Evening sun cut the atmosphere at a razor-sharp slant, bathing the fields and mud houses and even the trash piles in intense orange light, but Laura and I hadn’t ventured down the street, over the bridge, and into the village to take pictures. We looked down the mud road that stretched out before us and immediately recognized the smiling face of the man standing in front of the green-roofed clinic where he works as a guard. Bek was still all smiles by the time we reached the gate. He opened for us and led us into the waiting room of the gray building welded together from shipping containers and covered in gray tin siding.
In a few minutes his wife Aina joined us, and she had brought ice cream cones—not the 13 cent ice cream cones. No, sir. These ones easily cost 30 cents each. It was going to be a good meeting.
We were gathering that early evening because a few days earlier Laura had seen this video. She shared it with our friends, and they had, in turn, shared it with others, and the response was immediate and overwhelming. People were asking us how they could give money to help. The image of a grown man in tears because he hasn’t eaten for two days is hard to get out of your mind. Many people shown in the video live on the other side of the highway that forms the northern boundary of the capital city. It’s where Bek and his wife live. And just a little ways further north from their house sits the city dump is. From our house we can see (and smell) the smoke rising from the smoldering trash. Laura went to a patient’s house there once. When the largest bazaar in Central Asia shuts down because of a pandemic, the result is catastrophe for the workers there who barely scraped by as it was. Now it’s been nearly two months. Hunger pains are growing.
Laura, Bek, Aina, and I talked through a plan. We decided to give fifty families packages of food in the following quantities:
5 kilograms (11 pounds) of flour
5 kilograms of pasta
2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of potatoes
2 kilograms of onions
2 kilograms of carrots
1 liter (1 quart) of cooking oil
The next day, Monday, Aina would talk to the village leader’s assistant and ask for a list of needy families that we could help. (It’s always best to have the approval of the local government whenever you do anything.) Bek and Aina would add the names of families they knew were in need to that list. They would talk to the owner of a store right near their house and see if he would deliver the food to their house after buying it in bulk from the bazaars where he buys supplies for his store. If he could deliver the food on Friday, we could make the food packages on Saturday morning and deliver the food to people’s houses Saturday afternoon in our car. We figured it’d be better to actually take the food to people instead of having people gather at Bek and Aina’s house. On one occasion when the clinic had given away food, two people had almost gotten into a fist fight. We thought avoiding gatherings of people altogether was the way to go. More discreet. Would allow us a little bit more control over the situation. Planned like true Westerners.
We finished our ice cream, made written notes of our plans, and went our separate ways that evening. Bek stayed in the small guard shack on the side of the clinic where he works. Aina would eventually make her way back home outside of city limits, across the highway, and in the direction of the eternally smoldering piles of trash. And Laura and I headed in the opposite direction, back over the bridge and into city limits, where amenities like running water and steady electricity and even natural gas are in abundance.
By Tuesday morning the plan had changed. Naturally. We weren’t going to have the food delivered. Aina and I were going to go with the shop owner to the bazaar to buy the food. And we weren’t going on Friday. We were going on Tuesday, that very morning. And we weren’t going to deliver the food to people’s houses in our car. We were going to have people come in small groups of four to Bek and Aina’s house to pick up the packages. At that point, the only part of our plan that was the same was the list and quantities of food that we were going to give away. But hey. At this point, six years in, we’re go-with-the-flow professionals. And by that, I mean, it only took Laura and me a single, relatively small argument to finally agree that we’d go along with Bek and Aina’s change of plans.
By 9:15 Tuesday morning I was en route to Bek’s house. It’s about a 20 minute walk if you huff it. I met Aina at the gate of her house, and we walked over to the small store of the man who was taking us to the bazaar. It appeared that the store and the man’s house had both been carved out of the same building. Inside the store, an open doorway behind the counter revealed a wooden staircase and what looked like the entryway of a house. Aina and I decided to wait for the store owner outside. By that time it was clear I hadn’t really needed to huff it. We waited for maybe 10 minutes. A younger man opened a gate behind the store, but no one else appeared. We waited some more. Finally a flatbed truck pulled out of the gate and stopped in front of us. In a few minutes, we were off.
Aina and I were both wearing masks. Officially, they were still required. In practice, masks were a thing of the past, especially due to the rumor that the whole virus thing was actually a government conspiracy to receive emergency aid money from foreign countries. “At first we were all scared, but now we’re used to it,” Nuri the shop owner said as we bumped down the highway.
