Background
Traveling in Kyrgyzstan was an experience completely different from anywhere else I’ve been. I mean, not just a cliche “they have different architecture and good food” kind of unique, but this country added a whole new level to my understanding of how people live in this world. Being located in Central Asia on the western border of China, inhabited by ethnically Turkic nomads who grew up in the Soviet Union, being almost completely covered in high mountains, having traditions like playing horse polo with sheep carcasses and drinking fermented horse milk, and consisting of a nearly self-sufficient population all set Kyrgyzstan apart from other places I’ve traveled, but what really made it a unique experience was the fact that, together, my girlfriend Indre and I (ok, mostly Indre) were getting good enough at Russian to have a conversation with anybody. Up to this point, I had been traveling mainly in places where I could only have a conversation with educated people since I didn’t know the local languages, which incurred a huge selection bias on my impression of those countries. In Kyrgyzstan I could not only observe villagers’ lifestyles, but also about ask about their perspectives on the world [note that Russian is not the native language of Kyrgyzstan, but nearly everybody speaks fluent Russian thanks to the Soviet Union].
Keep in mind while reading that everything I say is based on generalizations made from our interactions with numerous local people, and while they represent cultural trends, they do not represent the attitudes of every individual. This lifestyle applies mainly to villages, especially in the southern part of the country, as the capital city is much more “Westernized”. We met people mainly by hitchhiking in their cars or being approached while walking down the street and questioned by curious villagers (this happened like every 2 minutes).
Chapter 1: Initial Interactions
The First 5 Minutes After Meeting Someone
Everyone is curious about what in the world a foreigner is doing in their village. Are they lost? There is no sense of social intimidation when approaching someone they don’t know. Whereas in somewhere like Northern Europe or the USA the most acknowledgement you’ll get from a stranger while walking down the street with a big backpack is a head nod or a smile, in Kyrgyz villages almost nobody was silent.
Children would always yell “hello!” (or sometimes “goodbye!” when they forgot which is which in English). Groups of older boys–the ones who were old enough to not be cute any more but too young to speak decent Russian–would often warn us of their presence with a slightly constipated-like grunt “uuuuuueeeeghhhhh”. They would then bark some questions at us in Kyrgyz, which of course we understood none of, so I would try to entertain them for a while by teaching them how to throw nuts in the air and catch them in their mouths. When they ate all of our nuts, they would just sit and watch us doing whatever we were doing–setting up the tent, cooking over the campfire, etc., while occasionally grunting or asking another question in Kyrgyz in hopes that we had learned the language in the last 5 minutes. Women would often politely say hello in Russian and ask a few questions, which sometimes resulted in asking us to come into their house for food and tea. Men would most commonly shake my hand but not Indre’s, and then bombard us with questions and sometimes invite us into their home for food and tea. When a man did shake Indre’s hand, it would often be a comically long handshake and he would keep holding her hand and keep shaking until he finished what he was talking about.
It was really refreshing that people asked questions when they were curious and weren’t afraid to approach us. People often came off as rude, from our American/European perspectives, but they were really just curious, and nobody was ever threatening in any way. The thought that we could be bad people out to get something from them never crossed their minds, as we’re taught to think about all strangers in the USA.
It must have been incredibly confusing for people to see this bearded, dread locked white person and his red-haired “wife” (everyone assumed we were married) who happily ate ramen cooked on a fire and slept outside in the mountains where the wolves who kill their sheep roam. In a country where camping traditionally occurs in yurts carried up a mountain on horseback and is a job necessary for survival rather than a recreational activity, backpacking tents and sleeping in the mountains for fun is a very weird thing indeed. The reactions we got from telling people how we travel ranged from complete denial to fundamentally transforming their view of foreigners (traditionally viewed as rich people who stay in hotels and eat at restaurants and have endless money to dish out). It was fun to be in the spotlight all of the time and make people’s days more interesting, though by the end of our 6 week trip, all we wanted was some peace and quiet where nobody would jump in front of us to ask how much money we make.
We heard the same questions over and over and over, usually in the same order. Whether hitchhiking or just walking through a village, it began with “Where are you from?” often yelled at us from across the street. This would be followed by “What are you doing in Kyrgyzstan?” “Do you like it here?” “Where are your children?” “How old are you?” “WHAAAAAT?! And you don’t have children yet?” “How much money do you make in America?” And then they would tell us about their dream to go to the USA and be rich, because their friend’s cousin’s neighbor heard of somebody who went to America and made $8,000/month being a truck driver.
Time and time again, we told people that, in fact, their friend’s cousin’s neighbor’s acquaintance is a liar. There are poor people in America too, and in many ways poor Americans have it even worse off than Kyrgyz because they don’t have the knowledge or resources to grow their own food or build themselves houses from the Earth, so they rely on money which they don’t have for survival. This was often met by total disbelief, which was multiplied when we told them that we are incredibly impressed by Kyrgyz people and we love how everyone is nearly self-sufficient and able to live without money. The evasive dreams promised by capitalism seem to have spread as far as Central Asia.
