Halfway Point

As I start typing this my left leg is stiffening up. I don’t know what it’s from, but it might have something to do with standing in the freezing cold for an hour and a half before starting this morning’s running competition. I was asked yesterday by my department head if I could be at the town sports center at 8:30 to participate in a race. How far is it? Who is running in it? Irrelevant, apparently. "Just show up at 8:30 for registration wearing this uniform and the race will start at 9:30.” Ok.

Just a couple quick things to say about this. Never again am I showing up an hour before the stated start time for anything here. There was no “registration,” just a lot of standing and shivering, waiting for the race to start. And on that note, never before have my hands felt closer to being frostbitten, no joke, even though it was only about 40 Fahrenheit. In addition these minor irritations, I counted no fewer than 873 people asking me the same question: Why was I wearing shorts? I tried to be patient with this at first, when I could still feel my hands, but somewhere between the 870th and 880th inquiry about my legs and why I hadn’t brought “warmer trousers” I said “MY LEGS AREN’T COLD. STOP WORRYING ABOUT MY LEGS. MY HANDS ARE FROZEN.”

After 90 minutes of waiting, the race finally started, and I was nearly trampled to death by 150 Kazakh kids that started at a dead sprint. The course was almost a mile, so I ended up passing a lot of these kids later, but I also ended up finishing somewhere around the middle of the pack. And eventually my hands did regain feeling, at least enough feeling to type this entry.

Well, we’re at about the halfway point of our time in Kazakhstan now. It’s a little bit hard to believe, sometimes, but really it feels about right. However if the first three weeks of this school year are any indication, this next year-plus will go by a lot faster than the last 13 or so months have. Most of the groups I teach this year are the same ones I had last year, so I had a much better idea of what to expect going into this semester. And this year I’ve had the opposite experience of last year, insofar as it’s been great seeing the students all back and talking with them about their summers, while the administration has been giving me more headaches with their ever-changing class schedules and general lack of understanding of my purpose here. It’s slowly getting better, but I guess I’ve realized that the kinds of things that in America we would be accustomed to having figured out days before the first classes start are generally worked out in the first 2-3 weeks here, and sometimes beyond. For example, the class schedules. Those are still being worked out. And the submission of curriculum plans to the dean’s office. Those are still being turned in. Maybe it doesn’t actually work any better than this in the US - I would have no idea having never taught there - but it can be pretty frustrating this way and requires a lot of patience, something I used to think I had a lot of.

So, the first three weeks of classes have gone more or less okay. I’m more at peace with not being a “real teacher” in most of the classes and so have stopped giving silly quizzes and meaningless homework assignments and pretending I have the power to give the students zero’s for failing to do these assignments. And you know what? It's been great! We’ll usually either have a debate about something (the state of the Kazakh language and the number of days per week students study are about the only topics of concern for them - they’re not quite the political animals American university students are), or we’ll go over new colloquial or slang terms and practice using them, or we’ll read an excerpt of America the Book by Jon Stewart because I think it’s hilarious. (We’re also watching The Office - once a week, if all goes to plan - in one of my classes.) The students mostly tell me the lessons are helpful for them and this way the whole job is a lot less unnecessarily stressful for me, the classes are more fun for them, and we’re always speaking English so they’re getting listening and speaking practice, which is the main thing they need and ostensibly the main reason I'm here. If I give homework and the students turn it in, I’ll check it and give it back to them with corrections, which I hope is helpful, but I’d be kidding myself if I thought I had any real power or leverage with which to give them assignments and expect anywhere close to 100% compliance. I could do this if the university were willing to give me my own class, but it’s mostly opposed to this idea, primarily I think because I’m not a teacher on their payroll (Peace Corps pays us) and each teacher on their payroll has to accumulate a certain number of hours. So I would have to take hours from a local teacher, and if I took hours from one and not the others that wouldn’t be fair to the others. Not that I haven’t thought about making a secret arrangement with one or two teachers to do this, and not that I’m not necessarily doing this, but this is why the university can’t endorse the idea.

