My Neighbors

There are a lot of young men who hang out in the stairwell of my apartment building. Here are some of my encounters with them.

Shortly after I first moved in, I walked past two of them sitting on the curb outside the entrance. After I passed, they called to my back, in English, "Hello Tom." I turned around, smiled, and said, in Kazakh, that my name was Ryan and not Tom. I could still hear them laughing as I climbed the stairs, and a minute later they knocked on my door, wanting to get to know me. This is how we met.

I ran into them once in the store down the street. I bought them some beers, and we sat on a picnic table outside our apartment building to drink them and chat. I didn't understand much of what they say, because their speech is 75% slang, but the mood was friendly. Up came an older man with a white beard, and everyone greets him warmly. He asks one of the young men for a cigarette, and the young man suddenly starts furiously yelling and cursing at him, and the old man yells and curses back. It turns out that the old man is his father, and this is just how they talk to each other. The old man produces a bottle of vodka and a single plastic cup, and pours it full of vodka. He hands it to me. I can't drink all of this, I say. No, no, we'll take turns, they say, they just don't have any other cups. We pass it around. Soon the young men disperse and the old man talks about the evils of war and the beauty of Ukranian poetry. I learn a derogatory slang term for Ukranians, which the old man applies to himself, and then launches into an epic in Ukranian.

Another day, I pass the old man, Dydya Kolya, and some other older men on my way to work in the morning. They are drinking at a picnic table. They greet me, and I come up to say hi. We chat. One of the quiet ones suddenly grabs my sleeve forcefully. "Whrre you frum?" he slurs. "I am from America." "Letss talk." "I have to go to work." "Nnnoo, your gonna stay here antalk to me." "Really, I have to go." The man is still holding my sleeve, and is now staring me full in the face, all hurt and anger. "Let him go," says Dyadya Kolya hesitantly. I free my sleeve, say goodbye, and go to school.

Whenever I pass them in the stairwell, they pressure me to have a shot of vodka with them. If I don't have anything else to do, which is rare, I will. Then we talk. One time, they they told me their nicknames. Dyadya Kolya's son is called "little bird". "What should my nickname be," I ask. "We'll call you 'calm' (tikho)", they say. "Because we like to go out and make noise and get in fights, but you're calm." "But we behave well in the stairwell," one of them, named Rulan, corrects. "Have you been to Russia?" he asks me. Yes, I say. "You won't find a better-behaved group of people hanging out in a stairwell in all of the former Soviet Union," he tells me.

One night I come home to find Little Bird sleeping outside on the stoop, next to a large dark water stain.

I was tired when I came back from the Uralsk language camp. (That was the Russian Border guard incident trip.) On the second floor, a group of the young men was drinking. I greeted them, and they invited me to drink with them. "No, I'm tired." "Why are you tired," they asked. "I just got back from a trip," I said. "Well, you have to drink," said one of them. "No, I don't want to, thank you." I tried to walk past them, and one of them moved to stand in my way. "You will have a drink," he said. "I'm sorry, but I said I won't have a drink, and I won't have a drink," I said. He said, "that's what you think." "C'mon, have a drink," say the others. "Don't be angry, but I won't," I said. I tried to walk around again, and again the young man moved in my way. "You will have a drink," he said. "I won't," I said. "Let him go," said Little Bird. "What is your name," I asked the man standing in my way. "Mereke," he said. "You don't even remember my name?" "I am not going to have a drink. Please don't be angry." And I took him by both shoulders and moved him around so I could get past. He doesn't show any reaction, and I move on up the stairs. "See you later!" says Little Bird.

Little Bird once asked to borrow 500 tenge. "I'll pay it back right away," he said. "As a friend, I need this money, I have a date." I gave it to him, and he thanked me. The next time I saw him a week later, he said he would pay me soon. "It's very uncomfortable for me to owe you money. Don't worry, I'll pay you!" He never mentioned it again, and never paid it back. Two months later, I came home at 10pm, and he was sitting on the stoop with a friend. "How are you?" I asked. "Terrible. I have a terrible hangover." "It's ten o'clock at night," I remarked. "I was drinking all morning," he said. "If only I had some money!" His friend said, "If I had money, I would give it to you, you know that." An awkward pause. Suddenly, Little Bird leaps up and runs to throw up in the trash bin. He comes back and squats with his head in his arms. "Well, I hope you get better," I said. "I will never be better again," he tells me.

