International Women's Day and a General Update

As I sit here listening to the timeless Erasure hit "A Little Respect" on my iTunes shuffle, I'm reminded of a) the Scrubs episode I saw before I left the US that actually led me to download it and b) how poor my musical taste is by most conventional standards. And as I try to start writing this update, I'm reminded of all the things that have happened over the last 3 months or so that I've wanted to write about, but haven't gotten around to writing.

I wanted to include some photos of the Axmet Yassaui Mausoleum in Turkestan that a few of us recently visited, but those pictures are still on my camera, which is in the apartment I just moved to, but haven't completely moved into yet (maybe partly because I don't have internet set up there yet). So hopefully I'll put those on the next entry.

Anyway, starting with the most recent and working backwards, today (March 8) is International Women's Day here in Kazakhstan, and in a great number of countries not named "America." Actually I think it's a mostly former CIS-state phenomenon, but either way it's big enough that the security guard at my building told me America is "not correct" because we have only Mother's Day. I realized this year that really it's a lot like Valentine's Day is for us, where guys bend over backwards to please their girlfriends, wives, or girls they’re interested in. And this year with the holiday falling on a Sunday, it's been stretched over a roughly four-day period from Friday, when all the male teachers gathered and gave roses to all the women teachers, to Monday when we officially observe the holiday with a day off. And I started hearing "congratulations" being tossed out to women as early as Wednesday. Like I said, it's a pretty big deal here. When I'd mention to students (mine are mostly girls) that their one-day holiday had been conveniently stretched into 4-plus this year, some of them would laugh a little, and some of them didn't find it funny at all and I'd move on to something else.

So last night we had a small vecherinka, or party, to celebrate our women. We cooked plof, an Uzbek dish comprised of rice, carrots, and meat, we wore dresses for a short time, and we played a few different games including an “impressions” game where we did impressions of each other. It was all really fun except for having my face painted with lipstick and eye shadow that “comes off easily” in “2 or 3 minutes” (my eyes are still sore from trying to rub it all off last night). It was worth it though for the girls who do so much the other 364 days of the year - they really do a lot here - so we didn’t mind making a few sacrifices for one day, though I really hope none of the pictures surface at any point in the future.

For Valentine’s Day we also had a small party, but that was organized mostly by the girls. And there’s apparently been a recent push here, especially by older locals, to stop observing Valentine’s Day, even informally, because it’s a foreign holiday. It’s been informally celebrated by young girls and guys here for the last 10 years or so following independence, but I heard from a few people that this year for the first time they weren’t allowed to do a valentine card exchange in schools as they had been doing every year. I’m not sure exactly the reason, but according to most of my students it seemed to be just an aversion to non-Kazakh holidays and nothing necessarily anti-American.

As for my lessons, they’ve kept me very busy. We’ve focused a lot on essay writing this semester. I’ve seen some improvement in some of the students’ writings, but it’s been a challenge trying to teach some of the lower-level groups the idea of choosing an idea/opinion, putting it at the end of your first paragraph, giving reasons for your opinion in your second paragraph, and summarizing your opinion in the third paragraph. Much of the problem, I think, comes from the fact that when they’re asked to write essays here, it’s usually pretty general, like “write about friends” and then they just write everything they can think of about friendship. So when I give them a more specific prompt like “What is the most important character trait for you in a friend?” they see the word “friend” and then just write about what it means to be a good friend, without really thinking about what the question is asking. But each group is different with this, just like with everything, and some improve more quickly than others. It is funny though - I’ve noticed how difficult it is for them to understand me when I talk about how to write a good essay, but amazingly how easy it is whenever I mention anything about games, or I promise to bring my pictures from home to the next lesson. They don’t let me forget about these things. “Hey remember when I gave you that homework assignment last week and you promised you’d do it?” I want to say this often, and I probably will start soon. I’ve started openly making fun of my students recently, mostly because they deserve it, and generally they take it pretty well, I think because they know they deserve it. Granted they do have a LOT of lessons and a LOT of assignments, but they also tend to be pretty lazy pretty often, as I was when I was a student. Sometimes it’s hard for me to reconcile being hard on them and insisting they do the assignments when I know I didn’t always do all the work when I was a student, but the thing is, it’s not only the teacher’s right but also his job to insist on these things. So I try to remind myself of this often. Even so I often find myself being lenient, and especially with the groups I like and respect more, i.e. the groups that give my their respect in lessons.

There’s one funny anecdote that actually happened a couple months ago that I’ve been wanting to write about, and it’s completely unrelated. Shortly after the new year a group of 6 of us went to a cafe that we would occasionally go to. My sitemate McKenzie, just back from vacation in Thailand where the service is apparently excellent, was making his first trip to a cafe since coming back to Kazakhstan. He ordered two dishes and when they didn’t come after a pretty long wait, he went to remind the waitress of his order. Apparently she didn’t understand, because she ended up bringing two of each dish. This wasn’t a huge problem for us, because we were hungry, so when the waitress refused to admit her mistake and indicated we’d be charged for it all whether we liked it or not, we went along with it and just ate everything. The problem came later though when the check came. We had ordered 5 beers total for the 6 of us (one didn’t drink) but we were charged for 6 beers. When we told the waitress about this, she again absolutely refused to believe us. That’s when it became heated, because she had already given us two meals we didn’t order, and now she was not only charging us an extra beer but also insisting that we were lying over a charge of 120 tenge on a 3600 tenge bill. We went to the head cashier/manager/I have no idea what to call her, but this was the most ridiculous part. Our local Russian speaking friend tried to explain the situation to her, but she was having none of it. Some of the lines she gave that were later translated for us included, “Why don’t you just admit that you don’t have enough money to pay” and “If you were a real man you’d pay the whole bill.” I was so offended by this, even though this wasn’t the first time we’d experienced sub-par customer service in Kazakhstan, that even though the food was both delicious and cheap I completely boycotted the cafe (until yesterday, when I was nearby and really hungry). Despite the fact that this country isn’t known for its customer service, I was completely shocked by this wait staff’s child-like behavior. Even if they thought we were lying, didn’t they realize that they were permanently alienating 6 customers over a charge of roughly one dollar? I still can’t believe it. It just makes no sense. But at least it was entertaining, and it’s made a good story in a few of my lessons. The younger generation here seems to share in these sentiments about the lack of service in the region, so hopefully it’s something that will change over time.

Ok well it’s time to move so I’m not sure when I’ll be able to post again, but hopefully it won’t be too long. I do want to get those pictures up. In the meantime take care and enjoy the start of spring (training!). Bye.