Road Trip

Another Road Trip

            Roads are just a crazy and common part of our lives. No one in the US talks about driving as much as we do, not unless you have a crazy-long commute or drive for a living. Every trip we take is a complete unknown as to how it will turn out and you just never know what story is coming out of a given trip down a road.

            This last one is yet another “adventure.” I remember an essay Louis L’Amour wrote that basically said that only an idiot goes out looking for adventure. I believe it was titles So You Want Adventure Do You? Basically it said you can get yourself into all kinds of adventurous trouble if you want but you are stupid if you do. Adventure is what happens when stuff goes wrong, when plans are derailed and all of a sudden you are making do in a new and potentially disastrous situation. It’s rarely fun, often dangerous, and something you really shouldn’t go looking for, but at the end of the day (if you get out in one piece) it makes quite a story.

            This was supposed to be like pretty much any fall trip up. The weather hadn’t got bad in a while, it was about to rain but the rain hadn’t started yet, and the road keeps getting better and better. I was hoping to leave the capital around 6am and get home in under 12 hours this time, a very ambitious but not impossible timeline with the current road conditions. We packed up as smart as we could, got as much ready as possible the night before, did our shopping and pulled out half an hour late on Monday morning.

            All went pretty much as expected for the first 3 hours. We got gas in a big town about 220km from the capital, then headed out of town over a pass that would take us to the border. Just at the edge of town we got pulled over. I didn’t think I was speeding, you never know what law you are getting pulled for breaking but I stopped without feeling too defensive. Turns out the very polite and friendly police were just saying the road was closed for construction up ahead, at least until lunch.

            Now, you never know why roads are actually closed, but it’s not always why you are told. Sometimes you aren’t told at all. Sometimes it’s something totally different than you are told. Sometimes the army is doing maneuvers, sometimes there is an actual military operation, sometimes someone important is going to be there, you just never know. So, we pulled over to the side of the road and watched a few tv shows on the computer. About lunch time I asked again and the police were willing to let us through, so we lost about 2 hours but the journey is still worth making.

            So we went up a hill. There is really one high pass left on the way home, this is it. At the top of the hill is a police and army post stopping access to the border towns and a small town. As we got up to the post, the army registered us and let us through like normal but the police stopped us and said, once again the road is closed for construction. No one is allowed on it. It’s closed from 6am to 6pm every day. Ah.

            So talk as I did, I could not talk my way through that post to the road even to see if the construction crews would let me through. It was just after lunch time by this point, so we drove back down the hill to the town to look for a place to stay. There are hotels here, but it’s usually hard to find anything that’s even basically comfortable for a family. The one place we did find I went in and there was not even anyone around to book a room with, not a good sign. Back to the capital we drove.

            We took a day to rest again. 11 hours on the road just to end up back where you started can be a bit draining, so I spent Tuesday repacking and reorganizing the car a bit, getting ready to try again. Our initial plan was to drive starting at 1:30am, get to the post before 6 and hope that lets us through, then get home early afternoon. This is a long drive in the dark and tired, but it seemed like the only thing to do. The other option was leaving late enough to drive through the post at 6pm, but arriving at home in the early morning hours after driving all night on mountain roads is just a bad idea.

            Then we got a phone call that opened another option: the Northern Route. There is the first road cut through the mountains that goes over a pass in the north of the country. By reputation the road is shorter, but higher and worse quality than the southern route, which is saying something. So, off we went on a new road out.

            Now, one thing about living in the former Soviet Union, they figure if you don’t know how to get there, you ought not to be going anyway. So, they won’t make good maps that show you the turns or put up signs in most places, you just need to know how to go. It makes travel to a new place interesting to say the least. On the plus side, it’s not like there are many roads around, so it’s hard to get lost once you get on the right path.

            So we were off on an unknown road in terrible weather. I did make one wrong turn on the way, ended up 17 kilometers (10 miles or so) out of our way so it lost us half an hour early in the morning. It was raining on us just a few minutes after we left and kept on all morning and into the afternoon, which didn’t slow us down much but did keep it from being dusty. I say raining, but there are more passes on this route and just outside the capital we crossed the first one in a couple inches of snow.

            The road is smaller and much less traveled than the first 200km of our normal drive, which is nice when you don’t have to do any passing or getting stuck behind big trucks in the mountains. We made the turn off the main road to go over the pass and the road got noticeably worse. It is paved in parts, though mostly what’s left is little bits of pavement with mostly pothole rather than road. The road winds up the mountains, through villages and in some really beautiful country. This side of the mountains has trees, a new experience for us here.

