Imagine, for a minute, the street that you live on. Strip the concrete and replace it with a dust road, cut the sidewalk and make it into road-side ditches of dirty water with wild green weeds. Now, here comes the real stretch: imagine big, dirty sheep grazing along the sides of that road, and sun-browned men sitting on the ditch ridge with a little mutt. Yes, I said sheep. “On my street?” you ask incredulously and shake your head. At least I didn’t ask you to imagine that you were that man sitting with them. Yes, sheep on your street. See, in Central Asia, that’s what it’s like. You know the shepherds that you read about in the Christmas story? Well, that’s not just something in the first century BC; it’s part of real life.

So, meet a real shepherd in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. He’s not really at the top of the social pyramid, and he probably doesn’t own more than two changes of clothes. He may live in the “city” and take his sheep to the nearest ditch and meadow every day, or he may live in the nearby hills where he can roam with the herd. Either way, he’s not that much different from the average working man there: he has a family but can’t provide for it adequately; he has a home but can’t keep it warm. The thing about shepherds is that they know that they will at least get some compensation for their work—as a last resort, they can kill an old sheep and have food for a couple weeks. The shepherds in Samarkand have slow-paced, predictable lives. They’re entirely removed from the pressure, stress, and social whirl of a more modern profession. They seem almost out-of-place in the world as we generally know it.

Besides for the young boys who almost always get their own sheep at some point, I only knew a few shepherds and their families. These people live without electricity, phone lines, or running water—nearly inconceivable to the average modern person. Their small lives revolve around acquiring or producing the bare necessities of food, wood to burn, and an occasional medicine for the sickly baby. One shepherd’s family that I knew lived in a two-room mud brick house. When we came to visit, the wife cooked up a meal on an old stove outside around the back of the house. They were very poor, but not too badly off compared to the rest of the village. The shepherd’s home sat on the side of a hill, near the brown, desert-ish fields where his sheep, cows, and goats grazed every day. Even the old, soviet car that we would drive up in to visit them seemed like a luxury when parked by the rusted barbed wire that surrounded their land.

To modern minds, these shepherds don’t get much done. When they take the herd out every day, they don’t have a laptop to work on or even a book to read while they sit. They have their shepherding friends, often, to sit with them by the winter fires or under the summer shade. Even little things, like a birth in the community, are big deals; they don’t have a whole lot to get excited about. But, when you look closely, you realize that doesn’t seem to matter. The shepherds may have anachronistic, monotonous lives, but they’re generally happy. They’re poor, but the daily substitute of eggs for meat doesn’t seem to bother them. Spending time with shepherd’s families always makes you feel like you’ve stepped into a different world or time zone. Time slows down, and life suddenly loses its complication and stressfulness.