Postcard from Bishkek

As I look at site history log, it seems as if I had nothing else to do all month … and I wouldn’t blame you for coming to that conclusion based on that evidence.  The month is not half way through and there  over thirty pages have already been added – more than in any other month, apart from when I was reconstructing the site a year ago.  Some months I have struggled to get one or two pages added.

I hasten to add that this is not true … I have been more than busy – I have been run off my feet.  It is just that so much has been happening.

One reason why I have been able to add so many pages in such a short space of time is that, as was the case when I was recreating the site a year ago, some of the pages had already been written and had appeared somewhere else, so they only need editing for this site.  Such as most of those pages appearing in the new section: … living in “Interesting Times”.

Another reason why so many pages have appeared is exactly because it has been such a busy period, with lots happening and I have taken the trouble to write up the events whilst they are still fresh in my mind.  In fact, so much has been happening that I think I could have added half as many pages again without too much trouble.

Actually, I also find writing the pages helpful, cathartic.  Many years ago, as a schoolteacher, I would always end the day by running through the events of the day in my mind, asking myself questions like: What went well?; What could have gone better?; What do I need to do to follow that up? …  and so on.   It helps me to put things into context.  Writing these pages help to serve a similar purpose … and I hope that they prove interesting.

We have a saying in English that: “it never rains … it pours”.  This happens to be one of my favourite sayings, (yes, another one), and I can often be heard quoting it … either in English, or in Russian … and some of my staff have even taken to quoting it back at me.

Well, it has been raining quite a lot recently, and I think I can rightly it has been pouring.

That’s just a figure of speech.  It has literally be raining quite a lot recently … and on occasion, it has literally been pouring.

One of the unforeseen incidents that this has led to, resulted in my receiving a late night phone call from Genya, (one of the family of the baseball kids).  I have written about them before, but haven’t said much about their story.

Basically, they come from a large family.  Mum would have been granted the title “Hero Mother” in the days of the Soviet Union … indeed they still have that honourary rank in independent Kyrgyzstan and, technically, she is entitled to it as she has ten children.  They range from four to twenty six years old .  Two of the children no longer live at home, and I am not sure what has happened to Dad … I have never met him and I think it is probably better not to ask too many “pointed” personal questions.

Anyway, that means there are still nine people living in their home, which comprises of just two small rooms.

It is not unusual for people to live in such cramped conditions here.  I remember that when I first arrived here, so many years ago,  and was learning Russian, that I was given a passage to translate which was about a schoolboy who had a school assignment where he had to design his “dream house”.  At the time I found it very odd, because it included phrases like: “it would include both hot and cold water” and “everyone would have their own bedroom”.  At that point I didn’t realise the full import of this.  It was only as I began make friends and visit people’s homes that I began to understand.  Hot water is usually provided from a central town heating station, and many homes are not connected to the system.  In the countryside, many homes do not have even piped water.  There have been several projects organized by donor agencies which aim to improve the water supply to such communities.

When it comes to everyone in a family having their own bedroom, then that is pretty close to a life of luxury.  Although some people have quite large houses, (especially in the villages in rural areas),  or apartments, those families who live in apartments in the towns often have very small space.  I know of one family of four, for example, where the parents were both lawyers that lived in a one room apartment … the equivalent of a “bedsit”.  The two children, teenagers, slept on divans in the the main room whilst their parents slept on the floor in the kitchen.

Following the translation, I was given the task of describing my home back in Britain.  It amused my teacher very much … “How many rooms did you say there were?”, she asked.  “Did you say you had two toilets?” … and when I mentioned the tiny conservatory tacked onto the back of the house, she burst into hysterics … the Russian word for conservatory is “Orangery” and I must admit that in English this sounds much grander than it was in reality.

Now, although I come from a small family – there were just two of us, my brother and myself – my father was one of six children and my mother was one of eight, so you think that I might have some understanding of the problems of overcrowding and growing up in a large family from the stories they told me about their childhood, their reminiscences about their youth.  However, although my father grew up in a small house … it was one in which there were five rooms, and my mother grew up in quite a large house which had eight rooms, and I remember well  how some of them were really quite large.

You’ll probably understand from the description above about the exercises I was given by my Russian, how I lived in reasonable sized houses back in the UK.  As it happens, my current apartment in Bishkek has just two rooms … just like the family’s … but that’s more than enough for me as I live alone, and in my two rooms I have almost twice as much space than they have in theirs.

So, in other words, my personal experience when it comes to living in “cramped accommodation” is fairly limited.

But, back to that phone call from Genya.  It was quite late in the evening and, although I hadn’t yet retired for the night, I was getting ready to do so.  I am not used to getting late evening phone calls, so I had a fair inkling that something was wrong.

Apparently their roof had sprung a leak, and the water seeping through as a result had weakened the plasterwork on the ceiling in the bedroom, and without warning it had collapsed, falling onto two of the children, including the youngest, as they lay in bed.

I could hear the distress in his voice as he told me what had happened and also the commotion in the background.  Fortunately no-one was seriously hurt, although they were obviously scared out of their wits – especially the two on whom the ceiling had fallen, and everyone was in a state of shock.  Having checked that they were OK, the question was: what to do next?

It made me wonder what I would do.  In a way, although I was sorry to hear about their problems, I have to admit that I was grateful it wasn’t my ceiling that had fallen.  As it happens, I have insurance for my apartment and, back in Britain most people have insurance to cover this sort of incident, but here, however, there is basically very little insurance … and they certainly have no cover.

There was no hot line to call, no one to take the stress out of the situation, no one to “stop a drama turning into a crisis”, as the advertising slogan used to put it.

Tags: Baseball_Kids, Expat, Life_in_Kyrgyzstan