July 31, 2003
As all PCVs, when I first arrived I and the 65 other volunteers went through three months of more or less useful “technical and cultural training,” which prepared me less-than-more for my service in Ming Bulak Village, Talas Oblast. Talas is in the northwest of Kyrgyzstan, and it is cut off from the rest of the country by mountains and by roads that only made sense during the Soviet Union. To get to the capital city (Bishkek), I have to cross through Kazakhstan, which provides lots of adventures with border guards and broken-down vehicles. Ming Bulak is small, about 3,000 people. Many of the villages are more multi-ethnic, with Kazakhs, Kurds, Tajiks, and ever-decreasing Russian and German populations, but my village is only Kyrgyz. I teach 8th through 11th graders at the local school. The only books we have are leftover from the Soviet Union, and the are full of propaganda. Some examples of subjects are, “Lenin in London,” “My summer in the Camp for Labor and Rest.” !
Teachers are paid around $15 a month, and the schools have next to nothing, not even chalk. I don’t really want this letter to be about how poor everyone is though! So I’ll move on to what I most wanted to tell you about: bride-stealing!
Islam isn’t so strong here, because Islam came late to Kyrgyzstan and then was banned under the USSR. I’ve heard it described as “Islam light” and I think this holds true. Everyone says they are Muslim, but no one prays, vodka drinking is a basic form of entertainment, and there is little awareness of what the Muslim holidays we celebrate actually mean. One “tradition” is the practice of wife-stealing. A man will pick himself out a bride, and then steal her one day from the street or from her house. To me, the most disturbing thing about this tradition is that no one really sees it as a major problem. I first heard about it while I was still in Bishkek. It came up during one of the PC cultural training sessions. The session was run by local PC employees, who are part of Kyrgyzstan’s educated cultural elite. They treated the problem lightly, either laughing at it or saying that it is fading away. When I have asked local people about it, they explain the tradition th!
is way: “Sometimes, our boys are shy. They are too afraid to ask the girl, so they just take her.” I’ve heard other examples where parents forbid two children to marry, so the prospective groom arranges with the prospective bride where and when he will “steal” her. But I think this is the exception. Most of the time, I think it is a really traumatic experience. Legal recourse is not an option. The stigma of shame is enormous. If a girl goes back to her family after being stolen, she is damaged goods, whether or not she was actually raped.
I’ll tell about two examples. I have a friend here who teaches me Kyrgyz sometimes. I know her husband, too, and when I met him I thought he was friendly and considerate. She is a year younger than me, and she has a two year old son. I was excited that she wanted to be my friend, despite how much work it is to talk to someone who speaks such bad Kyrgyz. We spent a day together once away from home, and it came up that she was actually a stolen bride! It happened while she was going to a concert with her sister. She ran away a week later, but he came after her. Now she says she is happy, because “his character is good.” I asked how long it took her to feel like she would make it in her new life, and she said about a year. (!!!!) My other personal example is in my own host family. I’m extremely fond of my host mother. She’s one of the kindest people I’ve met. She told me that their oldest daughter, Jildiz, was getting into marriageable age, but had no boyfriend. !
So she and my hostfather arranged for one of their colleagues to steal Gildiz. They said that they knew he was a good man and would be a good husband. So now Gildiz lives with her husband in Bishkek. Isn’t it crazy?
Almost everyone here talks about the end of the Soviet Union with regret. This is true for many of my young students as much as for the older generations. It is indisputable that quality of life went down dramatically after 1991. I think Kyrgyz culture was Russianized to some degree, and now it is reinventing itself. For example, married women wear jolooks (headscarves) now, and wear more conservative closing because they want to reassert their identity as Muslims. Before 1991, they dressed more like western (Russian) women. Kyrgyz people are also looking more to America now, especially when it comes to acquiring more material goods. Everyone thinks that America is full of rich people, and that therefore Americans are all happy, and they want to go down that path. But if they want America’s stuff, there is no accompanying concept or discussion of legal rights and democracy and self-empowerment. I’m interested in how it will all turn out, because there are lots of co!
nflicts within their multi-political/ cultural legacy.
