swelling at an enormous rate, since everyone wants to be in my classes. It was also encouraging (but also a bit annoying) to hear the kids who had been in my summer club show off everything they learned to their classmates and also imitate my Audra-isms, complete with my tone of voice: “Okay,” “Hey, guys”(when trying to get attention), and “Oh my gosh!” (Although I am still dismayed that they didn't catch on to “what's up.”) One boy in the seventh grade who I have never met before gave me an apple and won my instant affection, which is, I suppose what he was going for with it.

In a closing note: I have been listening to my itunes on shuffle and it just came across the Urinetown soundtrack. You know, for some reason, I don't find it quite as funny as I used to, now that I don't have access to plumbing. Its a shame.

Later:

I just got finished eating supper, and I was reminded that I need to sing the praises of this new food that I have just discovered. It is probably the strangest food I have ever seen, and against all my expectations it turned out to be delicious(all other weird Kyrgyz foods have turned out to be as disgusting as they should be. Salty yogurt balls and fermented horse milk. Ick). This food is so strange that I don't think that I can properly describe it with words, but I will take on the challenge. When I first saw it, it looked like a square block of damp cement or wet gray sand on a plate. Apa ordered me to eat it, and I was scared that it might be some kind of meat pate or something like that, so I asked what it was. She said a word I somewhat recognized but couldn't place, so I had no choice but to just taste it. Pulling a piece away, I realized that the texture of it was something like cedar mulch, but it was a little bit sticky like sugar. As soon as I tasted it, I remembered what the word was: sunflower. The gray stuff tasted like sunflower seeds and sugar, and Apa informed me that the food is made with sunflower, sugar, and oil or butter or fat (it is all the same word and it drives me nuts), but I have no idea how it works. The texture is so strange, and once you chew it, it kind of melts and then gets hard on you teeth like a Butterfinger. So strange! It’s like space food.

August 26, 2009

September and the first day of school are quickly approaching and I am terrified. Still, I am doing my best to enjoy the last few days of summer. The sun is still really hot, but there have been some nice breezes in the last few days that make my daily treks to school for teacher meetings enjoyable. The walks have also been more interesting and even slightly treacherous as the street is all but covered with dry harvested sunflowers. The dead brown flowers are piled in huge heaps every few yards on either side of the street, somehow reminding me of the aftermath of a mass genocide (I know its morbid, but that is seriously what went through my head). The harvested seeds lay spread out on the edges of the pavement in perfect rectangles neatly lined by stones, and the heads of the flowers spill all the way into the middle of the street so that cars have to weave around the flowers and seeds like an obstacle course. A few houses have also laid out their homemade mud bricks to dry on the street, and I would hate to see a car weave around a sunflower pile to crash into a pile of bricks.

It is strange to be really busy again. I have been lesson planning all day today, and yesterday I spent several hours on it too, in addition to having a Kyrgyz lesson and helping my host mom and sister do yet more canning (salad this time). I was apparently an essential part of this process because Apa and Aijamal are observing Ramadan (locally called Orozo) which started on Friday. They needed me to taste the salad to make sure it had enough salt, and they couldn't do it without breaking their fast. I told them I didn't know how salty it was supposed to be, since I had never made canned salad before, so they had to call over a neighbor anyway.

I don't know how they are doing this fast. I would have to cheat for sure. It is too darn hot and the days are still really long. They pretty much sleep all day, but still. My host dad isn't fasting because he works at a hospital and needs to keep his energy up all day. I am glad, because I would feel really guilty if I was the only one in the house not fasting. At dinner time we all sit down together and Apa tells me and Ata to eat, but she and Aijamal wait the five minutes, or whatever, until they get the official go-ahead from TV that it is sunset. The TV station shows some footage of Mecca and some Kyrgyz imam in a kalpak says some stuff and then we all omen together. I didn't do it the first time because I figured this was a Muslim thing, and being as I am neither Muslim nor understand a word of what the imam said, I probably shouldn't participate in the prayer, but Apa and Ata gave me the stink eye, so I did it. Whatever, a little extra prayer never hurt anyone, and it is nice that they want me to participate in their family activities.

So, back to me being terrified about school starting. Right now, I am more or less fuming with frustration. I am sorry to say that I expected a lot more out of my counterpart. She had been telling me about all of these conferences and teacher trainings that she attended where she learned new and innovative teaching strategies. I had assumed that I could learn a lot from her about teaching. Yesterday I had to confront her directly about the specific form her lessons usually take (she has been skirting around the topic all summer) and I almost screamed when she told me the answer. She typically writes a text on the board, the students copy it down and note the new words, and then the next day they read aloud the text or recite sections by heart. When I asked how she teaches grammar, she said that she assigns exercises once or twice a month. That is it.

I hoped that we might have had a misunderstanding, so we moved on to lesson planning. She asked me if I had prepared topics for the first two quarters. I said no, because I don't know the level of the students and I also don't know the required curriculum. I suggested that we start out all grades with a review of the basics: alphabet, numbers, greetings, simple present tense, etc. and go from there. She seemed confused, and then I realized why when she showed me last year's calendar of “topics” along with the books that they came from.

The books are absolutely horrible. The problem isn't only that they are old and made up almost entirely of Communist propaganda, but they don't teach anything. There is no explanation of grammar and very few exercises. It is all just short texts with a few translated vocabulary words. The list of “topics” looks something like this: 1. “Knowledge is Power” 2. A.S. Pushkin 3. Anna Rodinova 4. Kyrgyz Folklore 5. Jack London 6. “John Reed: Champion of the Russian Revolution” 7. “For Peace and No Alcohol” 8. “The Moscow International Book Fair” 9. “The Future Belongs to the Youth” 10. “Golden Rules of Etiquette for Children” okay, you get the idea. Do you see any pattern at all? Neither did I. If you continue on, you will find some more Russian authors and poets and a lot of English-sounding names that I have never heard of. Why would Kyrgyz students read about Russian authors in an English class? That's what their Russian literature classes are for. And aren't there enough authors in the English language that they don't have to pick out ones so obscure that a British lit. buff like me hasn't even heard of them?

