More fresh powder

I woke up to another layer of fresh powder this morning. Natalya told me that was unusual, that Karakol hasn’t received much snow this year.

I headed up the mountain with the workers again. This morning, they sent two trays of eggs and five giant red mesh bags of potatoes up with us. The workers put their snowy feet on top of the potatoes as we rolled up the hill and I wondered who would eventually find these potatoes on their plate.

I had another good day of skiing. Being Saturday, some local residents came up to the base for a picnic and sledding. The base has a great lift for sledders. Upon reaching the bottom of the hill, they sit on a long wooden sledge that is attached to a motorized rope and they are pulled up through the pine forest.

I stopped at the picnic tables where the locals were gathered to take a rest. From that vantage point, I could see the skiers lining up to go uphill. They were dressed in blues, purples, yellows, greens and reds, like so many jelly beans. In comparison, the locals wore only black and dark blue. These people carry bags of onions, huge thermoses of tea, plastic bags full of round white bread, and satchels of food for their picnic lunches. A group of men surrounded the skis I’d taken off, prodding the material, putting their feet in the attachments, ignoring my warnings that if they broke my rental skis, I’d have to pay for them. Only one man among them had skis, which he used to walk up a small hill, then ski down. His narrow, weak, wooden skis looked like someone had carved them by hand. He asked me to trade. I wished I could.

Among my new acquaintances on this day was a woman, Galina, who has worked for a Norwegian satellite company for the past seven years. When I told her I’d lived in Osh, she said she went there a few years ago.

“It’s a nice enough city,” she said. “But the people are something else. It’s like they live in another century. We saw signs celebrating Osh’s 3000th anniversary and we joked, in 3000 years they haven’t accomplished anything.”

Together with her new friend Olga, a beautiful photographer in her 30s with blond highlights and red lips, they planned the ideal Kyrgyz government.

“What we need to do here is to rent leadership,” Galina proposed. “For example, we will take the leaders from Monaco and bring them here. We need civilized and rich people. A country can never do well if it’s filled with poor people. But if rich people would live here, it would be great.”

Olga shook her head in agreement. “If we ever took a local leader,” she said, “it would have to be an old child and without a spouse or children. Anyone here has three villages he is connected to, plus three villages for his wife, and all those people trying to get them from them.”

I rode back down the mountain with Olga, her husband, son and friend. They were friendly, happy people, who sang together in the car, whistled and clapped, and stopped every two minutes to take photos – admiring the beauty of the trees, the mountains, a remote yurt, a melting snowpile. I found their joy infectious and I left their SUV happy, until a group of three street children surrounded me, staring at me with cloudy, menacing eyes. When I emerged from their midst and yelled at them to stay away, one ran after me and hit my backpack. In a place like Karakol, it is so easy to move between worlds within moments.

The best skiing in Central Asia

I spent a fantastic day on the slopes of Karakol’s ski base. I woke up to a nice layer of fresh snow, a present for men’s day some people joked.

I headed up the mountain in the giant green, military like vehicle (called a vahovka) that takes up the base workers. Almost 20 people, mostly men, squeezed along the three benches. Though it was early and still dark, they were in good humor from yesterday’s holiday. One man passed chocolates around.

“I was up late and my head hurts,” the friendly and honest man who handles ski rentals told me. “There was vodka and beer and a sauna and girls.”

They seemed like a nice team and after being reminded of the poverty and low wages in Karakol (people here seem to have a grey, worn look to them), I was glad to see so many people heading to stable jobs. Among them was a girl I used to work with, Natalya. She was fired because she lacked the energy and strength of character needed in her former position. But now she works in the ski resort administration, handing out ski passes, taking money for all the base services, and keeping the accounts. Her quiet and polite personality fits well with this work and she seemed happy.

On the way to Karakol, I saw so much development taking place along the shores of Issyk-Kul, people hurrying to finish before the summer season opens. Many of the structures were new, bright, and almost gauche, especially when placed directly next to a small, decaying wooden house. I worried that the rich and criminal were taking over all the good areas and business opportunities.

But seeing this base at Karakol reminded me that such expensive ventures also create jobs. Granted, virtually no locals can afford even one day’s ski rental and lift ticket, much less a night’s stay on the base (the cheapest room is $40). But quite a few people have been employed as a result of wealthier people coming to utilize these services and their lives are comparably better as a result. Yes, the rich are getting richer, but the poor are also doing a little better too.

I met lots of interesting people today. No one could seem to believe that I was there alone. But I enjoy traveling independently every so often. Not only do I have complete freedom to plan my day as I wish, but it’s so much easier to meet people. I finally met a few locals skiing, the director of a school for guides and some of his students. Skiing is part of their training to become guides. The base lets them ski for free in return for them helping out around the base.

I met a man who spent eight years in America (he wore a Green Bay packers jacket and excess weight as souvenirs). He said he liked the ski base in Bishkek that had a sit-down chairlift better. “Here you have to stand up going up and standing up going down,” he said. “You never get a chance to rest.”

I met a woman who’d come all the way from Omsk, in Siberia. I met a woman who traveled with a large group of family and children from Karabalta. She used to be employed by an international project doing internet training. Now she has her own internet cafe and IP telephone shop. I met a man from Bishkek who wants to head back on Saturday so he’ll have time to plant apple trees in his yard on Sunday.

And I rode back down the mountain in an SUV with Vitaly, a wealthy young Russian businessman from Bishkek and his family. He told me that two years ago, he had two small electronics shops. He took a bank loan for $20,000.

“I imported my goods from the United Arab Emirates,” he said. “And as soon as I took that loan, I suddenly became a wholesale, rather than a retail buyer. I got big discounts on my purchases and everything changed. Overnight, I reached a place that it would have taken me two to three years to reach.” He smiled at the memory.

He now has five shops and a $100,000 credit line.

The skiing today was just gorgeous, fresh powder snow, no lines, and few people. I often felt like I had the entire mountain to myself. After lunch, some paragliders started to fly off the top of the mountain. They wore skis and bent their legs as though they were skiing on air. They floated over the pine trees, over the mountain tops, looking out at Lake Issyk-Kul.

“Whoo-hee!” one of them cried out, as he rose up into the air, higher than the two falcons who live at the mountaintop.

Men's Day in Karakol

It’s men’s day again, that former Defenders of the Motherland Day, now searching for a reason to justify a day off work. I’m not complaining, as I’ve used the holiday to head to Karakol, on the north of Lake Issyk-Kul. I’m in an internet café that is literally an internet/café. Right next to the computers are tables where a family is gathered for dinner. As I type, I listen to women standing, lifting their shot glasses, and toasting the men in their party.

