Sad to Leave

It seems that host-country nationals here do not like volunteers voicing their opinions on blogs, and neither does the PC. There have been some problems with nationals taking text from volunteers' blogs and using them for political purposes, I personally do not think it is worth risking being sent home for any misunderstanding that may result from form someone using things said here for a political agenda. I therefore will hide all posts here until we have returned to the U.S. and will instead send future posts in mass e-mails. If you would like to receive these posts, please inform us at filmcricket@hotmail.com.

Frisbee Golf at the Reservoir

Today was truly excellent. As a going-away adventure, all of the PC volunteers in Talas Oblast trekked out to the town of Kirovka to have fun in the sun on the shores of the old Soviet water reservoir. It sounds less fun than it is. I had a blast, and made a little progress with my social weirdness that I will explain in a bit.

To get to the reservoir, we have to hike it about an hour through the village and onto the meadows and rolling hills and ravines that butt against the mountains. The scenery was really cool, and the hills were turning green with the recent rain, but they were still dry and dusty. Twelve white Americans, backpacks, water bottles and all, paraded through this half Kyrgyz, half Kurdish village on our way to a beach adventure. We got the staring treatment the entire way, it must have seemed like a holiday to the locals. Sightings of pasty white folks are rare in these parts, but twelve in one day, and traveling in packs, is quite the experience. It gives the village something to talk about for the week, if nothing else.

The girls parted ways with the boys half way because it turns out that some volunteer in the distant past designed an 18-hole Frisbee golf course out in the meadows and all of us wanted to play a round. It was hot, an intense 90-something degrees, and since Kyrgyzstan is a mile up with little cloud cover, the sun can sting very quickly. This is where my social weirdness comes in. All my life, I have been terrified of the idea of going shirtless in public. Even as a kid, I refused to take off my shirt while swimming. For some reason, I felt that I was either too white, or too pudgy-even if it wasn’t actually true, I just felt more comfortable not showing that part of my body to anyone. Plus, taking your shirt off is something cool kids did. The cool athletic kids loved to go shirtless, loved to show off how lean they were, or how tan their bodies could get with their sweat beads glistening in the sun like some freakin beer commercial or something. I would leave my shirt on while I swam, and I endured the pain that resulted when the fabric of the shirt rubbed against my nipples until they were raw and chaffed. It hurt but at least no one could make fun of my blindingly white body and possible love handles. Well today, I decided, “screw that. It’s really hot, and I need to get over this.” So, I played Frisbee golf shirtless, bearing my skin to anyone who was brave enough to look for the first time in my life. I was self-conscious at first, but I figured that I have lost enough weight here so that the chubbiness argument I make to myself in these situations didn’t work. Ian made the good point too that I’m married now. The only person that cares about my white body has already seen it from every conceivable angle and in every possible shade of white. It felt good. I felt free. I felt like I was growing as a person (sounds lame doesn’t it? I’m so freakin retarded sometimes that this counts as personal growth).

The course was brutal. The wind howled down the mountains before us, making every shot a combination calculation/ prayer for luck. Par was 3 on every hole, but our par was about 4 or 5. I actually shot par on one hole, which was the only one of the game. It turned out that I wasn’t totally shitty at Frisbee Golf, like I assumed I was. I wasn’t stellar, but I had fun and was competitive at the same time- and for my first game, that made me feel kind of cool.

On the third hole, we had ourselves a little encounter. A Kurdish teenager on a donkey was riding alone through the hills, and his path crossed ours. He headed up the hill while we were waiting for him to get out of the way so we could tee off, and as is customary in this country among men, he dismounted and shook all of our hands in turn offering the standard Islamic “asalaam aleikum” greeting. No one in our group knew any Kurdish, so the conversation was brief. He knew enough Kyrgyz, the only common medium of communication we had, to ask three things. First, he asked if we had cigarettes. We said no. How about vodka, he asked? Nope, no vodka either. He was disappointed at this one. He said he really needed 100 grams of vodka today. Then he asked where our women were. He said we should bring our women out here to you know…We told him hey were swimming. At this, he perked up and wanted to know where they were swimming. Wisely, we said we didn’t know. Donkey Boy followed us for about three holes, observing how crazy we were for throwing plates out in the hills for no apparent reason. Then, he saw his friends coming on their donkeys and the flock of sheep he had been tending out here on the pasture. Thankfully he left.

