Graduation

For the last month, I've been beginning to say goodbye to the life I've made here. I'm not exactly in the Sarah-McLachlan's-I-Will-Remember-You-on-repeat-on-my-iPod mood, nor am I feverishly marking off the days till I get the hell out of here…but I am feeling a certain combination of relief and wistfulness not unlike that felt when I graduated from UVa and DB.

We had graduation on May 24 – a very long, but good, day in which yours truly became the unofficial photographer. Ceremonies began fairly early in the day, with the graduates receiving various honors, performing skits and dances of their own devising (they can break dance! Well!), and receiving armloads of flowers. I don't know if I've mentioned the traditional attire of Kyrgyz schoolchildren: boys are to wear black suits with white shirts while girls should wear some variation of black-skirt-white-button-down (the strangest incarnation of this being the lacy apron variety, which makes the girls look like some odd version of a French maid – imagine Britney Spears in that in "…Baby One More Time"). And atop the girls' heads are giant bows, making them look like walking Christmas gifts. Anyway, at my school at least (it's a semi-private school, so the kids are "cooler" than your average villager), this uniform goes by the wayside by 8th or 9th grade…until graduation, when the girls once again don the big bows and matching skirts. Every year, the two graduating classes of girls design some outfit and have it made. This year's were, for me at least, particularly amusing. One class had white button-downs paired with pleated miniskirts and silver-shiny tube tops. The other had alternating pocketed bubble skirts and plaid suspender-ed minis. A show of schoolgirl sexiness that made me a little uncomfortable. Oh, and not to be outdone, the boys were brightly colored button downs with matching ties. It was quite the fashion show.
The kids wrote poems about every teacher at school – mine was about how I have learned the Kyrgyz language and customs so have become a Kyrgyz girl…and they like that I'm always "joyful" (and it probably didn't hurt that I didn't give them any homework for the last month of school). I also got a nice thanks-from-all-of-us-and-best-of-luck-in-the-future speech from my director. And a calculator and a whole bunch of roses.
After the ceremony, the teachers went to have lunch with all of the parents, which was your typical ash (rice pilaf+carrots+meat+onions), bread, seasonal fruits and salads, and, of course, tea and vodka affair. It was kind of cool for me to meet the people who created the kids who have both won my heart and driven me crazy over the past two years. My favorites were the tired mothers of naughty boys who seemed simply relieved that their young men made it to graduation. Toward the end of the lunch, we started the "singing cup" Kyrgyz party game where there's a cup of something that gets passed around the group…if you hold the cup, you've gotta sing a song. Usually I sing some English song that people recognize and/or whose lyrics I can translate, e.g. Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You" (which is, along with other classics like the Beatles' "Come Together" and the entire catalogue of German 80s duo Modern Talking, universally well-known here). This time I tried to shake things up with "Midnight Train to Georgia," but I forgot the words by the end of the first stanza. Oops.
By late afternoon, I'd been recruited by the graduates to come to their version of prom. I showed up and was – big surprise – the only adult there. So I danced with my kids (including a couple of mildly awkward middle-of-the-dancing-circle-dance-offs between me and some boys I'm pretty sure have teacher crushes on me). I felt both well-liked and old.

More goodbye-Kyrgyzstan moments to come.

Terri

PS I *officially* return to Kingsport, TN, on Friday, July 18. I'll then move to Charlottesville mid-August. You should come find me -- I'd love to catch up.