Kashka Suu-Epilogue

The camp is over. My kids are gone. I sit alone in a spacious apartment in Bishkek, the whirring sound of the AC unit and the noise of the city remind me that I am not up at Kashka Suu. From my bedroom I can see the snow capped mountains and the foothills before them. Behind one of those hills is Kashka Suu, my home for the last month. A magical place where much learning, laughing and fun happened. The past two days a lot of tears were shed as we packed our bags and said goodbye. A lot of nerves were frayed too before the final day as we waited for the kids’ Kazakh visas to come through. Apparently no one wanted to deal with getting 39 Afghans transit visas so every day of waiting was an ordeal. It’s not easy moving Afghans around the world, let alone Central Asia. But fortunately at the last minute we got them their visas and were able to leave on the 16th as planned. Besides the visa drama, there was the SHOS drama too. SHOS, Russia and China’s response to NATO, had its summit in Bishkek this past week which meant the whole city was in lock down. That caused us stress as we tried to figure out how to move 39 kids on a bus around the city (that wasn’t too hard since we weren’t in the city proper) and whether we would be able to get over the border. Rumours were flying that the border would be closed during the summit but in the end we got the kids up and over the border in record time. Getting the kids up to the Almaty airport (a 6 hr bus ride) was a synch, a huge relief to all of us after all the worrying and nerves spent on getting them there. When all of them were finally through passport control, I broke out the bottle of vodka to toast with my colleagues.
Saying goodbye to my Afghans is always a teary eyed experience yet this year’s group got me more verklempt than usual. I don’t know why, maybe because there were lots of personalities to deal with (more than usual) or I spent more time with them than usual, who knows. There were two students I really bonded with over the month, "Af" and "Jh", and saying goodbye to them was hard. "Af" and I bonded over a five hour hike through the mountains back to Kashka Suu after our rock climbing trip (it was supposed to be a 2 hr. hike but locals don’t have a sense of distance apparently). "Jh" came to camp without his glasses and, as I found out in the first few days, he’s blind as a bat. We had a hilarious time together in the Chinese-run eyeglass store in Bishkek before going up to Kashka Suu. Between his English and the Chinese eye doctor’s Russian, the salesgirl and I were peeing our pants laughing. I would tell him to stand up, he’d sit down, I’d tell him to take his head out of the eye tester machine, he’d put it back in. The best was when I asked him to get to walk with his prescription to make sure he didn’t get dizzy and he walked across the floor and out the door, down the stairs onto the street. I had to run out and stop him for who knows if he would have stopped or gone into traffic. His right eye is worse than his left so he had this pair of glasses heavily Coke bottled on one side. The kids made fun of his glasses at first and he didn’t wear them, but I nipped their joking in the bud and then he wore them. We all fell in love with him and his funny English. The last few days he got really quiet and serious. We had a coffee together at the Almaty airport, another bonding moment, and I asked him why he was so quiet and serious and he said “I am very unhappy. I am leaving all my great teachers and friends at Kashka Suu. And I will miss you very much Mr. Tom. You are like my father.” That got me choked up. When we said goodbye an hour later, we were both crying. He called me father and said he loved me. I said I loved him too and wished him all the best in Minnesota. "Af" was a crying mess like most of the girls when we said goodbye. We hugged for a few minutes and then
she was off. One by one, me and my students said goodbye at the red line that separates passengers from those staying behind. Off they went to the Lufthansa counter to check in. They stood in a cluster by Passport Control, waiting for the rest to check in. I waved "Jh" over for one last hug goodbye and told him to study hard and be a great student. Other boys ran over with him for a last hug from me and Cale, my assistant. Soon they were all through Passport Control and no longer my kids. They now belong to Naeem from our DC office. After a celebratory shot of vodka with Cale, Stanley and Tim (our Almaty colleagues who pushed hard to get them visas), Cale and I were back on the road to Bishkek, a four hour cab ride in the middle of the night. We arrived back at Kashka Suu around 6 am, the glow of the sun rising marking a new day. Weary from the drive and lack of sleep, we made our way back to our cabin. A hush lay over the territory and somehow even in the early morning light, it was clear that something was missing from Kashka Suu. The boys and girls cabins looked dead, hollow shells of concrete and wood. Gone was the exuberant, noisy, chaotic energy of teenagers. Remnants of the students lay about; sunflower seed shells, papers and clothes left behind. The end of camp is always like a death. In the blink of an eye, it is over and you walk around in a daze slowly coming to grips with the fact that the kids are gone and it’s all over. For a month I wake up worrying about 38 students and 11 staff members, now I don’t need to worry about them. The kids are on a flight to the US, my staff is packed and ready to go, there’s nothing to worry about here anymore. I can relax now. That was my thought as I got into bed and took a deep breath of mountain air pungent with smells of grass and flowers, falling into a deep sleep as I exhaled.