the bucket

I kicked the festering bucket yesterday. It wasn't full as usual, which is a mercy, it's our house's organic garbage, and it sits in the kitchen in a red bucket, right beneath the poster we hung yesterday, right where I needed to put my foot down in my descent from the set of drawers. It spilled right under my seat, which is only fitting, so that at dinner I couldn't put my feet on the ground.

Damira, my host mother, and I had been in the process of hanging a giant poster of food up on the chalky walls with scotch tape. This was a most excellent poster of food products, and will be the envy of all the relatives, at about 5' by 4' with fruit, vitamins, some kind of muffin, tea, and silverware. (Although, as Damira pointed out, this one doesn't display a full meal, as Aiman's poster does - no meat).

Zhopar Aizhanovna

Zhopar Aizhanovna came into my class at 9:00, turned a pencil case upside down, filled it with yellowish well water from an old coke bottle, and gave me a handful of lilacs, and then fairly skipped out. She’s always like this. I often find myself (and the students seem to, also) impossibly confused after what ought to be a normal exchange. In the beginning, I thought it was a language barrier. No. She mixes Russian, Kazakh, and English with everyone, although almost no one speaks all three.

I had a very Zhopar-ish afternoon. I went to school to get the biology book from her, still extremely groggy from a mid-afternoon nap, and she told me she would walk to the corner with me (she’s the teacher on duty and is supposed to monitor the school), and I realized that she really just wanted to get out. I mentioned that I hadn’t been to the Russian [language] school, and she immediately suggested that we go. I agreed, happily – I’ve been waiting for someone to take me to the other local schools, but no one’s ever taken the hint. We went to the Russian school, and she started peeking into rooms and chuckling, the teachers all came out and asked her how’s life. She always greets in Kazakh plural form and proceeds in Russian and English, regardless of someone’s first language. She knows everyone, the ethnicity of each family in each house and their names, what their children are doing, but she forgets or confuses the details as often as she gets them right. As is usual with her, it’s all there, somewhere.

She is a kop shashatin adam, which kind of translates to “a person who often throws things into disarray” the word “shashau,” is usually for the action when the grandmothers throw treats (candy, usually) to people at various celebrations, but generally throwing things around can take the same word. So, after we talked about the lilac blooming everywhere now, she started down a road that certainly wasn’t leading back to work, and I realized that she was taking me to her house. “We’ll see, they have probably made a house while I have been gone,” she said, cryptically. “Yes, yes!” she said, pointing to a well-settled-in house, “they have built it!” It gradually came to light that she hadn’t walked that way since she stopped working at the Russian school two years ago. But there were other things too. “Here!” she said, with a flourish toward two upside-down, ruined cars on a heap of garbage, “our monument!” and chuckled. The road to her house was deeply rutted and must have been incredibly muddy (shin-deep, at least) a couple days ago. Her garden is far from the usual neatly arranged vegetable beds everyone is planting these days. It’s more like a park, with a place to sit and look at it, which is rare. A few of her fruit trees died this winter, and since she mentioned it several times, I think she was truly grieved. She called her cow in three languages, and Masha came out, nudging two deer-faced brown calves. Then, Zhopar Aizhan banged on a couple windows, went inside her house, and came out again. “They’re not asleep!” she said, “come in! You are welcome!” I came in, leaving my shoes in the first room. “We built it ourselves. You see our shed [kitchen, I don’t know why she calls it a shed]” And, indeed, although most of the house was there when she and her husband bought it, certainly, some rooms bore the distinctive style of Zhopar. They had added a couple small rooms, a pleasant, well-lit kitchen with lots of plants and a vase full of dirty cutlery (if you want to use it, you wash it), and the first room, where you leave your shoes, with the oven and various machines for making dairy products. There were plants everywhere. She told me to sit on the couch beside her son (she was delighted he was at home – she wants us to marry) who was fixing cell phones with wires and Philips-head screwdrivers. She bustled through the house shouting in English and Russian. Quite soon, her husband wandered in, sat beside me, and immediately launched into a monologue in English beginning with “You may have noticed that we Kazakh people resent having our freedom taking away. . . .” I couldn’t follow very well. I had somehow imagined him being the opposite of Zhopar Aizhan, but they are very much alike. And her son, who, at 26, behaves toward his parents as a teenager would, is deep down the same, too. Although Zhopar and Aslan, her son, cannot sit for long periods of time, Zhopar because she wants to run away and Aslan because he has always forgotten something. Zhopar has beautiful hair, which was kind of in a Mohawk today (not deliberate, you can be sure), she did something to make it stand straight up and peak at her scalp, all two and a half inches of it. It’s pure white at the top, and at the bottom it becomes black. She might be the only woman with gray or white hair who doesn’t dye it. Oh, and tea, and photos afterward, of her when she was in her 20s touring the Soviet republics, wearing a backless dress and a Kyrgyz man’s hat, and sandals from India. She pointed out her stylish handbag in a photo of Armenia, which she had gotten by pretending to be foreign. She saw the bags in Moscow and wanted one badly, but there was an enormous line to the cash register. She had ignored the line, walked to the front, grunted and pointed to the one she wanted, gave the salesgirl money, and took the purse. No one said anything.

