How Guests are Treated

I am so fat. Well, mostly I just feel fat. You don’t really go into a home here without getting fed. And by fed, I don’t just mean tea and bread (a staple in every household). I mean a full plate of fried lamb and potatoes, or laghman (a Kyrgyz noodle dish), or manti (meat dumplings), or any number of other dishes.

I have been told on a number of occasions that, when the Kyrgyz still lived in yurts, that a traveler could come to any household, enter the yurt and sit down. He would then be fed. Only after he had eaten would people ask him who he was or where he was going. When you visit people, you get fed.

I don’t know what it was like here right after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I was in Ukraine shortly after that, and people’s lives were pretty hard there. I suspect it was the same here. But, based on what I see and what many people have told me, things are pretty good in Kyrgyzstan now, from a getting-your-daily-needs-met point of view. The family in Chong Jer told me that even if they didn’t have much money, they always had food. All of the people I spoke to in Talas said the same thing. Everyone has a small piece of land and they grow a lot of what they need on it. A lot of people don’t even buy very much at the bazaars because their households are largely self-sufficient. People have food and they distribute it very freely.

This is especially true during holidays. Ait (the end of Ramadam) just ended. I was told that in Talas (and in many other parts of the country), you could basically walk into any house that day and be fed. They didn’t have to know you and you didn’t have to know them.