From a dictation exercise on whales:
I went running a few days ago, on a particularly foggy morning. I ran toward the field, that used to be steppe and is being closed in on by new houses, and promptly got lost. In an open field that’s only about 60 acres. So, as my situation was beginning to dawn on me, I saw what looked like the Loch Ness Monster. The long, thin neck at an indeterminate distance, a head-like shape, and the sense that it had moved, although I hadn’t seen it directly. Shudder. I decided to continue following the sledge ruts instead of running in the opposite direction, when suddenly a second Nessie popped up directly in front of me, and a number of watermelon-sized, moving things resolved out of the mist. I had agitated them. Gobble gobble, they said. I hope whoever set his flock (or herd?) of turkeys loose on a zero visibility morning was as frightened by them as I was. They’re big! One of the males followed me with his tail all spread out, and I felt very little and very slow.
Today after the second performance of “Oliver Twist,” I saw Zhopar Aizhan (a 60-something English teacher, we talk in English) walking out of the English room with a fistful of leaves. “What are you doing!” I said, “Are you eating Svetlana’s plants?” She giggled. “I worry about you, you know.” She giggled more. Seriously, she eats plants. Aloes, specifically. She thinks it cures a sore throat, so when she had a cold, she stripped the schools’ aloes and walked around with a pocketful of little green tentacles. During our Womens’ Day banquet, she pulled one out and began to gnaw on it. Our director looked on with goggle eyes. “We can’t leave her alone in the room with the plants anymore,” Svetlana told her, deadpan. Later that day, I came around a corner and saw my director nibbling on a little aloe chunk and making a face. “Shh!” she said, and pulled me aside where I couldn’t be seen. “I don’t know how she does it! This is awful,” she said, chewing.
The play went well, with more energy in the first performance on Wednesday, and I hope the kids are proud of themselves. They said their lines better than ever before. The script was not written in such a way that anyone can say it naturally - “imagine I am one of those wealthy old gentlemen who wander around Clerkenwell square peering into the shop windows.” Pretend you’re a fourth-year third language learner and you have to say that in front of your school. So we’re all proud of the students and a bit tired of ol’ Dickens, after many many rehearsals.
We have a lot of volunteers in this oblast. In the city proper, we have two women and a man (one is placed at a university and the two others are NGO volunteers) here now and two (NGO’s) coming. Near the city, there are three women working at secondary schools. I’m one of these. South on the Europe side of the Oral river, we have two volunteers in Chapayava, Mike and Amber. South on the Asia side of the river (via my village) is Tim D’s village, Akzhayiek. Southeast, also via my village, is Tim K’s village, Fydorovka. We will lose Mike and Angela in early June and get new volunteers in August. So the current status is four men, six women; in May, it will be four men, eight women, and in June, three men, seven women. It feels like a lot of Americans, not least because we hear so much about each other from locals. They know all about us, even if we’ve never visited the village. I hear when the other volunteers are sick through teachers, and some people I’ve met say hi to me from outlying villages through my students. They come in on Monday and say, “Cizge [insert name] salyemdacti, Susan.”
My favorite things about my job are my students, bless them, the two English teachers at my school (before a frustrating three-hour meeting during which nothing was accomplished, Zhopar said in English across the table “I am ready to run away now.”), my host family, especially when something really funny happens and we all sit laughing with our chai sloshing in the cups. And days like today, the cream of spring. Warm, breezy, and the air in the city is fresh. The weather really is fine with me. Even in winter, the days are bright and the snow is clean, if inconvenient. And the mud seasons are so astoundingly muddy I’m willing to go through them, just for the sake of my mental story file. The Chapayeva volunteers have a video clip of the thaw (a week or so earlier in the south of the oblast, on the steppe), which looked like the day after the Flood. There was water ankle deep, at least, everywhere. I mean it. The village was like a kiddie pool. At least there isn’t as high a proportion of cattle there as there is in Akzhaiek, Tim’s village, which had just as much water and mud, and a lot more, um, I’ll let you imagine.
Saturday was a citywide clean-up day, held over, I think, from Soviet times. It’s really a great idea, and it works well and makes a difference: everyone who’s free (and it looked like a lot of youth clubs were involved) goes outside and cleans up. They rake up the trash that didn’t make it to the proper places and recently melted out of the snow, they sweep, they clip, they plant. It looks great. Oral is one of the greenest cities PC volunteers are sent to, mostly because it’s a little bit north of the steppe proper. It has a different feel from the other cities I've been in - a bit less Soviet-ified, almost frontier town-y. The houses on the oldest streets lean against each other. It can support a lot of trees (fruit trees included) and grass. It’s not as lush as the village in the mountains where I started off, where apricots were so thick on the ground you had to walk on them, but it’s far greener than Almaty. I expect leaves within the week, although one curve of the river is still frozen in the middle.
At Tim D’s school, there are seven English teachers, all Kazakh. Amber, Tim, and I had tea with them, and we went around the table introducing ourselves. “I am Aizhan. My name means ‘wise moon’” “I am Nazgul. My name means ‘tender flower’” “I am Aizhan. My name means ‘moon soul.’” “I am Kamshat. My name means ‘beaver.’” “I am Zhanna. My name means ‘eagle.’” The last English teacher said her name and what it meant, then said: “We are as the American Indians.” Tee hee.
I’ll update this as this week’s homework comes in. You’ll hear from the 7th, 9th, and 10th graders and the 11th graders will answer the ones they haven’t gotten to yet. I’ll also ask the teachers I work with.
I just printed some worksheets for tenth form today. It’s kind of an event. You have to find the dame with the key (if she is in fact at school. If not, better luck tomorrow). Sometimes, the door is open and the teachers are gathered inside. There’s one girl who sits at the computer, the only one of about 10 that is connected to the poor little printer. You tell her that you need to print something, and she will sigh deeply and hold out her hand for you to put your disk into it and do her thing: sigh, open your documents, and press the print icon for however many copies you want.
Several of my acquaintances and students have asked if the people on the other side of this blog are interested in Kazakh/ Kazakhstani culture, life, etc. I told them you were, and that I try to tell about it (not exhaustively, of course). Anyway, I have helpful, thoughtful students who are good at English and very proud of their country, and I thought that it would be great if you would ask questions and they answered. So, please send questions! Questions about anything: what they learn in school, what they name their dogs (Rex. So now you can't ask), what they think of me, why they don't like chocolate chip cookies, etc. Send any questions to susanwunderink@yahoo.com , I'll post them here. Thanks!
I have been sleeping most of the day (two days, as I'm making this entry), spending also a significant amount of time blowing my nose and reading a rather menacing Agatha Christie novel, in which students all over the world rise up to become armies called Golden Youth and disguise bloodthirst as hippie culture. The hero is an eccentric young British gentleman with bad taste in clothes. Not one of her better works.