In the Summer of 2007 I had the honor of leading the first American delegation to a remarkable language camp called Moscovia, about an hour from Moscow. Here's an account my experience at Moscovia.
Moscovia is the brainchild of Yury Luzhkov, the powerful and controversial mayor of Moscow. It is truly is a remarkable place, where some three hundred students from thirty-three countries come together for three weeks every summer to study Russian and get to know each other through an impressive array of cultural interactions. Students stay in youth hostel-like conditions and are divided into international groups of about fifteen. Delegation leaders stay in a nice hotel. :-)
My roommate, Farid, lives in Cairo within walking distance of the Pyramids. A few years back, I read an article about how forensic scientists and artists were able to complete the first ever facial reconstruction of King Tut. A caption beneath the haunting face said something to the effect that such a face would not be at all out of place today on the streets of Cairo. I was stunned when I first saw Farid. His face strikingly resembles the face I saw in picture that accompanied the article. He is Christian, about 10% of the Egyptian population, and I learned a lot from him about modern Egypt. Farid, a Turk named Tufan, and a French woman named Dominique became my closest friends while I was there. I won her over by telling her that when all the anti-French nonsense started in the U.S., I immersed myself in French films and went out and bought all the French wine and cheese I could get my hands on. Needless to say, I've got invitations to visit Farid in Cairo, where I am already planning to walk to the Pyramids, Dominique in Angers, and Tufan in Istanbul. I never thought I would return to Turkey, but now I have a reason.
Students are placed into international groups of about fifteen. The groups and hostels are supervised by group leaders, specially trained college students who also seem to know music and theater. These "vozhati" are blessed with the charisma of life coaches without their smarminess. Beyond the daily classes at Moscovia, there are disco nights and film nights. There is a costume ball and a talent night. Each group produces a film which is shown toward the end of the program. Each group stages a farewell performance on the next to the last night.
The camp began with two days of what most older American teenagers would find as juvenile orientation games, but they did help to trigger an initial bonding experience. Before the three weeks were over, students graduated from playing orientation games to attending classes together and to sharing every aspect of their lives together in a remarkable international environment. When our delegation left at 1:00 AM to catch a 7:00 AM flight from Moscow, a couple of hundred people came to see us off, and both the boys and the girls cried like babies.
Whenever I received a compliment about one of my five students, my standard was reply was, "Thank you. I got very lucky." Two girls, Skyla and Annie, and three boys, Scully, Severino, and Ian, gave me no trouble at all. Annie and Scully, the oldest, were at first turned off by the rigid regime of the place- morning exercises, quiet hour, lights out at 11:00- but eventually even they were won over by the magic of the place. Annie cried the hardest when we left and her goodbye, from the stage during her group's farewell performance, was tearful and heartfelt.
Toward the middle of the second week there was an all important Festival of International Cultures. This event was a very big deal and was attended by big shots from Moscow, although not Mayor Luzhkov. Students from thirty-three countries were given three to five minutes to perform in front of the entire community and invited guests. Many performed elaborate folk dances in gorgeous folk costumes. We found ourselves in a dilemma. What is an American folk costume? A cowboy outfit? Is square dancing really understood throughout the world as an American folk dance? Since I had the honor of leading the first American delegation to this camp, even ACTR, the American Council of Teachers of Russian, in Washington wasn't sure quite what to expect and how to prepare us for the experience. We had to wing much of it.
Anyway, I suggested to the kids that rock and roll is a quintessential American art form and that perhaps we could do a series of rock dances beginning with the present and going back in time to 1960 and the Twist. The kids went with it. One girl knew the Soulja Boy dance (At first, I thought it was a contemporary cover for the early Sixties hit, Solder Boy, but I quickly found out differently! ) Somebody else knew the Electric Slide, and we could all fake the Twist. The folk costumes? White tee shirts, blue jeans and a red band to evoke the flag! We made up signs for the three decades, and I ran out onto the stage and held them up before the kids started dancing. I joined in for the Twist.
