The road

I made my last trip to the city today and on my way up, I realized that I have never really talked about this road here before, and now seems like as good a time as any to explain. This road between my village and the city is about 110 kilometers long. By American standards, this road would take about an hour to drive. It is covered in potholes and swerves and is extremely uneven, so it takes anywhere from an hour to 4 hours depending on the vehicle and the weather.

Fun Facts:

- It is a horrible road
- It is one of the better roads in Kazakhstan
- I feel safer on this road in the winter when the snow and ice level it out.
- There are two small settlements between my village and the city. (The first time I passed the middle one I thought, wow I'm glad I don't live there. Perspective is a great thing.)
- There are no rest-stops. But your driver will gladly stop by some bushes for you. (This is mostly true of all of Kazakhstan. Even long-distance bus trips will sometimes stop on the side of the road and tell the men to go to the bushes on one side of the road, and women to go to the bushes on the other. Say what you will about American rest-stops, but they exist and that in itself is amazing.)
- There is one police check-point. (The only time I've been stopped at a check point was leaving Astana just after Swine Flu broke out. The officer looked at my visa entry date and sighed with relief, "So you don't have swine flu then!" I said no, I don't, and I was allowed to go my merry way.)
- There are three Islamic cemeteries between my village and the city.

This last fact might seem weird, but it is significant because every time they pass the cemeteries (just the Islamic ones, the Russian Orthodox ones don't count) every Muslim in the car will say a prayer, which involves cupping your hands in front of your face and then symbolically washing your face after you're finished. "Every person" includes the driver, so oddly enough, even if you are not Muslim, you wind up praying that the car's alignment is good enough to stay straight when the driver isn't holding on to the steering wheel.

If you can't get a bus, taxis are almost always available. Taxi service is a lot like hitch-hiking. You just stick out your hand and a car will pull over and you get in. I realize that this sounds dangerous, but it's what everyone does. One day I was walking to the bus station when a car pulled up. "Are you going to the city?" I said yes, and the driver offered a price to go, and I jumped in. In America I will have to get used to not getting rides from strangers again.

Wrapping it up

I know everyone says this, but there is no other way to say it; I am shocked at how quickly time has gone by. And now we are getting down to the last WEEKS of my service here, hours go by like days and then suddenly a month has passed. This week is “language week,” which began at my school on Tuesday with a huge culture competition. About 12 different classes chose and presented on a different nationality, which included singing songs, presenting baked goods, and dancing. And during this huge (3-hour-long) pageant I suddenly realized that I would really miss all of this. Yes, working here is frustrating, yes, some people are very impatient and upsetting, yes, I dream about America (inaccurately, as my mind has turned it into this magical land where problems don't exist) almost every day. But there are traditions and people here that I will miss. All of this sentimental feeling was balanced out Wednesday when I had to teach a doubled-up class on my own for a while. The class sat, some sharing seats because there weren't enough chairs, one student complained that he didn't feel like learning today. The rest of the class agreed and proceeded to ask me questions about American cell-phone services, my close, personal friends Britney Spears and 50 Cent, and translations to some Pit Bull lyrics until my counterpart finally came into the room and whipped them into shape.

America! Land of burritos! Home of convenience! Free Wi-Fi with purchase of coffee! It's going to be so familiar and strange all at once. I'm going back to an America with a new president, an America recovering (? They say it's “over”) from a recession, an America without Scrubs or T.R. Knight on Grey's. An America that is obsessed with Vampires all of a sudden (I just got another load of magazines in the mail and am astonished at the amount of Vampire stuff that's come out. What's with all the Vampires guys?) America! Where something like Lady Gaga is possible! ANYTHING is possible!

I'm excited.



Prediction Post - November 30, 2009

Job-hunting sucks. America is loud, I'm sick from eating burritos three times a day for the past three weeks, and I have a nervous twitch in my left eye from drinking too much coffee.

After a couple years

I know about 6 months ago I said I would write more often, and this summer I failed miserably... This was due to a combination of travel, camps and the sad fact that the internet cafe in my village closed. Mid-July I walked by it only to find the door padlocked shut. So I asked the woman working at the shashlik stand next to it "Do you know when it will be open?"

"Probably never"
"What?"
"They took away the computers."

At least we had it for 11 months. This news was not as bad for me, but horrible for my sitemate who is trying to apply for grad schools from here... Anyway the reason I can make this post now is because school is back in session! Yesterday I attended my last first bell ceremony and received flowers from a hand-full of students who were just so grateful I haven't ditched them for America yet.

