March 28
With all of our official duties completed, we decided to relax today. We walked to the Tsoom store at noon and bought Vasya and Julia new shirts and then we walked to the outside bazaar to buy more bananas and apples. At some point I think they will grow tired of apples and bananas, but the end is nowhere in sight. Within 2 hours, all the bananas were gone and we’re down to 1 apple. When I got the can of peas out for supper they were both leaping for joy. I’m beginning to wonder how they’ll react when they see the produce section at King Soopers at home.
Today we started talking about “Strange American Habits”. The cultures of our two countries are very different, neither one is better than the other, but we explained they’re Americans now so they need to start learning our culture. That statement brought 2 great big smiles. They’re very eager to learn so we decided to focus on 3 things to start with:
Americans bathe everyday
Americans wear different clothes everyday, and
Americans don’t bump into each other in a crowd without saying “excuse me”
In Kazakhstan, people wear the same clothes several days in a row. There’s nothing wrong with that, just not done in our part of America. Very few families have washing machines so you might as well wear it until it’s completely dirty!
I’m not sure how often the kids bathed in the orphanage, but they’ve been doing pretty well here in the flat. They love to use the hair dryer so that must be something completely new. In Kazakhstan, bumping into others and trying to get in front of someone else is how things are done. There are many more differences we’ll need to work on but we’re going to approach it slowly otherwise it will be too overwhelming.
We’ll start table manners at home. They’re both pretty good (in a Kazakh way) but double dipping here is the only way to eat. Serving spoons aren’t used, we’re still working on that concept. So please forgive our table manners at the beginning.
Russ started working on English with Vasya and decided that English is a very difficult language. Just look at the work “circus” and try to explain that pronunciation. In Russian, the c always makes the s sound and the k always makes the k sound. A word like circus is unexplainable. Vasya knows the alphabet and can sound out words (similar to my Russian) so now we just need to work on vocabulary. Sentence structure will be difficult because they put their words in a different order, but we’ll get there.
Wendy
Today we started talking about “Strange American Habits”. The cultures of our two countries are very different, neither one is better than the other, but we explained they’re Americans now so they need to start learning our culture. That statement brought 2 great big smiles. They’re very eager to learn so we decided to focus on 3 things to start with:
Americans bathe everyday
Americans wear different clothes everyday, and
Americans don’t bump into each other in a crowd without saying “excuse me”
In Kazakhstan, people wear the same clothes several days in a row. There’s nothing wrong with that, just not done in our part of America. Very few families have washing machines so you might as well wear it until it’s completely dirty!
I’m not sure how often the kids bathed in the orphanage, but they’ve been doing pretty well here in the flat. They love to use the hair dryer so that must be something completely new. In Kazakhstan, bumping into others and trying to get in front of someone else is how things are done. There are many more differences we’ll need to work on but we’re going to approach it slowly otherwise it will be too overwhelming.
We’ll start table manners at home. They’re both pretty good (in a Kazakh way) but double dipping here is the only way to eat. Serving spoons aren’t used, we’re still working on that concept. So please forgive our table manners at the beginning.
Russ started working on English with Vasya and decided that English is a very difficult language. Just look at the work “circus” and try to explain that pronunciation. In Russian, the c always makes the s sound and the k always makes the k sound. A word like circus is unexplainable. Vasya knows the alphabet and can sound out words (similar to my Russian) so now we just need to work on vocabulary. Sentence structure will be difficult because they put their words in a different order, but we’ll get there.
Wendy
posted by The Petersons at 6:01 PM
1 Comments:
You have one of the most interesting blogs I've ever read. What a brave family y'all are! Best wishes for a happy voyage home.
Post a Comment
<< Home