We finally got a monument in Podstepnoye on May 9. Everyone wondered what it would look like. It looks like two gravestones, and it's right outside the school, since the school is next to the mayor's building. Everyone is scandalized. Yesterday Zhopar and Svetlana were talking about how they should be awarded for their years of teaching. "This will be our monument" said Zhopar Aizhan, "for working so long! They will put two graves outside the school, one for Sveta, and one for me!"

Camping

Five of us volunteers went camping in Chapayeva on Saturday. I was about 30 minutes late, since I waited for the bus for almost 40 minutes, and I met Tim D and Angela at the opening of the bazaar. We swung our backpacks in front of us and went in, weaving our way to the happy produce building. This is one of my favorite parts of the bazaar, a high, full room that has bananas, carrots, potatos, whatever greens are available, dried apricots, raisins, apples, and lemons year round. There are some seasonal things, too, like pomegranates and dates. We bought a lot of fruit, probably 5 kilos worth, put them in the packettes (plastic bags) we had brought, and took off. I love that room. I usually end up talking to the saleswomen for a few minutes, and although I don’t get a better deal for it, it’s nice. One of my students saw us there. We then walked to a different section of the bazaar, a parking lot full of cars parked and driving in the most inconvenient ways possible and young men milling about, taxi drivers playing chess on the hoods of the Ladas (Russian car. Horrible. Good for chess due to boxlike shape). We, too began milling about, in the process of finding a driver going to Chapayeva. We found one through a connection, a very nice man who knew previous volunteers. He was our agent and finally found someone who was going. Because it was a holiday weekend, the driver charged us quite a bit over the going rate. But we had no other option. The bus that leaves at 2:00 was already full (it was 10:00) and it’s a real rough ride, let me tell you. So, the ride was suffering, we staggered out of the car in front of Amber’s house.

So, off we went, loaded down with fruit, blankets, and cameras. We walked straight down Amber’s street to the hill where the street ends and the Winnie-the Pooh-ish landscape begins. There was a new lake on the field in front of the woods, since everything is flooded right now. It hasn’t rained for weeks, it’s dry, dusty, even, but some villages suddenly flooded to the second story within a day or two, Chapayeva doesn’t seem damaged, although the water rose extraordinarily high here, too. So Tim, who was wearing knee-high local boots went through, and the rest of us walked around the lake, past the boys fishing and shouting “good morning!” at our backs (people wait to speak English until you’ve passed them, then laugh hysterically). Stopped to look at a raft made entirely of plastic bottles, stopped to take a photo of Mike posing with a cow, then went into the shade of the enormous trees. They line the Akzhayiek (Ural) river about ¼ mile deep, and are too thick to hug, although most of them are very climbable. I don’t know what trees they are, exactly. Beeches, maybe? And underneath them, there’s grass in hard-packed, sandy soil. In summer, people go there to gather the Kazakhstani version of blueberries and blackberries (which I don’t eat due to the dental issues the seeds cause, and because of the aftertaste which quickly overwhelms the actual, not-very-delicious taste). However, we discovered after about twenty minutes of walking, that we were on a peninsula and the water around us was too deep and too broad to piggyback or wade. So, we went back out past the boys who were no less interested the second time, along the high bank, and tried to find a way to get to the woods where we wanted to spend the night. Tim, Angela, and I ended up discouraged, sitting on the ground by a floodworthy wooden boat, eating grapes and spitting the over the steep yellow dirt bank. There were about 30 steps chopped into the bank, presumably where people could take the boat into the water. Cows walked by. It was hot. Amber and Mike had gone to look for the owner of the boat, and/or anyone else who would ferry us 50 meters to the other shore, where the trees were. We thought it would be pretty lame to sleep indoors after coming out and it being a perfect day for camping and all. I was getting sleepy . . . . Suddenly, Amber reappeared, asked for her backpack, and without explanation took us through a couple back yards and across a field, to where our hero, Misha, sat waiting to fulfill his commission. Misha is a fisherman who has read extensively on the Kennedy family. He was willing to take us, two by two, across the flooded field, for 200 tenge each way. He told us (in a mixture of Russian and Kazakh) “tomorrow, when you need me, just shout.” And the next day, we stood on the bank, counted to three, and shouted “Meeeeeeshaaaaaa,” his wife’s head popped up over a fence, an arm waved, and in ten minutes, Misha pulled his boat around and took us back, mosquito-bittten and slightly redder/browner than the day before. It had been a success.

