Mountains of Heaven

Sad to Leave

2006-06-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

It seems that host-country nationals here do not like volunteers voicing their opinions on blogs, and neither does the PC. There have been some problems with nationals taking text from volunteers' blogs and using them for political purposes, I personally do not think it is worth risking being sent home for any misunderstanding that may result from form someone using things said here for a political agenda. I therefore will hide all posts here until we have returned to the U.S. and will instead send future posts in mass e-mails. If you would like to receive these posts, please inform us at filmcricket@hotmail.com.

Frisbee Golf at the Reservoir

2006-05-21T08:09:00.000-07:00

Today was truly excellent. As a going-away adventure, all of the PC volunteers in Talas Oblast trekked out to the town of Kirovka to have fun in the sun on the shores of the old Soviet water reservoir. It sounds less fun than it is. I had a blast, and made a little progress with my social weirdness that I will explain in a bit.

To get to the reservoir, we have to hike it about an hour through the village and onto the meadows and rolling hills and ravines that butt against the mountains. The scenery was really cool, and the hills were turning green with the recent rain, but they were still dry and dusty. Twelve white Americans, backpacks, water bottles and all, paraded through this half Kyrgyz, half Kurdish village on our way to a beach adventure. We got the staring treatment the entire way, it must have seemed like a holiday to the locals. Sightings of pasty white folks are rare in these parts, but twelve in one day, and traveling in packs, is quite the experience. It gives the village something to talk about for the week, if nothing else.

The girls parted ways with the boys half way because it turns out that some volunteer in the distant past designed an 18-hole Frisbee golf course out in the meadows and all of us wanted to play a round. It was hot, an intense 90-something degrees, and since Kyrgyzstan is a mile up with little cloud cover, the sun can sting very quickly. This is where my social weirdness comes in. All my life, I have been terrified of the idea of going shirtless in public. Even as a kid, I refused to take off my shirt while swimming. For some reason, I felt that I was either too white, or too pudgy-even if it wasn’t actually true, I just felt more comfortable not showing that part of my body to anyone. Plus, taking your shirt off is something cool kids did. The cool athletic kids loved to go shirtless, loved to show off how lean they were, or how tan their bodies could get with their sweat beads glistening in the sun like some freakin beer commercial or something. I would leave my shirt on while I swam, and I endured the pain that resulted when the fabric of the shirt rubbed against my nipples until they were raw and chaffed. It hurt but at least no one could make fun of my blindingly white body and possible love handles. Well today, I decided, “screw that. It’s really hot, and I need to get over this.” So, I played Frisbee golf shirtless, bearing my skin to anyone who was brave enough to look for the first time in my life. I was self-conscious at first, but I figured that I have lost enough weight here so that the chubbiness argument I make to myself in these situations didn’t work. Ian made the good point too that I’m married now. The only person that cares about my white body has already seen it from every conceivable angle and in every possible shade of white. It felt good. I felt free. I felt like I was growing as a person (sounds lame doesn’t it? I’m so freakin retarded sometimes that this counts as personal growth).

The course was brutal. The wind howled down the mountains before us, making every shot a combination calculation/ prayer for luck. Par was 3 on every hole, but our par was about 4 or 5. I actually shot par on one hole, which was the only one of the game. It turned out that I wasn’t totally shitty at Frisbee Golf, like I assumed I was. I wasn’t stellar, but I had fun and was competitive at the same time- and for my first game, that made me feel kind of cool.

On the third hole, we had ourselves a little encounter. A Kurdish teenager on a donkey was riding alone through the hills, and his path crossed ours. He headed up the hill while we were waiting for him to get out of the way so we could tee off, and as is customary in this country among men, he dismounted and shook all of our hands in turn offering the standard Islamic “asalaam aleikum” greeting. No one in our group knew any Kurdish, so the conversation was brief. He knew enough Kyrgyz, the only common medium of communication we had, to ask three things. First, he asked if we had cigarettes. We said no. How about vodka, he asked? Nope, no vodka either. He was disappointed at this one. He said he really needed 100 grams of vodka today. Then he asked where our women were. He said we should bring our women out here to you know…We told him hey were swimming. At this, he perked up and wanted to know where they were swimming. Wisely, we said we didn’t know. Donkey Boy followed us for about three holes, observing how crazy we were for throwing plates out in the hills for no apparent reason. Then, he saw his friends coming on their donkeys and the flock of sheep he had been tending out here on the pasture. Thankfully he left.

On the 10th hole, we saw the donkey boys again, but this time they were a little more riled up because we could see that they had spotted the girls down by the water in their bikinis. Great. They hooped and hollered as they galloped away on their poor tired donkeys to go harass the girls. We played through the hole extra quickly and tried to get to the water before the yokels had time to try something with them. Thankfully, the girls had become quite surly and intolerant of local men in their time here, so they were quick to lay down the law about how much shit they would take from the horny, slobbering, donkey guys (which was none, it turned out). They either got bored or were baffled at the display of strength from these American girls- which all Kyrgyz men believe are sluts and prostitutes because of the American movies they watch- and they quietly retired to the sidelines once we showed up. We continued to have our picnic, while they just watched. They must have hung around for about an hour, mulling over just how they would one day tell their grandchildren about the fantastic day, out in the pastures with their sheep and their donkeys, when out of nowhere Allah sent to them 7 sexy American girls in bikinis, all of whom were looking for the perfect shepherd to share all of their sexual fantasies with. They entertained themselves with this notion, but after getting repeated warnings and proddings from the American men, they had to show off by killing a snake with a knife thrown from the backs of their donkeys. Man, they were really laying on the charm with the ladies with that stunt. Rain threatened, and soon enough, they were off to seek shelter or a place to relieve themselves. This encounter probably provided them with a whole winter’s worth of bedtime fantasies though.

We walked home, then caught a marshrutka (a van used like a taxi) back to Talas, where we were greeted by a thunderstorm and cooling rain, thank god. In all, this was a great day. It felt like being home a little (surreal Kurdish playboys excepting). Little things like the smell of sunblock, the fact we were playing Frisbee Golf, or the peanut butter crackers someone brought along that they got from America. These little touches help to keep us aware that there is a normal world out there. All of you get to experience it every day, but we have to really work to make this place not like the Twilight Zone. This little trip to the reservoir may seem like no big deal, but believe me, it is a good day when we can experience something- anything- even vaguely like home. We miss you guys, and we can’t wait to come back.

Finals

2006-05-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

I had my English finals this week for the fifth year students. This is their last test with me before they graduate. Exams are shaping up to be very interesting experiences. I didn’t get a bribe attempt this time, which is good. But I did get a healthy share of funny and tragic stories from the students.

All student bodies are stricken with debilitating illnesses, grandmother deaths and car accidents around exam time. I am convinced, that exam week is probably the most dangerous time of the year for the elderly, and the best time of the year for paid-by-the-visit doctors. There’s always something going on in students’ lives that prevents them from taking the exams as they are scheduled. “Can I come to your house on the weekend and take the exam then,” I am asked. “How about a time that is more convenient for me and less convenient for you?” Or, “Can I take it next week instead of right now because me standing here right in front of you, speaking in English is interfering with my ability to concentrate properly.” The best one is, “I didn’t take your last exam, you know the one in January- yeah the one from last semester, when can I take it?” Amazing.

My exams are conversational, as you know. Five minutes of conversation to see if they can follow a train of thought, and respond in a reasonably cogent fashion. Not a big deal for students that have studied the language for 5 years, right? Half of the fifth year students actually know some English, and for that I am grateful for it. After all, it is their major. They should be able to understand some of it. The other half have managed to study a language for 5 years without actually being required to know any of it. This is the Kyrgyz education system. What they do is put students into groups when they enter as freshmen. These groups are unbreakable. The entire group stays as a group for the entire 5-year English program. They all take the same classes, and have the same classmates for five whole years. If a student fails, that student is required to retake the test until they pass it- whether by actually passing it or by paying the teacher a bribe to move them ahead. So, by the third year, students that have fallen behind in reading or speaking skills have given up because the system doesn’t allow them to fail and retake a course. The system is an old communist one. Everyone must succeed. The group is more important than the individual. Even if you aren’t really succeeding, we’ll pretend you are to make it easier on the administration. After all, we can’t have students from different groups taking classes together. That’s why we put you into groups in the first place. It’s like an insane asylum or something! The idea that a student has the right to fail doesn’t exist here. All students are winners, even if they are retarded.

This time, I had another awkward and depressing experience during one of the exams. We had talked about ghost stories earlier in the semester, and I included “Ghosts and the Supernatural” as a topic that could appear on the test, chosen at random by a roll of a die (a d12 by the way, thanks for the dice set guys!). One student got this topic and proceeded to tell me that yes, she believed in ghosts because she is being tormented by the ghost of her friend. I was intrigued, but I learned from my last exam not to ask personal questions of my students. Without me asking, she told me that her friend had been brutally murdered last year by a gang of young men that caught him and cut him to pieces with an axe. She began to say that he had died so horribly, so cruelly…and this is when she broke down in tears. I felt so strange at that moment, so awkward and small. I had no idea what to say to this. All I could do is put my hands on my head and try to change the subject. It was happening again! Do my tests bring out painful memories in my students? Will every exam be marked with at least one horrific story of loss and regret that brings on fits of tears? Read my Exam entry to find out what happened last time. It was only after the test that I had time to reflect on this story. The incredible pain she endured, and surely he endured from the blade of an axe, is something I cannot imagine. I have never known anyone that has had to deal with something like that. This place has enough problems without axe wielding gangs. Then it hit me. There’s an axe-wielding gang in my town! Holy crap! I feel really safe and cozy now! Just a month ago, someone was stabbed in the bazaar, I remember now. And there are stories about a man (or sometimes it’s 2 young shepherds) that killed and ate two girls in the next town over- actually in the town I was supposed to live in before, Bakai-Ata (you’ll remember, it’s the place that didn’t have any water). Who knows if there is any truth to this particular story…all accounts are different, but everyone seems to agree that 2 girls were killed and eaten there last year. The word “vampire” comes up often when they talk of it. In any case, living here has been real. I asked for an adventure when I signed up for this. I guess I’m getting it.

Evil Eyes

2006-05-14T10:11:00.000-07:00

Our host family has a 2-year-old daughter, and she’s quite the little princess of our house, as are most toddlers I should think. Well, last week, she got really sick. She was crying bloody murder all day for about 4 days. She had a fever, a runny nose, stomach issues, the works, poor thing. Medicine here is not the best, especially in our oblast, which is pretty remote as oblasts go. Her mother would go to the pharmacy every day to get an injection of some kind. Here, they give injections for practically everything. You can get aspirin injections, anti-nausea injections, basically anything that gets absorbed into the bloodstream. Then, I notice a bottle of antibiotics they were giving her in the bathroom. The expiration date on this bottle was February of 2001.

Anyway, the injection/ expired antibiotics weren’t working. She was still sick. So, her mother takes her to “the village,” which means anyplace outside of the town we live in, and takes her to a healer. The first day the healer gives the mother some ideas. “Has she been drinking any cold liquids,” the healer asked. Well, Malinda and I have taken to making tea in big water bottles and refrigerating them to have iced tea. Here, the Kyrgyz don’t eat or drink anything cold if they can help it because they believe that cold surfaces, weather, wind, or liquids cause disease. Even when the family is working out in the garden or their potato fields and they come in for a drink of water, they have us fill the glass with hot water first to make sure they don’t get refreshing cold water from the tap. So anyway, the mother begins to suspect that we have been secretly giving her cold water, and that’s why she’s sick. We weren’t giving her any such thing. We know how freaked out they get about cool to cold drinks, so we never, under any circumstances give the baby anything except hot tea.

I think after a day or two, she realized that the baby wasn’t drinking our cold tea, thank god. The last thing we need is the family harboring a suspicion that we were conspiring to make her baby ill. So she goes back to the healer. This time the diagnosis was this: your child was too happy, now she is sick. Someone obviously has seen your baby being so happy and cursed her with unhappiness out of spite or jealousy with the evil eye. Give your child a bath, and splash her with hot water from a juniper branch. That will solve it. Why didn’t we think of this? It seems so obvious in retrospect, you know?

Speaking of eyes, I had a very strange medical experience of my own two days ago. I have had the worst kind of sinus infection for about 5 weeks. I have been blowing dark green snot out of my nose constantly, with sporadic bouts of chills and headaches. I am on antibiotics now, it should clear up. But Wednesday, during dinner, I picked a really big eye booger out of my right eye, privately remarking that it was the biggest eye booger I have ever seen. Well, ten minutes later, I pulled another one out of the same eye- the same size and everything. This made me concerned. I inspected the booger in question, and it felt more like snot than a typical eye booger. It was sticky and darker green than most are. I don’t know what the real term for these things are by the way, I have always just called them eye boogers.

So, when I got home, I looked at my eyes in the mirror. The right eye was very dark red. Crap! Pink eye, I thought. Over the next 2 hours, I noticed pain in the eye, like it was bruised or something. It became painful to look up or to open my eyes wider than normal. And the boogers kept coming. It was as if my eye was secreting snot. I went to bed kind of frightened about it all. Here I am in the middle of nowhere when it comes to medical emergencies. If this needs to be treated right away to avoid blindness or something, I’m screwed. I went to sleep, and I awoke at about 2:00 am to discover that both my eyes were stuck shut from the amount of snot oozing from them. It had spread to the left eye in the night, and I scraped off a good teaspoon of crap, some dried, some still gooey. I looked in the mirror, and sure enough, both eyes were bloodshot and both hurt. They didn’t itch, which concerned me more- if it itched I would conclude pink eye, but this I didn’t know what the hell it was. When I got up the next morning, I cleaned up even more puss and crap from my eyes, but I noticed that they weren’t as red as they were before, and they didn’t hurt anymore. I went to school and they didn’t bother me the whole day. I have no idea what it was. If it was an infection, shouldn’t it have lasted longer? My eyes are still a little red and sensitive, so I’m calling Medical about it tomorrow. Still, it weirded me out. My guess is that I blew my nose (for maybe the 4000th time) and then touched my eyes before I could wash them, exposing them to the bacteria I have clogging my sinuses. If that is correct, then I am amazed at the healing power of the eye because it went into mucous producing overdrive and just got it all out in a few hours. Why can’t my sinuses do that? I have been sniffling for weeks now. Anyway, I’d better stop writing about all this gross stuff.

