Tag: Kyrgyzstan

Road Trip Part 1: Driving North

Published on by Mark Jahnke

In late July, my host family, who is from Issyk-Kul, invited me along on their annual road trip to the massive lake at the opposite end of the country. They’re from a small village at the very far end of the lake, in a town that is just about as far away from Osh as you can get without leaving Kyrgyzstan. With a short whirlwind of planning, I got permission to join them, and we set off on August 2nd, with the stipulation that I had to be in Bishkek by the evening of August 9th.

The minaret at Uzgen
The minaret at Uzgen

Rather than drive directly, though, we decided to travel a more circuitous route to see more of the country. Our plan included a drive on the spectacular Osh to Bishkek highway, a detour through a remote corner of Naryn oblast up to the world-famous jailoo at Song-Kul, and finally down over the mountains to Issyk-Kul.  We started out driving most of the way to Bishkek along the main north-south road, which winds its way out of Osh, around the pinnacle of Uzbekistan in the side of Kyrgyzstan, and up over the mountains to the Toktogul reservoir, before crossing more mountains. Continue reading “Road Trip Part 1: Driving North” →

Language Lessons: Kyrgyz Vowel Harmony

Published on by Mark Jahnke

Kyrgyz is an extraordinarily poetic language at times, and nowhere is this more apparent than in its vowel harmony, which is one of the language’s most famous and defining features. But what is it, and how does it work?

Vowel harmony, in essence, is a set of rules that mean that in any truly Kyrgyz word (i.e. isn’t Russian, Persian, Tajik, Uzbek, Arabic, etc.), there will only be two vowels, and they will be of a related sound (i.e. left shift vowels are open-jawed and right-shift vowels are the same sound, with your jaw closed further. Try it with “oh” and “oo” and you can see that your mouth stays mostly in the same position, just closes slightly). It also dictates which vowels will be used in the formation of a suffix. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry. It doesn’t make sense to describe it in text, so I’ll walk us through a few examples. Continue reading “Language Lessons: Kyrgyz Vowel Harmony” →

Mile 3: You Better Work

Published on by Mark Jahnke

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.

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My Kyrgyz Kitchen: Mother-In-Law’s Tongue

Published on by Mark Jahnke

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” →

Nomad Horse Games Festival

Published on by Mark Jahnke
Horsemen rest near the end of the day.
Horsemen rest near the end of the day.

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).

Continue reading “Nomad Horse Games Festival” →

Mile 2: Two Months, Two Towns

Published on by Mark Jahnke

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” →

Roses

Published on by Mark Jahnke

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.

Mile 1: One Month On

Published on by Mark Jahnke

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.

Continue reading “Mile 1: One Month On” →

Site Placement: I’m Moving To Osh!

Published on by Mark Jahnke

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.

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Bishkek Day

Published on by Mark Jahnke

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” →