28. April, 2003
Hi again! I'm in Talas because I have to go to the bank. The sun is brilliant, and things are well. Class was positive today, and I'm on top of things. I'm optomistic that the post office might open for me today when I go home. Saturday was great, I came here with Aizada, who told me what it was like to be wife-kidnapped, while we ate lunch in a cafe of her selection, where we ate fried eggs and beer. It was rather divy, but I felt like I was integrating. I can't believe I have a FRIEND. She is shy, but workable, how I'd classify myself. Last night I went to visit Essengul, who wasn't home. I chatted with her daughter in law, who is very sweet. The days are getting longer, which means i can be out on the street a little later.
Spring is miraculous!
Hi again! I'm in Talas because I have to go to the bank. The sun is brilliant, and things are well. Class was positive today, and I'm on top of things. I'm optomistic that the post office might open for me today when I go home. Saturday was great, I came here with Aizada, who told me what it was like to be wife-kidnapped, while we ate lunch in a cafe of her selection, where we ate fried eggs and beer. It was rather divy, but I felt like I was integrating. I can't believe I have a FRIEND. She is shy, but workable, how I'd classify myself. Last night I went to visit Essengul, who wasn't home. I chatted with her daughter in law, who is very sweet. The days are getting longer, which means i can be out on the street a little later.
Spring is miraculous!
April 23
Another day, another frustrating episode of cultural perplexity… Today, I went to school at 8 o’clock as usual. I greeted some of the teachers. The Zavooch, or head teacher, told me that I had been summoned to the rayon center, Bakai-Ata, by the education head. She knew nothing else, only that I had to take one of the teachers from the elementary school with me. I trudged off to the elementary school, a twenty minute walk, privately steaming mad about the fact that my plans to teach some kids some English were thwarted again, this time by the rayon center’s director of education himself! No one thought it at all amiss that I all my classes should just be cancelled, except me. I picked up the other teacher, who was also in the dark about our mission. Of course I had to give her the five soms for our transportation, because she didn’t have it.
We arrived at the rayon center, and went to the “white house”- the rayon center building. These buildings (every locality has a “white house”) always give lots of food for the imagination about what life during the USSR must have been like. It’s a multi-story building, where all administrative mysteries happen.
Bakai-Ata itself is a village like Ming Bulak, except there are remnants of impoverished soviet administrators and bureaucrats. There are fewer cows in the streets, but it feels more forsaken. The transportation is bad, meaning that cars don’t go there as much, so you can’t hitchhike in and out and have to wait for the rare overcrowded marshruka.
There were other teacher types waiting around. I still didn’t know what was going on, but I finally found out that we are all judges for a teacher competition tomorrow and Friday. Two more teaching days down the tubes! We (the other five teachers and I) waited in a small room until we were summoned to enter the head education bureaucrat’s office. His desk was actually on a pedestal. He didn’t really acknowledge our presence. I was by this point pretty annoyed by Kyrgyzstan in general, but became more so when he continued to write a letter, address it and painstakingly cover it in wide plastic tape, as we gazed up at him. It was hard to look anywhere else, what with the pedestal and all. Some of the women whispered to each other, but didn’t raise their voices. I couldn’t believe that they thought this was OK behavior.
The teaching profession is such a mess. No one smart would ever become a teacher now. The salary can’t get any lower. Less than 20 dollars a month! The low-end militsia (police) make less, I think, but the corruption opportunities allow for upward mobility at least. There is no incentive to become a teacher, and even less of an incentive to try to become a better teacher. I’m interested in what this competition will turn up.
At home I had a lovely lunch of fried eggs. I ate with Zamir, my host brother, who is quite shy (by American standards, normal by Kyrgyz standards). It is strange for me to live with adolescent boys who address me with utmost respect. We chatted a bit, for the first time. The boys work all the time. I wonder whether they like it.
At English club, we played a game that made it impossible to avoid speaking English. I gave out a prize of one of Chris’ Old City Coffee pencils. It went over big. Then I scrubbed some of the ink off of my desks, with the help of some of the more devoted girls. They fetched water from the stream for me. My desks are all painted Soviet blue. Surely you’ve seen this shade of blue in some of the pictures I’ve sent. They have holes drilled through them, chunks missing, and are wobbly. A totally unsuitable writing surface.
Next, I went to the post office, escorted part way by my entourage of English club girls. These walks home are usually in-depth interviews. I can’t count how many times I’ve given this interview. I know, it’s the life of a star. I have learned to be patient about repeating myself everyday.
