moving south

well I thought if I moved south it might be warmer, and since warmth is so important to me....I've decided to move...well only about 7 blocks south...but its still south and the apartment is warmer than my current apartment:-)

Yes I'm honestly moving...it came about kinda quickly, but it seems it is what I'm supposed to do. I hadn't been thinking about it until my landlady said we had to move out at the end of the contract which meant the end of April. So I prayed about it and it seemed if I moved out of the center to the area where my fellowship meets, and where all my local friends live, my life would be more accessible to them. so I was all set to move. Then my landlady said we didn't have to move and really wanted us to stay but I decided...no I really do want to move, but didn't tell her that. I just thought about what I wanted in an apartment and wrote it down, and then that same day a friend told me about an apartment in the exact location with just about all my requirements met. So I decided to go for it and worse come to worse I'd just pay rent on two places, but then today I went to my landlady's and said I had to move, and she was all happy because it turns out a former tenant is returning from America and wants to live here again...so I'm moving, and its all working out so much quicker and better than I planned!! Amazing, but not unexpected considering who I serve!! So there are a few more details to work through, but I expect them to all fall into place too...

so this week I move south, I can see the mountains from my new apartment, I'm five minutes from all my local friends, rent is less, and the conservatory is 10 minutes away. Life changes quickly here, and I know moving will bring even more changes in my life. What I don't know, but I'm sure I'll find out!

Victories

I have to write while I’m still on a high of how well God provides for us! Language victories are the best of all I think. When you can communicate and not necessarily feel at a loss for words in another language, its a great feeling. Tonight I had such a good time with a local friend, both of us were in kind of funny moods and when she invited me home after practice for Sunday morning, I said sure. We had a great conversation! It was the first conversation with her that I didn’t feel at a loss for words, and I felt like could express my heart. For me that’s a victory. I really like talking with her, because I feel like we understand each other’s hearts and what our Father is doing in our lives, she’s mature and also a leader and there is so much we can talk about. Usually I feel a strong lack of words to talk with her about what I want to, and usually I can’t exactly understand everything, and it leaves me very tired; but tonight it was all different praise God! We had such a good time, and we both left in better moods!

The other victory is that I can read in Russian now, like really read! A couple weeks ago on Sunday morning I realized that I actually understood what was written in the Bible rather than just guessing the meaning from what I remembered from English, and then for one of my classes I have to read Anna Karenina and I bought a copy in Russian, and I sat down and realized I could read that too, and not just pretend to read it!!! And on top of it all it isn’t tiring!! Of course I don’t understand everything, and sometimes its just gathering a general understanding of what’s going on, and a lot of words I look up in the dictionary, but all the same I can read rather comfortably!

So tonight I’m happy. Victories do come; it is possible to learn a new language and all the study time pays off eventually, and it gives me such motivation for continuing to study so that I can even more accurately express myself!

weekend of parties

nothing like a weekend full of eating!! Yesterday I finally had all the girls over from my fellowship group. For a long time some of my other ex-pat friends and I wanted to do this, and just let our friends how much we love them and appreciate their friendship. We didn't have time over Christmas, so went for Valentine's Day instead:-) So these are a couple pictures from that. I made lots of pizza and breadsticks, and the other girls brought dessert and salad and our Kyrgyz friends had a blast!

Then today I went with some of the girls to my friends parents house, and had a very Kyrgyz afternoon of being fed for four hours! It's quite the experience to go to a local's house because its a big deal for them, and they have so much food on the table. Many salads and stuff, and then a main dish, and then dessert, and it goes for 4 hours or more! But it was fun and now I'm home from all my parties and visiting, wondering how I'll ever get all my stuff done to start the week! But I guess it will all happen sometime!

schizophrenia of language learning

some thoughts on language learning since my lesson was cancelled this morning. I told my teacher I wasn’t feeling well, and she ran from my house like she was scared she was going to die. I don’t know if she’s that afraid of getting sick or if she just didn’t want to teach me today:-)
Anyway I pulled out a book on language learning and read a description that describes my life right now, and so I thought I’d share:

“Stages of Language Learning and Cultural Adjustment
Stage 1: Excitement and euphoria
Stage 2: Culture Shock: withdrawal, complaints regarding the local culture
Stage 3: Culture Stress: tentative adjustment and recovery, though with vacillation
Stage 4: Near or full recovery: assimilation or adaptation

