The Black Cloud of Doom

One of the downsides of life in Kyzyl is the phenomenon I have started to call the "Black Cloud of Doom." This is a cloud of smog that hangs over the city, obscuring the sky and making it hard to breathe. The problem has its roots in human activity, of course. The issue is that coal is the sole source of power in Kyzyl (there is a hydroelectric station further down the Yenisei, but that electricity is sent somewhere else). The one large coal burning power plant produces all electricity for the city. In addition, the many private homes in Kyzyl burn coal in their stoves to heat the houses. It seems to me that roughly half of the 90,000 people here live in log-cabin type homes, the other half in apartment buildings. The apartment buildings are actually environmentally more sound, I think. Looking out over the private neighborhood next to our apartment building, I see a field of little gray columns of smoke, all leading calmly upwards and joining with the Black Cloud of Doom. Sometimes from the hill where the university is located, all I can see to the south is a mass of swirling dark brown air, and when driving into Kyzyl from the main road it looks like a brown smudge on the otherwise beautiful steppe. It's not pretty, but I suppose (and have read things which tell me) that this sort of pollution continues on and off across Mongolia and then gets worse in China. It's not exactly a pristine world over here...

The really strange thing about pollution in Kyzyl is that it's totally bipolar. One day it will be nasty to the point of making me queasy on the street, but the next clear as a bell—blue sky and beautiful snow-covered mountains on the horizon. It's a strange place, that's for sure. The nearest frame of reference I have for the landscape is New Mexico in the American West—however everything is much colder here. But the air, the mountains evoke that rugged, arid climate. The air here is dry and it moves in odd ways (layers and pockets, etc). Kind of reminiscent of Fairbanks winter weather, actually, with a lot of coal smoke floating around...

Life with my host family is enjoyable. I got lucky, and found a family that fits me pretty well in terms of values and lifestyle. Apparently a shaman told my family three months ago that they needed to find an opportunity to practice their English if they wanted to grow. Well, they forgot about this, but then after they adopted me they remembered, and decided that it was really lucky. We spend a lot of evenings laughing hilariously about different things—often intercultural, sometimes just about life and the university. We do a pretty great job sharing such a small space. I have started to think of our apartment in terms of “micro-environments.” There are about 5-7 good places to sit and work, and we all take turns occupying these places. At regularly spaced intervals we all gather around the kitchen table in the tiny kitchen on stools and eat some tasty things and drink plenty of tea. The food is really simple, because we live on teachers' salaries (they are microscopic in Russia), but it does the trick. I am learning a lot about different things one can do with cabbage and potatoes, and also making some new things for my family to try. Last weekend was pancakes and omelets, both of which were well received. I am learning a lot about cooking here, because the ingredients are entirely natural and I have to make a lot of substitutions, which means looking up the ingredient and what it's chemical function is in the dish. It's really fun; I could brag a bit about my baking soda+smetana substitute for baking powder in eggless pancakes...

Teaching continues to be a pleasure. I especially am getting fond of the third years. They are a joy to teach--so excited and eager. Today I gave them the option to join the other group of third years to watch a video of Hamlet, but they said they would rather do the lesson I had prepared because they wanted to learn the vocabulary! We ended up having a really good discussion about human rights and individualism vs. communalism (not communism, mind you). I think that college-aged people in general are pretty cool--very open and fearless in a lot of ways. I had a good discussion about this with my host mom earlier, who is giving me lots of advice about settling into my post-college "adult" personality.

Going back to landscape; I find the area around my university rather fascinating, because to the casual observer it looks like a vast industrial wasteland. In happier, more prosperous times, the West end of town had some “booming” industry—-a fur coat factory, a milk combinat, and at least a dozen other factories. Now they all stand dormant and empty. Windows are dark. Glass is slowly getting broken out and bricks crumbling away. The campus of Tuva State where I work is located a good 15 minutes outside the city. We cruise through the crowded downtown traffic for a while (though it's much better since they just re-opened the main street after paving a nice smooth layer of asphalt). Then we emerge on the edge of town, and head up a hill, past scores of garages and a couple gas stations. Then we get into abandoned factory land; semi-snowy (right now) fields with big concrete barricades placed in seemingly random positions. The last stop before my university is the psychiatric hospital—tucked away almost from sight on the edge of the steppe...

The university itself is a cheerful place. Six big yellow buildings sit clustered together on the hill, with enclosed walkways connecting them,so you don't have to go outside in cold weather. Some of the buildings are dorms, some academic buildings. There is a octagon-shaped reading room that is supposed to remind one of a yurt. I find the students to be an especially jolly bunch. They live on hardly any money—scraping together what their families have to spare, plus a hardly existent stipend to buy lots of bread and macaroni. They fry the macaroni in oil and eat it with bread and live five students to a room--with cots and little personal space. All the same, they are constantly trying to pay for my lunch and are invested in a lot of creative ventures (dancing is amazingly popular here among all segments of the population). The students stand at attention when I come into the classroom and are always willing to run and wet the rag for the chalkboard or look for a spare piece of chalk. People in the hallways are nice too, although I have the hardest time recognizing faces. I keep having experiences where someone I'm standing next to at a bus stop in town suddenly turns to me and says “Good morning” and I realize that I had lunch with them the week before. But people seem forgiving of my shortcomings, and I am trying really hard.

All my days here are soaked in language. Different languages, different ways of using language. I pay 500% more attention to it here than I ever did in college, even as a English/foreign language major. It's like the air we breathe, and Kyzyl is especially exciting because of the bilingual element. I have a theory that because the two languages (Tuvan and Russian) are equally relied upon that the people here are somehow especially alive to language. My students certainly understand what it means to learn another language, so English is just more of the same. Many of them say they prefer it to Russian because it is grammatically more similar to Tuvan, but I also hear tell of Tuvans who pretend to speak with a Russian accent to seem more Russian. Certainly the connections between language and culture run deep. Sometimes I feel like a character in some old-fashioned adventure novel. I don't think the world is supposed to be this interesting anymore. I would say in general, traveling to Russia feels like setting the clock back fifty years. Post modernism hasn't quite hit here yet... And I kind of like it that way.

All the best to you, far away family and friends. I wish you guys could have seen the full moon in Kyzyl the other night, or come to the wickedly cool Halloween celebration we had (the students went all out and put on an elaborate play about evil spirits and death!). Anyways—hope all is well!

Lots of love,
Riley