Dream On

2006-04-10T11:42:00.000-07:00

After reading the comment on sleep paralysis, I followed the link and read up on it. From there, I read stuff on lucid dreaming, and recalled a conversation I had with my aikido sensei on the subject. He told me that he had experimented with intentionally going into lucid dreams, and that it was possible to practice it, so that you could potentially enter a lucid dream at any time. For those that don’t know, lucid dreams can be thought of as dreams in which you are aware that you are dreaming. The effect is that since you know you are dreaming, you can control the content of the dream and feel the physical effects of the situation as if it was really happening to you. You can feel what it’s like to fly, to fall from a tall building, to run from a tiger, to kill zombies…whatever it is you dream, you feel. When he told me of his own experiments, I was intrigued.

I have vowed to experience at least one lucid dream while in country. Here’s why: I have a lot of nightmares. They are always bizarre, full of goblins, dark forests, ghosts, haunted houses and such. I want to enter this world fully, lucidly, and experience this haunted world firsthand, to feel the wind blowing on my face in a moonlit cemetery, to talk with demons that hide in closets, and to walk through the crumbling streets of the Land of the Dead as a ghost myself. I want to live in our world by day, and in this shadow land by night. I want to literally confront my demons, and maybe have tea with them.

Maybe 70-75% of my dreams are nightmares, but I have a hard time recalling the details of them. I wake up knowing I am scared, knowing that my dream was strange, but I can’t remember the specifics. Well, with lucid dreaming, you have to first develop a dream recall faculty, and I have already begun this phase of the experiment, with noticeable results in just a few days. I now keep a dream journal next to my bed so I can write down everything during the night, usually when I am half-asleep. So far I have not come close to a lucid dream, but I am making progress. When you train yourself to become lucid in a dream state, you are supposed to do reality checks- the idea is that if you can test the physics of your dream while you are dreaming it, then you can become aware that it is in fact a dream and not the real world. Once you have this awareness, you can paint your own dreamscape, since you know it is of your own creation anyway. It’s supposed to be like being a god, walking among your creation. This is a power I would very much like to experience.

Wacky Weather

2006-04-08T11:27:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken Friday. It was 72 degrees, sunny. The cherry blossoms here are all in bloom right now, they are exquisite. Their scent wafts down the streets, and it feels like life is returning to this place after a long, frigid winter. You can actually hear the cherry trees before you get to them, they are so full of buzzing bees. Hundreds of them, with their fat yellow cake legs, gathering as much pollen as they possibly can since no other flowers have bloomed yet.

Now this photo was taken Sunday morning. It was 43 degrees, wet, white and miserable. Another volunteer told us that while it looked nice this week, we can expect at least another snow day, and he was right. We get these fronts in from Siberia, bringing in cutting cold wind and clouds, and the valley effect turns it all into snow. Yesterday we were out gardening in shorts, and now I have to bundle up to go to the bazaar. Weird.

Nocturnal Visitations

2006-03-29T09:19:00.000-08:00

This is kind of creepy. Some of you may know of a certain dreamtime phenomenon whereby the dreamer feels like something is pressing down on their chest, holding them forcibly to the bed, the dreamer unable to move. Sometimes it is accompanied with difficulty breathing or a feeling of panic. David experienced this directly in Arizona, when he reported being held down by an old woman (correct me if I’m wrong) while sleeping on the couch downstairs one night. In Kyrgyzstani folklore, this phenomenon has a name. It is a demon that goes by the name albarsti (албарсты: all-bar-sti with the i as in “hit”). This demon comes to you in your sleep, and tries to strangle, smother, or otherwise murder you. It usually comes to women in the form of a hairy, monstrous man or an animal like a wolf or a bear; and to men in the form of an old or haggard woman. It is there to kill you or to portend your dreadful future. Well, Malinda was visited by the албарсты last week, and it has caused quite a stir in our house.

It was the night we returned form Bishkek. Usually, Malinda sleeps on her hands- this is a habit left over from a time when she had eczema on her hands and she slept on them so she wouldn’t scratch them. This night however, she slept with her hands crossed on her chest, rather like a corpse or a vampire would in a coffin. This proved to be a mistake. In her dreams, she was visited by a force, an invisible force that pressed its very real weight down upon her chest, making it impossible to move. She felt out of breath, her hands caught under the mass of this thing and her feet felt paralyzed. She tried to look over at me and scream, but no sound could escape her lips. She finally awoke in a sweat, but she knew something significant had just happened.

When we told our host family, they instantly all agreed it was the albarsti. Too many pieces were just as the stories tell it- and this happened to a foreigner that couldn’t have known about the obscure folktales told in darkened village rooms to nervous children and superstitious grandmothers. No, she must have had an encounter with the demon of Kyrgyz dreams. They told us that our host father had a similar experience 15 years ago, when an old woman came to him and tried to saw off his arm while he lied there, staring helplessly at her grinning crone face. Then other stories filtered in. Some of my students swear they have been visited, and that it couldn’t be good that Malinda had too. The theory around our house now is that we somehow picked up the demon from our bed in the hotel in Bishkek. They live there apparently, and can travel with the beds’ occupants around the world, seeking out new victims. Either way, our family is not particularly happy that a demon now resides in their daughter’s former room.

Personally, I think this is the coolest thing to happen to us yet. This supernatural cross-cultural experience has put us closer to being accepted as one of them- an insider if you will. The locals want us to go to a moldo (молдо), the Islamic version of an exorcist or faith healer. The Kyrgyz burn juniper branches to cleanse the air of germs and evil spirits, and the moldo will read special verses from the Koran to rid the house of the offending demon. I kind of like the idea of it hanging around, so I will try to avoid an exorcism. Whether or not you believe this phenomenon is really a visitation, or a heretofore poorly understood nervous or psychological quirk, it’s still fun to think of our room as haunted, and that we may pass on this uninvited guest to our friends’ rooms when we sleep over :)

A New Path

2006-03-22T07:30:00.000-08:00

I have taken up a new spiritual path here in the wild. We have two volunteers here that are ordained Buddhist monks of the Zen tradition. I had the occasion before we split up last time to get them to show me just how one goes about meditating- I have tried a few times on my own, but never had a clue whether I was doing it right. So, now that I have some guides, I have embarked on a secret journey into myself. I have always had a special place for taoism, and buddhism has always been interesting to me but I never understood it- so much sanskrit, and westerners treat it as a dry academic subject rather than a living religion. But here, I can freely explore it and have knowledgeable people close to me to go to for questions. I think this could be really positive for me. Well, more on this subject later I guess.

41 Pounds Lighter

2006-03-22T07:03:00.000-08:00

Here is a before and after shot of me with 6 months in-country. I weighed in at the medical office in Bishkek, and I lost a whopping 41 lbs. I couldn't believe it, I thought for sure I lost 20, but never expected to be that far gone. I'm happy with my weight loss, but Malinda hates me for it (not really). She lost 20 lbs, but she wants to beat me. So far, I have lost the most of our group, the 2nd place contender lost 25- and this guy was skinny to begin with. PC has put him on a special protein shake diet because they were concerned with the rapid weight loss, but I haven't been offered such. That's because I was too much overweight to begin with. I have lost so much because of a drastic change in diet, with only one meal a day sometimes, combined with 4+ miles of walking everyday (except weekends, and some days I walk 8 miles). Well, I feel better about myself, and now that it's warming up, I am going to buy a cheap rug and do an hour's worth of karate and aikido training outside, weather permitting. Malinda and I have also taken up pro-badminton. We bought a set of incredibly cheap Chinese made rackets and birdies (did you know that a birdie is called a shuttlecock in Britain? heh, those crazy brits and their cocks) and now it's become a thing that we do. Anywho, that's our phys-ed update. Enjoy your own spring and summer while they last.

IST

2006-03-17T06:06:00.002-08:00

Over the last week, all of the K-13s went to a hotel in the capital and participated in a blitz of seminars and lectures designed to reinvigorate us after three long months at our sites. Well, some of this did occur, but so did a lot of other things.

IST stands for In-Service Training. We will get another round of this seminar marathon in about 9 months, called Mid-Service Training. While I don’t particularly mind the all day seminar thing, as long as everyone else has to do it, most of the other volunteers hated it. We are a strange group, PC Volunteers. By nature, we must be incredibly independent. This is a trait that is absolutely necessary if you want to go out into a strange community, far away, and try to carve out a place for yourself. It’s kind of like Going West. We’re on the wild frontier of the Islamic world, where anything can happen, with nothing but a few bags of necessities and a dream. We are not accustomed to being told what to do, and resist the attempts of the Peace Corps administration to do so almost at every turn. But I didn’t mind so much, I guess I’m not a stubborn loner character that can’t handle authority. When you put 58 loners together for a week though, you get nasty results sometimes.

Along with being loners, Peace Corps Volunteers are also very social. Only a “people person” would want to help those without, and to “integrate with their communities.” There is a conflict in personality types here, and the PC ends up getting volunteers that are kind of neurotic. I am part of this group, don’t be fooled, but I lack the extrovert qualities that so many of the others have and it might be a disadvantage for me.

Still, for us, Bishkek was a place to shower for 7 days straight, eat Italian food, cheeseburgers, and pizza, and feel somewhat at home. Now we are back in our sites, and things could not be any different. Bishkek is the only place in this country where things feel somewhat normal. Granted, if any of you stayed in our hotel, you would have thought you were being ripped off- it’s below Motel 6 standards, but it felt like the Ritz to me.

Boredom

2006-02-23T09:49:00.000-08:00

These few weeks have been pretty slow. Talas is not the hip, fun-loving town you have imagined it to be. The media hype of this place really oversells it, in my opinion. The other volunteers here are showing signs of Kyrgyzstan fatigue though. After a year, some of them are down right grumpy about this place. One in particular has nothing good to say about Kyrgyzstan, and she ends up spreading her negativity like a virus. I think she will leave soon. But, to end on a good note, here is a picture of Malinda blowing you kisses!

The Plight of Women

2006-02-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

Most women here live lives of servitude and self-imposed semi slavery. There is a social order here to be observed: men work in the fields and tend the animals, while women stay at home and rear the children, cook the meals and clean the house. This system would work in a traditional society I think- as long as life is relatively simple, with few external disruptions, such a system can produce remarkable stability and peaceful co-existence. However, the world market has invaded this once pastoral culture, and has imposed upon it certain unpredictable elements. With sky-high unemployment, most of the men have no fields to tend, and no animals to take care of, and to be consistent with the traditional social order, they must sit at home, watching TV and drinking loads of vodka with their friends, while occasionally trying to find a job. The world market has not yet touched the world of the housewife. Women, to fill their obligatory role in the traditional social order, still must cook and clean and raise the children. They step over their inebriated husbands as they wash the floors, and diligently cook the meals with the little food they have, trying to avoid discussions of money because it may just end in an argument or worse. The old system does not work in a modern, market-driven economy. Jobs are scarce, but humble and obedient wives are plentiful.

This week, I held exams for my 4^th year students. The test was simple: hold a 5 minute conversation with me on a random topic and grades will be dispensed on grammar, vocabulary, etc. Well, we had read the Robert Frost poem, The Road Less Traveled in class, and one of the topics I had prepared was about the decisions we have made in our lives in the past and those we may make in the future, to kind of go along with the theme of the poem. So, a student comes in for her exam and she draws this exam topic from a hat. I start with the question, “What has been the most important decision of your life?” She looked down at the table for a while, and when I was about to ask another question, she interrupted with, “I have made no decisions, only mistakes. Many, many mistakes.” I pressed on. “Well, we all make mistakes right? Tell me about one of your mistakes,” I said. She then told me that her marriage was a mistake. Immediately I felt that we were on dangerous ground here, and I should try to change the subject. But she continued.

I knew she had been kidnapped- most of my married students have not had the choice to marry the man they wanted to. They had to marry whomever had managed to grab hold of them tight enough to throw them in a car and drive them to his parents house, where she was bargained for like a piece of livestock (and often raped afterwards). I wanted to tell her it was not her decision, but I knew it didn’t matter. She looked like she was on the verge of tears. And she had that kidnapped look- a look so many women have here. They feel trapped, destroyed, and beaten. To refuse the hand of a successful kidnapper is thought shameful by the older generation. It is an insult to say to a man and his family that the woman is too good for their him. But to say yes, to enter into a relationship of willing bondage is to die a little bit every day of the rest of her life. These women look at me with their worn out eyes, eyes that have cried so many tears that they feel it is no longer worth the effort. Their faces say, “help me” but they know there is little to be done.

