Our students

My other teammates may disagree, but I really believe that Cat and I have the best students ever. I simply adore them all. Every night we come home and compare stories about classes that day and talk, once again, about how freaking amazing they are. And they really seem to enjoy our classes, too (yay!!!!!). The first lesson, I taught them ways to greet and say goodbye to people beyond simply “hello,” “hi,” “goodbye,” and “bye”. And now every time they see me, whether in school or not, they call out “yo” or “what’s up” and then start laughing... it’s fabulous.

On Saturday we met a group of students to go downtown to the new Ramstore (a great, though very expensive store/mall that sells a lot of American brands you can’t find anywhere else). Once we got there we split up into groups, and about five of them went with me. I felt like I had an entourage! They just followed me around the store. Even when I told them that I was done shopping and just wanted to walk around with them while they shopped, they kept taking cues from me. One girl wanted to go into a store to buy makeup (it was very Sephora-like... makeup, perfumes, etc.) but we ended up walking the store trying to find lotion for me because I’d mentioned earlier that I wanted some. As soon as we walked in the door they swooped down on a saleswoman en masse, told her what I was looking for, and then led me all over the store, telling me which brands were better, cheaper, smelled good, etc. It was like having a whole team of personal shoppers! It was amazing.

They are so considerate and helpful. It’s a cultural thing, I think. They will do just about anything to help you out and be friendly. If you invite someone to something, they will go. It doesn’t matter if it’s not something they are particularly interested in or not. They will go. If you need help with something, they will bend over backwards. It’s unbelievable.

When we left the store we went to a cafe nearby for dinner. Cat dropped one of her bags and a huge bottle of hot sauce she had bought broke in the bag. Some spilled on the floor, and I got some napkins to clean it up. Apparently that was not okay! Dias, a friend of one our students, yelled “No!” at me. He wasn’t being mean or trying to startle me, but he was just apparently horrified by the thought of me cleaning it up myself. So I just let it go and chalked it up to a cultural discovery. All in all, it was pretty humorous. We were still chuckling about it ten minutes into the meal.

The group got smaller as the afternoon progressed, until finally it was just me, Cat, Asem (Asyem), Julia, and Dias on the marshrutka home. And the two drunk German guys hitting on Cat. If we had been alone, it would have been pretty awkward, but Julia and Asem were running interference via language, and Dias was there just as a male presence. We invited the three of them up to our apartment for coffee. We mutually amused each other (Cat’s dancing, Julia and Cat singing Shakira songs, me asking them how to say things in Russian and then trying to write them down using the Cyrillic alphabet, Cat and I trying to communicate with Dias using our extremely limited Russian, his slightly better English, and our handy Russian-English dictionary, etc), and they finally left around 9pm. All in all, it was a great day.

And tonight after my 4 o’clock class, they all swarmed me, asking what words I knew in Russian. It was so funny. I counted to 100 for them, and then started recounting random phrases and food names that I knew. They just thought that was the funniest thing ever. Then they started teaching me new words and telling me how to spell them in Russian. I’m not sure why it is so funny to them when I try to write things in Russian, but it seems to be pretty universal.

Have I mentioned that I love our students?

(Written Tuesday, September 19)

PS. Thank you to everyone at First Baptist! I just recieved four CD's of the August services in the mail today (Friday). I almost cried. I loved every bit of it... the sermon, the children recieving their Bibles, hearing our beautiful choir. I loved just hearing the familiar voices. Thank you to everyone, both the people who took part in the service and the people responsible for recording and sending it to me. It was only the second sermon I've heard in English since I've been here! Thank you!

Water, water, everywhere!

And I do mean that quite literally. Apparently they are shutting off the water to the entire city of Karaganda for the next few days. They said at least two days, which could mean anywhere from three days to a week. Yay. And the water shuts off every night at 11. So Cat and I have spent the last hour frantically filling every container we could lay our hands on. We have numerous bottles we’ve saved from cokes and such, all four of our wash tubs, our teakettle, three giant pots from our kitchen that we don’t use, a random 5 gallon bin in our bathroom, and a bucket. It’s awesome. I sure hope that we won’t need this much, but you never can tell. And if we run out, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. So we have water everywhere! Good times.

(Written Monday, September 18)

A good day

Since I can’t afford to spend a lot of time online, I am writing all emails and blog entries on Cat’s computer and saving them to a flash disk to take to the internet cafe. There may be occasions when I won’t get to answer an email for a week or more, and I will probably end up sending multiple emails and posting several blog entries at one time. The moral of the story is, please don’t be put off if updates seem to come in spurts. If you desperately need to contact me, you would be better off calling. If you would like my number or my address here, you can either email me (but we’ve already determined that that’s not the best option in a hurry) or you can get it from my parents, Nikki Hardeman at FBC, Kate O’Rourke, Jamie Barton, or Luda Kwon.

It’s all about the little things in life. I know I’ve already written that once since I’ve been here, and I’m sure that I will write it many more times before June. But that’s just because it’s true. It is not meant to imply that it’s horrible here (because it’s not), but that there are so many little things we take for granted that are unusual here.

A sermon in English, for example. Today a fellow American, Scott Tucker, preached at Living Vine church, translated into Russian by another church member. Until now, the only things I’ve been able to understand are the scriptures, because we can usually discern what book they mean and look it up in our own Bibles. Then the Tuckers invited all the ESI teachers over to their apartment for lunch. We had sweet tea, chicken salad, sandwiches, ICE!!! It was great. Their sons showed us their UGA memorabilia and all their Braves baseball cards (yay for Georgians... they lived in Columbus before they moved here), and I played a very exciting game of chess with the younger one.

Now Cat and I are preparing to go back with laundry... they have a washing machine! I have thus far managed to avoid doing my laundry by hand, but it’s only delaying the inevitable. I actually wouldn’t want to avoid it the entire year even if I could. It’s all a part of the experience. Somehow this even feels like cheating a little bit. But I’ll get over that for right now. I have to teach tomorrow, I don’t have anything but t-shirts left, and it’s raining, which puts a damper in the whole clothes-line plan (quite literally. Oh wow, what a bad pun. Eric Lowery would be so proud... someone should tell him).

It's all in the details

I love that, though the whole picture is very different from what we’re used to, the details make up for it, at least for me. There are tiny bits of beauty in things that we usually don’t bother with in America. No matter where we eat, even in the school cafeteria, it is on nice china, painted with beautiful scrollwork or floral patterns. The doorframes and doors in our apartment are downright ornate! They are all carved wood and latticework. Every light fixture is a chandelier, even if not very expensive looking.

And if they do one thing well here, it is curtains! They are gorgeous! In our apartment, our director’s apartment, the reception hall at the wedding, every room in our school, including our classrooms… they all have beautiful, floor-to-ceiling, sheer curtains, often embroidered with small patterns or flowers. I love it. It makes me happy.