We were a big hit! The next day everybody who saw me greeted me with a twist movement. The kids were driven crazy by their friends from all over the world who wanted to download the songs, especially Soulja Boy, onto their i-pods. A loud speaker at the camp played an international array of rock and folk music all day long. The day after our show, we must have heard Soulja Boy ten times! My kids assured me they had the clean version, and that's what we rehearsed to. However, the camp DJ had to download all the music played, and, unawares, he downloaded the dirty version. The kids told me this only after our performance! I figured that I must have listened to it fifty times, and if I, a native speaker of English, had absolutely no idea what he was saying, then neither would any of the Syrians, Egyptians, Turks, Kazakhs, Mongolians, and various and sundry other conservative Muslim citizens of former republics of the Soviet Union, who, as I write this, are no doubt listening to the song on their i-pods. Most moving was the fact that after the show, kids from all over, including Syrians and other countries that rather hate us, came up to our kids and asked to pose with them and the U.S. flag. If there were thousands of Moscovias and tens of thousands of kids visited them every year, we might some day eventually even come close to achieving something like world peace. My students were told again and again by their new found friends that they were so happy that met real Americans, because now they know that we are a good a decent people and that their stereotypes had been destroyed. Our reputation has sunk to a new low around the world. Five American students helped to restore it, if even a wee little.
There were three excursions into Moscow, about an hour away. The kids traveled in their groups, separately from the delegation leaders. Unfortunately, I only got to see my friend, Andrei, one time, but it was a very nice visit. I did not need to see Lenin for the fourth time, so I left the group for the day and spent it with Andrei and his wife, Oksana. Among other things, they took me to a Georgian restaurant where I pigged out on their wonderful cuisine, and to Tsarotsino, another one of Luzhkov's often controversial projects. It is the restoration, from the foundation, of a Gothic palace, which was to be built for Catherine the Great. As the story goes, she traveled from St. Petersburg to Moscow to inspect it, didn't like what she saw, ordered the architects to make significant changes, then returned to St. Petersburg and died. The project was scrapped. The restored complex is impressive and the grounds are lovely, but nobody really knows if it even remotely resembles what Catherine or the architects had in mind.
The third excursion was the most eventful one. They bussed the entire camp- it took thirteen buses- to the opening of Children's Olympics on Red Square. Although the Moscovia staff oversold the event- among other things, we were told that both Luzhkov and Medvedev would address us- it was indeed very special. Red Square was blocked off just for us, and the event was broadcast on the local Moscow station. Russian celebrities emceed the show and provided entertainment. I am most happy to send a picture of our delegation with St. Basil's as a background drop. In 1979 when I first laid eyes on this magnificent cathedral, I could never have imagined such a picture in a million years! The country has traveled an amazing journey and so have I with it. It was my fifth trip to including the year I spent in the former Soviet Union at the height of Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost and last summer at MGU.
I spent my days attending "master classes" for the delegation leaders, making myself available in various and sundry ways to my students, observing their classes, taking long walks, swimming, taking the sauna, taking the afternoon naps many of my friends tease me about, visiting other delegation leaders for Armenian cognac, Karke De, cafe au lee, and other foreign delicacies, generally relishing the fresh air and being oblivious to the greater world around me. One computer was hooked up to the Internet, and it served some 350 people. Needless to say, I didn't ever have much time to read the New York Times. Russian TV doesn't spend much time covering the United States, so for three weeks ignorance was indeed bliss. (By the way, it didn't take five minutes after I got back home before media coverage of the campaign was getting on my nerves big time.) At night before going to bed, I watched Murder She Wrote, Ona napicala ubisttva, and Bewitched, Moya Zhena Povorozhila menya, with the first Darin. It was great to revisit Samantha, Endora, Gladys, Aunt Clara and Uncle Arthur all in Russian, although nobody can come close to the astonishing voice Agnes Moorehead created for Endora.
Although my stay there generally was most pleasant, there were restrictions, even on the resident directors, which irked. The closest village, Peshki, is a pleasant forty-five minute walk from Moscovia. Adults are allowed to go through the gates of Moscovia and walk to Peshki, but they are not allowed to take students with them. It was a shame. It would have been a very nice thing to do with the kids, and it would have given them the feeling that they are not in what amounts to a habitat, a very nice one, but a habitat nonetheless.
Moscovia is surrounded by a beautiful woods, and the walk is truly lovely. However, the woods were off limits both to the students and to the teachers. A fence surrounding the woods ensured that no one would attempt to explore them.
