It is really a funny thing, these marriage jokes. First, they insisted on knowing what kind of girl I wanted to marry. “She must have a mouth like a thimble,” I said. This, requirement, stolen from an old children’s story I read early on out here, inevitably ensures a laugh. Usually, in fact, it steers the conversation away from a potential bride, and towards the novelty of my request. Not today, however.

Today, instead, the women in the room, mostly mothers in their 40’s and 50’s, guffawed, saying their big mouths helped them laugh louder. One women, even, was less specific, and in other ways, much more so. She just looked at me with a grin and said, “mouths that are big are just better,” and the room erupted in laughter. 

Our driver, this time around, is a quiet, laid back man, the husband of one of our trainers. He enjoyed talking with me, slowly, about food, and America.

“In China,” he said, “they eat everything. They raise everything, and they eat everything. For example,” he said to one of the son’s of the house, “you raise chickens, for eating, right? Right? The Chinese raise frogs and turtles and insects. They do it all.”

“I ate scorpions in China,” I chimed in.

“See, everything.”

“In America, do you eat dogs?”

“No,” I said, “no dogs, no cats, not even horses.”

“Really, why not horses?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t you eat dogs?”

Somehow, magically, he didn’t even have to think about this one. “Because they eat poop.”

When evening time came, I went ten kilometers down the road to the Ak-Tala rayon center of Baiotov. My friend Travis lives out there.

He showed me around town. I was amazed by how impressive the place was. It was a town of 5 thousand or so, and in Soviet times, had clearly been designed to impress. There were parks and museums, restaurants and billiards. The roads were wide and provincial.

“Sometimes, I think, in some other universe, this town went the other way. Here, in our universe, it got worse, and in some other universe, it just got nicer.” Travis was full of this really deep, very local thinking.  

“I’m gonna’ be serious about winter this year.” He said, a sentiment I’ve heard more than once from village volunteers lately. “I’m paying my neighbor to make me juice in 3 liter jars. I want twenty of them. She’s also gonna’ help me make salads, I hope to get 50 jars. I’m not gonna’ be hungry this winter.”

Travis is also going to buy chickens. “I like eggs, you know? I can get young chickens in the bazaar for 50 som (about a dollar). I want ten,” he said, “I’ve already bought the feed.”

I left his house that morning, raving about his family’s jarma, and when I got to training, there was a new attendee, a girl, about my age. “Look Carl,” women said, “she’s skinny, like you, and she has a mouth like a thimble.”

In these the waning days of summer, when the nights already getting cold, my stalwart Anne, right here in Naryn, brainstormed the right idea for a very Kyrgyz date: we went to the roadside kymys strip-mall called “40 Yurts” and had a very informed, very esoteric kymys tasting.

This place boasts perhaps 20 kymys stalls, and it was our intention to share a cup from each. We hitchhiked most of the hour way up and back, one leg of it in the cab of a Kazakh big-rig. At our destination, we tasted from six different vendors, and found tastes that ranged from sour to very cheesy (we also found our goal of trying one of each 20 fermented milk varieties, a little, shall we say, ambitious). Nevertheless, It was a palate building exercise in a most peculiar delicacy, and a date that any Kyrgyz could appreciate.

This week also heralded the first of my natural dyes trainings. We started in the hamlet of Birlik, in the far-flung rayon of At Bashy. Making dyes, it turns out, is more about collecting the right materials than about the actual process. While our materials were, at times, less than ideal, we did produce an excellent burgundy from the bitter berries of the barberry bush. Next week, I hope to employ carrots and onion skins to form some brighter, more striking variations.

And with that, folks, an intriguing question from a response last week calls me to take a step back: “What does ol’ Kyrgy Carl know about natural dyes, anyway?”

Well, when it comes to naturally dying organic fibers, I’m as green as a spinach leaf before a boiling cauldron. Instead, for this training, I’ve hired local experts to do the work, and I sit and watch with the rest of the students. My job, thus far, you see, is about making connections; I am introducing these women to trainers with good skills (and footing the bill), and it’s as good a service as any.

And in the mean time, is back to the grunt work of being a foreigner in a strange land. I’m with my host-family again, full time. I spent this afternoon showing my host sister how to kill slugs with salt (they make horrible nests in the pits of pulled carrots, but are then all the easier to kill…). She also told me about her plans for the future, her aims to see the world traveling as a diplomat. For this Kyrgyz teenager, it seems, the sky’s the limit.