She went on saying that her family life was “broken.” I said this is too personal, and we should move onto other topics. I felt like a heel to do this. Here I am, a man in a position of authority, grading this poor girl on her English skills and she is telling me something she would never tell another man. I didn’t know what to do. I changed the subject by asking another question, this time about her future and what she envisioned for herself in the years to come. This way, she could continue to talk about this obviously painful topic if she wanted to, but could easily talk about something else. She answered lovingly about her son, how she wanted to give him everything, to make sure he got a good education, and that he was raised in the right way. It was though she had made some peace with her plight (gritting her teeth and cursing the whole way I ‘m sure) by plunging head first into her traditional role as child-rearer. She would not run away to be rid of her husband or file for divorce. She would not demand to be treated better. She would not take to the streets with other women, demanding that this kidnapping business be thrown into the trash heap of barbaric traditions. Instead, she embraced the very system that had ruined her life. But I sensed that she would quietly fight it. She would do the work as one woman, doing what she can to make sure this “tradition” dies a painful death in her lifetime. She will raise her son to be respectful of women, to honor the hard work that they do, and to reject the cruel tradition of bride kidnapping so that the girls that grow up with him will not have to face the ugly possibility of being stolen away and forced to pour tea for her kidnapper for the rest of her days. Of all the ways to fight this injustice, she chose the most difficult. She has truly sacrificed herself so that others may live free.

Good Eats

2006-02-02T08:31:00.000-08:00

Check this out. Click on the picture to get a good, full-sized picture of this stuff.This is what we had for dinner on Friday night. Well, this is what THEY had, Malinda and I couldn’t stomach it. Malinda actually ate 2 spoonfuls of the noodles (with no “meat”), I just couldn’t. There is this dish called Besh Barmak, which is ramen noodles tossed in animal lard, served with chunks of meat and globules of fat. It’s traditionally horsemeat, but they made this special dish out of sheep’s heart and, get this... lungs. I’m not kidding. Even on Guam they don’t eat the lungs! Tongue, okay. Gizzard, fine, even the intestines are pretty universally eaten. But the freakin’ lungs? The rationale for eating the organs was this: the sheep only eat clean grass and breathe only clean mountain air, so clearly eating the lungs and heart is like eating Kyrgyzstan itself. I snickered a bit when they said that. They threw in some intestine for good measure, but still. It is the worst thing I have ever seen. And the smell! This is mutton, not lamb, so it’s like 4-5 year-old sheep, freshly slaughtered that morning and it has that distinct mutton smell which makes us gag. Our host mother didn’t appreciate me taking a picture of the pot. Maybe she secretly knows that this was not meant for human consumption. Jenn, this dish validates your rule against eating organs of any kind. The organ meat turned black like old tires, and the noodles turned grey with the run-off. Imagine grey ramen...would you even think of eating grey anything? It looked like a big plate of weird mushrooms, leeches and pale worms on a bed of cup-o-noodles, haha. Oh man, this place is a trip sometimes.

Exams

2006-01-25T11:49:00.000-08:00

Over the last 2 weeks, I have held English examinations for my students. This has been an interesting experience, let me tell you. The exams themselves were usually not interesting, with some exceptions (see The Plight of Women for one), but the grading process sure was. Here, they get grades of 1-5 for everything. 5 is the best, and 1 is supposed to be the worst, but in reality teachers never give 1s. Their lowest grade is a 2. Not me. I give 1s. And plenty of them, if I feel it is appropriate. My exams are oral, and the student is graded on their ability to hold small conversations. Some students just sit there and say nothing for the five minutes they have to demonstrate their skills. It is very awkward. They just stare at the desk or something on the wall, while I try to solicit an answer from them. After 2-3 minutes of trying to get them to talk, I simply give up, and we sit there in complete, tense quiet for the other 2 minutes. You can see the embarrassment in their faces, it’s great. After a few minutes of this treatment, they muster the courage to ask if they can leave, and I say, “But of course,” and drop the 1-bomb on them. They are flustered at first. Did he say a one? No one gives ones, this must be a mistake. So they ask me, why a one and not a three. Well, I laugh and explain to them that they didn’t actually say anything, so they failed miserably. And then the begging begins. Please, give me a three. Pretty please. You must give me a three. They love the word must here. It is funny, they know enough English to bargain for a higher grade, but can’t string two words together for any other purpose. Then there are the girls that aren’t satisfied with a three, and instead beg for a 4. Oh, how I laugh at this. When they finally leave, taking in the gravity of that moment- what shame they will incur when it becomes known by their families that they actually received a one- they resolve to return after everyone else is finished with the test and take the exam again. Fine, I allow them to do this. They deserve the chance to improve I say to myself. But the hilarious thing is, they come back for the second round, and again we sit in weird silence. This time, I don’t try so hard to get them to answer. I patiently sit and stare at them, waiting for English to billow out of their mouths like vomit after a round of hefty drinking. But it doesn’t come, and I inform them again that yes, they will get a one and if I could give them 2 ones, I would.

Then there are the students that don’t have the linguistic skills to even bargain for the grade. They send in their friends- the good students that managed to learn some English in the 5 years they have spent studying it- to come in and bargain for them. Oh, she was sick and couldn’t come to the exam, they tell me. Or, she is pregnant, and can’t study very much, so I should give her a 4. I guffaw and give the speech I have given so many times by now about academic integrity, fairness and responsibility. For these bargaining middle-men I tell them that these poor students are cheating them. They worked hard for their 5 or 4, and I am happy to reward them with a good grade, but these bums that send in their friends to bargain for a good grade deserve the 1 that they will surely get.

I have students in my classes that I have never seen, and will likely only see on exam dates. This isn’t unusual in a university setting- it happens all the time in the states. The student takes an easy class, never shows up for lectures, aces the exam anyway, and moves on to the next course. But the no-shows I get have a tried-and-true routine that they follow. They don’t come to class, and work instead. They take the money they earned through the semester and arrive on test day with a fistful of money to bribe their teachers into giving them a passing grade. It works on many local teachers. They are happy to take the 200 som (about $5) and pencil in a 4. But, it just won’t work for us volunteers I’m afraid. First, 5 dollars? This isn’t even a half-assed bribe attempt. Second, the whole idea of a bribe is the antithesis of why we wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer in the first place. Thankfully, no one knows of any volunteer ever accepting a bribe- who would admit it though?

Giving bad grades does ruffle feathers sometimes though. Teachers identify about half a dozen “good students” and teach them, where the other students are left in the dust. They are “stupid” or “troublemakers,” we are told. Those good students will receive 5s for every class regardless of their performance, and the others will be lucky to get their 3, again regardless of their performance. So, when a supposed “good student” comes into a volunteer’s class and gets a 3 because it turns out that they actually suck at English, the administration shakes their heads and changes the grade to give the impression on paper that the school has bright students. Great system, eh? It all comes from the old soviet system that rewarded good performance on paper. The city with the most grain production gets a raise, or the school with the most students earning 5s gets new desks or something like that. So, all they have to do is fudge the grades, and wha-la! New desks. So far, none of my grades have been changed to my knowledge and I’m crossing my fingers it will remain like this. But honeymoons with volunteers end quickly, so we’ll see how it is at the end of the next semester.

Chris’ Job

2006-01-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

As an English Conversation instructor at Talas University, I am required to work at least 22 hours per week. I work Monday through Friday, anywhere from 8:00-10:00 am to about 1:00 or 2:00 pm. Not too bad. My job is to be a native speaker resource for the English students to practice with. My classes are 1 hour and 20 minutes long each, and the idea is to just talk. Talk, talk, talk. But it is not that easy. The Kyrgyzstan educational system has done all it can to squeeze every ounce of creativity, individuality, and desire for learning out of their students, so that by the time they get to university, they just expect it to be more of the same. Their teachers use Soviet-era books (if they are lucky enough to have books) that “educate” everyone about the glories of the Soviet Civilization, the virtues of not asking questions, the joys of communal labor on the collective, and the grand ideas of Lenin, Stalin and Marx. They simply assign a paragraph to their students to read and memorize, and bam! They know English! Right? They memorize answers to questions like, “what is your favorite season?” and “what do the British do at meal-time?” This gives me a lot to work with, let me tell you. The Kyrgyz education system is designed to crank out faithful communists, with no critical thinking skills, and no desire to learn anything new. New is bad. Also, copying is good. To copy is to learn. Not understanding is bad. If a teacher asks, “do you understand?” what they are really asking is, “are you too stupid to get it?” If you answer that you do not understand, you can expect a scolding, maybe a whack with a ruler, or some form of public humiliation. So, when I get the students, they say they understand everything, and never ask questions. This is the great death knell for learning. Most students are shy as well, as 98% of them are women, and women are expected to be neither seen nor heard here. They just sit, quietly, not understanding anything, and then go when the bell rings. A room full of blinking, slack-jawed robots produces great conversations. To be fair, I have a handful of truly excellent students that can speak fluidly, and with competence. These are the ones I concentrate on. I would feel obliged to concentrate on the quiet students, if this were high school, but since it’s university, I take the attitude that they are here because they want to be, not because they have to be, and if they want to learn, they will participate. I don’t feel bad for flunking the quiet ones.

Malinda and I will begin an English Club, disguised as something far more fun. We will do a debate/ logic/ critical thinking club once a week. our idea is to do puzzles, logic problems, and critical thinking exercises twice a month, and the other two weeks reserved for formal debates. We want to make two teams to inspire some good old-fashioned capitalist competition. We’ll see if it works. I’m hoping it does, but I have already learned that hope is not a habit I should be getting into.

Azamat Says…Americans are Useless

2006-01-04T06:33:00.001-08:00

Meet Azamat, a 65 year old Kyrgyz man from the village of Almaluu. He’s a man that gets to the point, a man who doesn’t take any shit from anyone (especially women), a man who has thoroughly embraced his Kyrgyz-ness. He knows his place in the world, and won’t hesitate to tell you yours. Some may call him stubborn, some enlightened. Some may call him a bastard child that hits the bottle too often, but I simply call him Azamat. Azamat will be dropping by the site every now and then to illuminate our darkened American lives with his thoughts on the foreigners that have arrived recently in his country to plunder its riches. Let us listen to his words of wisdom, shall we?

“Bah, Americans! Fools don’t know anything…They come here thinking they will teach us something, but truly it is us that teach them! Oh how they cry when something goes wrong. ‘It’s too cold…There’s too much fat in my noodles…I smell like sheep’…bitch, bitch, bitch. I swear, these people would not survive a single winter without us there to make sure they ate enough, or to remind them that it’s cold outside, so they should wear a hat. It’s like they are children or something. They need our help; it is not the other way around. A button falls off of their shirt, and they think they should throw it away! Is this what they do in America? Just throw it away? They have no idea how to fix anything. Once, I put vodka in my car to get me into town because I didn’t have any benzene. It gave me trouble on the way back, and it broke down. The dumb American I was with scratched his head when he looked at the engine. It was like he’d never seen one before. I told him to get the scotch tape, and we’d be able to fix it, but he looked at me like I was crazy. He gave me the same look when I asked him to slaughter a sheep for the end of Ramadan. What, do they not slaughter sheep in America? How do they get so big without eating meat? All the Americans I meet don’t eat meat. Stupid Americans! How can you be warm through the winter if you don’t have fat to eat? America must be a hot place, I have decided. Everyone there goes around naked, and no one eats meat, so it has to be sweltering there. But, when they get here, they don’t walk around naked because they are so cold. All Americans wear jeans, and they wear those stupid looking backpacks, you can spot them a kilometer away. I have already said that the men can’t seem to do anything useful, but the women can still pour me tea and cook dinner in those jeans. I say the men should go home, and leave their women here. Their women wouldn’t want to marry American men anyway, since they can’t fix a tractor or plant sugar beets. And, what’s in those backpacks they carry anyway? Certainly not tools, or a sewing kit, or a hat for when it’s cold. No, only a camera and a couple of cokes. They are so stupid…”

Come back soon to read Azamat waxing philosophic about those strange Americans and their heretic ways!

New Years in the KR

2006-01-04T06:33:00.000-08:00

New Years here is an interesting experience. First, the temperature hit -28°Celcius today, that’s -18° Fahrenheit for you guys. In other words, f&%king cold. Houses here have the old radiator heaters that the Kramdens of the Honeymooners have- or for the younger folks, those kind of radiators that line the walls of New York tenements in the 50s and 60s, where you have to bang on the pipes to get the Super to crank up the heat. So, it has been pretty cold indoors lately.

Last night, Malinda and I went to a café for an office party for the UN organization she works for. It reminded us so much of Guam, circa 1991. For those of you that have been, picture the Top of the Mar at Christmas time- there was cheesy dance music MCed by someone that is not fit to MC a white trash wedding, and a karaoke station, complete with a man in a suit that was paid to lip sync all the songs, so it would look like they had live entertainment. I’m not joking, the guy pretended to sing these songs, while chewing gum, and missing most of the cues. It was hilarious. I mean…why?? It boggles the mind. Nobody was fooled, everyone knew he wasn’t singing. It had the feel of a Guam baptism or wedding, with their cheesy songs, tacky decorations, and a thrown-together aspect to it all. They gave away little prizes like pens and bottles of water, and everyone was so excited to get them too. Maybe it was all the vodka everyone was drinking, but they loved it all the same.

New Years in the KR is a lot like Christmas. The Kyrgyz co-opted Santa Claus from the Russians, remaking him as the bringer of good luck for the next year. He is the classic Coca-Cola Santa, beard, red suit and all, but he wears silver garland around his neck, and has a granddaughter that stands around looking pretty. Looking at the Kyrgyz Santa, I could tell he was subtly different, and I couldn’t put my finger on it until Malinda said to me that the Santas looked like they were wearing boxing robes. That was it! Yes, indeed, they wore red and purple boxing robes with white trim on it to make it more Santa-ish. And they wore huge rubber noses- not Pinocchio noses, but more like grossly round and rosy European noses. I guess Asian noses aren’t big enough for a white holiday icon. They also have a New Years tree, which looks suspiciously like a Christmas tree, with a star on top, ornaments, and presents underneath it, to be opened on New Years Eve. They like to sing Jingle Bells at New Years parties for some reason, and the Kyrgyz positively love dancing, even though they have basically one move. Watching the old guys dance is entertaining. Many of them look like ultra-serious Japanese businessmen cutting loose, stiffly grooving to the Turkish and Russian dance music they get here. I don’t dance, I have a mortal fear of it actually- for those of you that wondered why we didn’t dance at our wedding, there is your explanation- so I stayed at the table, while Malinda got down with the other locals. But, she had no idea what awaited her, haha.

