My Bloody Valentine

January 25, 2010

I will take the sunshine and warm weather as sign that my streak of bad luck is finally over! I'm still taking it easy, trying to get rid of this cold that seems to be draining all of my energy, so I hope the weather keeps up tomorrow so I can go for a nice long walk and get some exercise and fresh air.

I still can't believe that the electricity was out for my whole neighborhood for a full five days. I sometimes think that nobody really cares about these things all that much—or that they just don't want to be the person responsible for getting something done about it.

I have an analogy: there were a few times during my first few months with my host family when I would spot a mouse inside the house or out in the summer kitchen and point it out to whoever was there at the time. They would always be like, “What? I didn't see a mouse,” even though I thought they probably did. After a while, I realized that they would all look away and pretend not to see it, because if no one knows its there, no one has to do anything about it. If no one make a fuss about the electricity, no one has to do anything about it.
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Sometimes I wonder if Kyrgyz people get any kind of thrill out of slasher movies with the way they are always slaughtering sheep and horses. There just seems to be so much blood and severed heads and such, and even though I try to avoid all of the slaughtering and butchering (mostly, to be quite honest, because I am lazy) I still find myself having to move a dripping sheep's head from one side of the kitchen floor to the other because it is underfoot, or going to get a bucket for water only to find that it is full of steaming fresh blood (I try to tell myself that they have blood-specific buckets separate from water buckets and milk buckets, but its a hard lie to sell).

Last night, after dark, I went in search of water to distill because I was out. The water buckets in the house were empty, so I went out to the summer kitchen where there is sometimes a big barrel of water. I couldn't remember where the light switch was in the kitchen, so I was feeling around on the walls. In the dark, I noticed that a low table had been put in the middle of the floor and there were some large piles of something silhouetted on it. I figured it would be some big chunks of meat (they don't heat the summer kitchen in the winter, so they use it like a fridge). I found the light and switched it on. I found myself being stared down by a glassy eye rolled slightly backwards in the disembodied head of a beautiful brown horse. It shot a frozen frantic look right at me backwards over it's ears. It was strange how much more unsettling this horse head was from a sheep head. The eye seemed to have so much life behind it, and so much intelligence, it seemed irreverent for it to be sitting there, uncovered and alone in the dark, grimy kitchen. I stepped around the head and got my water and left, and congratulated myself for not jumping when I saw it. Six or seven months ago I certainly would have.

February 8, 2010

The horse head has finally been removed from the summer kitchen after staring at me through the window for a full two weeks.

Its snowing again—seems like just as soon as the snow melts we get another covering. I won't complain because its so pretty. I just hope we don't get so much that the power lines get knocked out again.

Well, there's not much else to report. I thought I had something else to say, but I guess not.

February 15, 2010

Brrr. We're all waiting for this cold snap to end. Apparently it usually starts getting warmer down here in February, but we've been having temperatures and snowstorms closer to February weather in Iowa. Thankfully we don't have to worry about the windy blizzards like back home or the avalanches I've heard about in the villages a few more kilometers up the mountains. And to be quite honest I actually prefer the below freezing temperatures to the melting snow and slush. Yuck.

Right now the main paved road that I walk down to get to school looks like an impossibly straight frozen river. Kids zoom past me by alternately running and sliding down a trampled smooth strip of packed snow in the middle of the road. Resembling skateboarders, the kids actually have been getting to school earlier than usual. After school they race home again to get their sleds. Besides being a fun toy for kids, the small sleds with runners are very useful for hauling heavy water cans to the canal or spigot. With the surface of the roads made even for once by the packed snow, the heavy cans can be pulled almost effortlessly.

Kids without sleds make do with what they have. As I was walking home one afternoon I witnessed a small boy squatting on a square of aluminum roofing and propelling himself forward on the frozen road with two short sticks. He was making surprisingly good time, but looked so silly, like a cross between cross-country skiing and row boating.

February 18, 2010

Valentine's Day was almost a week ago, but love is still in the air at my school. According to my counterpart, most people around here had never heard of Valentine's Day before two or three years ago, which is hard to believe, looking at the enthusiasm with which my students embraced it. Last week a huge red box sat in the school lobby, steadily filling up with valentines. In our English lessons we assigned all our classes to make valentines in English, and we had the highest number of completed homework assignments of the year. I was amazed. I was also surprised at how bold so many of the kids were in writing to a classmate of the opposite sex and writing “I love you” and such.

The other day in my 10th grade lesson, a boy slipped me a small piece of folded pink paper when my counterpart left the room for a minute. It had “to my Valentine” written in impossibly tiny letters on the front. Inside was a twenty line poem in Kyrgyz. I thanked him, but had no idea what the poem said without looking at it closely. My counterpart came in and I stood up to show it to her, but the boy was shaking his head desperately behind her back, so I kept it to myself. I've been trying to decipher it, but Kyrgyz cursive still just looks like a bunch of “m”s and “n”s to me. As far as I can tell the first lines are something along the lines of “you are the light from the sun” and “I have fallen in love with you,” etc., etc. I showed it to the girls in my advanced club, without saying who it was from (he didn't sign it) but we didn't get much further with the translation. I don't really know what this kid was going for with this.

In a completely unrelated topic, I'm still waiting for the new, indoor bio-toilets to be finished at my school. They were supposed to be done by September 1st. The school's outhouses are worse than ever now as the shit-cicles have grown so that they come out of the hole, and kids have taken to not even trying to hit the hole. I can't tell if things will be better or worse once everything starts to thaw. At least the smell isn't so bad when everything is frozen. However, I am conscious of the fact that I don't smell so great myself. I haven't been in the city for two weeks, and it has been way too cold to take a bucket bath. My host mom and sister either haven't made a trip to the public banya or they haven't offered to take me with, and I am not brave enough to venture to it myself. I'm very much looking forward to a shower tomorrow!