At work yesterday evening we celebrated by having beer and smoked fish and giving each man a beer glass.

I’m taking Friday off and spending the four-day weekend in Karakol. I came here last weekend – a hurried trip given the six hour drive each way – to try out the ski base. I’d heard that the Russians had invested in the base, making a nice hotel and café, and that the skiing was the best available in Kyrgyzstan. Also, given the warm weather in Bishkek, Karakol was about the only place that still had any snow.

The skiing was indeed fabulous. Wonderful snow, fresh mountain air, spectacular views of forested peaks and foggy valleys that changed with each trip up the chair lift. The only bummer was the chairlifts – tbars and individual poles that require standing and at least for me, often inspired falling. The given one’s proximity to their partner on a t-bar, I found myself in more conversations than I do on the Bishkek chairlifts. Everyone I went up with was from Bishkek. Unfortunately, no one in Karakol (where teachers are paid $30 a month) is able to afford skiing. I met an investor and director in the major bottled drink manufacturer, Shoro. I rode up with the nephew of a government deputy, who bragged to me how their family showed up with no reservations, but the fully-booked hotel cleared out two rooms for them.

“What about the people who made those reservations?” I asked.

“They told them the hotel owner came to town.”

I saw a well-built man who skied in nothing but a little pair of blue shorts, his brown body shimmering under the mountain sun. I saw a man skiing without poles, holding a baby in his arms as he went up the chairlift and skied back down. And I saw several families – mother, father and child, going up together on the t-bar. Somehow, they were able to prevent their three pair of skis from overlapping when I struggled to avoid crossing my skis with just one other person.

Anyway, I loved it and I’m back for more. I’m staying in a place that operates as a yurt camp in the summer. In the winter, I’m in a nice, wooden, relatively warm room. And I’m the only guest there. One of my colleagues should be coming out to join me tomorrow.

As I headed into Karakol in a shared taxi, a police officer stopped us at the edge of town.

“Have you been drinking on this holiday?” he asked the driver. He hadn’t. I asked the driver if he expected many drunk drivers on the road.

“Probably this evening,” he said.

So, before the local men get too crazy, I’ll be heading back to my yurt camp.

Things to Note in Kyrgyzstan

I think I might be at the point at which I’ve been here too long (it’s almost a year and a half). I’m finding the quantity of things I notice about the city, people, and culture is less than it used to be. It might be that I no longer have a family to live among and write about, it might be that Bishkek is less interesting than the regions, it might be that I don’t have enough of a life outside of work, or it might be that I’m losing my sense of perception as the unique aspects of life in Kyrygzstan became routine to me.

A colleague recently moved here from Bulgaria and complained about how dark the streets are.

“Dark?” I asked. “I can see a light,” I said, looking out the café window. Of course, I can remember back to when I first moved to Bishkek and I also found it dark. But now, compared to the true blackness of Osh, Bishkek is a bright, vibrant and orderly city to me.

So, if anyone chances to be reading this and there is anything you are interested about in Kyrgyzstan, please ask me and I’ll make an effort to take note and write about those issues.

One interesting little rumor floating through the air is that people are expecting another revolution on the one year anniversary (March 24th) of last year’s revolution. I don’t put much stock in it, but it’s common enough that at a recent training, people were discussing a future event and someone casually commented, “Oh good, that’s before the 24th, before the next revolution is expected.”

The Sounds Through the Heating Vents

It’s a good thing that I don’t spend much time at home. This weekend, I was bothered by the constant sound of a baby crying. Worse, this evening, the clear sounds of a woman crying filtered through my vent, as though she was just next door. There was no banging, no sounds of fighting, just her garbled speech (probably in Kyrgyz) and her loud, endless, hyperventilating cries.

For weeks now, spring has been in the air. The streets have long been devoid of snow and even in the mountains, snow is sparse enough to make skiing difficult.

Today I wandered around the Ortosai market, one of Bishkek’s central markets. I bought mushrooms from a man selling them atop a wooden table, overflowing in their bowls. I enjoyed looking at the variety of items for sale – electrical plugs, colorful magnets from China, household appliances, lamp shops, boots, clothing, maternity wear, canned and bottled staples, beans and flours sold by weight from burlap bags, all sold from within square green metal containers or from wooden tables.

This past weekend I rode a trolleybus for the first time. And I saw the greatest congregation of elderly people I’d seen anywhere. I’d heard that the World Bank was financing the purchase of 150 new buses. Because the main form of transport, the minibus marshrutkas, don’t accept the free passes issued to the elderly and invalids.

“It seems the difference in price between 7.5 cents and 12 cents plays a big role among the elderly,” I said to Sergei, noting the difference in price between the trolleybuses and the marshrutkas.

“Of course, when pensioners are living on pensions of $20 a month, every som counts,” he said. I knew that. Just that day I’d passed an old man who regularly plays his accordion on the corner for donations. His wife used to sit with him, but she is no longer there, making me worry that she is either sick or has passed away. Another old women walked through the marketplace with a bent back and worn clothing, asking for help, taking 1 som (2.5 cent) bills into her wrinkled hand. And yet another old women, missing her legs, sat on the ground in between stalls, hoping for donations.

“Just yesterday,” Sergei continued, “the President issued an order that marshrutkas must stop for the elderly and for children. Right now, they prefer not to take them as passengers. For the elderly, they know it will take a long time for them to get on and off the bus and they demand a seat. And for children, they know they won’t pay. So they just refuse to stop when they see young or old people flagging them down. But now the President says they have to.”

A Walk Through Town

Walking to work this afternoon, I passed an old man in an old, wooden blue kiosk. “Iron Repair” was painted over the door. I wondered how many people these days take their irons in for repair. I found it sad to see an aging man in a dying profession.

A few feet further on sat an old man on the side of an entrance ramp, selling low-quality gasoline out of plastic bottles. He is there from morning to evening, rain or shine. I don’t think either of these pensioners foresaw how they’d be spending their golden years.

I walked under a dark bridge, then took the stairs back up to the street. Along that street, prostitutes gather. I knew that from the bloody condom I saw once on the street and the beer cans, vodka bottles and cigarettes boxes that line the road – the numbing devices needed in that profession. But I usually walk that stretch in the mornings, before anyone goes to work. Today, at 1 p.m., a few prostitutes were already out.

For the girls themselves, young, thin and heavily made up, I felt only sadness. But what I found really disgusting was the men hanging about. There were two police officers, drivers of old Zhiguli taxis, and several youths just squatting aimlessly nearby. If the girls want to sell their bodies to earn money, I feel that is their decision. But for the men to assume control in this profession, as if they have some claim over the women’s bodies, is really gross.

