I climb up here in the heat of the morning sun. I climb up here in the cool of night. From here I look over the roofs of the town below and into the stretching valley beyond.

To the north, over the foothills, the valley will open to the steppes of Kazahkstan and beyond to the mountains of the Altai;

To the east lie the peaks of the TianShan with China behind.

To the south west a larger valley emerges with passes to northern India.

North west lie the Aral, Caspian and Black Seas with the plains of Hungary beyond.

​I was born near here in a town by a lake in the shadow of the TianShan.

I have returned for a ‘pause in my life. I will tell you of my experience.

​My chance for a ‘Time Out’ has arisen quite unexpectedly. The App. I have been working on with my fellow programmers was acquired, out of the blue, by a larger start-up company. The buy-out does not make us multi-millionaires, let alone billionaires. But it comes with a ‘non-compete’ clause. We have to turn our skills in a different direction while the commercial use of our brain-child is further developed by the purchaser. The buy-out has given me enough to allow me to take a break, a pause, and a chance to refresh.

​I could have returned to the town near here where I was born and bred. But my family has left. The town itself is transformed by tourism. I looked for a place where a traditional way of life still lingers. I find it here.

​I have chosen this town for my pause and Time Out because it takes me back to the setting of my childhood, a generation ago.

Here there is a combination of a Kyrgyz way of life and a Russian way. Here Russian style houses face out to the street and the Kyrgyz face inwards around their courtyards. The dwellings are still bordered by their agricultural smallholdings – with the apricot and peach trees of this region and the vegetables for self-supporting living.

There is still too a daily market; both a mosque and a Russian orthodox church; women with headscarves and women with free-flowing hair. Against this setting, I can reflect more easily on the changes in my own life and the setting in which I now live so far away.
 
My friends, back where I now call home, say that I am being sentimental, selfish, self-indulgent. Perhaps I am. I know that taking a pause and having a Time Out is a luxury. Most people never get the chance for a pause in their lives. And why should I not use my Time–Out to give space to sentiment. I have spent my student years and my professional life in an abstract world of the mind. Time for a change; don’t you agree? I came for another reason too. I will tell you about that in my next blog.

​I promised to give you another reason for my choice of this town for my Time –Out. My own life has been shaped by a journey across cultures. I could not have imagined my present home, or current way of life, when I was growing up near here.

​ I want a moment to stand back from this intercultural journey – to consider what I have gained and what I have lost. I hope to measure this better here, where in the background, all around me are the traces of thousands and millions of journeys that have gone before.
 
Across this part of the world, people have moved from West to East and from East to West, South to North and North to South.

With the interchange of people there has come trade, new technology and new scientific knowledge. There have come different ways of experiencing the world –through the different social organization of nomads, settlers and the settled.
​
There also have come different religious beliefs. In the hills, towns and cities of this region, if you look carefully, you can see traces of Zoroastrian worship, Buddhist temples, Nestorian Christianity and caves where perhaps Sufi wanderers and Taoist hermits once lived, as well as the churches and mosques of today.
 
Perhaps there are no insights to be gained. Perhaps I am engaging in a form of ‘New–Age’ self-indulgence, or traditional magical thinking. We shall see.

​I have been staying in this town now for about six weeks. I am boarding with a family in a traditional courtyard house. In the inner courtyard there is a pump, a washroom and a toilet, storage spaces and a summer kitchen. In the outer courtyard the chickens live, hay is stored, and animals are bought in to overwinter.
 
There are four generations living in this house. There are three very young boys, their mother, who has quickly become my close friend, her husband and his parents, a grandmother and a great grandmother.

​It is my friend’s mother-in-law who holds the strings between the generations and whose approval, or disapproval, determines the family mood. I eat with them in the evening and spend the days walking the town and the surrounding foothills of the mountains. Internet connection is reliable. But I try to limit the time I spend on it.
 
My friends back home are messaging me every day to ask when I will return. They also bombard me with their ideas for the new Apps we should be pursuing. Every day I am pulled by their desire to form again our old partnership.

But I need time alone. It is a rare moment in anyone’s life that one can take a pause. I want to take advantage of it. You tell me. Should I go back?

Today I got a surprise.

I returned from today’s walk to find my friend waiting. ‘We have decided to go up next week to the summer pastures. I want to know if you would like to come with us’, she announces.

​ Of course I do. It is a signal of support. Equally important, in the pastures of the high mountains I will be out of Internet contact. My friends back home will have to wait for my reply to their pleas to come back for the next project. My real Time Out can start.
 