Daily life is full of smaller problems like avoiding the sheep fat for dinner, counting the days until the next bath (once a week or every other week!), pining for vegetables, and smaller rewards, like having successful communication with people in my village or being able to gracefully turn down some mother’s offer to become her daughter-in-law.
As all PCVs, when I first arrived I and the 65 other volunteers went through three months of more or less useful “technical and cultural training,” which prepared me less-than-more for my service in Ming Bulak Village, Talas Oblast. Talas is in the northwest of Kyrgyzstan, and it is cut off from the rest of the country by mountains and by roads that only made sense during the Soviet Union. To get to the capital city (Bishkek), I have to cross through Kazakhstan, which provides lots of adventures with border guards and broken-down vehicles. Ming Bulak is small, about 3,000 people. Many of the villages are more multi-ethnic, with Kazakhs, Kurds, Tajiks, and ever-decreasing Russian and German populations, but my village is only Kyrgyz. I teach 8th through 11th graders at the local school. The only books we have are leftover from the Soviet Union, and the are full of propaganda. Some examples of subjects are, “Lenin in London,” “My summer in the Camp for Labor and Rest.” !
Teachers are paid around $15 a month, and the schools have next to nothing, not even chalk. I don’t really want this letter to be about how poor everyone is though! So I’ll move on to what I most wanted to tell you about: bride-stealing!
Islam isn’t so strong here, because Islam came late to Kyrgyzstan and then was banned under the USSR. I’ve heard it described as “Islam light” and I think this holds true. Everyone says they are Muslim, but no one prays, vodka drinking is a basic form of entertainment, and there is little awareness of what the Muslim holidays we celebrate actually mean. One “tradition” is the practice of wife-stealing. A man will pick himself out a bride, and then steal her one day from the street or from her house. To me, the most disturbing thing about this tradition is that no one really sees it as a major problem. I first heard about it while I was still in Bishkek. It came up during one of the PC cultural training sessions. The session was run by local PC employees, who are part of Kyrgyzstan’s educated cultural elite. They treated the problem lightly, either laughing at it or saying that it is fading away. When I have asked local people about it, they explain the tradition th!
is way: “Sometimes, our boys are shy. They are too afraid to ask the girl, so they just take her.” I’ve heard other examples where parents forbid two children to marry, so the prospective groom arranges with the prospective bride where and when he will “steal” her. But I think this is the exception. Most of the time, I think it is a really traumatic experience. Legal recourse is not an option. The stigma of shame is enormous. If a girl goes back to her family after being stolen, she is damaged goods, whether or not she was actually raped.
I’ll tell about two examples. I have a friend here who teaches me Kyrgyz sometimes. I know her husband, too, and when I met him I thought he was friendly and considerate. She is a year younger than me, and she has a two year old son. I was excited that she wanted to be my friend, despite how much work it is to talk to someone who speaks such bad Kyrgyz. We spent a day together once away from home, and it came up that she was actually a stolen bride! It happened while she was going to a concert with her sister. She ran away a week later, but he came after her. Now she says she is happy, because “his character is good.” I asked how long it took her to feel like she would make it in her new life, and she said about a year. (!!!!) My other personal example is in my own host family. I’m extremely fond of my host mother. She’s one of the kindest people I’ve met. She told me that their oldest daughter, Jildiz, was getting into marriageable age, but had no boyfriend. !
So she and my hostfather arranged for one of their colleagues to steal Gildiz. They said that they knew he was a good man and would be a good husband. So now Gildiz lives with her husband in Bishkek. Isn’t it crazy?
Almost everyone here talks about the end of the Soviet Union with regret. This is true for many of my young students as much as for the older generations. It is indisputable that quality of life went down dramatically after 1991. I think Kyrgyz culture was Russianized to some degree, and now it is reinventing itself. For example, married women wear jolooks (headscarves) now, and wear more conservative closing because they want to reassert their identity as Muslims. Before 1991, they dressed more like western (Russian) women. Kyrgyz people are also looking more to America now, especially when it comes to acquiring more material goods. Everyone thinks that America is full of rich people, and that therefore Americans are all happy, and they want to go down that path. But if they want America’s stuff, there is no accompanying concept or discussion of legal rights and democracy and self-empowerment. I’m interested in how it will all turn out, because there are lots of co!
nflicts within their multi-political/ cultural legacy.
