Guesting: Going
Hello all! Hope you had a great 4th. It has been a busy month here. Another volunteer and I are halfway through two English clubs. One is TOEFL Prep and the other is a conversation club. We have about 14 students coming on average; however, they are a little younger than we anticipated. We have many high school aged students. This works fine for our conversational class but our TOEFL prep is a little advanced. Last weekend I had the opportunity to go guesting. This is a common Kyrgyz tradition, and I’m not sure how I haven’t gone guesting until now.
Last Saturday, my host mom took me and my 6-year-old host sister, Ayana, to go to the mountains to go guesting. We were going to a colleague’s house. In fact, the whole party of people were colleagues and various family members. So we got up on Saturday at 6:30am to meet the carpool at 8:00am (this might be a reflection of Kyrgyz time management. definitely more relaxed here). Then we drove about an hour and a half into the mountains. The view was amazing. We followed a river most of the way up the mountain and passed herds of horses grazing on the green slopes. The only downer to the trip was that my sister got car sick as the driver swerved around rocks and pot-holes. We stop one time to take a quick picture and then continued on our way. Near the end of the drive , we rarely passed a small village and eventually there were more yurts than permanent houses.
We finally got to the house that actually had a yurt set up right next to it. For the day, the yurt operated as the kitchen for all of the food needed to feed the 20+ guests. We began the afternoon by eating various salads and toasting. There also was an older gentleman who played the accordion and sang to provide the afternoon’s entertainment. After the first course of salads, a cycle of eating, drinking, and shuffling to the next room began. There were too many people to all eat at the same time, so we rotated through. I somehow made it into the kids group (though my sister didn’t…hmm). This was fine since only the kids and teens spoke any English. During one break in the food cycle, the teens took me to the river nearby to go fishing. I successfully marked myself as the awkward American when I tried jumping a stream, landed a foot in the ice-cold water and had to be pulled to the other side to avoid falling in. I took pictures while the rest of the group foraged for worms and tossed the line into the river. Unfortunately, there were no worms in the unturned ground, so the group started digging through manure piles with shovels. I was a little relieved that they didn’t find any there either. Giving up, we headed back to the house and warmed up by sitting in one of the minivans.
At about 5pm, we all got into cars and drove farther up the mountain until the road ended. The group piled out of cars and began digging up various wild flowers such as edelweiss. And soon a circle formed, the vodka reappeared, and accordion music ensued. I have a great picture of a white soviet car parked next to a snow bank with the accordion sitting on the ground behind it. Once the field trip was finished, we headed back to the house for meat. At about 7pm, the remainder of the food was divided among the guests, and we were on our way home.
