"Carpet Cleaner" will not be going on my resume

I recently spent almost two weeks volunteering at a hostel in the southern Kyrgyzstan city of Osh. This wasn’t something I had set out to do when I first decided to take my time off - when I first came up with the idea to take a break from normal life I thought I’d volunteer to do something more altruistic than aid and abet the backpacker industrial complex, but it was a great way to save a bit of money while traveling, set down shallow roots in a foreign city, and remind myself about what it is that I do and don’t enjoy while working.

When I was in Vietnam eating all the banana pancakes I could put my chopsticks around I started to getting weary moving around every few days and nervous about my time Central Asia. It sounded so much more rugged and primitive than SE Asia. I visited a website I had heard about called workaway.info that connects travelers with volunteer opportunities around the world. Options in Central Asia were a bit sparse but there were a few hostels and guest houses in Kyrgyzstan looking for help with maintenance, marketing, and interacting with guests. I emailed a few of them and immediately heard back from Aigul at the Apple Hostel in Bishkek. We set up some time for a WhatsApp call and afterwards I agreed to spend two weeks doing some of those things at Aigul’s hostels in Bishkek, Cholpon Ata (a lakeside resort town), or possibly the one that that was not yet opened in Osh.

As my time in Kyrgyzstan approached I checked in with Aigul and it was clear she wanted me in Osh. I did a bit of internet research and was not immediately excited. It sounded like Osh was more of a transit point than a charming city and from the the photos on the Apple Hostel Website, the property did not have the Spotless IKEA Chic vibe I had grown accustomed to from the hostels in SE Asia. Instead, it looked rather Soviet Worn with dust harboring carpets everywhere, including in the kitchen. Who puts carpets in the kitchen anyway? It turns out the Kyrgyz do. By the way when you visit the Apple Hostel Website you are greeted by their motto, “The Best Budget Hostels in Kyrgyzstan” which I have to say sounds like it could be included in Borat’s National Anthem of Kazakhstan, if you change the country of course.

When I arrived in Bishkek I met with Aigul and it sunk in that I wasn’t just going to be spending a few hours working on the hostel’s online presence in the morning and getting guests excited to go on a pub crawl, historic walking tour of Osh, or trip to Tajikistan in the evening. While Aigul’s family employed about ten Kyrgyz people to clean the place and staff the front desk in Bishkek, the satellites in Osh and Cholpon Ata are run entirely by volunteers. Myself and one other guy who also looks younger than he actually is, Andreas from Denmark, would be in charge of the place. Neither of us knew anything about Osh or spoke a word of Russian or Kyrgyz. At least he had volunteered at a hostel before.

The backpacker mansion

When I arrived at the hostel in Osh my suspicions were confirmed: this was not the gig I signed up for. However, the hostel itself was nicer than I expected. Several guests would accurately describe it as a mansion for backpackers. There was a delightful patio with fruit trees that provided shade and would soon bear fruit (it was just missing some furniture), and the inside was homey aside from the carpets that had accumulated a significant amount of dust. I spent a day with the volunteers Andreas and I were replacing, a couple from Germany who seemed worn out. This may have been from the stomach bug they had both been suffering from but I also got that sense that cleaning the hostel, keeping up with the bookings, greeting and making sure guests had what they needed, and checking with Aigul on everything, including how expensive the toilet paper could be, was not an easy job.

The vacuum didn't work much better on the floor either...

A day or two after the German couple left I too felt tired. Keeping those carpets clean was not easy. The vacuum cleaner seemed to be a relic from the time the Soviets were in charge of the region. There wasn’t much structure around what we were supposed to do and Andreas and I found that as soon as we finished our cleaning tasks guest would start arriving and we would need to help get them settled. We decided we needed to try to organize things. We put together a list of supplies we needed, developed a system for keeping track of the clean linens so we didn’t do more laundry than necessary, and I worked on a guide for our replacements so they would know what their actual job was and how to do it. This made life easier but what really helped was having Aigul come down from Bishkek. She realized it was time to take a look at the hostel now that it was up and running. Personally I was glad she was coming because she had said no to pretty much all of our supply requests on the grounds that most of what we had asked for was already there. Either Andreas and I were blind or we didn’t know where to look.

