Summertime

Hello,

I haven’t updated in a while because blogspot has been blocked. I’m having my sister post this for me.

I have about a third of my Peace Corps service left at this point. I expect to be coming home some time in May, which means I just have the coldest months of the year left to get through – oh boy! It’s still pretty warm here but I can see fresh snowfall up in the mountains which makes me a little nervous. My second school year is going well so far, thanks mostly to our new textbooks which my students love (and so do I). This morning our classes were cancelled for three days so the students can help at home with harvesting.

Things have calmed down since the unrest in June, and hopefully they’ll stay that way. There are parliamentary elections on October10th so I’ll be extra cautious and hope that nothing happens.

I have lots of pictures to share from the summer…

This is the apricot bazaar in my village. People (from ages 5 to 65) stand at the side of the road and try to make some extra money selling the fruit from their yards/orchards. It’s very funny when a car pulls up and everyone bombards the potential customer with his or her best sales pitch: “Mine are the best! I’ll give it to you cheap!” A bucket of apricots goes for about $2.50 in July and August.

My parents came to visit me for a week and we took a trip out to the heart of central Kyrgyzstan, to Song-Kol lake. For two nights we stayed in a yurt belonging to a local Kyrgyz family. They take their sheep, horses, cows and donkeys out to a vast meadow each summer and the animals (and children) run free between a large lake and a mountain range. It’s very remote – no roads, no electricity, no running water, no cell phone service. Just clean, cold air, unblemished natural beauty and the best hospitality you could ever ask for. As long as you don’t mind cow dung as fuel. The homemade yogurt, bread, fresh jam and baked fish fresh from the lake were wonderful.

Here we are with our hosts outside of our yurt:

Lake Song Kol


Best entertainment for kids: a donkey

We were walking towards a distant mountain path which turned out to be a field of wildflowers.

It’s not every day that you see a herd of yaks. Unless you are a yak herder, of course.

My new favorite animal: half-yak, half-cow.

Here are my parents with some of my host family, my mom and I guesting at my counterpart’s house, and the beach in my village.

The US Embassy sponsored a camp for children from Osh and Jalalabad (the areas most affected by the riots in June). It was at a hotel in my village and I helped out for a week. They learned about human rights and law, did arts and crafts, played sports and swam in the lake. Here I am with some of the kids.

If doing group activities about human rights wasn’t your thing…

there were plenty of markers to stick between your toes.

Sports and games on the beach. Not a bad way to spend a week in August!

Some PCVs in my region organized a camp about journalism for high school students. I took two girls from my village to the camp site (about 3 hours away). They had a great time but one of my students got really homesick. I said, “Three hours from home? Man, that’s tough.” Just kidding.

Here’s a group photo and the students writing articles and making presentations.

I went to visit my friend Nazgul’s village (about 4 hours away) the weekend before school started. She took me up to this hidden lake which was about a 2.5 hour hike into the mountains. It was about the size of a football field and freezing cold. We had a picnic and a nap and then looked at waterfalls and tromped through the woods. We saw some yurts and this 70-year-old shepherd, Nazgul’s neighbor. People pay her 40 som (85 cents) per month to watch a sheep, and 50 som ($1) per month to watch a cow. So she makes about 8000 som ($175) a month during the summer, which is a lot.

Nazgul milks her family’s cows every evening and carries it in buckets to this house, down the street. Her neighbor buys milk from everyone in the village and then sells it to a dairy factory nearby. They thought it was SO funny that I took this picture.

I went to visit my boyfriend Josh in Beijing in August. Looking out the plane window as I flew east across northern Kyrgyzstan, i was reminded that this country is basically all mountains.

Here are some photos from the celebrations on the first day of school:

Here’s a babushka (that’s ‘grandma’ in Russian) rocking a Britney Spears shopping bag.
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You never know what you’ll find in the trunk…

Celebrating the Eid (the end of Ramadan is called “Orozo Ait” in Kyrgyz) with family and neighbors.

My siblings and neighbors sorting apples in our backyard

A cute little neighbor

Another cute little neighbor