Discovering the World Cup in 2008

I saw my first World Cup match in July of 2008. On a military base. In Kyrgyzstan. Having never been in the military, only a series of strange events would have put me there that summer.

From July 2008 to August 2010 I was a Peace Corps volunteer in a small mountain village in Kyrgyzstan. In early summer of 2010 peaceful protests began with the goal of forcing the president of Kyrgyzstan out of office. The protests were met with violent government repression. Hoping to deter the protestors, the president contracted snipers who stationed themselves on the rooftops around the capital city. As the protestors, mostly university students, marched down the streets, the snipers aimed and fired. 81 Kyrgyz youth were killed over several days, and violence broke out across the country. The Peace Corps program determined that the volunteers were at risk, and the evacuation plan was set into motion.

A military base is the last place on earth you would expect to find a group of Peace Corps volunteers. And it would have been the last place on earth we wanted to be, except that there was lots of food there. After surviving for two years on very meager village diets, most of us would have done just about anything for a balanced meal.

I don’t want to paint an inaccurate picture here. I definitely hadn’t been starving. But I had been hungry. A lot. My primary diet consisted of bread and tea. Breakfast was bread and tea, lunch was bread and tea, and dinner was bread and tea. The next day started out the same, with bread and tea, except that lunch was boiled sheep meat and potatoes. While the male volunteers lost lots of weight and started to look gaunt, the female volunteers didn’t. Apparently male and female bodies metabolize carbohydrates differently. So while their malnutrition was obvious, ours wasn’t.

That was our physical state when we were evacuated to the military base. We were a motley group of about 30 malnourished volunteers, who had become used to bucket-bathing on a weekly basis during the summer (and less often during the winter). I can only imagine what the military men and women thought of us. We often spoke Kyrgyz or Russian among ourselves, made constant reference to strange Kyrgyz village traditions, and gorged ourselves on the mess hall food. And we were shameless about it. When you’ve been an outsider long enough, you get used to being ‘strange,’ to the point where you stop caring what others think of you. So we got seconds on Steak Night in the mess hall and took multiple showers a day. It was hard not to when the food was free and we had almost forgotten what running water felt like.

Then one night, one of the massive tents on the base was particularly loud. I remember standing outside in the dark and wondering what was going on there. The sound drew us in, and when we entered the tent, we saw hundreds of men and women in uniform seated facing a large screen, where a soccer match was being projected. The U.S. team was playing. Looking back now, I wonder how many of the people there knew the rules of the game. Certainly less than half. Probably less than a quarter. I definitely didn’t. But when the U.S. team scored a goal, the room erupted into cheers. A round of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” chants began and didn’t stop for a full minute. While I cringe when I hear a “U.S.A.!” chant now, at that moment it made me grin ear-to-ear.

Today was the last semi-final match of the 2018 World Cup, and while I watched the game (well done, Croatia!), I couldn’t help but think back to my first World Cup match back in 2008. Although almost everything about my life is different, the happiness that the World Cup ignites in me remains the same.