February 11, 2007
10:50 AMShimmer and shine,
let the vines unwind.
In the trees we'll crawl,
'til the light does fall.
We’ll find our home,
a place only we know.
New friends we’ll meet
in heavens of green.
Words unspoken,
sounds in the open.
The wind, our melody;
the rain, our harmony.
Beyond the clouds,
under the shrouds,
an image is waiting
to become a painting.
February 13, 2007
2:00 PM Today, I am going to start a new series in my journal (it will be a one-time appearance series). It is called “When Worlds Collide.” Every time I write it, it will feature one aspect to my life here that proves people all over the world are the same (the “smile” effect) and one aspect that shows just how different of a world I am living in right now. So without further ado:
When worlds collide…
…sometimes you get beautiful new planets:
Boys are girls in my village prove daily that bathroom rituals can be universal. Girls refuse to travel to the bathroom solo. And for the boys, it is common practice to catch them smoking in the bathroom.
…and sometimes you get a dangerous asteroid:
The bathroom at my school is an open air outhouse with half built walls. The boys and girls squatting areas are back to back (with a thin wall separation between them), and both sides have the power to remove your ability to smell for a few hours.
February 14, 2007
7:15 AMIt’s Valentines Day, I have been living in a foreign country for over seven months now, and I hope commercial space travel becomes affordable soon.
As for life in Kyrgyzstan, I don’t think I have done a dry update of my life’s happenings for a little while. So here it is, toast dry and “row, row, row your boat” simple:
Teaching:
I talk about this the most, and many of my thoughts and feelings go into this role that I play here. But overall, I love teaching. There are many tough days when the line between bad teaching and bad learning is blurred. I honestly must say, there are days that I feel as if I am teaching space flight technology rather than English. It physically hurts to end a day and know that everything I just taught will not leave the room with the students. My teaching still needs a lot of work, and it is tough sometimes to be learning how to be a teacher all the while trying to teach my students how to learn! It is tough, but I wouldn’t trade what I am doing for anything right now. I love it, even when it sucks.
Projects:
I am currently part of a few projects that I helping organize in my village. The first being a grant program for my school called the Peace Corps Partnership Program grant (PCPP). I have been working closely with my school lately to analyze what the school and the students really. The overall consensus has been an English Resource Center. We plan on creating this center right in our English classroom, as to give access to the materials while classes are in session (as well as when class is out of session). The way the PCPP works is that with the school/community, I help assess and accumulate a grant proposal with prices for materials and labor. Along with prices, I then work with the school to create a timeline for the projects. Once these things are done (along with another long list of little details), we then submit the proposal to Peace Corps. Upon approval from PC, the PCPP grant is then posted on the PC website for all friends, family, and acquaintances to help to donate to the grant. So, basically, all of you reading this, I will be informing you all soon of how to help my school! All it takes is a few bucks from a lot of people and soon the English Resource Center project will be moving full steam ahead, with your help!
Another project I am working on here in my village is to help start up a farming cooperative. Today is actually the first meeting of two main farming families in the village. They will be meeting with a farming consultation service that Amy and I talked to about coming to my village. The plan is that the consultation service will be able to help the farmers create a business plan. Along with the business plan, the farming NGO (named Rural Advisory Services) also has a handful of land and vegetable specialists that will be coming here that can hopefully provide some much needed tips on how to maximize the land for both production quantity and diversity. This is a big project that is just beginning and is still in its planning stages. I am very excited about this project and do hope that today’s meeting can be a successful beginning. The plan is to also help the farmers organize a grant in a similar fashion as the PCPP, but this grant is different in the sense that we will be applying for the entire 75% (25% comes from the community, which in this case is the farmers) from an outside organization. With some good work today, this project could be in full motion in a few months; kudai buyoursa, inshallah.
The Host Family:
It’s nuts because these people have become my family. Nothing will ever replace my birth family, and they know that. But they would be proud of the care and affection that my host family gives to me. I love my host family. I say that they have become my family because we are now going through usual family things. I got in a fight with my host sister last week (yeah, she is nine and I’m twenty-three; but come on, she was being stubborn and I was not about to hear it). We have family talks over dinner about our days, life, and the world beyond (we have honestly talked about space a lot; they know I love it and love to ask questions about it). We are even planning a family trip together (inshallah) to head somewhere outside of our village this summer.
Overall, the dynamics of moving into a new family, in a new country, create some incredible new life-lessons and insights into the new world I now live. Child-raising, household chores, family-time, and meal cooking; all of these tiny details that create a family have become part of my learning process. As I have written before, I have struggled a bit with the way that some things are done in my family. But I have also grown to admire many aspects of the way my family lives. I love and admire my current family, and I feel very fortunate to have fallen into this situation.
