29 June 2013
This morning, Rita and I
walked up to the new school building. It has apparently only been open for two
years, so it is really quite new. Inside, the building is just as lovely as it
appears from the outside. The classrooms are large, well lit, and well-equipped,
making up for its inconvenient location. During the summer the school (like
most Kyrgyz schools) is closed for ремонт (that wonderful word which can mean repair,
reconstruction, remodeling, or maintenance). As the school’s director, Rita
needed to check in and see how the ремонт was going and I got to tag along in order to check
out the inside of the school. While it is a really great building, I don’t
regret my decision to teach in the old school, given its convenient location.
Also, it might have been somewhat challenging to teach at the new school amidst
the paint fumes and other ремонт efforts.
After leaving the school, we
stopped at the first house down the hill to request use of their banya later
that day. Unlike my hosts in Toguz Bulak, my hosts here in Bar Bulak do not
have their own banya. While they do actually have a nicely tiled indoor shower…
there is no running water or plumbing, and as such it is essentially used for
storage and nothing else. Sigh. As such, they must either rent a banya from one
of the local families who have one, or they must travel to the town of Balykchy
(about a thirty minute drive) to use one of the public banyas. I was very
excited at the prospect of using the banya, as it had been nine days since my
previous banya experience. Unfortunately, shortly after we returned home, it
began to rain. For some reason that was unclear to me, the rain canceled the
banya. Ahh well. Such is life in the village.
I spent the afternoon in bed
with Котчик
– what else is there to do when it’s raining? – except for the brief interlude
of an hour or so when we popped over to the next-door neighbor’s house for tea.
“Tea” of course, is pretty much always a full-fledged meal. This meal consisted
of oromo, a pastry and vegetable dish of which I had heard but previously never
tasted.
By the end of the day, I had
eaten four meals, and I’m pretty sure that the family had eaten one before I
awoke. Sitting around with friends and family, drinking tea and eating is such
a huge part of Kyrgyz culture. My stomach is too small to keep up! The thing
is, while most of them are (shall we say) fairly solid, I’ve yet to see a
single morbidly obese person here, unlike in the US where they abound. I’m
guessing this has a lot to do with the lack of preservatives and other
unnatural chemicals in the food here, combined with the amount of hard work
these people do every day. During the school year, Rita, her coworkers, and
their students walk the steep kilometer or so to the school every day. In
contrast, I’ve seen my neighbors in Orlando drive across the parking lot from
their door to the mailbox instead of walking.
No comments:
Post a Comment