Before I had even arrived at my office on my first morning of work after swearing in back in June, I had already made a mistake. Thanks to my basic language abilities, I missed a change in instructions, and wound up half an hour away from where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be there. Oops.
I’m excited to bring you today a recipe that is both easy to follow and one of my very favorite foods that I’ve had here. It’s called Mother-In-Law’s Tongue, and it’s basically deep fried battered eggplant with tomato and a garlic mayonnaise. It has the extra benefit of being something that is very easily to duplicate in an American kitchen! Continue reading “My Kyrgyz Kitchen: Mother-In-Law’s Tongue”
There are a few things that most people, upon first glance at their Central Asia Lonely Planet, will remember most vividly about Kyrgyzstan: yurts and horse games. Most people who come to Kyrgyzstan get to see or stay in a yurt and drink kymyz to their heart’s content. But not very many get to see the traditional Kyrgyz horseback games. And yet this past weekend, I and several other volunteers found ourselves high in the passes of the Alay region south of Osh at the Nomad Horse Games Festival, one of the first of its kind in the world, organized by the Community Based Tourism organization here (If you’re planning a trip to Kyrgyzstan, CBT is one of the best ways to go).
It’s not that often that life swerves around as much as mine seems to have in the past month, but then again, it’s not that often in life that your path takes you halfway around the world to a country few Americans have heard of.
A week ago now, I moved to my permanent site in Osh City. It is the single biggest transition that I’ve experienced thus far, and it has been filled with excitement and anticipation. I now have lived in Kyrgyzstan for over two months, longer than both Tajikistan and China, and second only to Geneva, whose tenure I will surpass only as I prepare to leave Kyrgyzstan.
My second month here, though, was spent in the same village outside the capital as before, only this time, we knew both where we would be moving and what we would be doing – at least, to the extent that it is possible to know and fully understand a fully unknowable situation. It was much of the same exploration of language (that is a kind way of saying I sat on the floor for 6 hours a day conjugating verbs, which I did in fact very much enjoy), and learning our policies during weekly all-trainee meetings. Continue reading “Mile 2: Two Months, Two Towns”
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.
The other day, I was thinking about my strategy of counting down and breaking down my time in various placements to reduce the stress that comes from having so much time remaining. In particular, I was thinking about how I use that strategy for marathons, breaking it down into 26 consecutive 10 minute chunks (on a good day, pace-wise). It then occurred to me that 26.2 is about the same as the number of months that I am here in Kyrgyzstan. Thus is born my monthly summary series, Mileage.
I’ve been here for a month now.
SO the title of this post is in all caps because this was the day that I have been waiting for for MONTHS. See, when you apply to the Peace Corps, you are told your country of service and the sector in which you’ll be working. For the vast majority of volunteers, this means that you will be teaching English, but that also means that you have just about no idea where in the country you’ll be heading. In my case, as a Health trainee, I know that I get to work on health issues, and from my side research, I know where some of the areas of need are, and what kinds of organizations the Health program usually places volunteers into. BUT, none of us had any idea what our jobs would be, or where we would be. Until today.
Friday was a big day for us – not only did it mark over two weeks at our training villages (it says a lot that I began typing “months” instead of weeks while typing that sentence), but it was also our big Bishkek Day. Bishkek Day is a milestone because we get a full guided tour of Bishkek, the largest city in Kyrgyzstan, and it also is the point at which we are allowed to leave our villages to visit other volunteers, shop in a regional city, and also to travel back into Bishkek. In short, we are all thrilled and exhausted.
We started out our day at the normal time, but rather than sit cross-legged around a table and study Kyrgyz all day, we climbed into a marshrutka (a kind of minibus that I’ll write more about later) and rode into town, changing vehicles along the way. From one bus station, we took another marshrutka to the other so that we would know where both were (this is very important, since we have to take the local minibuses to get around town and the country). These each have waiting halls, a bunch of shops and stalls, and outside, a series of parking rows where the next minibuses to assigned destinations in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan depart. Merchants walk up and down selling bread, water, and soda from small carts, while drivers of shared taxis and the buses alike shout names of destinations in the hopes of getting additional fares. The logo of both bus stations is an “A” in a circle, with wings coming off the sides, in a socialist realist style. Continue reading “Bishkek Day”
I’ve spent so much time in Kyrgyz language class in the past two weeks that I figured that it was about time for me to write a little bit of a lesson for everyone back home!
Greetings in Kyrgyz are a major part of the culture. It is polite and appropriate to greet people you see as you go about the village, in ways particular to the age and gender of the person to whom you are speaking. The most common form that I use is салом алеикум (salom aleikum), which you may recognize from other countries that have large Muslim populations. This greeting is used between men only.
Another greeting we use frequently is саламатсызбы (salamatsyzby, where the y makes a sort of “uh sound between an i and a u), which literally means “are you healthy.” The proper response to that is саламатчылык (salamatchylyk). I use this to greet women around age and older, and women use this to greet anyone around their age or older.
The third frequent greeting is easier, салам (salam), which means “peace,” and is an informal greeting that I use with people younger than me, mostly kids, and with friends. The rule of thumb we use is that if someone is more than two years older than you, that you must use the formal greeting.
We then ask, “how are you,” which is кандайсыз (kandaisyz). The proper response is жакшы, рахмат (jakshy, rakhmat), which means “I am well, thank you.” Often we ask the same question, or а сизчи? (a sizchi?), meaning “and you?”
It’s a quick and easy exchange, and goes somewhat like this:
Me: саламатсызбы!
Villager: саламатчылык!
Me: кандайсыз?
Villager: жакшы, рахмат, кандайсыз?
Me: мен жакшы, рахмат.
As you probably noticed, cyrillic is the alphabet used here, but it’s not too different when you use it regularly. The pronunciation isn’t too bad – the challenge is that there are nine vowel letters in Kyrgyz, а, ы, о, у, э, е, и, ө, and ү, not counting the dipthong vowels used in many Russian words (ё, ю, and я), and as you might imagine, several of those sounds aren’t used in English.
Oh, and there’s vowel harmony. Next week. On Monday Bazaar.
In the US, the more militarily minded of families tends to observe in some capacity V-E Day, or Victory In Europe Day, or the equivalent from the Pacific campaign of World War II. But I’ve never seen anything remotely resembling the scale of the celebrations here of Victory Day, which marks the same occasion. You might have seen a few pictures or video clips on this on American television or news websites, but seeing it here from within the former USSR has been a very different experience.
Part of the reason for this may be that this is the 70th anniversary, which might command a larger celebration than otherwise, but part is simply because to the countries that fought on the Eastern Front paid a much larger price in lives; the USSR accounts for something like half of the deaths of the entire war, more even than Germany. Stalingrad did not have a happy ending (although it now has the world’s tallest statue, which is really both spectacularly beautiful and a marvel of engineering. It’s also sliding off its foundation slightly).
Over the past few days, we’ve seen a lot of Russian fighter jets flying over Bishkek and over the surrounding areas preparing for aerial demonstrations, and everyone was talking about the parade and the celebrations for days. Despite the rain, on TV we watched downton Bishkek fill up, and the newly minted Prime Minister give a speech about the holiday in the main square before a large military parade went by and the fighters did a fly-by.
The real spectacle came on Russian television, which broadcasts several Russian-language channels here, right alongside China Central Television Russia.
