Along with the cold, folks, comes indoor activities. While I don’t believe that the girls at my house are spending any more time studying (and God knows they’d never consider spending any less), there has been a definite increase in time spent watching TV. That’s right folks, the boob tube: its a ubiquitous machine here in country, present in even the smallest village houses. The is seldom more than one station available in Kyrgyz, and usually 4 or 5 more in Russian. Most homes, it seems, also sport DVD players. These little accessories make the wonderful world of Korean soap operas a very real phenomenon.

While in China, I had often heard that Koreans were the pretty boys of Asia, and that their television programming was a great export, particularly popular with the ladies. Here in Kyrgyzstan, DVD collections of these series flood the market. In one, four very rich boys gallivant amongst dramatic familial intrigue. In another, a 4 member, all boy, glam-rock band features a member who is a girl, but beneath all the make-up and general androgyny of the scene, nobody knows it. It is all exotic and the kids sometimes stay up until the wee hours of the morning watching it. Unfortunately for me, however, it is all in Russian.

In fact, folks, my family, all being fluent in the language, watch TV almost exclusively in Russian. “There is no interesting Kyrgyz programming,” my host dad had once explained. Unfortunately, of course, that means I can’t really partake. When the family retires to the den, unless I can scratch out a tickle-fest with the toddlers, or a chess match with one of the older girls, I inevitably sink back into my bedroom. Before my computer died, I’d write on it, and now I read, or just visit friends away from the house. This, I have noticed, has created a very real divide. Much of the unstructured social time in our house is dominated by the television, and that means I can seldom participate.

That is, until the other night.

Just the other day, I happened to be home around 6 pm. At this same time, the TV happened to be on (two not infrequent occurrences), but this time, it was the Kyrgyz channel that was playing. Then, out of nowhere, I heard an excited holler from the other room, “Carl!” my host sister shouted, “the news is on, in English!” When I came running, it was true. I had always heard of a mythical Kyrgyz news program delivered in English, but had never really believed it. But there, before my eyes, was a young Kyrgyz woman reading the news, the domestic Kyrgyz news, in English! Then, as I watched, with my host mother and sister in the background, I learned about many things that otherwise would have gone far over my head, including a general strike threatened by the country’s medical professionals.

“Oh, are they talking about our strike?” My host mom chimed in from the background, herself a doctor who delivers babies and performs more c sections than she can count (all for a salary that would make the Ameican professional weep). She is an impeccably smart lady who studied English in grammar school. Between that and her knowledge of English-Latin-Russian cognates from her medical training, can pick up a lot if she’s listening.

“Yes,” I said, marveled.

“They asked us to hold off until the first of February, when they think they will have more money to pay us. I hope so,” she said.

And right there, over just the littlest bit of shared media, we bonded in on a new level. For at least that moment, I wasn’t just a silly foreigner blissfully unaware of Kyrgyz national affairs; I was in the know, and I liked it. But then, as brief as it had come, the fast-talking Kyrgyz news anchors were back, and I was underwater again, trying desperately just to keep up. And, easy in retrospect, I know it is moments like this, thrust out of my comfort zone, that I realize just how many things there are working to divide us, even down to what kind of TV we watch. Needless to say, though, the divides are shrinking, and my host family and I grow closer every day.

Love always, and mind your TVs.

This makes snow removal an issue, to say the least. The one main street in town, Lenin, is one of the very few that are paved, and the only one that is plowed, though only rarely. On days when the snow is fresh, the cars that don’t have chains on their tires make sliding stops as regular practice. When the snow is tough and packed, the only real concern is slipping while you cross.

The side streets show no hope of plowing, and the thick snow does wonders to fill the pot holes. When kids aren’t sledding on the hills, or sliding, for fun, on every possibly decline, they’re grabbing onto cars as they slow down to round corners, and then sliding down the street attached to them (a practice I’ve heard is also common in Detroit.)

Now shoveling, as we think of it, is a bit different out here, if for no other reason than the curious layout of the standard home. Kyrgyz houses don’t generally have a front door. Instead, facing the street is just the plane side of the house, and next to it, a tall, metal gate. This gate will generally have one entrance for people and one for cars. Once inside, there will be a driveway, at the end of which features a garage. Before that garage, however, will be a turn off, sending you to what we would consider the back door of the house. This does not occupy all of the space in yard, however. Generally one can also find some yard space, an outhouse, maybe a fruit tree, and a large dog cage. Sometimes there will even be two buildings for different uses depending on the season.

