Try the Kumis

I once brought two big bottles of fermented mare's milk (kumis, the national drink of Kyrgyzstan) to an Embassy happy hour.

I was not roundly applauded for the move, funnily enough.

This started when I learned our Embassy's PolEcon Chief (a good friend and excellent foreign service officer) had never tried it. He wasn't avoiding it. He just... hadn't gotten around to it.

Well, I was going to fix that. I had already waxed poetic about kumis, saying it wasn't just a drink. It was Kyrgyzstan. Cultural fluency in a recycled orange-juice bottle.

For me, part of doing diplomacy well is experiencing the things people care about locally. Language, music, art, food, and drink. You don't have to love everything, but being willing to try what matters to people changes how you see a place. And how people see you.

So, a few months later, while election monitoring in Naryn, I saw kumis for sale on the roadside. I asked the driver to stop, bought two bottles (yes, they came in recycled orange juice bottles, I wasn’t making that up), and carried them back to Bishkek… a gift absolutely no one had asked for.

At our weekly happy hour hosted by the Front Office, I set the bottles on the table to some confused looks.

That's when I learned something surprising. Not only had my friend never tried kumis, but almost no one else had either. About fifteen foreign service officers serving in Kyrgyzstan. I was shocked, but not shocked.

So I poured some for everyone and said, "This round is on me."

Hilarious, Segars. 

The reactions were... diplomatic.

Curiosity. Raised eyebrows. Cautious sniffing. An occasional "huh."

But almost no one actually drank it. More than a sip, anyway.

My friend included.

For all I know, he finished his tour never trying kumis.

That moment stuck with me. It highlighted something about cultural fluency.

You simply cannot understand a place from a conference room. You cannot learn a culture from briefings. And you cannot claim fluency in something you have only watched from the sidelines.

I've been thinking about this again as I've started writing more online. Yes, I'm making a segue from kumis to writing. Stay with me.

A lot of senior leaders treat public writing the way my colleagues treated kumis. They circle around it. Study it. Analyze it. Think about it. But never actually try it.

And the few who do often overcomplicate it, as if they're trying to pack decades of experience into a single post. My earlier musings have touched on this, so I'll leave it at this: Try the kumis.

Whether it's a new country or a new medium, you can't understand it from the sidelines. At some point you have to actually taste it.

So, let's bring this back to you with a rhetorical question to consider.

What's the kumis in your professional life right now? The thing you keep circling but still haven't actually tried?

Because studying it from the conference room isn't the same as taking a sip.