Sometimes I allow myself to be weak here. I come out of these bouts of sadness, anger, or frustration and think that my susceptability to these emotions was entirely managable. Like with my family situation, I found out, through the help of a coordinator who helped me translate some complex and fragile concerns two days ago, that my family really cares about how I feel. I also learned again that the lack of privacy originates from an inherent part of who they are: their culture. Kyrgyz doesn't even have a word for our word "privacy": Tuck that into your wealth of trivia. I forget sometimes that I am half way around the world. During the conversation with my family, I looked across the table and saw sympathetic expressions the faces of my host mother and father. While the Kyrgyz coordinator spoke and even said things without really saying them to my family, which is something I can't do well not coming from this culture, all the foreigness of my living situation surfaced. As I already wrote, my family communicated to me how much they appreciate me and want to make sure of my well-being. My host father even said that the reason that I sit by him at the table is to make sure that if other guests come over that they know that "I'm with him." He is a protector. I thought about my dad and how he might respond to hosting a Kyrgyz host son; I noticed a resemblence. My host mother actually asked the coordinator if I liked living with them, starting our conversation. Because I had been sick and stressed, I didn't show them how much I cared. I thought about how my mom would be sensitive in the same way to a guest from abroad. I guess that what I'm trying to say is that it's easy to forget that I'm living in Central Asia when I'm at home in Kyrgyzstan. Sometimes it feels impossible to know what to say or how to act, but knowing that they care about me makes the occasional awkwardness excusable.
Work is back in full force this week. I have had all of my classes. I even had a suprising turnout for both my Ecology and English Clubs. We have been working on greetings and how to start a conversation. Even though they have had six to ten years of English before I arrived, they still have trouble differentiating between "How are you?" and "How old are you?" The problem with two basic expression really reflects the amount of work I have with these students. I have about half of my classes with me, and the other half, well, you just can't teach everyone English, can you? In my Ecology Club, we made collages of the mountains using trash that we found on the school grounds. There are no garbage dumps that I know of in Kyrgyzstan. Solid waste management means putting trash in a pile to be burned later. Our discussion after creating these art pieces was an interesting cross-cultural exchange. I left the club thinking differently about why there was so much trash on the ground in such an exquisite place. Kyrgyzstan lacks infrastructure like we do for trash disposal. Every week I take my bag of trash into the kitchen where it is burned. All the trash has to be burned, as it has no where else to go. Maybe they thought about the trash on the ground differently as well, considering how much there is and how to change this situation. I would really like to procure some metal bins for the school, so that the trash can still be burned but does not fly around when the wind picks up or get eaten by the wildlife.
I love my piano teacher here. I feel blessed by my luck with piano teachers. My last piano teacher in Portland and I have the same birthday and talked about Xanax frequently before my lessons started. She pretty much functioned as an hour of therapy every week during my third and fourth years at Reed. My relationship with my piano teacher here has some flare to it as with my former teacher. We laugh at each other a lot. I am working on a J.S. Bach prelude. Since about 30% of the keys don't work on the piano at my school, she found a way for me to play on a piano everyday for an hour at the music school. Once I buy a tape player, I may send a recording home of some of the pieces I'm working on. I love how music stimulates my brain. I can almost feel it tingle.
My family's Christmas package arrived today. I needed it after five classes and a club. It had a Blues tape in it called "Badass." My parents pretty much keep on rocking in the free world, it would seem. I was wondering where the synthesizer and off-key voice was, becoming so used to hearing techno on my radio. I have been writing more letters again, now that the Kyrgyz post has resumed service after a month of vodka drinking and holiday bliss. Relationships with coworkers, students, neighboring volunteers, and other people in my life have begun to take shape especially with my Kyrgyz and Russian steadily improving.
So, happily ever after again. I feel childish sometimes in my responses to situations and people. Coming from Northern California, I was never really taught how to be mean or suffocatingly aggressive. I am still working on how to talk about topics that require confrontation and me to be slightly offensive. Cutting out the nonsense of unnecessary politeness is high on my list for my personal development. Not wanting to hurt others feelings (like my family's in Kyrgyzstan) required me to endure suffering to no end. I read this really insane book by Gopi Krishna on Kundalini yoga, and a Jungian psychoanalyst provided a commentary. It was really far out. I am not sure what was weirder: the Indian guy's personal "evolution" or the Western, hokey interpretation of what was really going on. It was published in the 1960s by Shambala in Berkeley, which helps me to understand its audience. I'm ready to go back to the English countryside with Geo. Eliot as my guide. Not to look back to the last entry, but I can only think about scantily-clad Carrie ("Sex in the City") writing on her laptop about next to nothing. I wish you well. -MJ
