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.

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.

And so this is how I was introduced to the new volunteers, introduced not by my Christian moniker, but instead as I am apparently known but the staffers in our main office, as Kyrgyz Carl. The reaction, among my compatriots, was positive, though did inspire some gentle ribbing.

“We should drop him off in the mountains somewhere, get him lost,” one of the new volunteers told a friend of mine, “that way we’ll lower expectations on ourselves.”

To which my friend so appropriately replied, “you don’t know how much he’d like that.”

And so it goes. We were the new guys, learning the ways of the experienced crew. Now, it is us who are showing people around, telling them what we know. And talking to them, folks, is different than writing letters home. For instance, during our first meet-and-greet, my friend said, “well, I don’t think anyone has been really hassled out here.”

“Well,” I countered, “there was that time I got into a taxi with a drunk guy, who sped down towards the bazaar, and chased me from his car swinging his fists.”

Whereas here, folks, I focus on the wonderful moments, the ones that extend to the majority of my service, I felt obliged to warn these guys. They know how wonderful it is here, how safe it is. I told them about the time a very, VERY drunk old man grabbed my bag strap, perhaps trying to greet me, as he was to drunk to speak. We pushed him off gently, though, because we didn’t want to knock him over.

And I got to thinking, in those moments of story-telling reflection, how different one audience is from the other. Folks, I give you my world here, in positives and negatives, in the proportions that I see it.

But so is life. And this new crew is throwing me, and many of us in the old guard reflecting. Before we were comfortable with our language abilities, before we had friends in the community. Before we were clear on our jobs and were close to our coworkers.

And in that reflection, it has grown clear how that comfort snuck up on us. Little by little, we grew with this place, and are still growing. And as much as I want to show and teach the new volunteers, I know how much I needed to learn it all myself. This part of Peace Corps, the transition to the new generation of volunteers, is a very real part. The city is now populated with so many more of us, with new personalities and goals. It is an exciting time. More so that those sneaky little feelings would have led me to believe.

These Kyrgyz folks, so conscious about not getting cold, are walking around in skirts and t-shirts. I hardly even need a jacket to ward of a chill at night. We’re out and about without the armor that kept us warm all winter. The hills have turned green, and the animals have all gone out to pasture. The weather extremes, folks, make this place just all the more real.

The onset of warm weather has also brought another summer steadfast – kanykul­­, or, as we know it so faithfully at home – Summer Vacation. But before they’d let the kids out of their classrooms, we first needed to observe the tradition of akyrky kongoro – the last bell.

This is the ceremony where the old kids graduate, and the everyone celebrates. We were outside in the weather, and there was singing and dancing, and costumes and fun. But that was just at the regular school.

At the music school, where my 14 year old host sister was just finishing up, a recital commenced. There were piano players, a flute player, a kid who sang with an accordian, and lots and lots of komuz players. The komuz is the traditional Kyrgyz guitar type instrument, carved from the wood of the apricot tree. For those of you who saw the Trees for the Kyrgyz final video, you heard it played there, amongst a host of other traditional instruments. In the grand finale of the recital, all of the players plus their teacher got on stage for a powerful strumming string session of bliss.

The last bell, akyrky kongoro, has heralded far more than simply seeing the kids march about the streets in their new found free time. It also means all the happy summer things that I didn’t know I missed are coming back.

First off, kymys, the fermented horse milk that shocked me (and everyone else) on  arrival has started to flow from the mountains. It is much lighter than the cow kymys I’ve been drinking all winter, and carries an almost woody flavor. Nostalgia is a funny thing.

There are also sheep. Lots of sheep are around these days, and the prices are going down. Over the weekend, my host father simply informed me that we’d run out of meat at home, and a koi soi, or sheep slaughter, was in order.

This time around, though, I’ve seen it done, and I’m getting confident. As I have now decided that I would like to slaughter a sheep for my American family when they arrive a month from now, I decided it was time to get my hands dirty.

Now, while they won’t let me slit the throat yet, I am learning to skin the beast with my fist.  This stuff is Peace Corps, through and through.

Down in the sweltering Chui Valley rests the Metropolis of Bishkek, a city of anywhere between 800,000 and 1.2 million, depending on how you ask the question.

I had needed to come down from my mountain home to mail a laptop sleeve sample out to a prospective partner in Germany (hot dog!) and arrange a visa for my impending trip to the deserts of China this summer.

Where we in Naryn are just starting to feel the magical rays of real warmth, Bishkek is basking in it. Even in jeans and a t-shirt, I found myself sweating. Bishkek, folks, is a different world.

