Interlude

Before I continue on my cultural rant, I have to share a few other things that are not connected consciously, though I could make and argument if I so wished. I was walking home from having a beer, and much like other days, I heard the sound of brakes locking up on my busy street of Aini. I looked just in time to see the bottom half of a man hurtling through space, his white sneakers standing out in stark contrast to the dark, night air. I focused on the shoes, spellbound, as they danced through the air as if they were connected to no body and were being manipulated like a marionette's feet. This lasted for a long time and the feet moved in slow motion. Suddenly my hypnotic trance was broken by the sickening thunk of a plummetting body striking the pavement. Then a bit of shock set in. Surely this man was dead. No one could fly so high and so far without dying upon impact. I edged closer to the scene, now about 10 yards away.

Several people were upon the fallen man before I could get there. These were other jaywalkers, like the man, who were luckier than he. What did they do? They, like the other incident I spoke of, lifted him to his feet  one leg dragging behind him as if he had no control of it, and they forced his bodt into the backseat of the vehicle that had just struck him. I couldn't watch any more. I wanted to run out and check for vital signs and all that first aid jazz that I had learned from several classes in the past, but that is not their way. They are, apparently ignorant of western first response kinds of things.

Reflecting about the incident has made me wonder if we in the west are correct in the way we respond to incidents or if Tajiks really understand that to get the man to the hospital as soon as possible is much better than to do such things as perform CPR and call for an ambulance. And maybe this is because no one is trained in CPR and so would do more damage than not to a victim and regardless of what they might do when moving a victim quickly and roughly, it is still better than what they have to offer him in the way of assistance.

In  order to look at this further, I needed to look at other things people do on a daily basis that are contradictory to the west. One example is that they believe cold water is unhealthy because it is unnnatural. Another is the belief that you must have at least one bowl of soup a day to ward of illness. Neither of these things is logical prima facie, but I think they can be explained simply. Water here is absolute poison. For a long time people have had to boil water before drinking it. For them drinking it hot and warm is connected to a time before bottled water and so, what was done for health is still applied today though there is no longer a logical connection that they could explain. The soup thing might be connected to the dearth of vegetables in Russian meals that extended to the Soviet states. People just eat meat and potatoes and bread, and perhaps helpful mothers knew that the only they could get their sons and husbands to eat somewhat healthily, was to dump them into soups. If we look at these two possibilities, there is some truth in the superstitions.

Back to the flying sneakers: There is so much ignorance about western methods here and about the world in general and anything sciencey, that it makes sense to take the mountain to Mohammed. No one can help the victim and so understanding their lack of understanding, they realize they cannot do a thing except get a victim to someone who can. And so, are they really ignorant?