One afternoon I drove down that street with our driver, Sergei. On one corner, I saw a few girls that clearly looked like prostitutes. A little further down the street, on the other side, a bunch of girls stood together in a huddle. They seemed to be teenagers and were dressed in typical clothing of young girls – skirts, pants, furry jackets. I thought that they were students.

“No,” Sergei told me. “They were prostitutes.”

I asked him how much they charged. He said he didn’t know, but guessed $2.50 to $4 per hour.

“It depends on how they negotiate,” he said. “Sometimes they’ll take one girl to serve two men. And then she’ll charge more, maybe $5 an hour.”

He told me that special, high-class call girls charged up to $100 an hour. “They come right to your house,” he said. “And they are the type of women you’d never in a million years guess work as prostitutes – girls who have jobs with international organizations during the daytime.”

How Ainara got Stolen

During a recent visit of an Osh staff member to Bishkek, I heard more about how Ainara got stolen. Her coworker, Katya, told me that she hadn’t been dating this guy, but that he had been a friend.

Together with a group of friends, they were supposed to go somewhere. This guy said that he wanted to change clothes first and they stopped by his house. All the friends somehow left. He asked Ainara to come up to his apartment with him. She told Katya that at that moment she had the thought that he could try to steal her, but then told herself that it couldn’t happen. She went with him.

And when she got to his house or apartment, his relatives were there waiting. They cornered Ainara in a room and put the scarf on her, which according to tradition makes a woman married.

“How did Ainara react?” I asked Katya.

“She was screaming and crying, but they got the scarf on her,” she said.

“And how did her parents react?”

“At first her mother was against it, but then they talked her into it,” she said.

Among the women I know who’ve been stolen, I have known Ainara the longest and the best. It bothered me so much to hear about it that I even woke up dreaming about it one night. I wished there was something I could have done to protect her. And I wonder how parents possibly deal with the fear, the responsibility and the guilt. How can they possibly protect their young adult daughters, at all times, in all places?


A few days ago I was talking to a female government employee in Bishkek. She commented on the late ages of marriage in the U.S.

“Here people get married in their late teens and early 20s,” she said. “One of my distant relatives was recently stolen and she was only 16. She’s still a high school student and she’s married already.”

“In Bishkek?” I asked surprised. I didn’t think that stealings happened very often in Bishkek.

“Yes.”

“Did she stay with him?”

“Yes, she stayed with him of her own accord. We talked her into it.” Again, my stomach rolled. The next 60 years of this woman’s life determined by the violent action of one man and the community’s support of him.

Today I took a taxi with a 23-year-old who looked 16. I noticed he had a small star-shaped pin of Lenin as a young boy pinned to his air freshener.

“Is that Lenin?” I asked, surprised. I very rarely see Lenin displayed, as much as some remain nostalgic for Soviet times.

“Yes. Would you like me to give it to you as a gift?”

“No thanks. I’m just surprised to see him.”

“One day I was an Octoberist. I found it among my things and thought it was nice to look at.”

A few hours later I met an inspiring middle-aged woman who left her job as a physics teacher in 2000 to begin selling at the market. With two children headed for college, she didn’t feel she could meet the expenses on her teacher’s salary.

First she worked as a saleswomen, then opened her own container, where she sells clothing she has shown here in Bishkek. The change from the warm classroom to hours in a freezing iron container hit her hard and she lost all but four teeth – she says to the cold.

Her container is well taken care of and her goods – mostly bathrobes and women’s blouses, are well presented. I told her I liked her container.

“I love my products,” she said. She patted one white, fuzzy robe as she showed it to me. “This is called snegurhichka,” she said, naming it after the pretty young woman who accompanies Father Ice at the New Year.

What was especially nice was to see how she’d been able to improve her families standard of living. Within the past few months alone she’d purchased a $450 modern washing machine, and a new gas stove.


This evening I invited my friend Zhenya over to share the pot of vegetable soup I’d cooked up. She came over with her son Algubek and a bunch of goodies from her new store – carrot juice, yogurt, gumdrops and cookies. She loved the richness of all the vegetables in my soup, but both she and her son had trouble adapting to the lack of potatoes.

Algubek spun his spoon around in his bowl. “I’m just looking for potatoes,” he said.

She works every day at her new store, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. She can’t trust her salespeople to open or close the store without stealing, so it’s impossible for her to take a day off.

“I’m dying to go to the mountains, to get out into nature,” she said. “But I can’t find a way to take a day off.”

It was nice to catch up with her. I feel like I’ve been spending too much time lately either at work or with my expatriate friends. Zhenya was the first friend I made upon arriving in Kyrgyzstan almost a year and a half ago and I’m very thankful for all she’s taught me about local life.


Tomorrow Zhenya will accompany me to my belly dancing class. That’s something that I’ve taken up in the last week, along with downhill skiing and Kibo. Belly dancing is very popular in Bishkek. At the health club that I’m currently attending (where I’m pretty much the only foreigner), they offer 20 belly dancing classes per week, and most are packed. As a tall, uncoordinated white person, I pretty much look like a fool. But luckily the people aren’t very judgmental and they allow me to make my slow progress at my own rate.


I finally visited Beta Stores for the first time since it opened in late December. This was the major Turkish supermarket and department store that was completely looted during the March 2005 revolution. Understandably, the owners lost a lot of money and it’s impressive they even rebuilt. But the new Beta stores is less exciting than the previous version. They seem to have filled less space with goods, offering a smaller selection. And the upper floors have been divided into small spaces and rented out. This makes it look more like Tsum, the former state department store, than the major department store it once was. It was sadly quiet and empty when I visited, as though the new, shiny walls held only the ghost of its former presence.

The President comes to visit

This morning I came out of my apartment to find a string of police lining the lot across from my building. I didn’t see anything particularly of interest there. It seemed as though some construction could be underway.

“What’s going on?” I asked one of the officers.

“The President is coming,” he said.

“Why?” I couldn’t imagine what could be interesting there.

“They are building a big house here.”

I later told our driver, Viktor, about the hoopla. “It’s probably the new apartment building they are going to construct for government deputies,” he said.

“What? They are using tax money to build a large apartment building for deputies?” Most of whom spend at least tens of thousands of dollars to get into office. They are about the last people who need to receive free housing.

Sergei explained to me that now, deputies come to Bishkek and complain they have nowhere to live.

“So they government pays for them to buy an apartment. But then when t their term is up, the government doesn’t take it back, but it remains in the name of the deputy. There have even been cases of deputies who already owned an apartment in Bishkek. They put it in a relative’s name, then ask the government to buy it for them. They are basically get the government to pay them for their own apartments. It’s gotten that bad.”

