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.