09 - Klimbing Kosovo: A Konversation with a Kazakh
Over the weekend, I decided to join up with the Kosovo Hiking Club and galivant into the mountains for a day. We met at dawn near the old Yugoslav ‘Palace of Youth’ and climbed aboard the coach for the drive ahead. I immediately fell asleep.
About halfway into our journey, we stopped at a gas station for coffee and supplies, and I struck up some conversation with a German. He was pleasant and friendly, yet despite the two Red Bulls I drank, I fell asleep as soon as we returned to the coach.
After another couple of hours and stops to pick up more hikers, we arrived at the base of a mountain range south of Peja. Everything reminded me of my home in Colorado. Pine forests stretched in every direction, the soil undeath was dark brown and moist from the tree cover, and the trail was dusty and dry. I reached to touch one of the pines. The needles were soft. That was different than home.
I was the only American in the group, but I quickly made friends with most everyone while we climbed. The group was being led by the Chief of Staff to the President of Kosovo. She was quite friendly and was wearing a new pair of Hokas she had just received in the mail, sent by an American friend of hers.
The trail was easy enough. It was cool in the shade of the pines, and the mountain breeze kept the sun from beating us down too hard. After a few miles, we cut off the path and went down into a large ravine between two mountains. We negotiated the loose, dark soil as we descended through thick foliage. Fortunately, the air was still cool.
There was a small canyon in the middle of the ravine. We came down to the side where the rock made a hole down to the base of the canyon. The guides tied their ropes to a tree, and we descended down through the hole. There was a cave just on the other side of the stream made from some light stone. Some people swam in the cold, clear water. Others sat and talked. Others sang traditional Albanian songs, and their voices echoed up and down the mountains.
I made my way across the stream and sat down inside the cave, enjoying the scene and the company. I started a conversation with a gal I noticed had crisp and clear English, wondering if she was American or German.
As it turned out, she was from Kazakhstan but had spent a year in an American high school as an exchange student. We talked a bit about our jobs and time in Kosovo, but then she asked me about Americans and our social oddities. She wanted to know why our high schools were so mean and why we gossip like we do.
I was intrigued by her questions and asked more specifically what she meant.
“Why will people be nice to you one day and then pretend they don’t know you the next? Why will they then degrade you behind your back and then try to cut you off from friends?”
“I wish I knew,” I said, “did you have a bad time in high school when you were in the States?”
“I had a fine time, but I got in trouble once because I tried to fight a girl in the locker room because she and her friends were bullying another girl for no reason. . . it’s fine if you don’t like another person; that’s life, but these people in high school take it too far. They don’t stop and it’s just cruel.”
“Is it different in Kazakhstan?”
“No, but people know when to stop. They know that if you keep going, everyone will just be miserable, including themselves. That there’s no point. Like at lunch, you can go and sit anywhere with anyone, but in America, so many kids eat alone. Do they at least grow up?”
I thought about it for a minute, not sure what to say.
“I wish they did, but I think people just get better at being mean.”
“Don’t they know they’re just making themselves sick?”
“I think they do, but I wonder if it’s because of some underlying assumption that if they show any kind of vulnerability if they open up at all, someone will use that against them and ruin their chances at a career.”
“Ah, that’s it right there, you Americans and your careers.”
We had talked about hobbies earlier in the day, and when I asked her if she had any, she laughed and said, “Only Americans have hobbies.” She brought that up again.
She said, “It’s like with the hobbies we were talking about earlier. I don’t have hobbies; I just have life. I have my life where my job is just a part of it. You Americans have your “careers” and your hobbies to try to cling onto what’s left of your life.”
She continued, “In high school, everyone wanted a family, friends, people around them. They just didn’t know it. They didn’t understand that if they stopped being so mean to each other, stopped pushing each other away, stopped worrying about what they said to each other, and only worried about saying high to each other with a smile, they would all feel so much better.”
“I do wish we put our family and friends first; we’ve drunk the kool-aid thinking our fulfillment will come from networking, status, and career,” I said.
“Back in Kazakhstan, all the kids eat together. No one has to worry about sitting alone at lunch. Anyone can sit anywhere with anyone, and people are, at the very least, still nice. If the teachers just made them sit together for two weeks, they would bond and they wouldn’t have to worry about it again.”
Eventually, we got down the mountain. We talked more about law school and the differences in Kazakhstan, but this conversation about American high school stuck in my mind the whole drive back.
