Let me get to the meat of it folks, I shook hands with Hillary Clinton. That’s right, I said it. Her hand was soft. None of that, of course, explains the grin captured on my face in this official US Embassy photo, however. I thought I was just smiling sweetly the whole time, but I’ll let you all be the judge of that.
It was a funny little moment, to have such an important visitor come to such a little country. She was fresh from a spell in Kazakhstan, and her time in Bishkek was little more than a layover, as she left not 6 hours after arrival for Tashkent. Between those two countries, however, she was able to meet with the president, shake many of our hands, (“Peace Corps? The rowdy ones!”) and field some interestnig questions at the local university.
“Mrs. Clinton!” Came a shout from the back, “How can we get more Peace Corps volunteers?”
“I love Peace Corps!” She said, “I look into it!” Now we’re all looking in to what that really means.
But as she left Kyrgyzstan’s great capital, so did we, and in Naryn again, it was business as usual. Personally, I found myself in one of the places I love the most, a tiny village, with poor cell phone coverage and hardly two nickles to rub together. I was out monitoring a training, where one local euntrepreneur was teaching village women to make slippers.
“Before I came here,” she told me, “these women couldn’t make more than one variety of slippers, now they can make 12.”
I took pictures and smiled, and even got a pair for myself. And then, I sat back, and appreciated the moment.
The house I was in was covered in traditional art, from rugs to wall hangings. There were only 4 rooms in the place, and only three were heated. The women were working feverishly. The trainer, one of the women who led my natural dyes training, had agreed not only to lead the sessions, but also to comission 100 slippers from her students. Her plan is to sell them at a festival in Germany in January, along with the products of other trainings, and from her own co-op. Fast forward, 6 weeks from now, to the clean and warm and comfortable world these slippers will enter. How will they even remember the tiny corner of our Earth, cold, where so little grows; that place where they came from?
And one of the trainees was as heartfelt as a person can be. “Please,” she said to the trainer, “teach us everything you can. Out here, we have nothing else.”
And from Hillary Clinton, among the most powerful women on Earth, who’s time was so tight that every one of her moves was choreographed by an army of aids, to these women who wanted only to learn how to sew, I had to wonder, really, in the past two days, how far had I come?
