Dear Mom,
March 23
Happy the day after the Kazak New Year! The 22nd of March is
'Now-rez,' the Kazak New year/Spring holiday that has only been celebrated for
five or six years now. It was not celebrated during Soviet times and has
regained its popularity since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is a time
when the clean up of the winter months occurs, when the people start planting,
and the new year in general.
On Saturday, I met with the six students who are going to Michigan to
study at a community college there for a year. It was a 'get to know each
other' and organizational meeting for all of us. I hope to start an
unofficial "American Culture Club" for them where they can meet different
Americans and learn about our culture as well as improve their English.
We were invited to a celebration at the fifth campus of our institute,
the administration campus on Sunday. Beforehand, we went to the 'ploh-schad'
(the public square) where every holiday is celebrated. Many 'yurts' or round,
Kazak, tents were set up around the squares, decorated with woven rugs and
hangings. 'Shahs-leek' vendor were cooking their kebabs of stringy meat,
filling the windy, chilly square with meaty, greasy smoke. Many companies had
their own yurt with displays outside. At the end of the square is a large
official building with wide steps and a porch/stage where people were dancing
and singing, but unheard at the distance we were at.
At one yurt, a group of women were singing and playing the accordion
and the 'dohmbra,' the Kazak lute/guitar. We had met Chevat, the Turkish UN
volunteer, earlier, and he jumped right into the dancing and whooping with the
small crowd that had gathered. He is so outgoing and willing to jump into
stuff as to make me look like the world's most reserved and timid person.
Paul and I tried to escape, but we were quickly shanghaied by a costumed lady
and dragged into the dancing crowd. Unfortunately the crowd of dancers was
very thin, so we unable to hide ourselves trying to dance. While I usually
enjoy 'ethnic' music, this stuff was nigh impossible to dance to and had
absolutely no rhythm to it that I could hear. Joan has a picture of us
dancing - maybe it will get lost . . .
Quite a crowd gathered to watch our embarrassing performance. "Look,
Boris, look at the dancing Americans! Why is he wearing a backpack? Why does
he look like such a putzki?" It was mortifying.
Maybe as a reward, maybe as more punishment, we were invited into the
yurt to see it and to have some refreshments. Quite a spread of traditional
Kazak food was laid out on a table, and we sat down for some snacking and tea
until the 'plof' came out and then we got down to some serious eating.
Luckily this was a 'vodka-free-zone' yurt! We have some pictures of all this,
so you will be able to see it all.
After awhile, we escaped out to the crowd and wandered toward to the
main stage. Unfortunately they like to play loud, bad techno dance music and
have pre-pubescent children try to do MTV-like dance moves to it. It is
exquisitely painful to watch. In the crowd, we did run into an American man
wear a long coat and a painfully ugly white American cowboy hat. It turned
out that he was Keith McCray, an American who is the president of Hurricane
Oil here in KO. We had heard a lot about him but had never had the pleasure
of meeting him. He was pleasant but definitely not too much of a people
person. We all speculated about the beautiful, young Kazak woman with him who
was wearing a matching, ugly cowboy hat: interpreter, mistress, wife, hmmm?
We shmoozed with him for awhile, talking about the summer camp and
other things. After that, we grabbed a taxi to go to the fifth campus. There
we found three yurts set up on the road/walkway leading up to the entrance of
the building. On the steps of the entrance, where Paul and I made our first
appearances as PCVs and gave awkward speeches and the first and last time we
have worn our sport coats, there was a different set of people talking and
giving speeches and singing annoying songs. While Ahmad claims that the
technique they use to sing their traditional songs is quite difficult and
worthy of respect, it still sounds like whining to me. There, we met Timur
and Ahmad, who had been invited to the celebration.
We stood around for awhile and shook hands with many men who I have
only briefly met at best. "And this is such and such, the vice rector of the
gobbledy gook department, " etc. The only guy I recognized and was glad to
see is the vice rector of something or other who is in charge of our apartment
and keeping the toilet working. I'm sure we are very popular with him.
Unfortunately I was chosen to go up on that stage and give a little
speech that was translated by Timur. My brain and tongue froze when I got up
there, and I was only able to produce some lame statements about a successful
next year and so on.
We were then invited into the yurt that our Economical Faculty was
sharing with some other faculty. There we had even more plof and other Kazak
foods, all swilled down with vodka. After a few speeches and toasts, we then
we back outside to view all the yurts of the other faculties. There was the
'hunter's' yurt organized by the 'ecological' faculty - chemistry and biology,
I think.