It turns out that “Stage 3” is the key stage for language learning. It’s “when linguistically a person begins to ‘master’ the foreign language” that anomie is the strongest. It is here that one feels the most “uprooted,” homeless,” adrift. This is the first symptom of the 3rd stage, and one can be powerfully tempted to revert or regress back to one’s native language.
Interestingly, and perhaps frighteningly, passing through this stage has been likened by the second language learning observers to schizophrenia. In fact, some wonder if disequilibrium might not be “the key motivation for language acquisition: Language interacts with cognition to achieve equilibrium” (Brown 1994:60)
This is the most crucial period; it’s here we sink or swim. It’s here that we must also pay careful attention to the challenges and the payoffs, the sacrifices and the gains. There is a definite dying to self at this point, a losing of self, a letting go of who you have known yourself to be and a willingness to become someone else: as Jesus put it, he who seeks to save his life will lose it, while he who loses his life for my sake will find it. This may become much more real than you ever imagined possible. Do I say this to scare you? Maybe; regardless, you must count the cost and be prepared to pay it.” -from PLANTS language learning strategy

That is the best description of everything that I’ve been feeling for the last couple of weeks that I can find. (I'm at stage three if you didn't guess) I thought I was going crazy. Now I know its just part and parcel with learning a new language. I still don’t know who I’ll be when I come through this stage; but as long as I stay close in the arms of the father, I can rest assured that it will be someone better able to love my local friends.

Then this is just funny...for all of you who get a kick out of personality styes...it comes into play in language learning too, and when I read my assets and liabilities of my personality, I just laughed cause its so true! A good reminder that although I may feel a little schizophrenic right now...there are other people out there like me!

Assets
E:Willing to take conversational risks
N:Inferencing and guessing from context, structuring own training, conceptualizing and model-building
T: Analysis, self-discipline; instrumental motivation
J:Systematic work, get the job done (whatever it is)
Liabilities
E:Dependent on outside stimulation and interaction
N:Inaccuracy and missing important details, sought excessive complexity or discourse
T:Performance anxiety because self-esteem was attached to achievement, excessive need for control (language, process)
J:Rigidity, intolerance of ambiguous stimuli

this is just a good reminder it is only by the grace of God that I can make it through this process!

being sick in a post-soviet country...

I've discovered that there are some good things about being sick in a post-soviet country. First people here believe that the weather truly does affect your health. So if you are feeling a little weird one day...its just the weather, and people will tell you that and believe it if you tell them that. I love that 'cause I truly believe a lot of times it is just the weather...Second if you are sick here, you shouldn't do anything, and if you say you are sick people are immediately understanding and tell you to go home and rest and drink lots of water with lemon. Yesterday my Russian teacher told me to lie down for three days and do nothing, just because I told her I wasn't feeling great. Now all the understanding comes with downsides, like listening to people tell you all the things that you need to do to get better, or telling you its just cause I don't know how to dress for the weather, but it is really nice to not feel guilty about not wanting to do anything when I don't feel well, and having people tell me not to do anything!

P.S. I'm not really all that sick (at least by American standards) but according local advice I'm lying low today so that I can shake whatever has been bothering me the last couple of weeks

Spring is here!!!

Well I don't know if spring is really here, but today was a glorious spring day. It was about 60 degrees and sunny and the birds were singing and you could smell spring in the air. Its still early for winter to be over, or at least every one says that, so I'm not getting my hopes up yet but I'm still enjoying the glorious weather, epecially cause its been so cloudy here for so long. I love sunshine!

But God is good, and he gave me the opportunity to go sledding!!! And I think the hills here might even top the hill at the camp in New York. So I kind of don't want winter to be over cause I want to go sledding again:-) you can see some pictures! The only downside was that there were no sleds so it was on plastic bags with pillows inside. And somehow that doesn't give much padding, so the next day my backside hurt a lot!!! But the fun was worth the pain. The other downside was trying to avoid the horse poop, because there were lots of Kyrgyz ridding on horses there too, and so at the bottom of the hill the was a lot of stuff that I didn't want to be able to identify!! But the rush going down was worth it all! Oh notice in the picture we had a picnic half way through the afternoon, only in Kyrgyzstan do they have a picnic in winter at the top of a sledding hill....tea, bread, sausage, potates, cookies and all. Wow!!