            After lots of driving we ended up driving into snow again. It was still coming down and the higher we got up the pass the more snow was on the road. Before too long there were several inches of snow standing on the road, making driving interesting to say the least. It was slow and deliberate going, especially with no other traffic (no one to help if you get in trouble) and no familiarity with this particular road. It was a little slick on the way down, I get pretty focused when the brakes no long work downhill on the side of a mountain because of the ice on the road, but then soon the snow stopped and we were on the dry side. The sun came out and we went down a very steep section of switchbacks and before long were back on the road we know and have traveled before.

            This drive wasn’t the 11 hours I hoped for. 14 hours on the road from start to finish and we got home quite tired but happy to be there. Every adventure like that makes me grateful to be home and grateful to be back in once piece. We don’t go looking for it but adventure comes our way from time to time anyway.

Food

Food is a funny part of life for us. What we eat, what we find in the store, what we eat on our visits and among friends, these take a prominence here that they don't seem to when we were in the US. Now, don't get me wrong, we have always been people who love food. We loved hosting people for meals, loved going out to and trying new restaurants, had wide and varied tastes in food. We have always enjoyed food and even had great fun with the foods of the places we have lived before, whether that be Africa or South Asia.

Then we moved here. I am sure there are people who love Central Asian food. I am sure there are countries in Central Asia where the food is really good. We are not those people and don't live in one of those places. Our little corner of the world is a rugged and dry mountain climate and people who live in climates like this are much more concerned with simply staying alive than developing a rich and varied cuisine. As such, while we have very few terrible meals, we don't really have any we miss when we aren't here. Making local foods isn't particularly difficult, but we don't eat them in our house and don't make a habit of seeking them out. I am perfectly content to eat what is put before me in a village, but I won't be making it for myself.

Foods are pretty basic here. First there is the national dish, Osh. Osh means food. So their main food is literally "food". It's a rice dish, a pilau, basically fried and boiled rice with onion, carrot, garlic, some spices and some meat. Then there is ShirChoi, literally milk tea. With a bit of bread to dip or soak in it, this is generally breakfast, at least in the mountains, and often lunch for people in poor circumstances. Now it's more than just milk. Just to make it healthy and tasty they add copious amounts of salt and butter. This seems to be a mountain thing, they do a similar thing in Nepal among Sherpa and Tibetan peoples, but it's a big local dish that they are proud of. Bread, flat bread usually cooked in a clay oven, is at every meal and pretty much every time you sit down at someone's house to eat, bread is life here. Fried meat and potatoes, a few other special dishes that rarely show up in villages round out the general food choices that we get to face, all fairly bland and basic. There isn't much we hate (though there is a fairly not-great party dish for funerals and religious events that shows up every now and then and salt butter tea takes some getting used to) but really not much to miss either.

So we end up making our own foods much more than local stuff. This is often dependent on the vagaries of season, availability in the bazaar, even if the roads are open and imports can get up here. Sometimes our choices come down to hot dogs and bread, since that is what is here. Other times we have lots of vegetables and basics to cook almost whatever we want (as long as it doesn't feature pork very heavily, though duck breast fillets have shown up a bit lately and make a decent substitute). It's a pretty normal conversation to talk about finding different items, where they were, and how much was left.

"Yep, bananas are here now, about four dollars a kilo, such and such place in the bazaar."

"You won't believe it, but oreos showed up in the big grocery store yesterday!"

"Yeah, we have cherry Dr. Pepper right now. Don't know if they will ever get it again, but it's here."

"Hey, I found a russian thing that apparently is cottage cheese. Hope you can find it sometime, here is what it looks like, but I bought all they had. Sorry."

This can be a source of great friendship or great bitterness. It is hard to let go when a unique item from home shows up and no one bothers to pick you up some. On the other hand, when a random shop down in the capitals ships in a bunch of Dr. Pepper and friends pick you up some cans (or cases of cans as the case may be), it forges an unbreakable bond of friendship (at least from our side).

That said, we eat very well all things considered. Thanks to the Russians we get some of our favorite staples in stores here, including Gouda cheese (from time to time), mayonnaise, olives, and plenty of yoghurt. Cindy is quite adept at making bread, so we get sandwiches and such fairly regularly. We buy good meat in the capital and freeze it and bring it up, so even hamburgers and ground beef burritos get in rotation here. There are always a few little things that make eating a joy when they either show up or get sent to us. We want for nothing really but tastes of home can be as much emotional as tasty. Getting a food you haven't eaten since you were last home is a brief moment of joy that is hard to describe.

This is true even of people on short term trips. It's fairly normal to get short term personnel or visitors reminiscing about barbecue or sushi after two weeks in country, blissfully unaware of the years yet to come before you get to enjoy such things. You never know what you will miss until you can't get it, but we have to bite our tongues every now and then and avoid bringing up how long it is going to be before we get Chick-Fil-A so stop talking about it before I make you eat stale bread from the bazaar for the next week.

