I’m not really sure what to write. I’m not really sure I even want to write. On Wednesday afternoon, standing coat-less in a soft snowfall, I learned that I would be forced to leave Kazakhstan in but a handful of days. The voice on the other end of the line, a voice tired and scratchy from relaying the days’ news to countless volunteers sequestered in North Kazakhstan, told me that after 18 years of work, Peace Corps would no longer be serving Kazakhstan. That next week, we’re gone.

As it is, we’re departing only eight months into a 27-month commitment. Projects are still fledgling. Integration is still incomplete. Language skills are only just sticking, and our teaching impacts are only just sinking in. We’ve just finished our second round of trainings, learning how to parse grant options and further implement community projects. We’ve just finished learning how to manage both schedule and expectation as English teachers in the Kazakhstani school system. We’re only, just now, beginning to make a legitimate impact. In a sense, we’ve only just begun. And now it’s all being wrested from us, halted by a slew of suits who believe they know what’s best.

And maybe they do. They’re the ones, after all, who’ve compiled both numbers and stories. They know how many of us have been attacked and assaulted – according to our Country Director, Kazakhstan has earned the highest rate of any country in Peace Corps – and they know exactly what pressures have begun emanating from oblast- and national-level governments. Volunteers will never be privy to all of the information, but we have enough of a patchworkk network that we can piece together a picture of what serving in Kazakhstan is like. KNB agents sitting in classrooms. Upper-level ministers all but booting volunteers from numerous oblasts. Questions of espionage and revolutionary tactics. The shooting in Taraz, which saw eight Kazakhstanis die, taking place only a block from two volunteers’ houses. Brass knuckles, attempted break-ins, bizarre opium plant-and-frisks – to say nothing of the near-daily harassment, and worse, for the female volunteers – all added up to a setting those DC-based officials deemed far too dire to pursue.

And so, we leave. Eight months down, and none more going forward. Bolda. Fsyo. Peace Corps, finished in Kazakhstan.

* * *

Before arriving last March we’d read that Kazakhstan maintained a manageable and enviable stability, serving as an oasis of tranquility among its besieged neighbors. It stood out among the ‘stans for its balance of temerity and growth, for its ability to manage disparate populations and divergent neighbors. It managed, as the billboards state the country over, 20 Years of Peace and Unity.

And it did, really. The ‘90s threw it, wrung it of infrastructure and population, but the mixture of Caspian oil and capital investment – and Nazarbayev’s magnificent handling of ethnic relations – put Kazakhstan on a path of sustained growth. Despite the imagery of Borat, the last ten years in Kazakhstan have been among the brightest of any nation.

Tengiz. Astana. The demise of irredentism, and the ascension to the OSCE chair. Staking deep oil-fields, and buffeted as it was from the subprime and Euro crises, we arrived in a Kazakhstan sated in promise, into a land as self-assured and self-reliant as it had ever been. Twenty years in, and the future was as bright as you could find in the post-Soviet world.

Then, something shifted. This summer provided a sort of hinge, a passage from a much-lauded stability to something far … less. Reality began settling of a nation post-Nazarbayev. The nation’s largest strike – and the myriad beatings attached – revealed the sinister sides of a promising energy sector. Religious restrictions found both legal course and fatal response. Discussions of sovereignty bubbled once more, as Putin floated, and then cemented, the idea of a Eurasian Union, all while dozens of prominent Kazakhs called language allocations into question. Toss in a handful of seemingly disparate cases of terrorism, and Kazakhstan’s stability looked both farce and façade.

And amidst it all, Peace Corps volunteers turned up harassed, beaten, and raped at a rate far higher than anything one could reasonably expect. For the first time in nearly a decade, the rose-colored image Kazakhstan maintained turned a darker hue. And we, and those teachers and school-children with whom we worked, are the ones who now pay the price.

* * *

The Kazakhstani education minister has claimed that, due to his nation’s development, Peace Corps’ departure was a “logical step.” Christ. If you’ve worked for one week in a Kazakhstani school, if you’ve seen the faces of colleagues light up at your mere presence – and the tears that stream when you tell them you’re leaving – you know that your presence in these classes fills a marked vacuum. Part of Nazarbayev’s 2030 goal is a “Trinity of Languages,” in which every Kazakhstani has achieved fluency in Kazakh, Russian, and English. A constituent part of this goal is the presence of native-speakers. And while some volunteers are misappropriated, the majority of us are both feted and needed. Peace Corps still filled an enormous void in the Kazakhstani educational system. That’s not to paint us as some kind of ubermensch teaching corps; rather, it’s to simply show that there was no logical outgrowth of the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan. The minister’s line of reasoning is naught but a PR pitch, spin for an event that blackens all parties.

Likewise, while the recent surge in Islamo-inspired attacks may provide an easy excuse for both US and Kazakhstani governments, that reasoning seems far too facile. Colin Thubron once wrote that Islam rests lightly on these people. I would argue that it still does. Those members of Jund al-Khalifa have targeted neither infidels nor foreigners; rather, they’ve gone after ministers and officials, using Islam as a vehicle to express anti-government sentiments. Plus, Peace Corps countries – Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan among them – have suffered much worse, and still maintained a volunteer presence, at least in a limited capacity. There’s no reason to think Kazakhstan shouldn’t be able to do the same.

In the end, it was neither jihadist bombings nor logical progression that is forcing us to leave. It was the multi-level strains – from the KNB’s growing surveillance, to the impunity with which the drunks attacked us – that drove us from Kazakhstan. It was averaging one rape or serious sexual assault per month since June. It was school administrators allowing KNB agents to sift through both belongings and apartments. It was appointed government officials refusing to meet with Peace Corps administrators, out of either pride or contempt or grand-standing. It was these dozens of seemingly unrelated incidents – that, yes, were set amidst a backdrop of terrorist activities – that now tear us from our new homes and drop us back in a jobless line we’d thought ourselves fortunate to escape. It was a series of degrading relations, arising from both parties, that keeps us from showing this Soviet land that not all Americans are impudent, imperial assholes.

The reactions I’ve had have been diametric. I’ve thrilled at finding a new home, either in America or abroad. But I’ve also carried knowledge that I’ll likely never see my Siberian hermitage of Presnovka again. I’ve realized that I can finally reacquaint myself with ESPN and Mexican food, but I’ve also grasped that those I’ve come to love within my village – my counterpart, my schoolchildren – are people I’ll see only now see through photo or memory. I see an opportunity to forgo the minus-40 winters set to fall, but I also no longer have an excuse – “need that winter fat!” – to gorge myself on pechenyas and barsak. I swing from waves of relief to waves of melancholy, all because of a bizarre confluence of events, a confluence threatening enough that some DC official decided it was time to close shop.

Our service is cut, and our program is shuttered. I’m leaving Kazakhstan far earlier than I ever wanted. There’ll be no Nauryz in Shymkent, no Kreshenya in Petropavlovsk, no summer camps at Balkhash. I’ll neither climb Baiterek, nor stroll the esplanade in Pavlodar, nor see the marine graveyards of the receded Aral. I, and all of my fellow Volunteers, don’t get to see any of those plans through. And I don’t get to show these nationals how much I appreciated their hospitality, and how much I’d grown to love them through the last eight months.

Since 1993, Peace Corps has served in Kazakhstan. Volunteers have helped guide small business, have aided in orphanages and special-needs homes, and have, as I did, taught young Kazakhstanis English. All work came at the specific request of President Nazarbayev, under whose reign we arrived and now depart. All work was sorely need in a still-fresh nation, among a people now opened to an entirely new way of economy and education. All work – our work – is still required. And we won’t be here to provide it.

It is, as the Kazakhs would say, maskhara. It’s a mark of shame for all parties involved, and I can only offer my thanks, and my regret. My time here was too short, and my experience in Kazakhstan far too stunted. I’m going to miss this country – this hard, wind-swept land; these genial, weathered people – for years to come. Someday, the sting will dull. Someday, I’ll be back. Someday, I’ll know what to write. But all I can do is leave, and wait for that day to come.

When I studied abroad in Australia in 2008, one of the few disappointments – other than never figuring out the didgeridoo – came on Oct. 31. It turns out that the Aussies don’t celebrate Halloween quite the way we Americans do. It’s one of the few traditions that hasn’t crossed the Pacific, and it took some Yankee organization to get a party of any portion going that evening.

