The day I almost met the president of Kyrgyzstan

My day almost meeting the president of Kyrgyzstan.
I haven’t been feeling well so I have been lying in bed not doing anything for the past few days. I woke up today with a splitting headache but I had heard wind that the president might come to my village. That was enough for me to pull myself out of bed, wash my greasy hair that hasn’t seen water in over a week and put on mascara. I got dressed and was trying to figure out what I was going to do because I got ready an hour before my first class of the day when I got a phone call from my host sister, who is the assistant principal at the school. She told me that the president was coming and I needed to get to school. I book it into school thinking she would be there in the next hour or so. No such luck. I wait around in the teachers’ lounge for a good 20 minutes talking to the teachers and just observing. The school was in chaos at this point. All of the students were running around scrubbing the school down from top to bottom to prepare. One teacher shows up, I had passed her on the road as I was running to school, and we exchange pleasantries. She looks at me and notices that I have mascara on. Of course I have mascara on, I know that there will be pictures of me taken today and I want it to look like I have eyes. Well, as every teacher walks into the teachers’ room she points out that I’m wearing mascara. Good observation, thank you! She seems to not notice the fact that the entire school is running around, scrubbing floors, painting walls, and changing posters, but she notices that I have added black to my eyelashes.
Around this time the director comes in and craziness follows her. I don’t think I ever heard her voice at a normal level the entire day. Not quite sure why she needed to yell everything at everybody. With that my counterpart and I scurried off to our classroom (which really is no longer my classroom because it was taken away from me… another story). We stand and watch the students scrub that classroom down. They remove the cotton insulation from the windows (aren’t we going to need that because it is still winter) and mop the floor for the um-teenth time. Another teacher comes in the classroom and looks at the desks and tells the students to clean off the writing on them that some previous students decided was necessary to share with the world. At this point my counterpart has left to do something else and the teacher comes up to me and tells me that these students didn’t write this and it must have been my club students. Not sure where she came to this conclusion because all the writing was in Kyrgyz (not English) and there have been many different classes in this classroom that haven’t been my classes. Not to mention that some of these desks had come from somewhere else in the school with the writing already on them before they arrived here. I tried to explain that to her but with the combination of my splitting headache and horrible Kyrgyz I’m sure it did not come out exactly as I intended it to. Oh well. I went and taught two classes after this and then had to leave because my head hurt too much. The President was supposed to come by 4pm at this point.
While at home my host niece told me that she wanted to go back to the school with me when I was going to go back. We head out at about 3:30 and the whole way there she is practicing her English. This girl is 10 and she is amazing. She is coming up with sentences that I have not taught her with very few mistakes. We have been working on the difference between me too and me either. In Kyrgyz they are the same so we were thinking of examples and practicing. We get to school and wait, and wait, and wait. Meanwhile the principal comes back in the teachers’ room and starts yelling about something again. I have no idea what she upset about so I am very uncomfortable. Turns out some teacher has left for the day with still having some classes left to teach. So my counterpart and I are left with the duty of entertaining them. I say entertaining them because this is a class that we don’t teach and I have never met before. My counterpart starts playing a game with them just to keep them busy. This class ends and we are still waiting for the president to come. We decide to go to the “English classroom” to wait some more.
While waiting my other counterpart comes in and says we are going to teach 6th grade together. Wait a minute, I don’t teach this class. Why am I being told that I will be teaching this class? I ask her several times why I am going to teach with her and she just keeps saying that we will teach together. Finally I get her to tell me that it is because they want it to look like I’m working when the president comes. I’m pissed at this point. I go in the classroom with my second counterpart and stand on the side. I have no idea what she is teaching. She keeps handing me the book and telling me to teach something. She decides that she wants to teach present simple so she writes on the board:
I paint I don’t paint
You paint You don’t paint
He/She paints He/She doesn’t paint
We paint We don’t paint
They paint They don’t paint
Then again hands me the book and says write sentences on the board. I’m really irritated at this point but I end up pulling a really great activity out of nowhere. I get all the students participating and talking. I tell her that it’s her turn and she doesn’t know what to do. Didn’t she write a lesson plan? Ugh! While all of this is going on the president finally shows up to my school. There is a Center for Children’s Learning next to my school and they went there first. We can see the guards and the cars and police everywhere. Then we can see her come out of the center and they stand there for a few minutes, then they’re gone. WAIT A MINUTE… they’re gone? Yeah, they drove off to where ever they were going next. All of that for nothing. The cleaning, teaching classes that aren’t ours, the yelling, the chaos… and she just drives off. Strangely enough it didn’t upset me too much that she didn’t come, I have gotten used to this not happening when they are supposed to. Welcome to Kyrgyzstan!