What is really sad is that these are the good “topics.” Thank God they skipped over the ones in the book like “V.I. Lenin Visits the Orphanage,” or “My Mother is a Member of the Communist Party.” I'm not even kidding you, that is straight from the book. I really need to make a copy of the “Lenin Visits the Orphanage” story. It was the first page I saw when I looked at the books I was going to be using back in June, so it has a special place in my heart.

I hope that all this work I have been doing has not been setting me up to getting taken advantage of. I hate that they are looking at me like I am the expert, but I can't deny that my ideas for teaching must be better than theirs, even though I have virtually no experience. My fear is that the students might be going from getting Russian imperialistic bullshit fed to them from those textbooks to getting American imperialistic bullshit from me. I can only teach what I know, so there is going to be a lot about America in my lessons, and at this point I can't help but believe that I have better teaching methods than the local teachers. So, am I really any better than the Soviets and their atrocious textbooks? Or am I creating a moral dilemma out of nothing? For those of you who like philosophical problems, this would be a good time to use the comments option on the blog. A little discussion might be nice.

August 28, 2009

I'm still terrified about the start of school, but I am beginning to feel better because I decorated my classroom yesterday. It now has a tiny bit of color and at now at least there are a few items in the room that don't pre-date the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Thanks to Ramadan, I am finally getting into the kind of eating routine I initially wanted to get into. Apa is finally letting me fry my own eggs or whatever else for my own lunch. I'm going to try to keep this up because it is working out well for me. Ramadan has also started some interesting conversations with my family about religion. We can't get very far because of the limits of our language, but it is still very interesting. My host dad was trying to make some sort of comparison between Mecca and what he called “Square Time” (Times Square. Remember, he went to America), but I didn't get it. I think it is interesting that several Kyrgyz people who speak a little English have asked me (upon learning that I am Christian) “We Muslims believe in God, who do you believe in?” I find it hard to believe that they don't know enough about Christianity to know that we have the same God, but nevertheless, it is interesting that they ask. Once in Osh, I had a conversation with an English-speaking girl at the pool that went something like this: “We are Musilm. Do you like Muslims? What religion are you? Vegetarian?”

Last night I had a dream that I was walking around in Uzgen when I came upon a Burger King sign. I reminded myself not to get too excited, because there is a Burger King sign in Osh in front of a Kyrgyz gamburger stand (a gamburger doesn't even slightly resemble a Burger King burger). When I got closer, I realized that there was actually a Burger King building behind the sign, but when I got up to the door, it was boarded up. In my dream, I moped away, but around the corner, there was a McDonald's. This time, the door was open and the lights were on. I ran inside, but I was fooled again. It was only a Kyrgyz store that smelled like a Kyrgyz store: stinky fish and greasy kielbasa. I bought some yogurt and woke up.

Now I am eating some yogurt that I bought yesterday at the Kyrgyz store in the center of my village. It tastes like greasy kielbasa because it was sitting next to it in the fridge at the store. Yuck.

Hey all,

I am in Osh this week, which means internet access, so I just wanted to share a quick cute story with you while I was thinking about it.

One day in the village, my Kyrgyz tutor was teaching me some new vocabulary for things around the house. He taught me one word that he didn't know in English, and he drew a horseshoe and told me it was something for a horse. When I told him the English word, he was like, "Wait. Horse shoe?? Like a shoe for a horse?" And he cracked up, saying that was the most ridiculous image he had ever thought of. It is so funny how we would never think that this is something funny, but I guess picturing a horse wearing people shoes is kind of silly.

Anyway, I told him he couldn't talk, because the Kyrgyz word for stomach, "ash kazan," literally means "food pot." So there.

August 6, 2009

I know its cliché, but seriously, be careful what you wish for. I was talking to my real family the other day while they were on vacation, just leaving Custer State Park, I think, and I was lamenting the fact that I never see wildlife around here, except for some pigeons, sparrows, and frogs. I miss seeing squirrels and deer and such. Well, I jinxed myself, because yesterday I saw a five-foot snake. IN THE HOUSE.

I have never been one to be terribly afraid of snakes. I can remember catching little ones and stuffing them into my bug barn when I was little, but this one terrified me. Probably because it was about as thick as my arm.

I was sitting out on the front steps of my house, reading, when some movement just inside my front door caught my eye, and I had to take a double take before I believed what I saw. I wish I would have thought ahead and sat still and let it go ahead out the door, but no, I had to jump up and scare it back into the house. I was glad that I managed to hop over it and close the door that separates the entryway from the rest of the main floor of the house.

It started to slither through a little crack into a Harry Potter-style cupboard under the stairs, and I had the genius idea to just grab it by the tail and drag it outside, but I got scared when it started making angry hisses, and I let go. I immediately started hauling stuff out of the cupboard to grab the snake before it found another crack to slide through, but then I remembered an urban legend that someone told me a few days ago about a taxi going up to Bishkek from Osh. It is about a 10 hour drive, and at some point, they stopped to get some food. Every passenger drank a lot of kymys and then fell asleep for the last leg of the drive. The driver got to Bishkek and tried to wake everyone up, but they were all dead. A poisonous snake had fallen into the sack of kymys as it was fermenting (they hang the sack from the smoke hole of the yurt) and died there, poisoning the drink.

Now, I didn't think much of the story at the time. It sounds like a myth to me, and I can't stand kymys anyway, no matter how many times people tell me it is good for my health. But as I was rooting through the winter boots and whatever else was stuffed in the cupboard, I wondered for the first time if the snake might be poisonous. Even if the story was false, it mentioned a poisonous snake that came in through the roof of the yurt, and this snake probably came from the roof of the house, since at the top of the stairs in the entryway there is an attic open to the roof. If I had been in Midwestern America, I would have figured, “well, it doesn't have a rattle on its tail, so it is probably ok,” but who knows what poisonous snakes look like in Central Asia? I'm not the Crocodile Hunter. So I got my host sister, and she was scared just at the mention of a snake, so she ran down the road and came back with a nice teenage boy with a sweater to tie around his neck (perfect! A Soc to go with my Greasers. Sorry, I don't think I have explained that. Read on, I'll get to it) with the very masculine name of Jodi (or at least that is what it sounds like when I try to say it).