Because, of course, where you find an American, you also find a compunction for Halloween. For myriad reasons – the costumes, the candy, the hormones that come with being a teenage boy – Halloween has long been my favorite holiday, regardless of age or location. In grade school, I could finally be Batman. In high school, my friends bonded in haunted houses. In college, I passed out at 11:30 p.m., still swaddled in Mario trousers. Halloween has provided some of the best (and most embarrassing) moments of my life, so it should come as little surprise that I came to Kazakhstan with every intention of seeing that scary/smutty tradition continue.

But then, be it during training or at site, word got round that we wouldn’t be allowed to have anything Halloween-related in our extracurriculars. I’m not sure if this was due to backlash or fear of distraction, but whatever the reason, Halloween parties at Kazakhstani schools were officially forbidden. A sunk feeling, another bureaucratic road bump, resonated with volunteers. No Halloween. No Mexican food, and now no Halloween. Kicking us when we’re down, right in the costumed crotch.

But being at site, away from the bustle and take-out and WiFi of Almaty, does things to you. The isolation inserts a certain independence, a certain frontiersman attitude that results in damning directive and taking what you want. Red tape can only stretch so far. Thus, when a pair of your top 10th graders come to you asking for help in organizing a Halloween party, the voices of impertinence and regulation fade into the background, and where once stood finger-wagging disapproval now danced ungainly skeletons and grime-streaked zombies.

And so we went to work. My partner in this chillingly entertaining crime was my counterpart, Roza Amreshovna (who may have felt a bit of pressure from her 17-year-old daughter, Malike). Together, we cobbled together a few dozen fall-colored balloons, some Kleenex ghosts, and 15 of the largest apples in Siberia. We employed those same 10th graders as our marketing crew, sending them off with 100 tickets to disperse at 25 tenge per head. A week later, with tickets all sold and Halloween lurching toward us, we steadied ourselves for our little monsters.

After all, these kids had never experienced Halloween. They’d never known the joys of tricking-and-treating, never dodged traffic with a sheet covering their entire body, never superglued a pair of Franken-bolts to the sides of their necks. They’d never chugged witch’s brew, never slurped (gummy) worms, never gored Butterfingers with fake vampire teeth. To them, Halloween was just an idea. It was a carry-over of dubbed American Pie films, something that looked fun and new and wait-we-want-this-too. And we were tasked with giving them something that lived up to it all.

In order to satisfy all of our constituents, we decided to split the parties along class lines.* While all students have the same reasons for loving Halloween – wearing costumes, late-night mayhem – those reasons carry connotation based on age. As such, the 5th-8th graders would get first stab with a pumpkin-carving party on Thursday night, while the 9th-11th graders** would get Friday evening, right before the school’s auditorium turned into the town’s lone discotheque.***

*Economic humor!

**Kazakhstani schools only go until 11th grade, meaning the main culprit of slacking over here is junioritis.

***Don’t care how many times you ask me, guys – still not going to the discotheque with my students, even if it means staying in and watching the pilot for Zooey’s new show for the 17th time.

The pumpkin-carving was as to be expected: filthy, loud, and hazardous. Kids were tasked with bringing their own materials, but, being kids, only a few saw fit to follow instructions. As such, among the 60 students jostling for space, there were only about 20 pumpkins to go around. (To their credit, no knives were used in deciding which students got which tikva.) Teams of three and four went to work, hacking out toothy smiles and triangle eyes. A few decided that the pumpkins would need to be disemboweled (the better to help the pumpkin stand?), and one group thought that football-stitching would look great for the cheeks, but, on the whole, the students understood the mechanics of pumpkin-carving. After 45 minutes of slicing up their homegrown gourds, the kids gathered in an unlit hall downstairs and stood proudly by their Kaz-O-Lanterns. Pulling the pumpkin goo from the floorboards wasn’t a perfect end to the evening – at least I found my misplaced red pen while cleaning – but the kids, stashing their pumpkins in the teachers lounge, prefigured a successful Halloweekend.*

*Come on. Give me just this one. Please.

While the younger kids were a manageable miasma, all giggles and eagerness at being out past bedtime, the older kids, I knew, were a different breed. It was only a few years back that I was caught in their tangle of adolescence, and the memories of teenage interaction were fresh on my mind: all the social cues, all the clique-ish posturing and cross-gender attractions, all of it boiling to a frustrating froth.* That’s was the stitch in my tiny, gauche high school – I could only imagine it a thousand-fold at a larger public school, be it in the States or in Siberia.

*I can’t say this word without thinking of Dan Savage and Rick Santorum. Google at your own risk.

But then, if all my assumptions are based on SuperBad and Selena Gomez, I have a worse idea of high-schoolers than these Kazakhstani kids do. For interacting with these older students at the party showed me, if nothing else, that all those zit-and-testosterone stereotypes about American teens may not necessarily translate into students of Cyrillic. I mean, maybe it’s the language barrier. Maybe it’s because it’s only been two months at school. Maybe it’s because I’m the wayward American, and the kids only want to put on their best (ghoulish) faces for this dashingly handsome stranger. Whatever the case, it thus far seems that these Kazakhstani teenagers, the ones roiling in hormone and cracked voices, are far more of a polished product than their American counterparts. While they’re certainly less easy to … coax than the younger kids, the older students I’ve thus far interacted with have been breaths of fresh air, and while their foreign language skills have almost entirel regressed, these kids haven’t carried any of the petulance that so often sullies a teenager’s good name.

And so, our Halloween party went through without a hitch.* There was my director, Alexander Valentinovich, a man grand in both heft and voice, booming his Russian laugh as a pair of 11th graders twirled into toilet-paper mummies. There was a gaggle of ghosts – some students, some teachers – running from Human Brains to Pumpkin Tosses to Pin-the-Warts-on-the-Witch. There were the kids from the Kazakh school, trekking over to my Russian workplace, mingling with the kids from across the tracks. There were my 10th graders – those students who express, on the whole, less interest and aptitude in English than my wunderkind 6th graders – dressed up as dead brides and bloodied Minnie Mice, cackling and posing throughout the night. There were the younger kids, filtering through the open door just to get a glimpse at the ghouls and zombies and terrors of Thriller flitting across screens and dance floors, all those dank creatures coming to life in costume and charade. There were dozens of kids, experiencing what they’d only seen in movies, or heard of from friends and family who’d somehow crossed the steppe and seen another world. There were these kids, finally celebrating Halloween.

*It started a bit late, but that’s only because I asked Roza to apply a bit of purplish lipstick that I thought would make my zombie outfit even more convincing. Turns out it only made my lips sparkle. I was the Dolled-Up Dead.

The night was a pumpkin-smashing success, made all the more because it was a sort of bottom-up approach – the kids asked, and helped us deliver. The parties helped me carry forward a tradition I’d long enjoyed, and allowed me, though preempted by those American Pie flicks, to share a bit of the brighter (darker?) side of American culture.

There was nothing profound in the parties, nothing summing up any narrative of cultural clicks. But then, there didn’t need to be. It was simply a Halloween party, for a grip of school-children, none of whom had ever experienced an actual Halloween before. And if I could share something I loved with them, and see a few smiles crack their skeletal face paint, then, hey, I’ll take it. Sometimes it’s fine just to dress like the Living Dead, and have a bit of fun.

There’s no small secret that I carry a torch for Zooey Deschanel. I’m only a 20-something American male, after all. Her movies and her music – her entire manic mantra – are pitch-perfect, and I won’t hesitate to talk up her chops or her vocals or her dimpled charm. She’s adorkable, in the utmost.

Still, despite the dozens on comments adorning my Facebook wall now that her new show’s been released, it’s not as if there are other actor-singers I enjoy hearing-watching more. Zooey doesn’t stand out because of her artistic credentials, or because her voice sends me into some whirling, retro-pop tizzy. Likewise, and while I’d never call her* anything less than attractive – she does carry 98% of the male population, after all – it’s not as if there aren’t more beautiful women out there.

*Or any other woman, of course.

Nah, it’s not her voice, and it’s not her looks. It’s not the whole Katy-Perry-does-Patsy-Cline routine. It’s not even, because everyone associates me with anything Zooey, that I encounter her every time her career takes a turn. No, there’s only one thing about Zooey that keeps me coming back for more.

Those bangs. Those damn black bangs.