Delegation leaders were also not allowed to accompany their students to Moscow nor were we allowed to take their students to the nearest shopping mall, where they would have access to the Internet, among other things. Public transportation is available from Peshki. A trip to the mall would have been a lot of fun for the students. My students were particularly interested in art. They wanted to visit both the Tretekov and Pushkin galleries. I asked the director of the school, Nadezhda Borisovna Samoilova, if I could take the students into Moscow for the day and was told it was out of the question. Other delegation leaders from the West were likewise disturbed by this restriction.
We all left Moscovia on a high induced by the great adventure we had shared. It didn't take long, though, before we were confronted by the realities of the real world outside Moscovia's gates. Less than two weeks after our departure, Russia and Georgia were at war.
I am so happy that the war did not break out while we were there. The entire experience would have been dramatically different. The Georgian delegation was lead by a remarkable woman. She was smart, well read and cultured, still beautiful in her early sixties, and genuinely down to earth and friendly. I liked her very much. My students liked her students very much. So did the Russian kids. Had the war broken out while we were there, it would have overshadowed all our interactions. The adults, as well as the students, would have been forced to take a stand on it. The sense we all had that perhaps world peace was really possible would have seemed foolish, if indeed we would have had this sense at all.
For three weeks, we all lived in glorious isolation from the real world around us. We ate together, played together, learned together, socialized together and bonded in the unique way that those who find themselves in such an adventure do. Anything seemed possible, even a far off future without war.
After the kids performed Soulja Boy, even the Syrians loved us. Here they are posing for pictures with our kids holding the American flag.
A picture I could never have imagined seeing in 1979 when I laid eyes on St. Basil's for the first time: American teenagers posing in front of the cathedral on Red Square with the American flag.
My students' rehearsing Souja Boy
All decked out in Moscovia gear with two of my charges.
My good friend, Farid, from Cairo
Andrei took me to a Georgian restaurant with a friend from Georgia, second from left. It was the beginning of the summer and they were talking about how they thought there might be a war. I couldn't believe it, because I read the NY Times and other papers on line. There was no mention anywhere of the conflict. The Western press did not begin to cover it until the eve of the war, which happened in August. I told them that any conflicts that existed could surely be settled by negotiations. Andrei and his friend were skeptical. Sadly, I was wrong, and they were right.
Holding up proudly the American flag in front of St. Basil's at the Children's Olympics
The first American delegation to attend Moscovia on the Festival of International Cultures
My roommate, Farid, lives in Cairo within walking distance of the Pyramids. A few years back, I read an article about how forensic scientists and artists were able to complete the first ever facial reconstruction of King Tut. A caption beneath the haunting face said something to the effect that such a face would not be at all out of place today on the streets of Cairo. I was stunned when I first saw Farid. His face strikingly resembles the face I saw in picture that accompanied the article. He is Christian, about 10% of the Egyptian population, and I learned a lot from him about modern Egypt. Farid, a Turk named Tufan, and a French woman named Dominique became my closest friends while I was there. I won her over by telling her that when all the anti-French nonsense started in the U.S., I immersed myself in French films and went out and bought all the French wine and cheese I could get my hands on. Needless to say, I've got invitations to visit Farid in Cairo, where I am already planning to walk to the Pyramids, Dominique in Angers, and Tufan in Istanbul. I never thought I would return to Turkey, but now I have a reason.
Students are placed into international groups of about fifteen. The groups and hostels are supervised by group leaders, specially trained college students who also seem to know music and theater. These "vozhati" are blessed with the charisma of life coaches without their smarminess. Beyond the daily classes at Moscovia, there are disco nights and film nights. There is a costume ball and a talent night. Each group produces a film which is shown toward the end of the program. Each group stages a farewell performance on the next to the last night.
The camp began with two days of what most older American teenagers would find as juvenile orientation games, but they did help to trigger an initial bonding experience. Before the three weeks were over, students graduated from playing orientation games to attending classes together and to sharing every aspect of their lives together in a remarkable international environment. When our delegation left at 1:00 AM to catch a 7:00 AM flight from Moscow, a couple of hundred people came to see us off, and both the boys and the girls cried like babies.