Coming home once, two young men who I recognize but have never really talked to greeted me. "Do you have any money?" they asked. "Not anything extra, sorry." "Give us fifty tenge." "Sorry, man, I really can't." We go back and forth for a while. Finally, one of them says, "Do you want us to die, or what?" "You're going to die from fifty tenge?" I ask. An awkward silence. "Well, see you later," one of them says. The other adds, cheerfully, "Don't be offended!"

The Magic Chicken Is Bigger Than Almost Everything

Today I was playing a warm-up game with superlatives with my seventh grade math class. It begins with me asking the class, "What is bigger than a loaf of bread?" If the class answers that "a dog is bigger than a loaf of bread," for example, I then ask, "What is bigger than a dog?" and so on until the class agrees that they can thing of nothing bigger. We had gotten up to the earth, then the sun, then the galaxy, when one student proposed that "the magic chicken is bigger than the galaxy". After some discussion the class agreed, especially when it was clarified that "the magic chicken hasn't any end". Fortunately, an awkward theological argument was avoided when it was unanimously agreed upon that God was bigger than the magic chicken.

New Vestis

I just put up both the October Vesti, which I forgot to post last time, and the December Vesti, which just came out, and which I did remember to post. You can access these, and all the Vestis since Bryan, Jen, and I took over, by clicking on the link to the left. Enjoy!

Work

My work has become routine enough for me to usually think it's not blog-worthy. But since most of my time is really spent working, it's worth a summary.

My main work is still at school number three. I only teach four lessons a week of pure English: two hours to tenth grade, and two hours to sixth grade. I teach the sixth graders together with two local teachers, which has been really rewarding, because they get to see the positive results of communicative teaching. I tried to team-teach last year, but it didn't work; I basically just became a substitute teacher. This year, it has worked because I made it a rule that if they're not there, I won't be, either. Once the other teacher left in the middle of a lesson. I follwed her and told her that I wouldn't teach the class if she wasn't in the room. That having been said, now that we actually plan and teach together, they're both very enthusiastic, fun, and fast-learning.

Most of my lessons are taken up by teaching the math-in-English experimental program in the seventh and eighth grades. I divide the classes into two, and teach each of the four resulting groups four hours a week, for a total of sixteen hours. I write my own textbook for these classes, which I will be able to leave behind me when I go. Next semester, I'll teach half the seventh graders' math hours in addition to the English lessons. The government has not given the eighth grade hours for the experimental program, so I simply teach "extra" classes. Because the eighth graders also have their full regimen of math hours in Kazakh, I can be free with the syllabus, spending time on what I think is important. For example, we spent two weeks on the Pythagorean Theorem, rather than the four hours allotted by the Kazakh program.

At school number three, I also have three "office hours" a week, where students can come talk with me in the cafeteria, help with the English-language debate team, teach two classes a week to olympiad students, and play an instrumental role in the English Teachers' Association, which meets once a month.

Much of the rest of my work is through or for Globus, the local resource center. This year, Bryan and I have worked with the head of the center to make the center more independent and businesslike. We now keep and regularly review a budget, have regular meetings with minutes, assign ownership of tasks (which are reviewed weekly, so things get done), and keep track of all our finances and book lending with a database program I wrote. Globus, which was previously dependent on grants and volunteer support, now supports a full-time secretary, has allowed the head to quit her job at the university and work full-time at Globus making the same salary as before, and still makes a profit of several hundred dollars a month. This was my goal for the fall semester. I have two major projects remaining at Globus to finish before I leave. First, we now have a high-speed internet connection that I want to make into an internet cafe. (All four of the computers are now connected to the internet, allowing Bryan to teach internet classes to his students, but we monitor traffic and calculate the cost by hand, which won't do when Bryan and I aren't there to supervise.) Also, next semester, Globus will finally begin to use local volunteers to help teach classes, learn how to do the clerical work, and execute special projects. It is my second goal to have a core of local volunteers supporting Globus by the time we leave.