There’s no logic to the attraction, no Neanderthalic push, that would make Zooey’s bangs any more alluring than, say, a bowl cut, or a mullet, or a lower-back rat-tail.* There’s nothing that, evolutionarily, should generate such appeal. But there it is. Like corduroys or Chinese food before them, I’ll follow bangs to uncomfortable measures, and have neither compunction nor filter when writing about them.

*All of which are far more popular with the men in this nation than I’d like to acknowledge.

Now, you may wonder why I’ve elected to begin this post talking about Zooey Deschanel’s best assets, what the headwear of the headliner of She & Him has to do with a steppe-set life. Firstly, I’d offer that it’s my blog, so be thankful I haven’t written about her in every post. Secondly, this self-serving* preamble is actual a segue into one of the more appealing aspects of the fashion mode we’ve encountered in Kazakhstan. Because despite the dearth of Zooey fans in Siberia, the women of Kazakhstan have all decided that, truly, there’s no better look than a set of straight-drawn bangs.

*No better way to gear for writing than Googling pictures of Zooey Deschanel.

Everywhere you look, from the boutiques of Almaty to the janitors of Presnovka, women in this country have opted for the eyebrow-length bangs that Zooey has presented and perfected. None of that side-swept stuff some Americans offer – the bangs of Kazakhstan are straight and true, lined to immobile perfection. The women walk en vogue, their bangs slung forward as yet another asset in their myriad outfits, yet another way to distract Peace Corps volunteers from the job at hand. All but the wrinkliest of babushkas have decided that bangs are necessary. And I, likewise, find myself in slack-jawed agreement.

But where I would find a society without fault, it didn’t take long to realize that the bangs of Kazakhstan carry a double-edged sword. With a fashion-consciousness that most Americans – or at least those of the #Occupy protests – do without, the men of the Soviet sphere refused to let the women alone enjoy the perks of bang-dom.* As such, for every female you see in Zooey mimicry, a male follows not far behind, his forehead draped in similar fashion. Ethnicity is immaterial, as is age. Men who knew Stalin, boys who know SpongeBob – both will sport an inch (or more, in a few unfortunate cases) of starched hair, pointing straight down to their brow.

*That is the weirdest sentence I’ve ever written.

And that’s fine. Again, I couldn’t give three shits what kind of hair your sported, so long as you bathed regularly, and said thank you whenever I held the door for you.* But it’s just, on the guys … it’s not for me. It’s one thing to lay the feathered looks of Zac Efron and Justin Bieber – it’s another to take a fine-toothed comb and place Every Single Hair on a parallel plane directly toward your eyeball. It’s just not something I need in my life right now.

*Roza, if you’re reading this, remember to always thank someone in America when they hold the door for you. None of this stare-down-walk-past-because-apparently-the-door’s-magically-open crap. Don’t be грубый.

As it is, I don’t quite have the language faculty to get that idea across to the barber set around town. Their smiles disarm, and their prices – $2 for a haircut, plus a pair of free washes* – are low enough that I’d take a front mullet and be happy with it.

*This triples my weekly efforts at cleaning my scalp.

Which, in the half-dozen instances I’ve gotten a cut, I’ve done.

The first cut came some months back, tromping through the slush-mud to the only barber in Belbulak. As the scissors sheared their way across the top, I became lost in deciphering the nearby shampoo poster, wondering what both the Cyrillic and the product had to do with the topless woman eying us through her curls. Feeling the barber pause, I swung my gaze back to the mirror, and caught my reflection.

My pupils, meeting, swelled. My fingers curled round the armrest. My eyebrows jumped, losing themselves in the jungle of low-hung hair now mopping my forehead. I saw what I now was.

Bangs. Nothing but bangs, swishing across my forehead like unleashed rags in a carwash.

Before I could mouth a plea, before I could sputter anything in Russian to slow the process, the hairdresser pulled a white canister off of the table in front of us and, for a an added guarantee of you’re-gonna-love-your-new-look!, sprayed a layer of liquid plastic over the top. The mist fell slowly, like toxin from heaven. Suddenly, in lieu of the softness my weekly wash had just allowed, I was now sitting under a coat of plastic hair. Where my bangs once swished, they now hung erect. I looked equal parts Three Stooges, Jersey Guido, and Jim Carrey circa Dumb and Dumber. I looked like a frightened LEGO character.

In the five, six times I’ve gotten a haircut since, the process has not gotten any better. The reaction’s softened a bit – I’ve resigned myself to two years of these helmet-hard bangs – but that doesn’t make it any easier. After every cut I still end up walking home, praying for a spate of rain to wash the synthetic hold from my hair.* And while I’ve managed to waive the plastic sheet on a few occasions, that doesn’t make the bangs any less present, any more palatable.

*This actually happened once. Unfortunately, I overlooked the fact that bangs are the perfect path-holders, and rivulets of rain poured straight down, burning my eyes with all the fluoro-carbons a boy could ask for.

Of course, the palatability of those bangs – hanging like shredded, abused curtains – is entirely subjective. Walking through town after a fresh haircut, I find myself begin to blush, only to realize that the passersby pay no attention to the hair clinging to my forehead whatsoever. (Or, at least, the pay less mind to my hair than to the fact that my backpack has a small stain on shoulder-strap, which they find unbearably embarrassing for all parties involved.) I find myself under the same mat of hair that every other man, Russian and Kazakh alike, relishes. I find myself … fitting in.

Now, I’m not going to post any photos here, if only because WordPress is currently blocked in Kazakhstan, and the proxy site will not allow me to upload anything. But suffice it to say, I don’t yet have the self-confidence to share my bangs with the entire blogosphere. My forehead’s not been this covered since my high school days, when I wore a helmet of hirsuteness that ran from eyebrow to shoulder. Those are days that don’t need revisiting anytime soon. Nor does my current haircut need to waltz through the internet anytime, ever. And until the day comes that I share my haircut – which won’t be for a long, long while – I’ll spend my time walking around in my new rabbit-lined hat, and catching up on Zooey’s first season on TV. Because if I’m ever going to get used to these things, I’m going to need to see how she wears them. Suppose I should get back to Googling pictures of her now.

Feelin' Ukrainian

As anyone who’s ever seen a photo of me can attest, I don’t really give two shits about fashion. I care about how I look like a blind man cares about road maps. The most expensive shirt I own is from a Tom Petty concert, and the only suit I’ve bought came five years ago, its half-hung buttons attesting to more tear than wear. I rock the same three pairs of pants ad nauseum,* and the calls to end my stripe-on-stripe outfits ring as fruitless as the calls for me to sing at local festivals.**

*I brought three pairs of (near-)identical brown corduroys to Kazakhstan, in the multiple hopes that there’d be no pretty girls I’d want to impress. And then I found one who, somehow, liked them. That was cool.

**This has happened more than once.

See, fashion, in and of itself, is worthless. Like manners or a philosophy degree, fashion is little more than airy semantics, a bygone of classism, posturing, and those who’ve been suckered in by marketing and egos. Fashion is important only for those who don’t have a whole helluva lot else going for them. If you’d rather spend $400 on a new shirt rather than a pallet of new books, or if you’d rather spend time at outlet malls than an orphanage, it may be time to look in a mirror, and not simply the one in the changing room. For any designer to ever be lauded as “brave” or “daring” or “that Tom Ford – so hot right now,” is an affront to veterans, NGO operators, and people who, as it were, actually make some semblance of difference within peoples’ lives.

In the end, fashion is a farce. And it’s also one of the most fascinating things about the people I’ve met out here.

Before I continue, I’d just say that, with that little rant up above, it’s pretty clear I’d judge neither means nor character based on fashion. Sure, fashion is a means of conveyance – of position, of preference – but that doesn’t mean there’s anything more than skim-the-surface revelations about the person. Bums in suits, CEOs in turtlenecks, escorts in Versace: all contain far more than that which they simply wear. All are more than what some JCPenney ad says about them.

Anyway , as you can imagine, Kazakhstani sartorialist senses, those cultural tics that blend fashion with minus-40 function, are a bit different than their American counterparts.* It’s the first thing you notice upon arrival. It’s unavoidable, as obvious as the livestock running amok or the billboards of Nazarbayev peppering the street-sides. It’s one of the few cultural barometers that you will encounter every day.

*But then, can there really be any form of united American fashion sense? Flannels, cargo shorts, and baseball hats are all indicative of someone from the States – but small is the population that actually wears the first two, and people the world over have taken to baseball caps, if only through ingenious marketing from the Steinbrenner clan.