They dragged her up to the microphone and made her sing!! A traditional Kyrgyz song!! In Kyrgyz!! Oh, man, I was both very embarrassed and hurting with laughter. I had seen one of my students in the crowd earlier, and I didn’t want to have to admit that yes, that was my wife up there. But, Americans are like little monkeys to the locals. We are here to perform tricks for their amusement, and it gets pretty old pretty quickly. I was so glad I didn’t go up there to dance. Of course, one guy in our group had a little too much vodka, and was trying to get me to dance with him…man, he wouldn’t give up. Finally his wife told him to stop bugging me, and to dance with her instead, so I was saved.

So You’re Coming to Kyrgyzstan?

2006-01-04T06:31:00.000-08:00

If you are a new Peace Corps volunteer, looking for tips about what to pack on your trip to the Kyrgyz Republic, you have found the right place. So, you are limited to 100 pounds of luggage. This isn’t something you can ignore. You will have to pay for anything over 75 pounds for domestic flights to the city where Orientation is- we went to Philadelphia. Anyways, after that, international flights put the 100 pound limit, and anything after that will cost you some cash, and not a little cash either. Also, you have to drag your stuff around with you many times once you are in country, and the PC will give you 50 more pounds of crap when you arrive, so I recommend staying within the 100 pound limit.

Toiletries
That said, let’s get down to business. First, they tell you that you should bring 3 months of toiletries for your stay in training. This is slightly misleading, as you will only bathe once a week if you are lucky, so you can plan to take only 1 months worth, because it will last a lot longer than you think it will. Also, if you are a couple, you will live together for your entire stay in the KR, no matter what the Peace Corps might tell you. Our group was told that we may be split up, so my wife and I brought 3 months of toiletries each, which will now probably last us a full year. Anyway, you can find American soaps here (Dove, Palmolive, sometimes Oil of Olay), but if you are allergic to harsh soaps, bring your own. You can find shampoo (Pantene, among them) but conditioner is harder to find. It does exist, you will just have to look for it. The only toothpaste that you can find here that the PC medical office approves of is Colgate and Aquafresh, and they are available everywhere. The point is, basic toiletries are easy to obtain. You should concentrate on packing sanitary wipes (bring a ton of them), hand sanitizer, tampons or pads (while they exist here, they are very expensive), Q-tips, any special hair product you need like gel, mousse, what have you; and any special make up item you are accustomed to. You will not likely find it here. The make-up here is Russian, and the quality will vary. You just have to try things out. Bring cologne or perfume because you’ll start to smell kind of ripe after your 5th day without bathing.

Clothes
For clothes, don’t bother bringing anything white. It will turn brown very quickly, and will be covered in stains, socks especially. Pack black, brown, dark colors generally, and pack plenty of warm things like winter hat, sweaters, coats, long underwear (DON’T FORGET THIS) and pullovers. It gets freaking cold here, and the chances of you having good heating in your room is small. Pack a good pair of hiking boots that will last 2 years, because walking in the snow and mud all the time sucks, and you’ll regret not having waterproof boots. You will walk all the time, so spend the extra money for comfortable , durable shoes. Men should pack a few ties and a black and brown blazer, maybe a complete suit. They make a big deal about professional attire here during training, but when you get to your site, nobody seems to care what you wear. You’ll be so cold in your classrooms, that you’ll be bundled up for half of the year anyway, so it almost doesn’t matter in what you wear in the colder months. Also, expect to drop 15 pounds in the first 2 months. So, pack a few pants that are a size or two too small. And bring a belt! You probably shouldn’t pack any shorts because it’s not very appropriate here, especially for women- sorry, gender issues are huge here. You should also bring some pajamas because you will spend a lot of time in your little room reading or whatever, so you might as well be comfortable. Oh, and bring a good pair of house slippers.

Supplies
Bring food! The food here is just awful, and it will be so nice every once in a while to have some real potato chips, a candy bar, jerky, whatever you are used to. I’d go ahead and pack a box of food and mail it to yourself the week that you depart. The food will get painfully repetitive, and it’s all bland. The favorite seasoning here is salt and animal fat. The spices you can get here are limited to dill, cinnamon, paprika, bay leaves, salt, sugar, cilantro, parsley pretty much. Anything else is either non-existent or is so rare that it might as well not exist. I’d bring packets of spices like Taco Seasoning, BBQ seasoning, Italian Seasoning, and any other flavor not mentioned above. If I could repack my things, I’d drop like 20 pounds of crap and bring food instead. A multi-tool is nice to have, like a Leatherman, and bring extra AA batteries. The batteries you can buy here are of really cheap Chinese and Russian make, and they explode and leak acid like crazy. Bring extra watch batteries too. Do not bring a cell phone, they won’t work here, unless you have a European cell phone that has a slot for a Sim Card. Which reminds me, take standard European outlet adapters (220-240 volts), and at least one converter that steps down the voltage. Bring an mp3 player, stocked with music. Music may be your only friend for many weeks at a time. We brought a laptop and are glad we did, but know that stuff gets stolen here all the time. A camera is a must. Also bring interesting things to read, and maybe puzzles, games, a deck of cards, a good water bottle, study supplies like flash cards, art supplies if you are so inclined- art doesn’t exist very much out here. A key supply that you will be glad to have brought are ziplock bags. There are so many uses for these things! If you are a teacher, you should bring your own supplies, because you won’t be able to find much here. Here, you can get chalk, pens, graph paper, cheap markers, journals, and that’s about it.

If you are a single woman, consider buying a cheap silver ring to wear. If you are not married, people will try to hook you up with their sons, and this could lead to bad things. Kidnapping brides for their sons is the way things are done here, so don’t mess around with mothers that want you to marry their sons so they can come to America. Kyrgyz men are not known for their respect for women. My advice is to tell everyone you’re married, even if you’re not. Then they will leave you alone about it.

Medical
The cool thing is that the PC Medical Office is stacked with all kinds of medical supplies. Don’t worry about cough drops, ibuprofen, or basic first aid supplies. You will be given these things your first day. But, you can never have enough Pepto Bismol, so stock up, and everyone will be sick the first 3 months, so having NyQuil or DayQuil will help. If you have dandruff, medical has hardcore dandruff shampoo, so don’t worry.

I hope this helps, and I look forward to meeting you in country. We all get nice and cozy with each other here. Good luck, and we’ll see you on the flip side.

Piracy Nation

2005-12-19T06:12:00.001-08:00

Kyrgyzstan is filled with pirates of all sorts- except the kind on ships. The only available DVDs, or CDs are rip-offs, pirated by Russians and sold for about 200 som, about $5 US. Not only are they cheap, but you usually get at least 2 movies on each DVD. I have seen DVDs with 8 movies in one for 300 som ($7.50). But buyer beware! While it may say “The Aviator” and “Million Dollar Baby” on the cover, you may end up with the “Aviator” and “The People Versus Larry Flint” as one of our volunteers got. There is sometimes the option for English, but most of the time, it is in Russian, and you never know if it’s in English or not until you have spent your money on it. We won’t be buying any movies here for that reason. When they are dubbed in Russian, what they do is they turn the English soundtrack down so you can still hear it, but they put in a thunderous Russian voice over top of the sound, translating every voice- men, women, children…everyone. It is horrible. To watch Toy Story being voiced by one gruff sounding Russian dude trying desperately to keep up with the English is entertainment in itself. He did the Little Bo Peep character with such pizzazz I forgot momentarily that he had a penis.

There are countless rip offs everywhere. We found a shop that deals exclusively in fine perfumes like Click “Happy,” “Draker Noir,” and “Obsession for People.” We see Helo Kity everywhere, and today at the bazaar we found a bag with Santa Claus on it that said, “Merry Chris.” I know that isn’t a rip off, but it was funny to see anyway. We showed you the Barf soap a while ago, but there are all sorts of things like that. There is a dish soap called Mr. Proper, ripped off from Mr. Clean, with a big bald black guy snapping his fingers in the air like MC Hammer. “Proper!”

Gold Teef

2005-12-19T06:12:00.000-08:00

Many Kyrgyz people have gold teeth here. And it isn’t regular gold teeth. This is good Soviet gold. It looks like more of a gold-copper alloy to me. The coolest thing about them is that the platings are not cleanly cut. It looks like they are cut from sort of big industrial stencil, like they were making nails or something and someone thought they could make some teeth while they were at it. It’s really funny to me. The teeth are jagged, and they have a sort of mechanical saw look to them, so you know they cut the shit out of their tongues and lips all the time. There are a lot of people without a single white tooth in their mouths. They have all of their teeth, but every one of them are plated with this stuff. I call these people Robocops because they have a weird mechanized, cyborg look about them. Their mouths are industrial grade, and they look menacing for sure, ready to slice anything that is unlucky enough to get in there. It’s some kind of status symbol here. I’ll try to get a picture of some people for you to see.

Our New Home

2005-12-19T06:10:00.000-08:00

Time has flown by these past two weeks. We have settled into a routine here in Talas City, actually going to work everyday instead of going to training sessions. Work seems a lot easier. Talas is not a big city by any stretch of the imagination. We live with a U.N. volunteer and his wife, and their four kids. The oldest speaks English very well, and the next is working on it. The third daughter is quiet, and spends much of her day tending to the baby (which she does very well, she will make an excellent mother). The baby is adorable and very smart. Kyrgyz families have a much more hands-off approach to child rearing. The baby is not even two and she can feed herself. She is able to do an astounding amount of things for herself because the parents do not spend every waking minute with them, making sure they don’t pick up knives, or burn themselves. The child is allowed to roam about the house, doing most anything- they are in short allowed to find out about the world on their own, making for very self-reliant adults in the future. I think Malinda have learned a thing or two about the American don’t-let-the-child-do-anything approach and we can see that it is flawed. The quicker they learn about bad consequences, the better behaved they seem to be. The Kyrgyz however do not discipline their children at all. This is a mixed message I think, because the child doesn’t learn the consequences of bad behavior, only of the physical world. They learn that hot things hurt very early, that sharp things cut, etc. but do not learn not to throw their food all over the place or throwing a temper tantrum. Parents just tolerate this behavior, so it’s a little inconsistent.

Anyway, the family is great, though they eat a lot of mutton, which is my absolute least favorite meat in the world. I eat oatmeal instead. The house is cool, with two indoor toilets (god, it’s nice to sit while you poop!), and running water with two water heaters so you can get hot water if you wait a few hours. Also, some of you know we set up an internet account in the house! Where am I? It turns out that if your phone number begins with a 5 you can pay for internet access, so we hook up the laptop. Nobody owns their own computer here, so this is usually for internet cafes or businesses. The house is warm during the winter, so that’s good, and they do not own any animals, so it’s cleaner than our house in Ak-Beshim. We won’t find a better place to live by ourselves, so we don’t want to move out. The people are nice, so we are happy where we are. They get free English lessons for their kids, and we get toilets. It’s a good deal.

Kyrgyz Medicine

2005-12-02T23:35:00.000-08:00

The Kyrgyzstani people suffer from a variety of dreadful ailments peculiar to this region, and I am here to educate you all in the holes in Western Medicine that Kyrgyzstan has exposed. At almost epidemic proportions is the horrible Frozen Uterus Syndrome. The only documented cases of this bizarre disease have come from Kyrgyz hospitals, and Western medicine has so far been left scratching its head at explaining it. In Kyrgyzstan it seems that if women sits on concrete, a cold chair, or lenoleum, their uteruses will freeze into an icy mass, rendering the victim barren for life. Various cures have been proposed by Kyrgyz grandmothers like sitting on heated chairs for several days, extra underwear or several shots of vodka-the panecea of Kyrgyzstan. Vodka it seems is a wonderful aspirin-like medicine that treats everything from a cough to the measels to HIV. If only the Harvard Medical School had read the vodka scholarship coming out of this country,the world would be disease free in a mere decade!

Because of its climate, Kyrgyzstani diseases all inevitably can be traced back to the cold weather. One can catch the flu, syphillis, headaches, cancer, AIDS, diarrhea, botulism and especially tuberculosis by simply walking outside in October without 7 layers of clothing. If one even tries to do so, much fuss and stress can result in all mothers and grandmothers in the vicinity. Drinking cold water can also cause the aforementioned diseases, as can peeing without a hat. To combat the killing effects of the cold weather, the Kyrgyz have adapted many behaviors to act as the first defense against illness. First, they corral themselves into one room no larger than a bathroom with no less than four people for many hours at a time, safe against foreign bodies. They heat the room to about 98.6 degrees, and do not allow more than one window or door to be open at any one time to prevent a draft that would let any precious warm air to escape. The warmer and the more moist the air can be, and the longer they can breathe it, the safer they will be. We have been ignorant at the very least in our ventilation practices back in the states.

In case of an ear infection, freshly squeezed breast milk from a young woman dripped into the inner ear will do the trick. That,or vodka. In cases of recurrent cough, the patient should be hung from the ceiling from his ankles, and all orrifices should be plugged with wooden pegs to ensure the blockage of any leaks. Then, the patient should imbibe vodka. If one is cold, even inside, one should go outside, squat as low to the ground as one can without touching the ground of course, and imbibe vodka in copious amounts to warm the belly. If after drinking large quantities of vodka at a party, one developes a headache, warm water should be drunk with a vodka chaser to warm the head.

