iPhones in Outhouses

            I don’t live in a yurt in Kyrgyzstan as I know many of you have thought and I certainly hoped for. In fact, no one really lives in yurts all year round. I live in a nice one story house with a cement foundation, mud brick walls plastered with lime stone, and wood floors almost entirely covered by carpets. I sleep on a bed, no box spring or mattress, but it is raised from the ground and I have a comfortable layering of tushuks, a traditional mattress pad. But I do use an outhouse. At night I use my iPhone’s light to find my way to the outhouse.  As my best connection to family, friends, and news far away from here, my iPhone is among my most valued possessions and daily I fear dropping it down the dark hole in the middle of the outhouse floor. What goes down there never comes back out. My fear is compounded every time I hear a story from a local friend or another Peace Corps Volunteer about a recent smart phone falling down into the abyss.

            The other day I was struck by the irony of iPhones at the bottom of outhouses all around Kyrgyzstan. It’s comical, the pinnacle of modernity being rendered useless by something so antiquated. But it’s not antiquated here, the outhouse remains the most common toilet throughout rural Kyrgyzstan. Despite the world around rural Kyrgyzstan rapidly developing in technologies (including plumbing and sewage treatment) not all of these advances are gracing the hills and mountains here. iPhones and, admittedly to a greater degree, other smart phones are found all over Kyrgyzstan. Here, like in the US and elsewhere, you’d be hard pressed to board any public transit vehicle without seeing someone using a smart phone. People play Angry Birds in Kyrgyzstan, they just don’t do it while sitting on the toilet.

            To a more important degree, these contrasts of development and advances are seen in political rights and cultural practices. Ask any Kyrgyzstani about the form of government here and you’d hear a prideful response noting how Kyrgyzstan is the first Central Asian country to have a democratically elected president and parliament. But ask about the rights for the 80,000+ kidnapped brides this year, and you’ll get a more convoluted answer. Like outhouses, bridenapping in Kyrgyzstan has somehow continued in the face of advances surrounding the country. And like the outhouses, the existence of bridenapping is swallowing up any progress made elsewhere.

            For more on bridenapping, I’ve written another post about it, click here to read.

Тынч Means Peace, it also means Quiet

This post has been the hardest for me to write. This is the struggle of the Peace Corps Volunteer. This is the struggle to walk the tight rope of cultural respect and being conscious of human rights violations. This is where the idealistic volunteer, aware of the injustices in the world only to the extent of reading about them in a book, meets the true injustices in the bitter flesh and the tragic truth. I have been advised not to write this post. Americans and Kyrgyzstanis alike have told me this fight is useless and I am a fool if I think otherwise.

Read on to hear the struggle of this fool.

Тынч is the Kyrgyz word for peace. It also means quiet. I am a fan of peace, but in this instant I cannot be quiet. Too many hearts are screaming inside bodies with mouths sewn closed. You may not hear the noise, but quiet it is not.

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, I am here with three specific goals set by the US Government. 1. To transfer skills. 2. To share US culture with members of my host community. 3. To share my host community’s culture with the US. This post is none of these three. You may think, oh hey, it’s the third one. No. It is not. I am not discussing Kyrgyzstan’s culture. I will be discussing a practice that should be ended; it is not and should not be part of the culture.

Earlier this year a 12 year-old girl committed suicide down the street from my house. It was the second child suicide in the village since my arrival. I wrote a blog post about it, but before I could do an edit another tragedy struck the village. A girl from this village was bride kidnapped and during the getaway the bride kidnapper crashed the car, killing the girl. The bride kidnapper survived, he was not charged for anything, and the consensus was that he should have been driving more carefully.

Bride kidnapping is illegal, but quite possibly the least observed law in all of the country. Either due to a terribly misguided understanding of historic Kyrgyz culture, or a surprisingly effective attempt at promoting male chauvinism, bride kidnapping has become so prevalent in Kyrgyz culture most estimates say between 50-70% of marriages among the ethnically Kyrgyz are by bride kidnapping. There are two types of bride kidnapping, consensual and non-consensual. This post is specifically discussing non-consensual bride kidnapping.

Here is my struggle. Bride kidnapping is without a doubt the most harmful practice in Kyrgyzstan to everyone in the country, yet few realize the extent of its harm. People believe it is a central and positive aspect of the Kyrgyz culture, so criticizing the practice is considered criticizing Kyrgyz culture. A Kyrgyz person speaking out against it runs the risk of being ostracized.

