July 4, 2003 - World Surface: I waited my turn and stepped off the bus into a clear autumn morning in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and breathed in beautiful cold, dry air.
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July 4, 2003 - World Surface: I waited my turn and stepped off the bus into a clear autumn morning in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and breathed in beautiful cold, dry air.
I waited my turn and stepped off the bus into a clear autumn morning in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and breathed in beautiful cold, dry air.
I waited my turn and stepped off the bus into a clear autumn morning in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and breathed in beautiful cold, dry air.
Dirty bus curtains framed an eight-story soviet hotel as doors slammed open and we rattled to a stop. Unsure what was next but obediently taking the cue, sixty-five Americans on three chartered buses rose with a murmur and shuffled forward. I waited my turn and stepped off the bus into a clear autumn morning in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and breathed in beautiful cold, dry air. As I dragged my bags across the parking lot the massive white Alatau mountain range - bigger than anything in the states – came into view. The Kyrgyz national military band played on.
Peace Corps life abroad has three parts: a commune-style intensive ten-day orientation; a three-month village home stay for language and technical training; and pending linguistic and technical competence, a two-year, largely self-scripted sustainable development project.
This was orientation, and a large angular gray hotel on the outskirts of town where the Peace Corps planned to isolate us from the country we just eagerly arrived to live in. They intended over the next ten days to preempt any impressions of our own with a barrage worthy of a college minor in government-issued facts, regulations, suggestions, ground rules, safety awareness advice, disaster preparedness protocol, emergency action plans, food facts and infectious disease charts. We would be immunized against typhoid, tuberculosis, hepatitis, rabies, and the flu. We would talk to a cast of Peace Corps applauders as well as key movers in bailing us out including the US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, the US Security director for Kyrgyzstan, an American antiterrorist specialist, the country’s head of criminal investigation, and its most esteemed professor in local history. We would soon also be introduced to the director of Kyrgyzstan’s top university and ex-minister of Education, a member of Parliament and the country’s World Bank Director. Finally, the backbone of training and Peace Corps' legendary expertise, intensive Russian and Kyrgyz language training, would commence.
Most pressing, however, was where were the seedy bars?
My new host family's old Volkswagen barreled down a broken, dusty highway sagging with everything I had. The roadside teemed with donkey carts, women waiting for buses and men selling gasoline in water bottles. My new "parents" for the next three months of training and I were coming from the Peace Corps' adoption ceremony, and going to, well, nobody told me.
I had no idea how to ask.
It turned out to be Ivanovka, my new short-term home, and a medium sized village an hour (and a 40 cent "marshrutka" ride) outside the capitol. Its center appeared to be a bazaar, mosque and bus stop along the highway, and for the length of a city block a surpising epicenter of smog, commerce and traffic. The gigantic snow covered Alatau range loomed behind to the south and followed the horizon both ways as far as I could see.
We signalled and turned north off the highway down a narrow, bumpy road towards the Kazakh foothills.
Lighting a cigarette, my host father Sasha maintained a purposefully slow pace and began nagivating a series of wide, patient swerves over bumps and around ruts and holes. He was a veteran of the 1980s Russian war in Afghanistan, and had a quiet, careful demeanor that commanded in me a vague but palpable confidence.
We continued down the gridded neighborhood sidestreet that meandered twistingly while shifting spontaneously from pavement to gravel and back to pavement. Un-covered manholes laid at the corners of every cross street. Square, concrete Soviet telephone poles with tangled low wires lingered just above and small dirty cannabis plants scattered the roadside. Ducks treaded water in mud puddles, chickens pecked at hard ground, and geese wobbled around the streets in aimless gangs. Donkeys, horses and cows loitered near patched-together fences.
We pulled in next to what appeared to be a kindergarten, and Lida - my host mom permanently assigned to shotgun - opened her door, stepped out, and opened the door next to me all in the same motion as if rehearsed. A wide-eyed six-year old girl popped up, peered tentatively but specutalatively towards me, and crawled in.
We resumed our luggage-loaded gyrating slow-speed journey, and a picture of the snail's pace jalopy expedition across the United States in "the Grapes of Wrath" came to mind. I didnt expect or know what we were in for, I just watched out the window considering what seemed an interesting dusty melding of rural and suburbia. Small, square, dull colored fenced-in houses packed narrowly togeother with long, farmlike backyards. Simple but efficent re-used materials constructed walls, roofs and pit-toilets on every property. People, especially kids, where everywere.
As I continued to observe the world in a state of introversion, we finally stopped, three doors opened, everyone got out, and apparently, we were home.
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Story Source: World Surface
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Kyrgyzstan; PCVs in the Field Kyrgyzstan
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