Gettin Gone & Fresh Meat

After two years I am no longer the sole American in Darkan Aile. Now there are two of us. Her name is Corinne with the emphasis on the second syllable. The name Corinne, spelled in that particular way, is a French name but Corinne has no French anscestors. She is not prone to surrender. Corinne is a young one, just twenty-two, but I think she is capable of living and teaching in Darkan the full two years; AKA: not wussing out. Corinne is the only K-14 that was sent to the entire south shore of Issyk-Kul. After the K-12’s on the south shore leave, me, Brian and Andy, she will be here with only Coleen in Jety-Oguz and Nick in Barskon, two fine volunteers and wonderful people, to keep her company. She is a strong girl but she thinks that she will be too isolated in Darkan. It was like that for me at first too but I adjusted just as she will. She’ll have a hard, depressing winter, same as me, but by next spring or early summer she should be fine. Corinne is from Indianapolis Indiana. Today I learned that Indianapolis encompasses three-million warm bodies not counting your faunal beings. Three million is a lot of cigarrettes smoked, a lot of sick people and babies, and a lot of Starbucks’.

Corinne has a nose ring, same as me, and while we were talking to the director the other day he told Corinne that teachers didn’t wear noserings (actually, very few people in Kyrgyzstan wear a ring in the end of their nose) and that she would have to take it out before teaching began. I could tell that Corinne was a little distressed by this statement so I jumped in with a defence of Corinne’s nose jelewry. I said that if she took the protrusion out then she would catch a virus and die. Corinne added an emphatic yes. After thinking it over with the trademark frown on his face our director aggreed to our demands to allow Corinne to remain vulnerable to high-powered super magnets. It was a victory for us as well as a victory for Americans everywhere bogged down in the heavy Kyrgyz Educational System.

I’m coming home in two months. I’ve been over here for twenty-five. Being home was wonderful while I was home for the three weeks over the summer. I wonder how it will be returning to the states after two years in a strange land? This summer’s trip taught me that America was quite different from Kyrgyzstan but I liked it nonetheless. Now I will be living in Roanoke, in the old family home; the twenty-five-year-old’s dream. Will I dream about Kyrgyzstan? Will I wish that I was back? When we first came to Kyrgyzstan we were told about the “Honeymoon Period.” We would love Kyrgyzstan but soon our excentricity would settle down. Will that happen to me in the states? I think it will. I’m already starting to get the pre-departure blues but the clock still ticks and we all have to go on. Time stops for no one. I’ll be leaving Kyrgyzstan bound for the states on December eleventh: just enough time before Christmas to feel guily about not buying presents for misplaced friends. This year I’m not looking forward to the raging insanity of present shopping and the harsh solitude of Christmas-time traffic but I am, however, looking forward to coming home.