During the first lesson a couple girls kept asking me questions: "Do you think there will be ice cream after school today?", "Did you go home this summer?", "When will you go home?!"

I told them November. "When will you come back?!" I said maybe after a couple years... "YEARS?! We will be so big then! You won't even know us!"

I've been gone a couple years. When I get back, maybe I'll be so big you won't even know me! Probably not, but you get what I mean.

Uralsk – You're in Europe! (Or you traveled so far, you might as well be!)

Uralsk is in the far western corner of Kazakhstan, and it currently has no volunteers, so any camps that want outside help have to bring us in. So three other volunteers and I made the impressive journey out there. To get an idea of what I did, look at a map of Kazakhstan, look at the far eastern corner, then follow the southern border until you make it up to the far western corner. You might ask, “Jessica, why didn't you just go through the middle of the country? There had to be an easier route!” The simple answer is no there is not. The easiest way, actually, goes through Russia and we aren't allowed on those trains.

When I first found out that living in Kazakhstan would mean a lot of train travel, my first reaction was to gasp with glee as I recalled the Hogwarts Express. I had images of people running around in their school robes, buying magical candies, and people pulling out their wands to practice defensive spells to counteract the Slytherin's hexes. Well, I am here to kill all those romantic notions as I say that riding the train in Kazakhstan is nothing like Harry Potter. People change into their train wear* not robes; people buy sausage, not snot-flavored jelly beans; and nobody knows any sort of spell, defensive or otherwise. Nobody even has a wand! It's a big letdown, and I thought I'd just clear that up now.

So after 68 hours of train, we got out and got into a taxi for another 5 hours to get to Uralsk where we were met by a really enthusiastic guy who was the camp organizer. He is a FLEX alum, which means he studied in America for a year in high school, and this camp is one of the ways he tries to give back a part of his experiences to the kids here. We were housed in a school and each of us given a group of 10 students (grades 9-11) to help for the week. The kids were amazing, they had to interview to come to the camp, so their English was really good, and they were just all around really creative and hard-working. The week came complete with English lessons every day (given by us), skits, American sports and a trip to the river to swim and get sunburns. AND a competition between the teams. They got points based on how well they did in sports, the evening activities, and (most importantly) their attitudes, and how much they didn't speak in Russian or Kazakh. My team started out really strong, (uhhh, I had one of the most competitive kids in the world on my team) so we won every sports game. Every single one. We even took first in the skits competition, but as the week went on they kept speaking Russian! I made a pie chart to show them that we could win every single game, but if we kept speaking Russian we would lose. Sports was only 18%, Russian/cellphone usage was 48%! Come on guys! I told them. It's SO easy to get these points! But in the end we lost 1st place to the Sunny Stars. It's ok, it was a close competition.

The camp ended with tears, the exchange of e-mails and phone numbers, and requests that we come back to Uralsk again. It was so fun to spend a week with the kids, to talk with them about the opportunities they have for their futures, to ask them their opinions about different topics, and to see them expressing themselves, really well, in English. Our “no Russian/Kazakh” rule had fully taken effect by the end of the week, and they were having private side conversations in English! Even little things like “are you going to lunch now? Let's go together!” It's incredible what a difference one week makes.

A second happy ending! We couldn't buy train tickets back because it's mid-summer and they were all sold out, so we got to fly to Astana. Granted, that is only halfway to where some of us needed to be, but I will take 3 hours of plane ride to replace 40-some hours of train any day. Just another 13 hours of bus, 3 hours of taxi and I am back, safe and sound, in my little corner of Kazakhstan.

Moral of this story: Kazakhstan is big. Really, really big.


*”train wear” means anything from sweats to underwear, depending on the person and how much they don't care that everyone can see them.

The multi-purpose fridge

One noticeable difference between a kitchen in America and a Kitchen in Kazakhstan is the refrigerator. For a while we didn't even have one here. It's cold enough in the winter that we just put our stuff on the front porch, and in the summer... just don't buy stuff that spoils.

In December my family got a huge, new, pure white fridge, and I noticed something really weird - it stayed white. Nothing was posted on it, no pictures, no magnets, no notes. Nothing. It was so strange to see a plain, white, magnetic surface with absolutely nothing clinging to it. So at the beginning of the summer, I made a calendar for my family to see where I would be and when and I used a magnet to put it on the side of the fridge.