As such, in the seven months since I’ve arrived I’ve started to notice certain patterns of dress that the Kazakhstanis enjoy sharing. Some have surprised – say, children running in 50 Cent shirts, or 30-somethings walking past in retro Houston Astros jerseys – but some we’d been forewarned of before landing. Prior to our arrival, in the last few weeks of our lurching application to Peace Corps, we finally learned what style of dress we’d need to bring to Kazakhstan. It didn’t involve muumuus or dreads, flip-flops and tank tops. No, in Kazakhstan, as in most former Soviet member states, there is a marked emphasis on, of all things, looking good.

Thus, in week before I had to leave for Kazakhstan, I got to go on the second shopping spree of my life.* Mom helped pick out the cords, and I got to go find some dress shirts that would look fine if I ever spilled borsch on them.** I spent more money in that one week than I’ve spent in seven months here, and I still find myself falling short of the standard. Such is the emphasis on professional attire – indeed, such is the emphasis on wearing unduly shiny three-piece suits – that I’ve gotten more than one reminder to spiff up my outfit. Underdressed for Peace Corps. Never in my wildest dreams.

*The first came when a former girlfriend insisted that my dress meet her standard. We went shopping – seersuckers and golf shorts and boat shoes – and I ponied around, all fine and dandy and completely alien in the outfits. It didn’t take long to end the relationship afterward.

**Took only two weeks at site for this to happen.

I’m not sure if this dress code ties in to the practice of tufta,* or if it’s a more recent tradition to push Kazakhstan toward Westernization. Regardless, to have to improve your wardrobe as considerably as I did – and to still have it fall short of the standard set** – isn’t exactly what I had in mind when setting out on this path through Peace Corps.

*Tufta, an Armenian word, was the Soviet name for a practice pioneered by Stalin, perfected by Brezhnev, and still evidenced in numerous Soviet sphere countries. There’s no direct translation – perhaps “bullshitting” may do it – but tufta reflects itself in a preference for inflated numbers, a desire to see deadlines met regardless of reality, and in the knowledge that if everything looks good on paper than there’s no reason to check the facts behind it. It’s the sort of see-no-evil, climb-that-ladder attitude that most corporations roil in, the same that shook me from any desire to work within the sports industry. It’s the kind of practice in which fashion, an inherently hollow measurement, thrives.

**I overlooked wearing a tie to school the other day, opting for a v-neck sweater and matching undershirt. My regional manager, who was attending my classes, said my outfit was too “sexy” for school. Too much chest hair for the 10^th graders, apparently.

So ties-and-collars at school, but what of the days off? What about the babushkas who doddle along, or the coal-diggers keeping us warm, or the kids who make our lives a living hell so wonderful? They don’t wear J. Crew and Sears, do they?

Well, no, they don’t. In fact, it would appear that the desire for look-how-good-I-look stops with both teachers and government officials, the latter of whom sally back and forth between school events and mid-day vodka meetings. The rest of the populace of Presnovka wears those things you would expect out of a Soviet, Slavic, industrial town.*

*I can only comment on Presnovka, as that’s the Kazakhstan of interest, but the cities of Petropavlovsk and Almaty are a world separate. The men all look like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and the women are, ah, well, gorgeous. Russian, Kazakh, some strange Soviet mixture – doesn’t matter. All, without fail, wear heels, and look like they’ve stepped out of either a Guess ad or some Russian bride booklet. You reach the city, and you think to yourself that, surely, no women could possibly look this good, that your tastes must have regressed in those months in your village. Nope. They’re that good. I mean, not as good-looking as our American volunteers, of course … but still.

But as I have to get back to lesson-planning – and ironing my shirts for work tomorrow – I’ll update the sartorializations in the coming weeks. Here’s hoping stripes can finally go with stripes, and that all my corduroys are clean.

I’m the northernmost (male) Peace Corps volunteer in the world.

There’s a caveat in there for gender because we have a female volunteer, about an hour’s drive away, who lives in Mamlyutka, which hedges about .2 degrees north of me. And while I have indoor plumbing and an older woman who dotes on me to no end, the Mamlyutka volunteer had to deal with outhouses and self-sustenance during the 2010-11 winter. Somehow, she survived. Somehow, she still smiles.

Still, I can stake a claim that no man in Peace Corps puts up with the weather that I do. What’s funny, though, is that despite the title, and having now looked up exactly where I lie on a Google atlas, I don’t feel quite as accomplished as I originally thought. Presnovka rings in near the 55th longitude, grazing the border and still stuck in the lower half of Siberia. But the 55th parallel also contains parts of Irish beachhead, a bit of Germany, and the birthplace of Ridley Scott. To be fair, it also contains lower juts of Alaska and one of the funniest sculptures in Russia. But to hear that I’m as far north as Amstel drinkers and that guy who directed Alien, well, the title loses a bit of its luster.

Of course, none of those Europeans get to swagger around in a giant rabbit-fur hat or see haggard Kazakh men chasing down buses with vodka spilling from shot glasses, so at least I’ve got that going for me.

Walkway at twilight

Walkway at noonlight

Ingenuity

More Aegean than Siberian, but we'll take it

Whip 1

Whip 2

Czarist-era building, gutted, skeletal

Some students. Note the shirt.

Kindling

House, with typical colors

Made a friend named Vasily

One of the dozen lakes pocking the steppe around Presnovka

Two tons of coal piled behind the school, to keep us warm this winter

My house, "Dom Hlebovsky"

Fresh rainfall, filthy shoes

Whale-ribbed building behind my house

Lena: 69, with three heads of cattle she's walking to corral

Wayward, wind-tilted barn

Saturday nights in the town center. Note the Nazarbayev billboard.

Sunset in a lot

Water tower, road out of town

Steppe, 8:30 p.m.

More photos can be seen over at Facebook. And feel free to friend me, especially if you want to see me in a giant, dozen-rabbit winter hat.

The snow whipped horizontally outside, sending the flakes past my house and toward the nearby lake. The direction and speed made it seem like the house was in the center of a snow-globe spun one too many times. My house, its paneling pushing up against the innards of the home, groaned and clunked like a rusted Transformer.

As I didn’t have any lessons that day, I had to venture out only once, to grab beer.* I tucked in my long underwear, grabbed the hunting gloves my mom inexplicably bought for me, and tossed on a peacoat and a Mariners sweatshirt. As soon as I stepped out the door the wind butted me like a heifer. It skimmed right along the side of my house, and the open door-frame only provided another avenue for it to pull through. I somehow managed to get the lock settled seconds before my Ducks hat flew into the garden, and, saying a little prayer to the gods of REI,** began my march.

*At site I’m far from a prolific drinker – my tolerance has bottomed out, and a few beers do me for the night. These beers I needed came in anticipation of a Skype-date happy hour. Unfortunately, it never materialized, due to a mixture of technical difficulties and the why-bother-let’s-slug-vodka attitude that binds Kazakhstani families and college dorms the world over.

**Aunt Mary.

The walk to the store is usually no more than 10 minutes – a muck through the road, a quick shortcut through sawed-off cement, straight past the factory and a left around the brick water tower, and you’re there. Usually a nice little walk. But in this storm, the hike took almost 30 minutes. And it was anything but pleasant.

The wind wailed from the west, meaning I was walking headlong into its force in order to get to my beer. Within the first ten minutes my hood blew off two, three, four times – but even that was a reprieve, as it could no longer funnel the flying ice down through my chest. Still, without the hood my ears were nothing but ice cube cartilage, so back it went. I pulled my hat down around my eyebrows, such that it couldn’t also fly away, but that only limited my eyesight to my shoelaces and toe-tips. Still, it was better than keeping it up: Every time I tried to look around the crystal-rock snow battered my face. It’s not that the stuff was especially dense; it’s just that this maelstrom had none of the soft, downy pleasantries usually associated with snowfall. The few times I tried to gather my bearings, I felt like I was stuck in a sandblaster. My pores have never felt so abused.

The road, usually a mixture of tire-rut and snapping dogs, was completely changed. The mutts were shivering in their corrugated kennels, and the ground was a brittle path, mud snapping off wherever you stepped. I caught a respite heading into the shortcut – a slight hill and some poplars blocked a bit of the onslaught – but as soon as I tried to crest the hill, all pretense of control wore off.

