Olympic State of Mind

Salut,

Let me just open with the fact that I become a feral person whenever the Olympics start. I have been religiously following the women’s gymnastics team and watching it evolve since 2012 when Jordyn Wieber failed to make the all-around and Gabby Douglas became the first African-American woman to win all-around gold. I watch every year, without fail, replays of Aliya Mustafina winning gold in 2012 and then doing it again in 2016 on uneven bars. In 2012, after one year abroad in Lagos, I came back on home leave for the summer and sat in my grandparents’ house in their upstairs living room (in my grandfather’s designated “man-cave”, which was just his most of the time, with the occasional visit by my two cousins). We sat around the TV and watched, cheering on Missy Franklin on primetime. I did the same thing in 2016, about to be a high school 9th grader, and in 2021, about to be a college sophomore. Now, a year finished with the Peace Corps. This will be my only post about the Olympics, but I tend to get Olympic mania whenever the time comes around. Mihica watches everything; she’ll text me about dinghy sailing and rowing one day and then rugby the next day. My bias is obviously towards the big three that America dominates at: track and field, gymnastics, and swimming. Australia pulled no punches. (I occasionally check into world championships in swimming and gymnastics in between). Simone Biles’ gym is around 45 min-1 hour from my house!  I’ve always taken pride in her being my hometown hero. I read Katie Ledecky’s memoir, Just Add Water, and decided the Olympic path is not for me (diet and exercise regimens aren’t it)! I also learned she set a world record at my local swimming pool, the CISD Natatorium, where I once, several years ago, volunteered to help run a swim meet. 

In Kyrgyzstan, the Olympic spirit is sporadic. In my village center, a large billboard wishes luck to the Kyrgyz wrestling team. My host father’s nephew was watching possibly torrented replays of wrestling (the narration was English which he doesn’t speak). Kyrgyz news media on Instagram would publish any time Kyrgyzstan would compete and even post about Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan’s victories, of which there were many. Central Asia tends to have a leg up and primarily compete in more one-on-one combat sports like taekwondo, judo, boxing, wrestling, etc. I tried a few times to get my host family proper interested in, but we’d always circle back to Masha and the Bear. My mom got Peacock for like a month to watch it, and I got a free VPN trial so I could watch it on NBC (Peacock isn’t available unsurprisingly here). The internet connection was feeble, but I got the chance to watch a few sports live. Unfortunately for me, most of the events happened around midnight-4 am.  

The house is full! Yes, slowly but surely, the house is full of people. Five family members came back on the 1st of August, and we had a large table setting and dinner for them. We’re around 15 or 16 people, depending on if I count baby Kuz Sykal, and if I count myself, and if I count correctly. Kuz Sykal can walk now, so surely she counts, even if she still has to be watched like a hawk and passed around 24/7. Yes, the bathroom situation still sucks (one indoor bathroom with a shower and one outdoor toilet for 15 people sucks, it’s 9 adults including me, and 6 kids). We manage to eat at one table somehow. My host father’s nephew (my cousin) had been hanging around and even brought some construction workers with him (though they didn’t appear to be doing any work), but they’re gone now! 

I celebrated my 22nd birthday here. My last birthday, my 21st, I detailed in one of my older blog posts. I spent it in Bishkek at a great Italian place with my PST friends and drank an Aperol spritz. This year, my family and I drove to the mountains. They bought a ton of food and we had a large picnic which included watermelon, melon, fruit juice, bread, and chicken wings. The mountains were a welcome reprieve from some absolutely awful weather. Speaking of the weather, it’s been positively boiling. I bought a desk battery-operated fan and have been using a hand fan for a while. We don’t have AC and during mid-day, it has been around above the 90s (and feeling like high 90s sometimes even). We have an electric fan, but my family mostly balks at using it, so I’ll sometimes turn it on and be the only one to take advantage of it. I bought the family a few of the cheap handheld fans. The boys and men mostly walked around shirtless, and the kiddos jumped a few times into the baby pool outside. Most of my house, unlike lots of other volunteers whose houses I’ve visited, exists primarily outside, with two guesthouses and the two main sections of the house built with a large courtyard. This means I definitely can’t stay inside all day (which some volunteers can accomplish). Houses are unique in Kyrgyzstan and I could talk at length about the quirky designs and differing layouts I’ve seen in all the ones I’ve been to. 

Anyway, I was talking about my birthday. On the way back, my family bought a birthday cake. So, there have been over eight birthday celebrations we’ve celebrated at the house, in addition to several holidays I’ve mentioned too. The standard practice at my house for a birthday or a holiday (if my family decides to celebrate the holiday at all) is to say happy birthday/holiday, go about our day, and then eat cake/pizza/chicken wings with soda/juice and call it a day. Knowing how many birthdays we’d celebrate, I established early on I didn’t like cake and was not going to eat it, and I’ve never eaten cake with them. I was happy to just drink the juice/soda they brought or eat the candy or pizza or whatever. Anyway, they bought a cake, and when we got home, I went to the nearest store and bought myself a popsicle for myself so I’d have something. Later, I think my host dad was irritated when I told him (for the millionth time) that I didn’t like cake. They all shared it with each other, but that is the one weird quirk of mine I wished they’d remembered. The birthday overall was good. 

