And Then, Time Stopped: Chinggil

I only had a few days' worth of clothing in my bag and the most basic things I needed for hiking but I didn't really want to go home. What was waiting for me in Urumqi? Noise, pollution, harassment. And in the tiny community BaiXing (百兴) outside the village Chinggil (清河）? Peace and quiet，cows, doing laundry by hand using soap made from sheep fat, babysitting (yes, really), hauling water from the well, swimming in the river, following grandma around and chatting with her. In a word, my version of paradise for a while.
I had wanted to find a Kazakh village to stay in for the summer, a place where I could integrate myself into the family life, speak Kazakh every day, and get out of the harried stress of the city for a while. My efforts failed. The authorities here in Xinjiang don't let foreigners go just anywhere, and they often don't want you to stay in locals' homes. It's a sensitive area with strict rules that are prone to change.

This one just fell into my lap. After coming back from the mountains, I was invited to stay longer. Invited is not quite the word...it was more of a demand. A little boy in the family was to have a toi on the eighteenth, and no one was going to let me on a bus before then.

The local authorities didn't care, either. After a trip to the main police station in town to register me, they made it clear that they didn't care to see my face again and didn't care how long I stayed, as long as I didn't overstay my visa that allows me be in this country. Fine by me.

A toi is a kind of party, a sort of rite of passage. There are several of them in everyone's life, with variations depending on sex. This one was a sundet toi, or circumcision party.











So to kill the time between then and the party, I just did my best to help out around the house. Here, we are making baursaq, little balls of fried dough that are sort of like donuts, only not sweet. And made the old-fashioned way, with plenty of lard.

There were plenty of things that I couldn't help out with, but I made an enthusiastic observer and gave people someone to chat with.

That may not have been an advantage as, due to my fairly low level of Kazakh, they were practically limited to baby-talk, but everyone was pretty good-natured about it.

And so the days flowed on. I was often bored but never unhappy, and though I wished I had brought more than one flimsy little condensed copy of Arabian Nights in Chinese, I didn't want to be anywhere else.