First off, there are white people. Lots and lots of white people. I was simply taken aback. As I asked around, the only thing I heard was, “you should have seen 10 years ago!” For whatever reason, it hadn’t struck me during training. But a year later in Sunny Naryn, it was shocking.

This white person prevalence led to another surprise: dramatic insistence that I speak Russian. Here in Naryn, folks just ask if I know Russian, and then go on with conversation. In Bishkek, though, I kept running into, “what do you mean you don’t speak Russian. How is that possible? You must speak Russian.” I even had a drunk man on a public bus simple berate me for lying, until the nearby women came to my defense.

But the real stand-out experience was staying in the heart of the city, with some ex-pat friends. These were information seekers and do-gooders: journalists and NGO directors. They had hot showers, refrigerators, good wine and wireless Internet. At one point, I found myself cruising around in the backseat of an SUV with the subwoofer bumping jams from the 80’s. We went out for Mexican food, where the sangria flowed liberally, and spent another day at a “health resort” that featured outdoor seating, fountains, and a horse riding stable.

“I don’t hear much Kyrgyz,” I told my friend.

“It’s almost looked down on around here, even among the ethnic Kyrgyz.” He said.

There is a real foreigner community here in Bishkek, folks, previously unbeknownst to me. They live at Western standards, though at dramatically reduced prices. But we all got along. We’d talk about the local politics, about development theory, the health of the country, and farming practices. These folks were all tapped into the country, though in a different way than me.

“I feel a bit like a country bumpkin among you guys,” I told my friend, the one who invited me out.

“Don’t worry, man,” he said, “I think these people admire your passion for this place. You are seeing a very intimate Kyrgyzstan, one we don’t really get to see.” It was mutual respect all around.

And then, after these few days of these novelties, the food and the thinking I’m Russian, I got on a public bus for Naryn city. I was the only white face to be found, and people were apologizing for getting in each other’s way. And I knew I was going home.

That history has a long fingers in Kyrgyzstan. Among those are the Victory Day celebrations.

We started here in Sunny Naryn with a festival. Near the center of town there is a park with a giant memorial. Here thousands of people gathered. The entrance was lined with school children dressed to the nines in formal, quasi-military uniforms. We had a small march of soldiers, a 21-gun salute, and speeches by WWII survivors. These men, relics of an older time, came covered in medals. One, pushed in a wheel chair, brought an Uzi.

From there I made my way out to my new second home, the hamlet of Orto Nura. I had been invited under the auspices that they’d be slaughtering not the mainstay sheep, but a supple little lamb. This folks, I just couldn’t resist.

As for my part, I brought some of the fresh produce that has been showing up in the bazaars. Last week I saw radishes for the first time in months, and a large crowd around them. Since then, tomatoes and cucumbers have appeared, and their prices have been dropping. Since they first appeared, prices have dropped by half. My 1 kilo of tomatoes still cost and outrageous 2 dollars, but after we made the steadfast Kyrgyz favorite, tomato and onion salad, it was all worth it.

Before dinner I walked around the village, and checked out some of the new trees, and shopped around my Tree Growers Association. Then, after soft, soft lamb, and it’s intestines tied in knots, we headed out for a walk.

The mountains around Orto Nura are a wonderful thing. While across the river they are immediate, large and foreboding, on the Orto Nura side, they are smaller, accessible. Half an hour in, following one branch of a Naryn River tributary, we found a little house. It was neat an tidy, with trees and a little potato patch. There was a low animal barn around back, and kids in front. As we approached, the matron came out to greet us.

“Come inside!” we her first words, “we’ll have yogurt.”

This was Kyrgyz hospitality at it’s finest. They asked about us, where we came from, what we did. We asked to our own interests, like where the solar panel on the side of their house came from, and if they lived here year round (“no, no,” she said, “we move out in the summer, to the mountains.”)

And then, when I said I hailed from the Great Windy City, she just laughed, “oh! My brother lives there. He drives a taxi, you’ll have to look him up.” The world folks, just keeps getting smaller.

 
So, here’s the deal. I’ve got until May 5th to raise $1,750, and the sooner the better. Here’s the skinny:

There is a cooperative on Lake Issyk Kul. They grow fruit trees saplings. But they do more than just that. They also deliver them, and hold seminars in the villages where they deliver them, teaching people where the best places to plant them are, and the proper ways to maintain them. It’s a full service system, and entirely sustainable. Not to mention, the trees are just three and a half dollars a piece.