Daily life is full of smaller problems like avoiding the sheep fat for dinner, counting the days until the next bath (once a week or every other week!), pining for vegetables, and smaller rewards, like having successful communication with people in my village or being able to gracefully turn down some mother’s offer to become her daughter-in-law.
July 2003
My trip to Germany made me feel lonely, or reminded me about loneliness. When I am about daily life in Ming-Bulak, I don’t feel this way, because there are no examples of wedded domestic bliss (marriage sucks!), and because there is no cultural ideal of romantic coupledom. You don’t see copies of this ideal everywhere, in ads and storefronts or cafes, or live copies, of people who are trying to be this ideal.
I also saw how my eventual return to the states will be or might be difficult. My life-perspective is so changed, but not so for everyone else. My stories about, “but in Kyrgyzstan...” will get old quickly, because they tend to quash conversation. And they always come out sounding like I am preaching about being thankful about what you have, when that is not my intention.
Prague was lovely, as lovely as Paris. As I said in my postcards though, it’s in some ways just another European city overrun with tourists who want churches, museums, and views. We talked about how to see the “real” Prague, but I don’t know how one would set about doing this. It was also good to see Dresden, though we didn’t see much. The people we stayed with made more of an impression on me than the places we went, maybe because of where I am coming from. We stayed with Johannes’ brother and sister-in-law, who live twenty minutes outside of Dresden. They had a gorgeous property, with a guest house and ponies and an extensive garden. I could not help comparing these houses, lives, aspirations, and leisure activities to those in Kyrgyzstan. There are plenty of tragedies and trials in our Western society, too, but I don’t kow how to evaluate fairly whose are worse. My only thoughts are that even when I hear Germans and Americans criticize their respective societies (!or each others), both of these societies are places where life can function for most people, and where most people have a reasonable amount of control over important decisions about their futures. In America, there are “the fringes of society,” and in Kyrgyzstan, the fringes are society. Or maybe that is just statistics, and can’t be a real measure of societal well-being? I don’t know.
My trip to Germany made me feel lonely, or reminded me about loneliness. When I am about daily life in Ming-Bulak, I don’t feel this way, because there are no examples of wedded domestic bliss (marriage sucks!), and because there is no cultural ideal of romantic coupledom. You don’t see copies of this ideal everywhere, in ads and storefronts or cafes, or live copies, of people who are trying to be this ideal.
I also saw how my eventual return to the states will be or might be difficult. My life-perspective is so changed, but not so for everyone else. My stories about, “but in Kyrgyzstan...” will get old quickly, because they tend to quash conversation. And they always come out sounding like I am preaching about being thankful about what you have, when that is not my intention.
Prague was lovely, as lovely as Paris. As I said in my postcards though, it’s in some ways just another European city overrun with tourists who want churches, museums, and views. We talked about how to see the “real” Prague, but I don’t know how one would set about doing this. It was also good to see Dresden, though we didn’t see much. The people we stayed with made more of an impression on me than the places we went, maybe because of where I am coming from. We stayed with Johannes’ brother and sister-in-law, who live twenty minutes outside of Dresden. They had a gorgeous property, with a guest house and ponies and an extensive garden. I could not help comparing these houses, lives, aspirations, and leisure activities to those in Kyrgyzstan. There are plenty of tragedies and trials in our Western society, too, but I don’t kow how to evaluate fairly whose are worse. My only thoughts are that even when I hear Germans and Americans criticize their respective societies (!or each others), both of these societies are places where life can function for most people, and where most people have a reasonable amount of control over important decisions about their futures. In America, there are “the fringes of society,” and in Kyrgyzstan, the fringes are society. Or maybe that is just statistics, and can’t be a real measure of societal well-being? I don’t know.
pinatas at summer camp were a big hit!
photo by Loren Kupferschmid, PCV
photo by Loren Kupferschmid, PCV
23. July, 2003
Our first week of camp was a success! Loren, Megan, and Sarah from Talas came for the whole week. Though my house was quite full, I enjoyed having friends for a week. They came at the beginning of a power outtage (which is not yet over), so it was somewhat harder to be a host.
