The Russian word "anekdot" has a different meaning than its English cognate "anecdote." Russian anecdotes are what Americans would consider jokes rather than short, personal (and hopefully entertaining) tales. Considering how hard it is to translate humor across cultures and languages, we'll leave the Russian anecdotes for other websites and give you some American-style anecdotes from Peace Corps Kyrgyzstan volunteers.
Humor was one of the most critical and beautiful elements about the experience. Most of us became much funnier as the term progressed. Everything - from our daily lives, deprivations and language deficiencies, to the pantomimes, donkeys, and digestive issues - was funny. It was so easy to laugh. I had a cohort with an amazing sense of humor. It was the funniest time of my life, both in good and bad times.
My boss had a dairy farm with 20 good cows but no good male to make it all happen. She approached my host father, who had a great looking specimen at our house. They are all good friends, but my host father asked her for payment as a joke. After bantering for awhile, I said, 'Dad, our bull will be a volunteer. He will do the good free work for our community that I do!' They thought this was hilarious and called him 'The Volunteer' from then on. My dad even told his friends that his bull had lots of girlfriends at our farm!
A chicken epidemic was going on in our village. My boss was a doctor and apparently had a vaccination. She came over one evening to my family, which had 50 chickens, and offered to treat them all. So my whole family formed a chicken-transferring assembly line. My host brother was responsible for chasing them down in the pen, handing them to me legs first, and I'd usher them down the line squawking. The operation was hysterical. 50 chickens and 100 legs later, my hands and all the rest of me smelled completely rank. Every time my real mom would savor her chicken feet, I'd remind her that chicken feet smell exactly like stinky human feet!
There's always the shock of talking about sex with locals. One day my boss told me about a party she tried to throw for her aunt in Bishkek when she was in medical school there. My boss and her friend looked through her aunt's drawers and blew up balloons to decorate the house. When her aunt returned with friends, she looked mortified and swiftly pulled all the balloons down. My boss and her friend never understood why she wasn't happy until years later, when her medical school education taught her that those balloons were actually her aunt's condoms! It was one of the funniest stories I've heard from her.
We visited our friend Rob in Uzgen. He warned us about his odd and superstitious Kazak host mother. Then out came their dog with a bandana tied around his belly. What's that for, we asked? Oh, he said, our dog has a bad stomach, and my host mom thought it would help to tie a picture of Allah or something on his belly. We cracked up at the poor mutt waddling around with something or another tied to him.
I didn't know how to say 'to give birth,' so I made a swishing motion from the nether-regions with a 'ssssshhhhoooooooo....!' sound. My host mom thought it was hilarious and used the same gesture for a long time to come, even 3 years later!
My boss and I received a grant to fix up the toilets at the NGO's children hospital. It required hiring a poop-company to suck out all the waste to reuse the holes. When she described the process to me, I collapsed laughing at this middle-aged Kyrgyz woman making explicit sucking faces, sounds and gestures to express how the operation would be done.
Walking to work one morning all happy and energetic, I got groped by a teenage boy running past me. I chased him down the street all the way into the dirt alley where groups of school children watched, some of them laughing at me. He would run, stop and mock me, then keep running. I felt like I was in middle school again and was completely infuriated at the same time. He was running with another boy, and I caught up with the other, grabbed his collar and shoved him to the ground, demanding to know where his offender friend went. He wouldn't tell me, I let him go, and I got to work red-faced with anger. My boss brought me to every school in the area that day, demanding all the boys to line up so I could identify him, making an announcement to the whole school, pointing at me, saying, 'Here is this girl, who came all the way from America to help our community, and here she is being touched by our boys' (which made me pretty embarrassed!). She even drove me to the local elder's house to tell him the incident and demand that the boy be found. With no result, and with a project of ours not going smoothly either, it became a really bad day. They drove me home in their green kamaz [truck], which made a thunderous sound when it drove (which it barely did). When we went over unpaved, rocky roads, I bounced up and hit my head. I felt like I was literally in a tank with the deafening drone and the dust. They felt bad for me and knew how tired I was. Suddenly, I called out in Kyrgyz, 'WE'RE GOING TO WAR!' This broke the ice, we all laughed, and the day got much better.
There were several other examples that are too racy to mention here, but be prepared to find humor in everything and laugh!"