Then the stangest disease of them all, endemic to Kyrgyzstan is Descending Liver Disease. Cold air touching the exposed belly of the victim forces the liver to descend into the testicular region, or for women into the womb, where it causes fertility complications which can make it difficult for a woman to find a husband. To treat this physiological abnormality, one should eat tremendous amounts of beef or mutton fat. By slurping down golfball sized globules of fat, one slowly builds a fat layer underneath the liver. Over a period of about a month, the new fat reserves will push the liver back up to its original position, restoring health and enabling pregnancy again. As a final precaution, vodka should be imbibed to warm the liver as it makes its return journey.

I think Western Science can learn alot form the Kyrgyz people, and perhaps Americans will lead healthier, warmer lives if we take seriously the devastating power of cold wind and cold surfaces. Our vodka is woefully inadequate, with a mere 15-20% alcohol. To combat the cold, one needs Kyrgyz alcohol with a minimum of 35%. I think you should write your senators and congressmen to increase the minimum alcoholic percentage to meet this pressing need. Raise the alarm, get involved, and save America!

New Address

2005-12-02T23:24:00.000-08:00

We set up an address at the Talas Post Office, so you can now send letters and packages to our permanent site. It is:

Kyrgyz Republic
Talas City 722720
Main Post Office
P.O. Box #12
Christopher Peterson (or Malinda Perez)

New Sites

2005-11-25T22:33:00.000-08:00

We talked with the Peace Corps administration, and we have been reassigned to live and work in Talas City, the Oblast's capital. Malinda will now be working with an NGO of unknown type and size, and I might be teaching at Talas University. I'm excited about teaching there, as I can teach courses that I want to teach, and not just English to a bunch of noisy kids. Another volunteer in Talas City is either switching sites or going home (like us) and I am supposed to take her place at the university. Other than that, we don't know where we will live or our jobs at the moment. We swear in on the 1st (we will be officially PC volunteers then), and we leave for our permanent sites Friday, December 2nd. We will be saying goodbye to our cool family in Ak-Beshim, and our good friend Jennifer, who will be living across the country on Lake Issyk-Kul. Nopw the real adventure begins. No Peace Corps staff to help out, no language instructors...just us and the handful of other volunteers in the area.

Bakai-Ata

2005-11-19T02:37:00.000-08:00

We visited what is supposed to be our home for the next 2 years, in the village of Bakai-Ata, Talas Oblast. The family that we are to live with is very nice. They are religious Muslims, as opposed to most other Kyrgyz that don’t think much about religion. The good part about having a religious family is that they don’t drink. This one also doesn’t smoke. All plusses for us. Malinda’s NGO is pretty good. They have a nice office, and they seem like they really want to help people and not just skim off the top. Their prime goal is to help women whose husbands have died, or who never married and have no means of support. They have a kindergarten for the children of their clients, and it seems to be going well. Chris’ school is a big one, and he gets his own room and the students seemed motivated and disciplined. So our jobs were good. However, the village has a problem with water. By that we mean that they don’t have it much of the time. Every house used to have running water inside, but after the Soviet Empire collapsed, the East Germans that lived here fled to the new GDR, taking with them all of the villages engineers and plumbers (as well as electricians, and technician of every sort). The Soviets never trained the Kyrgyz for these jobs, so by 1995, all the pipes had burst, rotted away, or otherwise became unserviceable and no one was left that knew how to fix them. So, for 10 years, Bakai-Ata has simply gone without water, at least they way they once knew it. Each family now takes water from some phantom water source that we have never seen, which sounds like it is far away, and the entire town of 7000+ people bathe at a single public bathhouse for 15 som each. The reality is, people go a month at a time without bathing, and no one really cleans up much. We were given literally handfuls of water to wash up with each night, and it drove us crazy. After 5 days we were so grubby and greasy, it felt awful. We decided we could not live here for 2 years. There’s just no way we could do it. There are also no apartments in the village, so we are stuck living with hat family the whole time. This did not please us, as the Kyrgyz would say. So, we will talk with PC staff and see if we can get another site. We don’t know if this is even possible, so you may be seeing us this Thanksgiving if it doesn’t work out. Cross your fingers for whichever scenario you hope for- for us staying in Kyrgyzstan or coming home. Either way, we feel bad that Bakai-Ata will lose 2 volunteers. They are very nice people, but our own safety and health are on the line. The villagers want us to help with the water situation, but this problem is way way beyond our capabilities to slove. This problem encompasses everything from a lack of technical education in Kyrgyzstan to local and federal corruption, to labor and construction contracting problems (which involve the Mafia oftentimes). It’s just too big for a few kids from the states to fix. We wish them luck however, and I hope that somehow these gigantic issues can be dealt with soon. Otherwise, many people will begin to die out here in Kyrgyzstan as the water turns off for good in many of these communities. This is one of the shitty parts about being here. So many of the real problems are way beyond us and all we can do is sit and watch it all unfold. The government here needs to request Engineers, not freaking English Teachers. So, with a heavy heart we say no to Bakai-Ata. Like I said, if things don’t work out, we may be saying goodbye to Kyrgyzstan. We will keep you posted of course.

One Pair of Clean Underwear…One Soiled

2005-11-19T02:33:00.000-08:00

There is a saying among Peace Corps Volunteers everywhere that you aren’t a real volunteer until you crap your pants. They say this with a certain degree of pride and machismo (especially the guys) and when our group heard this, we were all kind of thinking, “hmm, that isn’t a club I want to be part of.” Well, on Sunday, November 13th, 2005, Chris became a real volunteer. We ate some sketchy food the day before at a little café in Bakai-Ata, and the spam-like fried sausages gave Chris some nasty action in his tummy. All seemed well, but when he woke up Sunday morning, a peculiar sensation was felt down below and seemingly without knowing it, there was definite soilage. Since that crappy village has no water, we couldn’t wash up properly and we had to endure a 7 hour cab ride back to our homes in Ak-Beshim. We jumped at the chance to have a banya (bath/ sauna) and we burned those undies in the fire that heated up our water. A fitting end to a good pair of underwear that dependably did its duty. All I could think of was that Simpsons episode when Homer joined the Stone Cutters, and as punishment for soiling their sacred parchment, they stripped him naked and burned his underwear, releasing some evil spirit that resided therein into the nether with a loud moan. I’m sure Chris’ was exorcised as well.

Barf!

2005-11-13T00:33:00.000-08:00

So, we wash our laundry with Barf detergent. We all get a kick out of this. This is but one of the many funny things you can buy here, another being all sorts of tee-shirts, coats, jackets, shoes, etc with random English words on it. I saw a spare tire on the back of a Toyota SUV (the model names are all different here, and I can’t remember the name of it right now, in the states it would have been a Rav-4) but this tire had a picture of a Siberian Husky on it with the word, “DANCER” splashed on the bottom of it in hot pink. Why? Who knows? We see shirts that say, “Quick!” and shoes that call out, “Sport Fox!” Hilarious. But someone at the Barf company must understand that their product sounds absurd in English, because in small print under the name, you can read, “Barf Means Snow.” Still, they print Barf in English letters, not Cyrillic, so I don’t know what’s going on there. English has a sort of status symbol quality here, and I guess it doesn’t matter what it says. Think of all the Americans that have tattoos of Chinese or Japanese characters which they can’t read. Maybe they have painted their skins with the equivalent of Quick Sport Fox, who knows. I’m sure the Chinese laugh at us too.

Packages

2005-11-05T22:43:00.000-08:00

Good news! We got your package from Yelm, and everything was intact and safe. The food was most welcome, as were everything else actually. We can’t thank you guys enough for sending it, it has brought a little bit of home into our hearts. Whenever a volunteer gets a package, everyone crowds around and looks into the goodie box for ideas on what they should ask for next time. Someone’s parents sent a totally random assortment of things. She got a harmonica with a Teach-Yourself-The-Blues booklet, a juggling set (we should note that she has never juggled, played the harmonica, nor expressed interest in either), a slew of travel brochures from the American South (she’s from Chicago, and again expressed no interest in the South), and a ton of the crappiest Halloween candy ever. We all laughed.

Malinda wanted me to post a new updated list of things we could use. We can find all the toiletries we need here, and medical supplies are at the touch of a button from the excellent medical staff here. What we are short of is food, food, and food. Volunteer shave begun to have the dreaded food dreams, which do not go away we hear. I dreamt of Fatburger many times, and Malinda has even dreamt of Taco Bell. It must be really bad if the crappiest, greasiest food brings so much sleepy happiness. The dreams are so lifelike, so detailed. I think I can smell the heavenly grease when I wake up, but it’s just the smell of burning coal or tires (the primary fuel here). We have both lost like 10-15 pounds already. My jeans are practically falling off, and I have one of those ghetto-boy poop sack things going on in my crotch area now. Anyway, here is a list we compiled as we fantasized about future meals:

Peanut Butter!!!
Oreos, Chips Ahoy & Nutter Butters
Doritos (nacho)
Flaming Hot Cheetos or Regular
Lemon-Ade and Crystal Lite Drink Mixes
Mixed Nuts
Chocolate Protein Bars
Granola Bars
Instant Flavored Oatmeal
Fun-Sized Candy Bars
Hot Chocolate powder
Chili Seasoning Mix
Chili Powder
Cumin
Italian Seasoning
Dried Oregano
BBQ Sauce
Stove Top (chicken)
Mac and Cheese
Any DVDs

Our Permanent Site

2005-11-05T22:40:00.000-08:00

Today we all found out where we will be spending the next 2 years of our lives- an important day for sure. This day was eagerly anticipated by everyone, and I’d say most people are either happy or at least not disappointed with their site placement. We had absolutely no say in where we’d go, though they did a good job at letting us think that we did. They gave us little interviews and asked us what we’d want or absolutely not want in our site placements a few weeks ago, but it was all for show. The Peace Corps had made these decisions for us probably before we arrived in country. So, drumroll… Malinda and I will be living in the village of Bakai-Ata in Talas Oblast. An Oblast is the equivalent of a county. There are 7 Oblasts in Kyrgyzstan. Talas (northwest), Chui (north central, where we live now), Issyk-Kol (northeast with the big huge lake), Jalalabat (west), Naryn (central mountainous Oblast), Osh (southeast) and Batken (southwest where no Americans are allowed to go). Our village of Bakai-Ata is about 30 minute by car southwest of Talas City, which is on most maps of Kyrgyzstan. This region is the bean capital of the country (whoo-hoo! beans!), and is pretty rural. Malinda is working with some kindergarten NGO (non-governmental organization), and we can’t figure out what it is that they do. It sounds like it’s just a school that somehow convinced Peace Corps that it’s an NGO. We don’t have high hopes for it because so many NGOs end up being big jokes. Anyone can become an NGO in Kyrgyzstan for 200 som (about 5 bucks). Think of that. For $5, you can register yourself with the government as a not-for-profit organization. Then you can con people like the Peace Corps into sending you a volunteer as free labor. You can then pocket all of the money that volunteer brings in and nobody cares. It’s a great system. We’ll see if hers is legit. Most NGO volunteers end up teaching English anyway because there’s nothing to do most of the time because these NGOs barely exist anyway. It’s usually just one or two people pretending to be an organization. I am teaching at what is supposed to be a good school, with lots of resources. Again, we’ll see. A lot of resources in Kyrgyzstan means they have donkey carts to bring the children to school. But right now, our sites are just words on a map. On Tuesday the 8th we get to visit them though, and that will be an eye opener I think.

Unfortunately, many of the volunteers that became friends over the last 2 months are being split up, and we are sad to see our friend Jennifer being placed way over on Lake Issyk-Kol (it’s the big huge lake on the map), about 10 hours away by car. That’s a real bummer. Some people were placed in the middle of nowhere, way up in the mountains with no other volunteers around for a hundred kilometers or more. Some were very happy with their placements, particularly the people who got sites in the South, and those on Lake Issyk-Kol. The Lake is a tourist spot, and is more developed. The South is warmer and there is access to fruits and vegetables year round. The Oblast of Naryn has a reputation for being a cesspool, and everyone dreaded being placed there. Some people of course were devastated with their placements, and I expect some people will quit soon. For the record, the volunteers that cried over their placement were in Naryn. We truly feel for those that are not happy with their placements. As for us, we aren’t jumping up and down in fits of joy with our Talas placement, but right now we aren’t crying either. There will be another volunteer from Seattle coming with us to live in our village, which is nice, and the people in our Oblast are cool, so we’ll become close friends over time, and I think that will help.

The good news is, our village has a new cell phone tower, and we will be getting a cell phone very soon. While it will be prohibitively expensive for us to call the States for very long, it will be very cheap for you to call us. The cheapest way for you would be to go to a Middle Eastern or Asian food store somewhere and get an international phone card. You can also go to UnionTelecard.com, and get very cheap rates for cards. It will be like 10 bucks for an hour. For us, it will be way too much, given our living allowance. Most volunteers call the States enough to say, “Call me back,” and then hang up and wait. When we get our cell, we’ll post the number on the How To Contact Us page as well as instructions on how the hell you go about calling Kyrgyzstan.

Stars

2005-10-26T00:33:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to say that the skies here are gorgeous. We can see every star, every night. Layers and layers of stars. So many that the familiar belt of Orion is actually difficult to find because behind it and in front of it are all these other stars so that he is not an obvious shape in the sky anymore. We can see a planet, I want to say it is Mars because of its red/ orange color in the eastern sky, and it gleams as if some god were holding up a candle in the darkness to see by. It is quite amazing. The Milky Way is not some haze that you have to allow your eyes to adjust to see, but a clear and distinct mass of white stretching overhead. I go out and stare at the stars whenever I can, and I think my family thinks I’m weird for doing it. I wonder if they have any stories of the constellations that they can recall. I wonder if they did once, but they now have forgotten them. Traveling nomads would have said something about the night sky, it seems to me. If they know of these stories, they are mute about it now.

