Salut and à Bientôt

Salut, The school year has finished.  It’s   difficult  to think about that, and  I’ve  been in Kyrgyzstan for 11 months, and by my next blog post, a year.  It was this time last year that I had graduated;  I’d  been moving out , and   I’d  been  doing everything to prepare to leave.  I learned I  was going to  come to Kyrgyzstan late, at the end of April/early May, so it all happened quickly.  The finish line between the Manas competition and the last day of school was three weeks of meandering. The mood was sour and morose. I  can’t  always figure out if  it’s  just because school is ending and everyone has  senioritis,  or because of the accident. Baktygul kept remarking to me that the students were in bad moods.  What’s  interesting to me is the language people use;  as a result of  language barriers, people always ask  me  “ Were you scared/afraid? ”  I  don’t  have the language to describe terror, or trauma, or even how to talk about panic and anxiety. So, we  just  say  “ scar

Salut, I had  originally  given this post a funnier title, but life has a way of hitting you, sometimes literally. This post  originally was  supposed to be more uplifting than the last, which was rather sad and  morose  on my part. It will be uplifting until it’s not.  I mentioned in my last post that our music teacher left; our schedule changed, which I really hate. I used to have back-to-back classes and now have an awkward gap on Fridays of 2 hours to kill time. The new music teacher has some  interesting  teaching methods; in the afternoon, I spotted her in the upstairs entryway having 1st and 2nd graders dance to Shakira in large groups for exercise! There’s been a rifle laid out on an extra dining table we don’t use  and   thought  it was fake as I’ve basically never seen it be used (and guns here  just  aren’t a thing). But the other day, my host brother, Meder, grabbed it and said he used it to shoot feral dogs? Okay.  Now that it’s spring, Adelya and Alihan like to  go ou