Turkey

OK, İ'm a horrible blogger. Sorry to the 3 people who might actually read my blog. In the past few weeks I moved into my own apartment, the school year ended, and İ took a trip to Turkey with my friend Kate. Today is my last day in beautiful İstanbul, and İ'm really sad to be flying back to T-stan tomorrow. The past few days we stayed in a tree-house hostel in Kabak Valley on the Mediteranean coast (near the town of Fethiye, for those of you who have maps). İt was amazing; İ can't really explain how nice it was to be able to relax outside amongst gorgeous scenery without children screaming my name and people watching my every move. So peaceful.

3 months

After spending 3 months at my site without seeing another American, I came to Ashgabat a couple days ago and have been enjoying little luxuries like running water 24/7 and furniture. The schools all have this week off, so a lot of the TEFL volunteers are in town, and it's been great talking to everyone about their sites and students, both complaining about kids who won't participate in lessons and discussing ways to make the schools better. It's also nice just to hang out with friends and be normal.

Winter

I'm sorry I haven't updated my blog in so long, but this is the first time I've been online since Christmas. Likewise, four days ago was the first time our apartment had running water in 7 weeks (it's brown, but you don't have to chase down a water truck to get it). Turkmenistan is just getting over its coldest winter in 40 years, so it was unprepared for all the frozen pipes. It hadn't snowed in Hazar in about 3 years, but this year we had snow on the ground for a solid 3 weeks. Adding to the fun of winter is the school were I work, which is not heated, leading to the ironic situation that while this is the warmest winter I've experienced (compared to MN and MA), it's the coldest I've personally been. Does that make sense? I think I'm getting worse at English.

But hopefully my students are getting better at English. I'm teaching 2 classes each of 5th, 6th, and 8th grade, and one 7th grade class (school in T-stan only goes up to grade 10). I was really bored in January (classes were only 20 minutes because it was too cold in the school), so in February I started 5 English clubs--3 for students and 2 for adults. So far clubs have been stressing my out because each one usually has around 25 students each week, and new students keep coming. It's just too many, so I think starting next week I won't let new people join. Also problematic is that half the population doesn't speak Turkmen, so for my Adult Beginning English club I'm faced with a room full of people who only speak Russian. Last week my friend Jamilya, who speaks really good English, translated for me. My student clubs usually only have a couple kids who don't know Turkmen, which isn't a problem because the other kids are good about translating the instructions I give in broken Turkmen.