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As many of you have probably already heard, the Peace Corps Kazakhstan program has been suspended indefinitely. After learning this news on the 16th of November, all the volunteers in the country were given a little under a week to say goodbye to everyone at site, and then we had to travel to Almaty for a “transition conference,” in which we did everything it was possible to do, in four days, to close out our service.

For those of you wondering “why”: we were told that PC Headquarters made its decision to suspend the program not based on any one factor, but because all the problems that our program in Kazakhstan was experiencing seemed to add up to a “perfect storm” situation. Those include the problems described in my previous post, as well as an unprecedented number of suicide bombings and other terroristic attacks in Kazakhstan this year (see related news articles).

As for me, I was one of those volunteers who felt safe at my site, I was just reaching a point in my service where I knew I had real friends and lots of connections, and I was confident enough with my daily duties to start planning larger projects. I don’t doubt that Peace Corps, knowing much more than I do about its status in Kazakhstan, made the right decision. Still, to have so much taken away, and so suddenly, was a blow that I am only beginning to understand.

Since my thoughts on the present are still a mess, I wanted to share with you all, instead, an essay that I wrote in October. I was holding off on posting it here since it was scheduled to come out in Vesti, Peace Corps Kazakhstan’s volunteer-run-literary-journal-of-sorts. Looking back on the essay now, it seems like a kind of time capsule – the last complete thought I had about my Peace Corps service, at least in writing, before I started to hear more about all the factors that eventually led to the program’s suspension.

And, really, maybe that’s the best monument I can give you: a sense of the way things were, and not the way they seem in retrospect.

Shieli, as I left it

***

The Local BFG

In my first year as a Peace Corps volunteer, I’ve shared no small number of exciting, frustrating, and absurd moments with people in Kazakhstan. I’ve been dragged into not one, but two kara-zhorga dance-offs in front of a full restaurant; I’ve tied a scarf around my head and squeezed my way into the crowd overflowing the women’s wing of our mosque on kadyr tuni, at the end of Ramadan; I’ve met an old man who said I was the first American he’d ever seen and gave me a huge, dead fish in recognition of that fact; I’ve spent an evening’s train ride with a soft-spoken Russian man who told me stories about his childhood in Siberia; I’ve crossed paths with a man dressed as a holy molda, with robe and staff, who insisted he’d received a personal letter from president Obama… But of these and all the other colorful episodes I’ve tucked away in my memory since August 2010, the moments when I’ve had the strongest sense of being a Peace Corps volunteer – when I’ve wondered to myself, “Under what circumstances, besides being in Peace Corps, could this possibly happen?” – have been those I’ve shared with people under the age of ten.

Any average day at site can yield a wealth of such moments. Take, for example, a certain Thursday this October. In the morning I left my house and walked to our local music school. One of the dance instructors there has agreed to teach me Kazakh dances after she’s finished her lessons with her regular students – that is, a class of fourth- and fifth-grade girls. When I first started dropping in at the end of their lessons, my appearance would set off a flurry of whispers and curious stares, but after the girls’ teacher explained to them who I was, they began to meet my eyes, creep up to me and ask me scattered questions. And on this particular day, when they had a break between run-throughs of their “lamba” line dance, their last scrap of shyness melted away, and they flocked towards me and settled around me in one mass movement.

The boldest among them pressed herself against my knees, as if she would keep walking towards me if they weren’t in the way, and started the Q&A session. “Apai, where are you from? Do your parents speak Kazakh like you do?” Then the other girls began to join in: “What foods do you eat there? Do your parents live in Kazakhstan?”

I asked them, in turn, where they went to school, and one of the fifth-graders from my school bragged, “She’s our apai.”

“You know her??” voices chirped in amazement, as fingers reached out to brush my hair.

“Of course,” the girl said coolly, as she hopped onto the chair next to me and nestled against my shoulder. “She’s always hanging out in our classroom.”

Their instructor called them to get back into position for the lamba, but before departing, the girl who still stood pressing herself against my knees reached out, took my face in her hands, and planted a wet, sloppy kiss somewhere between my nose and cheek. This set all the other girls ringing with laughter.

At school that afternoon I had a lesson with the fourth form. The day before, when I was out walking with my host sister, one of my 4th-grade students had passed us on his bicycle, and as soon as I entered the classroom, he came bounding up to me, asking,

“Apai, where were you going yesterday???”

“I went to the train station to get a ticket,” I told him.

“What!” he said with huge, surprised eyes. “Are you going back to your country??”

“Can I get to America on the train?” I teased. “I’m going to Almaty for the holiday.”

A girl who had wandered into our conversation piped up, “Why?”

“I’m going to a conference.”

“Just don’t go, apai!” was her advice.

“Well, I’m coming back,” I clarified.

“Ohhhhh,” they said, and apparently satisfied with this answer, took their seats.

Or, to draw an example from a less average day, one that occupies a special place in my memory: before the Kaz22 IST conference in March, I went to my old training village to visit my host family from Pre-Service Training. I spent most of my time during that visit with my nine-year-old host sister; she was my banya companion, she showed and explained eons of family photos to me, and she fearlessly led me across the street to a cluster of old pipes where she had seen a family of rats building their nest for the winter. In the morning, when I was packing my things to go into the city, she brought me an illustrated book of Kazakh fairy tales, insisting that I take it. I told her that the book was too difficult for me, and she should keep it because, unlike me, she could read the stories in it.

“Try reading it,” was her reply. So I dutifully found my way to the top of a paragraph and started making my way through it. I hadn’t gotten far before I was stopped by the word елістеу.

“What does this mean?” I asked her.

She pointed to the facing illustration, which showed an iron-clad batyr (the Kazakh version of a knight) gazing up into a misty vision of a beautiful lady. “It’s like when you see something in your dreams,” she explained, “but you’re not sleeping. Like, when you leave, I’ll think of you this way.”

Now, maybe I can take some credit for knowing how to let kids get close enough to me to share these kinds of confidences. But I never would have expected an American child, no matter how close she felt to me, to say – not that she’d miss me, but that she’d see me as in a waking dream! The simpler answer, I think, is that for someone so young and unaccustomed to foreigners, a person who comes from a distant land retains some traces of magic about them. I’m kind of like the Big Friendly Giant: I’m fun once you get to know me, but I still belong to a separate, somewhat awe-inspiring species. That shows itself in the long, unblinking stares I usually get from children on trains and in bus stations – and in the dazzling bursts of affection I sometimes get from children who feel they know me.

Awkward foreigner, English teacher, community member, host sister, friend: these were all roles I expected to play, and do play daily, in my time as a Peace Corps volunteer. Little did I know, when I stepped off the plane from Frankfurt, that I would also become my town’s local BFG. Yet this may be the role, I sometimes think to myself, that I’ll miss the most – if only because I’ll never get to play it again.

Unless, of course, I find a way to smuggle some of that magic dust onto the plane home…

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