We did manage to round up a good number of students for the camp. Still less than expected, but 15 or so came everyday. It was the first time these kids experienced anything of the kind. We had each day organized around a craft. First was photography, then Mexican pinatas, African masks, quilting, and orgigami. The photography theme was picked because we wanted to show them that you can do other things with cameras besides line people up in rows and click at them.
We wanted to teach a little bit about some other cultures, since multicultural studies doesn't exist even as a concept here. Since the idea was to do everything in English, we had to keep our lesson plans basic if we wanted it to still be fun.
Everyone had fun probably because of the fact that four Americans were running around. Because we always spoke English with each other, they experienced for the first time why one might want to learn a foreign language- to talk to and understand people! It was a much more effective lesson than me standing at the front of the class and slowly enunciating English words.
There were only minor setbacks. My school provided little in the way of organized planning or advance help. They even decided that the floor had to be painted two days before the camp begin, so for three days camp took place in our sock feet. None of the schools have electricity either, because the school can't pay the bill. We needed electricity because Loren and Sarah were going to prepare a hip-hop dance with the kids for Friday's talent show. So one of the teachers who was repairing the school helped us go to a neighbor's house and rig up extension cords over a roofs and through the school yard so we could plug in the CD player.
Friday night's talent show was scheduled for 7:00. Lindsey, a volunteer from Issyk-kol (very far away!) had shown up the previous day, and Nate, a volunteer from our oblast had all shown up. All the extra presences made for a lot of excitement. I think the kids were actually a little overawed. But because this is Kyrgyzstan, by 7:30, only two mothers had arrived, but left again for some unknown destination. Not only had we no audience, but some of the campers had gone home to go get their mothers. We started a little before 8, the missing campers did come back, and our audience swelled to include near neighbors and random small children in addition to several mothers.
We sang a few songs, including such well-known hits as "The itsy bitsy spider," "John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt," "Frere Jacques," "Row row row your boat," and the grand finale of "this land is your land." The hip-hop number was a huge success, with the most enthusiastic performances surprisingly on the parts of some of my boys! The evening ended by bursting our 3 pinatas. We had everyone take a turn with the stick, and I cannot tell you how much everyone laughed. It was a great evening. It was good to meet some parents, who now know who I am and have more of an idea of why I am here.
The day after the talent show, we went on an excursion to a pond about an hour from my village. More fun was had by all.
I forgot to say that we taught ultimate frisbee and baseball. More amazing stuff.
Many students asked about whether we can have camp next year for a month instead of a week. They really, really enjoyed the camp. They were all very sad to see my fabulous friends leave. I'm so greatful to have been able to provide this for them. They have so little to do or to be excited about in the summer.
The best part was that the ones who were most excited were some of the students who get the least credit or praise for being good at school.
I also had a great week with my family. All the boys who live in my house saw me differently because they saw me interact with girls my age who speak my language. But they were too shy to talk to them. But after they left, I had some conversations with the boys and Chinara, who asked a lot of questions. We don't have electricity, so there's nothing to do at night but sit around and talk. I talked with Chinara and Nurbek until midnight one night, and it was lovely! I am enjoying the simplicity and the chatting. I would almost say it is enchanting.
Azeemkan took Chinara and me on a little car ride one evening to one of the bean fields, and it felt like a little excursion. I also had a few English lessons with a few students, and attended Aizada's son's second birthday party. I am getting better at being a guest, at least more gracefully if not with more enjoyment. I also had a Kyrgyz lesson with her, at which I learned a new tense (major breakthrough).
Essengul's daughter Gulida is home from Bishkek, too. She speaks English well. I spent some time at their house too, and saw them almost everyday in passing. Essengul came to the talent show, too.