Anyway, Jodi took over and grabbed the hoe I had been chasing after the snake with, and I ran away. He rummaged for a while, then came out with a coiled up extension cord, “is this what American snakes look like?” he teased.

“No, it is there! I saw it go inside!” I insisted, but I could tell he didn't believe me.

After a few minutes of more rummaging, he said something I didn't recognize, but could probably be translated to something like “Holy Shit!”

I forgot my squeamishness for a minute to go in and gloat in my infantile Kyrgyz, “hahaha, now you see. Isn't it big? I said it was big. I grabbed it, before, it runs and I caught it but then I am scared, so I don't catch it and it runs. What you do now?”

Jodi motioned for me to shut up and watch the snake, which had coiled itself up in the farthest, tightest corner of the storage space. He came back with a long stick and proceeded to poke and prod the animal, which started again to make the loud angry hisses and scared me back out the door. I guess I had expected Jodi to coax the huge snake back out the door into the garden, so I arranged myself to let the snake pass by me, but then I heard some commotion, and some banging around, and Jodi called out to me that it was dead, and I should come see it.

Well, it was indeed dead. I don't know how he did it, but Jodi had managed to behead the snake quite neatly with the hoe. He then grabbed the body and flung it outside on the steps, where a crowd of boys began to form, and we all waited for it to stop slithering around. Ick. Jodi asked me if I wanted to eat it, and I told him no thank you he could eat it himself, and he said he would, but I know he just threw the snake away. It was so big that when he took it away, he had to hold the tail up over his head so that the headless end wouldn't drag on the ground. Ugh, I can't believe it was in the house. Here I have been spending all my time worrying about tiny scorpions that I've heard hide in your shoes and stuff, and there is a snake as tall as me just hanging out in the house. I am just glad that I don't sleep on the floor like my host siblings do. Not that a five-foot snake would have any problem getting into my bed if it wanted to.

Ok, so enough of that. Now to explain the other story.

So, I think Kyrgyz names are kind of tricky. There are still quite a few people I see everyday whose names I can never remember, and I figure that asking any more than three times just makes me look like an idiot. Most of these people have made-up names that I only say in my head, that at least help me remember what family they belong to, or whatever else. Most of them are uninteresting, such as The Neighbor Who Drives a Lada, or Nargiza's Sister Who Has The Baby With Shoes That Go Squeak-Squeak. One boy who is about 8 or 9 wears these ridiculous round sunglasses that have earned him the name John Lennon in my head. He is kind of the ringleader for a gang of four little boys, so of course they will always be The Beatles. There is a group of three older boys (jigits in Kyrgyz) that hang out at the end of our street around the time it gets dark, just trying to look cool. I have also seen them pick some fights down by the river (jigits picking fights is an annoyingly common occurrence). These I named the Greasers, after the book “The Outsiders.”

Later:

Yay, my door is finally fixed! Like I had been trying to tell Apa, the job was much more complicated than just replacing the broken door knob. The guy had to take a hand plane to the inside corner on the hinge side and shave off a lot of wood so that the door fit the frame. I am so glad that it has been taken care of, especially after the snake incident, because who knows what other critters could sneak in through my open door?

But that is not even the best part of today. I told Apa I was thinking of buying an armchair for my room, and there was one in the Uzgen bazaar that I had my eye on and was totally affordable, but I needed Apa's help in arranging how to get it home. She told me not to buy one because she had a chair she could give me for my room, I just had to wait for the next time my host brother was home so he could bring it down from the attic for me. For some reason, I assumed that it was a chair to match the couch and other chair that sit around unused in the big dining room next to my room. I wasn't too excited about this because it isn't a very comfortable set, but I figured it I could put some cushions on it or something. Anyway, I was way wrong. The “chair” is a seat from a car. How ghetto is that? I am pretty excited about it. It is an excellent addition to all of the wonderful mismatched-ness of my room. I can't decide whether I want to leave it as is, or get some obnoxious fabric to drape over it.

Oh, and I just got back from swimming in the river, and another snake was spotted there by some boys. I asked some people if the snakes around here bite, and the general consensus was that they might, but there really aren't that many snakes around, so don't worry about it. What the heck! Not that many snakes? There's one right there, and there was a freaking anaconda in my house only yesterday! Sure, there aren't many snakes around here compared to the reptile house in a zoo, but come on. But I guess it is a comfort to know that the monster that paid a visit yesterday was a freak occurrence. Maybe we should have kept it in a giant bug barn to show it off instead of killing it.

July 24, 2009

Wow, it is really hot out. I went to the Uzgen bazaar today with my family, and we all came home and crashed on the floor in the (thankfully) cool living room. The electricity was out so we didn't even watch tv, we just laid there for a while until Apa provided me with motivation to get up by mentioning that there was cold orange juice in the refrigerator.

Last night, Apa asked me if I would have club this morning. I thought this was a strange question, as she knows my schedule pretty well and had just been included in a conversation with her sister-in-law who had asked the club schedule so that she could send her kids. I said yes, and she made a face like she wasn't happy about something and said, “ok, we'll talk tomorrow.” This morning, she asked me again if I was going to school. She said she was going to Uzgen, and I said that's fine, I have food to eat for lunch, I'll see you later. Then she basically ordered me not to go to club, and to change my clothes, because I am going with. I didn't really have a choice. We ended up leaving about the same time I usually leave for school. All the neighbor kids came running to walk with me, and my sister had to tell them that there is no club today. They all gave me sad faces, and I felt really bad, but I figured this trip to Uzgen must be pretty important to Apa.

I guess I was dragged along in order to be another pair of hands to carry bags. This is when I realize how wonderful the invention of the shopping cart is. A string bag full of potatoes and carrots is really heavy. Still, I can't complain, as I find bazaar shopping with Apa to be a fascinating experience.