Take note here: Long driveway, little lawn. Good for cars in the summer, bad for your back in the winter.

At my house, this all means starting from the gate and pushing all of the snow towards the back where there is a little strip of green. We filled that up about a month ago. Next was the same procedure, just a little farther back, to another green spot, until we filled that up too. The last timed it snowed we went way back, to a far corner. But for this maneuver, my family had a system. We’d shovel out a path, and then lay a fleece blanket down. We’d pile a mountain of snow on the blanket and then drag it to the back corner, where we’d shovel it again.

That was cool, but we’re the lucky ones. Up and down the streets here in Sunny Naryn, both big and small, there are huge mounds of snow, some 4 feet high, and the average American would assume them to be from the giant shovel of the plows. But no, not here. Here, it is the concerted labor of countless men, bearing one load after another of snow, carried in wheelbarrows, on blankets, pieces of siding and sleds. All of this sound pretty reasonable? Now, imagine that instead of an ergonomically correct, light plastic shovel, you’re doing this with a piece of plywood fitted between the teeth of a picthfork. But thats just life, folks, and I love it.

In fact, we had our record low the other night, -35 C (that’s -31 F, not including wind chill, wink wink). Coming home in the cold with a frozen nose is bad enough. But knowing you’ll have to return to that cold, to do nothing but squat over an open hole in a small room is the icing on the cake.

As winter slowly approached, my growing habit had been to wait as long as possible to endure this tribulation. That might have put me at once every three days. Needless to say, my midsection was getting less and less comfortable.

Ironically, it was the vaguely offensive luxury of that hotel (see the video here!), however, that has got me aggressively adjusting to my icy outhouse. See, I got a little ill in the bowels at last week’s PDM, and of my fancy indoor toilet, I took full advantage. It was that little taste of the good life that reminded me how wonderful it is to be comfortable in the plumbing, and how a quick run outside is really worth the trouble.

So I’m working at it now, folks, rest assured. And truth be told, its never as bad as ya’ think it’s gonna be. Sure, I have to put on a hat, but I generally am already wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt. Plus, it’s also amazing how quickly you can go when you really need to.

Otherwise, this week is marked by some new “real” work I’m up to. Through some mean cajoling and pestering, I got the UNDP and local Aga Hun supported University of Central Asia to sponsor a course teaching rural handicraft cooperatives business skills. As a good community developer, however, I insisted the course syllabus not be drawn up until we conducted a needs assessment of the ladies we’d like to teach. What that means, really, is just more of the dream.

Thus far, we’ve been to 4 villages and met with 41 women. To date, these meetings have been entirely in Ak-Tala rayon, the poorest rayon here in Naryn, the poorest province of Kyrgyzstan. And for whatever reason, I feel like I have experienced the greatest honest luxury in recent memory.

We drive as many as two hours outside of the city, with the fingers of the mountains coming down to our left, covered in velvet snow. The women we meet with bear no signs of timidity. They tell us aggressively of their issues: they want accounting skills, to learn to harness capital, advanced felt production technology, guidelines for pricing, and most of all, more orders: no one’s askin’ for hand-outs here.

Then, inevitably, before we leave, they’ll show us their workshops, and with each visit, their work gets more and more impressive. For those details, tune in next week.

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

Our Dec. 25^th Christmas (as opposed to the Jan. 7^th Russian Christmas) started things off. While festive decorations went up around the 20^th, aside the occasional Santa Clause, the only direct mention of Christmas comes in the form of “Christmas Tree.” Having these is a common tradition here, and they’re called that, however the date we accept as “Christmas” goes almost entirely unrecognized.

For my sake, my family breaded and fried some fish, a relative rarity in these parts. The complete oblivion surrounding our customs took an ironic form for me, personally. Before dinner on Christmas, we picked up two tons of coal, in the form of 30 large sacks to fill a 3×3x6 foot shed. That makes me, surely, the naughtiest kid Santa has ever seen.

The following day, 13 of the volunteers in Naryn Oblast convened into one volunteer apartment to celebrate American Style. We prepared a spectacular feast, held a Secret Santa, played games and told stories. It was a big slice of the familiar packed into just a few hours.

