Five Months

On Sunday I submitted my Mid-Year Report, which is required of all Fulbright grantees half-way through their grant period. Which means that it has been five months since I landed in Dushanbe, and now there are less than five months left. All of a sudden, ten months seems not long at all, and I realize that I will soon be one of the Sharons and Davids that people here remember coming and leaving. 

Marking January 1st - while fun - was not as meaningful to me. I still measure my life in school years. If I am to measure by calendar year, then I should be reflecting on all of 2012: writing my senior essay and hanging out in our common room and graduating and the Cove and Tajikistan. It is a colorful and exciting collage, but not a cohesive whole. Rather than making New Year's Resolutions, I have made Fulbright Resolutions, or perhaps Fulbright Realizations: what I have realized since August 20, and what I plan to realize by June 13, when I fly back to the U.S.  

My Fulbright Renewals are the result not only of realizing I am half-way, but also the result of returning after a month of traveling. First to Nepal, then return-trip detour to Almaty, then back in Khujand for a week of winter, then to Italy, where I met my family and celebrated Christmas. I arrived again in Dushanbe on New Year's Eve and came back to Khujand three days later when my baggage arrived. 

I was met at the American Corner by a flurry of students finishing their applications for the Global UGrad progam. I was swept into essay-reading and turning away reference requests. In the three weeks since, I have made myself much busier than I was September-November. I now have morning classes, instead of lazy planning sessions. One is my new series of TOEFL preparation trainings (the American Corner as a Public Organization is not legally qualified to teach 'classes,' only provide 'trainings'). That involved a sign-up, a test to scare people away, and fighting away late-comers. I also have a "Reading Club" (read-aloud time) and a Hunger Games book club. I am teaching an advanced writing workshop (we are working on essays, starting with a biography - think middle school). I am trying to start a competitive debate club, rather than my open-to-all debate/ activity/ discussions. I have had extra classes with visiting groups of 30 kids each from two different nearby towns. I have put a lot of time into thinking about how to teach about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the inauguration.

I have benefited from taking to heart another ETA's self-identification as an after-school programmer rather than a teacher. Extracurricular is a better word: you cannot be 'after school' if there is no school. The government declared there would be no school in January this year because it was supposed to be too cold to heat classrooms - something that does not happen every year, but did happen last year. University students are either in exams or on break. The American Corner is crowded. 

This means I come home more tired and stay up late planning - but now I have real coffee to help me get up in the mornings. And when I am teaching, I am moving and thus warmer than sitting in one place. 

January has been milder than (the one week I saw of) December, but it is still cold. My winter wardrobe includes a scarf every day - worn tied behind my head with the ends hanging - plus leggings, pants, turtleneck, sweater, coat, gloves. All of those are worn inside as well as outside. It used to include black boots, but the heel broke and I haven't had time to take it to the cobblers at the bazaar (they fixed both zippers on the same boots for 5 somoni). 

Our water is not the most reliable: pipes have frozen twice, and the pump stopped working once, but now it just ebbs and flows throughout the day so sometimes we have to turn on the pump to get any warm water or even to get enough to wash the dishes. 

I eat a lot of soup. I made some delicious braised cabbage this week. I try to remember to get vitamins somehow, even though vegetable selection is sparse and I forget about the fruit when it is not shoved at me (apples are now 7 somoni a kilo instead of 1 somoni/free in buckets in the fall). I drink a lot of honey-and-lemon. Lemons here are large and sweet and more lemon-y. 

More plans to realize: See a game of buzkashi. Celebrate Navruz exuberantly. Go hiking. Use my binoculars and my new Guide to the Birds of Central Asia. Try to learn more Tajik music. Actually study Tajik vocab. Spend more time with people. 

The hardest questions for me to answer in my mid-year report were in the "Cultural and Social Adjustment" section. 

1. What were your strategies for getting acquainted with the people and the culture? 
2. What kind of changes did you make in order to adjust to the local culture?  

"Were," "did;" do they mean that my adjusting is all in the past? I am comfortable here, and I think I often know what to expect, so in that sense, yes. But while I might be "adjusted," I am merely "acquainted" with people and culture, and I agree - I do not feel that I know much of anything. I ended up answering in the past tense what I was really meant as directions to my future self for the rest of my time: Be available and present with people.  Listen more than I talk. Work on figuring out when and how to hang out with people. Continue trying to figure out everything.

Mice

Mice are usually good at hiding, and yet recently they have been scurrying their way into my life. Not live ones, luckily; though I do think they can be cute, I had most of my sympathy driven out of my vegetarian heart when part of my job at summer camp was to be "Mousketeer" and set traps to catch the rodents that ate holes in our clothes and threatened the kitchen. I do not welcome them inside, and our apartment here has proven rodent-proof. That does not mean that my heart is hardened to fictional mice.

