Account of a Halloween Celebration in Kyzyl (as per the request of S--)

The celebration of Halloween at the University was the brainchild of the head of our department at the university. The head of our department is truly a force with which to reckon. She is not a large woman, but makes a large impression. She seems to walk with springs beneath her feet and works with manic energy. Several years ago she decided that English students at Tuva State should celebrated the holiday of Halloween in order to develop their understanding of culture of the USA. And thus I came to celebrate Halloween in Tuva with more pomp, circumstance, and meaningful reflection than ever I did in the land of my birth...

The celebration was structured as a large competition between the different years of students at the university and upper-level students of English from the Russian high-schools around town.

The fourth year class was in charge of organizing the event, which was held on the stage in the auditorium at our university and featured a bumping, bopping techno soundtrack and lots of spooky sound effects. There were six teams taking part in the competition. I was, unfortunately, roped into serving on the judges' panel for the competition, which was one of the hardest things I have had to do since coming to Russia. The “Is this moral?” alarm was going off in my heard, because I was judging my own students who I had helped to prepare for the competition! Oh well. I gave them high scores because I honestly liked them best! But even I couldn't say whether that was because they were my students or if they were really the best. I have lost all faith in the criminal justice system after this experience—it's impossible to be impartial. Hopefully I did a bad enough job judging they won't ask me to do anything like that again...

The teams were required to prepare the following materials: a carved pumpkin, a poster about Halloween, a mini-musical Presentation of their team, an original song, a team chant, an entry for the essay contest, and a 3 minute short film. Plus, each each team was given a different nation of the world (nation was LOOSELY defined... one team had “Africa” as their nation). Their job was to show how Halloween was celebrated in this country. If you ask me, this is where the concept of the competition could have used a little refining/rethinking... for example, my third years had to show Halloween in Japan. Luckily I have a friend studying in Japan right now (Hey, E--!) who was able to give me some inside scoop, and (as I suspected) Halloween is not celebrated in Japan, except as something imported though the American-cultural-Diaspora/Globalization. However, this did not stop our department chair from requiring that each team focus their entry around a country, and my third years dutifully prepared a report about Japanese spiritual festivals honoring the dead and somehow managed to locate enough kimonos for everybody involved.

It was actually a near thing that the competition could take place at all. Like I mentioned in my previous post, the university is located on a hill about 20-30 minutes outside of the city. The power lines to the university seem a little tenuous. We have frequent blackouts at school, where everybody starts wandering around the dark hallways bumping into each other. Unfortunately, or perhaps auspiciously, one of these blackouts occurred about half an hour before the Halloween show was supposed to begin. Tuva time is a little less exact than, say, American university time, so people didn't show up for a good half an hour until after the show was to begin. Then there was massive chaos—ghosts, goblins, witches, cursed clowns, etc., all running around in a panic because there were no lights. Thankfully, after about a half an hour the lights came on and the show could go on!

The teams were energetic and the competition was tough. Much English was spoken, in a variety of accents. One of the difficult parts of my job is defeating British English, which I find has already taken a firm hold on the hearts and minds of the Tuvan youth. Although I must say I understand its insidious power... I myself the other day found “colour” on the chalkboard, written in my own handwriting... The students all did a fantastic job speaking in English. I spent the hour before the competition helping the frantic MC prepare his banter, all in English. I was surprised at the event how much of the (surprisingly large) audience spoke and understood a fair amount of English, and how enthusiastically and creatively the students rose to the challenge of portraying Halloween. Our Dia De Los Muertos celebration in high-school Spanish wasn't quite this all-out...

The competition itself was full of hilarity, surprise performances—including a “who can shriek the loudest” competition, a section where representatives from each of the teams had to act out phrases in English, including “A pelmen in boiling water,” “A frog in love,” and “A computer virus.” Much laughter occurred. One of the things I realizing about people in Tuva is that they love to laugh. I laugh more here than I have most other places in my life, except maybe at home. And all this ridiculous laughing is not something I remember from my previous trips to Russia, so maybe it's a specifically Tuva thing? Maybe I just have happened upon a lot of people who like to laugh.

My absolute favorite part of the competition was watching the film of my third year class. We had read Edgar Allen Poe's short story “The Black Cat” the week before, because they had been assigned that story for their film. For those who don't know, the story is a really gruesome account of a nice guy who starts drinking, then starts torturing his beloved cat, kills it, then the cat returns from the dead in a new form to torture the man. The man kills his wife on accident and the cat turns him over to the cops. It was actually a fantastic story to read with the students because it had a good moral about the dangerous of alcohol, which are big problems here. One of the students in my class had a personal tragedy where one of their parents ended up killing the other one last summer, and then themselves. This student is now the eldest in a family with six little siblings. Yet this student got really involved with the film, taking a starring role in the adaptation—I was glad to see this, even though originally I wished they had been assigned a story without so much personal resonance. The film they made was awesome, set in an apartment in Tuva, had cross-dressing, excellent portrayal of the drunk guy by one of the class monitors, and even a surprise appearance by a real Russian cop. Clearly the students had enjoyed making the film...