A side note: ordering a dish that sounds familiar may not always yield familiar results. At a cafe for lunch, I asked Apa and my sister to pick out something new for me to try. Apa ordered three portions of what sounded to me like “beefstroganov.” “Oh, beef stroganov!” I said. “We have this in America. I like this food!” And then I tried to remember if I actually do like beef stroganov.

As it turns out, it didn't really matter if I like beef stroganov or not, since the plate I was given contained neither noodles nor (go figure) beef. Upon glancing at the menu again, I realized that I had heard wrong, and the dish that I was eating was actually written as Бистрогонов (bistroganov) although it was listed underneath Бифштекс(beefshtiks), a that actually is beef, and the closest you can get to a hamburger (albeit a bun-less hamburger) in this part of the oblast. And the beef is not in sticks (or shtiks): I guess it is just a russianization (or is the term “russification”? Probably) of the word “beef steak.” I'm not in love with beefshtiks, but I really just like saying it. Go on, try it: beefshtiks beefshtiks beefshtiks!

By the way, the first item on the menu was also familiar: gulash. Sometimes it is difficult to spot these familiar words through the Russian letters, but it is all the more gratifying once you decipher it. However, I am pretty sure I don't want to try the Kyrgyz version of gulash.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, it turns out that bistroganov was quite tasty. Basically it was some meat (sheep) in a tomato-y sauce, poured over some awesome steak fries.

Since I skipped club, I decided to also skip my Kyrgyz lesson, even though I was home in time. The lessons are good and helpful, but they fry my brain. It reminds me of training. My tutor is making me realize that I have severely underestimated the complexity of the Kyrgyz language. I really should stick to just learn the grammar that is needed for me to be understood on a basic level, but I find the really weird extra stuff so interesting. For example, I was practicing a sentence during my lesson, just using simple present tense and talking about the things I typically do in a day. My tutor interrupted me and said “Now, when you peel potatoes and carrots, do you do it by yourself or with your host mother or sister?” I thought he was prompting me for another sentence, but it turns out that the verb is conjugated differently depending on whether you are doing it by yourself or as a group. I think that is absolutely wild! But then, I am also obsessed with the word “beefshtiks.”

My tutor is doing an excellent job, and I am so fortunate to have him around. It is really nice to know that he is around and willing to help with a communication problem (every time I talk to him he asks me if I am “experiencing any defects with your new family?), especially because my counterpart (who is the person who is really supposed to be helping me out if I need it, the problem is that I have just as much difficulty communicating with her sometimes) is in Bishkek until mid August. No big deal for me because I don't see her very often anyway, but when she told me she was going I felt kind of ditched. Still, it is a great opportunity for her. She apparently won a contest put on by a new local tv station going in in the village, and she will be hosting some show part time. The training is in Bishkek, so that's where she is now.

Yesterday was an interesting day for me. Mostly interesting because it was remarkably uninteresting. The night before yesterday at around 9 I was just chilling in my room, reading a book, waiting to be summoned for supper, when Apa came in and told me to change my clothes because we were going to grandma's house (Kyrgyz people have their home clothes and their going somewhere clothes, a habit I quickly picked up on). I figured I was going to be in for a long night of guesting, but I was wrong. It was starting to get dark, so although the house isn't far (right across the street from my school, actually) the man who drives extended family around a lot (I haven't figured out the relationship with this guy actually. Is he like the chauffeur, or what?) drove us there. I got in the backseat and had to wait a few minutes for the rest of the family to come out. The driver is always really nice to me, but he doesn't talk a lot, which is fine with me. I offered my polite greeting routine and then we both sat in silence for a moment. The moment didn't last long, as I felt a strong kick in the back of my seat and heard a groan coming from the trunk. I gave a little yelp of surprise, and the driver glanced back at me through the rear-view mirror and said, “sheep.” Oh.

So my family (and the sheep) made our way up to my host dad's mother's house, a large compound where a ridiculous amount of aunts, uncles, and cousins live. Inside the main room of the house, which was at the moment devoid of all furniture, the old woman sad on a pile of cushions against the center of the wall opposite the door as if she was holding court over her offspring and their spouses who all stood awkwardly around her. I got in line with my family to give her the obligatory kisses on both cheeks.

She introduced herself to me one day at school when no one else was around. I was sitting on a bench outside, waiting for a teacher who was supposed to meet me, when I saw this old, hunched over woman hobbling over with the help of a cane. She called out out my name like a question (we hadn't seen each other before) so I hurried over to meet her. “Yes, I'm Audra,” I said, holding out my hand (hand shaking is really, really big here). To my surprise, she gripped my hand and yanked me in with amazing force for a smacking kiss on each cheek. “My daughter!” she said, “I am your Chong Ene!” (the southern Kyrgyz word for “grandmother.”) She is an awesome woman. I love her.

Anyway we were there so that the men could kill the sheep that was in the trunk in preparation for the next day, which was to be a joint celebration of the presidential election and the anniversary of the death of Chong Ene's husband. I made myself useful by babysitting inside the house, glad to be given a task and not the option of witnessing the slaughter of the animal that had been groaning in the trunk a few minutes earlier (what a horrible way to spend your last hour on earth).

We only ended up staying for about a little over an hour, and didn't eat, like I thought we would, except for the “osti,” which is the obligatory nibble of bread you must take when you visit someone's house. When we finally got home and ate dinner, it was past 11. I can't get used to this schedule.

The next morning, I got rolled out of bed to head back to Chong Ene's house, where I spent a very boring day. I wasn't really invited to be involved in either the prayer part of the day (I always want to call it a “death day party”) or the food preparation, so I just did the babysitting thing again, which was more difficult this time since the kids were just as bored as I was. It was too hot to play outside, even for the little kids, and all that was on tv was election stuff. I was glad that I had the foresight to stick my UNO game in my purse. I kind of wanted to know what was going on across the street at my school which was a voting station. There was a lot of loud music being played over there, so I wondered if there was a party of something, but I am technically supposed to avoid political stuff, and I wouldn't have wanted to check it out by myself anyway. Well, I got to eat a lot of good food, so I guess that's good.

(Later...)