The morning after Aigul arrived, a housekeeper come to deep clean the place. While she went to work scrubbing every available surface, Andreas, Aigul, and I moved the carpets out of the house to dust them. Admittedly, I was not in a good mood as we did this. I was picturing volunteers being responsible for dusting carpets every week on top of all of the other work we were doing. As Andreas and I brought and shook out carpets for Aigul who was hitting them with some kind of dust removal paddle, soaking them with a hose and then scrubbing, one of the guests turned to me with a grin on her face and said, “well I suppose you are getting a good cultural education right now since this is what Kyrgyz people do to keep carpets clean.” My reply was either (I don't remember what I actually said on account of my bad mood) something along the lines of this cultural experience is not worth the $6/night bed that I was getting in exchange for doing this or a comment about how this cultural tradition could be replaced with vacuum cleaners that actually worked and happiness and productivity in Kyrgyzstan would jump 20%.

This moment, and the several 2 AM wake up calls Andreas and I received when unexpected guests arrived from Bishkek, were my lowest points at the hostel. Fortunately though after the carpet cleaning we helped convince Aigul that it would be easier to keep dust out of the carpets if we put them in storage and that the hostel looked looked better with bare floors anyway. Aigul decided the housekeeper would continue coming twice a week, she reviewed and approved the documents I had put together, and went shopping for a few of the supplies we had requested that we confirmed weren't already there.

I still felt that I was doing a job that was more appropriate for a paid employee (in a country where unemployment is high and wages low), but I at this point my enjoyment of the gig outweighed my frustration. Once I figured out the optimal time to leave the hostel I got a chance to explore the city. It turns out Osh is home to many delightful parks, one shop serving decent coffee, an enormous bazaar, a giant Lenin statue still standing from the Soviets, and loads of mosaics and murals (which I'm pretty are also a remnant of the Soviets). I found an English language school called the English Zone and spent some time with the students and made friends with the staff, all in their early 20s and from Bishkek. It was also nice to develop a routine. I found a good bread maker and my favorite vendor for tomatoes, cherries, and cucumbers. These are things you don’t get to do when you move around every few days.

The day the water was shut off I got to carry heavy jugs of water through town so we could drink and cook. We took that day off from cleaning.

My favorite part of being at the hostel though was getting to know the guests. Since Kyrgyzstan is not a mainstream tourist destination (yet), everyone who passed through the hostel had an interesting story that brought them to Osh. We hosted three different couples driving their own cars or vans across Asia, a couple who were long term cycle tourists developing a photography lesson slash tour through Norway, a few British guys hoping to spend some time in Afghanistan, a British couple who had been traveling around the world for a year and had a harrowing aborted engagement story involving a stroke induced by altitude sickness, and a few Kyrgyz guests. The majority though were folks like me, traveling through the safer Stans for one reason or another by combination of shared taxi and minibus with good stories to tell. Though he was a bit shy at first, I had a some nice conversations with Andreas and he was a superstar cleaner. I even grew to tolerate Aigul’s micromanagery “next time please let me know how much the sponges will be before you buy them” or “did this person check in yet” texts and came to terms with the fact that in the moments when we really needed her, like the morning we realized the water was shut off in the whole city or the afternoon the electrical circuit tripped and I couldn’t find the breaker box, she wouldn’t be near her phone. These were just more opportunities for Andreas and I to talk to locals with the help of Google Translate.

The day I left Osh, Andreas, who was staying on longer, asked if I was ready to leave. I told him I was because on that taxi ride from Bishkek to Osh I had gotten a taste of Kyrgyzstan’s scenery and wanted more. If I had more time to spend in the country I think by the end I could easily have stayed at the hostel longer. I liked running the backpacker mansion. Meeting people from all over the world and hearing their stories, helping them figure out where to go in Osh (assuming I knew), and organizing dinners where we could get to know one another a little more informally proved to be a good break from normal traveling. I think I would like it more if I was able to have a greater say in how things are run and organized. Of course I could do without all the cleaning and the tight leash from Bishkek. While I wonder if it would get old after the novelty wore off, it’s possible I may have stumbled upon something here. Maybe someday I’ll open a guesthouse. But if I’m going to do it here I need to learn Russian and or Kyrgyz first. I should probably figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t hurt the business of all the locals running guesthouses too...