And now folks, we’re replacing last week’s foreign celebrity’s with home grown Kyrgyz ones: Rosa Otubaeva. That’s right, Kyrgyzstan’s very own president is coming to Naryn. As it turns out, she went to school here from 2^nd to 6^th grade, and wants to pay the old spot a visit. She’s also planning to visit some of our very own volunteers: the noble teachers at the American Studies Center. And that means none other than the kymys taster extraordinaire, Anne, from our first paragraph. It doesn’t get, folks, any more Kyrgyz than that.

These two groups, folks, share a common, yet unique goal: to help the locals, and ask for remarkably little in return. Now, when I explain this to locals, their most common response is, “are you a spy?” When Claudia first met the Kiwis, here question was, “are you missionaries?”

It seems, folks, even among the like minded, it is hard to believe more of us exist.

From Peace Corps, it was Country Director, Regional Director, and the Regional Desk Agent; titles aside, these are big, important people. Our first encounter came over dinner, where we filled an insatiable  desire for knowledge. We told the group about our lives, our work, what it was like here, day in and day out. In exchange, they also told us about what Peace Corps is like in other countries, a topic we are surprisingly ignorant on. For example, I learned many Peace Corps countries equip their volunteers with bicycles, and, often enough, home-stay situations are simple not the norm. Also, the fact that we are in a cold, mountainous climate is fairly unique: while we have no tropical diseases to contend with, the winter is a serious beast.

The next day after dinner, these big-wigs stopped by the home or office of every Naryn city volunteer in my class. At my house, we treated them to a giant guesting breakfast, including a cake, and my favorite Kyrgyz food, dimdama: a stew-type dish, without the broth. As per usual, these guys fell head over heals for my family, and it even brought my country director to tears.

“Carl,” she said, “these past six months have seen very unique circumstances here in Kyrgyzstan. In spite of all that the country has seen, we have gone to great lengths to keep this program here. We have to be here, the people love us.” It was a bare and honest answer to all the questions we’ve had.

The other set of stars were Tony and Brian from New Zealand. KNZRT is a crew of international developers with more years experience per member than I have been alive. They come here each year, to monitor their development programs, and make no money for themselves. Watching Brian last year was like viewing a sage, the wise man who could show me the way to the career I’d like to have. This year it was more of the same, though with two sages, instead of just one. We toured small cooperatives that they helped start: bakeries, dairy, sewing co-ops.  They were introducing quality potato seeds, and quality feed crops. We even held a 1 day workshop in the end, one where I even got to play a little part.

One of the days, I blogged every hour for the whole day. Check out KyrgyCarl.com folks, for the mighty extravaganza.

For the rest of this month, I will be teaching handicraft women about dying their rugs with leaves and roots. Here’s my invitation to stay along for the ride.

The village we’ll be visiting is in the At Bashy rayon. It is about half way to Bosogo, the place I’m told that most resembles Switzerland. I’m preparing for magnificent scenery on the way down. And, to boot, this area is so clean and rural, the kymys should be plentiful and immaculate.

While the Kyrgyz do have a reputation sometimes, this one is simpler: My 14 year old host-sister stays up late. As simple a universal as any ever told.

Last Saturday night was defined by a fancy dinner involving two people from Washington: the Regional Direction for Eurasia, and a nice man who holds the fairly vague position of “Desk Officer” for our part of the world. The dinner was rounded out by our Country Director, in from Bishkek. We treated them to the local dinnertime hot spot, and they got to know the delightful local custom of employing an off-key karaoke DJ to spice-up the loud, Friday night music.

Then, along with the rising Sunday morning sun, this esteemed crew hopped from one volunteer to the next, viewing our living conditions and working environments. When they got to my house, my family, as always, charmed them to pieces. We had a wonderful breakfast, and my home-stay dad even had the decency to lie on my behalf.

“Yes,” he said, with a wink in my direction, “Carl stays up very late working, and then, like a strong farmer, he rises every morning with the sun.”

But the brass, as always, had a lot to see, and very little time to see it. One minute they were jumping happily around Naryn, and the next they were off to the beautiful Lake Issyk Kul.

In their stead came in the folks from the venerable Kyrgyzstan – New Zealand Rural Fund. For those of you who remember, these are the professional development practitioners who let me tag along with them a bit last year, when I was as green as green could be. This year, they’ve extended me the same courtesy.

The two men I’ve been hanging around with this week are veterans of this kind of exactly the kind of work I’d like to make a career of. They talk about development, about micro-finance, about “giving a hand up, not a hand out.” Finally, with the experience to understand what is going on, they are letting me see what the nuts and bolts of well funded, grass roots development work really entails.