My side of ascent, barricaded from the storm, had remained just warm enough that the snowfall had melted into the ground, and what would have otherwise been solid footing was now a muck of mud and weed and rock. Two steps, and back. Three steps, plant my glove on the ground, and feel my left foot slip completely out. Find a rock to put it on, look up into the blinding sand-ice, and grab onto a flailing, calf-high weed. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat until you’ve made it to the top, or until your corneas give out.

Five minutes on, I’d finally topped the hill. Little victories, and all that. Suddenly, though, there were no trees, nor further hills, to bracket the wind. As I de-crouched I was nearly tossed back the way I came – this fucking Mariners sweatshirt is an excellent wind-sock – and saw a thousand snow-rocks hurtling straight for my face. I stuck my bill straight down, bent over like Quasimodo, and hunkered forward into the gale.

The cold cut. Those hunting gloves, despite their great finger-traction for holding a bow-and-arrow,* didn’t exactly provide the ideal amount of warmth. I could feel my chest hair freezing into place, and my jaw starting to lock into its cross-bite slant.

*Hunting gloves, Mom? Really?

Now, bear in mind that this was probably 30 degrees outside, with another 15 knocked off from wind-chill. It was cold – balls cold, chatter-teeth and fetal-position cold – but it was, in the end, mild. It was still above zero. It was, if the locals are to be believed, sixty degrees warmer than what I’m going to see come February.

A sixty-degree swing is a drop from 90 to 30, a plunge from sweat to shiver. Another drop of equal magnitude, another sixty degrees sliced off, and … I mean, that’s the Arctic. That’s the moon. That’s a frozen ride across the River Styx, straight into Hoth. That’s not going to be pleasant. Of course, I won’t be venturing to get any beer on those days – I’ll be stuck in with Arrested Development and Russian flash cards. But still, when a 30-degree putsch can turn my stubble to ice and my fingers to Otter Pops, it doesn’t mean those Arrested Development days will be any more enjoyable.

Anyway, I managed to slump myself across the asphalt, curve around the water tower, and hit the final stretch toward the beer shop – little more than a renovated house, with all the drinks and candies a boy could need. On the home stretch I swung up to check my bearings, and I saw a 40-year-old woman walking by in a windbreaker and some boots, her glove-free hands clutching a pair of grocery bags. Dressed like it was another brisk fall afternoon, as opposed to this blizzard from Hades. Her face looked … a bit put off, like she’d bought the wrong brand of toilet paper, registering neither snow nor wind as she walked down the vacant street and toward the main road a half-mile away. She frowned. I shivered.

I kept on, and as I walked up to the final stoop, I looked up at the nearby barn. This three-story building loomed over the neighborhood. Its wooden siding was worn, faded to gray-brown, and a half-dozen telephone-pole logs stood upright at the joints. It was once, I’m sure, a sight – but with the years of winter wind, the building has begun leaning precariously to the east, looking Hitchcockian and hazardous. If the wind could have such affect on a ten-ton building, I’m not exactly sure how a tenderfoot Portland boy is going to react.

The beer shack was a world of reprieve – heated air, friendly service, much-needed telephone minutes for my eventual air-lift home. I grabbed three beers from the fridge, and held them to my cheek to warm up. Paying the man, I stepped back onto the stoop. I mumbled a few words to gird myself, a little Lombardi for the walk home, and tightened my hood-strings for the thrashing snow. The cashier stepped next to me and peered at the storm.

“You seen winters like we’ve got?” he asked.

“Nope, not like this. Only seen snow a few times in my life.”

“Ah,” he said. “Heh.” He breathed in through his nose, stared for a second more, then walked back in.

The walk home actually wasn’t that terrible. The wind was directly at my back, so no more snow-sand could wend into my random crevices. The back of my head felt like it had an ice pack against it, and my fingers were still locked into place, but I could actually see where I was going. Which meant that, as I walked once more across the asphalt patch, I could see a small Russian man – black hat and mustache; soaked plastic coat; knees bowed out like he’d been squished from above – walking toward me. The wind still felt like a NASCAR draft, but this man, just like the woman before, seemed to take no notice. He just walked. Unflinched. Unhurried. Just walked, right past me, right into the wind, right into the September snow.

I wear this to school every day.

Five years ago, a film came out that, by and large, introduced Kazakhstan to America. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit The Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan thrust Sasha Baren Cohen, and his irreverent character creation, onto an eager and awaiting American audience. It’s tough enough to believe that a half-decade has passed since I sat as a freshman, taking in the first film of a college career; it’s tougher still to fathom that I’m now spending two years of my life in Borat’s claimed homeland.

It’s a sad state when the first – and most often only – thing people know about this mammoth nation comes from a man with a penchant for body hair and anti-Semitism. But then, Kazakhstan, only a nation in a modern sense for the last twenty years, can’t really claim any international heritage. Genghis Khan, its most famous resident, was a Mongol; the republic played a negligible role in the fall of the USSR; all of the big-news unrest is claimed by the southern ’stans. When your only competition comes from a dope-fiend bicyclist and a series of prison camps, it makes sense that a man with a cockroach mustache and that god-damn one-piece would rise to the top.

Of course, the film was never really about Kazakhstan. Such is Cohen’s shtick that his absurdist, stereotyped characters – a Kazakh journalist, a gay Austrian fashionista, and his impertinent Ali G – don’t censure their homeland; rather, they shine a light on the audience they host, or the land they visit. Their origins are immaterial – the setting is what matters.

No, Borat never sought to drag Kazakhstan through the mud. It was, instead, that blank tableau where Cohen could create the necessary tools for lampooning all that ’Murrica holds dear. The film was less of an attempt to harangue Kazakhstan than a romp through those unsaid Americanisms, those traits of which we’re least proud. Borat highlighted our warrish tendencies, finding rousing applause while supporting America’s “War of Terror!” He stumbled upon an eager, chauvinistic audience with some good-ol’-frat-boys. He wrangled with intransigent feminists, and he punctured some of those Southern mores by bringing a low-class prostitute to a suit-and-tie dinner.  His stunts were as hilarious as they were revealing. In terms of comedy-as-social-metric, the film was an utter success – and it still remains one of the funniest, and crassest, films I’ve ever seen.

But, as can be expected, some of those social intricacies of the comedy were lost on the movie-going audience, and the only thing that’s stuck for a plurality is that Kazakhstan = Borat = Kazakhstan. As such, Borat jokes were a constant refrain when I was leaving for Kazakhstan, and even after I’ve arrived. I couldn’t care less – it was all I’d known of this place before I heard I’d be leaving – and, in a moment of regret pride, the first practice of my Cyrillic came on the back of a Russian-language Borat DVD box.

However, such farce carried overseas, and people in Kazakhstan inevitably caught wind of the film, if only a few watched it outright. The reaction was typical: people were miffed; one of the president’s former sons-in-law threatened legal action; full-page newspaper ads – which I actually remember seeing – were taken out to display Kazakhstan for what (Astana claimed) it was. Five years later, you still hear whispers of it, hushed comments damning the movie to the hell of Battlefield Earth and The Back-Up Plan. Kazakhstanis see Americans in the former’s land, and, in a pattern much attuned to the Kaz-is-Borat-is-Kaz line, believe that all Americans think Kazakhstan nothing but a Borat backwater.

Which, of course, most do. As such, time to let you guys know what the film got incorrect about this nation.

Most glaringly, the film’s purported scenes of Kazakhstan were actually filmed in Romania. (Despite being a member of the EU, this former Communist bloc nation actually maintains a lower PPP than Kazakhstan, according to the IMF.) Muddy roads and free-range livestock are still found in smaller villages as my own, but I’ve never seen such thatched-roof poverty of those overseas scenes purported. Alarm clocks are widespread. Horses are maintained for breeding (and culinary) purposes. Internet may yet have room to grow – I’ve waiting four months for a single outlet in my house – but my students spend more time on Facebook-knockoffs than tilling their grandparents’ potato dachas. We’ve earned the “Posh Corps” moniker for a reason.

The granite Eastern European faces piling around Borat are just that – Eastern European. Kazakhs, the nominal people, are Asiatic in appearance, products of centuries of mingled Hun, Turk, and Mongol blood. High, wide cheekbones. Bronzed skin. Bristled, black hair. The Kazakhs are less Boris than they are Beijing, and it doesn’t take an ethnographer to place their heritage squarely in Asia.

