14 October 2007
I don’t know if it’s pure laziness, but I didn’t feel like going to Karakol today. I didn’t feel like doing much of anything today, except for playing games.
All I want to do on Sundays is to treat it like a relaxing day, a day to kick your feet back, enjoy maybe some sports or something, and just hang out with family and friends. That’s not the way the Kyrgyz view Sundays – it’s another working day, except for the fact that schools and some businesses are closed. So every time I want to sleep in on Sunday mornings, I feel enormous guilt. The guilt is even worse when I’m sitting in my room playing Zuma on my computer while my host brothers are outside the house shoveling sand and some dark material that looks similar to coal. The fact is, I don’t feel like helping them – I am too lazy to pick up a shovel and go help them. It might be different if they asked me to help (they have before, and I have cooperated willingly), but Kyrgyz people tend not to ask for help – the assumption is that if you see someone working, you will naturally go help them. I don’t work that way – I really need to be told to help out if they really need my help. Otherwise, I’m going to continue looking out my window watching other people work.
Snow has been known to fall in Darkhan in October...
Usually the only person that asks me on any regular basis to help is my host brother Salamat. He seems like a nice kid, but sometimes I’m not completely sure. Everyone in the family talks about how his English is better than my host brother Altynbek’s, but I think it’s just because Salamat has more confidence to go out there and speak the language. Sometimes I feel like he’s making fun of me and my lack of understanding of his Kyrgyz, and sometimes his English. When it comes to posing questions in English, word order is important, and Salamat doesn’t pose his questions in a way that I can ascertain every time as being questions. The word order comes out like sentences rather than questions – the problem is that in Kyrgyz word order is unimportant, and as long as the verb is at the end of the sentence, everything is fine. I guess I have to realize that they’re not treating me like their brother – they’re treating me like their teacher (luckily Almas and Aizat here don’t treat me the same way).
Salamat keeps saying he will learn English, come to America, and marry an American girl – if he comes up with the money to fly, he’s perfectly welcome to stay with me.
Other than not leaving the house, I got to watch more Russian programming. I really used to think before I left the US that Americans were the most patriotic (if not nationalistic) people in the world. Not so – Putin’s Russia has America beat on this one. There are dance-and-music stage shows on Russian TV, almost MTV-like, and you can look in the audience and see a ton of teenagers waving Russian flags (if you look closely, sometimes you can spot the old Soviet flag). Except for right after 9/11, or for the Super Bowl or something like that, you’d never see teenagers on the MTV Video Music Awards waving American flags all over the place. In America patriotism and flag-waving usually starts from the bottom up, with small towns and businesses participating in celebrating the nation. In Russia, it doesn’t seem as organic – it is, without a doubt, patriotism and flag-waving from the top down. Putin made Russians feel proud to be Russian again, but he mostly did it through official government channels. Even the pro-Putin youth groups that roam the streets of St. Petersburg and Moscow harassing anti-government protesters are well funded by the Russian government. Let’s put it this way: Russia had about a ten-year experiment with true democracy. It didn’t work, and Russians chose bread and circuses (which explains the garbage on Russian TV) over freedom of choice. So far dismissing democracy seems to have worked out OK for Russia, though – who are we to tell them differently?
I don’t have the balls yet to ask when we’ll be having a banya next (Day 20 in the “I Haven’t Bathed Countdown”), but my beard is completely out of control and needs to be trimmed ASAP.
