Sunday, June 15, 2008

Fly with me

So my clubs have increased exponentially in size. Kids come, have a good time, then show up the next class with their friends, their neighbors, and their cousin visiting on vacation. Folks in the adult club get a sample of what I’m doing in class and then send their kids the next day, older siblings drag along their younger siblings, and so I no longer have classes with only four kids: now I have 20, 25, 15, and promises of more in the weeks to come. It makes planning tricky as I have to teach the kids who showed up to every session and have mastered “Hello, how are you? My name is Aygul” as well as find a way of intensively reviewing the basics for the new kids. Some days it feels like I’m just going in circles repeating old material, reviewing old material, and then running out of time before we can get to the new stuff. I’ve made a kind of peace with myself knowing that these summer clubs are more a symbol of my involvement with the community (they’re open to whoever shows up, while the school-year clubs are only by invitation from the principal and the other English teachers) than actual instruction.

The best part of the summer, however, is the five-day work week. For six months I have lived a six-day work schedule with a single day off (Sunday) to rest, recuperate, and seek out non-Turkmen companionship. When there’s only one day off, it becomes a source of minor anxiety to decide whether to spend that precious time connecting with people at site, going on field-trips with my students, or coming into the city for internet and American people time. But only working Monday through Friday means that on Saturday I can go on field trips and spend time people at site (see below), and then still have AN ENTIRE OTHER DAY to go to Ashgabat and pretend to be American for 5-8 hours on Sunday.

Last week I used my newly discovered Saturday to head with the eighth graders to Serdar Yoly (again) where the picnic was a bit lame until we found the swings. We arrived early, around 7am, before the swarms of kids (and my bio-rhythms) were awake so we had the playground all to ourselves. At first they just sat on the swings swaying slightly, using them basically as mobile chairs. At first I was annoyed – what a waste of a good playground swing! -- but soon it became evident that they didn’t know how to swing. When a boy pushed a girl’s swing, she went may be a foot and started squealing that it was too high. You must understand, I have this thing about swings. Swings are the closest thing we have to self-propelled flight; they simultaneously launch the imagination and create a breeze as the wind whips past your face and through your clothing. So when one of the kids got up to whisper something in a friend’s ear, I stole her swing and was soon getting a good 15 feet of air and terrifying my students that I was about to die. But they’re 16 and not about to be out-done by their stodgy old teacher so before long they were competing for who could get the highest. I even got Altyn, my fellow English teacher, on and up and going strong. The pictures don’t do the morning justice; they doesn’t capture the happy sighs and squeals, the laugher, the flashes of fear, joy, exhilaration, and discovery across their faces as they soared higher and higher. They can’t capture a kid’s first flight.

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