The Big Blue Marble Newsletter: Sample Article

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Life on the Other Side of the Moon

NOTE: In 1994, I spent a year and a half in Russia as a volunteer English instruction partially under the auspices of a nonprofit volunteer placement program called World Teach.  I worked with World Teach for nine of the eighteen months.  I also lived in Kaliningrad in the home of my future wife for six months after the placement and spent three months studying Russian in Saint Petersburg before my World Teach assignment.

World Teach provides volunteers with a range of support services including transportation from New York to the placement site, a month of teacher training (and follow-up training classes), a library with teaching materials, assistance with visas, teacher placement, and housing, access to a full time coordinator who helps with volunteers with any issues that arise during their placement, medical insurance, and an extensive pre-assignment information packet.  World Teach has a variety of programs available for a summer or a year abroad.  Its programs to Ecuador, Namibia, and Costa Rica cost between $5000-6000 for a year and $3500 for a summer.  There is also a free program to the Marshall Islands and low cost programs ($1000-$1500) to China and Guyana for a year placement.  The services are the same for all programs.  World Teach no longer has a program in Russia.  It may, however, have programs in Poland from time to time.  World Teach is also currently working to develop a program in Chile.

The majority of the volunteers are recent college graduates, though, World Teach accepts volunteers of all ages.  While I think World Teach provides a lot of useful support for its volunteers, you need to understand why you are using their services in the first place.

Some volunteers join the agency primarily because they want help to find a suitable placement. This is a lot of money to spend for just this service.  You can find a job teaching English almost anywhere in the world if you are persistent.

However, World Teach is helpful if you want support to be a good teacher and if you feel uncomfortable about living and working abroad for whatever reason.  It is nice to have someone from the USA to fall back on when necessary.  It also provides a lot of support (if you take advantage of it) to help you become a more skilled teacher.

During my placement, I taught at a small business college called Kaliningrad Commercial College. The student body was 90% female of ages 17-19. (Most males of that age in Russia have to do army service).  The students took courses in a variety of subjects including restaurant management (which, literally translated from Russian, is mass nutrition), pre-law, computers, and commerce. Teachers (who received only $60 pay per month) had to work additional jobs to make a living.  As a result, the school was unable to maintain a stable schedule.  Everyday, I would find out what classes I would teach the next day.  The school had a surprisingly advanced computer lab financed by a grant from Sweden.  My classes had between 8 and 35 students each.

The following story is about my experience during this placement.

About three months after I returned to the United States from my stay in Russia, I was invited to a 40th wedding anniversary dinner for an older couple who recently immigrated to the United States from Russia.  In typical Russian style, the table groaned under the weight of hundreds of skillfully arranged plates of potato and meat salads, stewed vegetable appetizers (called ikra, meaning caviar) dripping with oil and garlic, salami, bread, champagne bottles and--of course-- copious vodka.

After awhile, in accordance with tradition, the host started to call on the guests to give a toast. They elected to have the two Americans present start off the toast as a sign of respect.  The other American gave his speech in English and said essentially that the Russians must have been glad to live in such a free and rich country as the US.  He was pleasantly but lukewarmly received.  I said in Russian that I admire the people at the table because it was hard to live in another country.  I told the guests how weird it was that Russia at first seemed fairly normal and gradually over time began to seem odder and odder to me.

After my speech, several people came up to me and said how happy they were to have someone voice the way they felt about the US.  They frequently felt like they live on the ?other side of the Moon?.  I immediately told them that I understood.  Russia to me felt like the other side of the Moon throughout much of my stay.

Why did it feel so different? It is hard to pinpoint. However, several short anecdotes leap to mind that demonstrate some of the contrasts that I noted between the US and Russia.  (I recognize that these cultural differences may vary from your observations and welcome your comments). 

• During my first month of teaching I gave the students several short paragraphs to write. The best student in each class, invariably named Natasha, would turn in the paragraph on time.  Her paper usually required several corrections.  As time went on over the next month, I?d get the rest of the students' papers. As sure as clockwork, the papers got better and better as time went on.  Usually, the best paper came from the worst student.  After a couple of assignments, I asked the other teachers why this happened.  They told me that during communist times it was essential that teachers could show the authorities that all of their students were capable of mastering every topic (most students had 25 classes or more per semester) and  the only way to do so was to allow one or two students to do all the work for the rest of the class.  Those students would be paraded in front of the authorities during inspections to show how skilled everyone was.  As a result, most students early on developed one or two subjects where they excelled and the rest of the time they sort of slid by. 
  
