According to various NY Times articles a revolution was projected due to the parliamentary elections last weekend. We did not have any such revolution as forecasted. You can look up "Kyrgyzstan" on the NY Times website and read some of the articles from the past couple of weeks if you are interested. I submitted an application to take the Foreign Service Officer's Exam in the spring of this year. Even though I will not be eligible for a job until after Peace Corps, it is practice and a trip into Bishkek to take it. It will be interested to see what it takes to work for an Embassy. I am in Bishkek now and saw the doctor yesterday. My body continues to freak out as it adjusts to the climate, elevation, and food of Kyrgyzstan. I have some mild excema that is over a good portion of my legs and arms. I am going to start an elimination diet, and I bought a box of really expensive ($1.50) laundry detergent from the Turkish Beta Store in Bishkek that is formulated for sensitive skin. I could be having a reaction to my soap.
I skipped out of the commission's visit to our school today. I was not able to travel last night after my appointment because we are on a higher securtiy alert still due to the elections. I am heading over to the bazaar to try to find a cheap tape player for my classroom and buy a few clothes items I need. I made some homemade veggie burgers a few nights ago. If anyone wants the recipe, I will pass it along. I am looking forward to getting out of the city and back to my life in the village. Not much else to say.
(Written the next day.)
I am back in my site. My kids were really horrible today. I was feeling a little drained from the traveling from the capital, but I had a plan. They didn't have their homework. Today about 60 percent of my students showed up. In two of my classes, we are working on creating their own superheroes, so that they can talk about people in the third person. I wanted them to use their creative minds to create a comic strip that involves their superhero for homework. I felt like this would really motivate the students to use some of the spoken expressions that we have learned and to work with some new vocabulary as well. Instead the students feigned ignorance, acting like they had never seen a comic strip before. They were rude, loud, and didn't finish the assignment. I sometimes feel like I am wasting my time when the students don't try at all. With my younger classes, we are working on a house and household activities theme. They are really doing well. We talked about their dream houses today, and they really got into it. The idea of a "dream"-something had to be translated to them as much as the words themselves. I came home, feeling really frustrated with my work. I sat down to have tea and broke into tears: the third cry since I have been here. I can't believe that it happened in front of my new host parents, but sometimes you just can't hold in your emotions, the pressure in your head is too much. After about three minutes, I had had my fill of emotional indulgence. My yogic host father started to explain to me the power of meditation to create an undisturbable inner-calmness half in Russian and half in Kyrgyz. They also told me that the other volunteer had cried at their house a lot due to the terrible students in the village. I guess she changed her strategy for teaching, targeting only the students who were working and interested in learning. I have a really difficult time thinking that I should leave all but three or four students behind in most of my classes. I ate and had tea and spoke with them about why I'm so irritated by Kyrgyz students. I even suggested that, if I were in China, Japan, or many other countries, I would not be fighting with my students who would be respectful and open to learn. I don't know what students are really like, besides what I heard from my cousin and a volunteer who has already "early terminated" but I still have the feeling it would be better there. I have to keep on trying to be positive force here even if the students don't respect me or appreciate what I am doing to help them. Maybe one day they will wake up and appreciate me. It is sunny and spring has sprung. I am going to try to start having baseball for the kids most days after school. They really enjoy it, and only the good kids really come anyway to after-school activities. I am still fine tuning a full explanation for myself of why I am here. I know that I am not in a village in the middle of Central Asia just to teach kids how to speak the English. I want the students to feel creative, like individual minds sometimes, like they can control their lives and health, that they have potential. A foundation like this would help them to realize that learning English will help them with their futures and to become whoever they want to become. I feel like I am still working on the groundwork with my kids. They have stopped cheating for the most part except for the few students who are horrible at English. In the meantime, I just have to be patient and keep trying different ways to get through to them. It's disappointing that I have to work so much to motivated my students. It's not really what I was expecting coming here, but I will catalogue it with everything else that I didn't expect (most of which has been positive). And I got paid today, so nothing can really get me down that much. -MJ
