January 23, 2012

The snow had piled really high overnight, but remained fluffy and untouched thus making it easy to walk on it this morning. I even risked going through my favorite shortcut and ran into Yoomie on her way to work. I promised to break my ban on going out at night in this weather to attend the book club meeting at her new place next week.

I got to the training center ahead of Caroline and asked the teachers present to get into groups according to their color cards and recollect what had been their best lesson and what elements made it so. I could’ve asked them to detail how to build a rocket to get to the moon for most of them sat there with a blank look on their faces. I then wrote the steps to the basic lesson plan so they could indicate what they had done, but still no response. Firuz offered to relate his experience teaching a lesson on “sports”, but could not pinpoint what his objective for the lesson had been. It didn’t get any better after that and Zhulejo admitted they weren’t quite proficient with the three Ps method: presentation, practice and production or knew it by a different terminology.

I presented them with a timeline to practice the simple past whereby I wrote five different years on mine and asked them to guess what had happened to me then. Although I explicitly asked them to phrase the question beginning with “Did you…” or “Were you…”, they kept making affirmative statements: “You got married in 1992” or “You finished school in 1973.” When it was their turn to make a timeline about their own milestones, the teachers wrote the dates and the events and never bothered to follow the instructions to get their partners to guess. A total fiasco insofar as following instructions was concerned.

On the way to Caritas, I stopped at the printing company and brought a photocopy of my old business card for them to make me new ones. Although the price is a bit steep, 50 somoni or 25 cents per card, it’ll save me countless minutes having to write down my information for all the new people I meet. I also dropped the pages to be laminated, this time 59 of them, and asked the old guy to prepare a receipt for me so I can be reimbursed.

Walking through the snow began to feel like I was making my way through sand and it seemed to take me forever to reach the soup place. There was a young woman at the stove, as opposed to the older, stout one I’m used to seeing, and the soup was indeed different, oilier and lacking in the usual seasonings.

Nigina was back from vacation and we talked about work. I was told people in Tajikistan never work on an hourly basis as people either get a monthly salary, in cash mind you, or an agreed price is settled upon before any work begins.

I returned to pick up the laminated pages and made my way home at a very slow pace. Two blocks from my flat, I felt in need of help as I was carrying my school bag full of everything I could possibly need while out, another bag containing a huge disk of a flat bread Zhulejo had given each one of us, and the laminated pages. I had to pause for a moment before tackling the ascent to my fourth floor walk-up apartment. I took a nap while listening to RT documentary in the background. The soup had upset my stomach and I only had a glass of milk for dinner.