Discussion

Most of the world doesn’t understand “9-5”

I recently saw an article floating around my facebook newsfeed disparaging America for refrigerating eggs. People were like, “What the hell, America?! You are so stupid!” And I was like, if we have resorted to criticizing America for refrigerating eggs, that is actually proof of how great America is. “Oh, no civil war? No mass starvation? People aren’t fleeing the country by the millions? Ok, well I guess everything is going pretty—REFRIGERATED EGGS!! OH MY GOD! ALERT THE PRESSES!”

Just imagine: a country so incredible its affluence permits people to spend hours arguing in weblog comment feeds about the proper temperatures for eggs. Few places on this globe allow for such luxury.

What about turkey eggs?

It’s now after fall break at my village school, and our recently settled schedule has been messed up again. An outbreak of hep A has obliged our director to ban unnecessary movement throughout the school and keep classes in students’ own homerooms. I suspect at least a few of the absentees are cases of great acting rather than a crippling month long illness. “I can’t go to school, mom. I’ve got that thing, I think, that people are talking about, you know, the one where people get to—I mean—have to stay home from school…”

In one particularly bad day of student attendance last spring, I talked my counterpart into taking a little visit together to the “troubled” students’ houses to talk with the parents. While several of them were supportive and said they would do a better job encouraging, what one mother said caught me off-guard. I asked if school was important and she said yes, but that her son was needed to do the farm work so the family could have food.

I know not everyone in America has it altogether easier, and most people work very hard. But if I had to put a number on the average work schedule here, 5am-9pm would be a little more accurate. People work really, really hard, and especially the women since the lack of running water and consistent electricity tends to hit the domestic chores the hardest.

It’s not always the same kind of work we’re used to in the states, assisted by all our time-savers. But people are doing what they need to do in the moment to secure a future. That means when the coal truck comes to town, you stop what you’re doing, go home, negotiate a price, and then spend the next couple hours shoveling it into your shed. Staying warm is kind of a priority in Kyrgyzstan. Yet this disrupts my neat little 9-5 schedule I have all written out for myself, like I thought I was still in the states or something.

We get up, we brush our teeth, we hit the office, take an hour off for lunch, put in a few more hours and then go home to an evening full of whatever we want to do. We press a button and the dishes are magically polished. We flip a switch and are kissed by warm air. Our biggest complaints are re-matching socks from the dryer or that minute rice actually takes five. Now I scrub my clothes with a bar of soap and that’s after hauling the water from a pump down the street. I never realized what a precious gift I was being handed – that precious gift called time.

Time gives us so many opportunities. We can get a second job, help our kids with their homework, volunteer at a food bank, or even surf the web for articles on eggs. Let’s just not forget what grace a 9-5 affords.

I am very selfish

They say it takes getting married to realize what a terrible person you are. It’s not that you were a great person while single; you were terrible then too. You just didn’t have anyone close enough to point it out.

Like it was your fault. Everything about singlehood prompts us to be selfish and inwardly focused. From an early age we’re given individual desks and lockers at school and told to be self-achievers. When we hit that mystic age of adulthood at 18-years-young we’re told to pursue our own studies, concentrating day and night on how to improve ourselves individually. And then upon graduating we enter the work force, sacrificing family and relationships on the altar of career advancement.

We tell everyone it’s for the common good. That our striving for personal improvement is so we can best serve the world. But can the world be best served from the inside of a cubicle? Does our hand reach those on the other side of our selfish isolation? Will a workaholic lifestyle help our elderly neighbor with her spring cleaning?

All this I process as I slip into my room, latching the door behind me. I’m escaping the noise, I tell myself. I need “me” time. I’ve got work to do. But really I’m avoiding the work out there – the rounds of tea and kymyz, the dishes, the entertainment of guests. How did I get to be so selfish? Ah – I’ve always been here.

So I learn to share and give and bend as the Kyrgyz do so well. If a kid shows up to school with an apple, he ends up eating a paper-thin slice. If a neighbor asks for a sheep, it’s provided and the money comes later. Even cheating on exams isn’t seen as an affront but rather encouraged as helping lesser abled classmates.

imageGod bless the man who shared his underwear as a paint rag

I show up to school in my work pants and dirty T-shirt. I end up spackled in paint, a nose full of dust and a week to the next bath. But you know what – a hard day of work for others makes me sleep better at night and the camaraderie makes me enjoy the experience all the more.