Moving on, Happy World Languages Day! You didn’t know today was World Languages Day, you say? Well, now you do! (And September 30 is Translators Day! I’m not making this up!) It seems that every day, somewhere in the world (usually in Kazakhstan), there is a holiday for something, regardless of whether it is deserving of celebration/recognition or not. We have Men’s Day, Women’s Day (why not just merge the two and call it "Day"?), Children’s Day, Grandparents’ Day, Education Day (the first day of classes- really it’s just a holiday) here in Kazakhstan, Secretary’s Day in the US, not to mention all the other exciting and unique facets of life that are recognized with weeks or even months in their honor, like Dental Awareness Month, Library Week, Clean Drinking Water Month (I’m sure this has been designated somewhere).

Anyway, every holiday here means an occasion to have a concert. Yesterday, in honor of World Languages Day the World Languages Department threw a concert celebrating the different world languages. They invited basically all of the foreigners affiliated with the university and had us do something either in Kazakh or in our native languages. For me, they asked me to say about a minute-long greeting in Kazakh, and then recite a Kazakh poem, both of which I had memorized. The greeting went pretty well, as it was much easier to memorize since I actually knew the meaning of what I was saying. The poem, on the other hand - let’s just say I spent the better part of a week trying to fix these 27 lines of Kazakh grunts and noises into my head, and I simply couldn’t do it. It was pretty embarrassing getting to the middle and forgetting where I was, finding my place, and then getting within 4 lines of finishing and again forgetting where I was. I felt pretty bad about failing at this, but even with the mistakes the crowd seemed generally pleased that I had tried to do something in Kazakh, especially so literary and difficult, and gave me a nice round of applause. Many local citizens don’t know the language, so when they hear a foreigner even attempt to speak it people here are generally pretty pleased. This is what I was told afterwards, and while this is all true I think this is was mostly politeness to make me feel better, and I was still pretty angry at myself for not being able to pull it off. But you move on.

In other news, there is a small handful of students at the university that seems genuinely excited about the idea of learning to play baseball. In particular there are two students that have been asking me when we will start playing every week since last spring, and this week, after I explained that I was waiting to hear from the dean on whether we could unlock the gym to play whiffle ball, one of them said “I am sick and tired of asking.” Well alright! While perhaps a bit rude, this was all I needed to hear to be convinced that these kids weren’t just appeasing me because they knew I liked baseball, but actually really wanted to play. So we got the gym opened the next day and played 2-on-1 whiffle ball. It was pretty fun, and they definitely grasped the general concepts, while some of the rules like overrunning bases and tagging versus touching the bags didn’t quite sink in. But walking home they told me they wanted to start a Kyzylorda team that could travel and play teams in other cities (there are apparently teams in some of the bigger cities, like Almaty and Astana). So, I think this has become my primary secondary project (if that makes sense).

And one funny anecdote from class this week before I sign off. We were talking about the Peace Corps’ mission and its stereotype in America in one of my lessons when I asked the group if they had already known all of this, or if any of the information I’d given them was new to them. One girl said - and I asked her if I could retell this story to my friends in America - that the first time she met a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan was just after September 11th, 2001. Up to this point there had only been a handful of foreigners in the country, and particularly few in Kyzylorda, so in trying to make sense of why this guy would have possibly wanted to come to Kazakhstan from the US, she and her friends (in 9th grade at the time) decided that he was sent personally by George Bush to gather as much information as he could about the country before taking back all of his newfound knowledge to the president, in order for him to prepare an attack on Kazakhstan. “’Ooh,’ we thought, ‘George Bush is smart,’ she said, giggling.” It’s interesting, but people here are keenly aware of Americans’ irrational fear of any countries ending in ‘-stan,’ and in fact several people have asked just that question, if all Americans are afraid of any country ending in ‘-stan.’ One of the most important things I think I’ve learned here is how globally aware people here are, comparing especially with us, and how much they know about the rest of the world, with their ability even to empathize with other countries in a way I would never have expected. They certainly put me to shame with this breadth of knowledge. It’s one of the lessons I’ve taken to heart here and one that I’ll definitely take back with me.