I looked around the room before class and took stock: mostly girls, second through fourth grade. They fell into two rough camps — those who knew a fair bit of the alphabet, and those who knew almost none of it. My wife’s students hadn’t arrived yet, so I tried to send the younger ones, the beginners, over to her side.
“Merim, go learn the alphabet with Sonun eje.” Merim shook her head. Slowly, deliberately. And stayed exactly where she was. That was when I understood. They’re not here for English. They’re here because spending time with Nurlan baike beats whatever else the afternoon has to offer.
It’s the same after English class ends — a handful of kids always want to stay for Korean too. I used to think: what eagerness, what hunger to learn. It took me less than five minutes, the first time I watched them in Korean class, to realize that wasn’t quite it. There simply isn’t much to do in this neighborhood. And being here, in this room, with us — it turns out that’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon.
Still, even on those terms, the regulars are few. And no one practices at home — of that I’m certain, because we have covered the same material for months now and every session lands like the first time anyone has heard any of it.
Happiness isn’t measured by grades — I tell myself that, and I mean it. But when I look honestly at this village, at the patterns of poverty that have passed from one generation to the next like a inheritance no one asked for, education looks like the only door. My wife and I keep circling the same question: if the home doesn’t create the conditions for learning, and the school doesn’t either, can we? Is that something two people can carry? Would having a proper center change that — give it enough structure, enough weight, to actually take hold?
Every time we leave the children, we go home carrying two things at once: a gift, which is the happiness of having been with them, and an assignment that borders on impossible.
Today was no different. I drove home with that heavy homework in my hands, and outside the window the flowers were still blooming, and far in the distance the Tian Shan stood like a folding screen, white-capped and enormous, reminding me that I am very far from where I was born — in a country whose name I had never once heard before it became my life.
Time will move through this place as it moves through everywhere. The children who liked hanging out with Nurlan baike will grow up, and new children will come who never knew him, and Nurlan baike himself will fade without a trace.
But if something beautiful remains in these children — some quiet mark left by a person who will otherwise vanish completely — that would be more than enough.