This was the best idea ever, according to my host mother. I returned after a couple weeks of camps to find it covered in notes to my host brothers. "Don't forget! Feed the dog! Do the dishes! Don't spend too much time talking on the phone!"

It is the beginning of a new era.

The nature and BFFs

I had this really great plan to put some insightful update here, and then I discovered the "we read" feature on Facebook, so I just spent a lot of time updating that... Sorry faithful readers (mom). So quick update:

Last week I was at a Frisbee camp at my friend, Jeff's site. It was really cool to watch the kids improve and eventually be able to play without our help. And it was fun to run around and not teach English for a week.

This week I've been in what has been called "the most difficult place to live" in Kz. I'm here with my friend Mary for what we've decided is "camp Jessica" since I am as into making friendship bracelets as children are. Mid-week we took a hiking trip into the wilderness and went up the highest "peak" in central Kazakhstan (stop laughing CO people, it's still pretty). After, we descended and stayed with a family in a village on the other side of the mountain which was cool. I am always blown away with how hospitable people are here. Here came three dirty, hungry, maybe grumpy travelers that they didn't know that well and they opened up their home, fed us and I made best friends with their 8-year-old granddaughter.

"Jessica!" She whispered at dinner
"What?"
"Where are you sleeping tonight?"
"I'm sleeping in the next bedroom."
"Yeah?" I could tell where this was going.
"Yes, but I think I'll be sleeping with the cats, and Mary might have to sleep with me."
"But Grandma sleeps in that room."
"She told me I'm sleeping in her bed"
"... Alright." She got up to walk away then whispered, "Wherever you sleep, I'll sleep."

I gave her a friendship bracelet to make our BFF status official.

Sum sum summertime

It's summertime! Things are green instead of white, the sun barely sets at 11pm only to rise at 3am (compare with winter's setting at 4pm and rising at 9am), and the children we teach no are the ones who actually want to come to English camp (as opposed to the children who are dragged to English classes every week). Summer life in Kazakhstan is not bad at all.

So for the next couple months I will be traveling to different sites and helping other volunteers with their camps, and hopefully I'll be able to put “highlights” here.

This is a picture of a camp held at Lisa's school, which is a couple hours away from my site. We reviewed the past simple tense, then gave them pictures of people and told them to write sentences about what they saw. So, naturally he said, “Yesterday, I killed this bear.”

Bunnies

Our rabbits had babies. About ten to be exact, and in order to prevent ten turning into 40 my host mother has been telling my brothers "You need to sell those bunnies. What do we need bunnies for? We don't eat them; they don't give us milk or eggs. Send them away! Sell them at the bazar!"

"What?! Do the bunnies bother you? What did the bunnies ever do to you?"

So we still have ten baby bunnies.

A good spin on the outhouse trips

It is the 11th of May! We have been official volunteers for exactly 18 months now and as I sit here thinking about how quickly time has gone by, I start to wonder what will I miss about being here? For a long time, I thought something that I would not miss at all would be the whole outhouse experience, but I’ve started to notice little things that go with the outhouse trips for which I might start to feel a bit of nostalgia.

Observing moon cycles, for example. In America, I might notice sometimes that it’s a full moon, or when the moon looks really red because of all the pollution in the sky, I might think “that’s pretty.” But now I am almost obsessively observant. A full moon means I don’t really need the flashlight, while a new moon means I try not to have to go out there after 9pm. It’s pretty and functional.

Barnyard animals get in the way, making you think more than usual. It’s annoying, but kind of fun when you have to get through a maze of cows, broken tractors and barking dogs to get to the toilet. I don’t know, maybe it’s weird but I get a kick out of it when it happens.

You find out the weather in the morning. In America, I would leave the house sometimes not at all dressed for the cold or hot it actually was outside. But when you have to go outside first thing in the morning, you get a pretty good idea what you are in for that day.

… Ok, so there’s not that much that I will actually miss about the outhouse, but there is a little.

How to keep control of your class

Draw a line in chalk down the center of the table and tell the little boys, "DO NOT cross the line".



It was working until I took out the camera.

Seminar

My site mate and I had a seminar this week called "Using Multi-Media in the English classroom." It was mostly on how to use PowerPoint, songs and video plus how to do Google searches... We weren't expecting that many people, but 29 English teachers from the region came. I was going to put some pictures on here, but it turns out that somehow everything I have has a major virus on it and I can't open any of the folders on my camera's card... Sorry. Just know that it was really successful and that the general public (or just the English teachers) is demanding another one.

