Bazaar English

October 26th – 25 kulatov

Waking following first light, the mountains to the south of the city were large and snow covered. There was a thunderstorm on the 25th. My main achievement for the day was setting up Russian and Kyrgyz classes starting next week. For $360 dollars I will get a month of 6 hr/day instruction five days a week. That is 120 hours of class. I will do 3 hours of Russian and 3 of Kyrgyz a day. I will be exhausted by the time I get to the Fund, but with prices this low I’d be crazy not to! Right?!?! Right?!
For those of you curious where exactly my Russian stands, I was rated as Pre-Intermediate. A more un-outstanding rating would be quite impossible.
I made it back to the Fund to teach my first English class. Only one pupil showed. Her name is Salavat, a girl of 16. She has parents but doesn’t know who they are or where they are. She lives with her teacher at her prep college. Her older sister is rumored to be working in a café in Bishkek her face is on an Alpine Fund mini-calender. She loved to climb to relax. Salavat’s younger sister is in an orphanage hours outside of town. Salavat wants to speak English perfectly so that she can teach English and eventually come the USA to teach Russian. Though she was born to a Kyrgyz mother, she does not speak the language. As a result she is not sure whether she is Russian or Kyrgyz, or neither or both. Another befuddled victim of ethno-nationalism. Her grandmother is known and a “good woman.” Salavat visits her about an hour outside of town on free Sundays. Apparently her kids have abandoned her to a village with spoilt water even though they are “rich.”
The English teaching aspect of the Alpine Fund is quite small or to put it positively, precisely targeted. Larger outreach is beyond Fund’s ability/will-power for now. The orphanage closest to the Fund is run by a parasitic director nicknamed Satan by staffers. Regular English lessons should be easy and fruitful at this orphanage but Satan makes it not worth while. The Alpine Fund does not give material goods that can be misappropriated and sold for personal profit. Therefore, Satan wants nothing to do with us and would just assume not have meddlesome foreigners whistle-blowing or muttering about propriety in the corner. Another orphanage is well run but located 1½ hours outside of town (by crowded uncomfortable standing-room only Marshrootka). Thus to do an English lesson a volunteer would have to commit at least 6 hours. As projects such as this come and go on a volunteer by volunteer basis they are a daunting undertaking. The prospect of all ground being given up once a volunteer goes home and no one is there to take his/her place tips the scales in favor of discouragement. This is an example of something that I think we should be able to do with better consistency and organization. We may not be ready. It may be better to do a better job at what we already do than try and expand.
The Fund’s English classes focus on former orphans that became involved on the weekend climbs or weekly climbing-wall sessions that are now on the cusp between University and a life of low-wage labor in the bazaar (should they not get mixed up in a bad crowd). We teach 3 or 4 15-17 year old kids English once a week. These kids are too old to be in the orphanages which are geared to school kids only through the equivalent of 9th grade. Under the Soviet system they would then attend a technical college for 2-3 year and graduate as blue-collar professions. That system is now defunct but the orphanages are not reformed. The result is a bona fide dead end. But, if they score well enough on a TOEFL test or can raise the money to go to a year of university prep, they will almost certainly gain admittance to a local university where they will qualify for a full-ride on account of their destitute status.
Anna and Sean are trying to get about $1,000 together for a scholarship for Ulan, a very motivated and smart bazaar kid. His parents are blind so he was put into the orphanage. Now that he can’t stay there anymore he loads trucks at the bazaar all day to support his family. He studies English at night with the help of the AF classes. He even brings books home to soak up. He didn’t show up my night of English, but he is the star of the show right now. For kids like Salavat and Ulan, the Fund makes worlds of difference.
That is wonderful but it just feels like so few kids for an entire NGO. Others take part in the outdoors activities, as many as 60 kids a month. The impact of that is more of a break from an orphanage. A couple days of joy… a worthy cause in its own right but fleeting.
These impressions are just what I have picked up the last couple of days. I have no doubt made mistakes and am unaware of important information. I will continue to flush out the Fund on the blog as a means of helping me see what I should be doing. I have done almost no work for the Fund despite spending the last two days there. I have been meeting the people, learning what is up and getting my own life together. Speaking of getting it together, I was reunited with my bag. YAY! I had another good conversation with my host sister and mother about linguistics, fittingly this conversation took place in three languages, only my host sister took part in all of it. Did you know that modern Turkish and Japanese are both descendents of Hun? It’s True! My family here has the poster to prove it!