So, the events of April 8th, provide an interesting lens to view the last couple of weeks.
First of all, my place of work, the local UNDP office, is all closed up. They received a ‘do not work’ order from headquarters on the morning of April 8th, and haven’t gotten the green light since. That means, once again, I haven’t had much of an office.
My work of late has been mostly following these guys around, so them not working has meant me not following. Some of my other work involves connections I’ve made through UNDP, and without them, those connections have proven hard to maintain. But that, folks, hardly means ol’ Kyrgy Carl has just been sitting around idly.
Just as before, when things get tough, I get local, and there is little more local than the stump in my backyard. In fact, most of this past week has involved yard work.
First, it was cleaning up the stump mess. “I’m gonna separate out all these rocks, and then fill the hole with dirt,” I told my host dad, “then we can make the garden bigger!”
“Not so fast,” he said, “we’re gonna put a new room there.” This was the first I’d heard of this.
“What if I hadn’t taken out that stump?” I asked.
“Then I would have hired some boys to do it.” Turns out he had plans for this all along. “What you can do, though, is dig up all those currant bushes, and plant them over there.”
So I did that, and cleaned up the “over there.” I hauled big rocks from the ground, and then started scraping the paint off the old gate, to prepare it for making into the compost bin.
“No, no,” he said, “that old gate is gonna be the new shoe changing room. When we make this new room over here, we’re gonna tear down the old room over there. We’ll still need a mudroom, though.”
At first, this would seem frustrating. Despite being told one thing, plans changed around me as fast as I was working, but had allegedly been that was from the start. At the heart of it, though, I was now being told future plans. My host family is starting to see that I am capable, and is letting me in on things. This folks, is a big step.
Also, we celebrated Earth Day recently! In honor of Mother Gaia, I went out to the pleasant little hamlet of Orto Nura and talked about the 3 R’s to 40 tenth graders.
This time, unlike last time, I had an American to do it with (we performed a little play, in Kyrgyz, of course), and then after I talked, when the kids asked questions, I could actually understand them! After that, we headed out into the village, and did a trash collection subotnik all on our own.