The period between Christmas and New Years, was one of working uncertainty. See, the name of the game out here is company parties. My Dad and the electricians celebrated one day, the NGO/Government leaders another, then the teachers, smaller companies, students, large families, etc. And with only 3 or 4 real restaurants in town, this means it is wholly unclear when anyone would be actually working, or just preparing for their parties.

Match this with the bitter cold cheelde having tushed (or arrived), means getting bundled up to find an empty office is particularly unappealing.

On the subject of the cheelde, the forty days of the bitterest cold of winter, I’ve learned the first day is not necessarily a unanimously agreed upon event, but for me, one day stands out. As I left the house that morning, patches of frost covered the gate, like lichens, every tree branch in town sported a thick, wispy layer of it, like a sheath of white bark.

As for the Jan 1^st New Years (as opposed to the Muslim Noruz New Years holiday in March, or the old Russian New Years on January 13th), the celebrations were quit a bit more subdued than I expected. My family and I had a big meal together, complete with Champaign for toasting. Just after the stroke of midnight, the city erupted. For about 20 minutes the popping of fireworks was nonstop, and we went outside to be awed, locals favoring the big bright ones, over the copious noise makers I witnessed years ago in Beijing. After that initial burst, the cracking slowed down, but continued, intermittently, like a spent bag of popcorn, throughout the night.

Feeling the cold before my siblings, I headed inside, in time to make a toast with just my parents around. I thanked them copiously, for everything, their time, patience, their respectfulness, and eagerness to open their family to me. Their response brought a tear to my eye, “Carl, you’re now part of our family.” What more could I want?

Originally Written January 3rd, 2010

Its cold here, and the cold is different from any cold I’ve known. Thus far, the lowest we’ve hit is  around -13 Fahrenheit. While I think it’s already gotten down lower than that in Chicago, taking wind-chill into account, here its not all that windy, and that makes the cold, well, different.

The best way I can describe it is that when I go outside, my nose begins to feel as though it is freezing. Not “really-cold” freezing, but like, water turning into ice, freezing. When the cold first started to fall, I noticed people clearing their noses in powerful farmer blows. The habit is beginning to take on new relevance for me.

When the real cold hits, the locals know it. They even have a word for it, cheelde. This notes the forty coldest days of the year. While the dates vary, the first day is always cold enough that most everyone agrees. The middle of the cheelde is not as cold, but the last day is like that slap in the face interrogators always give their victims in the movies to wake them up after passing out: its just as cold as the starting day, but signals the end of the worst.

The cold has even permeated everyday language. Along with “how is your health, and, how is work?” a common greeting is now, “you’re not cold, are you?” One day my boss asked if my house was warm (a common question) and when I chuckled agreement I also sprung the question back on him. “Well, of course. But I’m from here, I’ve prepared. What about you? Are you ready?” Now, aside from being unable to procure a traditional coat and making do with hand-me-downs, how could I answer, Yes? How could anyone prepare for -40 (the convenient point where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet), without wind-chill, having not experienced it before?

Every day, in fact, my family asks me if I’m cold at night. On a record day, three of my family members, all independent of each other, asked me this question. What I really want to tell them is that none of it would be so bad if I didn’t have to brave this awful cold every time I needed to use the bathroom.

But where the cold is cold, the hot tea and loving family truly make up for it. I would never want to live alone in this place, and now, I can see why hardly anyone does.

Good luck with your own famlies, folks, and Happy Holidays.

Originally written Dec. 19th, 2009

I got home in the morning, around 9, for the sole purpose of seeing the animal meet its maker. She was tied up to the tree next to the clothes line. Just chillin’ there.

We hung around, had breakfast, no big deal. And then, maybe an hour and a half later, we got down to work. Two guys helped my dad, the first was Cholpon, the guy who lives with us, sometimes. I think he’s my mom’s brother, but I’m not sure. He’s always doing funny stuff like bundling up to go to the outhouse, and drinking honey seeped through a radish (apparently good for your throat).The other was a savvy looking guy who I’ve seen around before named Aibek. He seemed to really be the ring leader. He helped do the complicated job of tying up the heifer’s legs so that all three of the men could simultaneously pull the ropes and she’d fall over. But as knowledgeable as this man seemed to be, I think since it was my Dad’s cow, it was his job to do most of the slaughtering.

