We Love English! - English Week 2024

    The month of February is English Month in Kyrgyzstan! It's supposed to be a month to highlight English learning with open lessons, performances, and a bigger focus on English at school. At my school, although we are celebrating all month, the second week of February specifically is "English Week." With this, we decided to have our English performance on February 14th (aka Valentine's Day) with the theme "We Love English!" Here's a little of what we did:

    Our big production was our own interpretation of "Beauty and the Beast." Our interpretation means that there was no Gaston, limited singing and it only lasted about 15 minutes. However, quality over quantity, and our students put on an amazing production! Each class helped make the costumes, backdrop and posters, and some of our 4th, 7th, and 8th-grade students were the different characters. In the month leading up to this, I took on the dual role of English teacher AND Drama teacher as I helped the students write the script, practice their lines, and rehearse their scenes. In between each scene, we had different students sing or dance to English songs. 12 of my 4th-grade students all played Chip, and with their mother, Mrs. Potts (aka a 7th-grade girl), sang "I'm a Little Tea Pot." Our big finale included one student singing an English love song she learned from TikTok, while Belle and the Beast slow danced and the rest of the characters circled them. 

Chip and Mrs. Potts have become a fan favorite at school with drawings of them everywhere!

    After "Beauty and the Beast," we had a competition between classes to solve English riddles (ex. What has 4 legs but can't run? A chair.) To finish our presentation, several of the younger classes performed small nursery rhymes or songs. This included performances of "5 Little Monkeys", "5 Little Ducks", "Little Snowflakes" and "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Each class also made their own costumes, so we had many snowflakes, ducks, monkeys, and stars running around all day. Not to mention, all the costumes from "Beauty and the Beast", it looked like it could've been Halloween and not Valentine's Day. 

Some of our decorations created by students

    In addition to the students' performance, we also had English decorations around the school. Each class designed posters with nursery rhymes/songs or Beauty and the Beast that we hung up around the school to advertise English Month. My English clubs also created a poster called "We Love English Because..." and many students wrote why they loved learning English. 

 One thing preparing for this performance has taught me is that my students love to create art and do projects, and by including them in these things their interest in English grows exponentially! I'll definitely be designing my future lessons and clubs around more music and art. 

One of my student's "I Love English because..."

    Although my students' English performance may be over, we still have 2 more weeks of February to go. Future events include a spelling bee, a non-English teacher trivia game, and more... My students are also already asking about putting on an end-of-year English show, so I guess pretty soon it'll be time to start designing that. I mean I'm not complaining, because this performance has done nothing but motivate my students to learn more English and I'm looking forward to where their learning goes from here! 

Some of the English teachers with our director!

Sidenote: although you won't see pictures of any students or minors on my blog, if you follow my Peace Corps Instagram (@emilyinkgz), you'll be able to see some more pictures and videos from their performance. 

We'll Move to India Forever

 For those who read my last post, you'll know that I recently went to India during my Winter break (for those who haven't read my last post...I went to India). With the Peace Corps, we earn 2 days of Annual Leave per month of service. This leave can be used to travel to different parts of Kyrgyzstan or other countries, and since I'm a teacher, it can only be used during school breaks. This past winter break myself and four other volunteers decided to use our leave for the first time to travel to Kerala, India! 

Here's a brief synopsis of everything that went down:

The trip started by traveling to Almaty, Kazakhstan as no flights go from Kyrgyzstan to India. For me, getting to Almaty involved three different taxi rides to Osh (the biggest city in Southern Kyrgyzstan), a plane ride from Osh to Bishkek, and another bus ride from Bishkek to Almaty. Let's just say if there's one thing I've gotten good at, it's making extensive travel plans. Once we arrived in Almaty, we spent the hours before our flight exploring the city. The highlight was visiting the Zenkov Cathedral, the second-tallest wooden church in the world! I also met a man from Kerala, India who was able to give us a lot of recommendations (literally what are the odds).

The Zenkov Cathedral

After a flight from Almaty to New Delhi, an 8-hour layover, another flight from New Delhi to Kochi, Kerala, and a five-hour taxi ride through the rainforest and mountains, we reached our first destination: Munnar, Kerala, India! This was the part of the trip I was most excited for. Firstly, I booked us a treehouse to stay in that was also in a smaller village outside the main part of the city. This treehouse turned out to be in the middle of the rainforest, featured an outdoor shower, had the largest spiders I'd ever seen, and the best host who made us Masala Chai every morning. We also spent time touring the Tea Farms (aka the tea farms with the highest elevation in the world) and a Tea Factory. I don't think I've ever seen anything as beautiful as the endless hills of tea plants. During our last night in Munnar, several of us took a cooking class that began in the Munnar Bazaar to buy ingredients and then traveled 30 minutes into the mountains to our guide's home where his mother taught us to make authentic Keralan food.

The Cooking Process

The Final Product of Cooking Class

After Munnar, we traveled to Thiruvananthapuram (or Trivandrum for short). Here we spent most of our time at the beach and eating fruit (the best combination in the world if you ask me). Those who know me, know I love all things involved with the ocean (swimming, sharks, whales, almost being drowned by the waves, etc...). After being in Kyrgyzstan (the most landlocked country in the world) for 7 months, it was much needed to be back near the water again. I also bought some goggles, channeled my 8 years of swim team experience, and impressed everyone with my aquatic abilities. We also saw elephants, and one of them decided to play catch with me and his bamboo. Throwing bamboo covered in elephant snot is way easier said than done. 

The Tea Estates Surrounding the Mountain Road

Once we were finished in Trivandrum, we took a quick trip to Alleppey to visit the backwaters. Here we saw not only the backwaters, but also rice farms and several fishing villages that our only reachable by boat.

 Our final city was Kochi, the capital of Kerala. Kochi is a city full of history and features the ruins of a Portuguese Fort, prisons from India's fight for freedom against the U.K., a Synagogue built in 1568, along with countless other things. Our time here was spent mostly walking around exploring the city as there were pieces of history at every corner. 

Trivandrum at Sunset

After a beautiful and surreal week, our time in Kerala came to an end. On our way home, we also had a ten-hour layover in New Delhi where I found Reese's in Duty-Free and spent way more money than I should have on them. Reese's are one of the foods I miss most and so it was 1000% worth it. I also forced my friend to take a picture of me with them for the mems. 

Proof 

After traveling nonstop for over a week, I had reached a point of delirium and I think it started to show. Upon our re-entry to Kyrgyzstan, the Kazakh border patrol asked me if I'd prefer him to speak English or Russian. I then told him I don't speak English and instead I spoke Kazkh (I don't speak Kazakh but I'd heard it was similar to Kyrgyz). I then proceeded to do the entire border entry in Kazakh, and I think I confused him enough that he just let me through. 

This entire trip was nothing I ever could've imagined growing up. India had always been on my list of places to go, but I never thought it would actually happen. One of the many reasons I joined the Peace Corps was to travel to places I never thought I'd see. It's safe to say this trip fulfilled that. 

Here's a fun fact about me to close out this post: before going to India, I had only eaten Indian food one time, and it was in Kyrgyzstan.  I also have a comically low spice tolerance. Many people in Kyrgyzstan, the USA, and India told me that this was an insane way to figure out if I liked Indian food. However, I'm proud to announce I only cried once from spice during the trip, and I'm now such a fan of Indian food that I dream about it once a week. 

The One Time I Cried From Spice

Finally, shout out to Taylor Swift for writing the lyric "we'll move to India forever." It's been used as both a blog title, Instagram caption AND TikTok audio.