The Hills are Alive and Rainy

Well, I have officially entered Week 4 of training in the Kyrgyz Republic! Hard to believe that I will soon have been here for a month. My Kyrgyz language skills are improving slowly, but surely. Let’s just say I can pronounce it and write it out grammatically. When it comes to actually speaking it… well I still have a while to go! I mean, I think I’m at the same level of a 4 year old by now? Surely. 

Today, I was finally able to travel around by myself and decided to celebrate it with a nice hike. I visited some friends/fellow volunteers in a nearby village and we hiked the hills and valleys near them. While they have the luxury of doing so at their leisure, I am not so lucky and it was just what I needed! I’ve really missed my Denver hikes and finally getting the opportunity to see Kyrgyzstan’s beautiful scenery was the perfect remedy. It was most certainly an interesting and unforgettable hike! 

Let me start from yesterday and by explaining the crazy multi-polar Kyrgyz weather. Half of yesterday was hot, humid and sunny. Then in the afternoon, out of nowhere, a mini-sandstorm emerged with huge gusts of wind. Hence, the sandstorm. Shortly afterwards, it started pouring rain and caused a power outage. I had been celebrating a friend’s birthday and we ended up waiting over 2 hours for our food due to the outage. The majority of the evening was spent in the dark and waterless. I’m not quite sure what the connection between the two is, but nevertheless, that’s how it was. 

 

Fast forwarding to this morning…. we started our hike in pretty muddy conditions! Yay! Silly me chose to not invest some super duty hiking boots before leaving the states. After trekking in muddy hills for a while, we finally stumbled upon a ridge that overlooked the nearby villages and it was absolutely breath-taking. We then decided to continue the adventure and attempted to reach a higher ridge nearby. Attempted is the key word here and we failed pretty miserably. Most of us were slipping and falling in the mud and it was hilarious. After deciding to take a different route and head back, we then stumbled upon rain. At first, it was gorgeous with the clouds and fog rolling in and surrounding us. Then, it actually started to rain and we couldn’t see the path back down. 

Long story short, we did eventually make it back home. Despite the rain, mud, cows and cow poop. Whew! 

The next post coming up this weekend will be information on my permanent site! That’s right! We find out where will officially be placed for the next two years on Friday! So exciting yet so far away… I think that my prayers to be a more patient person are definitely being answered. If you know me, I certainly need a lot of it! 

After a much needed hike, two blisters and several sore muscles later, I look forward to recuperating this week and am in anticipation of what this weekend has to offer! 

Luxemburg…...Kyrgyzstan that is!

I apologize for the long pause! The past week/10/12 days (I’ve lost count!) have been crazy! After our 3 day orientation in the capital city of Bishkek, we were separated into groups for our Pre-Service Training (PST). Therefore, internet is pretty scarce now. My group is housed in the village of Luxemburg, which is approximately half an hour away from Bishkek. In our village, there is actually another group as well. There are about 6 groups that consist of 2 groups. So, there are 6 villages and in each village, there are two groups. We have our language classes in our villages and meet in the center of all the groups at Krasnayarechka for medical, cultural and program training.

We each live with a host family and my family is a wonderful family of six! The big family I never had! My “mother” is actually the grandmother of the family. Or, the chon-apa as they say in Kyrgyz. That’s right, I’m learning the Kyrgyz language! The language is so interesting because of the Turkic and Russian influence. The grammar on the other hand…. so many rules for endings! It’s crazy to see how much we have learned in just 5 days of language schooling! Anyways, back to my family. My “mother” is 65 years old and her name is Nyrjamal. Also living with her are: her son, Taalaй, daughter-in-law, Sveta, grandson, Adelet (23), grand-daughter, Alina (21), and grandson, Argen (15). They are farmers and so everything we eat is from their garden. They also have a cow for milking, which they sell to the milkmen, who will buy their milk to sell to venders (like restaurants, bakeries and etc.) in Bishkek. They also use the milk for their own personal purposes such as drinking, yogurt and porridge making. The yogurt my mother makes is AMAZING!!!! Seriously. You have not had yogurt until you’ve had this yogurt. It has a similar taste to Greek yogurt. Here, we add some of the fruit jam to it. They add this jam (also homemade) to tea, bread, porridge and well, pretty much everything. Tea is one of the sacred drinks here. We have tea all day and every day. It’s actually quite nice! We also have salad and bread with every meal. I have yet to eat a bad meal here! I’m sure I still have some interesting dishes to taste. 

