February 19, 2012

I barely slept a wink with the constant cough and the restlessness of worrying about making my presentation today. While drinking my three cups of masala tea, I practiced giving the presentation twice and still felt nervous as I seemed to be going too fast one time and thus running out of slides or too slow the other and never getting to everything I wanted to cover. When I got to the dining room, I saw Caroline sitting with three other ELFs and just waved at her while taking a seat at the table where Sally was finishing her breakfast. She reminded me she was staying tonight at a monastery recommended by a friend, but promised to come to my presentation for moral support.

As she was leaving, Magda came by and took a seat. I had arranged to talk with her in private later on in the day, but decided to ask her if she didn’t mind doing so now. She didn’t,  and I proceeded to tell about the way the embassy personnel in Dushanbe had treated me from the moment I got there and the fact that Tahmina had never bothered to notify me that my application to renew my post had been denied and why. I reiterated my suspicion that she didn’t see me as real “American” and was the one behind the plan to get somebody else next year. In addition, I related the conversation I had had with David, Valerie and Gabrielle where they had indicated that racism in Kazakhstan was also rampart and that I might not do much better there. Gabrielle told me that an African-American ELF posted to her city had quit shortly after her arrival due to the constant harassment.

According to Magda, as executive director of the ELF program, she has never been made aware of any ELF quitting a post due to racism and she’d like to talk to Gabrielle about the incident at her post so she can look into it when she gets back to Washington, D. C.  She promised to look into my complaint about Tahmina and get back to me. John, the ELF posted in Turkmenistan, and who has been missing from the entire conference, came to join us at the table and later William, posted in Bangladesh, did the same. I left and took a taxi to the conference as I was wearing the long Tajik dress Takhmina had loaned and my dress boots while also lugging my laptop for the presentation.

I attended a plenary on vocabulary taught by our English Language Specialist, Fredricka Stoller, and learned a new technique called “word splash”, which I hope she’ll be willing to share with me. Next was Rod Ellis, from New Zealand who spoke about teaching English through task-based activities. The room was packed and people stood at the windows trying to listen in while many other teachers recorded the entire presentation using their cell phones. I left the room five minutes earlier as I needed to retrieve my own laptop which I had lent to Corrie for her presentation.

Magda, Harry, Sally and Joe were present in the room upon my return and helped me set up the computer. I looked up and the room was full to capacity and people were standing at the back in two rows. Perhaps my presentation benefitted from the fact that one of the plenary presenters, a loud English woman, had made a reference to it the day before. I started on time and added a couple of personal anecdotes about my own reading experiences and the ones I had had here in Nepal while teaching senior students. I also mentioned that even some of the poorest school now had access to the Internet and an extensive database due to the implementation of the One Laptop per Child program.  I never got to the end of my presentation and at 1:05, I stopped to ask if they had any questions about the topic. No one did and when I said I was done, there was a stampede to the door as lunch was being served and Nepalis traditionally have their lunch much earlier in the day.

Sally came and gave a hug telling me how wonderful the presentation had been and a couple of teachers said the same. One came to ask how she could have access to additional resources to enrich the reading experience of her students as the laptop program had not yet reach her school. I referred her to Fife MacDuff at the American Embassy as he’d know exactly where she should go. As I walked out of the room, Harry approached and effusively congratulated me on my talk saying he had never even heard the term before both Stoller and the English woman mentioned it. He felt that I had kept my audience “at the edge of their seat” and had probably taught them something they had never learned about before. Joe and I had agreed to skip the daahl baaht lunch at the conference and head back to sleek and clean place we both liked. I wanted to go back to the hotel to change clothes and get rid of my laptop before heading out to the Thamel area where I had hoped to buy a few presents for family and friends.

                                                 Joe and I, wearing my atlas Tajik dress, in front of a restaurant.

Corrie, Valerie and Tara were planning on ditching the rest of the conference as well even when I felt bad since Sally was presenting that afternoon, but our schedule had been so tightly packed, we hadn’t had any chance of doing any sightseeing daytime and the day was clear and sunny, something we hadn’t had earlier in the week. Thamel was the same hellhole I remember and even more congested, loud and dusty as construction was still going on all around us. I didn’t recognize any of the shops and only found two restaurants that appeared familiar while more shops seemed to cater to Buddhist believers. Jewelry set in silver, which could have been purchased for a song ten years ago, now cost almost four times the price as the owner informed me that silver had shot up in value following the price of gold. I got a few trinkets, the shawl for my sister Esther, and found a place to order the paneer butter masala I had been hunkering for, but didn’t enjoyed it as it didn’t resemble what I used to eat at all. Corrie was surprised to hear me use the few words of Nepali I still remember with the restaurant staff.

Since there were five of us, it took forever to wait for everyone to select the items they wanted to buy, but I was finally in taxi back to the hotel with Corrie. We all had agreed to hire a taxi early in the morning to visit the historical city of Baktapur before departing for the airport. The driver had agreed to take us there, give us two hours to see the place and bring us back to the hotel by 11:00am. We need to check out of the hotel by noon and head to the airport at the same time, way too early for a 3:45pm flight in my opinion.