At the post office, there were no letters for me. I think there has been no mail delivery to the post office this week, but I can’t be sure since I can’t actually communicate with the Russian-speaking postal worker. She refuses to speak Kyrgyz, though she knows it. I wanted to mail two letters, but I left after the postal worker decided to let a drunk old man conduct his business first, which I think was getting his pension. She had already started getting postage together for my letters, but then started helping him. There is NO SENSE of customer service. The drunk guy started talking to me, which I was in no mood for today, so I left with my letters un-mailed. I figured out that the post office is mostly for getting ones’ pension and or teacher’s pittance. The reason that the post office is often is closed is that when the money for these things comes in, the post office closes so as not to have to give it to anyone. The post office also sells newspapers (which contain crossword puzzles and the all-important TV program), baking soda, salt, and soap. I think they like to try to give people these products in lieu of their salaries. There was also a policeman in the post office, behind the counter. I’ve never seen one in Ming Bulak. He later overtook me on the road home. He introduced himself, and had my name written in a little officialish book.
So I’ll mail my letters in Talas on Saturday. The last time I mailed letters in Talas, I had ten. It took three postal workers, a calculator and thirty five minutes to get them all postaged up. I am not exaggerating.
Aizada came over for an English lesson. We are going to go to Talas on Saturday together. We’ll go to the post office and Soros, and she’s going to show me the place where she studied. It will be a new experience to see Talas with a local person, because before I’ve always done it alone or with other Americans. I’m forgoing a weekend at Megan’s with her and Loren for this, because I’m excited to have a friend.
Yesterday my new 10 year old friend Tolganai came over for an English lesson. At first I was annoyed, but really she is too funny. She learns very quickly, and mostly we just chat. She’s extremely smart and confident, and she doesn’t annoy me like some precocious children (maybe I have to apologize for not being instantly enchanted with all children) but I am fond of her because she is also very perceptive and sensitive. She informed me that she isn’t going to marry a Kyrgyz man, she’s going to marry an American one. I told her, me too, and we both laughed very hard.
I have no lessons to prepare since I’ve been relieved of my teaching duties for the rest of the week.
The electricity was out today. I wanted to remind you that when there is no electricity there is no phone, in case you ever can’t get through. The electricity usually comes back on by 7.
Azeemkan had to go to the other store in the evening. Kesheemjan brought out a plate of cookies after dinner, with tea. We watched the popular soap opera about Italians in Brazil that is currently shown every night, and Kesheem tried to explain to me what was going on. The cookies and the explanations were touching. A little bit of kindness goes so far!
April 26
On Thursday, I sat through 21 lesson “fragments.” I wondered what kind of lessons teachers would turn out for this show. At first I was really impressed by the extremely elaborate visual aids. They were often beautiful hand painted watercolors of Kyrgyz landscape, since many of the lessons had to do with Kyrgyz culture or history. As the day went on, I realized that he important thing seemed to be performance. The teachers would speak the entire time, and the students role in the classroom was to provide a correct answer, which they did, because if the teacher was lucky, she had prepped the students ahead of time. So the day of lesson competition wasn’t really about developing better teaching-learning strategies to promote creativity or autonomous learning. The idea of a teacher competition is kind of silly, in my opinion, because it misses the point that teaching is not really about teachers. I didn’t go to day 2. Another ten hours of sitting in a cold school didn’t sound like fun, and really I am much more useful in my village. The ten finalists prepared more lessons, and the second day sounded even more like a talent show. The teachers will be dancing and singing. The finalists will go on to the Oblast competition, and eventually on to Bishkek. Maybe there is some good to it. With the incentives for teaching well so low, maybe it’s good to get teachers at least thinking about their craft.
Last night we ate manti, and it was SO GOOD. I actually did most of the preparation, Kesheem had stuff to do in between. We started at 3, and were ready to eat by 7! Very labor intensive. Some day I’ll make it for you, if I can get the dough right. They are dumplings. I have had them before, and sometimes not liked them because people like to put pure animal fat in them along with the meat. Yuck. These were heavy on onions and potatoes though, and we ate them with yogurt on top, and with spicy red pepper/tomato sauce, from the store. No one else likes the sauce (they aren’t into spice here), but I was in heaven!
Another day, another frustrating episode of cultural perplexity… Today, I went to school at 8 o’clock as usual. I greeted some of the teachers. The Zavooch, or head teacher, told me that I had been summoned to the rayon center, Bakai-Ata, by the education head. She knew nothing else, only that I had to take one of the teachers from the elementary school with me. I trudged off to the elementary school, a twenty minute walk, privately steaming mad about the fact that my plans to teach some kids some English were thwarted again, this time by the rayon center’s director of education himself! No one thought it at all amiss that I all my classes should just be cancelled, except me. I picked up the other teacher, who was also in the dark about our mission. Of course I had to give her the five soms for our transportation, because she didn’t have it.
