Dear all

Kyrgyzstan… Oh where to begin?

With the breath-taking scenery? The warmth and generosity of the Kyrgyz people? The succulent food? The temperate waters of Lake Issy Kol? The bizarre alpine flora? The dedication and team spirit of my friends, family and colleagues who all pulled together on this trip? The glorious “bagna” where a day’s filth disappeared from our pores? Or the full repertoire of “The Sound of Music” being sung by colleagues from three continents? I just don’t know....!

I could also recount scary driving experiences, and the shock of witnessing the immediate aftermath of a fatal, multiple car accident in a remote, mountainous area; the “rather too full” out-house that splashed just a tad; the occasional water/electricity outages; the bone-chillingly freezing ground we tried in vain to sleep on in our nomadic “yurt”; or any of the other little frustrations associated with things going “not quite right” that are inevitable when travelling in less familiar places. But those things are long forgotten now, and that’s about the extent of the niggles, whereas the first list could go on and on.

Oh yes – I could even recount a few funnies – like the cow who ventured horns to tail into our yurt up in the mountains while we were still comatose; the extraordinary way Dave NEVER EVER seemed to get a single drop of mud on his clothes, regardless of the work he did (and then said “if I hear anyone comment one more time on my lack of muddy clothes, I will really scream”…. And of course we all wanted to see Dave scream….; then there was Mike and Francesca’s “hammering and nailing dance” at the house dedication in Saruu; the honouring of my parents as the most elderly people on the trip (I should probably pop that back up there in the first category, I am sure)….Memories galore.

Yes – it was an unmissable experience.

Most of us have been back now for over a month, and at some level the trip feels like it never even happened. “Normal” life has taken over, and it’s only during the odd quiet moment, on receiving someone’s photos from the trip, getting my own photos back, or a kind note from someone from the trip, that jolts me and reminds me of the rich experiences we had.

Sixteen of us ventured forth to Kyrgyzstan, the small, ex-Soviet Republic in Central Asia – smaller than South Dakota apparently, for those that might mean something to; or, using my own scale, approximately the combined size of England and Scotland (no Wales, and no Scottish Islands). Kyrgyzstan borders with China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – yes, way East. Next to China, like I say. Close to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Silk Road and Gengis Khan territory. Did you know that before Gengis Khan came a-plundering and a-pillaging, Kyrgyz people were blond with blue eyes? Just one of those titbits learned along the way! Terrain is 93% mountainous, with some 7,000m+ peaks. This would also mean approx 6% arable land, and presumably about 1% urban on. Population 5 million. People living below the poverty line, and without adequate housing: 40% or more. Average annual income a mere $440 (teachers and others earn a lot less). I said annual income, not monthly.

We (mostly) all met in Istanbul airport and flew Turkish Airlines east, through the night, to land at about 3 am on Saturday 14th July. Arrived at our perfectly wonderful Bishkek hotels at 5 am, just as it was getting light, and got a few hours rest. Hotels had hot running water, which was more than I had asked for. Saturday was spent catching up to our new time-zone, wandering around the town of Bishkek (hot, dry, Soviet and concrete-y, but interesting nonetheless for watching faces, visiting markets, witnessing events, and of course eating food and drinking beer!).

On Sunday we had our orientation and visited the Habitat for Humanity site on the north side of town, where Habitat has won an award for innovative cane-reed construction techniques. Very interesting. Teams of people (construction workers and future house-owners work side by side, with volunteers if there is a team out there. No-one knows who will get which house, so all work carefully in case it ends up being theirs. This notion appealed to the socialist in me. Absolutely delicious lunch on benches in the orchard next to the building site, followed by a visit (or should I say “invasion”) of some finished houses, complete with welcoming inhabitants. They knew we might turn up and so prepared a feast for us on the off-chance. Delicious food, beautiful people, big welcoming smiles and patient answers to our many questions were to become a recurring theme.

After lunch, the 6 (or longer for some) hour drive through the mountains (and past the accident) to Barskoon, on the south shore of Lake Issy Kol. Altitude approximately 1,800m, terrain like alpine meadows, with impressive snowy peaks off into the distance. Not that we saw it the night we arrived. More delicious food and off to our beds in four different houses. Accommodation simple but comfortable. Plenty of bright, colourful rugs and thick blankets. Clever little wash basins that stored water in the back, or in a high basin, and that let it out with the use of a simple tap, or weighted pluggy thing. Very ingenious. Not that I was ever the one to go and get the water from its source. I am sure that would be tedious in the middle of freezing winter.

Early (to me) start each day with breakfast at 7h20 (precisely), and briefing for the day’s work. Breakfast might have been any of the following: a kind of porridge, eggs, bread and unbelievable jams, cold spaghetti, mini batter-type things, and lashings of black tea. Briefing was about the house and family we were working on for the day, the type of work we would do, how to do it, and useful safety guidelines.