I just got back into my room after supper (I helped Apa make stuffed sweet peppers, and it was amazing! It was similar to the rice and meat filling that is in Farah's dolmas, though not quite as flavorful.). I had turned out the lights in the big house before supper, and as it was now about 11 p.m., it was very dark in the house. Instead of turning on the light in the hall, I made my way through the dark entry way to get to my room. Every time I walk around the big old creaky house in the dark, I think about how this is the perfect setup for a horror movie. As I pushed aside the curtain that covered my doorway and reached around the corner to turn on the light, I heard a sniffle, and could kind of make out a person-sized shape standing up from crouching on the floor.

I freaked out a little bit. Okay, a lot, but only for a split second, because as soon as I switched the light on, there, sitting in the middle of the floor, his tail thumping on the carpet, was my host family's big lug of a dog, Churon. I have quickly become Churon's favorite person, as I have a tendency to not finish my plate of sheep fat and gristle, and I am the only person I have seen who pets him. Actually, I have only just now managed to remember his name (I don't know why it was so difficult, it seems like a simple name to me now) and had been calling him Marmaduke. Since I've gotten the name right, he loves me even more, and when he is not tied up, he follows me around everywhere. I wouldn't mind this in the least if he were an American dog, but he is not, and is probably infested with fleas and ticks. Yuck. He isn't even supposed to be in the house, but Apa and I have made an exception and allowed him to sleep in the entryway sometimes during the day. He is surprisingly obedient, but the temptation of doorways covered only with lace curtains must have gotten to him. He knew he was guilty, so he ran outside right away, and I didn't have to try to wrestle him out like I do sometimes. When he stands on all fours, his head comes up to my chest, and he probably weighs about as much as I do, so it is kind of tricky. I usually have to get some food for him. I am just so glad that he is a nice dog and not like my training family's three little terrors. I don't know why I was always so scared of little Rex, the smallest and most ferocious of the three. Churon could eat him in one bite.

August 2, 2009

I don't think I will ever be able to adapt to the Kyrgyz concept of time. I left home for Osh on Monday morning, expecting to be back home on Tuesday afternoon. It is now 6 o'clock on Sunday, and I just got home.

It would have been nice if my sister had warned me that we would be staying for a week, or maybe she just assumed I knew the typical Kyrgyz visiting policy. I had done my best to pack light, but light packing with one day in mind does not quite stretch for a week. This resulted in me wearing the same outfit all week and washing the shirt twice (it was a hot week) and being generally pissed that I didn't think to bring my dictionary or more money (I had to borrow from other volunteers. I hate borrowing).

Not that it wasn't a good week. It was a really good bonding experience for me and my sister, and it was nice to get away from the village for a bit. We really spent most of our time either at the pool down the road from the apartment we were staying at, or just sprawling on the floor watching American and Russian music videos, sappy Uzbek romance movies, and way too many episodes of this really bad Brazilian soap opera dubbed in Russian. It was probably the first time in my life where I just sat around doing nothing for an entire week and didn't feel guilty about it. Our lovely hostess, who I guess is my host sister's cousin's new wife, is a university student so she has the summer off. She is definitely a no-fuss housewife who made ramen noodles instead of complicated Kyrgyz dishes and spent the rest of her time laying around with us, even skipping the trips to the pool to watch more tv and sleep.

On Wednesday it was cloudy and breezy, so we climbed Suiliman Too (Soloman's Mountain), Osh's pride and joy and a very popular pilgrimage site for Musilms. To be honest, I am kind of getting sick of hearing about it, and I am mostly glad that I went to see it so that I don't have to hear the gasps of horror when I tell people that I have visited Osh several times without climbing the mountain. Maybe I have to be Muslim or really spiritual or something to really appreciate the mountain like Oshians do, but at least I could admire the view of the city from the top. And the museum was interesting, if a little sad and worn.

I spent Friday with some volunteers, came back yesterday to meet my sister and hoped to go home with her, but no luck there. We went for a long walk around the neighborhood with some new friends we met at the pool one day and they invited us for a tour of the city on Monday or Tuesday. I said I didn't think we would stay that long, but to my horror, my sister agreed. Turns out, she was just being Kyrgyz—they don't like to turn down invitations on the spot, so they agree and then make an excuse later. I think it is very annoying, and even more so that I have found myself doing it lately. Turns out Kyrgyz people don't like to hear other people turn down their invitations either, and often the invitations are empty anyway and they expect you to refuse later. What a joke.

Anyway, the apartment was really nice, even though the only furniture they had was a tv stand and a table. Kyrgyz people seem to have something of an aversion to furniture. Even when they have it, they hardly ever use it. The outside was a little dreary. If you walk for a ways down the road, there is a nice little park-type area with some nice and expensive-looking restaurants (one was called “Manhattan” and I wondered if they had American food. They don't.) and a small bazaar that was so convenient (shopping for anything requires such planning in the village). Even more convenient was that women would walk around in between apartment buildings yelling (in Kyrgyz) “peaches!”, “milk!”, “manti!” or whatever they were selling out of their baskets tied up in tablecloths that they were lugging around. I love this about city living! But I have to say that walking around in between the buildings was a tad depressing. It was just too many identical square, gray, Soviet buildings for one area. In the middle of the cluster of buildings there is the rusty remains of a playground, but it is the typical kind that I have seen all over Kyrgyzstan in various levels of disrepair. I would like to know what the Soviets expected kids to do on these playgrounds. Pull-ups during recess, perhaps?

Speaking of strange Soviet things (the country is full of them) I saw an interesting news segment the other day. It was in Russian, but I think I got the gist. The reporter was on a tour of an old Soviet fallout shelter somewhere in Central Asia. The segment was lighthearted, with the reporter laughing as she tried on old gas masks and such, but I don't know why she wasn't terrified. The whole place looked like something from a nightmare. Not only that, but the place was huge! I wish I could have understood what they were saying, but I was at least able to see that there were definitely intentions to accommodate a lot of people for a really long time. The scariest part was the tour of the shelter's weight room and a firing range. The lighting and the whole look of the place was so eerie I thought I might have nightmares. Even though there were several Kyrgyz people in the room, no one but me seemed to be paying attention, and when I asked if someone could translate what they were saying into Kyrgyz so I could understand, they were like, “this isn't interesting,” and changed the channel.

