When the rose gardens bloomed in the second month of our training, I was surprised. I wasn’t surprised to see flowers, but rather, was surprised to see so many roses in particular, organized into neat rows by color, bursting forth in so many gardens walking around our hub site, around my village, and in my own family’s garden.

At the end of my street was a particularly beautiful and well-curated garden that I would walk past most days when I was making my way to our hub site and coming back home. In his tiny yard, the man who must have planted them often watched as we made our way to the road to either walk or catch a marshrutka to our next destination.

The roses didn’t start to open right away. They took time. One by one, buds would open, many earlier than the others, some bigger, some smaller. Some are still only opening now, while some blossomed during early May.

I first noticed the roses as I walked away from our site placement event, an event that was really one of the most defining points of both the past month and of our entire service, since it was the day when our work and residences of two years finally were made known to us. There was a large patch with long rows neatly organized by color.

In the month that followed, more and more of them opened. Some wilted, and some blossomed for weeks on end. Some had only just begun to open as we left. Some had large insects in them, while others pricked fingers as they were picked.

Soon, the roses will have finished blooming, and we will soon be rewarded with Kyrgyzstan’s famous produce during the summer. The bounty from those will give us the strength to persevere and work through the long cold winters, and our memories of the roses will sustain us as new roses come forth into our memories, ready to harken another year of good.