Saturday, November 18, 2006

Moving On

About a ½ year remains. I don’t count down the days ‘cause I don‘t like spending time to keep track of time. But I don’t blind myself to it. 6 months is a healthy chunk of life. This final stretch promises to be the best. There’re no more cultural surprises. If someone tosses a chunk of horse down in front of me, it’s not strange. Why, I’d probably start drooling. It’s good stuff. And a goathead? By all means! Carve that thing up! I don’t mind spending a few minutes chewing through cartilage if we’re all having a good time doing it.
I didn’t come for an exotic adventure. Life is the exotic adventure. I came for the opportunity to understand more about it; i.e. the god of all this, myself, and what exactly I can do to help. The challenges are real as is the progress.


White Deer (lit translation), my counterpart, has recently gone on maternal leave and is due sometime next month. She’s out for the rest of the school year leaving 2 other English teachers, besides myself , to field the classes. One is the director of the school who looks at me like a ghost when we pass each other in the hall. The other is Sunflower, who is a young teacher like White Deer. Sunflower and I have begun team teaching the extra classes together which is decent. However, I’ve got a strong desire brewing. A desire from the deeps. Raw primal energy. I wanna change the methodology!!! Some of these classes are such a bore that time moves backwards. I’ve got students laying around like corpses waiting for an autopsy. I used to humbly accept this and simply blame it on the Soviets. But the fact is, I’m the one with the power to do something here. It’s to my shame to complain and do nothing. You might be thinking, well yeah Tom, what have you been doing for the past year and half?? To that I’ll say; Raise your hand if you’re in Peace Corps. That’s what I thought… I must move quick while the quarter is still fresh. This week I hope to implement some new strategy.


7 new volunteers have just moved into their respective sites in this oblast. I’ll meet them next weekend at a Thanksgiving party I’m planning with another volunteer in the city. We’re going to rent out a banya (sauna) house for 5 hours and throw a feast complete with cornbread and turkey-like rotisserie chicken. And since it’s at a banya you know what that means; my hygiene is secured for this week. It’s nice when things line up like that.


I still live with the same host family; Silk (host mother) and Venus (sister). We seem to be getting along alright. I started doing my own laundry in the summer because Silk was working long hard hours at her job and in the garden. Since then the ratio has worked like this; for every 1 hour of doing laundry I get about 5 minutes of scolding on what I did wrong and how to do it right. The cultural mentality mandates that if you have something critical to say, you toss in a few insults to emphasize your point. Such a time went like this: “You’re like my granddaughter! 5 years old! First put the hot water in, then the detergent. You don’t know anything!” But make no mistake, the bond is deepening. Still there’s the common miscommunication. Like what happened last night:

Myself: I want to make some banana bread.
Silk: What is this banana bread?
M: Bread with bananas. It’s very tasty.
S: Do you have the ingredients?
M: Yeah I bought some butter today.
S: What kind of butter?
M: Regular butter.
S: ---
M: I want to make it tonight.
S: It’s too late. Make it tomorrow for lunch.
M: Alright, what pan should I use for the oven?
S: No pan. The oven’s broken.

And that was the end of it.