During the week, we worked on two different half-built houses – that is houses some way along the road to completion. The first house was for the Suyunduk family with their five children, and the second house for the Sabyrov family (also with five children). The work we did was very physical and involved hammering thousands of nails (jolly hard work depending on what angle the nails are at, if your shoulder is smashed in multiple places as was the case for one of us, or if you are doing it upside down into beams half a metre thick); wiring around the nails with rather undisciplined wire, and cutting it off with anything from bare hands to Joanne’s posh wire cutters (much in demand); mixing mud from earth, straw and water (back-breaking work, even when beautiful ponies were roped in to do some of the chore); making bricks from mud (I never did this and was in awe of the dream team of women who did this so beautifully), hoisting buckets of water or mud up a precariously-perched pully), slapping mud on to floors for insulation, kneeding it and floating it (I sound very knowledgeable don’t I with some of these terms I didn’t know two months ago!); and the best activity of all – throwing lovely wet, sloppy, gritty, warm, textured, even tasty, mud at external walls for insulation; we layered it on nice and thick, and floated it to make it smooth. How my Kyrgyz partner in crime managed to reach those top spots without toppling from the scaffold, I will never know. As for the mud-throwing – what fun! What a laugh! Hard, physical work, but satisfying in the extreme. Even if my clothes have not come clean since!

Mike, my husband, and a former construction manager, reckons we moved the houses along at least a couple of weeks each. So it’s far from building a house in its entirety. More about just helping future home-owners along in their arduous task. Habitat for Humanity’s policy is that, along with paying off an interest-free loan for the cost of the house, future homeowners need to put in approximately 500 hours “sweat equity”, and labour on the house themselves. Hard in a climate where the building months are short, if you are trying to hold down another job, and have five kids. I can’t imagine.

We had frequent and very welcome breaks. Tea break in the morning and afternoon – which was never just tea, of course, but bread, delicious local jams, the little churros/doughnut-type things… I wasn’t hungry the entire time we were there! While I put on weight in Armenia, the work this time was much more physical and my excessive calorie intake didn’t seem to have an effect on the scales back home. I bet some of my more abstemious friends actually lost weight. Lunches and dinners were also tasty – at least to my palate and taste buds. Lots of mutton, potatoes, noodles, soups. No desserts as we westerners might define them. The bread and jam served the function if needed and were omnipresent. Any alcohol was beer we bought from local shops ourselves. Though a shot of vodka was forced on me by my host family as we left!

In all, we worked on the two houses for a total of 3 ½ days, which is not such a lot. Habitat trips are usually longer. Our remaining time was spent in “rest and relaxation”, and at a “house dedication”. Each deserves a short paragraph.

We had a day and a half of “rest and relaxation”, and had elected to have a somewhat traditional experience of staying overnight in a traditional Kyrgyz “yurt” (or nomadic tent). These are wonderful to look at – cream coloured canvas supported by flexible sticks; roundish, open at the top for light and aerating, cool by day, warm by night (hmmm – this might depend on whether or not there was an insulated ground sheet… not). Perfectly sizeable for a group our size, plus the hosts (grandfather, grandmother, sons, daughter-in-law, and 1 year old grandson).

Most of us walked some of the way up to camp from nearby Bokonbaeva. The camp was set amid breathtaking alpine scenery – gentle green mountains, with more jagged snowy peaks off into the distance; a bubbling stream; a herd of cows; and the toilet you just wanted to spend time in because the view across to Lake Issy Kol and the mountain range opposite side were awesome.

We had tea, quickly followed by dinner (well, we had been rather slow walking up the mountain). Stories, then music and singing of traditional Kyrgyz songs by our host, who shamed us with his wonderful voice and musical repertoire, and contrasted somewhat with our lack of collective musical confidence or competence. But we were graciously saved by our brave Scottish sisters Anne and Liz who graced us with traditional ballads (and on more than one occasion).

Yes – the night was damned awful. No two ways about it. It could have been a totally idyllic experience. And while I know we might exaggerate about just how little sleep we really got, I swear I got my best and only sleep between 6h40 am and 6h55 am when Dave and Mike were shooing the cow out of the yurt! It was COLD!! The ground seeped up through my bones. I was wearing every layer I had with me – which was more than most had brought. I was sardined between two other bodies. All to no avail. Frozen solid all night long. I always get rather morbid in such situations and predict that my death, should I live to a grand old age, will occur from freezing in my sleep (I get cold in a normal bed….). Francesca and Massimo, on the other hand, had the wisdom of sleeping under the stars and for some bizarre reason were warm(ish) and slept like babies – at least Francesca did. Her having a minus 30 degree C sleeping bag might have helped, I suppose.

A relief to get up and begin the day with black tea, bread and jam. Never so delicious! And a walk that was thwarted to say the least, but still beautiful. We attempted to get to a glacier at 3,800m. But for some reason I never quite understood, the guides said that the path was dangerous and we couldn’t get there. Oh well. I did rather well getting over my disappointment in about 2 hours flat, and chose to enjoy the bizarre mountain flora (those amazing thistles; edelweiss growing like daisies; and many flowers I couldn’t name).