My friend happily accepts my offer of help in preparing for the trip. The tarps have to be taken off the old truck standing in a corner of the outer courtyard.

The poles and felt panels of two family yurts have to be taken out of storage and inspected. The inspection is carried out by my friend’s mother in law who is the family member with felt-making and felt-repairing skills. I watch her at work on the combing, soaking, compression and framing of the wool patches.

​A supply of kerosene also has to be loaded, as well as two old iron stoves for heating the yurts in the night-time chill of the mountains. Bedding has to be aired and everything selected that will be needed for a two month stay.
 
‘This year Great-Grandmother is coming with us’, said my friend. ‘Go have a talk with her’.

​Next day I find Great Grandmother sitting on a bench under the apricot trees beside the house. She waives me over. ‘I am so glad you are coming with us’ she says. ‘My many summers up in the mountains have given me a lot throughout my life. Perhaps even a short experience can also give you something’.
 
During this week of preparation for the transfer to the mountain pastures we find time to sit together for a few hours each day. ‘I love this summer migration’ she says. ‘It has always been part of my life. But there was one period when it was very special, when the experience shaped the way I viewed my life and the world around me.’
 
‘It started, long before you were born, in the summer of 1941 with the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. All the families were on the point of starting our migration when the news came through of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union of which we were then part.

​Immediately all the men were conscripted for the army or other duties. The town was left only with young boys and old men. There was an immediate decision to be made. It had to be made by the women. Should we go up to the mountains or not’.

​‘It would have been easier if the decision had been taken in that summer of 1941 to abandon the trek to the mountains’ continues Great Grandmother later on.

‘But there was a big downside. If the pasture around the town was consumed by the herds over the summer there would be no winter feed. The herds would have to be slaughtered at the end of the summer. We would all be blamed for the destruction of our wealth when the men returned.

I was just starting on my teenage years. I was not consulted. But I listened to the arguments in the market place. No one wanted to take that decision to slaughter the herds’.
​
‘Going up to the mountains was not easy either. In those days we had no trucks. We had mules, horses and some camels with a few old men as camel drivers. But we did it – not only in that year, but in the following summers until the men began to return in the years following the war when they took charge again’.
 
‘It took me a long time to admit it without feeling in some way guilty. But those summers were marvellous for me. Of course I worried, along with my mother, about what was happening to my father and elder brothers drafted into the army. But there was a freedom to my teenage life’.

​‘Those mountain summers were wonderful for me’ continues Great Grandmother later in the week. ‘

Equally important, I could stay on at school when we came down from the mountains at summer’s end. You take school for granted. But mine was the first generation of girls in this part of the world to receive more than rudimentary education. In the normal way of life around here I was reaching the age when my father would have been looking for a husband for me. School would have ended. All that changed. There were no men around to take those family decisions. School continued for me and my friends. All talk of marriage was postponed’.
 
‘There was something else that made it a very special time. We had suddenly entered into a women’s world. We were visited by communist party officials from Bishkek and Osh. But they had been caught on the wrong foot by the outbreak of war. They came only to give assurances, false in the early years, that all was going well in the war. Some town elders remained. They still tried to exert a traditional masculine dominance. But they were too confused by what was happening to be able to exert authority.

​ In practice, all the key decisions were being made by women. From being behind the times, we women had suddenly jumped ahead of our time’.

​The day has come for our journey up to the summer pastures. In the cabin of the truck, my friend’s husband is the driver, Great Grandmother wedges between him and me and, on my other side, against the door, my friend squeezes in with her youngest on her lap. Safety regulations? Forget it.
 
In the back of the truck there is all that we have selected for the stay in the mountains, and a calf and a foal securely tied down so that they will not jump out in their fright. The other two boys are jammed in the middle. Two shepherd dogs make up the truckload.
 
We start out at dawn. There are other trucks on the same journey. We form a convoy linked by the blue haze of diesel fumes from badly running engines.
 
We have stopped on our long upward grind through forest in the late afternoon. Engines are overheating, drivers tired. We do not make a proper camp. We stop in a field by a flowing river. Women and children divide off in one direction; men in another. We unload some bedding and a few awnings but otherwise we prepare for a night under the stars.
 
In the midst of the bustle, Great Grandmother takes me aside. ‘We are in the way here’ she says, ‘come with me’.