At one point Nuri opened the ash tray of his truck, looking for something. Turned out he didn’t have any of his license or truck registration with him. What exactly was he going to show the police when we got stopped at the checkpoint heading into town on our way to the bazaar? Then Aina revealed that she had forgotten the official document from the village leader’s assistant (with the official blue stamp, mind you) that said that a group of volunteers would be delivering food in the area where she lived. What proof could we offer those same checkpoint police to show that we were on official business and not just three rebel rousers freewheeling around in the middle of a pandemic? I would have turned back to get the Nuri’s documentation and Aina’s magical blue-stamped piece of paper. They saw otherwise. By the time we pulled up in line at the checkpoint, I figured I’d just have to wait and see. So I did the only thing I could. I prayed.
When it was our turn at the checkpoint, the officer approached the car on the passenger side. Aina was in the middle, and Nuri the driver was, well, driving. I just hoped the officer wouldn’t ask me any questions. Was my mask enough to hide my bright-as-day foreignness? I doubted it. We’d soon find out. Nuri put my window down, and one of the first things that the officer said was that there couldn’t be more than two people riding together in a single vehicle.
I thought for sure the officer was going to turn us around, especially when Nuri wouldn’t be able to show him his license or registration and we wouldn’t be able to offer any proof that we were on a mission to buy food to give away.
“We’re volunteers,” Aina said. “We’re going to buy food and give it away to needy people.”
Nuri backed her up.
Without a word and without asking for either documentation or any proof of our claim, the officer waved us through.
I need to pray more often, and I need to pray not only when there’s literally nothing else I can do. I wonder what my life might look like then.
We pulled into the first bazaar and began making our way through winding, crowded streets. We stopped where semitrailers of carrots were parked. After some haggling with several people over the price, Nuri said he’d take 100 kilograms (220 pounds). The men weighed two enormous sacks and threw them onto the bed of Nuri’s flatbed truck. Take a wild guess as to how much 100 kilograms of carrots costs. Go ahead.
Give up?
A smooth $10.45.
Next we bought 100 kilos of onions (for $24.30) and a little over 100 kilos of potatoes (for $41.10). Then it was on to find pasta, flour, and oil. At some point after loading up the potatoes, the conversation between the three of us turned to the idea of us giving away pasta.
“You know,” Nuri said, “people have been bringing macaroni to my store and exchanging it for other things. They don’t want macaroni. They don’t know what to do with it.”
“People are tired of eating macaroni,” Aina chimed in. “They’d much rather have rice.”
“How much is rice per kilo compared to macaroni?” I asked.
Aina said it was something like $0.18 more per kilo. It was obvious that Nuri, a store owner, was used to calculating numbers in his head because after just a few seconds, he came up with the total difference between buying pasta and buying the same number of kilos of rice instead: something like $45.
I wanted to say, “Only?” But I held my tongue and pondered the situation.
Here’s where the rubber meets the road in terms of what we’re after here. From the beginning, Laura and I thought it would be best to do this under Bek and Aina. Weeks before, they themselves, together with their friends with love-touched hearts, gave away food to 11 families on their street. Since they had already taken such an initiative, we hoped we could come alongside them and simply allow them to do more of what they’d already done. May their neighbors, many of whom have been harsh and full of nothing but gossip about this family who dares to follow a “foreign” God, see their good works and give glory to their Father in heaven.
So we wanted this to be their operation, and we wanted to stay in the background as much as possible. That means, of course, that you have to let them call the shots. And it turns out their metric for calling shots is not always calibrated to our metric. So how much do you just go with the flow? They wanted to change the menu. But pasta was clearly already written on the list. I had brought extra money just in case, but what’s a guy to do?
“Oh, and what about sugar?” Aina asked. “That would be good to give away, too.”
Hmm. Now that’s adding a whole other item.
We went back and forth comparing the prices. Finally we seemed to reach some sort of agreement. Originally we were going to give away five kilos (11 pounds) of pasta, but we agreed to buy three kilos of rice and two kilos of sugar and nix the pasta altogether. If they were happy, so was I. In the end, I lost track of the actual price difference. But that was the least of my worries. We wound around the streets of that bazaar and then made our way to another bazaar, stopping here and there in our flatbed truck until Aina had crossed everything off her list. We even remembered to buy plastic bags to separate the food into. Then it was back to Aina’s house.
Their house sits on a small, fenced-in lot just north of city limits. During the 2005 revolution, people from all over the country flocked to unincorporated land around the capital, illegally claimed plots, and put up houses. Entire villages sprang up. Their area is just one of many such villages that hug the city on all sides. Their gate is pea green and rusted. The rest of the wall around their property is mud brick in some places and corrugated sheets of asbestos (commonly used for roofing here) in others. Their electricity is spotty, and they don’t have running water to their property. And they are much better off than most. Bek kept his job all through the quarantine.