Why is bride kidnapping so harmful? Is it really much worse than arranged marriages? Isn’t it just a different cultural understanding? If you are asking these questions or similar ones, please continue reading and if by the end you are not convinced, let me know.

For those of you who really know me, you know the death of a 12 year-old girl is not one I can just let go of. Similarly, the preventable death of any youth is not just sad to me, but a terrible tragedy and failing of society. Those who have died are not the only ones suffering from bride kidnapping, the bride kidnapped women, the men involved, the children, the families, even the economy and the future generations all suffer. Bride kidnapping is not a localized issue and it is not a short-term problem. 

Women: Non-consensually bride kidnapped women are raped. Over and over. And this is considered acceptable. It often interrupts or altogether stops their university education. Economic opportunities are cut down to none or negligible. These women are no longer treated as humans, but instead as property.

Men: It may seem irrational, but men suffer from bride kidnapping as well. They are forced to treat women as less than human and suffer from the psychological issues connected with that. Bride kidnapping destroys the potential for men to have a respectful relationship with their spouses. The practice of bride kidnapping often means men are marrying before they are ready.

Children: In poorer rural areas, girls are brought up to expect to one day be bride kidnapped, at a young age girls begin to accept their future lives at home tending to domestic chores. When this is the only prospect presented to the girls, there is little drive to pursue education. For those girls who do pursue their education and make it to university, a bride kidnapping during their studies means they are never to return. The Kyrgyz say that the girls can return to university, but it is incredibly rare since most families require the new bride remain at home for two years before going back to her parents or university. By this time they have children to raise and feed, meaning time and money are no longer available for university. Boys are taught they will be handed everything in life, even a wife. Why work hard for anything if it will be given to you? Especially school?

Family: It is customary for the youngest son to live in his parents’ house with his parents and family. Often the bride kidnapped wife of the youngest son is physically and verbally abused by her mother-in-law. This results in permanent animosity within the household and pent up anger within the bride kidnapped wife.

Economy: Kidnapped brides are commonly forced to remain in the house for the first two years and there after are expected to take care of the household chores and child rearing. This means for many, they cannot work or start businesses, meaning fewer laborers and fewer businesses. My organization works to help these women start businesses, but given the constraints we can only help women start businesses they can conduct from within the home. With such a large percentage of the population out of the workforce, the economy is doomed. Not only are they out of the workforce, but women also happen to be the higher savers. Statistically women save much more than men around the world, the cost this has to the Kyrgyzstani savings rate is significant. A male dominated workforce also means more corruption and cronyism, a cost itself to the economy and an indirect cost by being a disincentive for potential foreign investment.

Future Generations: With bride kidnapping, women do not control the family finances. When women do control the family finances higher percentages of income go toward the children’s nutrition, school supplies, academics, and healthcare. Women also tend to favor sons to a lesser degree than men do, resulting in better health and education for daughters. Stunted growth among children in Kyrgyzstan is extremely high, especially among girls. Studies show, were women to have jobs or businesses and control the family finances, stunting would all but be erased in Kyrgyzstan.

Certainly, bride kidnapping is not the single factor holding Kyrgyzstan back from blooming as a successful country, you don’t need a degree in economics to see that. My point however, is that it does have an impact on far more areas than meet the eye. Were it to end, Kyrgyzstan would see improvements in all aspects of life. I’m here to develop Kyrgyzstan on a micro level, so I will focus on this problem at a micro level, but in reality only a micro change can be expected from that. Maybe someone interested in developing Kyrgyzstan will pick up on this at a higher level, кудай буйруса (God willing).

Maybe it’ll be a human rights activist, if so, here is some fuel to get started:

·      Bride kidnapping is clearly saying that women do not have the right to their own life, liberty, or security of person.

·      Bride kidnapping is, essentially, slavery.

·      Bride kidnapped brides are categorically subjected to rape, physical abuse, and verbal assault.

·      Often marriages from bride kidnappings are never officially registered as marriages, meaning brides do not have rights of inheritance should their husbands die, or alimony should their husbands desert them.

·      Local police routinely refuse bride kidnapped brides recognition when they attempt to file a complaint.

·      The marriage is not consensual and studies show 18% of these marriages are with a bride under 18 years old.

·      Bride kidnapping interferes with education, both before and after the act.

Kyrgyzstan wants peace. Like all places on earth, Kyrgyzstan deserves peace. But things must get loud. Feelings must be verbalized, voices must be heard, and change, true change, must occur before Kyrgyzstan can be quiet.