Whenever I received a compliment about one of my five students, my standard was reply was, "Thank you. I got very lucky." Two girls, Skyla and Annie, and three boys, Scully, Severino, and Ian, gave me no trouble at all. Annie and Scully, the oldest, were at first turned off by the rigid regime of the place- morning exercises, quiet hour, lights out at 11:00- but eventually even they were won over by the magic of the place. Annie cried the hardest when we left and her goodbye, from the stage during her group's farewell performance, was tearful and heartfelt.
Toward the middle of the second week there was an all important Festival of International Cultures. This event was a very big deal and was attended by big shots from Moscow, although not Mayor Luzhkov. Students from thirty-three countries were given three to five minutes to perform in front of the entire community and invited guests. Many performed elaborate folk dances in gorgeous folk costumes. We found ourselves in a dilemma. What is an American folk costume? A cowboy outfit? Is square dancing really understood throughout the world as an American folk dance? Since I had the honor of leading the first American delegation to this camp, even ACTR, the American Council of Teachers of Russian, in Washington wasn't sure quite what to expect and how to prepare us for the experience. We had to wing much of it.
Anyway, I suggested to the kids that rock and roll is a quintessential American art form and that perhaps we could do a series of rock dances beginning with the present and going back in time to 1960 and the Twist. The kids went with it. One girl knew the Soulja Boy dance (At first, I thought it was a contemporary cover for the early Sixties hit, Solder Boy, but I quickly found out differently! ) Somebody else knew the Electric Slide, and we could all fake the Twist. The folk costumes? White tee shirts, blue jeans and a red band to evoke the flag! We made up signs for the three decades, and I ran out onto the stage and held them up before the kids started dancing. I joined in for the Twist.
We were a big hit! The next day everybody who saw me greeted me with a twist movement. The kids were driven crazy by their friends from all over the world who wanted to download the songs, especially Soulja Boy, onto their i-pods. A loud speaker at the camp played an international array of rock and folk music all day long. The day after our show, we must have heard Soulja Boy ten times! My kids assured me they had the clean version, and that's what we rehearsed to. However, the camp DJ had to download all the music played, and, unawares, he downloaded the dirty version. The kids told me this only after our performance! I figured that I must have listened to it fifty times, and if I, a native speaker of English, had absolutely no idea what he was saying, then neither would any of the Syrians, Egyptians, Turks, Kazakhs, Mongolians, and various and sundry other conservative Muslim citizens of former republics of the Soviet Union, who, as I write this, are no doubt listening to the song on their i-pods. Most moving was the fact that after the show, kids from all over, including Syrians and other countries that rather hate us, came up to our kids and asked to pose with them and the U.S. flag. If there were thousands of Moscovias and tens of thousands of kids visited them every year, we might some day eventually even come close to achieving something like world peace. My students were told again and again by their new found friends that they were so happy that met real Americans, because now they know that we are a good a decent people and that their stereotypes had been destroyed. Our reputation has sunk to a new low around the world. Five American students helped to restore it, if even a wee little.
There were three excursions into Moscow, about an hour away. The kids traveled in their groups, separately from the delegation leaders. Unfortunately, I only got to see my friend, Andrei, one time, but it was a very nice visit. I did not need to see Lenin for the fourth time, so I left the group for the day and spent it with Andrei and his wife, Oksana. Among other things, they took me to a Georgian restaurant where I pigged out on their wonderful cuisine, and to Tsarotsino, another one of Luzhkov's often controversial projects. It is the restoration, from the foundation, of a Gothic palace, which was to be built for Catherine the Great. As the story goes, she traveled from St. Petersburg to Moscow to inspect it, didn't like what she saw, ordered the architects to make significant changes, then returned to St. Petersburg and died. The project was scrapped. The restored complex is impressive and the grounds are lovely, but nobody really knows if it even remotely resembles what Catherine or the architects had in mind.
The third excursion was the most eventful one. They bussed the entire camp- it took thirteen buses- to the opening of Children's Olympics on Red Square. Although the Moscovia staff oversold the event- among other things, we were told that both Luzhkov and Medvedev would address us- it was indeed very special. Red Square was blocked off just for us, and the event was broadcast on the local Moscow station. Russian celebrities emceed the show and provided entertainment. I am most happy to send a picture of our delegation with St. Basil's as a background drop. In 1979 when I first laid eyes on this magnificent cathedral, I could never have imagined such a picture in a million years! The country has traveled an amazing journey and so have I with it. It was my fifth trip to including the year I spent in the former Soviet Union at the height of Gorbachev's policies of perestroika and glasnost and last summer at MGU.
