While so much of America was getting pounded with snow this week, so too did we in Naryn get a little bit, though only an inch. While it still took me an hour to clear our whole driveway/compound, it was easy work; easy work that catered well to having a three-year-old helper at my side.
Folks, my time here is growing short, and that weighs on me more and more with each passing day. As my host dad stunned me at lunch today, “Carl, I’ve never seen your pictures from home. Would you show them to me?” I complied with his request, and then felt the most powerful homesickness I can recall. There, all of the sudden before us, were the smiling faces of my siblings, the warm embraces of my family; I was shot back to long evenings, falling asleep on the couches belonging to my closest friends.
And at the same time, those feelings brought me back to the present, with a deep intensity. Last night I made paper airplanes and ambushed a screaming host sister, and then I wondered if she’d tell her school friends, “look at this design! It’s how they do it in America.” Later, I helped another host sister with an English paper, assuring her that “200 words or less” didn’t mean a relevant assortment of 200 nouns, adjectives and verbs; but instead a collection of cohesive sentences who’s total component words should total 200. “But Carl,” she said, “it says words, it doesn’t say anything about sentences.
And this morning, as I put off going to work so I could shovel the snow, I made sure my little three year old host brother got dressed and came outside with me. He threw little snowballs at me. And while I batted them away with the snow shovel, laughing together with him, I wondered if he would remember even a single one of our moments together, or if years down the line, the older girls would talk about me, while he just sat quiet, or maybe asked, “did Carl play with me, too?” And later, while he crunched eggshells by the compost, ones I had so gingerly laid out for him, I wondered, how many of these moments, so important to me, will stay in these people’s minds.
But that is life for the transient, the temporary guest. My memories are largely my own, for I know that years down the line I will have very few to reminisce with, but so is the path I’ve chosen. But then again, each moment is new, and each brings with it a surprise to turn around my thoughts.
When I broached the subject of a replacement volunteer with my host family the other day, they balked, and it made me happy. “Maybe, if there was another one, a boy, just like you, we could it,” said my host dad. But then he reconsidered as he looked at his daughters. “No,” he said, “we’ve grown accustomed to you. You eat when we eat, you are thirsty when we are. I don’t think we’d want a new volunteer after you are gone.” I smiled and knew I wasn’t a tenant, a source of income for the family. But why did I even need reminding?
Or this past Monday, during my weekly banya, I bathed with a guy just a few years younger than me. He said that even though he had no work and no money, he was hopeful, and spent his time going to the mosque to pray. He said he had sworn off alcohol and cigarettes, the real opiates of society. He asked if I was married, and when I would. I asked him if he’d marry for love, or just kidnap a girl off the streets, as is not uncommon.
“No, for love,” he said.
“Why?” I asked him.
“Because there isn’t enough love,” he said so simply.
And then, for the next few minutes I basked not only in the depth of his answer, but also its context. Here we were, in a deeply impoverished land, and this young man, with no education, in a community where men want to talk to me about little more than sex and prostitutes, he gave me an answer more profound than I could have imagined. He was marrying for love simply because there isn’t enough love in this world, and he wants to add to it. What better answer is there?
And so, these, among so many others, will be my memories. And that leads to the natural question, what will be yours? You, the readers of my letters, when my travels are done, let me be so narcissistic as to ask, what will you all take from all that I’ve shared?
