12 October 2007
Aitengar Maarek Bolsum! That’s what I’ve been saying all day today, and I’m not completely sure what it means (it is Kyrgyz, not Arabic). Today is Orozo Ait, the end of Ramadan. The tradition is that everyone visits their neighbors’ homes, and drinks tea and eats borsok. I just got done going to everyone’s homes, and I feel like a tick ready to pop. My host parents and I walked to all of our neighbors’ homes and drank tea, and in the process we gathered people along the way to visit other homes. It’s almost like an adult version of Halloween, except the meaning is more peaceful and religious. As usual, everyone was trying to convince me to have a Kyrgyz wife. I respectfully told them that Kelly would kill me if I did, and that got them laughing (I said “Kelly”, then I pretended to choke myself). We met one older man at one of the homes, and we walked around with him for a while – he was absolutely the worst-smelling Kyrgyz person I’ve met in this country (B.O. like you wouldn’t believe – thankfully my host father didn’t sit me next to him).
And I’ve been saying “aitengar maarek bolsum” to every host at each house, which in turn they say “rahmat” (thank you) to me.
This is what would happen at each home. We all pile in, we sit down around the dastorkon (place for food – sometimes it’s a low table, sometimes it’s directly on the floor), and tea is passed around. Once all the tea’s been handed out, usually the oldest male recites passages from the Koran while everyone sits silently. Once that’s done, everyone prays silently for thirty seconds, after which time they ceremonially wash their faces twice. Only after that does eating and drinking begin. Since everyone is visiting so many homes, people only drink one cup of tea (rather than two) and eat something very small. The tea would sit fine with me, if people in Issyk-Kul oblast didn’t insist on adding milk/cream to everyone’s tea (I’m slightly lactose-intolerant). They do boil the milk here to pasteurize it a bit, but they don’t skim out the fat, and if the tea is hot enough, the fat almost cooks to form a slight film on top of the tea. So gross, I have a hard time swallowing it (but it’s better than sheep meat right now to me). I like cream in my coffee, but definitely not in my tea. I’m actually curious as to whether the stomach problems I had earlier this week had to do with some bad milk that I may have had in my tea (everyone in my host family except for my host mother knows I don’t want milk in my tea).
One thing I have a problem with in Kyrgyzstan (and frankly in the USA also) is grubby kids. I don’t have much exposure to kids in the USA simply because I’m not around them that much, but I’ve been around a ton of kids here. There are so many ways for kids to get dirty here, and kids generally don’t like to clean themselves anyway. So, I’d be walking along, and a five-year-old boy runs up to me, wet from the muddy creek he was just splashing in, with dirt all over his face, snot coming out of his nose (snot is almost part of the kids’ uniform here), and he offers me his dirt-covered hand to shake. No, I don’t want to shake your hand, kid – do me a favor and hose yourself down first. Same thing goes with inside the home (but luckily there are parents to say something about it). A friend of Aktilek’s is over, and his hands are all greasy from the borsok he was shoving into his mouth, and he’s trying to climb over my legs, leaving greasy prints all over my clothes. During PST in Epkin there was a house along the way to my house and John’s house where some of the filthiest kids I’ve ever seen lived. Many times we would walk by and see them looking disgusting, and they would want to shake our hands. John and I, after shaking their hands, would tell each other that we were going to burn our hands to sterilize them before we did anything else that day.
Let me set the record straight, though, that even though I’ve seen snot coming out of Aktilek’s nose, he doesn’t gross me out – he’s a much cleaner kid than his friends (and frankly, he’s a lot smarter, too).
As I mention how much I dislike dirty little kids, I remember that this is Day 17 in the “I Haven’t Bathed Countdown”.
