June 25, 2012

My new room still stank of raw sewage even after keeping the window open all day and night. Firuza knocked on my door at 8:00 so we could have breakfast on time and start our session sharply at 9:00am. We had another kind of milky porridge, two boiled eggs and the Russian bread I’m not fond of, but that the others prefer to the flat bread because many of them can’t afford to buy it on a daily basis. Nigora had left the camp the night before to accompany a student for his high school consultation or the chance to talk to some of the Khujand area universities about his chances of entering one of them. She had made no arrangements for us to secure a place for the English language session and thus we had no room, tables or chairs, erasers or paper or even a stapler. I was fuming mad while facing 62 students ready to engage in some interesting activity.

We had to wait until everyone had finished their breakfast to be able to borrow the tables and chairs from the dining room area. Students quickly gathered with their friends at a particular table until I told them they were to be randomly assigned to a table according to the color of the card we gave them. Some of the girls frowned and hesitated about joining a table where mostly boys were seated, but I told them there was no choice in the matter as eventually they would have to work with males and better get used to the idea. I started out by completing a KWL chart by asking them what they knew about the Fourth of July celebration and what they wanted to know and wrote their answers in the tiny whiteboard we had available. We passed out the handout about the Fourth of July celebration and I instructed them to do a round robin of reading a paragraph aloud while the rest of the group followed reading silently; however, this was obviously something they had never done and most of them wasted time going over every page of the handout without actually doing any reading.

After twenty minutes of reading, I told them we’d complete the “What we have Learned” portion of the KWL chart by having each group complete a summary of the article on chart paper and display around the room the following day. We then proceed to play “Concentration” with irregular verbs, a game they found fascinating, and then “Where am I”, which did not work out so well as the students have had little practice in asking questions and couldn’t follow the rule of not telling their friends at what particular location they were. Even the teachers didn’t know some of the places the cards mentioned. Overall, the students were ecstatic with the activities they had done and came to me with words of gratitude and praise.

Lunch was slightly better as we had the usual bowl of soup, lagman this time, and then a tiny portion of plov. It was Gulruhsor’s birthday and Nigora came back in with a cake in the shape of a turtle, something incongruous for a woman turning 25. I was hoping for a chance to take a nap, but all four teachers repaired to my room to learn more about the resources I had available in my laptop and I ended up putting together a folder with enough material to fill a CD. Nigora promised to bring blank CDs as the ones I had brought with me had been intended for Manzura and Eraj’s photo albums. The students, males in this case, had a football game in the late afternoon and we were supposed to be present to cheer them on, but I turned down the invite and stayed in my room reading.

Dinner consisted of more soup and then a small piece of flavorless chicken with a piece of potato and carrot by its side. I handed the chicken to Firuza and ate the vegetables, soup and bread. Gulruhsor followed me to my room so she could obtain some American music from me, and we ended up talking until it was time for bed. She is completing her masters at a university in Dushanbe and volunteers at a group that receives foreigners when they come to visit the city. She desperately wanted to improve her fluency and wanted to hang out with me every minute possible. We decided to have the students rehearse to dance the hokey pokey song for the closing ceremony, which meant I have to be ready at 7:00am when they do their morning exercises.