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.
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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.

Good Grief

The Kaz 19’s had their Mid Service Training last week, which was a good time to catch up and give each other inspiration and encouragement for our last year here. I returned home to find that in my short time gone, my host grandmother had passed away.

Her death should not have been such a shock to me. She’d been increasingly ill since the summer, and for the past month, my host mother and her relatives had been trading off sleeping with her at night.

In the days that followed my return, my host brothers were more subdued (no wrestling matches, no dance parties), and one of them took to sleeping during the day and staying awake all night. He said he couldn’t explain why, he just couldn’t sleep at night. So we continued with our routine, hoping for something to shake us out of our drone-like state.

Before I’d learned of her death, I got home to an empty house. I found that the cat had pooped in a corner of my room. Now, you’re probably going to judge me a bit, and I’m going to have to deal with that, but I didn’t clean that poop for a couple days. Why? Because a) I don’t know where they keep the cleaning stuff. Every time I ask “where is the soap for _____?” as long as it isn’t laundry detergent, my host parents make my brothers clean it. b) I didn’t want to make anyone clean that while they were mourning their grandmother. So I kept silent. But after the second night, my younger brother came into my room and saw that Ricky (the cat) had left me a “present”. He thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. He ran to tell Maksat, who also laughed, and for the first time in a few days, we all laughed together. It’s nice to get a bit of the joy back. Then he cleaned it up. I tried to say, if they’d just show me what I should use I could do it…

They kept telling me it’s because “we’re without mother” so the cat was left inside. She hadn’t been home at all, mourning rituals require that she stay at her mother’s all week. “Without mother” nothing happens smoothly. “Without mother” we didn’t light the pichka the way we should. “Without mother” we forgot to eat meals. “Without mother… things are bad.” And it became our little joke, that without our mother at home we were just going to have to accept that our life would be sub-par.

She returned for one night to see us, and she sat down and told me the details of her mother’s passing. She explained that apa had died in the first day of Eid-al-Adha, which many people said was a blessed day to die. She seemed to have aged 10 years in one week. I didn’t realize how much energy it would take out of her. Her eyes were tired, and her voice frail. She told me that for the next 40 days, she would be gone a lot. “I will be preparing her house, taking care of things. Remembering her… Mourning her… Without mother… things are bad.” And then she began to cry.

I’ve had the misfortune to be abroad when some important people in my life have died, and I didn’t realize until that moment that I hadn’t really grieved those deaths as freely as I might have liked. When you’re on the other side of the world, and you start crying because your grandmother is dying; there is no one else around you who knows her, no one else to sympathize. A girl in my gym class in Belgium told me “Yeah, well. That’s life.” And it’s true, but that wasn’t exactly what I needed to hear. And when you have no visual proof that the person is gone, you can sort of push it aside in your head. Not denial, really, just forgetting. And now here I am, in a foreign country where I don’t know the rituals, I don’t know how to console someone. But all the evidence is there. There is a really nice old woman who let me drink chai with her and use her banya, and I will never get to listen to her give me advice again. There is a family that I live with in a pain I’ve never experienced with my real family because I’ve been absent for it. And although she wasn’t my real grandmother and I only knew her a year, I get to grieve in a way that helps me remember and grieve all those I’ve not been able to. Although it is sad, I am grateful I got to be here for this time.

And so we cried a bit, knowing that pain crosses all cultural boundaries, death affects everyone, and that without that person you’ve lost, your life is going to be sub-par. For a while, at least, without them… things are bad.