Linguistically, Borat’s favored “jekhsimash!” greeting is Cohen’s concoction, and sounds nothing like I’ve heard over here. (Some have heard garbled Polish, but it just sounds like a sneeze to me.) And while anti-Semitism does exist, Kazakhstan is a remarkably tolerant nation, with semi-annual congresses of international religious leaders meeting in Astana to foster interfaith dialogue. No ‘Running of the Jews’ out here.

That’s not to say the film was all fabrication. As far as I can tell, Borat got two things right. Firstly, the Kazakhs don’t care much for the Uzbeks. Or I should say, such a stereotype exists. It’s much like saying Americans don’t like Mexicans, or don’t like Muslims: a few intolerant voices, transposed on the moderate majority, have created and disseminated such an impression. But between the lagman and the plov – two of the best dishes I’ve yet had in this country – I’m not sure how anyone could possibly dislike the Uzbeks.

Secondly, and less hilariously, the tradition of ‘bride-napping’ – the method with which Borat nabs Pamela Anderson – remains alive and well, especially in the southern, Kazakh-heavy portion of the nation. Such a process is just as it seems: a man abducts an unwed woman and, in keeping her from family and friends for a few days, sufficiently ‘sullies’ her good name. While the woman is rarely forced into sexual encounter, enough remains unknown of those few days that her character is dishonored within the community, and she is all but shamed into marriage. The practice is, thankfully, waning, but a few years ago a volunteer watched helplessly as one of her teenage students was kidnapped at knife-point by a half-dozen young men and whisked into a waiting car.

So, yeah, Borat got a few things right – but it mostly an inaccurate, insanely funny mess of anti-Americanism. While I’ll always malign it for the million jokes I found while leaving for Kazakhstan, it did, if nothing else, successfully introduce the ninth-largest country in the world, an aberrant blank on millions’ mental maps, to America. Instead of being greeted with only quizzical, uninterested looks – the faces that Turkmenistan or Kyrgyzstan would have generated  – I was instead instructed to grow a mustache and told that the country was “very niiiiice!”

Of course, there are only so many instances of “I liiiiiike” and “What’s up, vanilla face?” that a boy can take. But, hey, it beats the reaction I would have gotten had this been the land of Bruno. Yeesh.

The building isn’t terribly old – thirty, forty years, maybe late Brezhnev or one of Andropov’s or Chernenko’s sole dictates – and, stuck in the throes of Siberian steppe, was soundly built. The mortar would have insulated the minus-40 wind; the inner machinery would have had to suffice among the worst wear. Granted, late-Soviet infrastructure took knocks for both planning and maintenance – Chernobyl and the Aral drainage are but the most notable – but still, there’s a certain … solidity, a stoutness, that mirrors a people and the necessity of our extremes. A hardiness, or perhaps hardness, evidenced in both citizen and construct.

And yet, with broken plaster still flaking onto the nearby saplings, the building is but a skeleton of what once was. It’s imploded. It belongs in Bosnia or Iraq, some far-flung war-zone that sees bunker-busters and IEDs – not this oil-rich land, this country of swelling GDP and geopolitical surge. It’s as out-of-place as us fresh-faced Americans. It is, like many of the other aspects of this country, an enigma, and its causes and impacts point only, abjectly, to a decade that nearly tore this nation apart.

*             *             *

Twenty years ago, with Communism hastening toward its near-complete demise, Kazakhstan stood out of the way. A spectator to the western-front rumblings, this country neither provoked nor reined. It simply … watched. Yes, there was 1986’s Alma Ata Uprising – riots that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) claimed “were the children of the Kazakh elite [either] drunk and high on dope ….”* – but, and especially in comparison with the other restive republics, the Kazakh SSR paid due fealty to the Moscow chair. With Nursultan Nazarbayev as Gorbachev’s right-hand man – some reports claimed he was being groomed for promotion to prime minister – and with a high rate of Russian irredentism in northern Kazakhstan, it was the smartest tack to take.

*Most of these quotes and facts are going to come from Martha Brill Olcott’s Kazakhstan: Unfulfilled Promise, written in 2002. Also, those riots in Almaty – which occurred five years to the day before Kazakhstan declared independence – are worth their own post at a later time.

As such, when the Union did crumble, Kazakhstan still stood in Moscow’s good graces. While some – famed author Alexander Solzhenitsyn among them – claimed that parts of Kazakhstan rightfully belonged within the Russian Federation, Nazarbayev and Yeltsin enjoyed a détente of whatever ethnic roiling reached their ears.

Helping matters, Nazarbayev was the strongest proponent of an economic union among the former Soviet republics, a shared identity without the trappings of politics. Decentralization, while maintaining the ties that once bound. While Nazarbayev never attained his sought-after Euro-Asian Union, he did help form the Confederation of Independent States, an economic fraternity that still contains the majority of the former SSRs. Such alliance with a wounded Russia allowed Kazakhstan to promptly form a client-state relationship* without becoming but a puppet of the Yeltsin-Putin-Medvedev corps.

*Twenty years later, Russia remains Kazakhstan’s largest patron – the goods still flow, and the pipelines still run – but to suppose a debilitating dependence on Kazakhstan’s part is to misread its independence. Indeed, Chinese inroads, independent relations with Iran, and military exercise with America all point to a country working for the sole benefit of itself. This nation is of its own, betrothed to none other, and maintains and cultivates a severe sovereignty that some other former republics (Tajikistan and Belarus among them) do without.**

**The likeliest way for Russia to have maintained undue sway over Kazakhstan was through economic belligerence. However, not only was Kazakhstan able to pay off its IMF debts eight years ahead of schedule, but it also managed a few other, touchier methods for getting rid of its debt burden. Certain oblasts owed Russia large sums, but, in a convenient reshuffling during the mid-‘90s, such oblasts were incorporated into larger ones. When Russia came calling, the Kazakhstanis simply threw up their hands and said, “Debt? What debt? What oblasts are you talking about?”

But this union, this confederation, could not stay the vacuum left by the Soviet fragmentation. Baltic states excluded, a collapse of the whole meant a collapse of all. While avoiding bloodshed on the scale of Romania or Yugoslavia, there were still deaths in Tbilisi, in Riga, in Yerevan. And while there was the obvious ecstasy and catharsis of Yeltsin standing atop that tank, or of glasnost unveiling any of the hundreds of truths swept under the Soviet rug, the coming questions drowned out any answers 1991 may have provided.

Suddenly, Kazakhstan, a faithful follower of the regime’s doctrine, was thrust out on its own. The nation was “awarded” its independence at a gathering of Soviet republic leaders, a meeting from which Nazarbayev was absent. There was no struggle. There was no say. And, if the next ten years were any indication, there was no time to prepare.

*             *             *

Aside from a political severing, the most immediate impact in independence came in the form of migration. As you may know, Kazakhstan served as something of a dumping ground for all of Stalin’s untouchables, those masses convicted as “wreckers,” “saboteurs,” and “capitalist swine.” Indeed, this nation’s cosmopolitanism resembles America’s – but in the sense of the Atlantic slave trade, with political chattel deposited for the purpose of working the land.

For decades, Kazakhstan had housed nearly a million Volga Germans. These descendants of the great people movements under both Catherine the Great and Stalin had maintained their language and their culture,* and, diverging from the large European groups in America, carried a torch for a land they had lost.

*One of the most surprising things about living in Kazakhstan has been encountering the amount of people who speak German (and who think we’re German, as well). The most common foreign languages taught in classrooms are English and German, and every House of Culture I’ve thus seen has provided a room for German heritage. Unfortunately, the legacy of beer and brats seems to have been lost, smothered by the Russian tradition of vodka and salted fish.

As such, when the Wall and the Union fell, the Federal Republic of Germany extended an invitation, as well as economic incentive, to their ethnic brethren living abroad. They would find land in Germany, and their citizenship would be restored. In the first 10 years of Kazakhstan’s independence, nearly 600,000 Germans – two-thirds of the German-Kazakh population, most of whom had been born in Kazakhstan – uprooted for their ancestors’ homeland. They left behind jobs, histories, and, in cases to which I can personally attest, young children.