I have started a new "Reading Club" at the American Corner: I inherited one when I first arrived that became frustrating, since I had to figure out what to read and how much to print since new people would come every time and I wouldn't know how many and what level they would be. So I canceled it, since that is the wonderful prerogative of my position. But at the conference in Nepal, our main presenter emphasized that she believes that reading aloud helps students at all levels. New research supports reading aloud to ESL/EFL students because they can listen to correct pronunciation, not worry about comprehending every word, and understand more than when they try to read aloud themselves (I know I experience this: when I read aloud in a foreign language, I focus on words and my brain cannot also focus on meaning; I have to either read it quietly before or after). I seized upon this suggestion, and decided it could stand on its own. Read-aloud story time in libraries is a time-honored American Library Tradition. And the American Corner is in a Library. And we are all about teaching American Traditions. Most importantly, I really enjoy reading aloud.

I looked through our collection of lower-level books, and considered something like Old Yeller or Sarah Plain and Tall, but settled on The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. It is a recent children's classic and winner of the Newbery Medal in 2004. I was a little older than its target demographic when it was published, but my mother bought it for my younger brother, and I was taken by the hardcover's soft-pastel drawing and the pages' deckled edges, and quickly swallowed the story of the mouse who falls in love with a human princess. I didn't really remember the plot when I picked it off the shelf at the American Corner for consideration, but its fate was sealed when I found a PDF teachers' guide that advertised using it in a class for ESL students, as well as parents' reviews that said it seemed to be written as a read-aloud novel. Participants at the American Corner have now learned the words "scurry" and "despair." [If you would like to learn a new word, mouse in Tajiki is муш (mush), which is comfortingly close to English, but a bit cuter-sounding.] They are still figuring out the graphic organizers I have given them (they didn't seem to want to draw). But I am excited to reach the second section next week, when we learn that the king has banished soup from the kingdom due to a series of events involving a rat. There is true despair in the kingdom over this - and there would be here, too, because soup is an important staple of the Tajik diet (I know a Tajik girl who went to the U.S. for university and wrote home asking for soup recipes to make in the dorm kitchen because she was homesick for soup and couldn't find any).

I took several books from the shelves of the American Corner; one night I read The Tale of Desperaux in bed, and the next I read Maus, Art Spiegelman's graphic novel about the Holocaust. Both have careful illustrations, but the latter took my breath away from darkness rather than light. I had always wanted to read it and was recently reminded of its existence when the ELF in Almaty told me she is using it in her university English classes. So it caught my eye when I saw it here. We have a fairly random collection of books that are mostly too advanced or too specialized for most of the people who come to the American Corner, like 400-page biographies of Benjamin Franklin, or to a book by Julia Alvarez co-written with her husband Bill Eichner. 

But this week Christmas came in the form of hundreds of new books - from Scholastic! It was like book orders in middle school, only many times better - and many times heavier. Several people waited for the truck on Monday, but by the time it arrived there were only five of us left, and it took over two hours to carry all of the them up to the fourth floor of the library in the dark. I carried books, and the boys paired off to carry the new shelves and tables. We still don't exactly know what's in all of the boxes, since the embassy ordered them, but we understand that they are easy books more appropriate for people just learning English, and I cannot wait to find out (maybe Stuart Little is there?). We have managed to investigate the one large box of DVDs, which included many good movies, but I was most excited about An American Tail.

Sarah and I have been talking about showing this movie since September, when we realized that it would be a great way to discuss what it means to be an immigrant and temper the mania for visa requests. It is about the trials of a Jewish-Russian immigrant family to New York in 1885, from getting separated from family to being swindled by rats who take advantage of recent arrivals. And, yes, these characters are also mice. (Wikipedia informed me that Art Spiegelman thought director Stephen Spielberg plagiarized his idea, but decided not to sue.) Before arriving, the family is certain that "There are no cats in America/ and the streets are paved with cheese!", but, of course, there are cats in America. Spielberg makes our hero Fievel Mousekewitz heart-breakingly cute, especially when he and his sister sing "Somewhere Out There." Previewing the movie at home, I was surprised to realize what a little kid Fievel is; I remembered him as my age - which shows that I last watched it when I was about 8. When I showed it yesterday people weren't ready to talk about it, but they did say they enjoyed it - and they stayed until the end, which often doesn't happen when we show movies. 

I went home with another one of the new DVDs, since I have a cold and needed something to curl up with alongside my honey-and-lemon 'tea'. It shockingly doesn't feature mice: You've Got Mail instead has everything comforting that doesn't require thought: bookstores, Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, and a happy ending.

Mouse update 26 Jan: To keep the theme going, during our Burns Night I read his "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785." I love the image of the him stooping to talk to the mouse - though we also speculated that perhaps his tendency to stop and write a poem instead of continuing to plough his field might have contributed to his failure as a farmer.