I like school!?!

You should see the smile on my face as I leave school every day.

The first week, I had two 10-year-old escorts home--the most adorable of my 70 some students. The second, my entourage had grown to four cute girls. Today, I walked out with no less than NINE little girls walking me home. I am in love. I almost want a midget of my own. Almost.

Fourth graders are amazing!

ignorance is not bliss

Yesterday three Russian boys, all with some sort of facial disfigurement, walked by my Kyrgyz friend Elya and I as we walked in the opposite direction. The sidewalk was just wide enough for them to walk past us with no trouble, but that would be considered normal behavior, something not common here. Elya’s on my right, the Russians are on the left, and as we walk past one another, we don’t even brush shoulders there’s so much room on the sidewalk.

As our paths cross, the Russian closest to me grabs my butt, and all three turn and make faces and noices at us as I flick them off. And I keep walking—that’s life here in Osh, Kyrgyzstan for you.

I don’t even think twice about these incidents anymore, let alone report them. They’re so common, I would be calling my Safety and Security Officer every other day. He could go door-to-door and find the dozens of boys and men who’ve touched me inappropriately in this town. [edited]

What’s the problem? they would ask. They’re just being boys. Ignore it.

Ignore it. That seems to be the motto in this town. If boys harass you, ignore it. If they grab your arm on the way to school every day, ignore it. If they throw snowballs at you, ignore it. When they bother you, it means they like you. You can’t imagine how many times I’ve heard that one. They like me, and that’s why they pull my hair? They like me, and that’s why, on days when I don’t wear my watch, at least 10 men will ask me the time?

[edited] It’s disturbing that I’ve given into it as well, despite my do-gooder, problem-solver approach to PC. I ignored the Russian boys just like I ignore all the Kyrgyz and Uzbek boys.

What more can I do, as one person among thousands? I can change my behavior, but the local women will continue to allow themselves to be harassed, and will keep letting “boys be boys,” negating any of my efforts.

call me a hermit

I am trying to make the most of my time here, but when I truly think about it, I never planned on enjoying it. It's funny, I've always wanted to do it, but I never looked forward to how much "fun" it would be. Maybe that's why I'm not really allowing it to be as "fun" as it could be, i.e., I don't go hang with volunteers every weekend. I live in the city--there are around 10 volunteers here, and no one can understand why I choose to not hang around Americans all the time. Hmm...I envisioned it as a time of introspection and soul-searching...is it that? It is, I think...I do realize new things about myself and my desires on a regular basis. And from past experience, I know that I can't look as deeply into myself as I want if I'm around people, particularly Americans who are reminders of the "real" life I left behind, which is why this experience for so long has seemed like the perfect chance to get away and finally get to know the one person who I've never been able to figure out--me. While I am making the most of this time, I'm also very much looking forward to emerging from this self-sentenced "moral isolation" so that I can put to use what I've learned, both about myself and the big, scary world.

unlike the human brain, blogs deprived of nourishment can survive many months.

It's 3 am where I live and I just spent the last two hours googling people from my past. Even though you'd rather not admit it, you know you've done it before. It's a dangerous, dangerous tool, this Google thing.... I'm not sure why I did just spend an entire dollar of my monthly US $90 researching these people. Some, I knew personally; others, I've spoken no more than one word to in my entire life, and yet something drove me to go stalker on them.

It's a little odd, I know. But then, I'll be the first to admit that I'm little odd--I'm in Peace Corps for crying out loud. What I don't understand is why am I up late googling people two days before a less than half-finished grant proposal is due? What makes me take the nail and scratch it across the proverbial chalkboard, because, essentially, that is what late-night googling is? You google these people, often those you envied, you see what they've accomplished since you last heard of them, and end up feeling exactly as you would expect to at a 5 or 10 year school reunion where only one person succeeded and it wasn't you.

But it was different this time. (Yes, I have done this on more than one occasion... and so have you.) I came across their achievements, and I felt good. I was pleased to know that people had succeeded in some way, and hadn't, well, wasted their lives. I wasn't envious or disappointed that they had done great things or become great people (difficult to admit for most, but I'm telling you because I'm past it now and can understand the utter waste of life such negativity is). I was just a little sad. A little sad because, in all my time around them, more often than not, I wasted it judging them instead of allowing myself to look past our differences and to get to know them. A little sad because I thought that back then I was the person (who doesn't irrationally dislike/judge people or wish bad things upon them) that I'd striven to be.

