February 25, 2013

Another gray, overcast and foggy day greeted me on the way to Willoughby’s flat. The fog was so thick I couldn’t even make out the building where she lives from the marshrutka and needed reassurances from the driver that I had indeed reached the end of his route.

Willoughby offered me some cold ginger tea before we spread all pages of the resource booklet on her long table to sort them out according to some logical categories. I then realized that she had only printed the original booklet as it was originally published in Nepal, but not the additional pages I had sent Bill with the vocabulary lists and the new materials I had created since 2002.

I promised to print those pages at home and then bring the package back to Willoughby so she can deliver it to Bill for the eventual printing. I hope the Peace Corps office doesn’t balk at the number of pages included as it seems to be growing exponentially.

Willoughby went on her way to get a pedicure, and I got on the trolley to go home where I spent the rest of the afternoon working on a variety of projects including emailing my landlady about the repairs still to be done in the flat. She replied she’s now enrolled in German classes five evenings a week and has no time to take care of them. She agreed to my hiring a handyperson and deducting the cost from the month’s rent.

Damira called to say she was having trouble downloading the CATEC application and wanted to stop by and see if I could help her. She hadn’t given any thought to what she would be presenting and thus couldn’t complete it while she was here. She now thinks she wants to prepare a poster, but has no clue how to incorporate one of the topics on critical thinking.

I offered her dinner and tea and the obligatory question about what religion I belong to came up. When I told her I was an atheist, she went on a long soliloquy about how great Islam was for the Koran contained explicit rules on how to guide a person’s life from the cradle to the grave. She believes in the existence of the hell and heaven, the devil and angels and jins (ghosts), dead people who roam the earth because they haven’t been allowed into either hell or haven.