Back to base camp with the yurts; another delicious meal, some glorious sunning of ourselves like lizards on rock; then back to our more urban base or Barskoon (population a few thousand). What a treat! What a “time out of time”. Even the lying about on rocks sunning ourselves and reading was worth the entire trip, from my perspective. Rest-time that I, for one, never get.

After work the next day (Friday afternoon) we had the privilege of being invited to a “house dedication” in Saruu, a village east along the lake shore, about 40 minutes drive away. When Habitat-funded houses are complete, the tradition is to have a house-dedication. This is a ceremony where the house keys are handed over to the new home-owners. In the case of the house in Saruu, a great big party was on offer (we should have known by then that the Kyrgyz don’t do things by halves, and that special welcoming gene overrides all else). We (actually, Mike and I specifically) were invited to do some final painting of a remaining window frame, and cut the red, satiny ribbon (I felt like royalty!) before taking the keys to open the front door. I felt that the honour bestowed on me was a bit embarrassing, but went along with it not least because it was jolly fun. My mild embarrassment turned to speechlessness when Peter pulled me aside, took me to the front of the house, and showed me a plaque dedicating the house to me, in appreciation of efforts to eradicate poverty housing in Kyrgyzstan. So this was the house that had benefited specifically from the funds raised by the long mountain run last August! I was enormously touched and honoured.

We danced a lot, sang a bit (some with a microphone – Liz, Anne, Joy, Jenny, Massimo and Mike), and some without (the rest of us). We ate and ate and ate. I have a great photo of Francesca just laughing at the food presented to us! She seems to be thinking, “What – eat AGAIN?! We have just eaten!” Mum and dad were instructed to sit at the back of the room, opposite the entrance. Apparently it’s the place of honour for the most esteemed guests (one could also say the eldest, which is the way it works in this culture).

We spent a few hours at the party for the house dedication, dancing off at least a bit of the many courses we had ingested, and playing and dancing with the extensive family – if I recall correctly, about 10 people or so were going to live in it, comprising three generations. It was a very moving afternoon.

We worked one more half-day after that, then headed back to Bishkek, minus three in the party (Jeanne, Francesca and Massimo) who were extending their holiday and going mountain trekking. They had stories galore to recount, but came back safe and sound, which was the main thing. The journey back was nice and uneventful, the way I like it.

After a farewell dinner and a very short night in our respective Bishkek hotels, we tried to get a bit of sleep, and most of us got up at about midnight to head for the airport and our 3 am flights west to Istanbul. Everything went very smoothly. I chatted to a British diplomat family with three young kids while at the airport and determined to bring our own kids to this part of the world before too long. I think travel here is definitely more complicated, and tolerance and patience are needed, but it’s perfectly doable, even with kids our age.

As for being in Istanbul airport – how nice to luxuriate in the richness of what it had to offer, even if the amount we spent on Turkish coffee, espresso, caffe latte, and other goodies, was totally obscene.

And then back, back to our various homes, or for Jennifer, on to the next adventure. It felt wrong somehow to be dealing with “normal”, routine matters – working through the mail, dealing with phone messages, looking over email. We hadn’t had any email access through our Blackberries all the time we were in Kyrgyzstan; only the occasional SMS came through. It was surprisingly easy to get used to. I felt on holiday in a way that is just not normally possible in today’s technology age.


To end, here’s a quote from Jenny Scott, who travelled all the way from Melbourne for this experience. She sums it up better than I ever could: "An opportunity to gain more than you could have wished for by giving up more than you initially imagined you ever would. We worked hard, we gave up luxuries and we earned the love of a whole community. And, most of all, we built houses for global neighbours who don't have one. At the end of the day it was easy to leave mine for while".


Thank you all, to the team of 15 friends who trusted me enough to fly to this place far away from Scotland, Italy, France, Switzerland, Belgium, The Netherlands, Hungary, the US, and Australia; to the Habitat employees and volunteers in Kyrgyzstan for holding our hands so gently; to the people of Barskoon for welcoming us into their village and homes, being patient with us, and feeding us such delicious fare; to everyone who sponsored the crazy run in the mountains; to anyone who was just plain interested and supportive; and to Laura from Habitat for Humanity who helped lead the team and managed all the hard bits. You all helped make the trip come true, and to get some families closer to living in decent housing.

As for those people who are clamouring for information on a future trip… I do have some ideas, plus a scary ambition as to how to raise some money… More another time!

Thanks again,
Emma


PS: Photo links for anyone brave enough to look at them. I haven't had the time, energy or inclination to name them, so just put them on slideshow while you are waiting for the kettle to boil....

A short-ish selection: http://www2.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=171490507/a=102552589_102552589/t_=102552589

The full caboodle: http://www2.snapfish.com/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=171375176/a=102552589_102552589/t_=102552589