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.