The Germans weren’t the only to leave. Similar migration patterns took place among other ethnic groups – 300,000 Ukrainians, one-third of the population, moved back; many Belorussians, Poles, Tatars, and Koreans also left. However, the largest group to uproot was, unsurprisingly, the Russians. The reasons are simple: a cagey population, eyes only on ethnicity, seeing a people it once suppressed now turn to power as their homeland simultaneously shrinks in on itself. All told, some 1.1 million Russians,* about 25 percent of their population in Kazakhstan, departed for Russia between 1988-’98.**

*One of the reasons such a high number actually remained in Kazakhstan was this nation’s proximity to the motherland. There were only slightly more Kazakhs than Russians at the time of independence – Kazakhs only reached a majority in 1997 – and many Russians hoped that the Yeltsin government could somehow bring Kazakhstan back into the Federation’s fold. Of course, such hope was mitigated by the political and ruble crises of 1993, and geographic sovereignty was maintained. More on ethnic relations later.

**Among all these numbers, it’s worth remembering that at the time of independence Kazakhstan was only about 16 million in number. With the combined out-migration of Germans, Ukrainians, and Russians, the population dropped by about 12.5 percent. To speak in relative terms, that’d be 37.5 million Americans departing, most of them white-collar and well-monied. Kazakhstan’s population is only just now recovering to its pre-independence levels.

However, a population drain in and of itself is not necessarily a harbinger of all things doom and gloom. It is the quality of the population lost that marks the impact to society.* According to Olcott’s numbers, the combined departures of the Germans, Ukrainians, and Russians represented a “44.2 percent [drop] in the number of skilled workers from 1985 to 1993.” Management wilted. Factories shuttered. A nation without any history of capitalism now stood with a crippled hierarchy and a depleted skills base at a time it would need them more than ever.**

*God I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m preaching eugenics.

**Even in pre-Soviet times, it was always the Uighurs and the Uzbeks who carried a penchant for bartering and business – the Kazakhs were too busy with their flocks to pay much attention to start-ups and IPOs.

These emigrations, of course, came concurrent with haphazard privatization and the mad scramble for anything worth a kopek. The resulting depression was all but written on the wall:

• Industrial production, the heart of the Kazakhstani economy, shrank by 25 percent in 1994, leading Kazakhstan’s GDP, already meager from the beginning, to drop 31 percent relative to its pre-independence levels. Interestingly, the areas hit hardest were the northern and eastern – that is, Russian-dominated – oblasts. For example, in 1994, Pavlodar saw 11 percent of its industrial output shuttered, while 10 percent made no profit and 44 percent only survived by selling off their assets. All told, that’s a year in which 65 percent of one oblast’s businesses didn’t make a cent.
• The south, Kazakhstan’s poorest region, saw over half of its population dip below the “established subsistence minimum.” All told, 55.5 percent of Kazakhstan’s southern half lived in some form of poverty during the 1990s.
• In mid-1996, about 80 percent of the industrial work force in North Kazakhstan (my oblast!), Semipalatinsk and Kostanai were idle or not receiving salary.
• In 1999 63.6 of urban residents in Western Kazakhstan (and 43.2 percent of those in rural populations) reported that they “couldn’t provide adequate food” for themselves or their families.
• Officials allowed two hunger-strike-related deaths in 1998 in Zhanatas, outside of Taraz, when protesters, including pregnant women and women with young children, picketed for back-wages. These wages never arrived.
• When the tenge was first introduced as Kazakhstani currency in 1993 – its inception is a story for another time – it promptly sported a 2,500 percent annual inflation rate for the first two years, drastically altering any economic progress or planning.
• In a nod to America’s unholy wealth disparity, “the gap between the incomes of the richest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent was fourfold in the pretransition years; by 1998, it was more than elevenfold.”
• (This quote is fantastic, and not just for the fact that two of my good friends now live in this city): “Things got so bad in Saran [near Karaganda], where there had been a large industrial rubber plant, that people were offering to sell their apartments for 1,000 tenge ($6.80) and even to trade them for a bottle of vodka.”
• Wealth often confers health, such that when the assets bottomed out, so did the peoples’ well-being. Life expectancy dropped five years from ’90-’95; infant mortality jumped from 26 to 36 out of 100,000 from ’89-’97; and by the end of the decade one Kazakh social service official estimated that about 40 percent of the country’s youth were “drug users” – not taking into account the penchant for that wonderful Russian staple, vodka.
• All told, when Kazakhstan achieved independence, the Human Development Index ranked Kazakhstan as 61^st, similar to that of Mexico and Poland – but after just five years it fell nearly two-dozen places, hovering around the Philippines before bouncing back to 75^th by the end of the decade.

You get the picture. One of the few stories our former teacher, Nina Petrovna, shared with us about her personal history came in Pavlodar in the mid-1990s. Nina, an ethnic Russian – and one of the most wonderful women I’ve ever met, this country or otherwise – told us of the lines she and her son would wait in, all for a bit of flour, sugar, and spice. The lines would take hours, and the only reason she would bring her son, now in his early 20’s, was because he would be eligible for an equal amount of rations. This kid would stand by his mother’s side, slip in hand, just for a chance to eat for the day. While my friends and I played Power Rangers, while Kenneth Starr debated a dress, while Griffey was sliding across home, this boy and his mother waited.

*             *             *

It took about 10 years for Kazakhstan to find itself. Actually, if anything, it took about 10 years for the country to find a way to turn its oil profitable. The Tengiz oil field, Chevron’s largest international project, was discovered in the Caspian in 1993, and the nearby Kashagan field, found in 2000, proved to be the largest oil reserve discovered since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay some 40 years ago. * Still, mere presence didn’t confer prosperity – some 25.8 million barrels of Kazakhstani oil were extracted in 1990, but it took seven years of independence for that level to once more be attained.

*A Muslim-majority nation, whose main export is oil, that willingly gave up its nuclear warheads? Somewhere, a neo-con is crying.

As is obvious to anyone who has heard of this nation outside of Borat and this blog, Kazakhstan maintains a petro-economy, and the oil wells should last another few decades – and that’s barring any new finds. As such, when Slate runs a five-piece series entitled “Kazakhstan Rising,” you’ll understand that it’s not just hyperbole set for Borat’s fifth birthday.

But those last ten years, as opposed to the first ten, are neither here nor there. That story is far brighter; that story lends credence to those local billboards that read, “Kazakhstan: Twenty years of peace and unity.” I simply wanted to write about those first ten, the ones that sucked this nation dry, the decade that battered a country before it could even begin.

The ’90s are gone. But like a bad dream that still slips back, you know it’s there, that it happened, that it’s just beyond the pale. You see it. Hints, mostly. Shades of a past only just gone.

Sometimes you get a full picture, its bleakness boring into you with slack jaws and vodka-weathered faces. You see it in the 70-somethings, the red-blood communists whose religion fractured and fell when Yeltsin shoved off Gorbachev and declared his new day. You see it in the 30-somethings, the ones whose educational opportunities wilted with the ruble crises and privatization schemes. And you – or perhaps just I, and all those who knew the creature comforts of a ’90s child in America – see it in the 20-somethings, the ones who caught but the far end of it, who were strained enough to age quicker than those Americans now skittering through their land.

But most of all, you see it in the buildings. Because these buildings, smothered with vines and and melded into the background, are everywhere. Once stalwarts of a grand Soviet dream, now imploded and strewn like carcasses. Buildings as shells. Buildings as pieces. Ossified for future generations to see. Stuck just beyond someone’s backyard, always reminding of a decade gone, but not nearly forgotten.

It was 5:15 in the morning. There were four of us in the cab as we rolled out of Almaty’s train station after a 30-hour ride from the Siberian north. Our baggage turned the shock-less stationwagon into a Chicano rider, catching tumbleweed plastic beneath our low-hang muffler, and as we rumbled to a red light I took stock of the surroundings.

Dawn, still thirty minutes from sunrise, draped a gray silkscreen over the trees, the gates, the sidewalks. The Tien Shan squatted navy blue against the lightening sky. (After months in the unending, undying flat of the north, such size made one of us ask whether they were either bulkheads or tricks of light, because surely no land could ever rise to such height.) To our left sat a coffeeshop – as evidenced by the COFFEESHOP emblazoned above the still-closed doors – and to our right ran the low knoll of a park, poplars and spruces jutting up at measured spaces. Through the trees you could make out the hint of the former presidential enclave, a blockish, unenviable structure, its rectangular colonnade making the façade look more prison than palace. Tram wires slung above. Downtown Almaty spread behind us, a menagerie of post-independence condos, all glass and carbon-fiber, and the Soviets’ granite gaudiness, culminating in the crown-top Hotel Kazakhstan. A half-mile away, the 1,000-foot Kok Tobe radio tower connected its dozen red lights, an awkward, aluminum relic of communist technology.

