I made it back to my village after a week in Almaty for a Peace Corps conference. I got to see those big ole mountains again, visit my training host family, get attacked by my old neighbor girls, and eat some foods that I missed (both national and international cuisine). Spicy food! Broccoli! No way! There were some wonderful moments.

But as good as it was to speak English full speed again, it was also really weird. I kept slipping in phrases of Russian and Kazakh when those languages better expressed what I wanted to say. And as useful as it was to recharge my batteries, remember that I am part of a larger organization, and hang out with a bunch of Americans, it feels really nice to be back here. Things shrink down to the day-to-day at site and I blissfully lose track of things like long-term development goals.

I get to listen to stories, too. From tales of organized crime and random acts of violence to the best time to plant tomatoes, listening is a pleasure. I had a particularly great day hanging out with three taxi drivers in Pavlodar waiting for them to gather enough passengers to send a car our. A Kazakh, a German/Russian, and a Russian, all sitting around their favorite bus station café, treating the American to coffee, pot roast, bad jokes, and their historical grievances. You’re not really even Kazakh, says one, look at you with your black hair, you guys are supposed to be light skinned with blue eyes. You’re just a Mongol mutt – one of that tribe that kept my Russians at war for hundreds of years and destroyed our chances of being a Western nation. The Kazakh replies with something about the horrors of Soviet occupation, collectivization, and drafting for WWII front lines. To which the German plays his trump card – he’s the one with Nazi POW blood in his veins that was sent to die out in a labor camp. The outpost Russian village in wild Kazakh territory turned prison town – that’s where I live.

Somehow, I never had this conversation with my friends in America. Race, nationalism, and history are things we tend not to talk about and like to pretend make no difference. Here, though, go ahead and invoke the 14th century Mongols – everyone will understand what you are getting at.

But history is, of course, always up for debate and revision. One facet of history is already starting to slip away. It’s there in the back yard of the local history museum, the one housed in a beautiful log cabin with overflowing ice dams and a padlocked door. Walking home from ski practice, a friend of my host brother’s put it right: It’s like a graveyard to communism. Isn’t that Pushkin over there? Well, no, I wanted to correct him, it’s Marx, but you’ve got the right idea. He and his three buddies (two busts of and one pointing Lenin) are tucked away near the rubbish heap. They must have been collected from various prominent positions around town. Most places in Russia also did this after the fall of communism; I believe there is an entire sculpture garden in either Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Or my 7th grade host cousin, who one day watching a television serial/bioepic on Stalin (there was another one going on when I was in Irkutsk; it’s a popular theme on Russian television stations) asks: What does repressed mean? And my host mother answers, it means punished. Which is a legitimate one word answer, but there is so much more in that word. It contains the experiences of this girl’s grandmother, who was a slave laborer on a state farm with nothing to eat for years because everything went to the front lines. And the stories of the German taxi driver’s family. And the tales of Tartar families relocated here trying to escape collectivization. And writers exiled, generals purged, war heroes sent away to freeze with Lenin tattooed on their breasts.

So, in short, there are still things here to fascinate me, and I can’t help but wonder at people who think they can know a place after a week long tour. I’ve been in this village for almost 6 months, and everyday I figure something else out. Like today, I found a new route home that bypasses the lake our road has become. Small successes…

Oh, and if you’re wondering, a great time to visit would be July. I’ll round up some students to sing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” with you.

Love,
Nora