On the 10th hole, we saw the donkey boys again, but this time they were a little more riled up because we could see that they had spotted the girls down by the water in their bikinis. Great. They hooped and hollered as they galloped away on their poor tired donkeys to go harass the girls. We played through the hole extra quickly and tried to get to the water before the yokels had time to try something with them. Thankfully, the girls had become quite surly and intolerant of local men in their time here, so they were quick to lay down the law about how much shit they would take from the horny, slobbering, donkey guys (which was none, it turned out). They either got bored or were baffled at the display of strength from these American girls- which all Kyrgyz men believe are sluts and prostitutes because of the American movies they watch- and they quietly retired to the sidelines once we showed up. We continued to have our picnic, while they just watched. They must have hung around for about an hour, mulling over just how they would one day tell their grandchildren about the fantastic day, out in the pastures with their sheep and their donkeys, when out of nowhere Allah sent to them 7 sexy American girls in bikinis, all of whom were looking for the perfect shepherd to share all of their sexual fantasies with. They entertained themselves with this notion, but after getting repeated warnings and proddings from the American men, they had to show off by killing a snake with a knife thrown from the backs of their donkeys. Man, they were really laying on the charm with the ladies with that stunt. Rain threatened, and soon enough, they were off to seek shelter or a place to relieve themselves. This encounter probably provided them with a whole winter’s worth of bedtime fantasies though.

We walked home, then caught a marshrutka (a van used like a taxi) back to Talas, where we were greeted by a thunderstorm and cooling rain, thank god. In all, this was a great day. It felt like being home a little (surreal Kurdish playboys excepting). Little things like the smell of sunblock, the fact we were playing Frisbee Golf, or the peanut butter crackers someone brought along that they got from America. These little touches help to keep us aware that there is a normal world out there. All of you get to experience it every day, but we have to really work to make this place not like the Twilight Zone. This little trip to the reservoir may seem like no big deal, but believe me, it is a good day when we can experience something- anything- even vaguely like home. We miss you guys, and we can’t wait to come back.

Finals

I had my English finals this week for the fifth year students. This is their last test with me before they graduate. Exams are shaping up to be very interesting experiences. I didn’t get a bribe attempt this time, which is good. But I did get a healthy share of funny and tragic stories from the students.

All student bodies are stricken with debilitating illnesses, grandmother deaths and car accidents around exam time. I am convinced, that exam week is probably the most dangerous time of the year for the elderly, and the best time of the year for paid-by-the-visit doctors. There’s always something going on in students’ lives that prevents them from taking the exams as they are scheduled. “Can I come to your house on the weekend and take the exam then,” I am asked. “How about a time that is more convenient for me and less convenient for you?” Or, “Can I take it next week instead of right now because me standing here right in front of you, speaking in English is interfering with my ability to concentrate properly.” The best one is, “I didn’t take your last exam, you know the one in January- yeah the one from last semester, when can I take it?” Amazing.

My exams are conversational, as you know. Five minutes of conversation to see if they can follow a train of thought, and respond in a reasonably cogent fashion. Not a big deal for students that have studied the language for 5 years, right? Half of the fifth year students actually know some English, and for that I am grateful for it. After all, it is their major. They should be able to understand some of it. The other half have managed to study a language for 5 years without actually being required to know any of it. This is the Kyrgyz education system. What they do is put students into groups when they enter as freshmen. These groups are unbreakable. The entire group stays as a group for the entire 5-year English program. They all take the same classes, and have the same classmates for five whole years. If a student fails, that student is required to retake the test until they pass it- whether by actually passing it or by paying the teacher a bribe to move them ahead. So, by the third year, students that have fallen behind in reading or speaking skills have given up because the system doesn’t allow them to fail and retake a course. The system is an old communist one. Everyone must succeed. The group is more important than the individual. Even if you aren’t really succeeding, we’ll pretend you are to make it easier on the administration. After all, we can’t have students from different groups taking classes together. That’s why we put you into groups in the first place. It’s like an insane asylum or something! The idea that a student has the right to fail doesn’t exist here. All students are winners, even if they are retarded.