Insanity:
Well, you have met Fiona. She’s nice.
Health:
Inshallah. Overall, I am doing very well in this department. Besides being a bit out of shape, my health is holding steady. No major problems since I have been at my Permanent site. As for being out of shape, the lack of snow and unseasonably warm weather has led to a resurgence of soccer in my village. We play about three times a week in the stadion (stadium, or soccer field). Futbol is quite different here being as that the field carries more rocks than grass. I have started to get used to the surface and in time, will figure out how to yell at many of the players who believe they are Jackie Chan rather than Rohaldinho.
My Vices:
My need to write is cured by this blog. My need for coffee is cured with a combination of DD from home and instant pleasure. My need for cheese will never be fully satisfied. I miss ESPN. I miss dark beer. I could use a cigar. I miss the movie theatres. I miss you.
My Puppy:
Canopka is now officially labeled as an aristocrat by me and my host family (aristocrat is a Russian cognate). Most dogs in this country will eat anything; if they can find food, they will eat it. My puppy, well, he is picky. He refuses to eat bread and will sit under the table waiting for meat or a meat bone. Then, to add his upscale lifestyle, he sleeps in the house (making him part of the .0003% of dogs that do so in the KG). I love the little guy, and it’s fun to see how different of a life he leads. He has known no other life, so to him, all of this is normal.
February 16, 2007
7:40 AMWith the sun comes the light.
With the moon comes bright.
In the morning the blue gate opens.
In the evening heaven’s gate opens.
February 16, 2007
5:00 PM
Dig a ditch, the war has begun;
we no longer have control,
our future now lies in the gun.
We won’t remember before.
Our children will know us
only through our destruction.
“Their once was people with hope.”
Our history will be their dust.
Their problems, our creation.
What once was fireside lore,
is now the rising with the sun.
Our world may be no more;
the life we know may soon be done.
February 16, 2007
7:00 PM
A transcript from my walk home from school:
Fiona: Do you think they know?
Me: Who?
Fiona: Everyone else.
Me: What is it that they know?
Fiona: That you have a flower who lives in your room who you talk to.
Me: I do write down the majority of what we say into the blog.
Fiona: Do you think they believe you?
Me: What is there to believe or disbelieve? You are a creation of the world around me.
February 19, 2007
6:30 PMThis past weekend (on Saturday to be exact) I held a Valentines Day party at my school. For this party I invited as many volunteers as I could on the lake who were willing to come. A good group of volunteers made it to my village for a day of fun and games at my school. The party began with an English skit competition that my students have been working on for the past three weeks. Then, after the skit competition (for which all of the volunteers were “judges”; I write “judges” as such because I decided before hand that everyone would be a winner at the end) we played a bunch of English and Valentine’s Day related games. After we all, the volunteers, left the school we headed back to my house where previously in the day my host mother and Amy had brewed up a huge batch of chili.
I could go into detail about all of this, but overall it would just end up being a very dry moment by moment recap (which is what I pretty much just did in the paragraph above). So, to please Andrew Paul Lewis, I will take the role he expects of me and explain everything about the weekend that could not be seen!
Overall, it was a wonderful weekend. Everything that was planned went smoothly, things started relatively on time, and the volunteers and the students all had fun. I couldn’t help myself, though, at school to step outside of the situation and just watch the events and myself a few times. During the skit presentation I was so proud of my students.
I had this feeling of pride the entire time the skit was going on. I felt like a parent watching his children in the school play. After every skit I walked up to my students to tell them they did a good job and it felt so sincere. I was so proud of them up there on the stage. Every time a new class was about to get up on the tiny stage to perform their skit for the volunteers I would get knots in my stomach; I was nervous for them!
I loved it.
As we moved from the skit competition into the games, I switched to organizer mode and started getting everything in order. I love being in organizer/host mode. I have always loved this role, and this is one trait that I have not lost since being in the KG (another one of many traits I take from my parents after all of the years of watching them prepare for family and friend gatherings). Attached to this organizer role was also a very new feeling at my school.
Essentially, I had total control of everything that was going to happen during this event at school. I had organized the event with my counterparts (I now have two women, the two English teachers at the school, whom I work with pretty closely at my school), but overall, I was in charge. The students, the teachers, and the volunteers were all looking to me for guidance and direction to keep the event moving. This is a rare occurrence at any school in the world, let alone the school in which I am a guest at and that I still have many struggles with understanding everything around me.
