The "F" Word Part 2
This is part 2 to read part 1 click here
In December the MTC hosted pensioner’s dinners. The "pensioners" were retired Russian teachers. Mostly from communist years who now received a small pension from the government. Everyone at the training center played a part in this outreach to the community. I anxiously awaited my assignment. As we waited, I heard horror stories about "bathroom duty" that was reserved for the most hated people and considered a punishment. If you were put on it you had for sure done something wrong. At this point, I'm sure you've guessed that I was assigned to bathrooms. The problem was not that we had to clean the bathrooms. The problem was that 300 Russian women needed to use the 3 stalled bathroom, but were not accustomed to the American way of using a toilet, sitting on it in a public restroom or putting the toilet paper into that toilet. The solution we were given was don't put trashcans in the bathroom, and they will figure it out. They did not. (Be warned: the next sentence is really gross. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you have a weak stomach). Me and 3 Russian students, ages 13-16, stood outside the bathroom during all the breaks, while as many women as possible used the bathroom. When they went back to their tables we went to work. The floor would be completely flooded with what seemed like an inch of urine. We had to mop up the urine and pick up discarded toilet paper from the floor. Halfway through the meal and at the end of each meal, 3 meals a day. My Russian team members pretended not to understand me when I had to make any requests of them that they deemed too gross. I very quickly learned how to say several phrases regarding bathroom sanitation in Russian. I also could tell when they were lying to me and started just telling them that I knew they understood, at which they would giggle nervously.
When I left for Russia my intention was to stay the full term, no breaks. Tickets were really expensive to fly back and forth and I had already maxed out my budget. But my parents heard the emotional strain I was under and found a way to get me home for Christmas. A few days after the pensioners banquets were over I went home for a break. When I was home, they tried to convince me not to go back. I think they could already tell the toll it had taken on me. But I'm stubborn. I didn't want a few rules and a weird mandate about my hair to beat me. So I resolved to finish out my time there. It was only 5 more months. What could happen in 5 months? My mom cut my hair to my shoulders and I headed back to Russia.
When I returned, everyone was surprised. I was a little surprised at how surprised they were. I went back to my regular routine. A guy was added to my teaching team. I had a new roommate. But other than it was about the same...at first. Mr. P and I had settled into a rhythm before I left and I thought we were ok. I still had not been told anything specific that I had done wrong. Just generalities that seemed superficial. Until the day my care package arrived from home. I knew it was coming and had been anxiously waiting for it. When it finally arrived, I had to go with a guy and another girl to the US embassy to pick it up. It took a while, so we were about 20 minutes late for the meal. I was
excited about my package, but I took to my room, glanced through the contents, and then ran down to dinner. As I was walking in to the dining room, one of the Moms that lived at the MTC, approached me and asked to speak with me after dinner. I hadn’t really interacted with her before that, but I didn't think anything about it. After dinner, I found her and she directed me to the office area. She told me I had walked into the dining room with a "very sensual spirit." She added that she had noticed it being a problem I had, and she and the other mothers had been talking about it. I was bewildered. Sensuality was honestly the furthest thing from my mind. I promised to do my best to not let it happen again. She asked me to stand and walk around the room a couple times as she eyed me closely. Then she reluctantly let me go to my room.
Toward the end of January, the dean of women started having regular meetings with us. She would say things like "listen ladies I know we are in tight quarters and it's hard not to let your emotions run away with you. But remember why you are here.” At that time there were probably 30 girls and 7 guys. Personally, I was not attracted to any of the guys. I considered a few of them friends, but they weren't the type of guys I was interested in. Least of all my teaching partner, "J." He was very vain, and spent most of his time talking about how great he was. I decided to ignore him. On our 6 hour trek to school and back, I spent the whole time avoiding him. The translators we traveled with and I would try to sit on separate train cars, and we would walk very fast or very slow so we didn't have to talk to him. They didn't particularly like him either. One day we did a skit in the school, and he and I had to play a married couple that didn't particularly like each other. He ad-libbed a bit and said, "oh my wife is so terrible she is a horrible and ugly hag." Several of the children stood up and started yelling at him angrily saying, "No she is not! She is beautiful and nice! You are horrible and ugly!" I loved those kids. Somehow, in spite of our intense distaste for each other a rumor was spread to the contrary. Even though we did not ever talk (aside from working together). When we did work together, we traveled with 4 other ladies (3 Russian, 1 American). But people began to say I "liked" him.
