march

I’ve learned to speak many new languages here, while at the same time sometimes losing the ability to converse in my mother tongue. First of all there’s the Kyrgyz language. I haven’t mastered it by any means (and perhaps my level of Kyrgyz being higher than most of my students’ English level, when they’ve studied for years and myself only officially instructed for about two months, may show I have not mastered my teaching job either), but I get around okay doing normal things: shopping, getting a taxi, ordering in a restaurant, stepping over bound chickens for sale on the ground. But I do this while speaking Kyrgyz.

I have learned more than Kyrgyz and the odd ends of Russian required for anyone looking like a permanent tourist. My previous employment at the fruit company showed me that big businesses speak a language of acronyms, and the government is a big business. I regularly spout off lines such as: “Some PCVs from the K17 PST will go to the ToT for PCVTs.” (Yet just the other day I said, “My hair the back a little longer to cut.” That’s the approximate word order in Kyrgyz, but I was speaking English). While not an entirely new language, those unfamiliar with it may as well be listening to Brad Pitt in the film Snatch.

As if I wouldn’t return to America incoherent enough, a tight knit group will often form new vocabulary or phrases that contain situational signification that, to those external, it conveys little or no meaning (the inside joke, but I prefer to think of our humor as more unique than that).

Small children have an unfortunate trait of often becoming larger children, but while walking in the bazaar recently, we found cell phone baby. Cell phone baby was just a baby talking on a toy phone while intermittently looking back at us. Unintentionally, as we were just following our shortest path out, we tagged behind cell phone baby for about five minutes weaving through many sections of a large bazaar. Since two groups would unlikely be going this exact zig zag path we decided that she was probably using the phone to call the militia to report the tourists trailing her. She eventually went one direction (through means of parent carrying her), and we turned the other and headed home. I don’t remember exactly what we bought at the bazaar that day, but we still talk about cell phone baby.

So be warned. When you next see me in America (or you could visit!) I might only speak slow simple sentences that insult your ability to understand English, it’s also possible I will only be able to form disjointed English, or I could rant about PST and VRFs while expecting knowledge of the incomprehensible meanings behind the mancave, Jordan, and winter pants parties. But at least you’ll understand cell phone baby, a little bit.