In the field where we decided to sleep:
Amber: “Wow! Look at that snake!”
Angela, Mike, Susan, Amber look at snake.
Amber: “Is it poisonous?” Snake flashes orange-marked poison glands and a significant neck.
Volunteers: “Yep.” .
Tim picks up a stick, gets snake on end of stick.
Angela: “Tim! Leave the snake alone! It’s poisonous!”
Tim: “All the more reason to not leave it alone.”
Amber: “Augh! It’s coiling! It’s coiling!”
Angela: “Amber, when we say ‘coiling’ we usually mean ‘making a coil,’ not ‘slithering off’”
Tim readjusts snake, flings snake far back into the field. Volunteers gasp. There is a second of silence.
Angela: “TIM! You’ve got to tell me when you’re going to do these things! I would have used “action” mode on my camera!”

It wasn’t really a nice night from a comfort standpoint, but the stars were something else. I went to bed first, into the humid tent. I immediately became cold. And, having become cold, became convinced that there was no better place to sleep than where I was. Angela came in the tent a while after I did, when my nose felt to the touch a bit like a cold, peeled potato (it was sooo humid!) We shared blankets. Amber came in, and by the amount of space I had left, I who was shoved into the corner, with the wet surface of the tent on my face, I thought all five of us were inside. No. This was an artificial lack of space. I didn’t know it until Angie began cursing violently and told Amber to stop crushing us. I sat up a bit and tried to see the other side of the tent. There was no one else there. “I’m cold!” whined Amber, with 75% of the blankets in the middle of the tent, while the two of us were squeezed into the downhill 1/3 (it was a 2 person tent). Angie cursed again and started unzipping the flap. The unzipping sound made me anxious. However, I still didn’t have more space, since Amber rolled toward me once Angie was outside. I must have slept a little, because I woke up when it was light enough to read my watch. It was 5:20. I suddenly felt desperate to get out, so I climbed over Amber, and went out feet first. The other three volunteers were sleeping soundly near the fire. The air was dry and clean. I put some wood on the fire and ate a bunch of grapes by myself, as the sun rose.

Around 7am, as the cows were fording the river, Tim wandered off without telling anyone what he was doing and came back with the snake for a photo opportunity. I took the photos. Then, he threw it back again.

cacti

Another of the little quirks of living here is that people love cacti. They’re everywhere, but especially in computer labs. They’re all over computer labs. They’re on the floor, on the desks, on the mousepads, etc, dozens of top-heavy little cacti in flimsy plastic containers, loving life and growing at amazing rates. They are a bit of a problem for me, since I don’t look at the mousepad when I use the mouse, and I usually come away with little red spots all over my right hand. I can move the cactus from the mousepad, but I may not put it on the CPU, I have to get up and put it on the window, then replace it when I’m done. Nothing may be put on the CPU, I’m not sure why, I think people think they’ll crumple or something. There is, of course, method in this, but we have yet to discover exactly why cacti must be near computers. I asked some of the students and they said that it’s because when your eyes get tired of looking at the screen, you should look at a living plant for a while (but why a cactus? I’d think a bonsai or something.) Someone else said that cacti absorb radiation from the computers, which is more likely to be the real explanation. Relatively few of my students knew that cacti aren’t native to Kazakhstan. I guess they thought that they grew out there on the Kara Kum, with the black and white and brown camels.

Nege "eek" dep?

“Susie, why does your door say, ‘eek?’’ asked Dilda apai. “It said, ‘eek.’” “I don’t know,” I said, sitting down to breakfast, “maybe it will rain again.” “Eek. Eek. [three or so seconds] eek,” she said, quietly.

Didn't Chekov write something about this?

