Get Your Soviet Face On

My outhouse. On a scale from one to ten, mine has earned a sweet 9.5 for depth, lack of smell and general cleanliness.

Outside the family home.

Just another day in Kyrgyzstan.

My desire to go has come, and to me bread is necessary

In my last post I mused on gender in language. This time around I'm pondering self-centeredness.

From what I can tell the Kyrgyz language has no modal verbs such as want, will, should, can and must. English is filled with these. I want to go. I need a jacket. You shouldn't lick doorknobs. In Kyrgyz, adverbs replace the verbs and make statements more indirect.

Commands, for example, sound more like suggestions. You should go, becomes "if you would go, it would be good." I don't want to go, becomes "my desire to go has not come." Kyrgyz speakers do not have things either. Instead, things exist. I have a cat, becomes "My cat exists."

If people in this region value the needs of the collective over the needs of the individual, the language seems to reflect this by removing "I" entirely. The self is only implied through its relation to a desire, need or possession.

I'm going to have to change the way I think, before I open my mouth.

In other news, Why I Will Be Okay.

1. Bring on the fried goat and fermented milk! I'm not a fan of American food anyway.

2. I already only shower once a month and, I've been assured, don't offend the noses.

3. Two beers cans = one camp stove. I try to be crafty.

4. I've lived in the city. I've been mugged, frozen, lost, assaulted, hit by car doors and dined out of dumpsters. I've lived in the country. I've fought chickens for eggs, dug cat holes in the dirt, climbed mountains, butchered pigs and run for miles. I'm privileged as an American, but this apartment still doesn't have hot water, reliable plumbing or a bathroom door.

5. I have so much love from my friends, family, colleagues and partner. Just knowing this keeps me going through hard times.

Also,

6. No worries.

It's a phrase that falls from my lips at least once a day, partly because it has become my automatic response to all of life's mishaps, but mostly because I truly believe in the wisdom of letting go of what things we can't, shouldn't and don't need to control.

I depart this weekend for three months of intensive training, so for now, no news is good news!

Without Gender

Салам! бул Кыргыз тили.

Street signs, newspapers, friendly banter and Beware of Dog... every day, I'm deluged with symbols and sounds that tell me what to do, where to go and how to respond. Without language, I'd be lost. Gestures convey a lot of information, sure, but try explaining modal auxiliary verbs with nothing but your fingers.

As a Peace Corps volunteer, I'll be teaching English in a secondary school. I'm pretty confident in my expertise on the subject, being a native speaker and a writer by trade. But abroad? I'll need to master a new language. If I can't buy an onion at the market, I can't expect to hold a very meaningful conversation with my colleagues.

The Kyrgyz Republic has two official languages: Kyrgyz and Russian. The latter is spoken mainly in cities and in business. I've been studying both. In Russian, as in the Romance languages, all words are masculine, feminine or neuter. It distinguishes between men and women in most roles, e.g. businessman vs businesswoman. In Kyrgyz, however, there is only one word for he, she and it. There is no designation of a "chair" as male or female, as if an inanimate object has genitalia. Just one pronoun. So far, I haven't noticed many words beyond "mother" and "father" that explicitly assign gender to a person. As someone interested in sociolinguistics and gender roles, I'm beginning to fall in love with Kyrgyz.

How does having a genderless language affect society? Does it lead to more equality? Less? Is gender still expressed in some other way? I hope to find out.

I've heard that historically Kyrgyz men and women had fairly equal footing, with everyone participating in activities like horseback riding, hunting and animal husbandry. Today women hold advanced degrees and work in universities, hospitals and nongovernmental organizations, but they are also expected to marry early, raise children and tend the household more than men.

So maybe language isn't a strong influence on culture. But just for fun - what if English had no words for he or she, or man or woman? How would it change the way you interact with people on a daily basis? Would it matter if you had a waiter or a waitress? And why?

I expect a 300 page essay exploring this theme from every one of you. Annnd... go!

;)

p.s.
To the extent of my small knowledge, the intro says, "Hi! This is the Kyrgyz language." Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Nothing like disaster to bring us together

"Good luck, guys!"

I was standing knee-deep in a drift in the center of the street with a bucketful of powder and slush. My partner stood nearby.

A plow had driven through earlier and piled the snow high against the line of parked cars. We had been tasked with digging free our friend's car, armed only with a plastic bucket each. Previously these buckets had been catching the drips in the pipes in the bathroom. Now they were makeshift shovels because all the neighborhood stores had sold out of all the more efficient digging implements. We had twenty minutes to be out of there and on our way to a photo shoot. It was starting to snow again. We might have looked despairing to the casual observer.

A blizzard had blown through the day before and given our city a post-apocalyptic vista of shuttered storefronts, deserted streets and cars abandoned at the mouths of alleyways. The color of the sky matched the color of the snow, tricking the eye into thinking that you might step out on the lake and walk until you hit the horizon. Everything was quiet. Even the airplanes had stopped flying. So I was, in reality, pretty stoked.

At the shout, I looked up to see a bearded man walking purposefully toward the red line station. He wore a sparkling purple ski hat. He waved at me.

"I'd stop to help, but I'm in a hurry," he said.

I told him not to worry. We were able-bodied people.

But he broke his stride. He turned around and came back. "Use my shovels," he said. "They're over there on the porch."

He pointed to a nearby building and I thought the shovels would be leaning against the outside wall. He dug in his pocket.

"Here," he said. "This is the key to the front door." He put the ring of keys in my hand and held my eyes. "Just leave it unlocked and drop the keys through the slot when you're done." After advising us to use the good shovels and not the janked ones, he turned back around and kept walking to the train station.

I think I thanked him. I was stunned. This man had just trusted me with the keys to his home and his shovels and who-knew-what-else. There was a notice tacked up in my partner's tenement building requesting that thieves please return the shovels they had stolen. The tools were in short supply.

This is, of course, because shovels are far superior to plastic buckets.

We finished the job in a few short minutes and, with time to spare, we thanked our mystery man with an illustrated note and a bag of candy.

Stranger danger, indeed.

Every so often someone comes along and knocks me off guard with their kindness. It's all too easy to let the city face take hold. That is, the face we put on to protect ourselves when we have to pass a thousand strangers every day. A thousand people who might want or need or expect or wheedle something from us. Something to shake us off schedule. It's easy to let so many people fade to scenery. White noise.

As someone about to embark on a two-year journey to become a stranger in a country still strange to me, I couldn't help but think: would I trust a stranger with my keys?