• Russian men and women acted totally different from each other in the classroom.  Even though 90% of my student was female, my male students did most of the talking in the class.  One day one of the other American volunteers, Kelly, invited me to visit her seventh grade English class.  All throughout the class the boys talked and fidgeted and the girls remained still.  The moment Kelly asked the class a question, every boy raised his hand to answer.  Most of their answers were wrong.  After one of the boys tried to answer the question, Kelly asked one of the girls if she knew the answer.  Without fail, the girl student knew the answer. 
  
• One day I was talking to one of my students who worked as a waitress in a restaurant for businessmen. She told me that she hated her job because her customers were always grabbing her in inappropriate places. A couple of days later I told this story to one of the American volunteers who had been in Russia for two years and spoke nearly fluent Russian.  She told me that young Russian girls were often groped. Then she said that most ads for employees even requested employees ?without complexes,? which according to the volunteer, was code for ?willing to sleep with the boss.? 
  
• A couple of months later I got a part time job teaching English to a young computer guru who worked for this very wealthy man. We met for his classes in one of the nicest apartments in the City.  I noticed after awhile that the apartment looked unlived in and asked the student about it.  He told me that Russian businesses often kept apartments around the city where men could take their mistresses and that it was necessary to maintain such an apartment to attract clients to the business.  After awhile, the young man?s boss asked to meet me. He asked me to set up an account in the USA to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.  I declined, even though he promised to pay me several thousand dollars a month for what he said was no real work. 
  
• One of my male students, Sasha, invited me to his home one day to go to a s?ance where he would call up the spirit of Marilyn Monroe.  When I went there he told me that he had practiced the s?ance and met Marilyn and she told him that she never wanted to see him again and so he couldn?t call her up for me. 
  
• On the first day of class I asked the students what they like to do in their free time.  One of my students, Tanya, tested me by answering to ?have sex.?  A bit perplexed by this response, I replied that most women prefer to ?make love? since ?having sex? referred to the physical act while ?making love? was more romantic with champagne and roses.  She replied, OK, I like to make love. While I was proud of my response, I often asked myself would an American girl have made this comment. 
  
• Russians on the very first day of school have a special party to open the year. During this celebration, the teachers are introduced to the students.   Nina Mitrofanovna, the headmistress of the school, introduced me by saying that ?Paul is from America, he is single and I hope he finds a wife here.?  When I married one of her students nine months later, the headmistress was interviewed on the radio and advised potential students to come to her school because they might be able to marry an American. 
  
• About a month after I started teaching, I went into the small cafeteria in my dorm to order something to eat, and when I went to leave the restaurant, I found that I could not open the door.  I looked around and noticed that one of my students (Nina, who later became my wife) was holding the door so that I could not leave.  Nina, who I think was a little drunk at the time, told me that it was her birthday and that she wanted to introduce me to an old man, Alexei Nikolaivich.  Alexei was a 78-year-old blind man who Nina took care of.  Born in 1917, his parents, minor royalty in Siberia, were put under house arrest for the first four years of his life.  Alexei Nikolaivich?s father was a scholar.  He talked to his son every day in a different language.  One day he?d speak English, the next French, the following day Russian, then German, and finally the local Siberian language. As a result, Alexei could speak 14 languages almost fluently.  The odd thing was, since he had never spoken English to a native speaker, he could talk to me very clearly and intelligently, but could only understand about 50% of what I said in response! 
  
• Whenever I had students act out a scene in English, it always had funny results.  In one of my classes, I had the students play-act a crime. One of my male students played the criminal and at the end of the class one of the other students asked him as part of the skit, ?Why did you commit the crime??. His response: ?Because I am a hopeless victim of society.?  Another time I had students act as if they were famous people in history.  One student picked the name of Lenin.  The other students had to ask her questions and she was to reply as Lenin. One of the students asked her, ?Why did not you (Lenin) have any children??  Her response: ?I don?t have time for such bourgeoisie things.? 
  
• When I first went to Russia, our group of volunteers sat in on a class taught by a local English teacher .  She spent the whole time gently chiding her students.  We all thought she was too harsh. However, we often found ourselves criticizing our students at some point during our teaching.  My turn took place about three months into my assignment.  It was a cold, dreary day and I was just beginning to get a bit of a culture shock.  I had one class where the students did not seem to response to anything I did. Exasperated, I finally said. ?You are all a bunch of babies.  I am tired of teaching you. I will get the school director to talk to you unless you shape up.?  The next time the students met with me, they were all energetic and pleasant.  I thought it was weird that after so little prompting they were so easily docile and loosened up.
  