It felt wonderful.
I love people looking to me for answers; and on this day my students and the teachers were really looking to me to run the show. It was a very different event in the sense that there was a lot of structure to it and there was no real competition involved. Sure, we played games and had a skit competition, but in the real sense, there were no winners and no losers on Saturday. Weird as it may sound, my school is not really used to this; every gathering for the students is based around some type of disorganized competition that pits the classes up against each other. There was none of this on Saturday, just games for the fun of the games.
In the end, the students, the teachers, and the volunteers all had a wonderful time. We played games with the volunteers against students and other games where volunteers and students were mixed up. And while I keep talking about how much fun and a wonderful time everyone had, the best result was one that I hoped for, but couldn’t organize.
Basically, this whole event was a way to try and expose my school and my village to different Americans other than myself. I wanted my students and fellow teachers to see that not all Americans are like me (which is a good thing!). During and in between different games, the volunteers, teachers, and students all naturally started congregating and sparking up small conversations. In between the craze of making sure all of the games that we planned were organized and started up, I was able to step back a few times and smile. The smile was the result of my hope being played out right in front of me.
My students and teachers jumped right at the opportunity to meet new Americans and the volunteers did an incredible job opening themselves up to the onslaught of questions and discussions that took place. It also worked out that of all the volunteers to visit me, only one of them was male. This was good because I really wanted my school to meet Americans other than me, and specifically female Americans. Many of my best students are girls and it was very good for them to talk to and meet people they can relate to a bit closer.
Amy found this out very quickly with my students earlier in the week. She had come to my village a few days earlier to help me with preparations for the event. During these preparations she had come to school a few times. On one occasion, she was engulfed in a swarm of twenty girls who seemed to all begun unloading their pent up questions for a female they could confide in. I know Amy was kind of freaked out by it, but I made sure that I apologized and thanked her at the same time. I knew my students were searching for the female connection, and I was glad that they had the opportunity this past weekend.
The result and aftershock of this past weekend is already being felt at school. Many teachers asked me how the party went and how did we think of the games we played. There is a lot of interest from the teachers about this event that combined education and fun. I have also heard (from my host mother, who has started back up working at school) that the director is trying to use the work that I am doing to inspire the other teachers. I am trying to stay out of this part a bit, since the director is basically saying, “look what the volunteer is doing, when will you all start working like this.”
I am not a saint or a savior, and I do a lot of things wrong at the school. So I am trying to be careful as to how I respond to the new buzz within the teacher’s collective. Overall though, the buzz has begun and they are talking now. I made a lot of progress in starting to build a “foundation” from which to build on at the school. It is moving slowly, but there was progress made and the teachers have been exposed now to something new. If all works out, I may start being able to have teacher training sessions at school next year revolved around many of the teaching methods that I grew up with and come naturally to me.
In regards to the students, I have been planting the seeds for the past few months and this past weekend was the first big rain for them. They ate the weekend up, they loved it. All day today walking through the hallways I was receiving question after question about the different volunteers who came to visit their school. The exposure to others who are driven is infectious, and I do believe that the volunteers may have passed off some of their passion on to the students. These are events for a small village that many will never forget, and that is a good thing.
As volunteers we are not superhuman creatures trying to save the world. What we are is a group of people who all share in a passion for the world around us. Within the volunteer circuit and our respective villages we have the ability to inspire and encourage people simply by sharing our passion for life. A smile, short conversation, or sharing of stories back home all of the power to give people a glimpse into a life they may have never thought possible. And again, the life we are showing them is not some golden-road America; what we are showing our students, co-workers, and friends is that there is a big world out there waiting to be discovered.
It just so happens that in this case, we are a connection to stories and information about the big world that lives outside the borders of this fine country. And when my students and teachers have the ability to meet and talk with many other volunteers that have different and unique stories to share, they then may start to see the world beyond the borders of what their life may allow them here. For some it may just be hopeful dreaming; for others, the knowledge of life beyond may be the inspiration they need to become something great one day.
I love my life.
February 20, 2007
8:30 AMI walked into my room last night and looked at the love seat couch in corner. Covering the couch is tan and brown flower patterned blanket. This blanket is very comfortable and always feels nice to sit back and relax on. The reason I paid much more attention to this blanket last night was because while all the volunteers were here over the weekend, someone had used the blanket. When it was put back on the couch it was laid down on to the opposite side that it had been laying since I have been living in this room.
