I haven’t had any news from the US Embassy regarding my placement or arrival dates so this week I’ve just been pondering my own expectations for the experience. Whenever I travel, I try to go into the experience with an open mind. Even though I’ve admitted that I’m a planner, I find that being open to having new experiences is the key to avoiding frustration.
Several people have asked me what I expect the experience to be like living and teaching in a very different culture, with an unfamiliar language, customs, and foods. To be honest, I don’t have a lot of expectations. I’m intentionally trying to let go what my own ideas of what the experience should be so that I can simply be open to what the experience actually is once I’m there.
Still, I do have some expectations. It’s impossible not to. So, I thought it would be worthwhile to list some of them here and then come back around to this once I’m in Uzbekistan and reflect on how the real experience compares to my vision right now of what it will be.
I expect to be challenged, a lot, on many levels. Here’s a few:
Just getting there is going to be a challenge. So far the shortest trip I have found has two layovers and takes 25 hours.
We are going to have to accomplish several important things in the first few days in Uzbekistan, not the least of which will be finding an apartment for the 5 months in country.
We also will need to sort out using the metro because we won’t be driving while in Uzbekistan. I find public transportation to be intimidating. In Minnesota, we pretty much drive everywhere because public transportation isn’t very good. It just hasn’t been developed here so doing simple things like reading the bus schedule or figuring out which side of the train platform I need to be on are scary to me.
Food. Food is most definitely going to be a challenge. The people who know me well, already understand this. I’m fussy. I tend to like the stereotypical Midwestern diet; bland food that is focused on meat and starch. Luckily, I’ve heard that the Uzbek diet is very meat heavy. On the down side, that meat includes horse. Um…I cried the entire time I was reading the Red Pony in my 9th grade English class so that’s gonna be a challenge.
But the biggest challenge I foresee is teaching. Not so much the teaching, but the communicating. As you already know, I only speak a few phrases in Russian and I speak ZERO Uzbek. I’ve been told that most of the students will speak little English. That means I have to have a translator. I teach in English, which then gets translated to Russian and maybe even to Uzbek. I anticipate this is going to be a struggle.
One of the reasons I love teaching is the interactions that I get to have with my students. My classes are very interactive. I love to discuss with my students, rather than lecture to them. If I have to wait for everything to go through a translator (or even two!) and back again, that’s going to seriously disrupt the flow of my classes.
But this all sounds like I’m expecting bad things… I have great expectations too.
I expect to travel, not just around Uzbekistan, but to other countries in the region as well. I expect to meet interesting people, make friends and professional connections, learn a lot of Russian and hopefully a little Uzbek. I expect to wonderful and challenging adventure and come home with lots of stories to tell.
Finally, I expect that my expectations will largely be wrong.
Experience Fulbright 