June 4, 2012

I had sent Madina, the coordinator for the American Corner in Khujand, an email letting her know that Corrie had been unable to make it, but I was there to carry on with the workshop, but she had not acknowledged it. I got up early to make sure I had all the materials at hand and that we made it to the place by 8:30am with plenty of time to print handouts and connect the LCD projector. It took us more than an hour to get into town while chatting with a young woman who had lived in Alabama for a while. Madina showed up just a few minutes before 9:00 and showed me the facilities which lacked a white board or the right cable to connect the laptop to the 52” flat screen. She decided to project directly onto the white wall and proceeded to print the required handouts.

We had twelve teachers, many of them from private schools, which surprised me, and all except for one man were women. I did the presentation on speaking emphasizing the aspect of pairing or grouping students for speaking activities instead of asking them to address the whole class individually to lessen their apprehension and fear of making mistakes. I showed them several activities to illustrate this point and then time was up, a short break was in order, and then we returned to the session on teaching vocabulary interactively. I went over the PowerPoint presentation briefly informing teachers about the need to teach words that students need for everyday communication while also teaching its many shades, family words, connotation and denotation so students would know when it was appropriate to use it. We played several games to show them fun ways to have students use the vocabulary in class instead of memorizing lists of words in preparation for a test.

Madina suggested a place for lunch called Zaitoon and we walked there while she talked about the history of the town of Chkalousk which she said used to be inhabited strictly by Russian prior to the civil war, but had been practically abandoned after the current regime dictated that all government employees needed to speak Tajik, and so most of them had returned to Russia. Eraj and I ordered plov and it came with a boiled egg and the beef wrapped in grape leaves, something I had never seen or tasted before. Madina had a cold and refused to drink anything cold as it would make it worse in her belief. When we returned to the American Corner having walked under the scorching sun, I stood under the AC unit trying to cool off a bit and both she and assistant tried to dissuade me from standing there telling me I’d get sick from the cold blast. I told her it was all mental and that I’d have been long buried if that belief were true.

The afternoon session had been intended for college students planning on becoming English teachers, but instead of late teen people, I was faced with a bunch of kids ranging from 8 or 9 to perhaps 16, an age bracket I have always had trouble relating to or working with. I talked to Eraj about my reservations as to what sort of activities would be appropriate for them when Madina chimed in that I could discuss whatever topic I wanted with them, something that seemed ludicrous given the ages of those presents. I pulled out the Jeopardy game Caroline had left behind and tried to get them to call out the different tenses and give me a sentence with correct tense to win the money. Few of them could do it, and I scrapped that plan. We asked them to work on describing a picture using the corresponding handouts and about five of them were able to write some coherent sentences. I was practically under a too-heavy a meal induced coma and could do little but issued instructions once in a while.

To end the dreadful session, I offered them the conversation game of asking a question and switching places to talk to someone else after just one minute. Even then, some of the participants could not understand the question or answer it when shown to them. At four o’clock, I dismissed the students, when I asked Madina where were the college students I had intended to see for the session, she claimed all of them lived in villages outside Khujand and had gone back there since classes were over for the summer. It seemed incongruous to me that there would not be a single college living in the city, but I left it at that.

I went to check my email and then remembered that I was supposed to contact the friend of Corrie’s where we were supposed to have stayed at originally. She was in the middle of her class and asked us to come over to the Commercial and Technological University as her students would love to talk to me for a while. Madina told us how to get there and out we went again into the furnace outside, got into the right mini-van and informed the driver of our destination, but he forgot and we passed it. We backtracked a few blocks and called Subhi from the entrance to the university and she came to get us. I was pleasantly surprised to see her classroom, a huge space with a round table in the center where some thirty students could sit comfortably in adult-sized chairs, with computer stations lining both walls and most incredible of all, an interactive whiteboard with Internet access from 8-5. The students pay 5.00 per hour of instruction, or about a dollar, and Subhi gets 60% while the university gets the remaining 40%. There were only five students, four women and a guy, all level one students, and they didn’t seem willing to ask me any questions whatsoever.

Instead, Subhi talked about her trip to the United States where she had studied for one semester at the University of North Carolina in Columbia and where she had met Corrie. The walls of her classroom were entirely covered with numerous posters covering different points of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary and Eraj spent time perusing them. When I asked her where she had able to acquire those, she played coy and just said that if you asked questions, you got answers.

I had arranged to meet Nancy and David for dinner at the local pizzeria where Nancy claimed the pizza was as good as what she had eaten in Italy. Subhi had met David on a couple of occasions, but not Nancy, and agreed to join us for dinner after dismissing her class. David didn’t come as he had come down with diarrhea on Sunday from something eaten at the open house. Nancy informed me that neither one of them had ever eaten a salad in Tajikistan, or any of the local dishes for that matter, for fear of getting sick. During the mini-van ride, Subhi suggested that I spend the night at her house and send Eraj back to the flat by himself. I told her I couldn’t do that since I knew how inexperienced Eraj was about getting around in unfamiliar places and moreover, we were getting ready to leave town the next morning and needed to pack our bags.

While walking toward the pizzeria, a dust storm came upon us and we barely made it into the building before being covered by sand and grit. The pizza place was a pleasant affair with lots of granite and wood furniture, but as it was 6:00pm already by the time we got there, Eraj and I agreed to have our pizza to go and to try and catch our mini-van by seven. I ordered a Margharita pizza and received something that looked like a plain cheese pizza with bits of green to indicate the presence of basil, and Eraj immediately commented he didn’t like the smell of it. He had never eaten pizza in his life.

We got into the wrong mini-van and the driver refused to take us all the way into Chkalousk unless we paid an additional 5.00 somoni, which I didn’t mind doing just so we could get there before nightfall. The grocery store was out of 3-1 packets of coffee and I bought a cold beer to drink with my pizza while Eraj, who won’t alcohol because of his religious beliefs, got a soda. A bunch of kids were sitting outside the apartment building and peppered us with questions, some of them practicing their English at the same time. They later knocked on the door and came in to chat with us telling Eraj they had never had a foreigner stay in their complex.

Eraj had one bite of the pizza and spit it out immediately as if he had eaten something poisonous. His only alternative for dinner was the leftover salami and flat bread and he was more than happy to eat that. After my bath, I gave Eraj my set of earbuds so he could continue to listen to his videos without disturbing my sleep.