January 27, 2012

Another beautiful morning with crisp air and absolutely stunning views of the mountains. Caroline was already waiting for me at the American Corner and I remarked that it was the first time since we met that she had been the one doing the waiting. We proceeded to the Kazakhstan embassy and found one customer at the window. The sole employee in the office didn’t even acknowledge our presence even after he left as she continued to move papers from one side of her desk to another while knitting her eyebrows and looking intently at the computer screen. After half hour of this, I was about to scream my head off, but Caroline dissuaded me convinced the clerk that the power to simply deny our visas and have security escort us out of the building. In the meantime, two other people had arrived and started a conversation with the clerk, in Russian of course. The last one was a beautiful young woman who asked us, in English, who was the last one in line. We pleaded with her to please ask the clerk to give us the receipt necessary to then go to the bank and pay for the visa. She did so and after fifty minutes of standing around we had a hand written piece of paper to take to the Kazakh bank quite a distance away.

Off we went to the address on Aini Road, past a gate with security personnel and into a luxurious lobby where we waited another half hour for someone to take our $60.00 fee and stamp the receipt. Back to the embassy where we had to leave our passport and were told to come back on Monday to claim our visas. We then went to the Indian embassy hoping to be able to pay for our visa even though we didn’t have our passport so as to expedite the process. The waiting area was fully taken up with about fifteen people, all holding sheaths of papers ready for inspection. I sidled up to the receptionist to alert her to the fact that we are there just to pay for our visa, but she told me I have to wait nonetheless until the guy who questioned me last week came in. When he did come in we were told we couldn’t pay for our visas without our passports. So much for that.

Caroline and I parted as she needed to go to Multikids and I needed to go to the PedInst to meet with the dean. When I knocked on his office door, he wasn’t there and the guy offered to call him, but he didn’t pick up. I was about to leave, but my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to call him from my cell to see if he’d answer. He did and told me he was in a meeting and to please wait for him for a few minutes. The gist of the meeting came down to this: the first year students that I had taught last year had done so poorly in their exams that their parents had come in to complain(something I really doubt) that they weren’t ready to be taught by a native speaker of English and needed to go back to having a Tajik teacher for their lessons. As a result, the deans had met and decided I should be transferred to teach the fourth year students preparing to become interpreters. When I mentioned that the agreement the university had signed with the embassy stipulated I was to teach future teachers, he countered by offering that I take over his classes for the same year students. He couldn’t say when my new classes would start, but did ask me to buy yet another one of the Russian textbooks I so much detest. I need to consult the embassy next week regarding this change and seek their advice.

I took a long bath when I got home and got into my new comfy pajamas. Both Zoir and Aziz came by later on and they both denied that students in their groups had done poorly in their exams. Aziz went further and firmly stated the dean was not being honest and probably had another agenda for making this change.  They were both crestfallen to hear I’d no longer be their teacher. Aziz requested that I help him put together a resume so his uncle, who works at the U. S. embassy, can help him get a job there.