The air was still cool, a hint of humidity foreshadowing the day’s heat. The shuffle of cars provided the only noise, but from a distance, as our four-lane road sat strangely, idly, empty. With the walk signs completing their countdown, the red light shifted back to yellow, then to green – because that’s how they do it here – and as the stationwagon lurched forward, it all hit me at once.

This was Almaty. This was a city.

This was civilization.

When we first ventured into Almaty some six months ago, the city came across all dust and dinge, broiling in sweaty bodies and carbon emissions. Buses listed past, belching their exhaust at every corner. Winter’s freeze left trees still stripped. Refuse boiled in the spring sun, and faux-efficient Soviet architecture stood spartan among the crowded lanes.

Beer was expensive. Kebabs were limp. Street art was as crass and produced as Rick Perry. The place muddled kitsch and stench, producing a charmless farrago of junk and grime and body odor in a way I’d never seen. The city, purportedly a sprawl of park, was anything but a natural beauty.

And so I left it, four months back. My last memories of Almaty entailed hauling 130 pounds of baggage through a train-car-turned-banya, heaving my shit while pouring pounds of sweat in an AC-less cabin. The parting image – smog overhead, vendors scowling, Americans melting into themselves – didn’t exactly portend an excited return to the cultural and commercial capital of Kazakhstan.

But then, such parting image also didn’t entail a summer at site.* It didn’t predict a summer without buses and beer gardens; it wasn’t predicated on a lack of manicured lawns or multi-story buildings. And while the occasional trip to Petropavlovsk – a city deserving of a few blog posts, in due time – allowed the chance to see street signs and lanes без potholes, that city is more established suburb than international destination.

*A summer which, I should add, saw me welcomed far quicker than I should have otherwise been. I may not say it enough, but the people of Presnovka deserve more praise than I can possibly give them. More on them sometime, in hardback. 

Shit – “international destination.” Four months gone from Almaty, and I’m already putting it on par with Bangkok and Boston, already claiming that it’s worthy of a spot on your global dartboard. Four months back, I would have kicked myself for saying it – I didn’t even think Houston warranted international attention; how could I possibly feel that way about Almaty?

And yet, there it is. I’m not saying that you need to whip over to Expedia to begin a bargain-basement search. Rather, I’m simply saying that when – and I do hope it’s a ‘when’ – you make it to Central Asia, you’ll take the time to pass through Almaty. To see this melding of Kazakhstani and capitalistic worlds, this best offering of culture and acculturation. To see this city as I’ve now seen it. Because while my views are obviously skewed, addled by the muddied roads and wind-slanted houses I now call home, I like to think those views aren’t entirely foreign, or at least not yet. As evidence, some experiences:

While in Almaty, I ate better, and for an extended period of time – to the detriment of my bank account, of course – than I have in over a year.* The meals ranged from expat fish’n’chips, complete with accompanied lager and darts; to heavy-cream gnocchi, set outdoors alongside a remarkably phallic fountain; to a stir fry of lamb and peppers, the first time that I can ever remember actually enjoying a heap of mutton. We didn’t eat out for every meal – this is still Peace Corps – but when we did, the selections sufficed beyond satiation.

*As with any subjective measure, the quality of the experience is severely slanted by the relative lifestyle. In this case, I was comparing the food I ate to what I’d grown accustomed to over the summer. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the food at my site – I actually ended up missing Babs’ cooking quite a bit as the two weeks wound on – but, rather, the variety of the offerings in Almaty outpaced the borsch-and-perogi diet that I normally ate.

Of course, having had a half-year without any of the American staples we carry so fondly, the culinary highlights of our time in Almaty came at whichever State-borne establishments we could find. While there’s still a vacuum waiting to be filled with strawberry milkshakes and grease-drip burgers, the offerings didn’t disappoint. From a lone table in the city’s MEGA Mall, an empty stomach can find KFC, El Taco, and, in a gift from that Great Cook in the Sky, Hardee’s.*

*Carl’s Jr., as we know it on the West Coast. A double-cheeseburger by any other name ….

Having not had a decent burger since arriving – and noting the banner that read “Top American-Brand Burgers in Kazakhstan!”* – we left a trail of saliva to the $8-a-pop plates. It was, of course, just as dispiriting to see these Kazakh kids machining our meals, to send them scampering in grease-splotch shirts … but, my god, when that first bite reached our lips, when the ketchup ran down our chins and the fries filled up the remaining space, there was no place I’d rather be. Such succulence, such season, such taste – such good – was directly proportioned in quality and quantity. The more you stuffed your face, the better the burger got. It was gluttonous and hedonistic. It was garish and heavenly. It filled me up like nothing I’d ever known.

*Surprisingly, Kazakhstan doesn’t carry a McDonalds, as meat-processing regulations prevent the Golden Arches from corrupting this post-communism holdout. This means no McBeshbarmak, or at least not in the foreseeable future.

The only meal that rivaled the burgers came from another proud-to-laud American export: Pizza Hut. Due to its proximity to our hotel – which, as we learned over the two weeks, also serves as a quasi-brothel – Pizza Hut stood as a favorite destination of Peace Corps Volunteers, with sorties headed out every night. On the day that myself and one other volunteer were too, ah, bed-ridden to participate in any of the activities, we decided to brave the bright afternoon to see if a personal pan could help us feel a bit better.

Short answer: yes. Long answer: this was the nicest Pizza Hut I’ve ever seen in my life. From the silverware to the carpeting, from the stirred mojitos to the wine table, from the pneumatic salad bar to the soporific shots of nature cycling through the televisions, this restaurant was unlike any Pizza Hut America’s ever known. Despite the familiar offerings – just that first bite, and I was instantly back to freshman year of college – this place was as foreign to us as it was the Kazakhstanis. This Pizza Hut, this American slice fixed in Almaty, was gourmet.

The rest of our time, that spent not gorging ourselves on whatever cheese-and-grease brew we could find, was spent either building a fort or gallivanting through the facsimile of a cosmopolitan, Western city. There were the giant, stark billboards hawking Louis Vuitton and Patek Philippe; there were Audis and BMWs rolling past with suits and stilettos inside; there were restaurants with full-sail ships and three-quarter chapels serving as decorations. There was the nightclub with a 2,000-tenge ($14) cover* – all for some House and fog machines – and there were the bouncers forcing one of us out of 2,000 more after a beer bottle tipped and toppled to the ground.**

*Da Freak, which is actually mentioned in Lonely Planet’s guide to Kazakhstan.

**Bribery seems to be a staple only in the larger cities. In addition to paying off this kickback – which my friend haggled down from the original 5,000-tenge demand – another, Justin, was forced to shell out 6,000 tenge ($42) when he realized, just an hour after boarding the train to Almaty, that his ticket read the incorrect date. While you’d think that additional 6,000 would at least land him a bed during the two-night ride, the compartment conductor provided him with only a chair and the knowledge that he wouldn’t be kicked off. Fortunately, Justin, having served as infantry in Afghanistan, was accustomed to rougher evenings – but still.

And, of course, there was MEGA, a temple to profligacy, a mall to end all malls. Chocolate fountains. ATMs dishing American dollars. Full-blown posters of Katy Perry.* The place, mired in the miracles of all things shiny and expensive, was a breath of Americana, an anchor of nostalgia for all those things idealistic Peace Corps Volunteers shouldn’t miss. It was disgusting. It was divine. It was, as one of us said, fucking awesome.

*There was also a Gap, in which, to the enjoyment of every single volunteer I’ve yet met, I finally bought a pair of jeans. While they were probably the most expensive pair of pants I’ve ever purchased – and while I still don’t understand how everyone else (correctly) assumed jeans would fly in Kazakhstan – I now have the option of wearing something other than the three pairs of brown corduroys I brought.

While we did actually spend a fair bit of those two weeks working – language lessons, teacher trainings, putting condoms on markers as part of an AIDS/PEPFAR seminar – the trip served as less of a training regimen and more of a troop reunion. It was a perfect layover in, and conclusion to, a summer spent acclimating to the isolation and realities of Kazakhstani life, a reprieve from the Russian and livestock that now dominate our lives. We swapped stories and shared music; we danced long and drank heavily. We compared where we were, and helped those along who’d had a rougher go of things. We were reinvigorated, and together. And we got to do it all in Almaty: International Destination.