Once at their house, we unloaded the food. We had 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of each of the following: carrots, potatoes, onions, and sugar. We had 250 kilograms (550 pounds) of flour, 150 kilograms (330 pounds) of rice, and 50 liters (about 50 quarts) of cooking oil. I called Laura to let her know we were there, so she walked over to Aina’s house. The plan was to go ahead and separate the items into food packages that afternoon and then deliver the food, but, naturally, Bek had gone fishing and wasn’t home. And it was starting to rain. So, naturally, Aina made us lunch. After we ate, we agreed to come to their house the following morning at 9:30. Aina said something about having her family start dividing the food into packages that night and that we could finish whatever was left the following morning.
So back the next day Laura and I went. And those little stinkers. Bek, Aina, and her two daughters had divided all the food into fifty precisely measured packets. All that was left was that day was to put the individual bags of food into two larger bags so families could carry them home. Bek was at work, so Laura, Aina, and I got to it. Once bags were divided, Aina got on her phone and started calling.
“Hey, Nuri,” Aina said to the store owner who had taken us to the bazaar the previous day. “Send me the four families you said you knew, OK? Just those four. No one else.”
Her system, as far as I can tell, worked like this: Previously, Aina had contacted several people whom she trusted and asked them to tell her how many families they knew personally that needed food. For example, maybe one person said he knew four needy families and another person said she knew three. When Aina called on the day of the food distribution, each of Aina’s contacts would tell those specific families to go to Aina’s house to collect their food. Once those people had come and gone, Aina would call her next contact and have that person send her another group of people.
It seemed reasonable. We had originally agreed not to do it that way so that we wouldn’t be overrun with people walking onto their property just off the street and asking for food. People carrying two large sacks with 17 kilos (37.5 pounds) of free food is a great way to draw both attention and a crowd. At first, groups of four or five people appeared at Aina’s gate a few minutes after she had made a call. Aina asked names and addresses, and one person from each family signed, indicating that he or she had received the food package. That way we could see who we had and who we hadn’t given food to, and in the future, instead of always giving food to the same people, we could make sure that people who previously hadn’t received food got some.
Most of the people who appeared at Aina’s gate were mothers with children, some wearing head coverings, indicating a certain level of devotion to the dominate religion in the country, but all except a few wearing a mask, indicating a strict adherence to Aina’s orders. A certain sadness colored nearly every face. Even before the quarantine and the shutdown of Central Asia’s largest bazaar where many of these people work, life was hard. Two months with no work was lemon juice in a dog bite. They wore their weariness on their faces. Now they had to show up to a stranger’s house and receive a handout.
“Are you thankful?” Aina asked almost every family. “Tell them,” she’d say and point to us. “He’s a teacher like me, and she’s a medical worker. They’re working here as volunteers to help people. Go ahead, tell them thank you.”
By the time you’re approaching 60 in this culture, you can say pretty much whatever you want and people will do it. So a lot of people wished us long life and happiness. Some of them even smiled.
For the most part, Aina’s system worked. We did have to turn some people away when they showed up but hadn’t been sent by any of Aina’s contacts. We wrote down their names and phone numbers and told them that if we gave away food again, we’d call them. Even so, I know we ended up giving away some food to people who came because they heard that others were receiving food.
When just a few food packages remained, Aina and I made a couple of deliveries to some of her immediate neighbors. One was just down the street to the house of a disabled man who lives with his wife and small children in a single room made of mud bricks. He was sitting on the front step, a crutch lying next to him, and he grinned as we passed through the gate.
“May God our Father bless you,” I said to him, setting the two bags of food at his feet, and Aina and I headed back to her house.
A older, rotund man on the street who had seen us delivering sacks of food decided he needed to put in his two cents. He lectured Aina on the decisions she’d made about who to give food to. In his mind we were giving food to people who didn’t need it when others who truly needed it weren’t getting anything. (We had already decided that even if people lied to our faces about their need, we’d still give to them because the fact of the matter was that even if they weren’t as bad off as their neighbors, they and their families would still greatly benefit from the help.)
Aina, who can hold her own with the most rotund of them, shot right back: “Why don’t you go give food to them, then?”
After several volleys back and forth, much of which was way beyond this white-belt Kyrgyz speaker, the man eventually walked off, and Aina and I walked through her gate and pulled the sliding lock closed behind us.
And with that, 850 kilograms (1874 pounds) of food had gone to 50 families who live in slum-like conditions on the outskirts of the city. Just like God looks down and waters trees on remote mountainsides and provides food for the birds who never farm a day in their lives, God provided each family with each kilogram of this food. We can no more take credit for any of this than the mailman can take credit for a letter you receive from a loved one. We’re messengers of the King, proclaiming in both word and deed that Love has come. Our prayer is that as these families feel such tangible acts of God’s kindness, they might taste his love perhaps for the first time and come to know him personally as the good, providing Father that he is. Truly, may they see these good works and give glory to their Father and to ours by trusting and enjoying him forever. It is to this end that we live.