We arrived at the rayon center, and went to the “white house”- the rayon center building. These buildings (every locality has a “white house”) always give lots of food for the imagination about what life during the USSR must have been like. It’s a multi-story building, where all administrative mysteries happen.
Bakai-Ata itself is a village like Ming Bulak, except there are remnants of impoverished soviet administrators and bureaucrats. There are fewer cows in the streets, but it feels more forsaken. The transportation is bad, meaning that cars don’t go there as much, so you can’t hitchhike in and out and have to wait for the rare overcrowded marshruka.
There were other teacher types waiting around. I still didn’t know what was going on, but I finally found out that we are all judges for a teacher competition tomorrow and Friday. Two more teaching days down the tubes! We (the other five teachers and I) waited in a small room until we were summoned to enter the head education bureaucrat’s office. His desk was actually on a pedestal. He didn’t really acknowledge our presence. I was by this point pretty annoyed by Kyrgyzstan in general, but became more so when he continued to write a letter, address it and painstakingly cover it in wide plastic tape, as we gazed up at him. It was hard to look anywhere else, what with the pedestal and all. Some of the women whispered to each other, but didn’t raise their voices. I couldn’t believe that they thought this was OK behavior.
The teaching profession is such a mess. No one smart would ever become a teacher now. The salary can’t get any lower. Less than 20 dollars a month! The low-end militsia (police) make less, I think, but the corruption opportunities allow for upward mobility at least. There is no incentive to become a teacher, and even less of an incentive to try to become a better teacher. I’m interested in what this competition will turn up.
At home I had a lovely lunch of fried eggs. I ate with Zamir, my host brother, who is quite shy (by American standards, normal by Kyrgyz standards). It is strange for me to live with adolescent boys who address me with utmost respect. We chatted a bit, for the first time. The boys work all the time. I wonder whether they like it.
At English club, we played a game that made it impossible to avoid speaking English. I gave out a prize of one of Chris’ Old City Coffee pencils. It went over big. Then I scrubbed some of the ink off of my desks, with the help of some of the more devoted girls. They fetched water from the stream for me. My desks are all painted Soviet blue. Surely you’ve seen this shade of blue in some of the pictures I’ve sent. They have holes drilled through them, chunks missing, and are wobbly. A totally unsuitable writing surface.
Next, I went to the post office, escorted part way by my entourage of English club girls. These walks home are usually in-depth interviews. I can’t count how many times I’ve given this interview. I know, it’s the life of a star. I have learned to be patient about repeating myself everyday.
At the post office, there were no letters for me. I think there has been no mail delivery to the post office this week, but I can’t be sure since I can’t actually communicate with the Russian-speaking postal worker. She refuses to speak Kyrgyz, though she knows it. I wanted to mail two letters, but I left after the postal worker decided to let a drunk old man conduct his business first, which I think was getting his pension. She had already started getting postage together for my letters, but then started helping him. There is NO SENSE of customer service. The drunk guy started talking to me, which I was in no mood for today, so I left with my letters un-mailed. I figured out that the post office is mostly for getting ones’ pension and or teacher’s pittance. The reason that the post office is often is closed is that when the money for these things comes in, the post office closes so as not to have to give it to anyone. The post office also sells newspapers (which contain crossword puzzles and the all-important TV program), baking soda, salt, and soap. I think they like to try to give people these products in lieu of their salaries. There was also a policeman in the post office, behind the counter. I’ve never seen one in Ming Bulak. He later overtook me on the road home. He introduced himself, and had my name written in a little officialish book.
So I’ll mail my letters in Talas on Saturday. The last time I mailed letters in Talas, I had ten. It took three postal workers, a calculator and thirty five minutes to get them all postaged up. I am not exaggerating.
Aizada came over for an English lesson. We are going to go to Talas on Saturday together. We’ll go to the post office and Soros, and she’s going to show me the place where she studied. It will be a new experience to see Talas with a local person, because before I’ve always done it alone or with other Americans. I’m forgoing a weekend at Megan’s with her and Loren for this, because I’m excited to have a friend.