When we first got to Osh, we went guesting at the home of my host dad's sister, only about a 20 minute walk from our apartment and, ironically, just off Karl Marx street. The place was a mansion! I throw around that word a lot in jest because so many Kyrgyz homes are very large and are often made of many separate houses in one complex. But this was a mansion by American standards. The main house was very much a tv show house setup, and the decorating scheme was a very Western matchy-matchy beige and light green job, not at all what I have seen in most houses with mismatched rugs, wall hangings, and curtains. There was a big screened tv in the living room and I could hear another tv going in a bedroom upstairs. They had a piano in the dining room, the first piano I have seen in a house in country.

While we were eating lunch, the mother called her son on the phone, scolded him for still sleeping, and told him to come meet the American girl and speak English to her. Since she used the phone to call him, I thought he must live somewhere else, but he was just in another part of the house. Yeah, its that big. He conveniently stumbled in without a shirt, probably expecting to show off for an American girl cut more from the Jessica Alba mold. Too bad. He gave me a tour of the house, which included a bigger living room with another big screen tv, a small collection of antique brass ware, and a kangaroo pelt draped over the couch. There was also a pet eagle tied up in the front yard, and really expensive-looking SUV in the garage belonging to the father (my guide was quick to tell me that his own car—a Mercedes—was being borrowed by his father that day). The craziest part was the last stop on the tour. It was a separate building containing, get this: an indoor pool! And a sauna and a shower. I know, right? In Kyrgyzstan! I wasn't able to understand what the dad does for a living. Probably he's a drug lord or something. Just kidding. But really....

Hi all, I have been spending the week in Osh with my host sister, staying at the apartment of some relatives. It has been a nice change of pace from doing English clubs and such. I thought I would only be here for a day, but I ended up just staying here because there is a PC conference tomorrow. Running water is great! And so are the public pools that we have been going to a lot, even though they are not chlorintated (spelling?) and I have probably picked up some skin diseases. But what can you do to beat the heat?

Yesterday it was cloudy and breezy so we climed Suliman Too (Soloman's Mountain), a place where a lot of Muslims make pilgrimiges. It was very nice. There was an archeological museum there too that was interesting, if a little bit creepy. There were a lot of really bad examples of taxidermy.

Anyway, more on this later when I have my own computer and can spend some time writing.

July 19, 2009

Wow, am I lucky. What I thought was going to turn into a seriously unpleasant stomach illness was cleared up within hours of taking the first dose of antibiotics. The worst of it was the funny noises coming from my insides. Not so bad. Although I am feeling a little queasy after the supper I just ate. Apa pressured me into trying kymyz again, even though she saw me almost gag when I tried it a few days ago. And all I had to wash it down with was some of the famous natural gassy mineral water from Kara-Shoro, which I also don't like. For the first time since I have come to this country, I started to feel like a picky eater. But I don't think not liking these two things is unreasonable. They are simply nasty tasting.

After she watched me gag down the one sip I agreed to take of each beverage and was finally satisfied, she went to the refrigerator and came back to hand me a leg bone the size of my arm in a manner that made me feel like I should be stepping up to bat, rather than enjoying a meal. I think she took the look of amusement on my face as indication that I love chewing cold, gamy meat off of huge bones. And really, if I can get at the good parts, it is not so bad, and it keeps Apa happy, so I guess it is all for the best.

July 21, 2009

Boredom is beginning to set in. Whereas I used to fill up my downtime with walks into the center of the village (a good time waster as it takes a good half hour even if I don't stop to talk to people, which I usually do) to just get an ice cream cone or a half kilo of apricots or something, it is just too hot to be out in the sun when you don't absolutely need to be. I did actually need to go to the post office yesterday to pick up some mail, and my host sister was horrified that I had made the walk there and back. An ice cream bar on the walk home was probably my salvation. Today I think I will brave the heat and taxi it to Uzgen to use the internet and maybe attempt to send out some mail (we'll see). A trip to Uzgen in the heat will probably just make me feel like a wimp, as I will have to look at all those women in burquas and wonder how they are surviving. I don't think they can even take advantage of the numerous ice cream places (which I will definitely hit up while I am there). Unless there is some trick to eating an ice cream cone that I don't know about.

Anyway, I have been doing a lot of lounging around in a sleeveless sundress that I stole from a volunteer that is leaving. Shoot. I should probably put on some sleeves before leaving the house. I read, listen to music, watch movies in English on my computer or in Russian on TV with my host sister (yesterday I actually watched Free Willy on TV with my 22-year-old host brother). I also write lesson plans for my clubs, but it is kind of pointless since I usually end up changing the plan completely. I feel like a lazy bum. I am learning a few house-keeping skills from Apa, like making jam. Last week, we made a ridiculously huge amount of apricot jam, and then moved onto cherry jam. This is a good skill to know, I suppose, except for that I only know how to make the jam using huge gallon canning jars (we filled up six with apricots and six with cherries!) and two huge kazans (iron cauldron things) over a fire stove: one for cooking the jam, and one with boiling water for sealing the huge jars. It was quite an interesting process, and not really as much work as I thought it might be, since the apricots were just washed and halved and the cherries weren't even pitted (watch your teeth). Yum, love Kyrgyz jam. So tasty.

July 17, 2009

Hooray for discovering new friends that speak English! A cousin is staying with my host family now, and she is studying English at university. It is a nice break, but apa is getting a little annoying with her demands that we both speak English together, but then tell her everything we said to each other. Oh well. I hope she stays for a while, it will be nice to have a friend I can talk to. She has a fantastic collection of late 80's and early 90's soft rock ballads on her cell phone so we had some fun sing-a-longs. I feel bad for her that she thinks this music is more recent than it is. Just like she thinks that the Backstreet Boys (her favorite band—she is 19-years-old and has a Backstreet Boys book cover on her English textbook!) are still together. Apa came into the room when we were singing along to “My Heart Will Go On,” sparking an argument over whether or not Jack was too beautiful for Rose. Apa is of the opinion that Kate Winslet is to big to be an attractive woman. And still, I don't understand the obsession with Leo DiCaprio. Did I write about how almost every family in my training village had a picture of Leo hanging up somewhere in their house like some sort of holy relic?