Side note: I wonder about the quality of the education this kids are
getting in these faculties. On one hand, they are not required to think.
They just sit through long lectures, sometimes taking notes. If they are
required to write a paper or do a project, they just copy one from the year
before with lots of pretty border designs and turn it in. The teachers don't
even bother reading it because they know it is the same one as before. The
students have absolutely no access to any research materials, so I guess it
doesn't matter anyway. On exams, multiple choice farces of exams, they cheat
openly, and the teachers look the other way. All that is important is
graduating the students. If you have a very high percentage of students
graduating with high marks, your institute is successful and you are rewarded.
They also have no labs or real equipment to speak of. I have seen some
chemistry labs, and they look medieval.
As you can tell, I am a little frustrated with my institute. It also
doesn't help to find out that our institute has a pretty bad reputation.
Apparently it is the place you can get into with the right connections or
bribes, receive a healthy stipend from the government (therefore not having to
work and being financially supported well-enough that you can party away to
your heart's content), not have to put forth any real effort or work, and you
get a diploma. Of course, it doesn't matter that the students are woefully
unprepared or uneducated since there are no jobs available for them anyway .
. . I am not bitter - nope, not me. So I get to teach English to a majority
of students who don't care and aren't willing to work. I get to teach the
alphabet to students who require so much Russian to be able to understand or
do anything that I might as well be a local teacher due to all the Russian I
speak. The first year students get English twice a week, and the second year
students get it once a week. Oh, that's a real commitment to the students'
education.
And I found out from some third and fourth year students last night
that there in fact is not an optional English class for third and fourth year
students as Timur told me. So I think I will have a little conversation with
him about that. I am sick and tired of being used as a teacher of cannon
fodder, forced to use so much Russian. I am a native speaker with a MA in
TESOL; I should be teaching the students who have already learned basic
English and who really want to learn, not all these morons in the first year.
Argh!
Back to 'Now-rez' - So after checking it all out - ho hum - we headed
over to the new, western hotel that is being built just by the fifth campus.
It looks like a Holiday Inn from the outside but in fact, is really quite nice
inside. Ahmad has been shmoozing with the western staff there quite a lot and
has gotten himself quite a good set-up.
We had cups of excellent coffee with the French chef who is actually
English. Tim, an American, is the owner¹s representative and main guy there.
He was our host for the afternoon and evening. Joan decided to go home to get
some work done, and Paul, Ahmad and I stayed to watch some American TV and
drink some beers. We watched an episode of Law & Order and one of Seinfield.
I took an excellent shower in a fantastic bathroom and even got to shave my
big, bushy beard down to a goatee. Hopefully you have seen it already via the
digital photo that Tim took and sent to Mike McDowell over the Internet. Tim
is a huge computer geek and has all the latest toys. He also has Riven and
demonstrated it to us a little - impressive!
We also got to eat dinner in their restaurant. It was all local food
- pelmeni, plof, etc. - but prepared very nicely and with a western flair.
I invited Tim over to our house on Saturday for that party for the six
students going to the U.S. They are coming for dinner at five, and about ten
other Americans and locals will come at seven. It will be an interesting
introduction to partying American style.
Side note: There is a really nice, old lady who is the cleaning
person and caretaker of the RC building. She is Kazak and wears rather
traditional clothes: head scarf, flowered skirt, and those Kazak
plastic/rubber boot covers that I wrote about earlier. I need to take her
picture and send you a copy. However I want to write about her mopping and
mopping in general. They mop a lot here; in the winter, primarily because
there is so much snow and mud that get tracked in. The dust of the summer
accounts for all the mopping that occurs then.
She uses a wooden mop tool, with a five feet long handle and a two
foot wide cross bar at the bottom - imagine an inverted 'T.' A large rag or
cloth is dipped into a bucket of water by hand (an unpleasant process with
cold water in the winter), wrung out in to the bucket (the same bucket of
water is used for the whole building - the water becomes quite nasty quite
quickly -she has to dunk her hands in it continuously - ugh!) and then draped
across the cross bar. With a push of the tool, the cloth folds under the
cross bar and the whole thing works like a crude mop.
Needless to say, Joan has not taken this up as a hobby and our floor
is infrequently cleaned. She asked Mom Lambert to mail a mop head, and we
will find a handle somewhere. Joy . . .
Right, so I am going to e-mail this off to you now. Take care and
write back soon. Oh yeah, what about the REI stuff with John Parsons and the
info about Dr. MacDonald? nag nag nag . . .
peace and love Rich