So while the new system seems a bit ridiculous, given the number of poor people who need housing, now all the deputies who need housing will live together in one building. And when their term is up, they’ll move out and the new deputy will move in.

The large expenditure in constructing the building will stop the more expensive practice of buying every new deputy his own apartment in Bishkek.

Another staff member stolen

On Wednesday evening I received a phone call from a former staff member in Osh. After catching up on all the news, he hit me with the biggest news of all.

“Ainara is getting married,” he said. I especially liked Ainara, with her continuous bundle of energy, her good intentions and her intelligence. But I hadn’t even known she was seeing anyone, much less planning marriage.

Damir told me she’d been seeing someone for about five months.

I expected she’d invite me to the wedding and looked forward to the excuse to return to Osh.

“When will it be?” I asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow??? Why so little notice?”

“She was stolen on Monday,” he said.

He told me that her boyfriend and his parents worked in Kazakhstan and that he and his parents had apparently planned the stealing in advance to time with his parents’ visit home for the holidays. Her boyfriend wants to reestablish himself in Osh and is looking for work there.

Nobody on Ainara’s side knew about it – not her, her friends or her parents. But the boy’s side knew far enough in advance to plan a wedding party to take place two days later.

“How did he steal her?” I asked.

He didn’t know. He’d only seen her for a short time when she stopped into the office. But he said that she looked happy.

As to why, if they were happy together and wanted to marry anyway, he didn’t just ask her, Damir didn’t know. “I suppose it’s just considered an old tradition,” he said.

Zhenya starts a new business

One evening my friend Zhenya stopped by on her way back from getting a cavity filled. I made her a cup of tea and she sat at my kitchen table while I finished preparing dinner.

Just a few weeks ago she left her job selling jeans at Dordoi and opened her own store. She said she sells groceries and cosmetics. She’s working long days, from 8 until 8, and so far isn’t earning much more than she did as a salesperson. But it’s now hers and should develop with time.

She hired an 18-year-old girl from a neighboring village to be a salesperson for her.

“She was just sitting at home, had finished school and couldn’t find a job. And do you know why she wasn’t working?” Zhenya asked. “Because she’d lost her passport. The passport department isn’t giving out new passports and nobody would hire her without a passport. So I gave her work without a passport.”

She said that the girl’s 20-year-old sister is in the same situation and she may hire her as well.

I was glad to see that she’s building a business for herself and I hope to go visit it at some point. In the meantime, she’s lost, at least temporarily, her source of support in America.

Her mother, who was working as a home aide to an elderly man in New York, was fired upon her return by the man’s daughter. The reason for the firing was her two week absence, though she’d asked permission before she’d left and it was her first time home in seven or eight years.

“She’ll find something else easy enough,” Zhenya said. “Because she doesn’t charge much, just $500 a week, and she has a lot of experience. She’s buried so many women already. But my mother felt sorry for the old man, who really liked her and was crying when she was let go.”

Return to an icebox

One week ago I returned to Bishkek after a short trip home for the holidays. I spent Christmas with my family and New Year’s with Mark in a fantastic log cabin we rented in a Pennsylvania state park.

I returned to the most absolute cold I’ve ever experienced in Kyrgyzstan. When I got off the bus from Almaty in Bishkek, my watch read 8:30 a.m. But the streets were dark and silent. There were no taxis, virtually no moment, and few lights illuminating apartments.

The bus stop was about a mile from my home and I decided to walk yet, seeing as I frequently walk that stretch without problem. But I hadn’t walked it before with four bags, on a snowy street, in the dark, and in what I later found out was minus 20 degree Celcius temperature. It was so cold that my fingers burned in pain and I worried about getting frostbite.

I tromped home almost in tears. Not only was I freezing and exhausted after over 30 hours travel, but I couldn’t understand why the city was so dark and lifeless. Finally, I asked someone the time.

“6:30,” he said.

I’d set my watch ahead one hour instead of behind one hour and that made the two hour difference. So life was still carrying on in Bishkek and I still had a warm apartment to gratefully arrive at.


A few days later, having warmed up sufficiently, I decided to go on a skiing trip with the group of outdoorspeople that go out of town each weekend. We went to a ski resort 1.5 hours outside of Bishkek, called Tugus Bulak. Ski rental was $15 and an all-day lift ticket $7.50. There is only one lift and it extends far up into the mountains, a 15-20 minute ride.

“Last year they only had a rope pull,” a young software company owner, Volodya, told me.

“A rope pull, going up to 2000 meters?” I asked. That was a long way to have to hang on to a rope. “Didn’t people fall off?”

“Off course they fell off,” he said.

There was only one lift and one two paths down, of about equal difficulty. From the top, a beautiful panorama of endless white mountains was visible and I had the privilege of skiing down into them.

My first run down, I didn’t consider it quite such a privilege. There were two steep parts on the run and I hadn’t put on skis in two years. Terrified, I stopped after every turn and it was a long way down. Near the end, I collapsed from altitude sickness. After lying in the snow, certain I would vomit, I took off my skis and staggered to the lodge.

A few hours later, I was ready to give it one more go. Knowing what to expect made it much easier and I had some fun coming down the second time.

By the next day I’d decided I would take up skiing this season. When again will I have the chance to live 1.5 hours from mountains and to have relatively cheap access to lift tickets and equipment. So I bought a pair of ski boots, which reduced my rental costs to $5 per visit and decided I’d try to ski at least weekly.

We had a four day weekend. We got Monday off for the Russian Christmas, which was Saturday. And Tuesday was a religious holiday, Khurban-Eid, the day that Muslims remember those who have passed away. So on Tuesday I joined Mihail and his group for another trip to Tugus Bulak.

This time, unfortunately, the chairlift was under repair and there was no way up but by foot. Some people did walk, at least partway. I foresaw a long day in the lodge. Until Volodya came to me,

“I’ve negotiated with the owners of some horses,” he said. “They’ll take us up the mountain and we can ski down.”

I was tempted to decline. It sounded too crazy. Then I remembered I’d be very unlikely to ever again be offered the chance to go up a mountain on horseback and down on skis, so I accepted.

We each got on a horse, we put the skis in a bag across his lap, and the owner walked in front of us. We probably went about halfway, or a little less up the mountain.

A thick, white fog covered the mountains and we couldn’t see more than 10 feet in front of us. It was like a movie, moving uphill on horseback into the unknown whiteness. Even Volodya talked about images of Nepal and Tibet that floated through his mind.

