Kyrgyz Humor

September 25, 2009

My six-month anniversary is fast approaching (I left the US on the March 28th, I believe). My language learning, which has been at a steady climb since I started has started to level off a bit without my tutor. I have been getting really lazy with my speaking (the side effect of having a really chatty host mom, I think), but I understand quite a bit. Now one of the teachers at my school has a plan to teach me one Russian word a day in exchange for one English word a day. Sounds like a good plan to me. Also, Peace Corps informed me that I could begin taking Uzbek lessons if I wanted to. Maybe I will take up that offer later, but right now I think learning two languages at once is enough, don't you? Anyway, my fake bazaar Uzbek has served me well so far, so I can just work on perfecting that.

School is still going well. It gets easier every day, but it is so different from American schools that I sometimes feel like I am on a different planet. Things that I would consider universal school practices completely baffle my students. I sprang a vocabulary quiz on my 10th graders, and the concept was completely foreign to them. The idea that copying work is bad is also completely foreign. Students do their classmates' work for them right in front of me and expect to be rewarded for their kindness, and are baffled when I scold them for it. I have yet to have a class where more than four students out of 25 have done their homework. I see this as a lack of interest and motivation, but this doesn't seem to be the case during the actual lesson. In all my classes, hands always shoot up into the air when I ask a question. Today I had my 10th graders write sentences about magazine pictures, and the ones that finished early asked if they could take another picture and write more sentences. It is all one big mystery to me.

Wednesday was a very mysterious day for me. It was National Kyrgyz Language Day, so there was an all-school assembly. There were a few soviet-style processions, and then some kids and teachers read poems and sang songs and there was some dancing. There was a group of kids who sang as a choir and did a choral reading. These kids, who I guess are part of some club or something, all wear these red scarves tied around their collars (the uniform requires a white collared shirt and black skirt or pants), but during their performance they had the scarf draped over their arm held in front of them like a waiter's towel. At some point in the assembly, someone called the teachers to do something and they shuffled me along with them while I asked what we were doing. One teacher just said something about “galstuk” (Russian for neck tie). It turns out that the teachers were supposed to tie the scarves around the kids' necks as part of the ceremony. I didn't get it at all. One of the performances in the assembly was a solo dance by a 4th grade girl. She did a belly dance routine complete with a fringe-y belly dancer outfit that is not age appropriate by American standards. I had seen this kind of dancing by little girls before during training, but I hadn't seen it in the south yet. It is very strange and makes me very uncomfortable. The old teacher next to me, who I had been chatting with in Kyrgyz, asked me if I liked the dancing, and I answered honestly, saying that she is a very good dancer, and American girls don't know how to dance like that. “But is it good?” she asked. “Yes, good,” I said. “Bad.” she said, and I could see she had set me up. She explained that it is ooyat (shameful), and good Kyrgyz girls should cover their bellies. I tried to ask why it is allowed in school if it is ooyat, but my Kyrgyz doesn't reach that far.

Now that I have been here for a while, I feel myself getting teased a lot more. The Kyrgyz sense of humor is completely beyond me, but then I think that my sense of humor is beyond everyone, so we are even. My host dad teases me the most. The other night he pulled a cooked sheep head out of nowhere (this was the third one in two weeks. I don't know where they keep coming from) while I was eating my soup, and carved it up. Cooked sheep heads are pretty gross looking anyway, but they are even worse when they are getting cut up. He wrenched off one of the ears and handed it across the table to me. I politely refused, but as usual, polite refusal doesn't work. Like always, I said I would taste it, so I did (barely) and put it aside. After a few minutes, he cut off the top lip and did the same. After that, he cut out the roof of the mouth and handed the wobbly flap of flesh over to me. I must have looked like I was going to puke, because he said, “tamasha!” (joke!) and took it back. He cut the piece of skin in half and handed part of it back to me. “This is the good part,” he said. I told a tiny white lie here and said that in my religion, we don't eat meat from the head. It was okay, because my host sister came by and devoured the whole pile in seconds.