With the cow on the ground, my Grandma came out to insist that we do an omeen and said a little prayer. Then my dad brought out a knife and started the work. We had a little trench dug there in the snow and dirt. The other two men held the cow in tow with ropes, one binding all the legs, and one tied to its nose. My dad approached it from the back and just slit the animal’s throat. But that’s not where it ended. For whatever reason, this one cut was not enough. He had to keep getting in there to finish the job. This was the only really gruesome part of the exercise. The only thing I hadn’t seen before. He just kept going into its throat to cut more stuff apart. The whole while, blood was pouring out, frothing in the snow. The cow was breathing, but the steam was coming out of the cut in its throat. It was twitching around, trying, perhaps, to get free. My dad just kept cuttin’.

All the while, I was filming the event. Once it was over, my dad asked, “are you scared?” “No,” I said. Then I got a “good job!”

With the cow dead, the scene looked like some sort of Hollywood horror set. There was the pit of blood, surrounded in white snow, except for what had been made into froth from its throat breath. There was the log its neck had been held over. After it had been dragged away from this scene, there was a smeared trail of blood. Watching the animal go was even worse, as by this time, the cut had been made so deep its head almost hung around as a courtesy.

At this point, the skinning began. I contemplated leaving, as I’m pretty familiar with this process, but, knowing that only in staying for the things you’ve already seen can you begin to see new things, I stuck around. I had this thought many times, and in the end, only left because I had to.

At this point, during the skinning, the guy who seemed to be the most experienced in the matter, started asking me if I was gonna do any of the butchering. “You keep taking pictures-” he just kept saying. Finally, my dad took the camera from me, gave me a knife, and they showed me how to cut off the skin.

I kept noticing how this was in stark contrast to my old family’s house. There, the slaughtering of cows was work. It had to get done, with quality, and the quicker the better. Sure, it was fun to talk about me helping, but nobody actually seemed to want me to get in there. Maybe I should have hung around the garage more, like a kid brother, until they finally gave me a knife. But I never did, and they never offered. Actions speak louder than words, especially when you can say so few, and no matter how many times I asked to be taught, they’d just signal good intentions, and then leave it at that.

But here, in this new family, (who seem a bit more emotionally involved with me regardless), it was the winter slaughter. This was going to be the meat for the whole season. It was a big deal, and I was part of the family. Unlike a kid brother tagging along, I was a part of the family, and they wanted to include me. So they did.

My dad said he’d take some pictures of me, and I got in with the knife. There is some kind of film between the skin and the meat of the animal. Like the glue you see when you pull a price tag off of a birthday present. My job was to cut this glue. I needed to keep from cutting the skin, so I’d have something to pull on, but I also didn’t want any meat left on the skin. So the cut had to be right in the glue, next to the meat. But as I did that, I found I was cutting a bit of the meat too. There is some kind of a film between this glue and the meat proper. When I looked at where the other guys were working, their films were intact. Mine was not.

So I kept going, enjoying myself all the way. I noticed the guy skinning the ribcage on the other side of the animal had moved from the knife, and when it was convenient just used his fist. This has the advantage of guaranteeing you won’t cut the flesh. But before I could try it, my apparent slowness caught up with the group (perhaps from watching the other men, perhaps from being too careful, or maybe from watching the flesh of this animal quiver, and remembering only minutes earlier it had been alive), and my dad stepped in to finish the job. After that I took some more pictures, lots more pictures, but it was the end of my specific work.

With the cow skinned, the first thing they did was cut off the legs. They’d already broken the shins off at the knees, and now was getting down to the meat, the haunches. They cut little handles between the muscles or tendons in the leg, chopped it off at the joint, and then carried it into the garage. It was so cold already, that we were going to have no problem freezing this meat. With the legs cut off, they moved to open the animal up.

Now, at the butcher’s house, I had never gotten to see this process. For some reason, I always just assumed you’d open the ribs near the butt up first, and then get the organs out. But they didn’t touch the back hips until the very end of the day. This part started with the front ribs, near the neck. They cut some of these open, using sharp knives. Occasionally, they’d use a hammer to put a knife through a bone. With the first few ribs out of the cage on either side, they then broke off what appeared to be the breast bone. This provided clear view of the lungs, and the beginning of the organ bag.

This I learned at Bucknell, from a girl who went hunting with her father and brothers. All the organs come in a sack. This makes them easy to clean out, from perhaps a deer, but in the cow, it only helped in the beginning. As we were breaking open the rest of the ribcage, the organ bag stayed pretty much intact. But at some point, the intestines and stomach started to spill out. Once we had the ribs splayed, they dragged the organs over to a plastic sheet.