Skiing down the mountain was fantastic. Because there was no chairlift, we were the only people that high on the mountain and we had it completely to ourselves. Thick snowflakes fell throughout the day, so we had a nice layer of powder. And due to the complete whiteness that blocked our vision, we couldn’t even be afraid of the steep parts because we couldn’t see ahead far enough to tell what was steep. We could only make sure that we stayed in the area marked by ski and footprints and headed downward.

Before we reached the bottom, the horses met us and took us on one more trip up the mountain.

While I didn’t get in the skiing practice I’d expected, that experience was unique enough to make my day. Afterwards, I filled my water bottles at a natural spring nearby and admired the trees covered with frost that formed fine art patterns on all the branches.

A city preparing for the New Year & A Good Charity

I left Bishkek today to head home for the holidays. I left a city in eager preparation for their biggest holiday of the year, New Years. Rows of stands appeared outside markets, filled with lit trees, holiday ornaments, tinsel and decorations. All kinds of businesses – from pharmacies to soap stands were adding holiday goods to their stocks.

Nigora and Shavkat invited me to come to Osh to spend the holidays with them. I would have liked to, had I been in Kyrgyzstan. Sven moved out of their home and into an apartment once his wife and child arrived. They didn’t like the idea of having to carry their small daughter outside every time she wanted to use the bathroom or wash. Nigora’s business is continuing, though her profit remains only about five dollars a day. She’s hoping it will improve in two to three months, when people get used to this new marketplace.

One day this week, I approached a run down taxi with cracked windows. It was obvious that the driver was an immigrant from a rural area – in this case, Naryn. When I came up to the door, two men jumped out to make room for me. It’s pretty common for one taxi driver to visit another while waiting for a customer, but I’d never seen such a group before. Then, when the driver turned off the small black and white TV he’d installed under the radio, I understood what attracted the crowd.

We clunked along down the Bishkek streets and stopped at a stoplight with a Mercedes kiddy-korner to us. The Mercedes driver washed his windows and the water spouted up so high that it rained on our car, several feet behind him. Such little unusual moments, which happen fairly often in Kyrgyzstan, are what I love about the country.

I recently found out about a charity in Bishkek that finds sponsors for elderly people, mostly without children, living on pensions of under $20 a month. Sponsors agree to donate $10 a month, which goes directly to the elderly recipient.

I thought this was a great idea and I adopted a babushka this week. Her name is Natalya Ivanova and she was born in 1927. She worked on a collective farm, then worked as a cleaner. After 35 years of work, she receives a pension of 563 som (less than $15). She is divorced and has no children and the description said she doesn’t have enough money for food or needed medicines.

The elderly were undoubtedly hit hardest by the social changes following Communism. Having contributed their entire working lives to the Communist future, they expected a socialist retirement, in which they’d be well taken care of. The reality is that they were left with nothing. Most of the beggars on the street are either elderly or Gypies. I give the elderly small change, but I liked the idea of a system in which the sponsors could keep the people from having to beg, to retain their dignity in their final years.

This week I visited their Spartan office to sign up for a year’s sponsorship. It’s a well-organized group. They gave me a contract, promising to give her $10 a month, gave me a short history of Natalya’s life, translated by their staff into English, and a photo of her.

I brought her some gifts for New Year’s and asked if they’d be sure to give them to her.

“Yes,” one of the staff members said. “And when we do, we’ll take a picture of her with the bags and email it to you.”

Since I’m hoping to be able to visit her beginning in January, I’ll be able to check that she receives everything that was promised. But it did seem like a committed, well-organized group, sponsored by the Swiss.

My babushka has been on the waiting list for over a year. They told me they’d contact her and tell her they’d found her a sponsor. She will receive her first $10 payment this month.

“She’ll probably have forgotten about this by now,” I said, thinking how sad it was to have to wait a year for $10 a month in assistance.

“No, she definitely won’t have forgotten,” two staff members said in unison. “They call us all the time,” one of them said, “asking when we’ll be able to help them.”

There are currently over 200 babushkas, in Bishkek and Batken, on the waiting list and 99% of sponsors are from overseas (mostly from Switzerland). If you’d like information on how to adopt a babushka, see www.adoptbabushka.org.

Crossing the border from Kyrgyzstan to Kazakhstan this evening, the transition was stark as usual. I crossed the border with a group of people that looked very unusual, as though they’d just descended from a remote mountain area. The women were all short, squat, and wore solid colored scarfs around their heads. The men wore embroidered caps, were dark-skinned, and many had beards. They spoke a different language and seemed to speak Russian poorly. They definitely didn’t look Kyrgyz, but when I asked one man where he was from he showed me a Kyrgyz passport and said Bishkek.

I didn’t believe it. I asked my driver if he knew where they were from. At first he guessed they were Tadjiks, then after waiting in line with them, he found out they were Dunguns, from a place outside Bishkek. They work in the fields in the summer and were going to Almaty to buy goods a market there that they could resell, possibly in China.

I’d seen Dungan architecture, especially in one area outside Bishkek, and I’d seen plenty of Dungan cafes. But I’d never seen so many Dungans in one place. They are one of the small ethnic minorities in Kyrgyzstan and I believe they originate from China. It looked like an interesting culture and I regretted that I didn’t have the opportunity to talk to them.

The road to Almaty is finished and the entire trip takes about 3.5 hours. Once the border is crossed, the roads are lighter, the buildings better lit, and holiday lights were strung above the road. I fell asleep and woke up at the airport, under the lights of a glittering giant New Year’s tree, and a glittering, modern airport. I felt like I was already in Europe, just a few hours from my Central Asian home.

In the lounge where I waited for my plane were quite a few Americans with small children. One of them, a man who weighed well over 300 pounds and was dressed in a black heavy metal t-shirt and baseball hat, caught my attention immediately. He didn’t look like the type of American who comes to Central Asia and I wondered what he was doing there. He held a tiny blond boy in his expansive arms.

Then I realized that most of the people around him also held small children. One woman with mousy brown hair, pale skin, and thick, dark glasses held a little Kazakh girl. A woman with loose baggy jeans and a red shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, patiently pulled a darker skinned little boy up off the ground. An already aging, intellectual-looking couple, held a little blond boy with spots on his face.

It seemed like they were all taking babies home from Kazakhstan. Looking at the variety of parents there, I wondered about the children’s luck. Of course, having a family is usually much better than being raised in an orphanage. Would they be grateful for this plane ride to another country, that would determine the rest of their life, or would they regret that no one had stopped it? Did the women who had given birth to them, not so long ago, have any idea that their offspring were headed across the ocean? But would all of them really be better off? I hoped so.

