kyrgyzstan

In February 2005, I came back from a humbling and life changing six months in a country I didn’t know existed until I received my Peace Corps assignment in the mail.

Kyrgyzstan (Kyrgyz Republic) is a tiny Central Asian country of 6 million people with a mix of Turkic, Persian, Mongolian and Russian culture. All of us stayed in villages with host families during 11 weeks of training. Of all of my experiences there, I cherish the kindness, generosity and starkly different way of life my host family showed me. Between the grit of watching their guard dog eat the entrails of a recently slaughtered sheep on my way to the outhouse in the morning and sitting in the corn shed to take calls from my family on a rotary phone, their house was and will always be one of my favorite homes in the entire world.

Afterwards I was sent to a cold, barren, rocky city called Balykchy in the dead of winter to teach English to students who for the most part didn’t want to learn it and had no use for it. It was the beginning of my understanding of what ‘developed country’ arrogance via volunteering looks like and the quickest way to knock me down a few pegs of my privileged naïveté.

While it didn’t go at all the way I expected, it started me on a wanderlust journey that continued into another 20+ countries that made me and continues to make me who I am. This is the first of a series as part of my resolution to honor where I’ve been to help me get where I want to be.