Here, the women stepped in. They got to work emptying remaining poop out of the intestines, and otherwise cleaning the edible organs, which comprise the vast majority. My dad cut some hair from the tail to tie up two parts of the intestines before cutting them, I assume from the end of the tube to the anus. At this dismantling point, I also got a clear view of the big white wind-pipe, and the smaller, softer esophagus. The wind pipe, I would late have the privilege of watching my mother run her teeth along the inside of during dinner, as if it were an artichoke leaf.

With the organs over to the side, being cleaned by the women, there was one large organ left alone. I had previously assumed, it being so big, that it was the stomach. It was not the stomach. It was a calf. There was a bit of talk about it. I guess they hadn’t known the cow was pregnant. There wasn’t much talk, though, at least not much that I could understand. Instead, someone just picked it up, cut the umbilical cord, and brought it to a lonely spot in the snow. Later, they’d slit its throat, as if it might otherwise get up and walk away.

At about this time, or perhaps before, more friends and neighbors started to show up. They came to help a bit and just hang out. This was, after all, a big event. At some point, three guys, all around my age, showed up with a bottle of vodka and a dozen beers. They pushed my dad to drink, which he did only politely, and then declined. I was not so savvy.

See, I’m usually better at sneaking my way out of drinking than I am a direct and persistent refusal. These guys would not let up. We talked. The one was hoping to marry his girlfriend next fall. After admitting this was my first cow slaughter, they wanted to charge me for watching this, so I quickly changed my story. They wanted to go to America with me when I left, as everyone does. But in the end, they wanted me to drink.

For this young American, three shots of Kyrgyz vodka on an empty stomach pretty much suffice. I followed it with a little beer, and proceeded to get quiet. I was drunk, and I didn’t want to proclaim it. Unfortunately, as the butchering slowly moved into the garage, and I got to talking at my Dad and one of the guys who had pushed the booze on me, I repeated something I had misheard my dad say about me on a previous occasion. “Right now,” I said, “I am very interesting in sheep.” Unfortunately, I said something to the effect of “right now, I am very drunk to sheep.” Right. They laughed. As they should have.

Originally written Dec. 9th 2009

Now! Enough about the past! We’ve had two festivals this week!

First, our American holiday, Thanksgiving. While getting a turkey proved beyond us this year, getting a chicken, stuffing, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes were not. In one of the volunteer’s apartments, the six of us Naryn City volunteers plus one ELF (English Language Fellow) working in country celebrated the holiday as proudly as any group of young Americans living as far from America as possible could hope to.

When I explained the holiday to my Kyrgyz friends and family, they all told me “we have the same holiday! It’s the day after yours!” While the reasons are different, the celebration is largely the same.

See, about a little over month ago we celebrated the first of two annual festivals called Ait (or Eid, in other Muslim traditions.) It featured huge amounts of food at the end of a long fast, and jumping from house to house eating and talking. This time around, there was no preceding fast, but the unique element was bonus generosity. I was told by many that the hallmark of this second Ait was the giving of extra food to the poor, and putting on concerts explicitly for the benefit of those who would not otherwise be able to afford them.

Now, unlike our Christian and American secular holidays that stay the same, or see only marginal date change year to year, the Ait cycle moves twelve days every year. That means seeing Ait and Thanksgiving fall so closely together is just a little treat for this, my first year in country, and won’t be seen again for a generation.

Otherwise, up here, in my little Kyrgyz town, butted against the Celestial Mountains, winter is all around us. The Kyrgyz traditional Kalpak has mostly been swapped out for tall and round fur hats that rest precariously on the heads of men, leaving plenty of room for warm air to lay trapped underneath. Women are all bundled up in head scarves.

The roads, both paved and dirt are packed heavily with snow, and the memory of plowed streets seems as though it will remain as such. As a small public bus stopped to take me to work one morning, I watched it slide to a stop, the tires stationary for its final 10 feet of forward motion. When the cars aren’t coming down the hill behind my house, scoring up the snow with the chains on their tires, the local boys riding down on the same sleds they use to haul water.

Its cold here, folks. On Thanksgiving it was ten degrees. I pile on the layers, and am making do. But as the locals remind me, this is hardly the beginning.

Originally Written November 29th, 2009