Cotton Pickin' Time

Cotton Pickin' TimeSaturday October 17, 2009 After a rather uncomfortable and cold night in the yurt, we are all up rather early for an iffy breakfast and an early leave back to the village in the various relays by jeep and then back on the bus to head to the lake. I had actually brought my swimsuit as if I might do something with it. What a joke is that! But we did have two bold soles who donned their trunks and painfully waded over the rocks into the chilly Lake Aydarkul. Apparently this lake was formed when there was too much water in the Aral Sea dam and water spilled over into this large depression and hence the lake. Honestly, I was not paying too much attention because I’m all dirty and unhappy about sleeping on the ground so I’m watching the lake and the sheep on the other side and the two tour members thrash about and just didn’t pay attention. Shame on me. After some lake time and wandering up on the hill to over look the lake, we left again for greener pastures or rather whiter ones. Uzbekistan grows a lot of cotton. We have seen the fields everywhere. And because of a wet spring and having to replant a couple of times, they are still in the midst or harvesting which is labor intensive and I think back breaking work. We had wanted to stop and see what it involved and we finally passed a field with workers close enough to the road that we could pull over. Marat explained to us how the cotton grows and matures and that on a single plant, there may be up to 50 bolls of cotton which don’t come ripe all at once so you might get everything pulled out of the field today but need to come back in a couple of days and start over again. The field was full of young boys and girls and women and a few men. Whole families go into the fields and I think that in this case, there is a lot of involuntary 'volunteers". Gulia had told us her 16 year old son was out picking cotton and he hated it but he must apparently do his share or he will have difficulties getting into university and other such things. Indeed, a lot of the kids picking looked to be 14-18. But I may be misjudging ages because I had Marat, our guide, ask one boy how old he was, thinking maybe 12 and turned out he was 15. The whole field was quite interested is us and most were eager to pose for photos as it gives them a slight break. Suddenly I see this very young girl coming through the ranks of cotton plants and she has about 8 branches of cotton in her hands with buds on them in various stages of readiness. She makes directly for me and presents me with the bouquet of plants. How sweet but what am I going to do with a handful of cotton plants. Then she comes back with her younger sister who gives me more plants. We took a lot of photos and in the end, Marat placed the plants back on the ground. I hope she didn’t see that small bit of betrayal.