This time, I had another awkward and depressing experience during one of the exams. We had talked about ghost stories earlier in the semester, and I included “Ghosts and the Supernatural” as a topic that could appear on the test, chosen at random by a roll of a die (a d12 by the way, thanks for the dice set guys!). One student got this topic and proceeded to tell me that yes, she believed in ghosts because she is being tormented by the ghost of her friend. I was intrigued, but I learned from my last exam not to ask personal questions of my students. Without me asking, she told me that her friend had been brutally murdered last year by a gang of young men that caught him and cut him to pieces with an axe. She began to say that he had died so horribly, so cruelly…and this is when she broke down in tears. I felt so strange at that moment, so awkward and small. I had no idea what to say to this. All I could do is put my hands on my head and try to change the subject. It was happening again! Do my tests bring out painful memories in my students? Will every exam be marked with at least one horrific story of loss and regret that brings on fits of tears? Read my Exam entry to find out what happened last time. It was only after the test that I had time to reflect on this story. The incredible pain she endured, and surely he endured from the blade of an axe, is something I cannot imagine. I have never known anyone that has had to deal with something like that. This place has enough problems without axe wielding gangs. Then it hit me. There’s an axe-wielding gang in my town! Holy crap! I feel really safe and cozy now! Just a month ago, someone was stabbed in the bazaar, I remember now. And there are stories about a man (or sometimes it’s 2 young shepherds) that killed and ate two girls in the next town over- actually in the town I was supposed to live in before, Bakai-Ata (you’ll remember, it’s the place that didn’t have any water). Who knows if there is any truth to this particular story…all accounts are different, but everyone seems to agree that 2 girls were killed and eaten there last year. The word “vampire” comes up often when they talk of it. In any case, living here has been real. I asked for an adventure when I signed up for this. I guess I’m getting it.

Evil Eyes

Our host family has a 2-year-old daughter, and she’s quite the little princess of our house, as are most toddlers I should think. Well, last week, she got really sick. She was crying bloody murder all day for about 4 days. She had a fever, a runny nose, stomach issues, the works, poor thing. Medicine here is not the best, especially in our oblast, which is pretty remote as oblasts go. Her mother would go to the pharmacy every day to get an injection of some kind. Here, they give injections for practically everything. You can get aspirin injections, anti-nausea injections, basically anything that gets absorbed into the bloodstream. Then, I notice a bottle of antibiotics they were giving her in the bathroom. The expiration date on this bottle was February of 2001.

Anyway, the injection/ expired antibiotics weren’t working. She was still sick. So, her mother takes her to “the village,” which means anyplace outside of the town we live in, and takes her to a healer. The first day the healer gives the mother some ideas. “Has she been drinking any cold liquids,” the healer asked. Well, Malinda and I have taken to making tea in big water bottles and refrigerating them to have iced tea. Here, the Kyrgyz don’t eat or drink anything cold if they can help it because they believe that cold surfaces, weather, wind, or liquids cause disease. Even when the family is working out in the garden or their potato fields and they come in for a drink of water, they have us fill the glass with hot water first to make sure they don’t get refreshing cold water from the tap. So anyway, the mother begins to suspect that we have been secretly giving her cold water, and that’s why she’s sick. We weren’t giving her any such thing. We know how freaked out they get about cool to cold drinks, so we never, under any circumstances give the baby anything except hot tea.

I think after a day or two, she realized that the baby wasn’t drinking our cold tea, thank god. The last thing we need is the family harboring a suspicion that we were conspiring to make her baby ill. So she goes back to the healer. This time the diagnosis was this: your child was too happy, now she is sick. Someone obviously has seen your baby being so happy and cursed her with unhappiness out of spite or jealousy with the evil eye. Give your child a bath, and splash her with hot water from a juniper branch. That will solve it. Why didn’t we think of this? It seems so obvious in retrospect, you know?

Speaking of eyes, I had a very strange medical experience of my own two days ago. I have had the worst kind of sinus infection for about 5 weeks. I have been blowing dark green snot out of my nose constantly, with sporadic bouts of chills and headaches. I am on antibiotics now, it should clear up. But Wednesday, during dinner, I picked a really big eye booger out of my right eye, privately remarking that it was the biggest eye booger I have ever seen. Well, ten minutes later, I pulled another one out of the same eye- the same size and everything. This made me concerned. I inspected the booger in question, and it felt more like snot than a typical eye booger. It was sticky and darker green than most are. I don’t know what the real term for these things are by the way, I have always just called them eye boogers.