Kyrgyz Economics

2005-10-26T00:30:00.000-07:00

Jeremy posted a comment that he would like to know why the Kyrgyz priorities are misplaced. Here is my admittedly inexpert response to this question after one month here. The reality of Kyrgyz economic life is there is little economic life. Unemployment is incredibly high here. Most people do not have jobs at all, and when they do, it is never stable. Most men spend most of the year idle, and that is the sad truth. There simply aren’t jobs. No one has capital to invest, and the Kyrgyz have little experience in business. They were horse nomads until the 20th century, then under the Soviets, they were basically slaves in the collectives. The Soviets built everything they have in terms of infrastructure, and after 13 years without that government to run things, everything is falling apart. Food is grown in the south, but the roads are impassable in the winter, so the north and the center go without most foods for 4 months or so. Telephones sometimes work, sometimes they don’t. Running water is not guaranteed either. In short, incentives for entrepreneurship are limited. Conditions are such that small business cannot get enough capital to become big business, and big business is tied to the state. Many volunteers that have been here for a year or two talk about the lack of a work ethic here, and I think it has something to do with an inherited collective social structure. Under the Soviets, everything was done on collectives. The ruins of collective farms are everywhere, and the village has always been the most important social network for the Kyrgyz. This emphasis on collective work, collective action, village identity, etc. has maybe lead to a lifestyle that deemphasizes profit, markets, entrepreneurship and individuality. Put this together with an economy that relies on raw materials like gold, and other minerals, with few exports, and you get a society that seeks to meets its needs without worry about gain or growth. Most people grow a portion of their own food, and all their dwellings were built during the collective years. Villages don’t grow, people just move to the cities- of which there are less than 10. Contentment has set in, and it stifles innovation and suffocates markets.

The basics of market economics simply are not present in this society. Take the bazaar for example. The bazaar is the principal institution for the buying and selling of goods here. A bazaar is basically a row of maybe 100 little stands, all of which sell the exact same goods for the exact same price. Stand upon stand upon stand will display the same things for a good half mile. Farmers do not sort their produce for some reason, so every stand will have, say a pile of apples, some good, some clearly bruised and rotten. You buy produce by the kilo, and the stand owner just gives you a random assortment of them. You will get some good, some bad. Americans demand that we get the good ones only, and we’ll argue with them about it, but your average Kyrgyz just doesn’t think much about this for some reason. The concept of taking the good apples and charging more for them simply does not exist here. We all know if you did this, customers would begin to demand only good apples and the rotten ones would never sell. This would force the farmers or the bazaar owners to stop buying the rotten apples from the farmers. As it is now, there is no shortage of apples, so tons of them go to waste anyway. Why not let the ones that are already rotten go to waste and let the people buy the good apples? Who knows. I don’t have an answer for it. It will take more time to figure that one out.

As for why the Kyrgyz have cell phones, DVDs, and Mercedes, but not plumbing, medical infrastructure or sanitation of any kind is easier to answer. The government is weak. In March of this year, the former government was forced out by a small mob of protestors and looters that set fire to a few houses and roughed up some government officials. The government could do nothing about such a small demonstration, so everyone knows how vulnerable it is now. It is a government put into power by a riot, and it knows it can be just as easily replaced next year. Corruption is a major problem because the government doesn’t exist in many important ways. After the privatization of the Soviet collectives, the only tax revenue that I see is in the form of bribes, extortion and license fees, and state provided utilities. The government cannot even pay their own employees much less repair roads, build power stations, or educate their people. But let me say this to clarify. In the villages, they don’t have DVDs, cell phones or much at all. They do have Mercedes, which is really strange to me. I can’t imagine how they afford them, but alas they are there. Their basic needs are met- they have food most of the time, water most of the time, and they have somewhere to sleep that is warm. Most of the heating is done by sheer body heat. Cram 6 people into a room the size of modest bathroom and it stays pretty warm. Of course, everyone gets sick because of it…but that’s another post. The point is, they have what they need to survive, and they have more per person now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, and they are not accustomed to seeking more. I see it as a cultural thing at this point. They don’t have the tools or skills to make any major changes in their lives, and most needs are met for the time being. I fear that in the next 10 years though, the water lines will be beyond repair, streets will wash away, electric lines will disintegrate, and the government won’t have any way to fix it. This process is already very much under way. Stuff just breaks, and so it sits there forever, broken and unused. Soon, all of Kyrgyzstan may be like this. Anywho, I will constantly modify my impression of Kyrgyzstan I’m sure, but at this moment, this is what I see.

Death in the Family

2005-10-19T02:00:00.000-07:00

I am just posting to tell you that we’re sick again. Everyone is sick here. Our host brother, father and mother are all sick to some degree, as are many other volunteers and their families. A volunteer couple’s host father died 2 days ago, and things have been a little weird for them. The Kyrgyz go through 2-3 days of ritualized, ceremonial mourning upon the death of one of their own. I thought it might be interesting to you back home to describe what goes on when these things happen.

The family erects a yurt on their property in the event of a death, and the body is displayed inside it for 2 days. Family, friends, etc come in large parades to the yurt to show their respect, and wish the family better luck in the future. “May he be the last in your family to die” is what they said. The women don their formal wears, which is basically a bath robe with a head scarf or a nice looking Kyrgyz dress that looks like a heavy winter coat you’d find at a Renaissance Fair. The men wear kalpaks, the traditional Kyrgyz felt hats that you see in travel books. Google kalpak, and you’ll find plenty of images. They line up and take turns in the yurt viewing the deceased and consoling the survivors. Traditionally, they would erupt into a loud and emotionally intense wailing. Crying they call it. But it is hard-core crying. They wail and scream, and ball their eyes out. This goes on for along time. Americans, and most Westerners are subdued when death comes. They cry, but it is nothing compared to what the Kyrgyz do. Americans sit in their quiet funeral parlors, and reflect on death and the life that is now taken from them in reserved contemplation. Of course, people get emotional in the states too, but our approach to death is completely different. The Kyrgyz explode with emotion, all at once. Americans ruminate about it over a longer time I think. I don’t think either system is any better than the other, but I think that in places where death is common, and frequent (this is the 2nd death in 2 weeks for our tiny village of about 600 people), perhaps it is better to get the grieving over quickly. In their brevity though, they do not sacrifice any meaning or intensity. Death anniversaries are usually observed the following year by erecting the yurt again and hosting friends and families with much food and vodka. For our volunteers that have to stay in the house where all of this is taking place, it is a bit much. I think they feel weird being thrust into such an emotional environment when they can barely communicate, and they don’t really know how to behave. I know it would be weird for us if, heaven forbid one of our family members die. Our Ata (father) has been sick since we arrived, and I don’t know how sick he really is. But, our host families really do think of us as family members, and if our responsibilities are not crystal clear in such trying times, we do not shrink from them. I know that couple will deal with this tragedy with dignity and will reflect positively on the Peace Corps and our country.

Italiaski

2005-10-19T01:59:00.000-07:00

Last night, Malinda and I took it upon ourselves to make the family dinner. We decided to go for Italian food, as you can find most of the ingredients here, even basil, which somewhat surprised me. They have so many tomatoes here, and no one seems to know any decent recipes. They usually just make borscht out of them, which I see as a gigantic waste. When you go to restaurants here, they all serve the same stuff that everyone makes at home! If the standard food isn’t on the menu, the Kyrgyz somehow feel cheated. So day in, day out they eat the same thing. We needed a break. So, with the help of another volunteer couple that we have become fast friends with, we doctored up a really kick-ass red sauce and pasta dish, with garlic bread to boot! Thank god they brought some oregano- mom and dad, please send Italian Seasoning!!! After a month of incredible oily soup, this was a welcome change. I tried to explain to our family that all of this wonderful food could be made with only a teaspoon of oil (sunflower oil in my family’s case) but I don’t know if I was successful. Usually they really load up their food with oil, so that their bowels are well lubricated. Not so good for us pasty white folk. Oh man, the food was sooooo good. Like I said, this may seem like no big deal to all of you back home, but it was truly an event for us. You have Italian food (Italiaski tamak)? Way the hell out here? Sign me up!! We will be talking about this meal for weeks. Here’s to hoping you never go so long without food you want to eat. Maybe they’ll want us to cook again soon. Chili is on the menu next time. But we have to hurry, because once winter comes, we will only have onions, potatoes, carrots and cabbage to eat for about 3 months. Yippee!

Lost Priorities

2005-10-15T02:43:00.000-07:00

The Kyrgyz have their priorities out of whack. The Kyrgyz Republic is a country of cell phones, DVDs, Mercedes Benzes, car alarms and MTV, but they all take a dump in an outhouse, have no germ control mechanisms to speak of, no refrigeration, no heaters, and have no doctors worth the title. The government here refused to request health volunteers from the Peace Corps, something that I think they sorely need. So much disease would disappear if a few basic safeguards were worked into daily life. Like washing dishes. All they do is rinse out a cup or fork, etc with cold water until most of the food is gone. Many things like cups and silverware is communal in a sense here, and every time I use a spoon I can’t help but hope that the last guy to use it wasn’t sick. I have already been sick with a flu-like bug, and it just made me more paranoid about the utensils I use and the hands that I shake.

A Day in the Life

2005-10-15T02:42:00.000-07:00

My day starts off with me having to pee in the middle of the night most nights. The outhouse is a good walk away, and it’s usually cold outside, very dark, and any mistake in the outhouse could lead to many more troubles for you. For instance, a volunteer dropped her flashlight down the poop hole after throwing up her dinner, so for four or five days, everyone had a really good view of what was down there from the flashlight beam, as those Energizer batteries kept on going and going. Touching anything in the outhouse is not a good idea, so I decided to skip all my trips to the outhouse to go #1 altogether. I now pee into a Fanta bottle at night, and dump it out in the morning. Sorry for that gross aside there.

We wake up to the sounds of crowing roosters and the Call to Prayer from a Saudi-built mosque down the street. Every village here has a brand spanking new mosque, and in our village, a total of 4 people use it. It’s the funniest crap I have ever seen. Two people go one Friday, and the other two go the next Friday, taking turns. Hilarious. The Saudis are really trying to spread the word of Islam here, and the Kyrgyz just ignore it for the most part. The Uzbeks on the other hand, love the whole Muslim shtick, and they are really into it. We brush our teeth with filtered water, precious filtered water, and wash our face with water from a gravity-powered faucet. That’s the extent of weekday bathing, except when we go #2, we insist on washing up afterwards. This is fine now, while it’s relatively warm, but I am not looking forward to doing this in January, when it’s -40 degrees. Celsius. I am not kidding.

We grab a few minutes of tea, which is nice in the morning, and maybe an apple or a piece of bread. Then we hop into a marshrutka and go to our training in the town of Tokmok, about 10 minutes drive away. A marshrutka is basically a Russian mini-van that acts as a short-distance taxi, just with more space for other passengers. They usually are packed in like sardines. Training is a long, boring series of meetings and lectures, from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm. We get an hour for lunch, and we usually have a packed lunch that we throw away because our family packs things like scrambled eggs, weird sausages, stale crackers and boiled, peeled potatoes. These are things that do not hold up well in a lunch sack after five hours, especially the eggs and sausage. Occasionally, we can go to an internet cafй or the post office during this break.

Then we catch the same marshrutka home, where we try to stay in our room as much as possible, doing homework, listening to our iPod or reading. The family serves tea at 6:00, and then dinner at 7:00 or so. Dinner can be either really good or really bad. Yesterday we had lamb dumplings in a borscht-like broth, and it was good. Today we had besh-barmak, which is spaghetti noodles tossed in lots of beef or sheep fat, and topped with some kind of diced meat. That was bad. The company is friendly though, but the exhaustion that goes with struggling through a broken conversation gets us ready for bed. We wash up again, this time with a little hot water left over from cooking dinner. Then we try to sleep as well as we can, but we do it on a sofa that folds out to an almost full-size bed. The pillows and cushions they use here (called a toeshoek) are awesome, and we’ll have to buy a few before we come home. The pillows are hard and the tцshцks are firm like Japanese mats, but not as hard as tatami. They are definitely Persian in design and are really comfortable.

This process continues all week, and then on Sundays, we get to do laundry and bathe. These things take several hours to do, so Sundays are a day of chores and maybe visiting other volunteers. Today, I am doing a lot of writing and reading, not bothering to study so much. I tend to study on weekdays. But that’s it for us for now. In December, we get assigned a site, and then we will have to go to work on weekdays, instead of training. I’ll write another day in the life post when we are on our own.

To Develop or Not to Develop

2005-10-15T02:41:00.000-07:00

I went to Jalal-abad in the south last week, and there we stayed with a volunteer named Brian. He loves Kyrgyzstan (he has it really good there though) and he loves what he calls “family values” here. What he means is the value that is placed on the family as a support network, and the closeness that families are here. The US family is disintegrating with increased independence of the individual, and he doesn’t like that very much. Neither do I. I wouldn’t call my family close, and most of us probably see our families a few times a year, and we get annoyed after several days with them. Am I right? Well, here it is a different story. The family is always here, they never leave, hehe. Here, families are necessary as most people are unemployed for most of the year. In the States, most of us are able to get by by ourselves or with our spouses. We don’t need the family there all the time. Such is modern life in a capitalist society. Many of you back home may wish that we didn’t throw our elderly into old folks homes, and that families stayed more together. It seems better doesn’t it? We seem so alone in the states, so fiercely independent. Maybe having closer families would be better, and we would be happier. I hope this doesn’t sound really red-state. But, red-states have seen their communities fall apart with drugs, teen-pregnancy, divorce and abuse. Blue states don’t have near the problems with these issues as red ones do, that’s why the whole Family Values thing comes from the Reds. But, I think we can all agree that the way families work (or don’t work) in the states may not be the best system.