The culture in ATI dictated courtship. If a young woman was attracted to anyone, she was to renounce those feelings as sin. If a young man was attracted to a young woman, he could go to his father. Upon his father’s approval he would then go to the father of the young woman and they would decide if the courtship would happen. The individual families worked out all the details. But once both fathers and the young man were in agreement, then and only then, would the young woman be brought into the process. Crushes, flirting and anything that went along with those feelings, was considered sinful behavior. One of the things I have realized as I look back on that time, is that we never learned how to identify actual attraction. For a long time I thought feelings of friendship were the same thing as attraction. This idea, paired with the way I was taught in ATI about male/female relationships, filled me with guilt when I actually liked a guy as a friend. It also left me confused at times about how I felt about people.
One day I went to visit my friend that ran the snack shop on campus. It was a small little place with about 10 options available for purchase. It's also the place we would pick up our emails. They cost us 10 cents each, because someone printed them out for us. Yes, you read that right. We didn't have Internet access. We had to have our emails printed out for us, then we could purchase them. There was a lot of privacy there. (I had been blessed with an ancient laptop at Christmas and could plug it into a phone jack for 5 minutes a day. Long enough to send and receive emails). My friend’s name was Mary Ann and her initials spelled MAM. I have an aunt who at the time had the same initials and we had discussed her nickname potential before, so feeling silly I began to share the joke with Mary Ann. "If you married Joe you would be MAT. Don't do that. Jim would make you MAP that's not bad..." and on I went. She was mildly embarrassed, but laughing along so the joke lasted a little while. Little did I know someone sat around the corner and listened to the whole conversation. She was known as the mole. Her assignment was to report on any "ungodly" behavior she noticed and listen when we made phone calls. There was one phone we could use. In a room with no furniture so there was an echo. I didn't know about her unofficial title until the end of my time in Russia.
Around that same time a friend confided in me about something very painful that she had never shared with anyone else. We became very close. I knew her secret, and that knit us together. Also, my roommate who had been asked to keep an eye on me when she was moved to my room over Christmas, became friends with me, and she saw me for who I was. She and 2 other girls spent most of their free time with me.
My roommate, Lindy, and I both got sick in January. We couldn't leave our room for a while and never seemed to get better. There was a father that lived on campus that was also a Doctor, so he was called to our room. It was determined we just had a virus and everyone should stay away from us so they wouldn't get it. After we supposedly got better, we both would have days where we felt so sick we could barely move. At that point, I was asked if I was faking it, because I seemed sick way too often to be normal. In reality, I think the stress of my living situation made it impossible to recover. And with no real medical attention, it was and is impossible to know what was wrong. Because of our health difficulties and living in such a strange artificial environment my little band of friends and I got even closer. We took care of each other and inevitably formed a kind of family. I had never considered myself a touchy person but we would hug and lay our heads on each other’s shoulders. Sometimes we would walk arm in arm. Nothing crazy just little forms of affection. But we were being watched closely. Because of me.
As our time was drawing to a close, one of our band of friends was leaving first. Her mom was coming to spend a few days in Russia, then they would travel back to the states. This friend happened to be the one that had shared her secret with me. When her mom arrived, she saw the two of us hug, and it raised an alarm for her. She claimed to have never seen her daughter hug a friend before. We all hugged each other so this was a shock to me when I heard it. But this alert from the mom was enough to begin what I think of as my Russian inquisition. I don't remember a whole lot about exactly how everything went down. I blame the 18 years that have passed and probably some level of self-preservation. But what I do remember is being brought into a room with Mr. C and Mrs. B and being read a literal list of infractions I had mostly unknowingly committed. Most of it had to do with flirting. Which by then, I knew was something they thought I was doing. Even though I wasn't quite sure what I was doing to flirt. But apparently, I never stopped. There were points about clothing choices, jewelry, my hair had begun to grow out again, etc., etc., etc... The biggest charge against me was trying to seduce both males and females at the MTC. I was dumbfounded. My relationship with my friends had been twisted from a source of strength to a source of weakness. Mr. C asked me why I had come to Russia.
I replied, "I wanted to minister to the orphans."
He asked me, "and how would you grade yourself based on your performance of that task?"
Broken, I responded, "I'm a failure."
The thing is, at that moment, that comment was the tipping point in 2 ways.
At first I thought. "Why did I waste all this time and money to come here and do nothing?" But the deeper question was why didn't I minister to orphans? Because of course, they wouldn't let me.
With that tiny rebel yell in my heart, I entered into my week of solitary confinement. I was paraded down the hallway each night and nobody was allowed to talk to me. I was moved from my room to a room with Mrs. B's most trusted single girl. Her job was to watch me as I slept, and make sure I didn't try to leave the room. In the morning Mrs. B would collect me early and escort me to my "prayer room," where I spent the entire day alone to do Bible studies on biblical friendship, modesty, and being a Godly woman. Mrs. B would bring my food at meal time, and try to gauge my level of brokenness and repentance. I had to stay in solitary confinement until after my friend and her mom left. Presumably, we had an inappropriate relationship, so not allowing us to say goodbye in any way was the only way to correct that. I think I was granted freedom a few weeks before I was supposed to return home. But the word freedom is not the best way to say it. The best way to say it is, I was no longer locked in a room every day the last couple weeks I was there.
