Two Stops Past Siberia

So I’m heading out to another Peace Corps Acronym this week, hailed by volunteers as the most valuable of these things, we’re gearing up to be taught Project Design and Management at PDM. This conference will be once again held at the Hot Lake of Dreams, the perpetually unfrozen Lake Issyk Kul. That means travel, and travel on the Peace Corps penny means an excuse to see the country, and visit friends.

This has been my first time out of Sunny Naryn since the winter began, and in the rest of the country, its, different. The main road out of Naryn goes over the Dolan Pass into a region centered around the city of Kochkor (or, Ram). Kochkor is a windy place, and this combined with the surrounding mountains means Kochkor, very much unlike Naryn, was almost barren of snow.

The next stop on the route away from home is Balykchy (Fisherman). Balykchy is a dried up, formerly industrial Soviet city on the south west corner of the Lake. Once prosperous, like an American Rust Belt city, Balykchy has fallen on hard times. Its factories are largely closed, yet it still acts as a transportation hub. Maligned by travelers frequently mistreated by taxi drivers who know their customers have no choice but to come through, and no reason to stay, it exhibits a characteristic particularly reminiscent of home. Balykchy, not cold as Naryn, is nonetheless as windy as Chicago. Biting cold, but nostalgic nonetheless.

My next destination was at the fabled home of my old teacher, Tamerlane, the Hero King. The snow had recently fallen here. Upon arrival, there was no need to call my friend because, as a teacher in town, there isn’t a soul who doesn’t seem to know him, or know where he lives.

I found him hiding in his kitchen, cooking with his wife, watching the two six year olds cavort around like elephants, and his 2 year old take short, choppy steps. Over the next couple of days, we hid inside from the cold, eating, watching nature movies, and talking with his family. Dinner our first night was Kyrgyz dumplings, called monty, made of mutton, fat, onions and potatoes, with a side of pickled garlic and tomatoes. His mother, bedridden, always with something interesting and specific to tell me, was feeling passionate about how Hitler and WWII were terrible, and it was good that we live in peaceful times. Sometimes we’d do chores together, like chopping wood, or stoking his furnace.

And it was one ironic image that I thought would stick with me. My teacher, starting a coal fire, with the torn pages of a book entitled simply “Leninism.” But instead, it was the freshly fallen snow on the road out of town. Thick and unplowed, cars, vans and trucks competing with cows, sheep, and horse drawn wagons for space on the road.

From there, it was off to the Karakol volunteers, and their world of consumer goods, Russian influence, and skiing. Volunteers here do much of what we do in Naryn, though their material life a bit more advanced.

There seems to be nothing happier than visiting good people on cold nights. I wish you all, my friends, this same success.

Originally written Januay 11th, 2010