The Real McCoy: Essay — Renee Giovarelli

Feb 262011
 

Tomb near Chong-Alai, Kyrgyzstan

Here’s a delightful essay, a character study, a study in cross-cultural (mis)communication, and a travel story by Renee Giovarelli. Some of you may have read her “What it’s like living here” piece published earlier on NC, also set in Kyrgyzstan, where Renee often travels for her work. Renee travels the world for an NGO involved in reforming land and property rights. But she also writes urgent, passionate essays about the places she visits. Her essay “The Bad Malaria Shot,” which she presented at her graduate reading in the summer, was a finalist for the Wasafiri 2010 New Writing Prize.

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The Real McCoy

By Renee Giovarelli

When I arrived in Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan at that time, and three hours by car from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, my final destination, Sergei Sergeivich Kuzmin stood pressed against the glass window watching me come into customs.   Hundreds of people, also searching the deplaning passengers for the first signs that their loved ones had arrived safely, stood behind him.  He was a master at pushing himself and me to the front of any crowd.  Seeing him, I relaxed.

Sergei

Sergei had been flying into Central Asia from Moscow to interpret for me for five years, ever since I first started working in Kyrgyzstan, which he called Kyrgyzia, the name of the territory when it was part of the Soviet Union and not an independent country.  Broad and short with a large belly and a Charlie Brown head, he brushed his thinning white hair straight back so that his forehead and bushy eyebrows were prominently featured, as was his sizable nose and enormous smile.  Over the past five years, Sergei and I had established a routine, which seldom varied.  Actually, Sergei established the routine and I complied.  I let Sergei guide me around and take charge of everything on my first trip to Kyrgyzstan, the first country stamped in my passport, and it had been impossible to wrestle any control back since.

But this was going to be our last trip–I had to fire him.

It used to be that every country in the former Soviet Union smelled the same when you stepped off the plane—a faint odor of sewage mixed with cooked cabbage and chilled sweat, and clothes that had been worn for several days but don’t exactly smell yet of body odor, burning leaves and dried cow dung.  For me, the differentiation of the Soviet republics was first signaled by the change in smells in the air at night.

On this, my fifteenth trip, it was cool at three in the morning but would soon be hot enough for a sleeveless silk blouse.  I filed out of the plane behind the oil men and World Bank consultants, in front of the missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers–not fitting in with either crowd. I wasn’t a middle-aged male in a white shirt and not an eager, young zealot with a backpack either, but somewhere between the two and slightly disdainful of both.

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What it’s like living here — from Renee Giovarelli in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Dec 292010
 

Here’s a lovely, exotic What it’s like living here essay from Renee Giovarelli who graduated from Vermont College of Fine Arts last summer. Renee travels the world for an NGO involved in reforming land and property rights. But she also writes urgent, passionate essays about the places she visits. Her essay “The Bad Malaria Shot,” which she presented at her graduate reading in the summer, was a finalist for the Wasafiri 2010 New Writing Prize.

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The Apartment

I don’t notice what it’s like living here when I’m here.  I sit down to write about place, and I only recall conversations.

I’m at a small wooden blue built-in table in someone else’s apartment kitchen.  The kitchen is small but bright, full of the high-desert sun.  Sitting here, writing, with no kids, no husband, no groceries to buy, bills to pay, dogs to feed and walk, bird cages to clean, I am a different person.  I will only live in this apartment for three weeks.  But while I’m here, I will work, I will write, and I will spend time with friends.  I will not juggle anything else—only those three things.

When I come to Bishkek to work, I live in someone else’s apartment—never the same apartment, it depends on who, in the network of friends and relatives of my co-workers, needs the money.  This time I’m on the fifth floor of a Soviet-style building, which could be any building in the city—no elevators, uneven stairs, the smell of cooking mutton in the stairwell.

For these three weeks, the owner and her family have moved in with a relative in the same complex–one building over.  There are three buildings, all five stories high, all facing a common yard.  The yard is dirt with a swing-set and a few benches.

“It’s not going to be that clean,” Zina says.  “They’re Kyrgyz.”

Zina’s Kyrgyz but she calls herself a marginal.  She blames the uncleanliness on the Kyrgyz’ nomadic ways.  Zina is my interpreter and friend.  She found this apartment for me.  The apartment belongs to someone she knows, but the connection is never made clear.  I will pay forty dollars a night to stay here, and after three weeks, the owner will have enough money to take care of her large extended family for months.  The owner will owe Zina a favor—the Kyrgyz accounting system Zina calls it.

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