Desensitation to death

One morning this week, as I exited my apartment on my way to work, I saw a man lying motionless next to the garbage bins. He was on the frozen ground, covering with a blanket of livid sky. He had the appearance of a drunk – the dark, worn clothing, the unkempt appearance, the loneliness of an aging man alone. But in my passing glance, his open mouth seemed exceptionally still, his outreached hand frozen in place.

I have to admit that I did nothing. I felt the requisite guilt as I continued walking and knew it was a terrible state when nobody helped someone in that condition. A lame excuse it may have been, but there was a local woman sweeping around the garbage bins, just a foot or two from his body, and she didn’t seem to pay any attention. Nor did any of the passerbys. So what should I, a foreigner do – without any medical skills, without knowing any emergency numbers.

I wondered how much of the lack of reaction had to do with his appearance. A lot, I supposed. I hoped that if I were lying next to a garbage bin, someone would stop. And I felt I’d do the same for someone who looked as though they’d found themselves there against their will. But who can really tell in the case of a low-income aging man? Most assume it’s a drunk and walk on.


Yesterday I held a holiday dinner for my local friends. Not wanting people to separate into groups due to language, I decided to invite almost only locals (plus one foreign colleague fluent in Russian), planning a separate event for foreigners in the future. I ended up with a group of almost fifteen people – Kyrgyz, Russian and Kazakh, including four children, from four months to nine years old.

I made a dish I’d learned from my roommate in Siberia – French meat (beef covered with potatoes, onions, carrots, sweet corn, mushrooms, mayonnaise and cheese), homemade peanut butter cookies, and fruit salad. I bought roasted chickens and premade vegetable salads and set out dried fruit, nuts and lepushka. For dessert, I made an apple cobbler.

We gathered around a table in the living room, listening to Christmas music CDs on my laptop computer and a little two dollar Christmas tree serving as the holiday decorations.

Though I was short on space and supplies (I asked most if they could bring their own plate and cup), it was a pleasant evening. Most seemed to enjoy the chance to meet each other and they stayed for several hours. Both the toddler and the nine-year-old told their parents they wanted to stay the night at my place, despite my complete lack of any toys.

They also seemed to like the food and praised the effort I put into it.

“You are not American,” said Svetlana, who has a baby with an American man. “Americans can’t cook. They don’t have any time for such things.”

I did spend the entire day on Saturday preparing. But I didn’t mind. Having sat down at so many plentiful tables as a guest, it was nice to finally be the host. And it was good to be reminded that despite the loneliness of living alone in Bishkek, I do have the gift of several wonderful friends and acquaintances.

The flu is making its way through Bishkek with great power. So many people at work are sick that my boss is bringing in a nurse to offer flu shots tomorrow.

The weather is cold and dreary, though the lack of new snow means there are some clear places on the sidewalk where the ice has melted. Nevertheless, after seeing how difficult it is to walk on a nonstop ice sheet, when a friend from Alaska offered to pick me up some attachable soles with metal spikes on her next trip home, I accepted with gratitude.

Yesterday evening, Zhenya invited me over to meet her mother. She had left Kyrgyzstan seven years ago for America and hadn’t been back since. Other than seeing great changes in her only daughter and nine-year-old grandson, I figured her city must have changed greatly since she left. I asked her what surprised her most.

“When I left, the area was in the middle of a great depression,” she said. “It was so grey and sad. People didn’t know how to live or what to do. People have gotten through it and found things to do. And what really surprises me is all the little businesses. It used to just be huge enterprises, and of course, they had mostly died by the time I left. But now so many small businesses have popped up and they really seem to have changed the atmosphere.”

Zhenya filled me in on our friends Marina and Elena. Marina’s fiancé, the retired American, whose baby she gave birth to four months ago, seems not to be coming back. Marina would never admit that outright. But she asked Zhenya for recommendations of dating services that would introduce her to foreign men.

And Elena, an intelligent and kind 34-year-old, who is virtually engaged to a Spainard, is starting to see his troubling side. He has already taken her to Spain once and has now filed the paperwork for a fiancée visa, so that she can go to live there for a while. She has quit her job and is focused on studying Spanish. It’s an amazing opportunity for her to get out of a place where her opportunities are limited, to build a life for herself, and to have the family she craves. However, Jose has begun showing a jealous and controlling temperament, not believing her when she says where she has been, calling frequently, and expressing fears that she’ll get to Spain and then leave him.

“Elena thinks it’s because of the communication problem,” Zhenya said. She’d scrunched her naturally curly hair with mousse, defining her dark curls in a voluminous mass. “She thinks that maybe he just doesn’t understand her when she explains where she’s been and if only she spoke Spanish well, they wouldn’t have this problem.”

I told her that I doubted it was a cultural communication problem, it was probably a personality issue. I had already told her that men who sought foreign wives on the internet often had a reason why they couldn’t find a wife in their own country. And for a 48-year-old Spainard to never have been married, there was probably a reason why he hadn’t been able to find a woman willing to commit to him.

“I am listed on that same internet site,” Zhenya said, “and the owner of the agency knows my mother. She called yesterday, saying there was an American in town who wanted to be introduced to me. I wasn’t home so she told my mother. When I came back, my mother threw a scandal. She told me that such men weren’t normal, that so many girls who used that agency were now missing – they’d been sold, disappeared, or who knows what else. And she forbid me from going to meet him. I told her I just thought it would be interesting, but I can’t go while she’s here.”

I urged her to be safe, to not give him her address or phone number, to meet him in a public place, to not get in a car alone with him.

It makes me really sad to see hard-working, well-meaning, good people struggling so hard to find the most basic things, love, opportunity, respect and security.

The biggest holiday of the year, New Year’s, is coming up in a few weeks and the stores are already starting to stock up with extra alcohol, fancy candy, pre-made salads, gifts wrapped in cellophane, and cakes. And the weeks of gathering and parties are already slowly starting, bringing people out to the shops and markets in greater numbers than usual. I love watching the bustling shopkeepers bringing in the best income of the year, which will make their holiday all the much more enjoyable for them.

Swimming Below Freezing

I was not thinking clearly enough about the circumstances when I decided to go to aqua aerobics this morning. Held at a nearby health club with an outdoor pool, it’s a wonderful creation that allows one to enter the pool directly from a heated area. I’d gone before on chilly days and marveled at the ability to swim outside in the cool air. But those days were nothing like today – a freezing winter day, in which snow remained on the ground, the sidewalks were sheets of ice and the snow-tipped brown tree branches rose into a grey-white sky.