I spent my days attending "master classes" for the delegation leaders, making myself available in various and sundry ways to my students, observing their classes, taking long walks, swimming, taking the sauna, taking the afternoon naps many of my friends tease me about, visiting other delegation leaders for Armenian cognac, Karke De, cafe au lee, and other foreign delicacies, generally relishing the fresh air and being oblivious to the greater world around me. One computer was hooked up to the Internet, and it served some 350 people. Needless to say, I didn't ever have much time to read the New York Times. Russian TV doesn't spend much time covering the United States, so for three weeks ignorance was indeed bliss. (By the way, it didn't take five minutes after I got back home before media coverage of the campaign was getting on my nerves big time.) At night before going to bed, I watched Murder She Wrote, Ona napicala ubisttva, and Bewitched, Moya Zhena Povorozhila menya, with the first Darin. It was great to revisit Samantha, Endora, Gladys, Aunt Clara and Uncle Arthur all in Russian, although nobody can come close to the astonishing voice Agnes Moorehead created for Endora.
Although my stay there generally was most pleasant, there were restrictions, even on the resident directors, which irked. The closest village, Peshki, is a pleasant forty-five minute walk from Moscovia. Adults are allowed to go through the gates of Moscovia and walk to Peshki, but they are not allowed to take students with them. It was a shame. It would have been a very nice thing to do with the kids, and it would have given them the feeling that they are not in what amounts to a habitat, a very nice one, but a habitat nonetheless.
Moscovia is surrounded by a beautiful woods, and the walk is truly lovely. However, the woods were off limits both to the students and to the teachers. A fence surrounding the woods ensured that no one would attempt to explore them.
Delegation leaders were also not allowed to accompany their students to Moscow nor were we allowed to take their students to the nearest shopping mall, where they would have access to the Internet, among other things. Public transportation is available from Peshki. A trip to the mall would have been a lot of fun for the students. My students were particularly interested in art. They wanted to visit both the Tretekov and Pushkin galleries. I asked the director of the school, Nadezhda Borisovna Samoilova, if I could take the students into Moscow for the day and was told it was out of the question. Other delegation leaders from the West were likewise disturbed by this restriction.
We all left Moscovia on a high induced by the great adventure we had shared. It didn't take long, though, before we were confronted by the realities of the real world outside Moscovia's gates. Less than two weeks after our departure, Russia and Georgia were at war.
I am so happy that the war did not break out while we were there. The entire experience would have been dramatically different. The Georgian delegation was lead by a remarkable woman. She was smart, well read and cultured, still beautiful in her early sixties, and genuinely down to earth and friendly. I liked her very much. My students liked her students very much. So did the Russian kids. Had the war broken out while we were there, it would have overshadowed all our interactions. The adults, as well as the students, would have been forced to take a stand on it. The sense we all had that perhaps world peace was really possible would have seemed foolish, if indeed we would have had this sense at all.
For three weeks, we all lived in glorious isolation from the real world around us. We ate together, played together, learned together, socialized together and bonded in the unique way that those who find themselves in such an adventure do. Anything seemed possible, even a far off future without war.
After the kids performed Soulja Boy, even the Syrians loved us. Here they are posing for pictures with our kids holding the American flag.A picture I could never have imagined seeing in 1979 when I laid eyes on St. Basil's for the first time: American teenagers posing in front of the cathedral on Red Square with the American flag.My students' rehearsing Souja BoyAll decked out in Moscovia gear with two of my charges.My good friend, Farid, from CairoAndrei took me to a Georgian restaurant with a friend from Georgia, second from left. It was the beginning of the summer and they were talking about how they thought there might be a war. I couldn't believe it, because I read the NY Times and other papers on line. There was no mention anywhere of the conflict. The Western press did not begin to cover it until the eve of the war, which happened in August. I told them that any conflicts that existed could surely be settled by negotiations. Andrei and his friend were skeptical. Sadly, I was wrong, and they were right.Holding up proudly the American flag in front of St. Basil's at the Children's OlympicsThe first American delegation to attend Moscovia on the Festival of International Cultures
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