Each day we go to a village where they have, through local staff, organized small scale development programs. Most of these are groups of 5 to 8 people, all nominally organized to accomplish a particular goal. One group might be trying to maximize growing efforts in a new green house; another with goat breeding; another with improved varieties of potatoes. But this is just one portion of the goal. Within each group, members pool a small amount of money each month, and then draw on this money for internal micro-loans. To make sure all of this works well, these Kiwis don’t miss a beat.

I sit and watch as, through a translator, these guys ask the groups how much every individual element of a project costs, from inputs to labor, and the opportunity cost of it all. Afterwards, we have long discussions on the development philosophy behind everything, and how best to help the poorest people in each village. The opportunity is simply profound.

And folks, if all this excitement weren’t enough, from this letter onwards, I will be participating in a 24-hour blogapalooza. That means, once per hour, every hour, for the next day, I will be making a post to my blog. That’s right. For anyone who really wants to know what a day in the life of Kyrgy Carl is like, now is your chance.

While I was cavorting about the Great Middle Kingdom, Naryn was seeing summer and its festivities in full force.

As the lady who runs my banya said, “we Kyrgyz don’t go on vacations. We save our money and have weddings!” In the three weeks I was gone, the big fat sheep came  down from the mountains and fueled countless summer galas: there were two weddings for people I knew directly alone, and the day I got back, my host-family left for Kazakhstan to attend another one. Since being back, the streets have been loud with hooting young men, jutting up through the sunroofs of their fast-moving wedding processions, honking up and down the main drag. This truly is summer in the city.

As well as having missed these weddings, I also missed, perhaps, the greatest concert I could ever have been privy to. See, in Kyrgyzstan, there are primarily two cell phone companies. The once great Mobi was recently purchased by a Russian company, renamed Beeline, and has been making great headway uniting all of Kyrgyzstan in wireless coverage. They were putting their homegrown rivals, MegaCom very much to shame. While I was away, though, MegaCom reasserted their strength.

To coincide with the opening of their new MegaCom branch office in the bazaar (a cool, clean affair spurned on by the six month old Beeline office down the street), they held a bash, a jam: a bona fid Mega-Concert (see what they did there?)

This day-long no-fee extravaganza hosted not one or two, but 10 of the biggest pop-stars that Kyrgyzstan has to offer. It was held outdoors in the Naryn city stadium. Everyone was welcome, and it went long into the night. In between acts, they even brought out a break dancing troupe and a band of comedians. While it may be true that I attended Woodstock ’99 (Thanks Uncle Chuck!), I don’t even think that compares to what this event would have been like (had of course, I attended.)

But all this might lead someone to believe the Kyrgyz Summer is all play and no work; that is hardly the case. Right now, the number one project on my plate is attempting to organize an extensive 6 session workshop series to teach 100 rural woman how to dye their shyrdaks and other felt handicrafts with the natural grass and flowers found all around them. These are skills once known, but lost during the Great Modernizing Soviet times. I one a big grant to do the work, and paired with a number of local groups to get it down, and now, through countless setbacks and frustrations, it looks like things might actually work out for ol’ Kyrgy Carl.

Never fear, once all is said and done, I’ll rain down with pictures and videos to make your proverbial socks roll up and down all your proverbial legs. So, stay tuned.

Beijing, it turned out, was a city both very similar, and very different to the one I left in the spring of 2008. Where in many ways, it hadn’t changed at all: big buildings, impressive sights, lots of cars, great subway; I found myself not recognizing much of anything. Beijing, while technically the same city, was all but foreign to this former resident.

But I still have friends there. My old business professor, an eager entrepreneur when I left him, was sporting two locations, 40 employees, a new wife and a very fancy car. I have two classmates who stayed, and they described watching the city change before their very eyes (and sometimes with surprisingly little warning.)

In the end, all the traveling, all the language practice, all the conversations, they pinnacled to one single two hour meal: I went back to my old host family. It was the quiet, safe environment that my language had flourished in its fullest, and being there again, it came right back. I walked right back in to our 16th floor apartment, there across from the Bird’s Nest stadium. Their first words were simple: “you got thin!” We looked at pictures, we caught up. We had dinner and a beer, and talked politics, just like the old days, (though now, I had to explain desperately what on Earth I was doing in ‘Ji-ar-ji-si-tan’) And they were delightfully unaware of the changes I just couldn’t get over. “Nothing has changed in Beijing,” they said, speaking more of their own needs than anything else.

“Yes, we have a subway station nearby now, very convenient.” But still, they just wanted to talk politics, and comment on the heat. I gave them a picture, and they gave me hugs. The food was wonderful. And then, just like that, we were off, China long behind us.