I have also started Kyrgyz lessons with the English speaking university student who lives down the street. He gave me a pleasant surprise when he showed up to our first lesson with his own white board (his mother is a teacher, apparently) and a prepared textbook-style dialogue for me to practice with. It was great.

I went swimming in the river with my English club girls the other day. It was actually a really nice place to swim, I was surprised. I wish I had thought ahead and brought my shampoo since I wash my hair with river water anyway. I was definitely the oldest person there by a lot, but I should get used to that since all I do is hang out with kids all day anyway.

I have been reading a book called “The Omnivore's Dilemma,” that I stole from a recently departed volunteer's library (I mean he completed his service. He didn't die). This book was the second that I read in a row that devoted an entire chapter to talking solely about Iowa and Iowan culture. The other was a collection of essays about Americans' perceptions of other countries, with the exception of one essay, which was a British citizen's thoughts on Centerville, Iowa, and why it should be considered “America's Hometown.” “The Omnivore's Dilemma” traces America's food from the beginning, which is why it starts out with a corn field in Iowa, where the author makes the claim that the base of most of our food comes from.

Anyway, the bottom line is that it was a strange for me to read so much about Iowa from outsiders' perspectives, especially when I wasn't expecting it. I mean, who would have thought that two random books that I would pick up, and that I probably wouldn't have read in any other circumstances, would have so much to say about Iowa? Nobody ever talks about Iowa! It seems like another one of those tricks on me.

But back to the book. So far, it is really great. You should pick it up. It has made me re-think my opinions of my diet in Kyrgyzstan a little bit, as well. The book talks a lot about feedlots and all the different things processed corn products are used for. While I was aware of these things, I didn't give them much thought. Now, while I daily lament the un-healthyness that I encounter here, I am also beginning to consider the ways in which people here are maybe smarter, or less barbaric, or something, in their lifestyles.

OK, think of it this way: looking at everything I have eaten in the past few days, I can list the processed foods that I consumed right now: peanut butter, granola bars, candy (all from America), instant coffee, and creamer (bought locally) and homemade jam. These are all things (with the exception of the jam) that Kyrgyz people probably wouldn't normally eat. I just eat them because I am used to the tastes.

Meat: While I complain about the taste and texture of the meat a lot, I think differently if I consider the life of the animal that it came from. The tough, greasy mutton that I usually eat was taken from a sheep that spent probably at least a few summers up in the green pastures in the mountains, drinking from clear, cold, mountain springs and being watched over by a kalpak-wearing man on a horse, who maybe spends his nights right there in a yurt. This sheep has already had a productive life, sparing its wool for making culturally significant and practical carpets or cushions. Contrast that with the ground beef in the American cheeseburger or taco. The cow was very young and in close confinement for most of its life, forced to eat food that is unnatural to it, including products from animals of its own species, and pumped full of antibiotics. Which culture sounds more civilized to you?

Although I can't be too preachy, considering that I am on antibiotics myself at the moment for a pesky little infection that, thankfully, isn't doing much more than changing the consistency of my poo (what's new? I don't even know what consistency it is supposed to be anymore) and making my tummy make really ridiculously loud gurgling noises. Is that all you've got Kyrgyzstan? Bring it on.

This also reminds me of something I heard a volunteer say recently: that some Uzbek people believe that outhouses are more sanitary—they don't like the idea of having an indoor toilet because it is in the house. Really, if you think about it, it does make some sense. Why would you want to do your business in the same place where you live?

OK, one more comment. I am finding myself becoming a cynical person. So much so that I annoy myself sometimes. I guess it is just the result of living in a place like Kyrgyzstan. I am going to be such an irritating person in two years, and I apologize in advance. It will be worse than all those “when I was your age...” Great Depression stories, because I chose to come here. But I know it will happen. I am sure that I will be one-upping everyone's complaints. Yeah. I will be that person. Someone will say something like, “Yesterday, the weather was so bad, the electricity was out for eight whole hours!” And I will be like, “Ha, when I lived in Kyrgyzstan, there was hardly a day when the electricity stayed ON for eight hours at a time.” Which is true, and which makes me sad, because this is supposed to be about as good as it gets, electricity wise.

I can also tell that my concept of time is already warped. I have been spending more and more time just sitting around at school, just like the other teachers. I guess the idea is is that they are supposed to make some sort of appearance of working during the summer. This pretty much means showing up, walking around the school a bit, maybe rearranging posters or something, sitting around with other teachers, taking a tea break, and then going home. The concept of “wasting time” seems completely foreign. The other day, I went to the internet cafe to help out my counterpart, but the electricity was out. The guy at the desk said it should be on in one to two hours, and as I started to turn around and head out the door, my counterpart plopped down in a chair to wait, without even a frustrated sigh. We did end up waiting just a little over an hour, literally just sitting, sometimes even in silence. I found myself constantly looking at the clock on my phone, but my counterpart, and even the guy at the desk didn't seem the least bit impatient. I was supposed to meet my English club at my house at three to go swimming, and on the way home I felt bad because I would end up being about 20 minutes late, and they had seemed pretty serious about meeting at exactly 3. I shouldn't have worried though, because none of them even started to show up until about 3:45.

July 6, 2009

Yesterday I tried to make a blog post in real time (that is, write it up on the spot instead of copy paste like I usually do) but of course, the connection bombed out on me before the thing was posted and it didn't save. Waste of time. So I will just write down my thought here and post it later:

I mostly wanted to comment on how nice it is when people are nice to you. This weekend I spent some time at a new internet cafe in Osh City. It is a really nice place with cushy office chairs and new computers, and they keep plastic over the keyboards when no one is using the computer. It's not that expensive, either. It is run by these really nice Uzbek guys who speak slowly and clearly and really do seem to appreciate my attempts at speaking, which mostly consists of me speaking Kyrgyz and slightly altering the pronunciation of some words. While I was on the internet, the guys brought out a watermelon, carved it up, and gave everyone in the place a slice on a clear glass plate. It was such a pleasant surprise. Or maybe they are just really smart businessmen, and they know that they have us hooked now and we will be there often.