Every movement I made was carefully scrutinized, and I was not allowed to leave the grounds for any reason until the day before I was to leave for home. They finally had mercy enough to allow me one last trip to the city with 2 friends and one of the guys, "R." After my solitary confinement, everyone either assumed I was a horrible person, or felt intense compassion for me because they knew I didn't deserve the treatment I received. I can't remember how our conversation started, but I remember sitting on an uncharacteristically empty subway car and talking with the 3 of them. "R" asked me what exactly I had done to be punished so severely. He told me that early on the guys had been told individually to stay away from me. And that my teaching partner was fully convinced that I was in love with him.
He said, "Whenever you guys got home from school all he could talk about was how you wouldn't make eye contact and acted so shy around him. He is convinced you are obsessed with him."
Aghast, I responded, "Oh my goodness, I hate him! Literally since the first time I spoke to him. I tried several times to give him a chance but he's so arrogant and annoying I can’t even handle listening to him talk. I avoided him so he wouldn't bother me."
My friends who knew this was true stared at me for a moment until I started laughing. Then we all laughed for a while.
The day I left my accountability parents came to say goodbye. "Mr. P" gave me some Russian chocolate and told me "You are a good girl Kathryn. I hope you know that Mrs. P and I love you and are glad you were part of our family." I don't know why he said that. I don't know if he said that to everyone or if he felt bad about what happened to me or what. Honestly it was a very uncomfortable thing to hear. If he really thought I was a good girl and they had been glad to have me in their family, why was I treated the way I was treated? Why didn't they stick up for me even just a little?
Part 3
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| "Pensioners Dinner" held 3 times a day for a week in December |
When I left for Russia my intention was to stay the full term, no breaks. Tickets were really expensive to fly back and forth and I had already maxed out my budget. But my parents heard the emotional strain I was under and found a way to get me home for Christmas. A few days after the pensioners banquets were over I went home for a break. When I was home, they tried to convince me not to go back. I think they could already tell the toll it had taken on me. But I'm stubborn. I didn't want a few rules and a weird mandate about my hair to beat me. So I resolved to finish out my time there. It was only 5 more months. What could happen in 5 months? My mom cut my hair to my shoulders and I headed back to Russia.
When I returned, everyone was surprised. I was a little surprised at how surprised they were. I went back to my regular routine. A guy was added to my teaching team. I had a new roommate. But other than it was about the same...at first. Mr. P and I had settled into a rhythm before I left and I thought we were ok. I still had not been told anything specific that I had done wrong. Just generalities that seemed superficial. Until the day my care package arrived from home. I knew it was coming and had been anxiously waiting for it. When it finally arrived, I had to go with a guy and another girl to the US embassy to pick it up. It took a while, so we were about 20 minutes late for the meal. I was
 |
Toward the end of January, the dean of women started having regular meetings with us. She would say things like "listen ladies I know we are in tight quarters and it's hard not to let your emotions run away with you. But remember why you are here.” At that time there were probably 30 girls and 7 guys. Personally, I was not attracted to any of the guys. I considered a few of them friends, but they weren't the type of guys I was interested in. Least of all my teaching partner, "J." He was very vain, and spent most of his time talking about how great he was. I decided to ignore him. On our 6 hour trek to school and back, I spent the whole time avoiding him. The translators we traveled with and I would try to sit on separate train cars, and we would walk very fast or very slow so we didn't have to talk to him. They didn't particularly like him either. One day we did a skit in the school, and he and I had to play a married couple that didn't particularly like each other. He ad-libbed a bit and said, "oh my wife is so terrible she is a horrible and ugly hag." Several of the children stood up and started yelling at him angrily saying, "No she is not! She is beautiful and nice! You are horrible and ugly!" I loved those kids. Somehow, in spite of our intense distaste for each other a rumor was spread to the contrary. Even though we did not ever talk (aside from working together). When we did work together, we traveled with 4 other ladies (3 Russian, 1 American). But people began to say I "liked" him.
The culture in ATI dictated courtship. If a young woman was attracted to anyone, she was to renounce those feelings as sin. If a young man was attracted to a young woman, he could go to his father. Upon his father’s approval he would then go to the father of the young woman and they would decide if the courtship would happen. The individual families worked out all the details. But once both fathers and the young man were in agreement, then and only then, would the young woman be brought into the process. Crushes, flirting and anything that went along with those feelings, was considered sinful behavior. One of the things I have realized as I look back on that time, is that we never learned how to identify actual attraction. For a long time I thought feelings of friendship were the same thing as attraction. This idea, paired with the way I was taught in ATI about male/female relationships, filled me with guilt when I actually liked a guy as a friend. It also left me confused at times about how I felt about people.