Where I had previously been overwhelmed by the mess they were making of the human rights of billions, this time, it was through the developer’s eye that I looked at the place. There are banks, folks, banks just everywhere. There are public toilets; free ones. I said to my friend there, “boy, in China, things get done. They say a year, they mean a year.” “Sometimes,” he replied, “they mean less.” But it was also polluted. With all the massive and beautiful buildings in downtown Beijing, I could seldom see more than have a dozen in any one direction on account of the smog. “They know it’s a problem,” my friend had said, “they say they will relocate all of the plastic factories here to an island within two years.” In America, you couldn’t even suggest such a thing; in China, it will happen.

And with that, we took the cheap, fast and clean subway to the airport, spent an overnight in Urumqi, and found ourselves back home in Kyrgyzstan, a place I was more than happy to see again. My friend, Matt had left us, one day earlier, in a manner fitting for two urban boys: in a subway station. Of my glorious summer break, only Corey, my fellow volunteer and I remained. At the airport in Bishkek, we pushed off the taxi drivers, and took a marshrutka into town. Home again, at last.

The “ear-ache”　I mentioned in my last email turned out to be none other than a viral infection in the depths of my right inner ear. It was only after the fluid drained from my Eustachian tube did the pain subside. It was arguably one of the most painful experiences of my life, and on I was overcoming when I last wrote.

These things are a risk of traveling, and only my second time really getting sick, since that awful bought of esophogitis I overcame in Vietname, those many long years ago.

But boy oh boy, folks, have things picked up since then! After recovering from the ache (from which I still have some ringing) (and writing that too boring letter) my friends and I cavorted about Xi’an and all it’s wild splendor.

Xi’an is the city everyone expects to find when planning a trip to China. It’s ancient city walls are still in full force, big and broad enough to host hords of tourists as they ride around them on bicycles. Inside the walls, the buildings still have their upturned eaves, and even the tourists night markets sport very un-pretty touches, like external air conditioners; proving they are still lived in by real, breathing people. Outside the city walls, the buildings are giant, and it seems as though the walls are defending the inner city from the montrosities without.

After a mean set of suction cups (traditional medicine meant to suck out poisons) the three of us amigos got on a 12 hour train for Beijing. Here in this heavy touring season, train tickets are hard to come by, and we settled for seats, even though the train was over night. This was fine, until we found that (first) all the unseated passengers linger in the seating car, and (second) a landslide and a fire redicrected our train, and balooned the trip up to a solid 28 hours plus.

However, we did arrive in Beijing, our spirits in tact, and only missed a day.

Now, we’ve a few more days here. My friends are all cavorting about the sites, while I meet friends from a time long past. But more on that, when we meet again.

The Uighur language is very close to Kyrgyz, and during a mission to track down my laptop (unfortunately now lost forever), I got to speak to many Uighur people. They comiserated my loss, helped me try to track it down, and took the opportunity, for whatever reason, to share their discontent. Perhaps it was the novelty of a white man speaking something like their language, but the stories were unending. China, folks, is a big a complicated place.

(Language side note: The Uighur people I spoke with sprinkled their language liberally with Chinese, just as the Kyrgyz do with Russian. Just one more parallel with the old Soviet Empire…)

But we haven’t just been on a tour of big cities, not at all. My crew and I spent some serious quality time in the city of DunHunag, the plastic-y Disney Land tourist town nearby the spectacular MoGao caves. Once we got over the overwhelming mass of tourists pumped through the caves (an attraction in its own right), we were able to see some of the most extensive Buddhist cave art in the world. The colors were magnificent, and the restoration an abomination. It would have all been for naught had we not also gone to the dramatically less touristed 1,000 Ming West caves, a singificantly smaller find, but absent the tourist hord. In this place, we experienced a quiet ambiance that might have been closer to how the place could have been during its heyday. This plus a riotous night market and a desert oasis (chock full of Chinese tourists all identically clad in knee-highm, bright orange, sand protecting booties) rounded out our desert time in sheer magnificence.

Since then, folks, we dropped by the delightful Lanzhou, for a taste of a pleasant working class city (with more commerce than, perhaps, all of Kyrgyzstan combined) and are now resting peacefully in the city of Xi’an, in China proper. It is this place that houses the unparalled Terracotta Warriors. While my friends check it out themselves (these are old stomping grounds for me) I’m resting from our long train rides, getting over an ear-ache, and waiting to see what my old home, Beijing, has waiting for me, after all these years.