Man vs. Robot
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Dear Friends,
Things have felt overwhelmingly busy lately. I organized a 300-person spring picnic event for work. Jake’s parents came to visit for two weeks. Nora caught a bad GI bug and gave it to me, and then we all came down with colds. We went to lake Issyk Kul. I launched my tapestry shop (thank you for your support—there are a few mini tapestries left if you’d like to peek). I designed a huge program for a festival my choir back home was hosting. I’ve emailed with nearly all the families coming to post this summer. Our cover band played a house party, the embassy social hour, and a gig at a local pub. I fed my child a lot of peanut butter sandwiches.
And on top of all that, the news. Shifting political leadership. Deportations out, refugees in. Sanctioned and unsanctioned communication platforms, gifts, laws, etc. I’m having a hard time figuring out how to shape the story of this year in my head.
I’m always feeling like I can’t track it all, and that nothing that happens is sticking in the right way.
Jake’s parents spent a few days in France before they came to Bishkek. While they were there, they went to Normandy, where there are museums, preserved battlegrounds, and cemeteries that tell the story of D-Day.
But now, probably because of the internet, it feels like everything is happening at once, too fast to even get the story down. How will future generations learn about this period of time if we can’t even remember it all now?
I suppose one answer is what I’m doing here. Keeping some version of a human record, albeit poorly.
Here’s what it feels like to be here: in some ways, a relief. It’s strawberry season in Kyrgyzstan, and you can get a whole kilo of berries for 250 som (just under $3). The road that leads from our house to the embassy is still under construction, so every day we get out by the roadblock and walk ten minutes through dirt and rocks to get to the embassy.
It’s hot, for May. The cottonwood fluff turns the world outside into an allergy snow globe. The grass grows tall. My coworker A warns me about ticks.
“It’s okay, I wore boots when we went out to see the poppies,” I tell her.
“They can JUMP. In your BOOTS,” she says.
They’re building a new cable car at Ala Archa National Park, so half the hike is just jack hammer noise, and the birds that used to come land on your hands have headed for quieter hills.
We take Jake’s parents to Lake Issyk Kul, where we stay at a spot called “SILENCE HOTEL.” It is as advertised—silent, with impeccable views of the lake and the snow-capped mountains behind it. It even has its own beach, albeit a bit plagued by horse poop. The best part of the hotel is the terrace café, which has open windows, mango passionfruit lemonade, and giant swings. We’d sort of thought we would explore the area, but we end up staying at the hotel the whole time because just up the dirt driveway, the entire town of Cholpon-Ata is a construction zone.
Along the road back to Bishkek, locals wave bundles of rhubarb at our passing car.
The rhubarb is tart, surprising, like the twists and turns on the journey to the lake, someone reads aloud from a phone.
Here is your metaphor, Kyrgyzstan says. It makes a great pie.
Everything here in this country is constantly changing, but it always feels like man vs. nature, in a way.
Being a government employee, though, feels distinctly man vs. man.
In the absence of any real timeline or information, we think of all the worst things that could happen to us. There’s continued talk of RIF layoffs, but there’s also the new State Department budget to contend with—a sliver of its former self. We wait to find out more information. What programs or allowances might be cut?
The point of all this man vs. man, it seems, is to make at least half of us turn man vs. self.
The brain spiral begins. The contingency plans feed more contingency plans. What changes can we withstand? What changes would collapse our lives here? And then what?
When bidding on new overseas assignments, Foreign Service families get good at imagining what our lives might be like in different countries, different environments. At first, man vs. self feels productive. Almost like planning. Almost like weaving a safety net against the chaos. But none of the knots are real yet, so like, what’s the point?
While working alone in the house one morning, I hear a sound that I think at first is an Apple AirTag.
Blinkyblinkyblink. Blinkyblinkyblink.
What is that? Why would someone be buzzing an AirTag?
Then, man vs. self, I think, oh, could be surveillance.
And then I realize. It’s a bird. A bird is making that noise.
Too much man vs. self and we forget nature entirely.
I feel like one marker of a crisis is not being able to plan for the future. I felt this way when my father was dying. Time looped around itself. Work, trying to start a family--all of the things I thought were important at the time—ceased to exist. It was the same during COVID. Could we plan to see one another? Could we plan to go anywhere, do anything?
In lieu of the future, we planned the present as best we could. There were the three P’s of the time—Peloton, puppies, and pastries, all which took micro-planning, routine, and commitment to being present. (To keep with the P theme, I took up painting and intensive parenting.)
And now, in this moment, again we can only live immediately. Planning for summer feels hazy. Planning for next school year is far out of reach.
“Your family is bidding this fall, right?” a colleague asks me.
“Oh,” I say. “I hope so?”
So instead of planning for the future, I teach my music classes. I put together a last-minute social hour event for the embassy community. I go to a friend’s house to bake bagels. I start a new tapestry. I clean out my closet. I order Nora new shoes and new pajamas. Even in all the stagnation, all the uncertainty—even despite a week-long stomach flu—she keeps growing.
“I can read everything now,” she tells me one morning at breakfast. “I can read the longest word on our classroom bulletin board. INTERNATIONAL.”
After we endure the jackhammers while hiking in Ala Archa, we flag down a shuttle bus to take us back down the mountain to the parking lot.
We sit in the back. The front is full of older Kyrgyz ladies, all dressed up and wearing fancy hats. And they are singing. They are singing every folk song they know, some in unison, some call and response.
Nora scowls and wants to know when we’ll be back at the car. I am enraptured to hear something so steeped in shared tradition. I have no idea what the lyrics mean, but I am okay with not knowing.
There’s a quote from game developer, Neal Agarwal, that’s been making the rounds this week:
“In a world of AI slop, something hand-crafted and made with care stands out like a sore thumb. It’s like seeing a home-cooked meal on the McDonald’s menu. It might actually be easier to stand out in that world.”
I should point out that there is no McDonald’s in Kyrgyzstan.
I take my in-laws to Orto Say bazaar, and we buy bags of strawberries and kattama (flat bread with onions) from a kid helping run the bread stand. I find the carrot kimchi I like that the Korean immigrants to central Asia invented—neither fully Kyrgyz nor fully Korean, but some perfect in-between. We buy peanuts covered in sesame seeds. A ball for Nora, featuring the Kuromi cat. Toilet paper and cucumbers and a jewel art kit for my mother-in-law to do on the plane home.
The bazaar is full of the best, freshest, most authentic things, and also enough made-in-China junk to thrill a 5-year-old for years.
And so goes everything, I suppose. Trying to sort the birds from the AirTags, trying to stay out of our own heads. Tiptoeing over the horse plops to get to the lake.
Stay out of trouble, stay in touch,
Dot
The view from the Silence Hotel.
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DISCLAIMER: The views expressed in this newsletter are my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the US Department of State or the US Government.