So, I’ve been gone this past week in a village in the south. I had a pretty good week and I’ll let the pictures speak for most of the trip.
Highlights:
Kulob 2700: Kulob is the neighboring city which was calibrating it’s 2700 anniversary. They had been working all year to make the city look great and the president and many important visitors were coming, so since I was close I decided to stop by and see the festivities. I went one day before the actual big events and saw a lot of the preparations. One of the fun things was that there were several kids walking around with costumes on for the concert/show/musical that they would perform for the president tomorrow evening. When I left the city the next morning they had made it a point to make the road to the city beautiful and even had school children lining the streets waving flags and flowers as the important visitors went by. Close to the city is an ancient fortress that they had also spruced up for the celebration. They had guys dressed up in warrior costumes standing on the walls and lots of girls in traditional dresses waiting to greet the guest with fresh bread. I talked my taxi driver into stopping for a few minutes so I was able to take some pictures and see it up close.
Picking cotton: Basically, the soviets turned Central Asia into their cotton growing area to supply the Soviet Union with cotton for clothing, etc… It’s the most important cash crop in the region. In soviet times they had cotton combines that picked most of the cotton. Since the fall of the union there aren’t any machines life and it is picked by hand now. Many children are working in the cotton fields as a way to earn money for their families, sometimes in stead of going to school… so I wanted to see it all for myself. In the family I was staying with all the children picked cotton after school and so on one of the days I asked if I could go too. They said it would be ok and we grabbed our cotton bags (old 100lb flour sacks) and headed to the fields. The fields were about a mile walk away. When we got there we lined up in rows with the other workers and headed down our row. We picked for and hour or so then rested under a tree that was in the field then headed out to pick some more.. I’m a terrible cotton picker…… but in the few hours that we were in the fields I picked about 10pounds… which was close to a full sack. They pay the people here about 3 cents for 2 pounds and I just gave the family I stayed with my 15 cents I earned for the day.
Swimming. There was a great swimming hole near the village and I made it a point to go everyday, especially since it was my only way to wash up.. as well as being a fun place to swim. It was basically a spill over pool for a local canal. It was pretty close to the river and so it always had fresh water running through.
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