Food is so much more than just sustenance. It is fellowship and memories. It is sitting around a table (or a table cloth on the floor) and enjoying company. It is trust and hosting and so much of what we miss and what we enjoy. It's a picture of home and something to look forward to any time you miss anything about home.

So, if you ever wonder why someone who lives overseas has so much food on the list of things you could send or you wonder why their Facebook feed is a constant obsession with junk food, it's something that stands in for home in many ways. It doesn't matter if they live in a remote corner of nowhere or in one of the biggest modern cities on the planet, you never get a full taste of home until you get home. (Even in London, trying to describe biscuits and Jimmy Dean style pork sausage at a grocery store, yeah, we got some interesting looks). Sympathize from a distance and let them have their longing. And offer to take them out for a meal sometime...or even better, host them in your home for one.

A Day in the Life

A Day in the Life

           

            Life does not always look consistent from day to day in the mountains, but we have some themes that keep reoccurring. For Matt, that means going out to projects to “inspect” them and decide if a project is one we want to do. We have to ask if it’s a project that is needed and wise, but also if it will give us a chance to spend time with people in the village and if this is in an area we want to keep spending time.

            Last week, the project visit of the week was a trip about 20KM out of town to a village of about 400 households to look at one of their canals. We were up early to get out of town by 8, in the summer the sun up on the mountains can get pretty hot so we wanted to avoid too much walking up in hot weather. Our engineer, our office manager, and I all hopped in the car and drove up to the village.

            Once we got to the village we picked up a couple of the village leaders and drove up toward the canal. We kept driving up, up, and further up, about half an hour up a little track in the side of the mountain to some high pastures for animals. I parked up where the road finally disappeared and we walked about 200 yards further up the side of the mountain to the canal.

            Now here’s the thing about canals here: they are dug and sometimes carved into some very steep sides of these mountains. Usually they are a slight line of green on a sheer cliff. To walk along these canals there is a little path about a foot wide you get to follow, inevitably on the down side of the canal. I have never hiked in areas as exposed as I do here walking up to and along canals.

            So we start along this canal. I am reminded of Donkey in the Shrek movies (“Shrek! I’m looking down!”) and remember that, while I don’t have a true ‘fear’ of heights, I do keep a very healthy respect of them. Nothing quite reminds a person of that respect like your right hand hanging over a thousand foot drop along a trail. Somehow locals take this like a morning stroll down a neighborhood sidewalk. I feel more like it’s a half-hour near-death-experience.

            We got out to the damaged section and looked the damage over. Sure enough, about 20 yards fell down off the cliff and need cement and rebar to reinforce it. Everyone working on the canal was over sixty, nothing is quite as humbling as being outwalked and outworked by a group twice your age. We talked over repairs, I got to pray with the group, and then restarted the casual little stroll along a cliff face back.

            I always have a slight temptation to kiss the ground once we make it back to solid ground, but try and act casual like everyone else when we get down. We still had the drive down the road, then a visit with one of our hosts for tea and soup for lunch. We sat in a little house next to the river, had a meat soup heavy on the fat, talked a bit about life and whatever came to mind, and took off for home.

It was partway through the drive down that I started to feel a bit weak and achy. By the time tea was over and we were headed home I was definitely feeling sick. After the half hour drive home, I was ready to crawl into bed, where I stayed for the next four days getting over some as yet unknown illness. You never really know how any given day is going to go.

Our little parking place. Notice the car?

The valley the canal is on. The canal is the little line on the mountain on the left of the picture. 

Discussing the canal before we head up.

At one point it goes through a split in between two rocks.

A little tight here. It doesn't look like it, but it's hundreds of feet down off there to the right. 

Just cut into the rock here.

This is where the canal fell out. 

Home Sweet Home

            As you probably know, we moved in January to the main town here in the mountains. Matt took on the director role in our NGO, so needed to be in the main office here. While we loved living in our little village, it was very clear we needed to move back, so back we moved.

            This involved a bit of searching for a new house, since one of our teammates is currently living in our previous home. After a few months of back and forth, we found what turned out to be a nearly perfect home for us. We have a really nice set up, a big yard with a garage, grass and trees, running water and a toilet inside, even a big heater and air conditioning unit downstairs. Yep, we are living in luxury now.

            Or course living in our new place does bring its own challenges. Winters are cold, but thanks to a bit heater that came with the house we can keep the entire downstairs nice and warm pretty much all the time. We managed to keep water all winter long, which was a huge blessing as often it freezes then you are living out of buckets until the spring.