Suddenly, the blanket stood out much more before; the flip side was a bit brighter and the flower patterns were arranged a little differently. With this new image in the corner of my room, all of the sudden the couch stood out much more than before. With this new image in corner of my room, I have been presented a metaphor for my entire life.
It may sound cheesy and I know that it may sound funky to have a metaphor for my life appear on my couch, but that is how life works.
Life will get become redundant if you spend the entire time looking at and sitting on the same side of the blanket. Sometimes you need to flip it over, feel the different material, experience the new color and patterns, and shed the couch in an entirely new light. Sure, you can always return to the side you start with, but for a while, see what it feels like to experience the flip side.
February 23, 2007
3:45 PMSpirituality is like Love;
You won’t understand it,
you may even mock it,
until you feel it.
Spirituality is Love.
March 1, 2007
6:15 AMI woke up this morning to nearly a foot of snow. Yeah, I know, sounds kind of mild compared to what has been going on back home. But keep in mind, for the past two months we have had no snow. For the past two months, temperatures have been unseasonably warm. So warm that for the past few weeks (thanks to a combination with no snow) I have been playing soccer with a lot of the local guys.
I walked home from school for the past few months in a sweatshirt. The past two months have been a pleasant touch to winter. Then, suddenly on Monday, strong winds started roaring throughout the village. By Tuesday morning, there were a few inches of snow on the ground and the temps had found their way back down below freezing.
This morning I woke up to nature laughing at me, welcoming me to March with another half foot of snow. Eh, what can one do? I love snow and I will not complain. I just got a little too comfortable with the weather for the last two months; time to shift my mind back into winter mode.
Beyond the weather, life is pretty normal (with the usual abnormalities spread throughout the days). This last weekend I had a small little adventure that I think I am required to write about:
This past weekend Amy and I took a short weekend trip to Bishkek (the capital, which is about three hours away from my village). Amy was doing a favor for a volunteer that had returned home to the States, and in return he offered to pay for a night at the Hyatt in downtown Bishkek. Before, I explain more about the Hyatt, I will explain the adventure that we had before.
One of the main reasons we were heading to Bishkek was to take pick up money from the volunteer (which then connected to another string of favors Amy was going to be doing for the volunteer). Amy came to my village Friday night, and then we were going to head to Bishkek Saturday morning. Right before we were about to leave, Amy suddenly remembered that she had forgot her debit card (the volunteer put the money into her bank account) in Karakol.
So, before we headed to Bishkek, we made a short (four hour) detour to Karakol, and then turned around for the (six hour) return trip back to Bishkek. We arrived in Bishkek slightly later in the day than expecting, which through a kink in some of our plans, but nothing to big. Basically what all the traveling did was make us really appreciate our stay later that night in the Hyatt. Simply put, a stay at the Hyatt in the States would be a fancy night out; a stay at the Hyatt in Kyrgyzstan is the equivalent to a week in Hawaii.
Amy knew a bit about the Hyatt, I knew nothing about it. I arrived there with a touch of anticipation and a bit of fear. I have become a village-boy (Айылдык бала), too many lights, luxuries, and loud noises scare me. I have grown very comfortable with my new life a villager, and don’t really like heading out. So heading to the Hyatt (and Bishkek) was a big step in its self, but when I arrived inside of the Hyatt, I quickly realized that I had sorely underestimated the hotel.
This place was gated all the way around with a giant fountain in the middle of the parking lot (they had a parking lot, with stripes; nothing here has a parking lot, let alone with parking stripes). By the time I made it up the fifth floor where our room was I was holding my jaw shut. Walking towards the room down the hall I was scared, honestly; it felt really weird to be in a place so fancy.
I made it to the room, where Amy had been waiting (she had to go in first, so we weren’t charged for two people in the room), and cracked a tiny smile; I kind of felt like Crocodile Dundee when he heads to New York and stays in a hotel. The room was fancy, by any standard.
So without being cheesy and breaking down the minute by minute happenings of our stay in the Hyatt, I will drop the highlights:
We ordered Pizza (there is a place that delivers in Bishkek) and fries for dinner. Overall I took four showers (in twelve hours) and one bath. I was able to watch ESPN and some NBA all-star game highlights, BBC and CNN world-news reports, and even caught a minute of a Star Wars flick. And to top it all off, Amy and I got to sleep on quite possibly the most comfortable pillows in the country.
Overall, by the time we left the next morning, I was glad we got to relax a bit, but felt really out of place. We needed to get back to our reality here, and eventually we did. Nonetheless, our stay (and brief moment) of relaxation and luxury felt really good and we were very thankful of the volunteer who so kindly put us up in the Hyatt for a night.