I was thinking, if our mission here is to help Kyrgyzstan develop, are we sowing the seeds of the disintegration of the family unit? With economic development, and material advancement, we are encouraging more independence, market capitalism, and all the things that have broken up families in the states over the last century. Are close families and market capitalism mutually exclusive? Remember the Adam Smith (maybe Locke, I can’t look it up here) metaphor about poor family-centered Catholics and prosperous, individually minded Protestants? Perhaps the Peace Corps mission is really the new version of White Man’s Burden, the grand Civilizing Mission of the new American Empire. There is something distressing about our role in a larger scheme of cultural domination as Peace Corps volunteers. Are we agents of a weird plan to make other cultures as close as possible to our own, but without giving them the tools to outdo us in the economic or military spheres? Perhaps we are.

My Wife Went to Kyrgyzstan, and All I Got Was This Lousy Dysentery

2005-10-15T02:40:00.000-07:00

So, I have been having some emotional problems since I got here. This is Chris typing here, nothing here is about Malinda’s thoughts. I will let her post those things on her own.

A funny thing happens when you travel somewhere totally foreign. Every person will go through a series of emotions, not exactly in the same order. Many travelers go through a Fascination stage, where everything in the new place is exciting, exotic, new, and all is good. All fears and annoyances are suppressed in a wave of euphoric emotions, as the experience of new things overwhelms everything else. Then, after a time, things begin to get on their nerves, they yearn for familiar things, for familiar faces, words, and sights. The Fascination gives way to Rejection of the new place.

I have been in the Rejection phase since I got here. What made it worse was everyone else was in Fascination mode. I got so sick of hearing about how all the other volunteers “loved it here.” I have not yet felt anything close to love about Kyrgyzstan. I thought maybe something was wrong with me, since I was not enjoying what everyone else seemed so happy to savor. I was not seeing it, and I still have not seen it. Malinda and I fought a lot, usually because I was in a sort of depressed, mopey state all the time, and whenever I would mention the fact that I was not happy, she would jump on me, asking why we came here in the first place. Having no good answer, I just bottled it up. I don’t know why I am here. So far, there have been no positive rewards for coming here. Training sucks, the place smells like a mixture of cow and human shit, the food is weird, and it makes everyone sick all the time, the toilets are nasty, I can’t communicate with any locals, it’s really cold already, washing anything is a pain in the ass, especially washing yourself and laundry, and there is absolutely no privacy here. People tell me that I am setting myself up for failure by thinking this way. They are probably right. But this week, I felt justified, in a twisted way for thinking the way I do. Everyone else in our group has been just neverending sunshine, never getting sad, never getting annoyed, and always telling me that I was wrong for feeling the way I did. But apparently, the stress was just bubbling under their skins without them knowing it. All of the sudden, I saw three people break down in tears, and I felt good that they were finally feeling bad. I do not feel guilty for this at all. I was actually happy that they were sad. It sounds awful, but it is reality. Some cried, some began yelling at the country director for Peace Corps, some vented by drinking, some made themselves sick.

I concluded from this that I was not wrong for feeling like I did. I just skipped over the Fascination phase. Maybe I’ll have it later. I was quicker to look into the future and see that in December, when we are turned loose to do our jobs on our own, alone, out there in wild, wild Kyrgyzstan, there won’t be much to be happy about. We will be dumped into another new community in the dead of winter, with language skills akin to 3 year olds, and virtually no structure to help us out. Many of the other volunteers are young, and in my opinion just naпve about the world. They see this as party time. So far, I have not been able to see any fun in being here, but who knows. I might have a change of heart. Every morning I wake up, and I look around to figure out where I am. Then it hits me. Oh yeah, I’m still in Kyrgyzstan.

Most of the other trainees spend a lot of time with each other. In the long run, this makes them dependent on English, dependent on the presence of other Americans, and dependent on company. The class of 2003 has lost 1/2 of their volunteers, and their retention rate is actually high for Peace Corps. Statistically, something like 60% of volunteers will quit early, either by choice or by forced medical evacuation. The class of 2003 (called K-11 because they are the 11th group of trainees to Kyrgyzstan- we are K-13) has lost 25% just from forced medical evacuation. For what diseases, I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want to know.

I feel very alone here. Even with Malinda, I feel alone. Even though I am never really alone, even though someone is always telling me where to go, what to do, shoving food in my face…whatever, I still feel like I am just floating through life here, without purpose, without meaning. I am tired all the time, exhausted with simply being here. Everything is a struggle, nothing is convenient, fun or even beautiful. Kyrgyzstan is not beautiful, like the travel books say. The whole country looks like it is falling apart, with buildings barely standing, old Soviet era infrastructure in shambles, with no new era infrastructure to replace it, animal dung everywhere, dust on everything, and no sense of landscaping, or maintenance of any kind. It all just brings me down. The place just looks desperate, and that desperation creeps into the souls of everyone that lives here. Especially me, it seems. In the states I would experience bouts of mild depression I think, though it was never diagnosed. Here, it seems worse. I don’t know what will become of me here, but I will hope for the best. I am very fortunate to have Malinda here with me. I need someone, but she isn’t the easiest person to talk to about these things, because she gets defensive about it. If I feel sad, she thinks I will make her go home early, and she wants to finish, no matter what. She’s stronger than me on this issue, and she’ll have to prop me up I think many times in the future. I am not ashamed to say this. Life is hard here. I don’t wish it on anyone. I hope things get better soon.

Damn I Want a Pizza

2005-10-15T02:39:00.000-07:00

I am so tired of Kyrgyz food already, lol. They cook everything in Cottonseed Oil, Sunflower Oil or rendered sheep or beef fat and all leave a distinct and unpleasant taste in your mouth/ stomach/ burps/ etc. I taste the stuff no matter where I am, and the air in the village is thick with the smell of it. If you have ever had cottonseed oil, and I had not before coming here, you probably will not request it ever again. One of the volunteers said that he could never spend his money on anything, because there wasn’t much to buy where he was. Then he discovered that they get Twix here…now he’s broke. Thank God that Kyrgyzstan gets regular supplies of Snickers, Twix, Coca-cola, and Orange Fanta (even if it’s always warm- ice is civilization you know).

Windows B.C.

2005-10-15T02:36:00.000-07:00

Internet cafes here are interesting places. They are all owned and operated by Russian families, as are most profitable enterprises here. But there seems to be a scam going on. All you need is something that resembles a computer, and on that computer, an icon that resembles Internet Explorer. When clicked, something resembling a browser should appear, and it should look like it is loading data somehow. Then, after 10 minutes of this, it should display the familiar “Unable to Load Page” screen that we have all come to hate so much. Ta-daa! It turns out you can charge people for this “use” of the internet here. It’s quite amazing. And they have a bandwidth monitoring program (in Cyrillic of course) that tells you how much you have used if you want to try to argue about it in our non-existent Russian. Often, to console you, they will reboot the computer, and you will see that their OS is some weird Russian version of Windows 95. Man. One of the volunteers called it Windows B.C. and I thought that was just too funny. By the way, Kyrgyz internet has a hard time with Hotmail and MSN for some reason. We are going to use our yahoo address much more often from now on. Mine is cuatican@yahoo.com, and Malinda’s is pillowholly@yahoo.com for those that want to know. When they can load Hotmail, we will use it because it is superior to Yahoo in many ways.

Kyrgyz Nazgul

2005-10-04T21:13:00.000-07:00

I forgot to post this tidbit, but it turns out that Nazgul is a woman's name here. We know several Nazguls already, but I can't help thinking they are evil when I meet them.

Jalal-abad

2005-10-04T20:50:00.000-07:00

So, we are in Jalalabad city right now, visiting a fellow volunteer for a few days. Jalal-abad is down south, close to Osh, and his community has a big Uzbek population. For those lucky enough to maybe have heard some Kyrgyzstan news lately, a bunch of Uzbek refugees fled to Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan is asking that they be returned. The US and the UN are pressuring Kyrgyzstan not to return them, on the grounds that they will be tortured upon their return. So, right now in the south, it is tense on ethnic issues, but we have had no problems so far.

Jalal-abad is an agricultural region, whereas the north and central Kyrgyzstan is pastoral and semi-agricultural. This is the breadbasket of the country, and it shows in the makeup of the towns. Uzbek houses have high walls (so that no one sees their wives, goes the Kyrgyz joke) and have more Western-style homes, with private areas, and closed, connected rooms. Kyrgyz houses have few rooms, virtually no private space and generally less sanitary conditions, with animals very close to humans. Uzbeks, with their more conservative muslim attitude, tend to distance themselves from animals, and are generally cleaner.

Chris is sick with a flu-like laryngitis-like bug, which has floored him on a few nights, but Malinda is doing fine so far. After the food-poisoning, there hasn't been a repeat of food-related illness with us. Though several other volunteers get sick every day because of the high amounts of oil and fat in the diet here.

Other than that, we are on a tight schedule here, we just wanted to check in and post some new content. We like getting your comments, it helps to hear any little piece of life back home. Thanks CA for your penetrating observations :)

First Week in Ak-Beshim (pronounced AHK- bay-SHIM)

2005-09-28T21:31:00.000-07:00

Our last day in the relatively posh hotel Issyk-Kul in the capital of Bishkek was deceptively comfortable, with a western-style breakfast of sunny side up eggs, sliced fried sausages and porridge, with tea of course- they drink tea all the time here. Then, we were to load up our belongings into a moving truck, and we were off to the city of Tokmok to finally meet our host families. Everyone was nervous, and no one knew what to expect. Until then, the Kyrgyz people we had met spoke English, and lived a rather urbanized, modern existence. We were now going to meet real Kyrgyz.

The bus wound through dusty boroughs of suburban Bishkek, with cattle herds, donkeys, carts, and little dilapidated Lada cars bustling their way to wherever they were going, and the smells of cooking fat and baking bread in the air. As we drove by, the young people on the street would either stare at the bus full of foreigners with intent gazes, or would flip us off- whichever suited them at the moment. Finally, we arrived at a restaurant in Tokmok, and we immediately saw some 150 or so Kyrgyz mothers and fathers, standing in the shaded parts of the parking lot and entrance to the restaurant, waiting for us. They stared at us, trying to peer into the bus from a distance just as intently as we stared back. I don’t think any of us were especially eager to get out of the bus, I know I wasn’t. I was nervous, and to tell the truth a bit scared of what I may find out there, in the crowd.

The driver got out, and he opened the bus doors for us. We were given the signal to get out, and we filed out onto the pavement in a line. The crowd of Kyrgyz parted like a line of peasants greeting their king and queen, and this made me even more nervous. We smiled as we walked past them, offering the few words we knew in Kyrgyz to them. “Salamtsyzby (hello)” and “Kandaisiz? (how are you)?” I didn’t want to get into a conversation, so I just smiled and whispered a nervous greeting. We entered the restaurant, and we saw the tables arranged by village. By this point, we knew what village we would stay in (Ak-Beshim) and Malinda and I found the table and sat down, hoping that the chaos that was developing would reach some critical mass of organization. Soon, we were given a piece of paper with our names on one side, and the name Murotova, Razia on the other. People eventually found their families, and we were paired up with an older woman, I’d say in her 50’s, our Apa (mother). She looked gentle, calm and grandmotherly. This proved to be an accurate first impression. Having nothing much to say to each other, we all sat down and hounded the dozen or so Language Coaches that spoke Kyrgyz, Russian and English to do some basic translations for us. With 200 people trying to communicate through a dozen coaches, the scene was funny and pathetic at the same time. We had had one day of language instruction before getting this far, and it showed.

The meal was naan (unleavened bread for those that don’t know), greasy fried rice (all the rice is greasy as the Kyrgyz use lots of oil or fat in their food as an adaptation to extreme cold), chunks of roasted beef, tea (chai in Kyrgyz), and freshly picked fruit. We ate and stumbled through the language, wondering what the next 11 weeks were going to be like. After lunch though, it was time to go to home. Another chaotic mess of luggage and tired volunteers to get through, and then we were on our way.

Apa and Ata

Our Ata (father) is a cool old guy, skinny and worn with time and hardship. He drove us home in his green Lada (an Russian car make), to a little farm just off the main road, Lenin Street. The house is painted turquoise blue, with a few chickens, a single cow named Marta, a field for vegetables, a small store where they sell Marta’s milk, soap, vodka, candies, cakes, cigarettes, and detergent, and other household goods, like a very small Mini-Mart. There is a swing in the back yard, and a stable for the cow. Then there is the banya- the place where all bathing takes place. It is not a shower, not a bath. Think of it as a sauna, but one big enough only for 2-3 people. The Kyrgyz bathe usually on Saturdays only. Some will douche (military shower with cold water) maybe on Mondays and Wednesdays, but this is the exception rather than the rule. And to top it off, there are the latrines. They are outhouses. Very stinky outhouses that don’t get cleaned very often. We have gotten into the habit of going #2 and immediately having a little douche session.

Jengei and Malinda
We live with an extended family. There is the Ata and Apa of course, and there is their 5th and youngest son Serik. But, their eldest son’s wife, Jengei (Jeng-ay) lives here with her two kids, a 12 year old son Ruston-bek (Roost-on-bek) and a really cute 10 year old girl, Saule (Sa-oo-leh) and she does most of the housework here. Daughters-in-law are handy things, as they are basically servants to the son’s family after marriage. They do all the cleaning, most of the cooking, and help with just about everything. In Kyrgyzstan, the men tend the animals, and work in the fields. In the last decade, many men have been going to Russia, Kazakhstan, even Turkey to work. They will be away for months at a time, and will come back home with the winter’s money. The women stay back and tend the house, children, and will often make rugs, handicrafts, or sell fresh bread, etc. For us, this means we see Apa (mother) all the time, and rarely see Ata (father).