So, when I got home, I looked at my eyes in the mirror. The right eye was very dark red. Crap! Pink eye, I thought. Over the next 2 hours, I noticed pain in the eye, like it was bruised or something. It became painful to look up or to open my eyes wider than normal. And the boogers kept coming. It was as if my eye was secreting snot. I went to bed kind of frightened about it all. Here I am in the middle of nowhere when it comes to medical emergencies. If this needs to be treated right away to avoid blindness or something, I’m screwed. I went to sleep, and I awoke at about 2:00 am to discover that both my eyes were stuck shut from the amount of snot oozing from them. It had spread to the left eye in the night, and I scraped off a good teaspoon of crap, some dried, some still gooey. I looked in the mirror, and sure enough, both eyes were bloodshot and both hurt. They didn’t itch, which concerned me more- if it itched I would conclude pink eye, but this I didn’t know what the hell it was. When I got up the next morning, I cleaned up even more puss and crap from my eyes, but I noticed that they weren’t as red as they were before, and they didn’t hurt anymore. I went to school and they didn’t bother me the whole day. I have no idea what it was. If it was an infection, shouldn’t it have lasted longer? My eyes are still a little red and sensitive, so I’m calling Medical about it tomorrow. Still, it weirded me out. My guess is that I blew my nose (for maybe the 4000th time) and then touched my eyes before I could wash them, exposing them to the bacteria I have clogging my sinuses. If that is correct, then I am amazed at the healing power of the eye because it went into mucous producing overdrive and just got it all out in a few hours. Why can’t my sinuses do that? I have been sniffling for weeks now. Anyway, I’d better stop writing about all this gross stuff.

Dream On

After reading the comment on sleep paralysis, I followed the link and read up on it. From there, I read stuff on lucid dreaming, and recalled a conversation I had with my aikido sensei on the subject. He told me that he had experimented with intentionally going into lucid dreams, and that it was possible to practice it, so that you could potentially enter a lucid dream at any time. For those that don’t know, lucid dreams can be thought of as dreams in which you are aware that you are dreaming. The effect is that since you know you are dreaming, you can control the content of the dream and feel the physical effects of the situation as if it was really happening to you. You can feel what it’s like to fly, to fall from a tall building, to run from a tiger, to kill zombies…whatever it is you dream, you feel. When he told me of his own experiments, I was intrigued.

I have vowed to experience at least one lucid dream while in country. Here’s why: I have a lot of nightmares. They are always bizarre, full of goblins, dark forests, ghosts, haunted houses and such. I want to enter this world fully, lucidly, and experience this haunted world firsthand, to feel the wind blowing on my face in a moonlit cemetery, to talk with demons that hide in closets, and to walk through the crumbling streets of the Land of the Dead as a ghost myself. I want to live in our world by day, and in this shadow land by night. I want to literally confront my demons, and maybe have tea with them.

Maybe 70-75% of my dreams are nightmares, but I have a hard time recalling the details of them. I wake up knowing I am scared, knowing that my dream was strange, but I can’t remember the specifics. Well, with lucid dreaming, you have to first develop a dream recall faculty, and I have already begun this phase of the experiment, with noticeable results in just a few days. I now keep a dream journal next to my bed so I can write down everything during the night, usually when I am half-asleep. So far I have not come close to a lucid dream, but I am making progress. When you train yourself to become lucid in a dream state, you are supposed to do reality checks- the idea is that if you can test the physics of your dream while you are dreaming it, then you can become aware that it is in fact a dream and not the real world. Once you have this awareness, you can paint your own dreamscape, since you know it is of your own creation anyway. It’s supposed to be like being a god, walking among your creation. This is a power I would very much like to experience.

Wacky Weather

This picture was taken Friday. It was 72 degrees, sunny. The cherry blossoms here are all in bloom right now, they are exquisite. Their scent wafts down the streets, and it feels like life is returning to this place after a long, frigid winter. You can actually hear the cherry trees before you get to them, they are so full of buzzing bees. Hundreds of them, with their fat yellow cake legs, gathering as much pollen as they possibly can since no other flowers have bloomed yet.



Now this photo was taken Sunday morning. It was 43 degrees, wet, white and miserable. Another volunteer told us that while it looked nice this week, we can expect at least another snow day, and he was right. We get these fronts in from Siberia, bringing in cutting cold wind and clouds, and the valley effect turns it all into snow. Yesterday we were out gardening in shorts, and now I have to bundle up to go to the bazaar. Weird.