Yesterday my new 10 year old friend Tolganai came over for an English lesson. At first I was annoyed, but really she is too funny. She learns very quickly, and mostly we just chat. She’s extremely smart and confident, and she doesn’t annoy me like some precocious children (maybe I have to apologize for not being instantly enchanted with all children) but I am fond of her because she is also very perceptive and sensitive. She informed me that she isn’t going to marry a Kyrgyz man, she’s going to marry an American one. I told her, me too, and we both laughed very hard.
I have no lessons to prepare since I’ve been relieved of my teaching duties for the rest of the week.
The electricity was out today. I wanted to remind you that when there is no electricity there is no phone, in case you ever can’t get through. The electricity usually comes back on by 7.
Azeemkan had to go to the other store in the evening. Kesheemjan brought out a plate of cookies after dinner, with tea. We watched the popular soap opera about Italians in Brazil that is currently shown every night, and Kesheem tried to explain to me what was going on. The cookies and the explanations were touching. A little bit of kindness goes so far!
April 26
On Thursday, I sat through 21 lesson “fragments.” I wondered what kind of lessons teachers would turn out for this show. At first I was really impressed by the extremely elaborate visual aids. They were often beautiful hand painted watercolors of Kyrgyz landscape, since many of the lessons had to do with Kyrgyz culture or history. As the day went on, I realized that he important thing seemed to be performance. The teachers would speak the entire time, and the students role in the classroom was to provide a correct answer, which they did, because if the teacher was lucky, she had prepped the students ahead of time. So the day of lesson competition wasn’t really about developing better teaching-learning strategies to promote creativity or autonomous learning. The idea of a teacher competition is kind of silly, in my opinion, because it misses the point that teaching is not really about teachers. I didn’t go to day 2. Another ten hours of sitting in a cold school didn’t sound like fun, and really I am much more useful in my village. The ten finalists prepared more lessons, and the second day sounded even more like a talent show. The teachers will be dancing and singing. The finalists will go on to the Oblast competition, and eventually on to Bishkek. Maybe there is some good to it. With the incentives for teaching well so low, maybe it’s good to get teachers at least thinking about their craft.
Last night we ate manti, and it was SO GOOD. I actually did most of the preparation, Kesheem had stuff to do in between. We started at 3, and were ready to eat by 7! Very labor intensive. Some day I’ll make it for you, if I can get the dough right. They are dumplings. I have had them before, and sometimes not liked them because people like to put pure animal fat in them along with the meat. Yuck. These were heavy on onions and potatoes though, and we ate them with yogurt on top, and with spicy red pepper/tomato sauce, from the store. No one else likes the sauce (they aren’t into spice here), but I was in heaven!
14. April, 2003
Thank you for your emails! I am pressed for time, as usual.
Life in the new family is good! A recap- my new family owns a store. There is a little boy named Elderbek, who is five, and my parents names are Azeemkan and Kesheemjan. I feel very much at home. Thank you for your mail! It was a deluge last week. :) Mom, you asked about what you could send me. Magazines are a current school-related and personal request. Loren resently got some magazines like Entertainment and Atlantic monthly and the New Yorker. We gobbled those up. But even old junk mail magazines are great, like the travel magazines we always used to get? Pictures are good for lessons. The texts would mostly be too hard, but adds and things I could work with. Small fun things are great, and edible fun things are
even better. All things are fun. Really.
I handed most of the seeds over to my family, they are very excited to be growing American tomotoes. There aren't green beans here, so that will be fun.
At IST, we had a speaker talk about communicative ESL teaching. It was rather useful, but for me the biggest hurdles are still how to make a curriculum that is logical, especially with beginners, and how to communicate directions when we don't have a common language...
Thank you for your emails! I am pressed for time, as usual.
Life in the new family is good! A recap- my new family owns a store. There is a little boy named Elderbek, who is five, and my parents names are Azeemkan and Kesheemjan. I feel very much at home. Thank you for your mail! It was a deluge last week. :) Mom, you asked about what you could send me. Magazines are a current school-related and personal request. Loren resently got some magazines like Entertainment and Atlantic monthly and the New Yorker. We gobbled those up. But even old junk mail magazines are great, like the travel magazines we always used to get? Pictures are good for lessons. The texts would mostly be too hard, but adds and things I could work with. Small fun things are great, and edible fun things are
even better. All things are fun. Really.
I handed most of the seeds over to my family, they are very excited to be growing American tomotoes. There aren't green beans here, so that will be fun.
At IST, we had a speaker talk about communicative ESL teaching. It was rather useful, but for me the biggest hurdles are still how to make a curriculum that is logical, especially with beginners, and how to communicate directions when we don't have a common language...
