A day in the life

Here is a sort of normal day in my life, it happens to be Thursday, May 10. I woke up as Deanna is leaving for work, around 8:00. I lounged around reading, eating and doing laundry for about three hours. Lately, what with reading in English and Russian, I have ended up reading a great many books simultaneously. I keep starting books in Russian- due mostly to my inability to walk past a bookstore without buying something. While I most certainly can and do read books in Russian, I do so at the rate of a dyslexic ten-year-old. I always have an English book- my emotional escape- currently Pickwick Papers, which is very funny. Then there are project related books, religious books- rare gems gleaned from our apartment shelves mostly full of truely bad “Christian literature” from the 1980s- then poetry, mostly for class. I think on this particular day I read a combination of a digest of a Deaf magazine starting in the 1930s, Pickwick Papers and Nekrasov, from a Soviet-era reader of 19-c. Russian poetry for kids that I found in the trash. While reading I finalize my schedule by text-messaging the teachers I will be working with.
I ate lunch early, reheating my fettuccini alfredo with peas and bacon which turned out not much like the dish in question, but nonetheless tasty. Our microwave recently started to catch fire whenever put into use, creating a rift along the ceiling where I think the carcinogens live. So away it went to the trash. Now I do my reheating on the stove.
At 11:30 I got on the metro and headed to School 30 for hard-of-hearing (the anti-sign school). I ended up running through a rainstorm on the way. I had been invited to visit the 12th grade English class for a “conversation”. This was my first time being in the classroom at this school so I was not sure what to expect. I found myself seated at the front of a semi-circle of about twelve students with the teacher sitting with me at the front. The students were to have prepared questions ahead of time. The conversation ended up being mostly with Pasha, the only one who was not petrified into silence by my oh-so-imposing presence. We talked about what I did to celebrate Victory Day, what I thought of Russia before I came and how my opinion changed after I got there (a favorite), whether I was married, where I had traveled and then we naturally ended up talking about Russian literature. I learned that Pasha’s dream job is to be a PR manager but despite his very decent speech he has trouble using the telephone. So he is going to get a technical education next year at Bauman Technical University. He found War and Peace boring and prefers Checkov and Pelevin. The teacher- Irene- used to be a military translator until she had a deaf son. She speaks the 1970-cira British English which textbook series “Happy English”has brought to generations of Russians. That said, she speaks very well and has enthusiasm and a sense of humor which make her fun to work with. Next week I'll come back to observe some different classes.
I was here for just one hour on this inaugural visit. At 2:30 I get back on the metro to School 65 for the deaf (home to the bilingual class where sign rules supreme), another one hour commute. It is time for our weekly Internet Club. I realize it’s taken just about three months to get this program worked out to the point where I just walk in, ask for the keys, meet the kids and take them to the computer classroom where there are functional computers in adequate numbers. (This is the first week all of these things have coincided!) This week is exciting as we look at the first draft of our blog, created with text the kids wrote and photographs I took. As is always the case, there was a unique group of kids, some coming for the second, third or fourth week with hugely varying levels of English and computer skills. Luckily this project is really good for such a diverse group because there are so many levels we can work on at once- typing (impossibly slow for some), basic computer skills (like cutting and pasting), basic internet (searching, translating ER-RE and ASL), English language (vocabulary and grammar) and then sort of global deaf citizen education. The hour goes by so quickly as I hop between four computers trying to make sure something makes sense to each kid. This particular week seems more successful than others. Alen, Dima and Arina enter their bio for the blog and Pasha works hard at a difficult English family vocabulary exercise online, getting 80% right. Whoot!
This evening is a special event, a concert of an integrated (HH and hearing) performance group called Angels of Hope. Sasha and Sasha, two of the MPGU students are in this group and got me a ticket. After another hour on the metro, I arrive just in time for the 5:00pm start. The concert consists of singing and dancing numbers with sign language to Russian pop songs interspersed with the wordy elocution of two MCs and dozens of bureaucrats, who mounted the stage between each number to offer congratulations and gifts to the performers. The songs had a definite patriotic theme, inspired by Victory Day and the support of the political party, Fair Russia- who it seems been very active in recruiting HH students to its ranks. While I did enjoy the singing and dancing numbers several aspects of the concert annoyed me. First, the patriotism seemed overdone, what with the camoflague and bellowing pop songs praising the motherland. Second, about half the bureaucrats used the term “invalid” to refer to the HH students in the group. Beyond the term itself, which I try not to get touchy about, was the overall notion that students with hearing loss are a sort of sorry imitation of normal (hearing) people and that those who help poor hard of hearing students are heros of the first rank. Third, I was very hungry, having eaten nothing since my pasta at 11:30 and the concert went on for three hours without intermission.
I chatted a bit with some deaf and HH friends after the show before bolting to McD and eating a salad, homestyle fries (a Russian only option, I think) and orange juice. For those of you familiar with my anti-McD vow, it still stands in theory, but on rare occasions becomes entirely impractical. Despite it being around 9pm, it was very sunny and warm so I decided to stroll along the boulevard, a park running down the centre of the street, at this part of the city very wide and green indeed, leading up to a fountain complex and a large pond (Chistie Prudi). I meandered, digesting my hastily gobbled dinner and the many impressions of the day. The park was full of people out for a stroll. Young men with long hair, leather and guitars were spaced out about every four or five benches, surrounded by small circles of young people drinking and talking or singing along. Some people sat along the shore of the water and made out. Others sat on the back of the bench, feet widely spaced on the benches and poured vodka in plastic cups. In front of a theater I think I observed some theater students doing some acting exercise or else playing something like charades. I circled back from the pond and got on the metro again for my 45 minute ride home. Here I drank some tea, read something and went to sleep.