The terrifying morning I was woken by an earthquake 

“Mo-lo-ko! Sme-ta-na!” This is the wakeup call I hear shortly before my alarm goes off every morning, the dairywoman doing the rounds in the cool early morning with metal pails of fresh milk and sour cream. 

The other part of the wakeup call and morning soundtrack is the “Khhhwk-pppht-sppppleugh!” of men walking along Erkindik Prospect, hawking their early morning phlegm into the roadside ditches. 

Spitting is something of a national obsession, for the men at least. A country of heavy smokers, they are constantly emptying out their lungs, aiming scrupulously for the ditches. Dug for drainage, these carry away all sorts – men spit, toddlers wee and women empty their pails of suds and dirty water. Downstream, you see children playing with dams and homemade boats, and workmen soaking their aching feet. 

On the wall at the American University of Central Asia where students are encouraged to express their views someone has pasted up an article on the anti-spitting campaign in China (among the posters on US President George Bush in Iraq, and the human rights records of Askar Akayev and the other Central Asian leaders) and written underneath: “Kyrgyz women – unite! Kyrgyz men – take heed!!!”

One morning it’s not the alarm or the shouts or the spits that act as my wakeup call, but the rumbling and shuddering that I at first think is a goods train rolling past on the Moscow line, a block to the south of my apartment. But instead of fading as the train goes on its way, the noise and motion intensify. Not only the chandelier above my bed but the bed itself and the walls of the apartment are vibrating. I realise it’s an earthquake, but I don’t know whether to run outside and risk being crushed if the stairwell collapses to stay where I am. 

It’s probably less than a minute before the dizzying movement of the earthquake subsides, and I get out of bed and start getting ready for work.