I am back in Bishkek by the grace of god and school's out and am riding the wave of my bliss from not having to teach English for three whole months. I found out that I have lost five kilos since I came to Kyrgyzstan, slightly more than 10 lbs. I have resolved to eat three fried eggs a day for the next month in an effort to regain some of this weight, yet I may be fighting a battle that I have already lost due to circumstances outside of my control. God give me the strength and so on.
I made my cooperating teacher cry, the lady who stole my salary from last month. Motivated-agitated by three cups of Nescafe coffee, a definite vice, I stormed into my director's office to get to the bottom of why my cooperating teacher had not given my Kyrgyz family their money. I also yelled at her about other violations of my contract and how I am never informed about anything that's going on at the school. In Kyrgyzstan, productive interpersonal communication occurs somewhere near 50 decibels louder than normal speech. She called the teacher in to her office in the middle of her class. The teacher claimed that she had given my host father the money in front of the director, a zavuch (an administrator), and me. She lied. She's supposed to be my primary point of contact and advocate but has fallen short. When I returned home after teaching my next class, my host family informed me that they had never gotten the money that she said she gave. Then, another English teacher brought the money to our house and inquired into the reasons for my cooperating teacher's mild psychological breakdown while at school. My director apparently tore into her after I left about stealing from me and not doing her job to keep me informed and help me with any issues I might have. The teacher who brought the money thought that my mother had caused the ruckus when it was actually my anger channeled through the director's completely inane way of relating to her kollektiv. Later that afternoon, the teacher who cried saw me cleaning up my classroom and preparing for the end of the year. She acted like nothing was out of sorts. She never apologized.
I can't wait to have an open schedule for the summer. It will be good for my spirit to work with the ecology center this summer and develop skills that will help me with my professional life. Last night I went out with some volunteers I had not seen in five months. I drank someone else's vodka and danced with the high-class prostitutes who cater to the expats. I am a magnet for prostitutes and free alcohol when I go out places now. It was nice to shake my ass and celebrate finishing a stressful, long haul of teaching with minimum training and inchoate lesson plans. Teaching English, actually working to help kids develop a better sense of self-identity, creativity and global perspective, is stimulating, but I am craving a change of pace. Learning Russian and working on ecological issues will allow me to shift out of the eternal recurrence of the same that has been going on for the last five months.
POSTCARDS. I really want to do a project for next year classes. I want you to send me a postcard from where you live in the States. If you are traveling this summer, please send me postcards from where you are as well. I want to compile them into a book so that my students can see different photographs of places in America and elsewhere where my friends and family live. Don't worry about what you write on the back of the postcards because most of my students can't read well enough to understand high-brow quips or sexual innuendo or words like fuck and shit. Kids here love to see photographs from all over the world. Also, you should send me mixed CDs and albums that I don't have with me here.
Final phase of scabies treatment will begin on Monday. The livestock parasite oral medication has arrived. This medicine combined with a topical treatment and a laundry service should rid my body once and for all of my bugs. I am looking forward to knowing that there's no possiblity for scabies to persist. A doctor came from America who does our medical consultation, and she explained to me in extremely technical terms that my skin is apparently "very tasty" to the bugs that live in my bed. We all have bugs that come out of our mattresses at night and feed on our flesh. Even you softies in America have them. I read about this in a Bill Bryson book during the winter. Every night when you warm the bed, the bugs crawl out and feed on your dead skin cells. Apparently the bugs that eat my skin here also irritate it.
I'm looking forward to hearing about other volunteer's lives during training and sharing our experiences. I think this will be the most worthwhile part of the next week: this and the hot showers and free food. I read a NY Times article written by a Reed alum who I remember meeting. He was reporting from Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It's comforting to know that I am never far from another Reedie anywhere I go in the world. I hope that I can meet up with him and hear about how he scored a job with a major newspaper to write about Central Asia.
I'm developing a roll of film and will make every effort to post photos on my website so that you can see how I live here. -MJ
