April 16, 2012

I slept surprisingly well and was up at 5:30am to start preparing for my four classes. I was ambushed in the hallway by Mr. Hasan who once again had many questions about the passage he was scheduled to teach today. The interpreter group had about half of the students present. The dean came in to speak to them about some housekeeping detail or another and I took advantage of the occasion to thank him for allowing Eraj to skip classes on Saturday and shepherd us to Khulob. I told him we had been treated like royalty, but he evidently didn’t understand the term and I rephrased it by saying “very nicely”. Few of them brought their homework assignment back, nothing unusual there, and we moved on to the task of assigning vocabulary word by their origins. I got the same quizzical look when it came to “man’s beard” or “hair” as the students couldn’t conceive that these objects belong to a human being and thus an animal. One of the students emphatically said he was not an animal.

The second interpreter group had about ten students and we did “Difficult Words” playing with homophones and the difference in meaning. Afterwards, we had a dictation exercise classifying word according to whether they were people, places or things. For the last one, they needed to be spelled correctly and capitalization of the proper names was essential. I had the students swap papers and correct each other’s mistakes. No one got all the names or categories correctly. Their ignorance of people and places outside of Central Asia is simply appalling.

The teacher group had only eight student and Eraj came in just dragging. I took it upon myself to allow him to go early as he teaches in the afternoon and I knew how drained he must have been with all the running around he had done for us between Saturday and Sunday. The rest of the group was given the task of identifying eponyms, something they had never even heard of and I had to do it alongside so as to complete it.I wonder if Tajik students also suffer from our "spring fever" mood and don't want to come to classes simply because the weather is too nice to stay indoors.

Mr. Boronov and Sadat stopped me on the way out to ask for more help with their teaching load. I was hungry and tired and begged to be allowed to go for my bowl of soup promising to help them out after the ETM is over. My lagman soup was overly salty and plain unpalatable, so I just dunk some pieces of the fatir bread in the broth and ate as much of the bread as I could before giving up on it. I don’t even know the word for “salty” in Tajik, so I couldn’t complain.

The staff at Caritas was a welcoming as usual except for Takhmina who was out of the office temporarily. I made myself a cup of instant coffee while chatting with Khurshed. We did the analogies, “Expressing our moods” and “Difficult Words” worksheets and I left the one on eponyms as homework for Wednesday. The walk to the mini-van was pure pleasure as the weather could not have been more gorgeous and the view of the mountains more striking. I had a big smile on my face the whole time and felt so good that I even stopped at Maryam’s apartment to give her a report on my doings and let her know that I’d need a couple more outfits made now that the warm weather was upon us. I noticed that when the temperatures were in the mid-80s last week, my regular pants felt suffocating. I’d like to have a few more loose tunic and pants outfits made to allow me to get ready in the morning without giving it any thought.

I anxiously checked my email the minute I got home to see what Aziza and Manzura had thought about my plans for the ETM. There wasn’t even an acknowledgment from either one of them. I called Aziza and she acknowledged receiving the emails while informing me that Manzura was away in Moscow and would be gone until Saturday. Evidently, no one at the embassy or Multikid is really concerned about the conference and is just me who feels any trepidation as to its successful delivery. Ruth called to say she had done her own printing of the handouts for her session on children’ songs. Takmina informed me the PedInst’s certificates had been signed and were ready for pick up. Perhaps Ruth will be able to pick them up for me when she goes there this week.

A teacher from the PedInst had taken the initiative to send me the draft of an article for publication he’d like for me to edit for him. I told him I’d have to sit down and talk to him about it before doing anything with a document that is almost illogical in its flow. He called this afternoon and practically dictated he was going to meet with me tomorrow at four or five in the afternoon. This is a college professor who obviously knows nothing about pragmatics and how the person asking for a favor does not impose the conditions for the delivery of said favor. I compromised by insisting the meeting would need to take place at my flat since I’m really busy and cannot take time off to have coffee or tea at some café. The nerve!