I just talked to Roselle at the local internet cafe, and she informed me that yet another member of my training group will be early terminating her service. It feels a little like a knife in the heart to have already lost so many of the people I trained with and to have another leave. Megan and I did Kundalini yoga together in Kegeti village on the floor of my first host family's house. I hope that she will be able to make it up to the lake once before she ships out. Hearing news like this decreases my morale significantly, but I only have three weeks of school left before the long-awaited summer, my first on the lake. It is alleged to be the best place to be in Kyrgyzstan in the summer.
School this week dragged. I was trying to push my agenda of teaching some grammar, and the students protested and wanted to play baseball instead. Some days I gave up and found myself pitching to my kids for a couple hours every morning. Other days, I made them sit through an activity on forming questions using all the tenses. I never heard back on helping teaching the students in Kazakhstan for the summer, but I just read about an opening to work with Afghan kids for a month this summer to help them with a similar program. It would be from July until August.
I have been dealing with my stomach's readjustment to Kyrgyz food over the last few days. The real problems started during my third class on Thursday. I have been moving back and forth from diarrhea to feeling so stopped up that I might explode. I would think that it has something to do with indigestion of the copious servings of mutton over the last week. Tomorrow, I am going on a hike into the mountains for the day. We are leaving at six in the morning and plan to be gone for most of the day. I don't actually teach this student but he was friends with the last volunteer, Mikko. I have to carry a Russian dictionary to communicate effectively with him, but I like learning from him about his perspective on Kyrgyzstan from a non-Kyrgyz resident perspective.
I read Che's diaries from his trip around South America called "The Motorcycle Diaries." I would recommend it for anyone interested in Che, travel narratives, or the psychology of budding revolutionaries. It's a fast read and some of the aspects of health and food difficulties were familiar to me. I am readjusting to my site really well. Last night, my volunteer friend Sage stayed with me on her way to Bishkek and, then, Italy. We had a lot of time to talk about our last week and a half. She came to my classes this morning and got a sense of how the secondary schools in Kyrgyzstan function. She works at a university in Karakol. She is a really talented teacher, and I was able to pick up some more tips on how to deal with my most disrespectful students.
I'm making it. We have training during the last month of May, and it will be nice to see everyone (who's still around) and talk about everyone's experiences. I also look forward to the ability to take warm showers and have access to internet consistently during the week. We are talking about hiking from a village near mine to Kazakhstan around the time of my birthday. We would use a guide and it would take about three days. The trail cuts through some river valleys and is supposed to be well worth the time it takes. I have to go to the bathroom really bad. Godspeed, all. -MJ