Saule and Malinda

The food I think is not so bad. It is fatty, but our Apa is a good cook, and so is Jengei. We have gotten meals like borscht, roasted chicken and mashed potatoes, lots of yummy naan, various cookies and little cakes, some rice but not a lot, dumplings, and pasta. So, we are not going without here. Theirs is a culture of hospitality, so you cannot get away with visiting a friend without having to sit down for tea and cookies, or even to have some of their dinner. Some volunteers actually gain weight because of this. I think we will lose in the end, because winter is fast approaching, and their diet degenerates into onions, carrots, cabbage and potatoes when all the vegetables are not in season. Speaking of veggies, the produce here is very fresh- Whole Foods quality organic produce, just like it used to be before pesticides.

Ruston-Bek

The first few days here, Malinda got really sick from some bad eggs we all ate in Bishkek. Chris did not eat the eggs of course, because he doesn’t like them, so he escaped a bout of raging diarrhea and vomiting. We had one of the worst cases of food poisoning the Peace Corps doctors had ever seen, and their facilities were strapped to find blankets, beds, IV’s etc. But, we all managed to get through it with only 2 volunteers deciding to go back to the States. Poor Malinda, she threw up for the first time in 15 years right there at the entrance to the elementary school we were training in. We surmised it was the tea she had that morning. Chris has never had a problem with the food or tea (so far), but tea can be dangerous because it isn’t really boiled for very long, and so it may not be safe. We have decided not to drink milk, to eat cheese, eggs, or the weird horse sausage everyone else seems to have to put up with. We were given a water distiller that completely purifies a gallon of water every 4 hours, and we use this water exclusively to drink and to brush our teeth. This thing is awesome! Peace Corps volunteers end up being water snobs after their service because of this thing.

We hope to include some pictures of our village and our host house here in Ak-Beshim. We hope you are all doing well, and that life in the US goes smoother than it does here!! Nothing goes as planned here, but this is the developing world. Life is on a different time scale here. Kyrgyzstan is no Shangri-La, but they manage with what they have very well. The Soviet Union provided the country with roads, electricity, plumbing, etc. but not the means to make roads, to generate electricity, or to maintain water systems. So, everything here has a dilapidated look to it. Everything is falling apart from neglect, and I hope that the Peace Corps and the many NGOs working in the region do some lasting good for these people. They have a kind spirit, and deserve much better than what they have.

That said, development is a difficult thing to achieve. The Russians here (about 30% of the population) have toilets, but the Kyrgyz choose not to have them. They have seen toilets, but they simply decide not to use them, for economic reasons or for cultural reasons. Sometimes you want to just force them to use toilets, but we have to realize that what they have makes sense for their environment. If something works, and is better than what they had before, they will use it. Unfortunately for volunteers, toilets don’t seem to work for the Kyrgyz. I am reminded of the head scarves in Afghanistan. Americans like to think that they have liberated Afghani women and freed them of the choking head wear, but a month after the war, the women started putting them back on, to the chagrin of many feminists. It just doesn’t work for their culture, so they don’t use it. C’est–la-vie.

Hello From Kyrgyzstan!

2005-09-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone! We have just a few minutes here in an internet cafe in Bishkek, so I thought I'd drop a line to let you know we arrived safely, but with much anxiety, stress and many problems. More on that in a bit. First, the news. Malinda and I have been assigned to learn Kyrgyz, and not Russian. This means we will not likely be in a city at all- perhaps in a small isolated village up in the mountains. We won't know where exactly until November. This means, internet access may be sporadic, and there is the potential to see some yurt action in the summertime.

So far, we have seen only Bishkek, the capital. Today, we are moving in with our host family in a village called Ak-Beshim. It is known for some cool archaeology involving Buddhism's move through Central Asia, so you may be able to Google it and get some info. Please do, as we will not be able to do so ourselves today. Maybe put a link to some site as a comment on the blog so I can get there easily. Bishkek is very Russian, with industrial sprawl on the outskirts, Russian pop culture everywhere, and a surprising amount of Mercedes. The Kyrgyz that live here are called "New Kyrgyz"- that is they love cell phones, rap, tight hip-hugger jeans, stiletto high heels, etc. The hotel we were put up in has a Soviet feel. Scary elevators that haven't been serviced since Gorbechev was in power, electricity with frequent power surges, no upkeep of the grounds, but overall, it is livable, if only for a little while. I made a joke a while back about how I imagined the toilet paper over here to be old issues of Pravda on a roll. Well, it's not that far off. The toilet paper is really a roll of cray (sp?) paper. It is VERY rough, the color and texture of recycled grocery bags, and in rolls too small to do the job for very long.

As for health, we are both doing fine, despite the diarrhea that Malinda has already. We got tons of immunizations, and promises of more to come. The water in the hotel is safe to use for brushing your teeth- surprising since it apparently is not safe in Moscow- but not for drinking. The food is mostly horsemeat, pasta, vegetables spiced with a lot of dill, canned cherry juice (it could be plum juice, our group can’t tell) and plain yoghurt drank as if it were milk. The tea is good though, and the meat isn’t nearly as bad as we thought it might be. It tastes like a roast cooked in a crock-pot actually. They eat some sort of spam meat all the time too.

As for the problems, there were many. We got to Istanbul after a terrible, long, hot, cramped flight to find out that one of our volunteers was deleted from the flight list, and his tickets were nowhere in their computers. The guy, Christian got pissed off, and began yelling at the clerks. Bad move. They punished him for this by refusing to talk to him, telling him it was his problem now and they weren’t going to do anything about it. This was a lesson in patience for him. He was guarded by Turkish security for the six hours that we had as a layover, and not allowed to be with our group. The group meanwhile, crashed on the floor- 66 exhausted Americans, by this time awake for 25 hours straight, with all their bags strewn all over the lobby. We had an Italian family come over and take pictures of themselves pretending to be asleep with us, and everyone else was staring and taking photos of their own to show to their friends no doubt. After calling Bishkek several times, only to discover that their offices were not open yet (it was like 4:00 am there at the time), we were all worried about how Christian would get to Kyrgyzstan. At the very last minute, literally the last minute, we were all boarding the plane and we saw security bringing Christian up to get a boarding pass. We all cheered, and he was a little celebrity. They stuck him in first class, the bastard. We figured out that this was all a torture strategy on the part of Turkish Airlines, and I think Christian won’t react so typically American again when things don’t go his way. Neither will we.

Anyway, we have to get going, the other volunteers need to email their families too. As soon as we can get online again, we will post to the blog with some pictures. We miss you guys!

Love,
Chris and Malinda

Itinerary

2005-09-15T17:12:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd give some general information here about our schedule for the next few months.

First, Kyrgyzstan is 14 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time, 12 hours ahead of Central, and 11 hours ahead of Eastern Standard. Seattlites add 2 hours and change AM to PM or PM to AM.
We leave for Kyrgyzstan via New York- Istanbul on Friday, Sept 16th at 5:30 pm, arriving in Istanbul on Saturday, and continuing onto Bishkek. We arrive at 1:00, There will be a bus waiting for us, and we will be staying at Issyk-Kul Hotel for a few days. We will not be able to call when we arrive, so do not expect a call to say we are okay. In fact, no call means we arrived safely. If anything happened, the Peace Corps will have contacted you.
It turns out that we will be living with the same host family!! So, we won't be separated like we were told. Hooray!!!
We will train in Tokmok, population 50,000 about 70 km east of Bishkek. Internet and long distance is available here, though we will be in training all day most days, so expect emails and calls on Fridays and Saturdays, your time.
We are sworn in to the Peace Corps after passing the language proficiency test on December 1st, 2005. A week later, we will leave for our permanent site, where we will live for 2 years.

Getting to Know My Fellows

2005-09-14T19:04:00.000-07:00

Our second day of Philadelphia was pretty cool. The other volunteers are fabulous. I am usually quiet and reserved, and do not function well when I am surrounded by a lot of people I don't know, but for some reason here, I am open and talkative. It's actually a good feeling. I feel more alive than I have in a long time. This may turn out to be a great experience after all. Just being here, having our service

Malinda doesn't want to blog so far, so it's all me.

On the Streets of Philadelphia

2005-09-13T21:50:00.000-07:00

So,we left today for Philadelphia, the site of our Staging Session- the time when we meet the other volunteers, about a dozen or so we've met already, and get details about our service, and immunizations (yippee!) I have to say, the other volunteers are very cool people, very friendly and we instantly had a lot in common. There were three other Seattle volunteers, and we met them all in the airport in Philly, where we waited for the slowest shuttle service east of the Mississippi. We waited in the friggin Philadelphia Airport for an hour and a half waiting for a shuttle that was crammed with people, luggage, and a drunk Irishman that locked the van door so that an elderly couple couldn't get in and take up more room in the van. He then told them he was "just f@#king with them." How sweet.

We had a very late dinner at Chilis, which cooked me a hamburger that tasted like potroast somehow, and went to a college bar for a bit. We're all jetlagged, and will likely be up until very late tonight, to our detriment of course. Now we're in the hotel lobby, hovering over our laptops (thank god I'm not the only one that brought one) as if we'd left civilization already, desperately seeking out the wired contact we have come to depend on in this strange modern world. One day soon, we'll have to let it all go, and resign ourselves to the way it was in the good ol' days of 1992- no keyboards, just typewriters; no printers, just pencils and stationary; but with the same homesickness that humanity has faced century after century.

Anywho, here is a final goodbye to you all. We will miss you, and think of you all of the time. We promise to be safe, and to do a good job. Now we begin the real journey. Wish us luck!

Love,
Chris and Malinda

14 Days

2005-08-30T16:32:00.000-07:00

We have 14 days left here in the U.S. It's a little unreal. All of our stuff is in boxes now, we are canceling all of our credit cards, bills, and everything. It is as if we are erasing our existence here, like some secret agent taking on a new identity. Well, we still have a bank account I guess.

Anyway, here is a news story on Kyrgyzstan that we just heard on NPR. There's a kicker for us at the end of the story. Combine this with this story, and we are set for a whole lot of fun over there. Malinda thinks it's funny that all of the sudden these stories are incredibly significant to us, whereas three months ago, they would have just been obscure stories about obscure problems in nowhere important. I hope now that our friends will pay attention to Central Asian news a little closer, but you never know.

Also, I know there hasn't been much on the site yet. I hope all of you come back regularly to check if something has been posted. Once we are over there, there will be plenty to post, so don't worry. Life is still boring right now. Not that I'm dissing boring, mind you. Boring may prove to be the measure of a good life.

One Month to Go

2005-08-15T21:56:00.000-07:00

The time is flying by! We have only 4 weeks until we ship out to Kyrgyzstan. I am a little nervous to tell the truth. I honestly have no idea what to expect there. I have read tons of stuff on Kyrgyz culture, poltics, language, history but I know that all of that knowledge will do nothing to soften the blow of suddenly being very very far away from everything that I know. They tell us that we will not be living together for the first three months there. We'll be living with our own host families throughout the langage learning and cultural immersion process. This seems pretty stupid to me. At the time when we are the most vulnerable, the most in need of someone familiar, we are made to endure separation. All bureaucracies are the same though- the military, the DMV, any large corporation- they all do things that make no sense on the most direct down-to-earth level. They only make sense higher up in the scheme, in the realm of budget committees and policy formation boards. Like their brillaint plan of flying us to Philadelphia to attend a 2 day pep rally and conference, but having us fly out of New York to Kyrgyzstan. Monkeys, I tell you. They're all a bunch of monkeys. I tell myself that is is all a grand scheme to get us used to the dysfunctional bureaucracies of the developing world.

The Adventure Begins

2005-07-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday, July 13th, Malinda and I were offered the chance to serve the Peace Corps in The Kyrgyz Republic. This blog will document our experiences, good and bad, in that fair country. We invite you to stop here occasionally to check up on us, learn what we have been doing over there, hopefully see some pictures of Kyrgyzstan, its people, our work, and our travels. At the top of this page, there is a link to our contact information, which will tell you how to send us email, parcels, or to tell us of some emergency back home. It will also give you a list of items that we may be short on, or other ideas for relief packages. On the sides of the page will be links to information about Kyrgyzstan, the Peace Corps, and anything else we can think of, as well as other media that we can manage to post. I'm hoping to post audio conversations, maybe even short video clips if it is possible to do so. If we don't get to see you before we leave, know that we will miss all of you, and will be thinking of you often.

Destination Kyrgyzstan

2005-07-16T23:19:00.000-07:00

Malinda and I have been given a second chance with the Peace Corps, this time in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan (Keer-giss-stahn), officially called the Kyrgyz Republic. This country is high up in the mountains, on the western side of China, and the northeast side of Kazakhstan. This is horse country. The Kyrgyz are traditionally horse nomads, but under the collectivization programs of the Soviet Union, they now live a so-called "half nomadic" lifestyle, mostly because of the strict authoritarianism that unfortunately has never completely gone away.

Malinda is officially a Sustainable Economic and Organizational Development volunteer, which means that she'll be working with NGOs, economic planners, entrepreneurs, etc. to try to foster economic growth and prosperity there. A lofty goal certainly, but we'll try as best as we can. I will be teaching English (personally, I don't know why they would need it, but I'll provide the service).

So the timeline, as we know it to be at this moment is this:

Leave for orientation (in the states) on September 13th.
Leave for Kyrgyzstan on September 16th.
Stay in the capital, Bishkek and its environs for 3 months, intensively learning Kyrgyz (probably Russian as well).
Then, off to our village for 2 years.

We will be changing our blog to a more appropriate theme, look for links here in the near future. That's it for tonight, I'm tired, and have to work early tomorrow. I'll be working on the new blog and assembling all sorts of goodies and info on Kyrgyzstan for you all, so come back every once in a while over the next week or so.