I have some theories about why that was, but I think in a lot of ways Poe's reality corresponds to Tuvan reality and studying his works here has a lot of meaning. Alcohol is often the escapist drug of choice for people here, trying to compensate for a situation that allows them little hope for mobility or security for the future. Tragedy is close to being the norm. Since I have been here I have heard tell of a number of tragedies in the lives of friends and acquaintances. The mentally ill son of the former neighbor of a close friend recently butchered his elderly mother. One of my students is short an arm from an auto crash. One day, five people I met on the street were either coming from or going to funerals for friends who had died. It seems like people die a lot here, and I suspect that the statistics support that assertion. Tuva is called the poorest and most violent part of Russia. I'm surprised to discover how warm and full of love me life here is though... I didn't expect that. Just, people here deal with tragedy a lot more frequently than I'm accustomed to and live with a great deal more uncertainty in their lives. Some of my students have lingering health problems from early periods in their life when they didn't have enough warm clothes and they remember being hungry as kids. I have heard tell that the environmental factors also contribute to this wealth of health issues. The largest asbestos mine/factory in Russia is located not too far from here, although it's half dormant right now. Men who served in the military in secret Soviet cities have problems with fertility and children being born deformed. Horrors are many here, and are met with on a daily basis. One day I saw a dog whose tail had been stripped of its skin, the dog stood on a street corner and seemingly did not notice the pain. A few weeks later I met a child who told me about seeing what must have been the same dog. It made me feel better; someone else had seen what I had seen and also been disturbed. I would say that life is edgier here than what I was accustomed to in the USA. Although we have our fair share of catastrophes and tragedies as well. Certainly car crashes and grisly murders are nothing new in our experience. Perhaps it is just that we hold them at greater distance, behind a facade of control and safety.

Interestingly enough (and I promise I'll get to a happier subject pretty quick here) my students had heard tell of practically the same story as Poe wrote, down to the details, happening in the course of daily life in Tuva (I assume minus the ghost cat, although I am living with people who largely believe in reincarnation and ghosts, so I won't assume anything). Someone's grandmother told them a story about a cat that a drunk man had gotten angry with, finally tossing the poor creature into the fireplace. The cat crawled up the chimney, emerging on the roof--without a single patch of fur left on its body. Another student remembered a similar story from her village. We concluded that Edgar Allen Poe could have lived in Kyzyl. The periods of hunger and his young wife's death from Tuberculosis in his biography also could have easily happened here... I haven't yet gotten around to mentioning infectious disease in Kyzyl, but it is a big issue.

Throughout the celebration of Halloween the ghost story element really seemed to set off the imaginations and creativity of people here. I observed in our preparations that the students really related to the ghost story element of our Halloween traditions. After asking my students about this, I was rewarded with the revelation that Tuvan culture has its own lively tradition of ghost stories. In their home villages, my students had grown up loving and telling their own Ghost stories, so they picked up the ghost story element of Halloween and ran with it! All throughout the celebration, images of ghosts and evil spirits was supreme, instead of the American emphasis on consuming vast quantities of sweets. In fact, I found Halloween to be a strangely meaningful and moving holiday here, whereas in the US it always seemed materialistic, sugar-coated, and kind of pointless. Here the sugar was less and the fear more real... I liked it.

Halloween was a blast. There is lots of creativity and interest in other cultures here. I felt honored that people celebrated “my” holiday with so much love and enthusiasm. I have a confession to make... I have only had two small drinks of alcohol since coming to Russia! This must be some kind of record for Americans in Russia—and I think it's largely attributable to living in a healthy Buddhist family with young kids. However, there is no shortage of real fun in my life. It's a nice change after college's alcohol-centered social world. I also think it's a sign of the power of cross-cultural living. Everything feels wildly crazy and cool without alcohol, so no need to spice it up. Plus the walking skeletons around town (i.e. drunk guys) are really good advertising against alcohol. Plus the cold, dark, dangerous streets. I have been занимаетсяing a healthy lifestyle and it feels good! Maybe if I lived with other twenty-two year olds it would be a different situation, but so far I'm really enjoying a year of clean living in Siberia. Although, I am getting really excited to try milk vodka in the villages. Hopefully that pleasure lies somewhere in my future.

Hasta la vista кабанчики,

Riley