            Once spring came along though, things are a bit different. Pretty much our entire town is living with inadequate water infrastructure, so our water is off and on and varies pressure from day to day. We went almost two weeks where we had water one day in that time (Matt was out of town for most of that, so Cindy got to do without on her own). Luckily our landlord is used to this so installed a 1000L tank in the back of the house that we could use. No showers, but we can do pretty much everything else out of that for a week and be fine. Our water is back now, though it is spotty at times, so life is good and warm.

            Our yard is beautiful. We have a couple dozen fruit trees growing with cherries, pears, apples, peaches, and mulberries all coming in at the end of summer. We even planted a little garden in the back, some sweet corn, broccoli okra, a couple tomato plants, pumpkin, and one hardy squash plant are trying to grow. If you know our history with gardening you know they are facing an uphill battle, but a neighbor is helping us keep stuff going, so there is always a chance.

            One neat little blessing is a patch of strawberry plants in the garden. Without any effort on our part they are alive and bearing fruit, so at lunch every couple days we get a fruit salad with a handful of sweet strawberries. We are usually eating them a couple house after picking them, nothing quite like it.

            Our boys are loving a yard with places to run and play, grass (it has to grow about two feet high before you cut it, it’s hay for animals) to run and play in, and lots of dirt to shovel and move around. We are enjoying so many little luxuries of life we missed in our village, indoor toilet and an automatic washing machine being near the top of the list. Living still takes up a lot of time, but it’s really nice to be living in a comfortable home like we have. 
            Here is a quick pictorial tour, enjoy...

Welcome! Here is the view through our front door. The kitchen is right ahead, the living room to the left, then the bathroom and toilet. To the right is our "pile" of stuff.

This is what the door looks like. To the left is the beautiful and wonderful stand up heater/ac unit. The a/c isn't in use that much, but the heater is a God send.

Our pile. You can see our freezer and the pile of stuff we can't figure out where else to put it. We have a shelf for stuff the team can take there on the left.

Our living room. Notice the chandelier, you have to have that to know you are in Central Asia.

The other side of the living room. We have great bookshelves and some great furniture from Ikea.

Our wonderful bathroom. Notice the indoor plumbing, very important. Also, notice the trash can full of water at the food of the bath for when the indoor plumbing doesn't work, also vital.

Our sink (that works!) and washing machine. This thing is awesome, automatic washing with no babysitting, plus it is a DRIER! Yeah, 20th century tech baby.

Our kitchen. Spices, working fridge, water filter, little helper.

Our kitchen table. What a great place to gather for a meal and convenient clean up for mommy!

Look at all the cabinet space and two ovens! Yep, gas and electric, prepared for anything. And, the gas canister is outside, so safety first you know.

This is where I moved the pile of dishes just to the right of the frame, so our kitchen looks clean and organized. Little photography trick there, like photoshop.

Yep, no mess to see here. Notice the SECOND working sink, both with HOT WATER.

Sam coming up the stairs. The boys can both handle them great, and they are even mostly evenly spaced. Sam calls them "ups".

Michael posing with his guitar in front of the "reading chair." At the head of the stairs we have a common room. My desk is just out of frame to the bottom of the picture, but I hadn't cleaned it up so you can't see it. Sorry.

Michael with is guitar in the toy/guest room. We keep it empty for guests, but the boys overrun it with car tracks and the mattresses piled in the corner there when we have no guests. As to the little electronic guitars the boys have, they are from the bazaar here, make terrible noises, and the batteries may have been accidentally disposed of maliciously.

The rest of the toy room with the car tracks all set up. 

Sam's bed in the boys' bedroom upstairs. Little shelves for the boys, a window, not much to the room.

Michael's bed and the bookshelf. Yes, the boys' room is always this clean and organized, what do you think?

Our front yard. The grass has to be grown this high, though as I type this they just cut it for hay. We have a little "manja" just on the other side of the car, a place to sit outside in warm weather. The frame on the front of the house is an unfinished balcony. These are all fruit trees too.

We even have a garage and a dog house, but no dog yet. Still trying after 2 years. Our garage is filled with storage stuff, keeping the American tradition alive and well.

The side of the house and our clothes line, which we do not have to use all the time because we have a drier. Did I mention the drier? It's great. 

Fruit trees in the back yard. Don't ask what all of them are, until something gets eaten off of them I don't know.

Our garden. Look, green things. Non-weeds are still alive in our garden and it's nearly June!

The back of the house. Yeah, it's not painted. It does beat the pink that our old house was painted while we were on vacation once.

Our washer/drier. Yeah, I think Cindy may love it more than she does her husband, she took a suspiciously long time to think about it when he asked.

Yes, we even have a freezer inside. Meats and cheeses, even the ice cream connector for our kitchen aid call this home, we had lemon sorbet and chocolate chip ice cream already this summer.