In Their Words: What Life is Like

I guess the title is a little misleading. This post is actually about how one person lives. I’ve been translating my interviews from Talas and thought it would be good to let some of these people speak for themselves. Whenever I post quotes from interviews, I’ll have “In Their Words:” in the title of the post.

This post is from a school teacher. She lives in Talas with her family. The following quote is in response to my question about where she thinks she fits in with the rest of the country, economically speaking. She said she was middle class and I asked her what that meant.

Well that means…hm…how do I say this…we’re a typical Kyrgyz family. We don’t live really richly, we don’t make a lot of money. Middle class, I figure, is when your pay isn’t that good. You use what you earn to eat. From month to month we have shortages. It’s good that my husband is a driver. It’s all backwards—I studied for five years and my husband, who has no specialty and no education, makes more money than I do. So I number myself among the middle class. That means I have a
roof over my head; it means I have kind of constant situation. It means I can dress ok, more or less. Not really extravagant, but…you know…just in general. Middle class is when your children can get an education. For example, children in really poor families can’t get an education. Just as soon as they finish [public] school, they go straight to work. They can’t allow themselves a higher education. Those of us who are in the middle class—it’s hard—but we can give our children an education. That’s
the basics of it. Does that make sense?

I then asked what it takes to maintain a minimum standard of living.

A minimum standard? That’s…well, I think, to maintain a minimum standard of living, the government needs to stabilize the situation somehow. For example, her in Kyrgyzstan—now I consider myself a patriot—but just the same, I think that here in Talas people are very hard workers. They plant their own gardens, in the higher regions they plant potatoes. They can feed themselves. But if the government set some kind of goal to…well this is how it turn out for us: foreign companies come and buy the beans, the potatoes, the grain, and right away middlemen appear. And they pay the farmer who grew the crops very little. But that middleman, who didn’t do
any work, he profits from it. It would be nice if the government paid more attention then…well…but people need to also worry about themselves, not just sit around. I feel like everyone needs to do his own job. If you have land, you shouldn’t let it go unplanted. You need to grow something on it. Our family doesn’t have land. We live in the city so we just don’t have any land. But we have a little yard here, and we don’t even let that go to waste. We plant some things for ourselves. I don’t buy at
the bazaar. We have apples—I try to make juice. We grow tomatoes—I do that myself. To maintain a minimum standard of living, I think you probably just need to work. Still, it would be nice if the government helped…