Updates

About a month ago, I cut and pasted all my old postings to see what I’ve written and I realized that I have some things I should update; this post is to tie up all those loose ends.

The entire 6th form really approves of my new hair color.

The cat got dirty the very next day. He is still disgusting, maybe even more so than before I tried to banya him. He probably went out and found mud to roll in just to teach me a lesson.

Even though it’s gross, I’m still eating stuff with a sauce made of mayonnaise and Tabasco sauce.

Our combined club is going really well. We have about three superstars who show up all the time and a few others who occasionally drop in. We are currently watching Gilmore Girls and talking about parent/children relationships while also looking at what some American lives are like. Our “resource center” is currently a collection of English books prominently displayed on a bookshelf in the town library. However, I found out last week that the librarians won’t let them check out the books, so I told them to tell me what they wanted to take and then to sneak them out… I think it’s more a problem of them not having the books catalogued or anything because they aren’t sure how to categorize them. We’ll work on that.

Once I get into my posts from the beginning of my service, I see titles with a lot of capital letters and exclamation points. “Site Announcement!”, “Site Visit!”, “INTERNET!”, “New Address!” I feel like somebody needs to sit that girl down and tell her to cool it.

Ok, I know I haven’t done this in a long time, but I’m asking PLEASE send me gossip magazines. I’ve got a lot of Time coming at me, but one of my students told me the other day she’s tired of reading about Barack Obama. It isn’t that she doesn’t like him, but she really wants to read more about… Brad Pitt, Britney Spears, etc… See? It isn’t even entirely for me; I give them to my school when I’m finished reading.

Train Observations

My train ride from Almaty is only 19 hours long, which is really short by most people's rides standards. But this last ride I was on my own for the first time since last summer and I had the opportunity to make a few observations.

Observation 1: If I keep my answers short and don't talk too much, the people I travel with think I'm from “Bulgaria or Moldova.” This either means my Russian is really amazing, or the people in Bulgaria and Moldova speak really broken Russian. This also might be due to the fact that I made my hair dark again. Before they thought I was from Germany. The strange thing is nobody ever thinks an American would be in Kazakhstan.

Observation 2: When they find out that not only am I an American, but I am actually living here, things get really interesting. They assume I live in a city, and then I tell them where I actually live. One man looked at me and repeated the name of my village, leaned forward and said empathetically “I wouldn't live there.”

Observation 3: After over a year and a half of living here, I don't understand why I even bother bringing food on the train. Strangers are more than willing to feed me. They call me down from my bunk and say “Jessica, come down and eat dinner!” Then they whip out the chicken, the tea, and the veggies and suddenly we have a feast that all 6 people in our area can't even finish off.

Observation 4: The train toilet has always been an area that I dislike. I'm kind of short, so hovering is difficult... I didn't realize that there is a place to stand ON THE SEAT. Instant squatty potty! I can't believe I've been traveling on trains this long here and haven't noticed that. My train ride was drastically improved because of this discovery.

Observation 5: ***Flashback to 26 years ago*** My mother and father are having the discussion “What will we name our baby?” My mother says “Marissa,” my father cringes and says “What about Cindy?” And they settled on Jessica because my mom read it in a Reader's Digest article and my dad thought “Jessica is in Dune!” ***Now*** 25-year-old Jessica has actually read the Reader's Digest article and finds Dune in the Peace Corps library, and thinks to herself, maybe we should find out who Jessica is. She is “a Bene Gesserit Lady, a duke's concubine and mother of the ducal heir.” ...? I'm disappointed at the significant lack of hobbits, Hermione and Rons, and Yodas, but I'm going to try to get past that and actually finish it. I read 26 pages on the train and came to this conclusion: When my dad was my age, he was a huge geek.

I mean that in the best possible way.

Nauryz! (again)

So while a week ago it was hot in the south, THIS week it cooled off and rained. It was so sad I decided to stay south for a couple more days to get some sun. Today is looking better. The picture is of Kokpar, polo played with a goat carcass instead of a ball. It was cool to see, but it was also freezing that day... so we decided to make sure we saw every national game possible (well, that we knew of), then we ate some free national food and we left. You might think it was a failed vacation, but I got to meet most of the new volunteers and it was actually probably the best time I've had with other volunteers here. We also started making summer camp/travel plans and I'm getting really excited (like I wasn't already) for school to end! Sorry this post was sort of lame, but I'm trying to keep my promise to write more often... Here's a picture of camels to make up for it.

