A Very Serious Country

In the taxi from the airport to my apartment in Bishkek, the sky changed from dim morning to clear golden morning over fields bordered by short white stucco houses with corrugated tin roofs, often with turquoise or blue painted structural beams carved with leaves or scrolls, or herringboned under the eaves of a roof.



Shaarbek and I discussed the upcoming residency and children's issues in Kyrgyzstan as best we were able, considering the hour. I described the children's design laboratory I was planning, and Shaarbek pointed out landmarks (a former state-supported culture-house, now converted into an adventist church; the many parks of Bishkek once tended by government-employed gardeners, less verdant now, according to Shaarbek, but still lush-looking to me).

Landscape always causes me to think of geopolitics: who's living inside these houses? What are the products of these fields, and where are they going, and who will eat them; or transport them along the "silk road", which looks more and more like a silken net of highways and paths crossing the region; or consume them as part of the ethanol/gas mixture fuelling cross-town taxis, or the abundant road excursions over the 95% of Kyrgyzstan covered by mountain ranges, some of which I would come to know over the next five days?

Shaarbek said that many of these houses were inhabited by partial families, as the parents and older siblings and others tend to go elsewhere to work - to oil-rich Kazakhstan, or Russia, or the United States if they can. Soon I would learn from Chopon, the office manager at B'Art, that traditionally in Kyrgyz culture the youngest brother lives with his parents after he grows up and the rest of his relatives have left the family home. Nonetheless, Shaarbek says in the taxi as we are heading toward Bishkek, "Migration in this country is no joke. This is a very serious country."