April 19, 2012

A most uneventful day as I taught my two classes without any remarkable incidents except for the fact that my students could not name anything a baby might use such as a crib, cradle, diaper or a pacifier . Farzona and Oigul came to see me to let me know they wanted to reschedule our outing to Farzona’s village as her family is hosting a large group of relatives this weekend. I was glad for the reprieve as I can use every spare hour this weekend to continue to fret over details of the ETM. I had my bowl of soup and took the mini-van home.

I stopped by Jamshed’s institute to pick up what he promised were tons of materials from all four ETMs he had attended last year. His supervisor, a cocky 22 year old guy, explained to me that his criteria for hiring an English teacher at his place was the teacher’s ability to understand and use the New English Files textbook, which he had photocopied illegally and contained very poor black and white illustrations. Since Jamshed had worked with a British team while living in Qurgonteppa, he was given the job right away he claimed.

I stopped at the supermarket for juice and milk and found they had both coconuts and very tiny overly ripe avocadoes not worth buying, but I did buy a coconut planning on eating every bit of it. When I got home, I realized I had no sort of tool with which to crack a coconut open, not even the hard concrete stoop I’ve used in the past. When Elbek came in for his class, I asked him to borrow his grandfather’s hammer for the task, and watched amusedly as he, who had never seen a coconut in his life, pecked at it tentatively while I held a bowl under it to catch the water. I finally convinced him to hit the heck out of it, but to my dismay the coconut was rotten on the inside. Who knows how long it took to get to Tajikistan? And to think I paid 15.00 somoni or almost $4.00 or it.

Corrie had not answered my emails regarding her contribution to the ETM schedule or sent the handouts that would accompany them. I was about to pull my hair out as I did call her two days ago to remind her. She did respond later on only to confirm my worst fear: She hadn’t done anything about it and would be sending the materials late tonight as the deadline for printing them is tomorrow morning.

Ruth called to confirm she got the signed certificates from the embassy and will deliver them to me on Saturday. One more thing off my “To Do List”.