This weekend, some volunteers got together for a nice little 4th of July celebration. It was a little unorthodox, but we are in Kyrgyzstan, so what can you do? Still, there was cherry pie and deviled eggs, so that made it American enough for us.

Today, I made pizza with my host sister. It was fun, but after we were all done, she told me that she doesn't like cheese. Oooops. The sauce was awesome, despite the crappy Kyrgyz tomato paste that I used, so she just picked off the cheese, which wasn't that hard to do since we didn't have a grater and had to cut the cheese in chunks. We made two pizzas and I almost finished one by myself. My host brother and cousin, who were the only ones home tonight, ate quite a bit, but I don't know if they liked it or not. I think they all might have been waiting for me to go to bed so they could eat some real food. I don't care. I often politely eat their food and then run back to my room and eat peanut butter bread and apricots. Have I mentioned my obsession with apricots? Why didn't I ever eat them in the states? Are they expensive there? Where do they grow them? Maybe I just like them so much because they were the key to once again achieving slightly more regular bowel movements after the fruit and vegetable-less diet in training. Too much information? Too bad.

I must relay a cute story from a few days ago. A frisbee came in a package from home, and when I showed it to my sister and threw it, she got a really funny look on her face and told me in half English that they have a frisbee that my ata had brought from America, but they didn't know what it was at the time. Later, my sister dragged me to the refrigerator, giggling like crazy. Inside, Apa had put a pile of meat on it like a plate. It was hilarious. Of course, later they realized that they had seen people playing frisbee in movies (they recalled a movie they once saw where a dog caught the frisbee in his mouth) but didn't realize it at the time. The frisbee is a hit, and for now I am enjoying feeling like I am more coordinated than everyone else, only because my frisbee throwing skills are the best.. They will probably all catch up to me in a matter of days.

(Update from July 18: My frisbee is gone! It was sitting on a bench inside our compound yesterday, and today I can't find it. My family's frisbee also disappeared. I blame the little boy across the street. He always wears these John Lennon sunglasses, which for some reason makes me think he is a likely suspect.)

July 9, 2009

I don't know why I insist on eating things that make me gag. There is a reason we have a gag reflex, right? This morning my apa gave me a tray of food because she is leaving for the day and locking up the main house. She gave me a big mug full of ayran—a yogurt-y drink that you put sugar in. The last time I had ayran was a few months ago in training, and it made me feel pretty queasy. This batch of ayran seems pretty good, but I can't say that I really like it. Still, I keep eating it. Why? (Note: every time I get served ayran, I start singing in my head “and ayraaaan, ayran so far awaaaay” and it gets stuck for several hours. How annoying.) Last night, the cvet was out (sorry, cvet is electricity. I just think it is a better word, and it is shorter, so I tend to use it all the time now) and we ate dinner in the dark. It was a jumble of boiled potatoes, cabbage, and meat. Usually I am pretty selective about the pieces of meat that I eat, but we were eating by candlelight, so I just grabbed a chunk. I regretted it as soon as I put it in my mouth, because it was obviously a piece of tongue. I know that people eat tongue, but it caught me off guard because it felt exactly like you would expect a sheep tongue to feel. It was a big chunk, so I couldn't exactly spit it out. It took all my strength and effort to swallow the rough-edged chewy chunk. Bleh.

I don't know if I have mentioned it before, but there is one more food here that makes me gag. They are called kooroot and they look like little ping-pong ball sized balls of chalk. Really, they are dried balls of salty yogurt. Sounds tasty, no? People carry them around in their pockets all the time, and are always offering them to me.

On another note, I wanted to talk about language stuff a little bit. I always think it is funny to translate things that people say to me word for word. The question “are you married” for example, is one of my favorite phrases in Kyrgyz. It literally translates to something along the lines of “have you climbed to your life/destiny/fate?” The connotation of the life/destiny/fate part depending, I suppose, on your opinion of marriage. The “climbed” verb is a funny word that relates to going either up or down a mountain (I forget which), either boarding or getting off a marshrutka (again, I forget), or taking a shower.

Peace Corps wanted me to introduce myself to the village government as part of the community entry assignments that they've been giving us to fill up our summer. Luckily for me, the head of the local government and the main secretary came to my school today because my school is a voting site for the upcoming presidential elections. I tried to speak almost entirely in Kyrgyz, and was really disappointed when my counterpart, instead of just helping by translating the few English words that I stuck in there that I didn't know, repeated everything that I just said in more grammatically correct English. I felt pretty stupid.

July 14, 2009

Argh! Not being able to communicate is so frustrating! I am currently waiting for my counterpart to call me so I can go to Uzgen with her and help her with an application online. The problem is, I don't think that she is qualified for the thing she is applying for, not to mention that she definitely won't make the deadline, but I can't seem to get the message across to her. Her English is good, but she is not confident in it, and she is definitely not fluent (a requirement). Most of our conversations are bi-lingual, which often causes problems considering that I have only been speaking Kyrgyz for a few months. We will see how it goes.

Another frustration is that, at long last, I have stomach issues. I seem to be fine now, but it makes me nervous to go to Uzgen where the public toilets are, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook for Central Asia, the worst in the country. I haven't used them yet, but I have also heard testimony from other volunteers, so I'd like to put it off.

The sad thing is is that I think I may have brought the stomach issues on myself by pigging out on American food, of all things, this past weekend when I visited Jalalabad city. How's that for irony? Not much to report about J-bad. It is the third largest city in the country, but it seems considerably smaller than Osh. There are some very nice areas, I saw a nice park, and we ate some excellent pizza by the side of a nice looking public pool. Although, you know you are in a strange place when you have to ask the waitress to hold the dill and pickles on your pizza.

One of the big pluses to J-bad seems to be a cafe that serves fried laghman. It is like really good greasy, salty, takeout Chinese noodles. Yum.