Home Sweet Krgystan

My friend Jill is currently living in Krgystan with the Peace Corps. She has had lots of crazy experiences, and I love getting her e-mails and reading up about the randomness that is her life. Here's an excerpt from her last e-mai:

"Now onto relaying the events of my first weeks at work…The actual
teaching and being in the classroom has been going fine, as I am still
somewhat of a novelty here. I'm finding their level of English is
very low, while their excitement to learn is high. I'm only hoping
that it will continue on as we phase out of the introduction stage and
into the simple present progressive and so on…My second day on the job
as it was explained to me was a school holiday. Not surprising in this
country where every major and seemingly minor event can be turned into
a reason for celebration. Note that I have already had 4 school
holidays interrupt my classes and class schedule in the first 2 weeks
of teaching. Anyways, for this particular holiday I sat through an
outdoor assembly filled with speeches, applause, and the hot sun only
to find out that my afternoon classes had been cancelled. I was
pretty unaware of what all the pomp and circumstance was about until
some of my 10th grade students informed me they had elected a new
student body president, a guy named Emil who has taken the English
name Eminem for my English class. Rap music is very popular here.
Anyways, these girls told me about the school dance that was taking
place that night and asked me if I would come… Condensing the next few
hours, for your sake, I debated back and forth about showing up at the
High school dance for a few reasons: I'm the new teacher, I'm the new
American in town, and because I didn't know how acceptable it would be
for me to dance, which I would OBviously do if I attended. I found
out that other teachers were going, probably to chaperone, so I
decided to go. Unfortunately, I made the grievous error of showing up
"on time" a highly unpopular thing to do, but I think I was able to
recover my image… Throughout the evening I was invited to join
different dance circles, pose in pictures, and even help DJ a couple
of times, which was sorely needed as we danced to two songs nearly the
entire evening a popular rap song by some French guy and a classic hit
by the ever popular 50 cent. Mostly I devoted my evening to: dancing
away from the male students, dancing away from some of the weird/old
male faculty, and just thoroughly enjoying myself. I found out later
that they only hold this one dance once each year, I think I'm going
to try to change that if I can, perhaps set aside one of my English
Clubs to organizing school dances in order to help build community and
fraternity, and to help these students get a larger music repertoire."