2. Uzbekistan, Early 2003
In Ulugbek, Uzbekistan, the neighborhood people burn their garbage every Tuesday evening at that part of the day I love and, which, in Spanish is poetically called “el atardecer.” Uzbeks burn their trash because they don’t have a trash pick-up service. That’s what I deduced; I could be wrong.
The air on Tuesday evenings can be stifling. A brownish gray fog engulfs the village. As the sun recedes and true darkness takes over, little hearths dot the night in the yards of homes and apartment buildings. The scene seems ritualistic but it’s merely functional.
Uzbeks dispose of food scraps, chicken bones, the shapely peels of oranges, fatty gristle, and many other indistinguishable organic bits and pieces by simply tossing them out in the yard. Surely, a scrappy “wild” dog or some other such creature will happily scoop up such waste and abscond with it. Not so with paper and tissues and the like. They must be burned. This category of things to be burned disturbingly includes soiled toilet paper, too.
In Uzbekistan, it’s best not to toss your TP down the toilet drain as the water table is relatively weak and anything “extra” often clogs up the sanitation system. During my first few days in Uzland I tried to be good about not tossing “used” TP down the john but it’s such a thoughtless, engrained part of first-world behavior. After awhile I got close to automatic in placing my “used” TP in the bin beside the toilet so much so that when I got back to the States, I placed my TP in the stall’s bin close to a dozen times before breaking my newly acquired habit. It’s pretty disturbing, however, to think that Tuesday nights’ smoke includes the village’s used TP. Helps keep our own troubles in perspective, eh?
After my first attempt hand washing my clothes in the cold water, with the powdered detergent perhaps appropriated called “Barf,” I learned quickly not to launder my clothes before dinner on Tuesdays. Best to wait until later in the week to avoid having your underwear and t-shirts suck up the suspect smokiness of a week’s garbage from an entire village.
This is a strange anecdote with which to start my piece on Uzbekistan, isn’t it? I guess it’s marginally appropriate as it makes quick mention of the matter-of-fact poverty endemic to Uzbekistan. Economic impoverishment. Many of us in the United States probably never think twice about the givenness of weekly or even twice-weekly curbside trash pick-up. That’s just the way things are. For me, in fact, throwing away my garbage is even easier as I just toss it down the chute at the end of the hall each morning and away it goes.
But, thinking more deeply and beyond the borders of ourselves and our lives as we know them, it’s obvious that to many people around the world, trash pick-up is a luxury that can easily be done without thanks to a match, a little patience, and some forethought.
Ulugbek is a small village about 40-50 minutes outside of Uzbekistan’s capital, Tashkent. I went there in January 2003 as a Peace Corps TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) volunteer. I was there to teach elementary-aged kids English. Not to spoil my story but I didn’t last. I stayed a little over three months before I, in the acronym-ridden universe that is Peace Corps, ET’ed (early terminated my service). It’s kind of a shameful thing, I guess. Like dropping out of school or, as I joke at drinking parties to my interlocutors’ sincere amusement, like being a beauty school drop out, à la Grease. I can even cheesily change the lyrics to the song “Beauty School Drop Out” to tell a bit of my tale: “Peace Corps drop out; no COS [close of service] day for you …” and so on. You get the picture.
Dropping out of Peace Corps is almost like a Stephen Crane-esque red badge of courage. Well, it is mostly, depending on the crowd with whom I’m interacting. Since ET’ing and retreating to Washington, DC, and back into the staid world of work, I, truth be told, have only interacted with a slew of Peace Corps people one paltry time. It was someone’s birthday party. I had maybe the week prior run into a friend from Peace Corps on L Street in DC.
A woman I'll call Kate was always a sweetie. She joined Peace Corps young, she must have just graduated from college when she signed up. I enjoyed her presence and personality during my brief time there but never solidified a deeper relationship with her. All the better, given the fact that it apparently wasn’t in my cards, so to speak, to last too long “over there.”
I ran into Kate one afternoon while escaping my boredom at the liberal magazine job I had right after finishing my MA. My vision is weak and blurry, especially at a distance. I remember that day. Must have been early February 2005. I spotted a girl who looked much like Kate (dark, thick hair, brown skin) but, given my eyes’ limitations, I’m never too confident in what I see. We approached each other and I became more sure that she was who I thought she was.
It was nice to see her and she invited me to join her and a bunch of other Peace Corps people that Sunday at a Thai restaurant up by the Zoo on Connecticut Avenue. I went and felt horribly awkward. Maybe it was simply because I hadn’t seem them all for a long time (close to two years had passed), since the night we were “sworn in” as official, true-blue, red-blooded Peace Corps volunteers; when we had to take oaths testifying our allegiance to the mission and integrity of Peace Corps. During the ceremony, I think I raised my hand but didn’t actually or audibly speak the pledge (I crossed my toes, too). And this was all before I had concretely decided I would quit. It had been a long time since that night we were sworn in and we went to a Georgian (the country, not the state) restaurant for a celebratory meal of turnips, French fries, and gangly meat.
It had been a long time since we five of us danced the traditional Uzbek dance we had been practicing throughout our last few weeks of training. It had been a long time, yes. But perhaps it wasn’t just a factor of time but more so the gulf that had developed between them and me, me the drop out, them all having proudly and with a lot of grit and resolve completing their full 27 months of service. I admire them but, in a way and I don’t mean to sound arrogant, I admire me too for winning the battle I waged within myself those three months while I was there in Uzland, miserable, constrained, hyperconscious, and lonely.
It was a bloody battle, brutal and seemingly without end. While I was “in country” (that rings a lot like a Vietnam War-era expression), I hated it. But, “it,” joining the Peace Corps and seeing the world and naively, perhaps even arrogantly thinking I could help the world was what I had always thought I wanted to do. In fact, when I was 15, I sent a letter to the Peace Corps Headquarters here in Washington, DC. I don’t know how I knew about them. Perhaps it was my dad, the ever-patient, understated history teacher that brought Peace Corps, through JFK, to my attention. But, yea, at the tender age of 15 I wrote to PC.
I wrote that I wanted to join and that I admired their mission, probably not expressed even as elegantly as that choppy phrase. They dutifully wrote back to me and kindly informed me that they prefer their volunteers have at least finished high school, if not college. “Stay in school and contact us again in a few years, kid.” And that I did, well, not right away. From that first handwritten letter to the day I joined PC as a volunteer in training, 11 years, many miles, and lots of emotions intervened.
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