Management was clearing doing what it could to keep the pool swimmable. The water coming in through the vent was so hot it burned if I got too close. And steam rose from the pool in heavy clouds.

Nevertheless, my wet shoulders and neck frequently emerged from the water during the exercises, allowing the wet hair ends to gel into frozen particles, allowing my skin to feel the frigidity of the air. I looked at the teacher, a young woman dressed in a down coat, wool hat and gloves. She was blurry through the steamy mist, but I could see her sitting on her hands as she demonstrated what to do with our legs, trying to keep them warm. Behind her rose a tall, old white Soviet apartment block.

A man giving swimming lessons to children stood at another end of the pool, also dressed in a puffy down jacket. I lasted until the end of class, but determined to not do any more swimming in below zero weather. When I swam my laps at the end of class, I wasn’t trying for speed or varying technique. I moved slowly, focusing on keeping as much of my body as possible below water.


This evening I gathered with some people at a delicious Lebanese restaurant. Three of the couples were Western men, together with local women. There were no Western women with local men.

I’m starting to get to know some of the expatriate community in Bishkek and that’s nice. There seem to be quite a few interesting and fun people and they tend to be good sources of knowledge about fun things to do.

The family in Osh

I became worried about the money problems my Osh family seemed to be suffering during my last visit. So when Sven, the person being sent to replace me in Osh, expressed interest in living with a family, I hooked him up with Nigora and Shavkat. He moved in a few days after I left and loves them as I did. He will live there a month. Then, if his wife and young daughter agree to those living conditions, they will all live there together. I was glad that he has the opportunity, as I did, to integrate with a local family. And I know that the income from a renter will be a big help to the family’s financial stability.

I call them about a once a week. Nigora did start her business, buying one of the cheaper stalls. She sells dishes on the table and men’s shirts hang from the rafters surrounding her stall. I asked her why she decided to sell men’s shirts.

“Because the people who come by my stall tend to be pretty poor, so I had to think of something that they could afford to buy.” Her income is small, something like $5 a day, and her profit even less, but Nigora is hopeful that business will improve as she gains experience and regular customers. She says that she usually works until lunchtime and the older boys come to replace her after their lessons, so she can return home and prepare dinner.

I can’t wait until I can go visit myself.

A Fire in the Snow

This evening I briefly went out to an internet café near my apartment. When I returned, less than an hour later, a man in thick clothing and a hard hat ran by me. When I turned the corner, towards my apartment entrance, I saw two fire trucks and a crowd of people gathered outside the building.

My heart briefly contracted. Had I forgotten to turn off the oven or the stove after making dinner. God, would I feel awful if I burned the apartment the owners had just remodeled and rented for the first time as an additional source of income. They were all gathered mighty close to my place. A group of women in headscarves looked up and prayed in a foreign language – maybe Tartar, maybe Tajik.

I nervously counted the apartment entrance. One, two, three was mine. Thank goodness, the truck was parked outside the fourth entrance. Not directly attached to mine, but close enough that a major blaze could spread to my place.

I stood with the crowd and watched. I saw smoke curling out of the fourth floor. Residents of the fifth floor apartments, on either side of the stairwell, stood and looked out the window. Of everyone, they were the ones who should really be part of the crowd standing outside. No one seemed to have bothered to evacuate them yet.

The blaze didn’t seem to be too threatening, not like the giant flames I once watched cracking through windows and shooting out into the air from a high-rise dwelling in Peru. So I went back home. And as I type, I can see and hear through the cracks in my shades – the glare of the fire engine light, the status of the walkie-talkie, the gossip and concern of the onlookers, a bang or two from the neighboring building.

Whether or not the equipment is any good, I don’t know. But I’m pretty impressed to see that two trucks arrived when the fire was still rather minor, along with quite a few fire fighters.

Ironically, today was the first real snow, the first snowfall that stuck to the ground and solidified into nice. Since almost no one puts down salt or ice, that means a very slow and slippery walk to work. I usually get in a good 40-60 minutes of walking a day in Bishkek and that mobility is one of my favorite aspects of life here. But the fun is reduced considerably when I’m forced to stare at the ground, instead of my surroundings, and focus on not falling.

Today I met up with some people knowledgeable about prisons in Kyrgyzstan. They told me that there are 17,000 prisoners in the country. In Bishkek, there is a holding cell and a main prison (“colony”). The prisoners with tuberculosis have been relegated to a separate area, called the TB prison. There are 400 or 450 prisoners there and half of them have TB.

“What are the prisoners without TB doing there?” I asked.

“They don’t want to move,” my friends told me. “The prisoners are organized into “families” and they don’t want to leave their families.”

“But they are prisoners,” I protested. “Why do they have the right to chose where they live? Why can’t they just be put in non-TB prisons?”

“Because the prisoners run themselves. There aren’t enough staff members to control them. So if they don’t want to do something, it’s not possible to force them to do it.”

They told me that during the recent prison revolt, during which a Parliamentary Deputy was shot and killed, all of the prison staff left and the prisoners were left on their own. The only reason they didn’t run was that the grounds were surrounded by tanks and the army.

This evening, at my Russian lesson, I learned useful words, like esophagus, large intestine, and spinal cord. As usual, my teacher, Iliana, got off topic, giving me a lecture about something we touch on during class. It eats up quite a bit of our one-hour class. And with only two hours a week, that doesn’t leave much time for vocabulary or grammar. But I rarely stop her because she usually tells me interesting things about the local life, culture or mentality.

Tonight she told me how poorly people lived in the mid-1990s, how young people educated from 1992-2002 received absolutely no education, and how the standard of living in Bishkek only started rising three years ago.

“Three years ago, you could buy a two or three room apartment for $3-4,000. Now, that same apartment is $20,000. Three years ago people started to leave to work overseas. So many people went to Russia and to Kazakhstan. There are Kyrgyz in Italy and in America. These people started sending money back, and only then could people start to think about things like buying property, starting a business, or buying a computer.”

She’s right. Kyrgyzstan has a huge rate of outmigration. I’d like to look into it more to get more specific facts. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it had one of the largest outmigration rates in the world. I went to villages in the south of the country where barely an able-bodied man remained. It didn’t matter that they were poor and educated. They could go illegally to Russia and find work in construction and other manual labor. They wouldn’t make much by Russian standards, but they’d make a lot more than they could at home. And the few hundred dollars they send back every few months is enough to significantly improve their relative’s standard of living. Local banks in rural areas do huge business in money transfers.

One of the best options for hard workers is South Korea. People there have to work hard for very long hours, but they can make $1,000 a month. I met a man in Osh who spent three years working in South Korea with his wife. They saved enough in that time to return, buy themselves a nice house, and have financial security for the foreseeable future.