One of the older (64) teachers slept in today, since her clock’s battery ran out during the night. She came to school thirty minutes late and was yelled at in the front hallway by the twenty-something vice principal, although this is the second time she’s been late all year, and there was no problem whatsoever in her coming late, she didn’t even have a class. However, the teacher was so embarrassed, she decided to retire, attributing her failure to wake up to dotage. She suggested to the principal that her position be filled by the vice principal’s little sister, who gossips with the students about scraps of my personal life.

tests

Here it is, May, the day of the Boy’s Day banquets, and I am grading the 7th grader’s biology tests, with many urgent to-do’s. The seventh graders have all cheated. I write checks on their paper each time I see them cheat during the test, but since all 24 of them cheat constantly, I’m just not fast enough to catch them all. And then the ones who have the red checks tear the checks from their paper or get out a new sheet and rewrite the test. Several of the girls, in answer to “What is the respiratory system for?” have written “Trachea are the respiratory organs of many arthropods,” although they presumably don’t know what trachea or arthropods are, or that “trachea” is plural. There is a ghost test, with about half of the answers correct, that was passed around the room and is now in my hands. About 80% of the students copied from this paper, and I’d love to know whose it is. I thought I spotted one honest girl, but she somehow got a sentence from a book on her test, something else about arthropods, although we’re studying cnidaria. Not a one of them got better than 9/12. Sigh.

This time, I’m going to stick it to them, though. They will get bad grades. I will watch as they are written in the journal. And if they fail Thursday’s re-take, they’ll get two bad grades. Let their mothers come crying. They know better. I don’t know if it’s worse that they all cheated or that the failed after I gave them the questions and the answers (in a different order), made a chart on the board and discussed them four days before this test. Not to mention that I taught this material. It would have been sooo eeeeasy just to learn it for themselves.

I haven’t had many cultural problems (although I teared up when an American service representative said “Thank you for waiting, I’m sorry you have had trouble, please hold, we’ll solve the problem immediately.”), but the issue of integrity is an area where I feel like I’m pitting myself against the immovable object. Yes, they have the same concept of it as I do - I’ve asked. But apparently the kids don’t mind falling short of it. In fact, they see this as a sort of safety. This class is the same one that told me that when people do their jobs honestly, they are sent away. But I intend to make it worth something to them, at least in their English classes, to maybe swing the balance in favor of something that sustainably leads up instead of down.

We talked a little about this issue in 11th grade, where we’ve been doing vocabulary about attributes. The students chose attributes (hopeful, self-absorbed, loyal, lacking initiative, etc.) and I gave them situations. They told me how a person with that attribute would respond. To, “you see your friend steal money,” Hopeful said she would believe the best of him, that he would give it back, Self-absorbed said he would go shopping with his friend, and Autonomous (who was really just being herself) said that she would confront him gently in private and give him the option to return it before she herself returned what he had stolen. I asked what a loyal person would do, and she said that there are two kinds of loyalty: loyalty with and without integrity. A person of integrity would make sure the money was returned. We talked about how in gangs young people are told that the ultimate integrity is blind loyalty (last week, we looked at an article in National Geographic about a Columbian city more or less controlled by drug cartels). I don’t think I planted these ideas in the 11th graders’ heads, I think they believed them before they talked to me, and it’s a great encouragement. That out of the 100% of cheaters in the seventh grade, some of them might become like Autonomous. And who knows what Autonomous might become.

This is an update on the test situation: I gave the 7th graders a failing grade, but they didn't care. They didn't care enough to not cheat on the second test, and I took all their papers except five. This is because they heard that there won't be a standardized test and that there won't be biology in English next year.

soon

This is a teaser message. I have been a prolific writer, but my computer freezes about every 10 minutes now, and I haven't been a persistent writer. So I have little chunks of blogs on my ailing little computer. Also, the school's computers give every disk a virus. I now have two disks which will be secret disks, and soon I will be posting again.

So, there's been a lot, a couple holidays, the anniversary of Victory Day, tickets home for the summer confirmed, five of us volunteers camping for a day, finding a poisonous snake, launching the poisonous snake into the field, finding it again, getting my first sunburn, the lavender that suddenly bloomed everywhere in my village overnight, the stove and table being moved to the summer kitchen, my groupies (9-year-old boys) following me around and saying WHATisyourname.

There is a week and a half of school left, then exams. The kids come to class from outside sweaty and unable to concentrate. Everyone is excited, we can't do any work.