A little background: as most of you know, I work with the UNDP here in Naryn city. We do work with the Kyrgyzstan New Zealand Rural Trust. As most of you also know, information here, especially timely information, is hard to come by. I just learned that this KNZRT just funded a project like this, and in learning that, learned that I could do it myself.

But there are two catches. The first is that the last day to place an order with them is May 5th. Had I known earlier, I’d have written about it then, but as is life. Second, the minimum order is 500. You got it, 500 trees at three and a half dollars a pop makes $1,750 dollars. If we raise that, we get trees this year. If not, your money waits in a pool and next year we buy boatloads.

Project Particulars

This is the first time we are doing this, though we’ll plan on making it annual. This year, we are working in the village of Orto Nura, and our partner is an English teaching volunteer named Rachel. Her host dad, Kochkunbek, is a real go getter. When I shopped around among the village volunteers, after talking to her, went up and called me directly.

I told him how the project would work, and he agreed to it. Him, being a savvy farmer, insisted himself that the project must happen quickly, as the ground was quickly warming, and planting must happen soon. Furthermore, he has agreed to find the villagers in the most need. After our donation service takes it’s percent, a community contribution is required on the part of the villagers. We’ve asked for 10% of the price of each tree. On top of that, Mr. Kochkunbek has organized with the village government that we be allowed to use their space to distribute the trees, and conduct the training seminar, in fund raising lingo, these elements are called the “community contribution.” This ensures that the receivers of the goods are invested in the project, and it’s sustainability.

Summary

Fruit trees are a big deal out here. They bring much appreciated variety to the Kyrgyz diet, as well as much needed vitamins. Along with eating and selling the fruits as is, people also boil them down with sugar, and make them into sweet, bread-dipping jams. They’ll make jars and jars of this stuff, and bring them out, one by one, all winter long. The limiting factor out here isn’t time or space, or even money, so much as it is access. Folks need access to high quality merchandise, plus good information on how to maintain their purchases. This project takes care of all of those things.

Now, as for where you come in. Provided below is a nice little link to our project on the fancy little “Chip In” website. They will allow you to make a donation to this cause with the same ease that you could buy a new ChiaPet from Amazon or a Beanie Baby from eBay.

In our case, though, you are buying trees. I suggest buying at least 5 trees. That’s $17.50. I wish it were a nice even number, but what can you do?

What’s $17.50, anyway? Almost a rack of ice cold Pabst Blue Ribbon? Three DVDs from Blockbuster, due back in a week? One really good martini? Out here, it’s five saplings, delivered and instructed, to a very poor, very remote part of our little world.

For anyone interested in seeing the project proposal itself, in fancy, formal form, click here.

The press will corroborate that Naryn had it’s share of demonstrations leading up to the events of last week. As you might imagine, I was well aware of them. While Peace Corps does insist that I avoid anything political, that’s not exactly why I didn’t mention them.

See, I’ve heard the international news paint a grim picture of a poverty stricken country, strife with political upheaval. While in a way (especially numerically) that is true, it’s hardly the whole story. There are also people here, smart, honest, hard working people. People who want to get ahead.

On April 8th, 2010, a day that will surely be remembered in Kyrgyz history, while some people were making a ruckus in the center of Naryn city, others were taking out their garbage, and filling water pails for their homes. My homestay siblings were in school, studying, until the teachers, sick from teargas, sent everyone home. While some shopkeepers had shut their gates, other’s stayed open all day.

The next day, most of the city just took a day of rest. The weather was nice, and in the park in the center of town, across the street from the government building that had taken so much grief the day before, people just gathered. The dozens of benches were full of people, just sitting. While on my sanctioned one trip out for food that day, one drunk man came up behind me. “Do you understand Kyrgyz?” He asked.

“A little,” I replied.

He then had trouble making sentences, but his intentions were clear, “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he repeated himself. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. We’re a peaceful people.” When the stories of violence in Bishkek recede, I’m afraid, so will the consciousness on Kyrgyzstan. For this, who will be there to apologize to them?

A few days later, after Peace Corps cleared us to leave our homes, I noticed a black circle out behind an apartment block with lots and lots of metal wires in it. I’d seen this kind of thing before. “Was this a tire?” I asked a woman passing by.

“Yes,” she said, “but it was just from boys, playing.”

“Right, but did they burn it?” I asked, imagining what fun I would have had burning a tire when I was little.

“Yes, but this was not from the revolution,” were her exact words, “they were just boys, just playing. We are not like that.”

And everyone I meet, it seems, wants to make sure I know this, the one thing I’ve known for so long. These people are kind, warm, hardworking and smart. They’ve got hard lives, but work hard to get ahead. They’ve got their problems, but so does everyone. This event should not define them, but they are plenty smart enough to know that to foreigners, it very well may.

