Let me catch you up. Life is good. Still, I've spent the last few weeks complaining to my long-suffering friends about bedbugs, dog bites, bacterial diarrhea, kids with slingshots, colleagues who stare off into the distance and then walk away whenever I attempt conversation, and the challenge of being a gender-variant individual in a gender-binary society, besides the normal stressors that volunteers face, like a total lack of privacy coupled with a feeling of total isolation and no idea how to express yourself through the vocabulary of a five year old child. This makes for great dinner conversation, especially when you can confuse words like “pig” with “uncircumcised penis.”
Well, I asked for a challenge. I'm sticking to it.
I live for the people that I meet and the moments that remind me where I am and how far I've come. This Is Kyrgyzstan (TIK). Even when Kyrgyzstan Wins Again (KWA), I have to laugh. I have, for example, walked into a camel. It was dark outside. The camel was sleeping next to the road. This is normal. Last week a colleague approached me, wearing a dapper suit and a white kalpak, to matter-of-factly inform me that he would not be coming to work because it is his daughter’s wedding, and he must slaughter the sheep. This is also normal. Last month my five year old host sister had three of her teeth pulled because they were rotting in her head. TIK. I give myself extra time to get ready in the morning, because my toilet is a small hole in the ground and I can’t pee straight. KWA.
No complaints.
Here we go!
June:
Stand front and center with your fellow trainees and perform an excellent rendition of Watermelon during the national song at your Swearing-In ceremony. Then put your hand over your heart, swear to defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign or domestic, and count yourself among the ranks of Peace Corps Volunteers.
Hooray!
Now what?
Milk a cow.
Do your laundry. By hand.
Lose the first layer of your skin due to chronic, blistering sunburn because, at this altitude, SPF 30 doesn’t cut it.
Take to the streets in a minibus stuffed with sixteen host family relatives and hold tight as you sit on an unbolted kitchen chair amongst cartons of carrots and bags of bread on your way to a beautiful place called Issyk Ata (which can be translated as either Place of the Holy Father, or Hot Daddy) a natural hot spring in the mountains where flowers smell like butter and fountains smell like eggs. Politely decline the Russian man who mistakes you for a German and insists that you bathe in his swimming pool.
Happy Birthday to you! Shock your village with the revelation that you are, in fact, older than your high school students.
Receive word from your school director that you are to conduct English club daily for 800 students in addition to facilitating sport days and weekend excursions to museums and other culturally rich locations. Meanwhile get lost walking to the end of your street.
Conduct a chill conversational English club and turn the Hokey Pokey into a neighborhood hit.
Attend a day-long feast in honor of one of your three grandmothers, wherein much tea is poured, many toasts are uttered and hundreds of guests eat, drink and run. Following said feast, find yourself suckered into hand-washing the dishes.
Admire the interior décor of the most versatile form of transportation in Kyrgyzstan: the marshrutka. Essentially a stripped-down mini bus, the marshrutka contains a small black hole which enables more passengers to squeeze inside beyond any sane capacity. Make all future decisions regarding these vehicles based on the artistry of their plastic-ensconced scorpion stick drives and swinging overhead tassels.
Draw babies with infected bellybuttons for the Ministry of Health.
Meet drag kings who give you the shirts off their backs.
Watch a hail storm roll over the village.
Culture tip: In America, we talk about seeing the Man in the Moon. In Japan, I’ve heard they see a rabbit. In Kyrgyzstan, I’m told, there is a girl hauling two pails of water. A folk tale tells how she was forced to work day and night by her evil step-mother, until the moon took pity on her and lifted her into the sky. Personally, I see a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Word of the month: Shakyr = ring. Children like to count my piercings, and frequently beg me to show them the one in my tongue. This is surprisingly not ooyat. The elders just shrug and say, “Moda.” (That’s fashion.)
July:
Donate blood to bedbugs.
Celebrate American independence in Kyrgyzstan.
Be instructed on the finer points of boiling eggs, because if you can’t pronounce the word “boil” you must not be capable of doing it.
Ride a wedding train around the capital city, soliciting cheers from bystanders everywhere. Wonder if said bystanders would still cheer, if they knew that the wedding party consisted of girls who like boys who used to be girls who like girls who used to be boys.
Lead a workshop about international business because the man originally slated to run the session opted to spend the weekend in Issyk Kul, where the water is always warm and the sun is always shining.
Go to Issyk Kul, and visit your Kyrgyz language teacher and his adorable family. Swim in a lake at the foot of the mountains, eat the best apple you’ve ever tasted and observe the ritual of Koi Soi. Koi means sheep. Soi means slaughter.
Split a sheep’s eyeball between a few of your closest in-country friends and agree to always look out for one another, through the bad times and the good. (see Steve’s most excellent journal for more on this: http://lifeinthejetstream.tumblr.com/)
See fireworks. See fireworks fly. See fireworks fall. See fireworks light the mountain on fire, and nearly kill us all.
Come home to find your grandmother now sporting a green unibrow.
Summer English camp! Teach kids from all corners of Kyrgyzstan how to make Play Doh from scratch.
Win an eating competition, and then spend the next two days evacuating your bowels in all manners possible. TIKKWA: Filter your water.
Cultural tip:
Word of the month: Jomok = folk tale. Temirlanagai, my language teacher, told me a tale about Issyk Kul that goes like this: in the beginning, God created all of the people and all of the lands. The creator then held a meeting to give each people their own piece of land. However, the Kyrgyz slept through this meeting. When they woke up, they went to God and asked what land they would live on. God said that all of the land had already been given away. The Kyrgyz were very sad and did not know what to do. So God considered the problem, and came back to the Kyrgyz. “You know,” said God, “I saved a little piece of land just for myself. It’s called Paradise, and I will give it to you.” And thus, the Kyrgyz got Issyk Kul.
I think there is a moral in there somewhere.
At the orphanage
My room. Oh, the pinkness.
Graffiti in Bishkek