Learning how to Swear

We've had a couple days of non-stop wind that knocked out the power in my village. After all that, I found that my laptop's power cord is no longer in working condition... So I'm really sorry, but until I get a way to fix that m posts will be A) Shorter, B) riddled with spelling errors, and C) not as focused. The silver lining, if we all want to see it, is that for whatever reasons the 16 month internet ban (against me) at my school has been lifted! And as I sit here, in a room-full of students playing Spider Solitaire instead of listening to the teacher, I'm inspired to tell you that they ARE interested in English on a very basic level:

Rap music is more popular than you can possibly imagine, so the words they learn are words they will never use in academics. At least once a day a kid will run up to me, use a few swear words to see what my reaction will be. I think this only works because I have been absolutely consistent with it, but I give them a quizzical, "huh? What did you say?" kind of look. They repeat the words, and I say "Beach?" And they nod, "Yes! Yes! BEECH!" Then they ask what it is. And I tell them, it's where people go to swim. Their faces go from euphoric to crestfallen s they realize that it's not a bad word. "No, no, no... Miss Jessica... Beeeetch!" And I give them a confused look and say, yes a beach is where you go swimming. This is infuriating for them, and a lot of fun for me. Other explanations range from "are you saying 'shift'? 'Ask'?" these all depend on their continual mispronunciation of swears. But they all know the F word. Like, there is no problem in pronunciation there, so with that one, I have just told them it isn't a word. They repeat it, and I say "I don't know what that is. Are you sure you aren't saying Fudge? Duck? What?" And they wind up walking away shaking their heads because they have either mis-learned a really bad word or I'm just such an idiot for not knowing the word that is repeated in every American rap song. I'm not sure which they think.

Traffic Laws

My goal is to write something here every time I get to use the internet... So surprise! I am in the city right now buying train tickets (to PARADISE) to Shymkent for the end of March. I will experience Kazakh culture as they celebrate the New Year (which begins March 22nd) and most importantly, I will experience warm weather and sun on my arms and legs for the first time in months.

So this week I made a pretty important discovery. Over the summer my village got its first traffic lights. They have created a safer environment on a couple of our most busy streets, they have also caused a lot of angry cursing from people who are used to whizzing by without giving our town a thought. Anyway, I was walking home, about to cross one of the newly-lit intersections when I looked up to see a horse-drawn sleigh approaching. I'm used to the horse-drawn things, but I suddenly thought "does the horse-drawn sleigh have to stop at a red light?" And I know he SHOULD, but will he? So I stopped dead in my tracks and stared (because if I've learned anything about the culture here, it's that it is never inappropriate to stare at anyone or anything) intently, waiting for my answer. The answer is no, the horse-drawn sleigh does not pay attention to the red light. Nobody was coming to cross, so there was no one to challenge its decision, but there you have it. Drive a cart or sleigh and you can speed on through.

My new Banya Buddy

I’ve been taking banyas instead of showers for a long time now. I have banyaed in several different banyas (which, I’ve found, is kind of unusual, but my host family keeps telling people that I like the banya so I get invited to… bathe at other people’s houses. It is weird but I’m not complaining). I have banyaed with counterparts, family members and other PCVs. I am used to getting beaten with the oak branch and I know how to return the favor. I can even sit in the sweltering heat for 30 minutes now compared to the 5 I could handle when I first got here. All that said, I felt it was time for a banya challenge.

Our family’s cat is really, really dirty. I know cats are supposed to be self-cleaning, but this one, for whatever reason, is not. The last time I can remember my host brothers taking him into the banya was sometime in October. And ever since the beginning of this year I’ve joked about how I was going to banya with the cat, but the cat would be out of the house on banya night, or I would forget, or I would be at some stranger’s house banyaing because they wanted me to see their banya. There were all kinds of reasons, but this weekend, Ricky (the cat) was sitting right in front of the door as I was getting ready to leave for the banya. It was meant to be. So I scooped him up and marched us out into the cold to cross the yard to the banya.