​Great Grandmother leads up a small animal track beside the river. In the distance we can see a waterfall. But she stops before we reach it at a point where the river suddenly widens into a small beach of fine gravel and quartz chips. Here she steps down and washes her face and hands.
 
‘In our wartime migrations our journeys took at least a week and sometimes more. This river was our half way point. We always came to this beach to wash. It was as though we were shedding ourselves of our town life and preparing for entry to a new world of the summer pasturelands.

​ Here we used to make our wishes too. Some of us still do.’ She points to the tiny strips of cloth tied to the lower branches that overhang the river. ‘They carry to the goddesses of this place our hopes for good health, for fresh energy, for help over obstacles’.
 
I follow the example of Great Grandmother. I too feel the need for fresh energy, to wash away what is past, to make way for something new.

​The next day we are packed and off before dawn. Soon we pass above the tree-line, above the cypresses and into the mountain pastures. We stop to pick up firewood.

Remains of snow still linger in the high pastures. As we come within sight of a lake in a shallow bowl of hills the convoy begins to disperse. Half hidden In the grass are the stones of the fireplaces that mark a campsite. My friend explained that the exact location of summer camp sites follows tradition. Different families or groups have their own sites handed down year after year.
 
Soon we have finished our journey too. Along with a small number of other families there is a wild scramble to unload the trucks and to get the site organized.

​I have no skills or experience to offer in erecting the yurts or in setting up their interior screens and pallets. I help in digging the trench for a latrine to squat over. I test it out. Too wide and you overbalance. Too narrow and the sides get messed up. I help put up a screen made of reeds between it and the yurts. We set up a similar screened area for washing with buckets we fill from the lake. A large skin is stretched to catch any rainwater.

​A daily routine is being established incredibly quickly. It is the herders who set the rhythm for the day. At dawn, the night-time herders come down from their watch and the whole camp stirs. At dusk, the daytime herders return hungry for food. We all eat. The day herders are also exhausted. The camp turns in to sleep.
 
Today Great Grandmother takes my arm. She leads me up to a low ridge. She stops at one rocky outcrop. At our feet the slopes run back down to our encampment and to the lake beyond. Away in the distance we can see the outline of the grazing herds of horses. Sitting up here we can see too, in the distance, the tumuli raised by Scythian warriors who have passed this way.

​At our backs the rocks are blackened, their surfaces engraved with ancient petroglyphs.
 
‘We all used to come up here during the war when we women were in charge’ says Great Grandmother. ‘There would be a time of day after the early evening meal when the small children would settle down, the night time herders would have set off and when we could relax after the efforts of the day. We talked. It was the older women mainly. But we teenagers could also chip in. We all shared a pride in our ability to manage the summer migration.’

Walking up to this outcrop with Great Grandmother has become a daily habit. I help my friend in the morning. We shake the bedding, wash the children in the lake and prepare some food for the day. But the afternoons are for her. My friend is happy to see us together. She does not want her wandering off alone.

​ I ask Great Grandmother what memories have stayed with her from those summertime gatherings up here among the rocks.
 
‘Of course in those wartime summers we mainly talked about our daily concerns – sicknesses or injuries, the condition of the herds, our saddle sores.

But as I looked back in later years on those summers I realized that something quite different and more important had begun to root. Simply because we were managing by ourselves up in the summer pastures, over the course of those summers we women came implicitly, without putting it clearly into words, to challenge our traditional place and role’.
 
‘I don’t think that the elder women realized how much my generation of young teenage girls absorbed this sense of questioning of what had traditionally been a masculine dominated world.

​For the older women the direction of their lives had been already set. But, for us younger girls a question had been seeded in our minds that would never leave us’.

​‘When the wartime years came to a close, a traditional way of life was re-established for all of us’ continues Great Grandmother the next day. ‘Those men who did return took up their old roles without a thought. I myself became an obedient wife and daughter in law.

To some extent though that resumption of the old ways was superficial. There were after-effects from those summers of a women’s world that stayed with me and my friends and contemporaries. We kept them hidden. But we each knew they were there’.
 
‘When we came back up here in future years as wives and mothers we always tried to meet alone up by these rocks. We could not get away often, but each year there would always be a few gatherings. I like to tell myself that my friends and I did not lose our questioning around our given roles in life.

​ Now when I hear about the wide horizons of your life, and even see expanded horizons for those women who remain to live here, I feel a sense of continuity with my own generation of hidden subversives’.
 
‘Now I am the sole survivor of that generation. My exact contemporaries have died. But the feelings we had to keep hidden then I can pass on to you today’.