I’m not married, so I probably haven’t yet fully explored the abyss of my total depravity. But I do live in close relationships and it’s enough to teach me a valuable lesson – if I focus on others and work hard, the selfishness ebbs to reveal what was hidden: community.

It’s easy to criticize the guy who’s doing something

There are numerous empty carcasses caught in the interwebs about Peace Corps being little more than a way for over-privileged college grads to pad a resume or drink cheap beer on a two year adventure. People moan and complain about everything under the sun that is wrong with the system, wrong with staff, wrong with policy, wrong with vision. But in the end it comes down to just one thing: the volunteer himself. What are you, given an all-expenses-paid two year stint in a foreign country, going to do? The options for abuse and ineffectiveness are wide and easily available. But the opportunities to do something great are as tall as the stars and as deep as the hearts of the people you live among.

What I’m doing may not jibe with those in the comfy academic or political swivel chairs. And I admit that I’m not saving the world; no development or friendship program can. But at least I’m doing something. I am sharing my skills and knowledge in order to do my part to try and make my little sphere a better place.

It’s easy to criticize the guy who’s doing something, because there’s something there to criticize. The Peace Corps is that guy – is filled with those people. People who stop gaping at the problem and put their hand to the plow.

There’s a proverb in Kyrgyz that reads: Koz Korkok – Kol Batyr. It means, “The eye is a coward but the hand is a hero.” If you merely look upon all that must be done to make the world a better place, the coward emerges to stomp with his boots of judgment and despair upon what little spark of inspiration had flamed. But put your head down and get to work, and the hand will fan that flame into a vibrant energy that can effect a great change.

Water is a limited resource

“Turn it off when you brush – it’s a five gallon rush – turn it off, off, off, off, off…ba dum ba dum ba dum…”

The words came rolling out of the fifth-grade recesses of my brain, matching the rhythm of my footsteps. I hauled the water and hummed the tune, making my way back over the kilometer of icy road to pour another bucket into the tank in our sauna. It would take four more trips before it would be full enough to light the bath. These words had stuck with me some twenty years, yet it wasn’t until now that they held any weight. One quickly learns the value of a gallon when every drop must be hauled by hand.

We were lucky. At least the water was flowing today. In other parts of the country water is often so scarce that people actually wash their hands with vodka – a testament to both the lack of clean water and the copious amounts of alcohol that line the shelves in every dukon.

Almost every household chore begins this way, with a trot down to the nearest working pump, a 40 liter container and wheelbarrow in tow. Often in winter there is a line. Usually it is the grade-school-aged boys that are sent on this task and so I would find myself, a tall shoot waiting my turn among the donkey pulled carts and two or three boys wrestling on the ground over who would get to go next. The rate of flow was enough to turn any man into a philosopher – or maybe just turn him mad.

 Patience is a virtue

 

And it takes intelligent men to control it, pushing it around in little spade-deep canals in half-acre fields, scribbling down the household gardens to receive water in daily schedules, pouring tea kettles down the pumps to break the sheet of ice that had formed the night before. Water is managed like money, stored like a second car, doled out like a paycheck and portioned out to the last drop. A song may be stuck in your head for twenty years, but some things you just have to see before it sticks.

It’s about the people

As Peace Corps Volunteers we sometimes find ourselves saying, “I could do my job if it weren’t for these damn people.” It’d be so much funnier if we could catch ourselves in the irony. But we get caught up, rather, in the frustrations of trying to get things done in the ways we want to do them, on our time, under our conditions, for our own goals.

I believe every volunteer is here because they want to help people. I can think of about 187 other places I could go to take a two-year vacation, and despite their obvious draws and benefits, I’m also not here for the sheep fat dinners, pit toilets or bi-monthly bathing sessions. But I do enjoy shooting the breeze around a meal, digging a hole with a neighbor and the occasional back scrub at the local sauna from a newfound friend.

The give and take is found here too – it starts here in fact, in the day-to-day stuff that makes up so much of our experiences. In order to help people we first get to know who they are, what they want and how they want to go about getting it. It’s their goals we’re after, and if it’s through our methods, then we have adapted them to make sense to the people whom they benefit. The Peace Corps wouldn’t be here if there weren’t things that needed to be changed, but we have to remember that in the end it’s not about procedures but about relationships. Yes, it’s going to be frustrating at times. But that’s because we’re working with people. And that’s why we’re here.