Wednesday, 09 December 2009 09:14
Question: What do chicken, beets and pomegranate seeds have in common?
Answer: Together, they make one of my new favorite Russian salads!
On Friday nights, Tim and I drive an hour and a half each way to a small town where we help teach English classes to disadvantaged kids. The classes are run by a woman named Svyeta, who is not a believer, and we've hit it off really well with her. Last Friday, she invited us to her family's home for dinner after class.She lives with her husband, parents, daughter, sister and three nieces and nephews-nine people altogether--in one small house. Babushka (Grandma) lives in her own little cottage on the same property, where she raises hens. They received us like royalty, preparing several "special-occasion"-type dishes for us, which only reinforced my already-dangerous love of Russian food and proved to me once again that there's no root vegetable that can't be rendered gourmet in the hands of the right cook. Afterward, they showed us all through the house and the orchard, and I spent some lovely moments perusing the bookshelves-and borrowing a couple of books-while Tim puttered around in the yard with the father, helping him prime the water pump, which had been balky lately.
When you eat with Russians, you spend the whole evening around the table: you don't move to the living room to be more comfortable, as Americans often do with their guests. In fact, a suggestion that you move to the living room might be understood as a signal that your guests have been there long enough, and it's time for them to pack things up for the night. So you can imagine that in a tiny kitchen, having eleven people around a table jam-packed with food for several hours makes for a very cozy, crazy atmosphere. It's a great time for those who don't mind a little chaos (we don't.) They were the most wonderful, fun, hospitable people: just the kind of people you instantly "click" with, as though they were your own family. We can't wait to go back!
On Sunday, I had the opportunity to present a 3-hour seminar on critical thinking to a group of school teachers and university professors. Since critical thinking is a fairly new concept in Russian education, I was given carte blanche to say whatever I wanted. In fact, I had to write my own material, since hardly anything on this topic already exists here. Some of the topics we covered included communication models, logical fallacies and a workshop on using the steps of the critical thinking process in a lesson plan.
The response was really overwhelming. A couple of women who are chairs of the English departments at the state university here told me, "We'll be taking this material back and using it with our own people: we've never heard these things before!" (In case you, gentle reader, are thinking the same thing right about now, let me assure you it's not true: you have heard these things, even if you don't recognize the names of them. Critical thinking skills are an inherent part of the American education system, where we are not taught material by rote memorization, but rather are taught the skills to process and evaluate information even from young ages. It's probably so natural to you that you don't even know that you know it. Now don't you feel smart?)
In between seminars, the women-several of whom are writing post-graduate theses on subjects like "Definite and Indefinite Articles in English" and "Use of the Demonstrative Pronoun as Euphemism"-crowded around to ask me questions on these topics, most of which I couldn't answer. It was a good balance: when non-native speakers know more about English grammar than you do, it tends to keep you from getting carried away by your own sense of cleverness. They asked for more seminars of a similar kind, and in February we are planning to host one for teachers city-wide.
We are often puzzled by the closed doors we continue to meet to children-at-risk ministry here, yet there's no denying that God drops unexpected ministry into our laps at every turn. For now, our job seems to be to stay flexible and be fully present wherever He leads us to work. No matter what it is--in the kitchen or in the classroom--it's always fun and rewarding!
