Reflect

Hello all,

As I'm sure some of you heard, and I had only heard second-hand the other day, Kyrgyzstan had an earthquake just recently. This took place in Osh Oblast, in the south of Kyrgystan, which is far away from me (relatively). Earthquakes and avalanches are the two biggest natural disasters Kyrgyzstan has, though they don't happen often. I am unaffected by the recent earthquake, but my heart goes out to the victims there.

Things are going decently well for me. I'm started to get develop a better relationship with my host family, and my fellow volunteers are proving to be good friends as well. My biggest challenge at the moment is trying to develop some form of curriculum that will prove to be effective. Herein lies the challenge:
A) My students have no books
B) My counterparts all teach from one book per class, some of which are very old (i.e. books from the early 80's that contain lines about how Soviet citizens have great freedoms to pursue their vocation of choice, while Capitalist citizens primarily join the army of the unemployed)
C) Seeing above conflict, students don't do homework and essentially learn nothing
D) Each class progresses as if students do the work, in effect continuing on with more and more complicated topics
E) English isn't learned, and everyone - both students and teachers - become frustrated with it all
F) It's taboo for me to meet with my counterparts outside of the school, they essentially have no free time after school, and lesson planning isn't done at school, so coordination and communication is very difficult

So seeing the above problems, I have a tall task ahead of me. I'm hoping to allieviate some of them in part by opening an English club at my school; that's not a complete answer, however. It will take a lot of dialogue, brainstorming, fresh ideas, compromising, and overall blood sweat n' tears to do what needs to be done in order to have an effective English program at school. As for me, right now I'm just trying to make do with what I can, i.e. adopting the partial-cursive (ouch for me) writing style they use here, and working with one of the things that should have died out with the Soviets but didn't - the dreaded blackboards.

Recently I've been able to read a lot of articles from other volunteers etc. both from past and present. It's heartened me to go back to my quintisential roots at King's by reading the happenings from my years there. Right now I've just received news of the tragedies that have happened on campus and my heart goes out to the faculty, students, residents and families - and I hope that the messages of hope and humility that were so prevalant during my time there will come through in these times to strengthen the community and give a strong sense of reality to sadness to everyone there. Please be safe, keep the victims in your hearts, and rely on one another to be there for support.

Peace,
Chris