The day after my extended family all arrived, I, for the first time in an entire YEAR, got invited to a toi with my family. Less than a full year but a long long eleven months, and here we are. It was… definitely a toi. It was an hour from our house, pretty deep in a village in the mountains, and it was a bridal party. Practically the whole family got invited (except Aidana, always stuck at home. She told me it’s been 2 years since she’s been to a toi). Going to a toi with 11 people, yes, 11 people, was crazy. We all fit into one car, somehow. We ate a ton of food, and the kids kept disappearing to chase after dogs. A long, long time ago we “had” a dog (as in it hung around the house, and they all decided it belonged to us) named Bingo. Now, whenever any of the kids see a small dog, they refer to it as Bingo. We danced at the toi. Alihan got himself a toy water gun, forcing me to repeatedly fill it up for him, and then later forcing his parents to buy all the kids water guns so they could fight. Which later of course got me super wet. 

The more people who attend a toi together, the exponentially more food you have to take home with you. We had mountains of candy and bread. Recently, a ton of the adults all went to a pata (funeral) and came back with more food than I’d ever seen anyone bring back. Someone, I forget who, jokingly told me Kyrgyz people hold events just as an excuse to eat. 

Whenever I talk to students at American Corner or students in general in the English club, they all discuss celebrating holidays and celebrations in the same way. While there are a plethora of holidays here and a few have distinctive traditions, most local people seem to celebrate similarly: clean the house, give gifts, give blessings, relax, and eat. To be honest, American holidays maybe should be more like that. Describing very distinct traditions like Halloween trick or treating always makes my students enthused. Trying to explain the significance of a Thanksgiving dinner to a culture that regularly holds huge dinners that would put some Thanksgiving dinners to shame is hard. 

I visited American Corner to host a talking club and ate some food after. I got a super upset stomach when I got home and told my host mom. She said dismissively “All food made in Jalal Abad city is bad. The weather is bad, therefore the food is bad.” My host father later said his stomach was upset because of the cold air on the way back from Bishkek. Superstitions y’all. Maybe I mentioned in a different post, but my school director sent a flyer earlier in the summer on how to avoid a heat stroke/excessive heat, and it gave random anecdotes about people who took cold showers or drank cold water after being outside and got super sick/had swollen skin. 

This last weekend, I took a trip to Toktogul. Toktogul is a large lake at the halfway point between Jalal-Abad and Bishkek. I’ve passed through Toktogul several times, and each time the marshrutka/taxi has always stopped at a different cafe along the road. Around Toktogul you can find fish to eat, a rarity, which I mentioned in my post when I saw Bhaavya. I’d never visited Toktogul proper, and it’s situated between a large mountain range, so it takes a long long time to go around it, and the road is windy. It is also a large hub for tourists. There currently is an eco-tourist volunteer in Toktogul, but he was visiting Bishkek when I went. I got the chance to eat some more chicken wings and some lagman, and I stayed at a lovely guesthouse. The owners knew the other Peace Corps Volunteer, and the main lady, Nargiza, was a former FLEX student (FLEX is an international student exchange program for high schoolers. Kyrgyz students are selected to go to the US for a year or two). She lived in Albuquerque and studied English, and as such, her English was excellent. 

I visited the lake, which was gorgeous and warmer than Song-Kol, so I swam for a bit. The walk to the lake from the village was around an hour one way, winding through large green fields of plants and flowers. In the evening, two other tourist groups came through. The guesthouse was a regular house with a second wing of guest rooms for tourists, and I ran into several kids who lived there. That day was one of the young girls’ 11th birthday, and we celebrated by having a large feast (and cake of course). The first group of tourists was two Russian-speaking men (but I wasn’t sure if they were ethnically Russian or not, they had come from Warsaw), one who could speak English, and the other who could speak Spanish. The second group was two women, one from France and one from Belgium, both who spoke French and English. Nargiza’s husband speaks French (which blew my mind, I’d never met a Kyrgyz person who could speak French fluently, but his mother is a French teacher. The dinner table as such was a mixture of languages, constantly switching between Kyrgyz (because the owners wanted to speak in Kyrgyz to me), French, English, and Russian. 

The Olympics ended just as quickly as they came. The torch was brought from Athens to Paris and now goes onward to Los Angeles. I've been to LA only once, and I'm hoping to be able to attend LA28. I suppose this wasn't as exciting as my last Naryn post, but my second summer camp is starting soon. Baktygul has come back from Bishkek. I've worn out asking my host family what news they have, because so often their lives are a repeat of the same daily routines, occasionally interrupted by a funeral or wedding. That's also part of being an adult, slowly easing your way into doing the same things over and over again. I try to stave off that for just a little while through my blogposts, always wanting to have something to add, to learn, to grow from, and to talk about. I can measure my life in Olympic cycles, and each time I marvel at how I've ended up where I did. The journey can hopefully only go upwards. 

À Bientôt,

Grace 

Music

1. Lucky- Halsey

2. Be Mine- Jimin

3. We Will Rise- Sam Tinnesz

4. On Somebody- Ava Max

5. Lucid- SVRCINA