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Travelers and tragedies
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This following post was taken from an email I wrote while teaching English as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Kazakhstan from 2006-08. This particular post is divided into two sections, entitled Travelers and Tragedies.
Travelers: Recently I've been meeting with a diverse group of international English speakers around Turkestan. I've meet with an ex-pat from China, an Egyptian professor of Arabic, a Chinese teacher, a Dutch lady, and I'm currently looking forward to meeting a French bicyclist in the coming weeks.
I had a great evening at a bar with a journalist from the Netherlands who is writing a book about women in Central Asia. She has visited most of the Central Asia countries from Tajikistan to Kazakhstan. It was incredibly refreshing to talk with a European for whom no topic was taboo. I'm sure we must have been quite a sight for the locals; two pale skinned foreigner in worn jeans, drinking beer, laughing and talking in a mixture of English and Italian as she's been working out of Rome as a foreign correspondent for the last five years.
She spoke in an animated voice and came across as one of those rare individuals who seemed to really enjoy what they do, finding their work exciting in different ways everyday. Indeed, once we started talking about our dreams and aspirations she told me that she's always believed that she could change the world. She smiled, "I know that I can't really do much, but if I can at least push one person to think about something in a different way with my articles and books, then I've succeeded."
Tragedies: On May 9th, school was cancelled and most of the town converged on the square to watch the schoolboys march in uniform and see re-enactments of WWII. Victory day, second in importance only to Nauryz and New Years, is a strange holiday where people celebrate the Soviet Union's greatest achievement: the defeat of fascism.
At the same time, people gather to remember the mind-blowing 20 million lives lost by the USSR during this conflict. It has both a happy festive air and the somber feeling that could only come from one of the worst tragedies in human history. The pure magnitude of the loss makes other countries pale in comparison, and many school children here don't even realize that the US and Britain were also involved in fighting Germany.
As for the war in the Pacific, almost nothing is known. In the square, school children dress up as mothers weeping for their lost sons, young men act as if they are going off to die in war, and the young girls are working hard to keep the country going. Like all good memorials, the day's events forced the spectators to contemplate the horror of war with all the death and destruction that comes with it.
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