Nocturnal Visitations

This is kind of creepy. Some of you may know of a certain dreamtime phenomenon whereby the dreamer feels like something is pressing down on their chest, holding them forcibly to the bed, the dreamer unable to move. Sometimes it is accompanied with difficulty breathing or a feeling of panic. David experienced this directly in Arizona, when he reported being held down by an old woman (correct me if I’m wrong) while sleeping on the couch downstairs one night. In Kyrgyzstani folklore, this phenomenon has a name. It is a demon that goes by the name albarsti (албарсты: all-bar-sti with the i as in “hit”). This demon comes to you in your sleep, and tries to strangle, smother, or otherwise murder you. It usually comes to women in the form of a hairy, monstrous man or an animal like a wolf or a bear; and to men in the form of an old or haggard woman. It is there to kill you or to portend your dreadful future. Well, Malinda was visited by the албарсты last week, and it has caused quite a stir in our house.

It was the night we returned form Bishkek. Usually, Malinda sleeps on her hands- this is a habit left over from a time when she had eczema on her hands and she slept on them so she wouldn’t scratch them. This night however, she slept with her hands crossed on her chest, rather like a corpse or a vampire would in a coffin. This proved to be a mistake. In her dreams, she was visited by a force, an invisible force that pressed its very real weight down upon her chest, making it impossible to move. She felt out of breath, her hands caught under the mass of this thing and her feet felt paralyzed. She tried to look over at me and scream, but no sound could escape her lips. She finally awoke in a sweat, but she knew something significant had just happened.

When we told our host family, they instantly all agreed it was the albarsti. Too many pieces were just as the stories tell it- and this happened to a foreigner that couldn’t have known about the obscure folktales told in darkened village rooms to nervous children and superstitious grandmothers. No, she must have had an encounter with the demon of Kyrgyz dreams. They told us that our host father had a similar experience 15 years ago, when an old woman came to him and tried to saw off his arm while he lied there, staring helplessly at her grinning crone face. Then other stories filtered in. Some of my students swear they have been visited, and that it couldn’t be good that Malinda had too. The theory around our house now is that we somehow picked up the demon from our bed in the hotel in Bishkek. They live there apparently, and can travel with the beds’ occupants around the world, seeking out new victims. Either way, our family is not particularly happy that a demon now resides in their daughter’s former room.

Personally, I think this is the coolest thing to happen to us yet. This supernatural cross-cultural experience has put us closer to being accepted as one of them- an insider if you will. The locals want us to go to a moldo (молдо), the Islamic version of an exorcist or faith healer. The Kyrgyz burn juniper branches to cleanse the air of germs and evil spirits, and the moldo will read special verses from the Koran to rid the house of the offending demon. I kind of like the idea of it hanging around, so I will try to avoid an exorcism. Whether or not you believe this phenomenon is really a visitation, or a heretofore poorly understood nervous or psychological quirk, it’s still fun to think of our room as haunted, and that we may pass on this uninvited guest to our friends’ rooms when we sleep over :)

A New Path

I have taken up a new spiritual path here in the wild. We have two volunteers here that are ordained Buddhist monks of the Zen tradition. I had the occasion before we split up last time to get them to show me just how one goes about meditating- I have tried a few times on my own, but never had a clue whether I was doing it right. So, now that I have some guides, I have embarked on a secret journey into myself. I have always had a special place for taoism, and buddhism has always been interesting to me but I never understood it- so much sanskrit, and westerners treat it as a dry academic subject rather than a living religion. But here, I can freely explore it and have knowledgeable people close to me to go to for questions. I think this could be really positive for me. Well, more on this subject later I guess.

41 Pounds Lighter

Here is a before and after shot of me with 6 months in-country. I weighed in at the medical office in Bishkek, and I lost a whopping 41 lbs. I couldn't believe it, I thought for sure I lost 20, but never expected to be that far gone. I'm happy with my weight loss, but Malinda hates me for it (not really). She lost 20 lbs, but she wants to beat me. So far, I have lost the most of our group, the 2nd place contender lost 25- and this guy was skinny to begin with. PC has put him on a special protein shake diet because they were concerned with the rapid weight loss, but I haven't been offered such. That's because I was too much overweight to begin with. I have lost so much because of a drastic change in diet, with only one meal a day sometimes, combined with 4+ miles of walking everyday (except weekends, and some days I walk 8 miles). Well, I feel better about myself, and now that it's warming up, I am going to buy a cheap rug and do an hour's worth of karate and aikido training outside, weather permitting. Malinda and I have also taken up pro-badminton. We bought a set of incredibly cheap Chinese made rackets and birdies (did you know that a birdie is called a shuttlecock in Britain? heh, those crazy brits and their cocks) and now it's become a thing that we do. Anywho, that's our phys-ed update. Enjoy your own spring and summer while they last.