Other than sledding, life is going on as normal here, just trying to keep up with music and language and church. Trying to figure out if I want to move, trying to figure out if I'll be a real student at the conservatory next year, trying to figure out how to best manage my time...the same old questions we all have. Life isn't so different here, and now I'm feeling very settled here, and it doesn't bother me that half my life is carried out in another language, sometimes I don't even notice what language I'm speaking in. So praise God that life half way around can eventually seem normal:-) Okay have to run and study Kyrgyz, which by the way is such a fun language...I love the way it feels running off my tonuge, even though I hardly know what I'm saying:-)

Menin atim Rebecca

yes I've started Kyrgyz and menin atim Rebecca means my name is Rebecca. Let's pray that what everyone says about Kyrgyz is true!! ie that it's a lot easier than Russian...after one hour and a half lesson I already have more to wrap my head around than I want!! It will be hard at AUCA because the class is full of Kyrgyz people, and we don't have a book and the teacher is teaching from Russian....not the most encouraging beginning, but thank God for all my Kyrgyz friends who I'm sure will be glad to help me!

On a side note, I had another scary "I've been here too long already moment..." I think horse might be my favorite red meat here. I went to my roommate's house the other night, and her mom made Besh Barmak which is the national favorite dish, and I was eating and thinking wow this is the best Besh Barmak ever, and the meat tastes really good, and then I found out it was horse, and my roommate was like, "oh I love horse meat if I'd known that you made it with horse I would have eaten it...." so anyway we left with a big bag of horse meat and ate it again last night, in stir fry, and yup it still tasted as good has it did in Besh Barmak....so if anyone is looking for a new meat I highly recommend a good cut of horse boiled in salt water....it has great flavor:-)

For those interested in the boring day to day details....ie my family:-)

Well just so no one thinks life is too different here, and so that my parents can keep up with the day today changes of their oldest daughter I thought I'd share that Nargiza'a Beauty Salon is now open and having a steady stream of customers. I returned for the second time to get my grey hairs covered up:-) If anyone is interested its located in the Vannaya Komnata of 92/4 Toktagula:-)


seems more like a science experiment on my brain:-)

I don't think this is going to look that pretty

and now you can't even tell the difference:-)

my two week sweater. I'm getting quicker and quicker! the first one took I don't know how long...the second one took two years, the third one 5 months and this one two weeks!

Happy New Year....a few days late

Well the holidays are over in America, but we're still in the middle of them here! Old Christmas (according to the old Russian calander) was Saturday, tomorrow is a big Muslim holiday and then soon is Old New Years! I feel like life will never geet back to normal!

New Year's here is always a blast...literally. There are more fireworks than I can even describe...everyone buys them...even big ones that launch high into the air, and then go out on the street to light them. Its a great show, and I stayed safely inside on a balcony to watch:-) The noise is also terrific, and the next day is even better cause everyone sleeps off all the vodka they drank, so the street are empty and quiet! Although it was another several days until all the fireworks were set off. I would always randomly here them, even in the middle of the day.

After New Year's I went to Narin to see my cousin's new house. Talk about cold! It was approxiately -5, -10 degrees, and her bathroom doesn't have insulation in the walls so there was ice all over the wall...its still better than an outhouse...but not much wamer:-) In general it wil be toasty warm when its all done....but until then I think I'll wait till its warm outside for my next visit!

Now I'm back in Bishkek, dreaming about warmer places and trying to get ready for a flute exam. I thought I was done with flute exams when I finished college, but apparently not! Thursday 2:00 is the big hour! Wish me luck

Little taste of Heaven

This morning, thanks to Nancy, I got to wake up with a cup of Starbucks! What a special treat since there isn't any good coffee here! And for dinner I ate Mac&Cheese, thanks to Beta stores...we finally have Beta stores back, bigger and better than ever. For those of you who haven't been here, Beta stores is a great Turkish department store, and it was destroyed in the Tulip Revolution and they just open on the 23rd...anyway there is a great grocery store on the first floor, its almost just like America...shopping carts and all! So its a pretty exciting thing to have back. Especially cause they sell American products including Mac&Cheese and cream cheese:-) So that's my exciting day! Christmas was great, and because I didn't leave Nancy's apartment for 24hours it even felt almost like I was in America...alhough we still had three different languages going around the table for dinner...German, English, and Russian! I hope you all had Merry Christmas's too!!