What a Week

Well the Giants pulled off the impossible. Who would have guessed it? (Other than my subconscious.) Can't wait to watch the DVD of this unforgettable upset and reenact Super Bowl Sunday, in April. Was anyone betting on the Giants, or did everyone lose money? One benefit of being so far away from the action is that I was able to stay even.

A couple frustrating moments this week. The first came when I arrived at school for my 8:30 class Wednesday morning. At about 8:33, as class was closing in on beginning (I’m “punctual” in relation to most of my students) the teacher whose class it was came up and asked me if I’d heard the news. Apparently our dean, who has worked very closely with me and Peace Corps, speaks excellent English, and is an all-around great guy, was being replaced. As I’d come to find out later, he was just moving to a different position in the main building, so I’ll be able to stay in contact with him, but this was pretty unsettling news to hear right at the beginning of the day and on the heels of the start of a two-hour class.

There have already been grumblings about the new dean, a woman that reportedly will walk into every class, not introduce herself, ask curtly “Who’s not here?”, “Who hasn’t paid tuition?” and then yell at the teacher in front of her students. She’s only been on the job one day, so I haven’t had the pleasure of this experience yet, but it’s already happened to at least one of the teachers in our department. Can’t wait to meet her!

Another interesting moment came later that day when I arrived home from the school. A few minutes after I came out of the bathroom and was in my room beginning to prepare my lesson, my host mom gave me her usual “Krees tamak zhey” which means “Chris we’re eating now.” But then she did something unusual: she approached my door and said quietly, and with a smile, “In Kazakhstan we always wash our hands after using the toilet.” Embarrassed, I immediately tried to show her the hand sanitizer on my desk that I use about 37 times a day, but she didn’t seem to understand because she just repeated herself twice. Now, I had a few options here. I could have pointed out that the water in our apartment doesn’t run roughly 95% of the time, making conventional hand-washing a frustrating endeavor, that “in America we eat our food with forks,” or that this was the first full sentence she’d spoken directly to me since I’d moved here three months ago. But, I showed restraint and decided against all three, mostly because she would have gotten bored and left long before I figured out how to say any of these things in Kazakh. After thinking about it I later explained to her that I had soap from America that I always wash with after using the toilet that doesn’t require water. Thinking that earlier she hadn’t understood this concept when I’d tried to explain it to her, I asked if they had such kind of soap in Kazakhstan. “Of course,” she said. Of course, why wouldn’t they?

Then today at the post office, my favorite venue for collecting memorable anecdotes, I had another “Only in Kazakhstan” moment (or to be fair, maybe it was an “only at the post office” moment). I collected a slip from my PO Box indicating I had a package and took it to the front desk, where there was no attendant. Now the people at this particular post office are not world-renowned for their friendliness or customer service, so I was not too surprised and was prepared to be patient and wait a while. Perhaps this is why I didn’t go postal as the following events unfolded.

After a couple minutes, a woman came up next to me also requiring assistance. When she saw nobody at the desk she got impatient and bravely walked through the trap-door opening on the side of the front desk, walking directly into the back room where you could hear a lot of women talking and laughing through the open door. When she came out followed by the attendant that usually mans the front desk, I thought “finally I’ll be able to get my package.” Boy was I wrong. The attendant didn’t as much as look up to make eye contact with me, the only other customer at the counter, but instead focused her attention on pad-locking the trap door the other woman had walked through, then turned around and returned to the back room, being sure to close the second door behind her this time. Normally I think I would have been angered by this, but I’ve been to this post office often enough to know the deal. There is simply no concept of customer service; you get helped when you get helped. Apparently it was lunch time and the workers were not to be disturbed.

After several more minutes had passed, another customer came up behind me and started knocking loudly on the counter hoping someone in the back room would hear him and come out. They did, and the same girl came out and said something in Kazakh before turning back around and returning to the party room. Finally after about 25 minutes of us standing at the empty counter, she decided her break was over and finally came out and angrily took my parcel slip. It then took her and her coworker only about 45 seconds to realize that my package was at the other post office on the other side of town. This has also happened before, so I wasn’t too surprised, and actually relieved because the workers at this other post office seem to have souls, unlike their crosstown rivals. Then the weirdest thing happened: as I was waiting for the other woman to bring my slip back, this first woman, who always works hard to give off an impression of hating everything about the world, especially anyone unfortunate enough to be her customer, started chatting me up about where I was from and what I was doing in Kazakhstan. She even smiled as I struggled through my introductory Kazakh responses. I have no idea how to explain this or make sense of it, or what is going through this woman’s head the other 23.9 hours of the day, other than to simply write the whole thing off as another cultural experience I couldn’t begin to understand if I tried.

The story has a happy ending though as I made it to the other post office without incident, picked up my package, and later watched my new “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” DVD for about an hour (thanks Mom/Dad!).

And finally, a funny moment from class this week: another teacher and I gave the students an assignment to draw pictures contrasting the differences between eastern and western cultures. In class I had shown them a number of pictures I’d gotten in an email where one side represented an eastern attitude or belief, the other side western. In one of the classes the students were especially creative, showing a Kazakh man spotting a pretty girl and dreaming in a thought bubble of making her his wife. The opposing picture was of an American man spotting a girl in a bikini and dreaming of a bed. So it’s good to know they think we Americans are so morally upstanding. Several other students' pictures showed Kazakhstanis returning home to a house full of people while their American counterparts returned to an empty apartment. I wanted to correct this oversimplified belief, but then I remembered that for the two years before I moved here I usually came home to an empty apartment myself. So I had to agree.

It's been a busy week, and I'm starting to realize I should have never complained about having nothing to do over break. All of a sudden every citizen of Kyzylorda wants to learn English in private one hour lessons. Luckily for me they mostly forget to show up, which leaves me enough time to eat and occasionally sleep. Whoever told me that in Peace Corps you'll probably have a lot of time to yourself to study the language or read was either a liar or a dirty liar. But truthfully, I don't mind being busy. In the end it's enjoyable working with so many people, trying to get to know their culture and the way they operate, and maybe helping them pick up a little English.