At Globus I teach three clubs a week. The first is a math club, which is very popular (usually about twelve students come), but not really fulfilling my objective, which is to try to find and train a teacher to replace my in the math program as school number three. Almost all the members of math club are high schoolers. Regardless, it's a lot of fun, and a few that came hating math have now told me that I changed their minds. The second is a music club, which although of questionable English education value, is a lot of fun. Once a week, I play the guitar and we sing American songs together. That's it. This is also a very goofy and popular club. Finally, I have a literature club where we read 10-15 page excerpts from modern English-language authors (we've read The Onion, Tom Bissel, Claude Brown, David Sedaris, and excerpts from McSweeny's so far). This started out popular becuase it sounds like a "real" English lesson, but lately only five to seven people have been coming, and none of them are the university students I intended the club for. However, the people who do come are really into it, and I enjoy leading their discussions more than any other classes I teach.

Besides this, I have other side projects, like compiling some advanced Kazakh grammar materials into an English language book that future Kazakh learners can use, co-editing PC Kazakhstan's newsletter, the Vesti, and applying to grad schools, which I have found to be a hefty task.

So whatever I write in my blog, you can bet that the above comprises 90% of my day. Now, back to the regular programming.

A Bumper Day For Packages

Last Friday I received, in a single day:

- My Newsweek
- My Economist
- A letter from my Ukranian relatives
- The pen-pal letters for my 8th and 10th graders
- The package from Amelia
- A package from my parents

O, the bounty that was mine! The workers at the post office remarked to one another, "смотрите как он радуется!" My students were overjoyed at the letters, and I got two easy lessons talking about things like what a "cheerleader" was, how to "hang out", and that Americans might, similarly, not understand what a "dombyra" and "beshparmak" are. Amelia knew precisely what a volunteer needs, having spent time volunteering in Africa herself: new music. CD after CD of magnificent new music, including two CDs from Eddy who - bless him - despite not having lived close enough to one another for many years still has a dead-on sense of what I will like.

And my parents! I've often claimed to get the most opulent, frequent packages in all of Peace Corps Kazakhstan, about which I've long stopped feeling guilty. (My mom once sent me three boxes of Hostess cupcakes as prizes for my students and I ate ALL OF THEM MYSELF. This I feel guilty about.) From the food, to the puzzles for my classroom, to the newspaper clippings (I scan the comics, blank out the words, and have my students fill in their own dialogue), to books for the resource center, to help with mundane financial affairs, to photographs and movies of home, to music, I can't imagine what I could have done to deserve such magnanimous parents. And the frequency of the packages! They must spend most of their free time buying gifts and stuffing them in boxes for me to keep up with their delivery schedule. They are saints! Seraphim! The most elaborate hyperbole can't approach the expression of the magnitude of their generosity! (In case you think I'm overdoing it, you should know that I am not only writing this so they know how grateful I am, but also so they don't feel inadequate next to Lindey Redifer's flowery gratitude towards her own parents. See the link to the left.)

So: to everyone who has sent things to me, thank you all very, very much. The postal workers read me right - I rejoice.

This Thanksgiving Was a Harbinger of Old Age

Last year, Karaganda hosted a massive Thanksgiving celebration, to which all the volunteers were invited. In was a lot of fun and extremely memorable. At the end of the lunatic weekend, they nominated Bryan and me to host the 2005 Thanksgiving in Kokshetau. (At the time, we were given to believe that this was a venerable old tradition, but this year we learned that they only started it last year. That's ok.)

Bryan and I, not wanting celebrating volunteers violently unwinding in the streets of our personal town, rented a sanatorium where we could be loud and crazy without bothering anyone. We arranged buses, planned a menu, bought all the food, made a budget, and arranged a tour of a local nature reserve. Everything went without incident, I think everyone had a good time, and there was no trouble of any kind.

In every event like this, there is a balance to be struck between memorability and calm. Catastrophes, large and small, are what make events unique in your memory, and are what make reflecting on your life fun. At the same time, catastrophes seem locally undesireable, especially when you're planning an event. In short, they carry long-term value but with a short-term disincentive. Thanksgiving Karagnada was exremely memorable, and I'm afraid Thanksgiving Kokshetau, as nice as it was, will not be.

I see the fact that I'm ok with this as a harbinger of old age. My values in the past have been inclined to catastrophe, and I think five years ago I would have been disappointed that our Thanksgiving went off without something sticky and nasty to make it cling to the pages of history. However, now, I feel very satisfied that we pulled off a well-organized, incidentless Thanksgiving that nobody will talk about a year from now. Well done, Kokshetau!