So my dear friends, I’ve realized from your responses that I’ve done a great job of painting a picture of my daily life, all the while giving you all very little context for what I’m actually doing out here.
Right now I’m living in the small town of Ivanovka doing little more than studying the Kyrgyz language. My weeks consist of for or five days of intensive language training, combined with cultural adjustment training, and technical community development skills. Of the overall experience, Language Trumps All.
Right now, five weeks of total immersion training under my belt, my language is still a patchwork quilt of words, phrases, and half understood grammar. For instance, I know two phrases for trying to get my way.
The first is “Come on, please?” This is, in Kyrgyz, is a very polite way to ask a shopkeeper to give in on a price, for instance. The second is “Do you want to eat a baseball bat?” This is the Kyrgyz equivalent to offering a knuckle sandwich. Now, imagine that my brother is being coy about passing the sugar at the dinner table, which would you say?
This kind of partial language leads conversations with my family to be somehow dreamlike. We always seem to come away knowing things, but are never really sure how it is that we know them, and in the morning are never really sure if we know anything at all. On a recent trip into the mountains, my brother-in-law asked me if I was having fun about ten times – and I must have responded in a new and creative, grammatically incorrect fashion on every occasion.
Learning a new language is truly a humbling experience.
The cultural training is also very curious and informative. For instance, bread in this culture is a truly sacred thing. The traditional homemade bread kind of looks like an oversized bialy, with a thick outer ring and a thin, flat section in the middle. There is a story here of some volunteers once who tossed some of this bread around like a Frisbee and were excommunicated from their village on account of it. Even today, joking about such a thing causes people to shudder. You also shouldn’t shake hands over a doorstep or whistle in the house. And instead of waving, men will put their right hand on their heart and nod their heads.
The technical training is valuable as well. The most stressed element of it all is how much time things will take around here. Our presenters always stress that this isn’t America, and the concept of time as a resource isn’t necessarily one people believe in. To think we’re gonna just show up and get things a’changin’ really isn’t going to be the case. Things will take time. Getting to know our communities, learning their language, and building a rapport with their leaders may be as important as anything else we do. Valuable life skills, I’d say, all around.
Anyway, aside from all the silliness I’ve been regaling you with these past few weeks, those are the real nuts and bolts of my life out here.
Thanks for reading again folks! Here’s Kyrgy Carl, signing off!
Originally Written May 12th, 2009