I don’t write about the negatives I see out here, folks, because as enticing and newsworthy as they may be, they would do a disservice to a people and a culture I so passionately respect, and desperately want to help. For every story of disobedience, drunkenness or violence, there are hundreds of patience, generosity and common humanity. If I don’t tell those stories, who will?

(Plus, I need to save some material for the book.)

The smells of Spring are also out and about. The air is often moist, heavy with the scent of mud, but on sunny days, the roads dry out, and dust is in the air. The roads are also a bit of a surprise. During the winter, they were in valleys of snow, thick with ice, and mostly level. Today, they have grown, in places, to twice their width, thanks to the snow melt. But we are also reminded now as to how bad the potholes are. Where they had hidden under the ice for many months, today traffic weaves and dodges, paying far more attention to the holes than the yellow lines.

This olfactory stimulation is also transporting me back to my training village, it looks like now, oh, a full year ago.

That’s right folks, I’m a year out of America, and looking at roughly 15 more months to go. That, frankly, is a long time to be away from home.

Some things are getting normal, like dodging the mud puddles, and switching between Kyrgyz and English as a matter of practice. I’ve have now brought some friends home to my house, and as my family learns more about me through them, I learn more about my family. Our relationship is deepening far beyond the polite or convenient. We have now seen each other in many circumstances, both the comfortable and the non.

My language is coming along well, though progress is hard to gauge. I couldn’t say for certain what I was understanding before, what I wasn’t. I am still all too cognizant of my limitations. Fluency seems like a mythical beast, and the more I learn, the more I wonder what the word even means.

And work. Work is the wild card in the whole system. My experience here hasn’t been what I read in Peace Corps stories of old. We weren’t sent out here to build fish ponds or improve water systems; no one committed resources to us before our arrival. Instead, we were taught how to engage in a community, given a site with a vague order to “help,” and then sent on our way.

I feel like I have spent the lion’s share of my time learning the people, the problems, the motivation. I’ve helped with a few trainings to date, asked for some money and sold 25 laptop sleeves, at roughly 12 dollars a piece.

It’s a small contribution to a place I’ve come to call home, but barely to understand. I miss Chicago, my friends and my family on a daily basis, but the Internet helps people be close when they’re far away. It’s work, it’s life, it complicated. I’ve plenty of time left here to help, and most of all, it’s exactly what I want to be doing.

We started out the week with a team of wool specialists from Ohio who came out on a fact finding mission on the possibility of setting up a mill here. After copious village visits, plenty of meat and greets, and a whole handful of fiber samples, they said,

“Carl, how has no one discovered the potential of this place already?”

“Because,” I told them, “this is Naryn.”

In truth, it was more than that. Not a lot of folks with this kind of know-how are willing to relocate their families all the way out here. But, for the few that are, like these, the potential is endless.

Next, my grandmother came back to Naryn from her wintering in Bishkek. It’s just for a visit, though. She’s in town for a wedding.

See, it’s my father’s little brother’s wedding. Now, while he (thankfully) didn’t steal his bride, that tradition did play a part. First, surely, as was mine, your curiosity is piqued. “Why,” you must be asking, “is this young fella’ getting married in the winter? The sheep are expensive now!” I asked these questions myself, and discovered, among other reasons, the timing of this wedding was dictated by his fiancé getting stolen, by another man.

“It’s a funny thing,” the groom told me, “if he had gotten her past his house, there would have been nothing I could do. But my friend stopped them on the road. Then I got there, we talked for maybe 20 minutes, and then I got her back.”

“Did you go alone?” I asked.

“Oh no. There were 20 of us.”

I can only make inferences as to what happened behind those decidedly casual sentences. But either way, he then went on to tell me how wonderful she is, and how much he loves her. And unlike an American wedding, she spent the whole weekend whisking around, quietly busy, cutting vegetables and pouring tea. And she did it all with an ever present smile. As my little sister and I headed out of the house one day together, and I asked her,

“Do you like the bride?”

“Yes, I do,” she said.

“Do you think they will be happy?” I asked.

“I think so,” and she smiled, “the borsok was good. That’s a good sign.”

And if all this magic wasn’t good enough, I’ve also succeeded in one of my other, long standing goals: to enrolled at Naryn State University. While “enroll” is really a strong word, what I mean is that I finally got the nerve to ask if I could sit in on a college level Kyrgyz language course. In my experience, the greatest obstacle to language acquisition is getting too comfortable with your abilities. This course, thus far, is proving, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to show me how limited my knowledge really is.