The outhouse here is quite interesting and surprisingly easier to assimilate to than I had originally thought. I just tell myself it’s like a 2 year camping trip! The other thing that has been easier to get used to is the amount of baths/showers I take here. Back in the United States, we take baths for granted. We have the luxury to do so whenever and how ever many times we want. Here, it’s just not possible to do so. I’m actually quite lucky and my family has a modern shower with hot water. Most of the other volunteers however, either have a banya or must go to a public banya. Although my family has a shower, they do not take a shower every day. Despite telling me that I can shower whenever I want to, I feel that I must do what they do. So… it’s a shower every 3 days. I have had fellow volunteers who have yet to take a bath since two Sundays ago, or they’ve only had one bath since then. Water is a sacred thing. Appreciate it. Seriously. Luckily, it’s not summer yet. I can’t even imagine…  sorry. 

As mentioned, internet/wi-fi is also not common here. Therefore, I only have access on certain days during the week when we go to the training center. Please excuse the long pauses that may continue to occur. We will become busier with more intensive language training and program training. All is well in the Kyrgyz Republic! The mountains are beautiful, the people are welcoming and my fellow volunteers are wonderful! I’m safe and I’m healthy! What more could a girl ask for? Here are a few pictures to prove it: 

Of Course We Had to End the Flight the Way it Started...

April 26, 2015

 

Yesterday, I arrived in Bishkek! After a grueling journey, I managed to arrive safe and sound with only my two-checked luggage missing. Oh, don’t worry, about 2/3 of my group lost at least one luggage. Let me start from the beginning….

 

April 24, 2015: We arrived at Dulles Airport at approximately 1PM. Our flight was scheduled for 6:35PM. This whole time, we had been thinking that we would have pleeeeeeennnntttttyyyyyy of time before our flight. How would we spend the whole 5 hours of time in between?!?! That is until 1/3 of us had already passed through security and I was almost to the screening section, when we were told that the Lufthansa check-in had completely messed up our luggage and needed us to all return to the check-in desks and re-do our checked luggage. We had been told that we would have to re-check our luggage in Istanbul. However, that was not supposed to be the case and instead, was actually supposed to go through all the way to Bishkek. Apparently, we would also have to get our boarding pass for the second flight in Frankfurt and our third boarding pass in Istanbul.   So, off to a GREAT start. Most of us came back and waited in line for about 30 minutes, when a few members of our group volunteered to stay and finish the process for us. Security: Round 2. We finally got to our gate and had about 2 hours left before our flight. About 1.5 hour before boarding, we were told that we all needed to get our visa and passport double checked with the airline. Only our group. The process took about the rest of our waiting time.

 

April 25, 2015: We landed in Frankfurt and had an hour between flights. It took us about 40 minutes to land, de-board and run to our next gate. Don’t forget, we still had to check-in at the gate to get our boarding pass for this flight. All 60 of us. Needless to say, we caused the flight to be delayed for 1 hour and our fellow passengers were NOT thrilled. 2.5 hours later, we landed in Istanbul! Thank goodness! Now, to check-in with our airline AGAIN to receive our boarding pass for our last flight! This took well over 2 hours and in the middle of the process, the line for ‘Transfers without Boarding Passes’ grew longer and was also filled with angry passengers. We would later find out that all flights were delayed and some even cancelled. Apparently, an earlier flight had landed and one of its engines had caught on fire. We were supposed to have a 5 hour layover in Istanbul. It actually ended up being 9 hours and we had to change gates in the midst of the ordeal. The cool part about our layover was the fact that the Kyrgyz Olympic Hockey Team was on the same flight and we totally took a picture with them. FINALLY arriving in Bishkek at 7:00AM… we discovered that only 1/4 of our luggage actually arrived with us. 

We ended up arriving at our hotel (the 5-Star Ak-Keme) at 8:30AM with only 4 hours until our orientation and the beginning of our training at noon. We had language lessons and introductions from 12-7pm. Needless to say, we were a sad group of volunteers. Everyone was exhausted. 

Here's a view from my hotel room: