October 27, 2011

Most of my laundry was dried this morning and I now had a bigger selection of pieces to choose from. The owner of the apartment across the landing from mine, and who had previously given me a ride to work, wanted to know how much I was paying for rent. She wanted for me to tell other ex-pats that her apartment will be ready for occupancy in about a week. I thought of Elisabeth, our fifth ELF, who’s still waiting for her visa. Got to the institute earlier than needed and searched for an empty classroom where I could do paperwork and had just sat down when one of the teachers came in to ask me to look after his class for five minutes. He must have been gone for at least twenty as I had a chance to sit down and read with three different students until they notified me they needed to move on to their next class. They were filing out when the teacher returned. He did not apologize or explained his absence. I asked him if he had a few minutes so we could talk in private about one of his students who is also in one of my classes. From the beginning I thought there was something wrong with him as he insists on shouting his requests, gets up from his seat constantly, talks out of turn and so on. When I sat down to read with him, he could not decode the words and had a terrible time with pronunciation. He might even have an eyesight problem. The teacher confirmed the student has a very low level of English, but he is doubly cursed with the fact that he’s an only child and the son of another faculty member, so it seems as if he’s being treated with kid gloves. As for the vision problem, he tried to tell me that all students get their eyesight checked when they exit their high school. As if getting a fake certificate is beyond people with money. Pariso informed me that the Halloween celebration had been switched to Friday and that they might not hold classes after that.

                                          More signs of fall

I tried to get my students in the first class to come up with a list of adjectives to describe a place and gave them as an example “noisy”. They didn’t recognize the spoken form and I wrote it on the board. I now know that when everyone reaches for his/her dictionary is because they have never seen the word before. When I asked a student to justify her response that Dushanbe was a beautiful place, she was taken aback and looked at me as if saying: “Everybody knows this a fact. How dare you question my statement?” When we tallied the responses from the students, no one had come up with single negative adjective about the place and I gave them as homework to think of aspects of their city they did not like. We will see how that goes.

                                               Peace sign

My bladder was protesting at this point and I decided to walk to the Morning Star Café, under the pretext of having a real cup of coffee, just so I could use their always spotless bathroom. A cup of coffee here will set you back 8 somonis, or about $2.00, so you don’t see any Tajiks here, but mainly Americans and Europeans. I flipped through a fitness magazine while periodically admiring the views of the nearby mountains covered in snow. I tried calling the dean at the Slavic Russian University, but the call would not go through.

During my second class, the disruptive student I had discussed before let me know through one of his classmates that his father would beat him to a pulp if he found out that he was misbehaving in class. Maybe I now have some leverage with this student.  I also learned that I now have an Iranian woman in this class who speaks no English, but was allowed to enroll in it because her husband is teaching computer science at the institute. The dean happened to walk into my classroom at this point and I mentioned it to him. His reply: “Oh yes, we have many problems.”

Ran into Dariush while walking home and he told he had tried calling when he passed by my apartment. My phone had not rung. I asked him if he would do me a favor and find out where I could get my handout blown up and laminated so I’d not have to make multiples copies for the students. He’ll find out and call me on Saturday. Tried texting Caroline and got a message about the network not being available. When I emailed her, she came up with the answer immediately: My phone was out of money. Duh!

                         Distinctive fence around the corner from my apartment

I had a chunk of flat bread, some cheese, a banana and apple juice for dinner as for the first time in my adult life I cannot find familiar ingredients with which to prepare my favorite dishes. I’ve been making do by eating soup and bread either at lunch or dinner while having muesli or eggs for breakfast. I continue to peruse the shelves of the local supermarkets, but I’m still unable to read Cyrillic, except for a few letters, and packaging here is completely opaque so I can’t really see what’s inside. I’ll have to recruit one of my students to come with me to the supermarket and read every label. Extra credit will be granted. LOL.