A banya (as I am typing this on my computer I can’t go back and check my other posts to see if I’ve already covered this, but here it is again if I have) is a series of rooms all around a coal or wood burning furnace. The first room is where you and your new best friends take off all your clothes and hang them on hooks. The second room is the wash room with a water pump, buckets and a bucket of sorts that is sitting on top of the fire to provide hot water. If there is a third room, it is like a sauna. You are supposed to go into that room and sit and sweat out the week’s dirt. If that room doesn’t exist, you take the buckets and set them aside as you sit and sweat in that second room. While sitting there you get beaten with an oak branch to exfoliate, and you beat your friend. It’s a really good time. After you have sat long enough/until your heart and head can’t take the heat anymore you go into wash mode. You choose a good bucket and combine your desired amount of boiling water with cold water combo and soap up and rinse off. Go back, put your clothes on and you’re good for the week (or two).

I was, perhaps, a little over-confident in my task to clean the cat in the banya. I thought, no problem, I cleaned the dog at home all the time (ha, ok, like 5 times ever, but I’ve done it) so I kind of had an idea how this would go… There were a few problems that came out of my over-simplified comparison. For starters, in America I could wash the dog in a bathtub with a running faucet, I could trick her into the bathroom by using the leash and dog treats, and there’s the painfully obvious fact that dogs are not cats. As much as my dog hated getting a bath, it was never painful. I never had to wash her in an environment that hot and steamy (I lost the cat at first, it was a particularly steamy banya), and the dog never meowed like I was performing some kind of bathing torture. The cat was obviously not pleased to be there, sitting in a bucket full of water. And remember that beyond that second room humans and cats are not wearing any clothes, and cats have claws. Getting into the second room in itself was a challenge because he attached himself to the doorframe. When I pried him off he waved his paws around frantically trying to reattach to something. And that something wound up being me. It was the worst idea I’ve ever carried out. Whatever, now we’re clean, and the next time I clean that stupid cat will be in the summer when I can simply dump water on him in the yard.

Slokim Parum! (This is what you say to someone after a banya, it means “with steam!”)

Consistency

A couple years ago when I was researching Peace Corps I read a lot of blogs. I mean, just an embarrassing amount of personal information about individuals’ experiences while serving in different countries. And I noticed a really weird trend. After about one year of service, they all stopped writing. Some not entirely, but almost suddenly there would be very little information and it was infuriating. “What happens during the second year?” I wanted to ask. And now I find myself in the same position, and I think I know what it is. Everything seems normal now. The things that last year made me want to immediately tell someone “you can’t believe what I just saw” are now commonplace, and the “we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore” moments grow few and far between. And even the things that do still surprise me are overshadowed by that really exciting thought – that in ONE year from RIGHT NOW I will be somewhere completely different. Then I start to worry about where I will be, what I will do, and the incident is shoved somewhere in my memory to be taken out at a later date. So when I sit down at the computer, I try to think, “What would be interesting to the people who read my blog?” Nothing comes to mind. Because it’s all stuff I’ve heard before.

So I’m going to try to write more. I’m sorry for being lazy about this and I’m going to be better.
____________________________________

Every so often I have these moments where my old self looks at what my now-self did and says something like "Gross," or "Uhhhh" or "Really?" Yesterday I had such a moment. I was lying in bed, thinking about how my stomach hurt and what I could have possibly eaten to make it feel that way. And as I thought about that day's food... I remembered the two pieces of bread I'd eaten with mayonnaise and Louisiana Hot sauce as a sauce on top… and nothing else. It tasted so good at the time, and now that I think about it, it sounds just so disgusting. It's really the dead of winter, when anything that isn't meat or potatoes is delicious and mayo tastes good on EVERYTHING.

All my best intentions

So I had this really great idea about a week ago for a post and got it all ready on my computer at home, then got the internet place to upload it and the power went out. Twice. Then I forgot the flashcard today. So I'm just going to blab a bit about what I've been doing... It's pretty much business as usual now. My site mate and I had our first successful combined English club at the center library last week. This is significant because we've been showing up since December with the intention of having a club and nobody showed. But see what perseverance and relentless self-advertising does? You get one student who comes on purpose and three students who wander in on accident and wind up staying because it's fun. I'll let you all know if we get more this week. One of my students came into class Thursday talking about the club, "It was so cool! We played games, we watched part of an American television show!" Then he turned to me, "Miss Jessica, what WAS that yesterday?" So with my new signs, and that student talking it up, I think we'll have a real club this week. He doesn't even know what fun is yet.