On Sunday morning I woke for the last time in my host family's house (I moved into my own two-room house the next day!—more on that later), drank tea, then left with my mama Aigul to learn first-hand about the cotton fields my host mother and father have been going to every day for the past week.
We went first to the bazaar, where we bought 100 round loaves of bread to take to the fields. Aigul and Muktar have about 65 people picking cotton in their fields (mostly Uzbek families that come 20km across the border for cotton season), which means they serve a lot of bread and ramen noodles every day for lunch. Then we continued out to the village. For most of the thirty minute drive, our taxi driver repeated how thrilled he was to have an American girl sitting in his car—"You know," he said, "in school they taught us that America was bad. That was the USSR." Sometimes I too marvel that just twenty years ago school children here were learning anti-western slogans, and now my students know more American pop songs than I do.
In the cotton fields, pickers were already hard at work, their scarf-covered heads bent over cotton plants. They work long days in the glaring sun and dusty fields, so the women cover themselves from head to toe in brightly patterned layers.
Aigul pointed out the extent of their fields, explained the process of gathering the cotton picked, weighing it, recording who has picked how much, and trucking it all over to the centralized collection area, where cotton from many growers in the area is mounded into gargantuan cotton piles. My technical and economic Kazakh is a bit fuzzy, so I can't tell you much about what happens to the cotton from there; I know it gets cleaned, the seed is used to make oil, the plants are chopped down for firewood, and the fluff probably ends up in China where it is made into cheap housedresses with "Diva" sequined on the back, then sold to Kazakh housewives in the Zhetisai bazaar.
Then we started picking. Aigul laid out a sheet between two rows of plants and showed me how to pull the soft cotton from its splayed shell. The first hour was fun. We picked and talked. This patient woman is one of the few people with whom I can have an extended conversation in Kazakh. I paused to photograph the surprisingly beautiful cotton blossoms and take in the expansive fields dotted by hunched backs and waiting trucks. We collected a sizeable mound of cotton fluff on our sheet, which we squished down and pulled further into the field to pick more.
In the second and third hours, I became more aware of the heat of the sun and the bend of my back, so I was relieved when my host mother insisted that we tie up the corners of the sheet to make a poof big enough for both of us to sit on. In the shade.
We (but mostly she) looked over the books where the kilos of cotton picked by each person are recorded, drank some water, ate some rice plov, and waited for the lunchtime hour. At 1:00 the pickers would lug in their morning cotton, fill their bowls and teapots with boiling water from large wood-burning samovars, and eat together before another 5 or 6 hours of picking.
Their cotton is weighed and collected at lunchtime and then again at the end of the day. Each kilo earns them about 20 tenge, and each day a person picks between 45 and 80 kilos. The current exchange rate is at about 147 tenge to the dollar, but since I've shaken the habit of translating tenge into dollars (it invariably makes me spend more than I can actually afford on my local salary), I'll say it this way: I picked about 10 kilos of cotton (which my fellow teachers think is hilariously adorable), so I would have earned about 200 tenge. Tonight, on my way home from school, I bought 6 eggs, 1 yogurt, and a round loaf of bread for 210 tenge.
Let's just say I'm glad the Peace Corps isn't paying me by the kilo.
