Kitchen Chatter

I’m sitting in my kitchen warmed by the glow of gas-fed flame heating my hot-water tank.  The flame is not as blue today and it may take another hour before the water is hot enough for a proper shower.  The gas flow is usually at a minimum after rain showers or storms (your guess is as good as mine), but the skies have been clear save the typical smoky autumn air of burning leaves.  And its not as if I have a spacious eat-in kitchen.  In fact, it measures roughly 6ft. x 6ft., where two people can only pass each other with hands on the other’s hip lest a sudden movement knocks over a pot on the stove or dishes piled up in the sink – so goes my excuse for intimacy, but it works.  Tonight’s dinner is a bowl of borsch (beet soup with potatoes and beef) prepared by Café Eurasia, conveniently situated across the street from my NGO.  Yes, its Saturday and I went to the office – to finish up a 15 page translation of a project proposal due Monday to an international organization.  Well, I didn’t’ translate it.  Earlier in the week, the pirivochik recited the translation while I typed.  I merely spent the rest of the week converting thick Russian accent into American speak.  At the bewilderment of my colleagues’ passion for literal everything, I had to convince them that an exact word-by-word translation would bore any reader out of the idea of what is written.  And the ideas are good.  Thank God its finished.  I’m leaving for the mountains that skirt the capital city of Tashkent for a week of Peace Corps training, and then out west to spend Thanksgiving in a meaningful way.

Mid-week I took an exploratory trip into the border regions (Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan) to ascertain the level of interest amongst the women in these rural communities to start an economic project.  We would provide the skills training as well as basic business and entrepreneurial mentoring, and even find a partner who can arrange a micro-credit loan for the start of their work.  Typical of our previous experience in the regions, the response was energetic.  We’ll return after two weeks to see what they have collectively decided together with the rest of the community’s women.  Some ideas enthusiastically thrown out included sewing, baking, greenhouse farming, and making traditional crafts. My favorite statement during this process was, “They sell traditional crafts made in Samarkand in the bazaars here.  Why can’t we make them ourselves?!”  That’s the ticket.  I’m excited to follow up on their momentum.

Scenes out towards the rural regions transform each time I visit, according to the change of seasons.  Agricultural societies are like that.  This time, I saw that all the cotton had been picked.  Large trucks drove by casting billowing bits of white plume behind them.  Tractors are out in force tilling the fields for next season, but only after all the dried up cotton plants have been hand-picked by the villagers.  I saw them bare-handed, bundling the spindly sticks and heaving them onto their heads, then transporting them to trucks that belong to farmers who will sell the dead plants for tandor fires that make the non so sweet.  The planting, cultivating, picking and tending to cotton is back-breaking.  As early as September until December, (mostly) women and children are obligated to pick cotton.  They will abandon their work and schools to obey a national conscription that is supervised by the mere legacy of servitude left over from the old Soviet mandate.  I’ve heard that it is also by law, however, I sense that it is done just because its done, every year, ever since there as been a leader to commandeer such obedience..

Someone told me that when there was a lack of cotton pickers this year, the militsia actually went into bazaars and forced merchants out into the fields.  Should it surprise anyone then, that on top of every other problem they face this year, this kind of treatment is what engendered the recent spate of violent riots – several in Andijon and one in Kokand?  In the process of trying to formalize the country’s economy by requiring all commercial enterprises to register as a licensed business, pay taxes, and utilize proper retail/operational spaces, the government is set to alienate the majority of the impoverished who have no hope of adjusting to the rigors of their demands.  Tax levels are too high, newly built store-fronts and bazaar stalls are too expensive to rent, and the indiscriminate collection of bribes by local authorities diminish any level of legitimacy the state’s taxation apparatus can even hope to enact.  And anyway, the only places I have seen where tax payers’ money is going to is in the construction of shiny new stores, which I recently found out, are owned by the government.  Again, should it surprise anyone that Uzbeks don’t want to pay taxes to a government that only constructs buildings that the people are then forced to rent?  Or that instead of being left alone to earn a meager hand-to-mouth living, the government forces them to work cotton, which is a state-owned export enterprise?

Survival in Uzbekistan must be kind of like what I spied in the fields of dead cotton plants.  Cattle was grazing in the fields and I thought they were eating dead leaves.  When I asked what was nutritious amongst the dirt and twigs, the reply from my colleague was that they were eating green, meaning grass.  But didn’t see any green.  Then again, I’m not a cow.

I’ve been reading a lot of survival books lately, mountaineering disasters in the Andes, Shackleton’s Antartic endeavors, Breasheare’s Everest expeditions, Pi’s fictional drift in the ocean, and now Gourevitch’s accounts of the Rwandan genocide.  Perhaps such extremities endear me to my basic amenities, and somehow give hope, for the people of the country I’m living in, to endure as much as the depth of the human spirit allows.

Comments

[Alicia]

Happy Thanksgiving from all these miles away, Dee. I remember when my mom was in Romania she was acutely aware of all she had to be thankful for. Stay warm. :)

[mahala]

I continue to marvel at the life you are living, and the lives you are witnessing. Thank you for your beautiful descriptions, Dee. Wishing you warmth and a Happy Thanksgiving.

[Deyer]

Its probably cold after the rain and alot of people use the gas.