• A couple of days later I asked them what they wanted to learn from the class.  They replied that they?d like to learn about holidays in the USA and Russia.  So I started a lesson.  It seemed to be going well so I asked them to paragraph about the holidays to be read aloud two weeks later.  I realized was a mistake, when all but the best two or three students started reading paragraphs from text books. (They wrote them out so that it wasn?t obvious.)   Many of these students did not read the text first.  As a result, they read paragraphs that were written before the fall of communism.  (Almost all the textbooks were really old). So several students started reading texts about the joys of celebrations on collective farms and how young people throughout the Soviet Union wanted to act just like ?Uncle Lenin.?  I listened to these texts and decided to let it go and use this as a reading out loud exercise. (Generally this is good for pronunciation development).  However, the brighter students in the class, all started to have fun with these texts.  In the midst of the reading the brighter students would make comments in Russian like ?I didn?t know that we still have Pioneers in Russia? and ?I am surprised that you still love Lenin so much.?  The students reading the paragraphs at first looked amazed and then asked, ?Is that what I read??  To which, I said, yes, and then they sat down with embarrassed looks on their faces.
  
• I was in Russia on the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.  I turned on a popular TV talk show, called Mbi (Us) hosted by Vladimir Posner.   He interviewed many young people who said that they wished that the Germans had won the war because Germany was so wealthy and Russia today is so poor.  Most of them had no idea that Hitler would have made them into slaves and when the elders in the audience expressed this sentiment, the young people just shrugged their shoulders.  I felt sorry for the older people in the audience. R ussia in many ways literally saved the world from the worst dictator in history.  Millions of people died in the war and the young people reaction flew in the face of the tremendous sacrifice made by Russian people.  However, I can?t be sanctimonious about the anniversary either. On the anniversary, my girlfriend Nina and I got in a little spat in front of an older woman who was selling fruit.  The vendor said, ?How can you act this way on such an important day.  Do you realize how much we suffered in the war??  Justifiably chastised, I demurred and stopped arguing with Nina for several days. 
  
• Russia (when I was there at least) had a double pricing structure for foreigners and local residents.  While this pricing system is common in many countries, it is nowhere near as prevalent and unfair as Russia.  It cost 20-40 times as much for a foreigner as for a Russian.  The fees for Russians were among the world?s lowest. For foreigners these fees were probably the planet?s highest fees.  This discrepancy angered me to no end.  One day I went with Nina to a church in the Kremlin.  She paid 40 cents and I was charged $7.50.  I blew up at the little old lady, ticket taker.  I told her that this was not fair.  I?d lived there for a year, made a Russian wage, etc.  She would not budge.  Nina looked at me and said ?Paul, calm down, there is nothing you can do about it.  It may be unfair, but you are making a fool of yourself?.   I thought about it for a few minutes and realized that she was right.  After that day I tried to negotiate with vendors and accepted whatever they said.  Most of the time I paid the Russian fee.  Yet, I will never get angry at the double standard again.

The cumulative effect of these little vignettes was a strong awareness that I truly did live on the other side of the Moon for awhile. Truth be told, while some of these experiences were frustrating, I wouldn?t have traded them for anything.  I was given a unique opportunity to pierce the soul of another country --one that was only available at that particular time and place.   I?m glad that I seized it with both hands and was willing to take some risks to get into Russia?s skin.

What did I learn about Russia?  It is hard to put into words.  Russia is complex.  It evokes powerful, conflicting emotions that test the boundaries of the soul and intellect.  Somehow Russia leaves an indelible mark that cannot be erased.  Ultimately, if you spend enough to get to know the country, you feel indebted to her humanity and intensity.  You know that while there are few places on the planet that can drive you insane as Russia can, you will become a more complete, kinder, and better person for having spent time there.

• This is a sample article from the FREE Big Blue Marble Newsletter about my (Paul Heller) trips around the world, meeting along the way others who share the pursuit of following their dreams to travel and live in another part of globe.  The newsletter also features many tips, program reviews, and other useful information gathered from the road to help you become a participant rather than a spectator in the daily life of distant corners of the planet.  If you'd like to subscribe to the newsletter (and my Postcards from the Road), please send me an e-mail or fill out your e-mail address in the space indicated on the left side panel of this website. 
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