Travels in Central Asia

Settling into Central Asia

This journey has been planned for almost six months. After two wonderful experiences overseas as part of a Fulbright-Hays Study team to India, and a U.S. State Department funded program to Armenia last summer, I had set out to carve my own future Fulbright experience to another spot in that vast expanse we might know by names such as Eurasia, Central Asia, the Confederation of Independent states, or crudely that land of the "stans": AfghaniSTAN, KazakhSTAN, KyrgyzSTAN, PakiSTAN,TajikiSTAN, TurkminiSTAN,and UzbekiSTAN. If you have not been here or had a compelling interest to study this region, your familiarity with these countries is limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan, or if you are a regular reader of the NY Times you probably encountered front page stories on what might loosely be called "politial unrest" in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan during the last three months. Long range, I have as my goal to serve as a Fulbright scholar in this region as part of a study on schoolteachers in Eurasia and Central Asia. My invigorating trip to Armenia last summer put me in contact with the compelling stories teachers in the region face as they encounter the the shifting ideological nuances of their countries in the face of little or no pay, burdensome responsibilities and often crumbling facilities. I submitted a paper to the International Symposium to get a closer look at this part of the former Soviet Union, while making contact with scholars and university administrators in the region. Yesterday, for example I was greeted by a young male graduate student, Seyit, a research assistant at Kyrgyz Turkish Manas University and an assistant to the symposium organizers. He was waiting for me at 4am just outside of immigration and was brandishing a sign with the letters PATRICK FLEMING in the crispest. landscape oriented, laser printing of Times New Roman font I had ever seen (and welcomed). From there he brought me to my flat and then helped me negotiate my way through the Bishkek phone world. When he left, I must say that in this world of Cyrillic alphabets (used for both the Russian and Kyrgyz languages), I initially felt as if I would never leave the place. I have had wonderful experiences in my life wayfinding through foreign spaces, from the skyscrapers of major cities, to the Arabic language towns in western Saudi Arabia, to the elongated scripts of the Hindi and Tamil languages of India, to marked and unmarked trails in the Olympic Peninsula of the Pacific Northwest and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Yet, my initial reaction to Seyit's leaving me in my new flat was that if I left the building, I would only stray as far as I could walk and remember. In the absence of clear English signs, I just knew I would never find my way back to my apartment if I left it. On this, I took a nap and hoped this bad dream would end.

posted by Student Success @ 6:21 PM