I came across the blog of one of the above-mentioned stalkees. Let's call him Ivan because I had my first Russian lesson today and Ivan was part of it. I have never had a full conversation with Ivan. But I've known him, or known of him, since middle school. Yes... it's been a while. Ivan and I went to the same high school and college as well, where we may have exchanged a total of ten words. Ever. In high school, a lot of people I knew were, to put it mildly, obsessed with him, which unfortunately and automatically put him on my people-to-avoid and be-unreasonably-unkind-to list. I haven't really thought about Ivan since I last read of him in our school paper. But when my insomniac's google-search led to the blog he wrote as a high schooler, I was touched. He became a real person to me, one that I could have related to and appreciated back in the day, and I was saddened by my single lost opportunity to have gotten to know him. Sad that I was so completely different in reality from what I had striven to be at that point in life. Sad, but not regretful, because among the many insights into life this tremendous distance from life as I knew it has given me is that everything happens for a reason.

Everything happens for a reason, and that is why I am still up at 6 am writing this and wasting more precious pennies online. That is why I spent the night feeling contented that people I hardly know are happy/successful/whatever.

Everything happens for a reason, and that is why, despite my acceptance of this philosophy, my stalker side came out tonight to allow me to truly internalize it.

Everything happens for a reason, and that is why I deliberately ignored a person who potentially could have been a great friend. If I hadn't ignored him and been unkind during our one encounter, I wouldn't have googled him tonight. I wouldn't have found the blog, that got the gears in my rusty philosophical mind shifting again. I wouldn't have truly had the epiphany (which I thought I had already experienced before) that everything happens for a reason and that the person I've wanted to be all my life is, among other things, happy when complete strangers do well for themselves.

It's almost 7 am. Everything has a reason, even my nonsensical writing on a blog that I thought was defunct.

Pictures and Skype

I spent a lot of money and an entire day uploading pictures for you, so go take a look! Some aren't recent, but that's what happens when you put it off for so long. More are on the way. Enjoy. Email if you want an update.

I finally bought a microphone as well, so Skype me! It's free (almost)!

alive, but the end.

I think the blog is dying like I am.... The first amendment doesn't apply to PCVs apparently, so I'm not sure how much longer this is going to exist. It's nice to have a place to write if I should ever feel the need, but I'd rather not be on a flight back to the States next week. So if you want me to add you to my mass update list, shoot me an email.

And I'm going to Turkey and India on Friday. ;)

Last week I asked PC for permission to come to Bishkek this Wednesday. Tuesday morning, less than 24 hours before I was planning to leave Osh, I got an email saying that my trip was approved. Talk about cutting it close. I managed to purchase a plane ticket, get to the airport at 8 am, and get to the bazaar in Bishkek without getting ripped off. That's an achievement, I think.

When I met up with my friend Nurgul at Fatboy's (an ex-pat restaurant) for coffee, I felt great. I hadn't realized how much I needed a break from Osh. While in town, I wanted to inquire about getting visas for my upcoming trip to India and Pakistan, so Nurgul and I went to the Indian embassy right after Fatboy's.

I read in my Lonely Planet Central Asia guide that the Indian embassy here accepts visa applications between 2-4 pm so we arrived right at 2 to find out that applications must be submitted between 9 and 11 am. So I got the form, and then tried to explain to the Russian receptionist that I'm Pakistani-born, that India is going to take my passport and use it as a paperweight or something for three months before actually giving me my visa, or at least that's what they do in the States, so I had to submit it then. She didn't want to deal with me, so she let me speak to the consular officer who then drilled me about my family history, and gave me a lecture about being an ignorant ABCD (American Born Confused Desi, even though I'm PAKISTANI born!) when I couldn't remember exactly which little Indian village my father was from. But all my problems were solved when I got my dad on the phone and had him speak to the officer. That's so typically Indian... Even on the visa application, they ask for your father's name or your male spouse's name. Grr. As soon as my dad spoke to the consular officer, I was granted an interview with the ambassador himself, who, upon hearing that my parents were doctors in Pakistan, gave me a visa right then and there. Indians...

Because of the craziness at the Indian embassy, Nurgul and I were late for our 4 o'clock meeting with the Pakistani ambassador, but because he's a close, personal friend of hers, he didn't even mind. I had my second cup of real coffee for the day (woohoo!) with him, and we talked about random stuff for two hours, and it turns out that I have a distant relative from Pakistan living in Bishkek! It's such a small world! AGH! And about my visa... next time I'm in Bishkek, we'll sit down for another cup of coffee as it's prepared. Score.

Today, I had a meeting scheduled with someone at the resource center in the American Embassy, and because I was a little late for it, I wasn't allowed past the gate. They wouldn't even let me reschedule the appointment because appointments have to be made by phone. Of course the only embassy that gave me trouble was my own. Of course.