One Bucket at a Time

This blog entry was written while I was still in Kyrgyzstan, but I didn’t feel comfortable enough to publish it while I was there. That’s probably because the NGO’s guesthouse at which I’m living has a view of a military base. I thought it would be in poor taste to point that out.

It’s a very nice apartment. Hot water (except for June when the city hot water is off) and cold water. Shower and tub. Flushing toilet connected to the city sewerage system. Electric oven and 4-burner gas range. 3kg washing machine. Balcony. On one of the main streets in Bishkek. Cable television. Air conditioning unit in the living room. 2 blocks to the “White House,” 2 blocks to work, 1 block to a 24-hour grocery store, 2 blocks to an air-conditioned “shopping mall” and 3 blocks to the nicest (and one of the busiest) stores in the country (Turkish-owned, of course)—and on the 5^th floor overlooking a Kyrgyz Ministry of Defense facility. Specifically, from the kitchen and balcony windows, in addition to views of the Kyrgyz Alatau mountains in the distance, you can see the swimming pool at the military base.

First, I want to say that I support the Kyrgyz Republic’s right to have its own military bases (not just Russian and American air bases—a topic we’ll save for another day). Second, I want to say that I support the right of the draftees/recruits to swim. It’s quite hot in Bishkek in the summer, and if there’s a pool at the base, I see no reason it shouldn’t be used. However, observing this swimming pool has become quite the metaphor for my time in Bishkek.

When I first arrived, the soldiers were busy painting the pool. Maybe it hadn’t been used in many years. Maybe they paint it every year. I have no idea. It’s not like I’m going to ask the soldier at the guardhouse whether they paint it every year or not while taking out the trash in the morning. Once the paint dried, filling the pool took about a week. Much effort went into painting the pool, then slowly allowing water to fill the pool from a single, tiny spigot.

Once the pool was full, the soldiers enjoyed it briefly. They did swimming exercises in the cool of the mornings. Splashing sounds came from just after dark but before the soldiers sing in the evenings. It was all the sorts of things you expect from a swimming pool. Then, one night, it rained. The next morning, the pool was as green as spinach.

Since it was no longer appealing to swim in the pool, it needed to be drained. And I’m not sure if it’s one of those things Kyrgyz soldiers do because they’re soldiers (made-up work to keep them busy) or if the pool doesn’t have a plug to pull somewhere to drain it, but the pool was drained by having people get in and heave small buckets (big enough to wash your socks in…not huge) of water into the drainage ditch that surrounds the pool. So they heaved the green water out by hand in big, wet groups.

Then the pool got filled up again. Soldiers started swimming in it again. Then the same thing happened. It rained. So again, groups of soldiers get into the pool with their little buckets and empty the whole thing out again. At this point, as of this morning, I think this was the fifth time I’ve seen soldiers manually emptying out the swimming pool. Of course, yesterday and today it’s been anticipation of rain (which has just started) instead of after the rain has already turned the water green.

At work, I’m feeling like a soldier always heaving water out of the pool only to have to do it again in a week. I’m repeating myself until I’m blue in the face—we’ve got to simplify the material to make it shorter; we’ve got to make the material easier to read so small farmers will be able to read it; we’ve got to simplify so that everything fits on one page; we’ve got to put this information in a chart so that it’s easy to read. Simplification is hard enough for Western scientists, and apparently I’m the first person to have tried to introduce it to this part of the world.

I’m beginning to wonder if it’s even worth filling up the pool in the first place if you’re going to have to manually empty it out, a bucket at a time. What’s the purpose of Sisyphusian effort at development? Am I only pushing the rock up the hill to watch it roll back down? Are all of our development efforts for naught? Is it worth trying to do anything if Kyrgyzstan’s health indicators, education level and literacy, environmental indicators, and food security indicators are just going to continue to degrade over time? No matter how often we fill up the pool, will that just mean that some severely food insecure household has to empty it out a bucket at time and gets left with what it had in the beginning—an empty swimming pool? Is it even worth having a pool (or is that a Western/European/American/Russian/Japanese wish imposed on Kyrgyzstan) if you’re going to spend more time manually emptying it out than you are swimming? While there are surely many possible technological solutions to the problem at hand (chemically treating the water in the swimming pool, adding a drain, covering the pool before it rains), what keeps the Kyrgyz people from using these, even after they’ve been introduced? Is it that they can’t afford the technology or is it that those in charge want to create some work by having people empty out the pool by hand, one bucket at a time?