One day I went to visit my friend that ran the snack shop on campus. It was a small little place with about 10 options available for purchase. It's also the place we would pick up our emails. They cost us 10 cents each, because someone printed them out for us. Yes, you read that right. We didn't have Internet access. We had to have our emails printed out for us, then we could purchase them. There was a lot of privacy there. (I had been blessed with an ancient laptop at Christmas and could plug it into a phone jack for 5 minutes a day. Long enough to send and receive emails). My friend’s name was Mary Ann and her initials spelled MAM. I have an aunt who at the time had the same initials and we had discussed her nickname potential before, so feeling silly I began to share the joke with Mary Ann. "If you married Joe you would be MAT. Don't do that. Jim would make you MAP that's not bad..." and on I went. She was mildly embarrassed, but laughing along so the joke lasted a little while. Little did I know someone sat around the corner and listened to the whole conversation. She was known as the mole. Her assignment was to report on any "ungodly" behavior she noticed and listen when we made phone calls. There was one phone we could use. In a room with no furniture so there was an echo. I didn't know about her unofficial title until the end of my time in Russia.Around that same time a friend confided in me about something very painful that she had never shared with anyone else. We became very close. I knew her secret, and that knit us together. Also, my roommate who had been asked to keep an eye on me when she was moved to my room over Christmas, became friends with me, and she saw me for who I was. She and 2 other girls spent most of their free time with me.
As our time was drawing to a close, one of our band of friends was leaving first. Her mom was coming to spend a few days in Russia, then they would travel back to the states. This friend happened to be the one that had shared her secret with me. When her mom arrived, she saw the two of us hug, and it raised an alarm for her. She claimed to have never seen her daughter hug a friend before. We all hugged each other so this was a shock to me when I heard it. But this alert from the mom was enough to begin what I think of as my Russian inquisition. I don't remember a whole lot about exactly how everything went down. I blame the 18 years that have passed and probably some level of self-preservation. But what I do remember is being brought into a room with Mr. C and Mrs. B and being read a literal list of infractions I had mostly unknowingly committed. Most of it had to do with flirting. Which by then, I knew was something they thought I was doing. Even though I wasn't quite sure what I was doing to flirt. But apparently, I never stopped. There were points about clothing choices, jewelry, my hair had begun to grow out again, etc., etc., etc... The biggest charge against me was trying to seduce both males and females at the MTC. I was dumbfounded. My relationship with my friends had been twisted from a source of strength to a source of weakness. Mr. C asked me why I had come to Russia.I replied, "I wanted to minister to the orphans."
He asked me, "and how would you grade yourself based on your performance of that task?"
Broken, I responded, "I'm a failure."
The thing is, at that moment, that comment was the tipping point in 2 ways.
At first I thought. "Why did I waste all this time and money to come here and do nothing?" But the deeper question was why didn't I minister to orphans? Because of course, they wouldn't let me.
Every movement I made was carefully scrutinized, and I was not allowed to leave the grounds for any reason until the day before I was to leave for home. They finally had mercy enough to allow me one last trip to the city with 2 friends and one of the guys, "R." After my solitary confinement, everyone either assumed I was a horrible person, or felt intense compassion for me because they knew I didn't deserve the treatment I received. I can't remember how our conversation started, but I remember sitting on an uncharacteristically empty subway car and talking with the 3 of them. "R" asked me what exactly I had done to be punished so severely. He told me that early on the guys had been told individually to stay away from me. And that my teaching partner was fully convinced that I was in love with him.He said, "Whenever you guys got home from school all he could talk about was how you wouldn't make eye contact and acted so shy around him. He is convinced you are obsessed with him."
Aghast, I responded, "Oh my goodness, I hate him! Literally since the first time I spoke to him. I tried several times to give him a chance but he's so arrogant and annoying I can’t even handle listening to him talk. I avoided him so he wouldn't bother me."
My friends who knew this was true stared at me for a moment until I started laughing. Then we all laughed for a while.
The day I left my accountability parents came to say goodbye. "Mr. P" gave me some Russian chocolate and told me "You are a good girl Kathryn. I hope you know that Mrs. P and I love you and are glad you were part of our family." I don't know why he said that. I don't know if he said that to everyone or if he felt bad about what happened to me or what. Honestly it was a very uncomfortable thing to hear. If he really thought I was a good girl and they had been glad to have me in their family, why was I treated the way I was treated? Why didn't they stick up for me even just a little?
Wow getting good
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