This happy day catches yours truly freshly home from a tradition set forth by my father, and his father before him: the business trip. Unlike in the stories of old, however, my trip was neither a sales call nor a networking event in the Bahamas; I left on the mundane errand of buying sewing machines. But things are not always as simple as they seem.

I got a call last Monday night, vaguely frenetic, insisting that we leave the following morning.

“Have you called the store? Have you placed an order?” I asked, not really believing the answers held any relevance.

“Yes, yes,” they assured me.

Then I called Peace Corps. “I need to leave my site, tomorrow morning, for Bishkek. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, or where I’ll be staying.” This was highly unorthodox, but by some grace of God, my manager had faith in me.

“If you need to go,” she said, “then go! We’ll take care of the details tomorrow.”

It is a day’s drive to Bishkek, and by evening time, I found myself in the home of a relative of my coworker. She was a prosperous woman who’d made good in the sock business. Her sister, my true partner, was engaged finding other machines elsewhere, and had roped this woman into her service. She, in turn, had roped her brother into caring for us and it was in his house we were staying. He was a trained economist who now worked with wood.

“Will you write a project for me?” he asked.

“But you already have all the machines you need,” I said. “You know how to use them, and have plenty of wood to work with. What help can I give?”

“Ah,” he sighed, “asking for help is just our way. Our president asks for help. Even our millionaires ask for help.”

The next day started out with promise: we headed out for a sewing machine store, were met by an impeccably dressed fashion designer, and set to picking out the proper machines. I think the pretty Russian girl behind the desk just thought I was quiet, and her jaw hit the ground when she, at last, heard me rant not in Russian, but Kyrgyz. This meeting, however, was not to be.

“If we buy the machines here,” they finally told me, “they will charge us a 12% value added tax. That just will not do.”

What then commenced was a jaunt, a journey, a day on the town. We may have visited every sewing machine dealer Bishkek had to offer. We talked with Uighur peddlers in a sewing supply bazaar, with small Kyrgyz shop owners, with a man who just seemed to have connections, and even a local Turk named Taliban who made polite conversation by informing me on the value that a kidnapped foreigner (like myself) might fetch in Tajikistan.

The sister griped constantly, bemoaning the process, and I just followed, carrying my giant stack of Kyrgyz bills close at all times. In the end, a nice Kyrgyz shop-owner agreed to deliver the machines to the house where we were staying. When we finally made that deal, it was the third time we had set foot into his establishment. Then, that night, after dinner, I finally grew tired.

“Here,” I said to the sister, a woman who now held my total confidence, “here is the money for the machines, just get this done.”

In many ways, however, this is as it should be. I swap money for work, that’s my bag. In their own way, they worked hard, and got the job done. All I had to do, really, was ride in, and write a check. If only it could all be so easy.

From the foreign excitement of last week, we have drifted into the equally exciting grandeur of the very local.

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.