Kyrgyzstan: Openness, Hospitality, Community

They are kind, open, tolerant, and curious. The people I met in their twenties and thirties proved to be well-educated and Western-oriented.

The cities are mostly made up of rather stark Stalin-baroque buildings, yet even in the small family-run hotel where we stayed in Bishkek, English was spoken fluently. In the villages, people live in modest, simple houses, usually in extended families. Children attend school during the day – education seems to be compulsory – and they wear uniforms. Often they walk alone, without an escort, sometimes as far as 5–10 kilometres to reach school, which shows how safe the environment is. Within rural families, traditional divisions of labour and gender roles dominate, yet women and girls also take part in social life. One of our interpreters told me that his grandmother had once been abducted as a bride – an act that is now a prosecutable crime – but the grandparents lived a happy life together nonetheless.

The shepherds in the mountains continue to practice traditional livestock breeding, just as their ancestors did for centuries. They are cheerful, lively, friendly, inquisitive, and hospitable. The farther away people live from civilisation, the more direct and open they are. Most of them cannot read or write, they ride horses, and they are never in a hurry. In summer, families live in yurts in the mountains, and in winter they return to the villages.

Ömür, the shepherd grazing his herd closest to our camp, worked a great deal for us. With his wife and six young children, he lives in the mountains from spring to autumn. They ride gentle, well-trained horses. Interestingly, they do not give names to their animals – Ömür simply called his horse “horse.” He and the interpreter were surprised that we name our animals individually. Ömür is an honest man: he helped build and guard the camp, and once he refused to leave his post until we returned, even though we arrived back very late and without warning. He was delighted to be invited to the camp’s opening ceremony, where he sat at the same table as the ministry officials – and no one found this unusual. Everyone enjoyed the Hungarian dishes we prepared.

Tariel, who now works with us, is a Western-minded, critical, secular young man, with values very similar to those of Hungarian people his age. Narimbek, who studied in Hungary on a scholarship, is religious, does not drink alcohol, and observes fasting, yet he too is a modern, European-minded young man.

A local beekeeping family, exceptionally kind and helpful, invited us into their home and treated us to a feast. We later returned the invitation at the camp. The family is diligent and warm-hearted – the woman even runs her own beekeeping shop. Their children all studied at university; one of them even worked in South Korea.