So you see that I am feeling very well and at home in my village and with my neighbors.
Our first week of camp was a success! Loren, Megan, and Sarah from Talas came for the whole week. Though my house was quite full, I enjoyed having friends for a week. They came at the beginning of a power outtage (which is not yet over), so it was somewhat harder to be a host.
We did manage to round up a good number of students for the camp. Still less than expected, but 15 or so came everyday. It was the first time these kids experienced anything of the kind. We had each day organized around a craft. First was photography, then Mexican pinatas, African masks, quilting, and orgigami. The photography theme was picked because we wanted to show them that you can do other things with cameras besides line people up in rows and click at them.
We wanted to teach a little bit about some other cultures, since multicultural studies doesn't exist even as a concept here. Since the idea was to do everything in English, we had to keep our lesson plans basic if we wanted it to still be fun.
Everyone had fun probably because of the fact that four Americans were running around. Because we always spoke English with each other, they experienced for the first time why one might want to learn a foreign language- to talk to and understand people! It was a much more effective lesson than me standing at the front of the class and slowly enunciating English words.
There were only minor setbacks. My school provided little in the way of organized planning or advance help. They even decided that the floor had to be painted two days before the camp begin, so for three days camp took place in our sock feet. None of the schools have electricity either, because the school can't pay the bill. We needed electricity because Loren and Sarah were going to prepare a hip-hop dance with the kids for Friday's talent show. So one of the teachers who was repairing the school helped us go to a neighbor's house and rig up extension cords over a roofs and through the school yard so we could plug in the CD player.
Friday night's talent show was scheduled for 7:00. Lindsey, a volunteer from Issyk-kol (very far away!) had shown up the previous day, and Nate, a volunteer from our oblast had all shown up. All the extra presences made for a lot of excitement. I think the kids were actually a little overawed. But because this is Kyrgyzstan, by 7:30, only two mothers had arrived, but left again for some unknown destination. Not only had we no audience, but some of the campers had gone home to go get their mothers. We started a little before 8, the missing campers did come back, and our audience swelled to include near neighbors and random small children in addition to several mothers.
We sang a few songs, including such well-known hits as "The itsy bitsy spider," "John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt," "Frere Jacques," "Row row row your boat," and the grand finale of "this land is your land." The hip-hop number was a huge success, with the most enthusiastic performances surprisingly on the parts of some of my boys! The evening ended by bursting our 3 pinatas. We had everyone take a turn with the stick, and I cannot tell you how much everyone laughed. It was a great evening. It was good to meet some parents, who now know who I am and have more of an idea of why I am here.
The day after the talent show, we went on an excursion to a pond about an hour from my village. More fun was had by all.
I forgot to say that we taught ultimate frisbee and baseball. More amazing stuff.
Many students asked about whether we can have camp next year for a month instead of a week. They really, really enjoyed the camp. They were all very sad to see my fabulous friends leave. I'm so greatful to have been able to provide this for them. They have so little to do or to be excited about in the summer.
The best part was that the ones who were most excited were some of the students who get the least credit or praise for being good at school.
I also had a great week with my family. All the boys who live in my house saw me differently because they saw me interact with girls my age who speak my language. But they were too shy to talk to them. But after they left, I had some conversations with the boys and Chinara, who asked a lot of questions. We don't have electricity, so there's nothing to do at night but sit around and talk. I talked with Chinara and Nurbek until midnight one night, and it was lovely! I am enjoying the simplicity and the chatting. I would almost say it is enchanting.
Azeemkan took Chinara and me on a little car ride one evening to one of the bean fields, and it felt like a little excursion. I also had a few English lessons with a few students, and attended Aizada's son's second birthday party. I am getting better at being a guest, at least more gracefully if not with more enjoyment. I also had a Kyrgyz lesson with her, at which I learned a new tense (major breakthrough).
Essengul's daughter Gulida is home from Bishkek, too. She speaks English well. I spent some time at their house too, and saw them almost everyday in passing. Essengul came to the talent show, too.
So you see that I am feeling very well and at home in my village and with my neighbors.