It’s quite fascinating to see the practical results of open borders and globalization. Of course it’s sad that many are leaving Kyrgyzstan, and that many families go years without seeing their husbands and fathers. But they are likely taking work that Russians don’t want themselves. For them, it’s an opportunity and a chance to raise their families prospects. And that is heartwarming to see.

I can hear one man yelling at another outside. They must have found the person who started the fire. Then he called someone, it sounded like his father, told him what happened and started to cry.

A Run in What Used to Be a Woods

Today my friend Sara and I went to visit a Western couple at their $2,000 a month house outside the city. The neighborhood, called by locals, Santa Barbara, was filled with giant mansions. A local man stepped out of a Mercedes in a full-length leather jacket, a pouty woman sitting next to him on the leather seats.

“This isn’t Kyrgyzstan,” Clara said, expressing a desire to see the rest of the country.

Her boyfriend and co-worker, Ulrich, is in charge of purchasing some cars for the organization he works for. He wants to import them himself. As a humanitarian organization, they could save $5,000 in customs charges. But due to the corruption, they might not get them at all if they don’t pay bribes. “I’ll probably end up having to pay half the $5,000 in bribes,” he said. His organization has a special accounting code for bribes.

We took a run through the neighborhood, to the nearby botanical garden. “This used to be the botanical garden,” Ulrich said. “But now, people come in with axes and cut down the trees to use for firewood. It’s just been left for the past 15 years, since the end of Communism.”

After the run, we relaxed in their personal sauna, complete with small pool, shower area, and changing room. It was a nice treatment for my incorrigible cold and I enjoyed the chance to spend time with such active, energetic people who are passionate about what they do.

Saturday Night in the Dark

When my electricity went out this morning at 9 a.m., I didn’t think much of it. It was daylight and I expect it would last an hour or two, a few hours at most. So I didn’t say anything, even when my landlord stopped by.

When I returned home at 5:30, just as the last light was fading, I still didn’t have electricity. But I could see that everyone else in the building did. Only then did I realize how poorly prepared I was. I had one little lantern with a fading battery. No candles, no flashlights.

I opened the drapes and tried to do a bit of housework in the last strands of light. Now, at 6:30, it’s already black. I’m sitting in the darkness, using up the battery on my laptop. When it runs out, I’ll lose this bright square of light and have nothing but a little glow from my cell phone to illuminate things.

What is there to do in this situation? Listen to my ipod, sleep, or get out of here. I’m waiting for my landlord to come over. After he does, I think I’ll try to find a café where I can spend the evening.

This was a busy week and I had little time to write. I came across some interesting characters, as usual, though. I met a nice couple who emigrated to Bishkek from Naryn a few years ago. The wife was 29. She’d just returned to graduate school and was teaching courses at the university. The husband, 34, sells cattle at one of the Bishkek cattle markets. Every week he rents a little Moskvich car, travels to cattle markets in surrounding villages, and returns to the city with FIFTEEN sheep bunched inside in the car! I try to imagine where he must sit.

They live in a small but warm two-room house. There was no furniture and a tiny black and white TV, about as large as my hand. They eat, sleep, and live on carpets spread across the floor. Next to the TV stood a statue of an eagle on a branch. Each week, when they received money, they put a bill into the small slot in the back.

“I don’t know how much we have, but at least 12,000 som ($300),” the wife told me. “We’ve been saving, for a TV and for furniture, for over a year.”

There has been a lot of publicity about rural people migrating to the capital, trying to steal land and demanding rights and services. I don’t know how or why this family came to Bishkek. But it was nice to see the earnestness with which they were trying to build a solid life for themselves and for their child. And I was surprised to see that they’d started their family so late by local standards.

One another interesting family was a couple who’d entered into what’s called a “citizen’s marriage” two years ago. That means that they live as though they are married, but they don’t formally register it. Both had children from their first marriages. The wife’s two children lived with them.

I asked the husband what he did for a living. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s not legal. If you tell anyone, the tax inspectors will come right after me.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” I said. (since I’m not including any identifying details, I am honoring my promise, even despite this blog tale)

He then led me to a shed outside the house and proudly opened the lock on the door. There, he had a whole series of contraptions made out of tin, tubes and buckets.

“This is where I make alcohol,” he said. “Once a week, I put it into bottles and sell it. I make a profit of over $300 a month.”

I thought about my neighbors in Osh. They also had a homemade alcohol production (called samagon). But they were much less cautious, inviting their customers to come right to their door to make their purchases, giving their dog reason to bark constantly at all the unexpected visitors.

I’ve started Russian lessons. Twice a week I meet with Iliana for an hour. It’s not enough for intensive improvement. But time is short and it’s good to have at least a little time each week to concentrate on learning something new.

Iliana runs a language school and she talked to me at length about one of her students, a Kyrgyz woman from the south of the country who is studying Russian.

“She’s 29 years old and is pregnant with her fourth child,” Iliana said. “She doesn’t want to have any more kids, but so far she’s had only girls and her husband insists on having a boy. She tells me that she doesn’t love him, that she doesn’t want to be with him, and that she doesn’t want to have any more children. She said that she’s having problems with her teeth because of all the pregnancies.

“I tell her that she needs to stand up to him and tell him to either choose between her health and having a ton of kids,” Iliana continued. “I tell her that she’s still young and she still has time to do something with her life. She always dreamed of getting a university education. But she was pressured to marry this man, a relative, by her family, and she did so right after high school. But now she’s committed to getting the education she couldn’t pursue before. She told me that after the baby she’ll sit home for one month, then will come right back to lessons. She wants to learn Russian and to go to the university.”

Iliana told me that women from the south are “deeply complexed.” She can’t understand why they have so many children.

I had asked her why kidney problems are so prevalent in Kyrgyzstan. She said it was because women have too many children. “After having a child, it takes at least three years to restore the vitamins to a woman’s body,” she said. “But these women are having a child every two years. They themselves are unhealthy, then of course they are giving birth to unhealthy children. I once yelled at an aunt who had already given birth to two mentally retarded children. Who needs these unhealthy children brought into the world? I asked her.”

Iliana herself is quite impressive. In her early 40s, she managed to go to London to study English for 2.5 years. While she was there, she got a job as a meeting services assistant for Price Waterhouse Coopers, making $12 an hour, enough to support her 16-year-old daughter to come study as well.

“People say that the best way to ensure your retirement is to spend on your child’s education,” she said. “You need to do that before you buy yourself a fur or a car. Then you hope that the child will buy it for you later.”