Life in Kazakhstan provides for plenty of reading time. Thirty hour trains, bad Russian television, and the familiar comfort of the English language have driven me to read a lot more than I did living amidst all the distractions of America. One of the books I have recently read is Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat. His premise is that over the past 20 years, a variety of technological advances and historical developments have combined to create a much more globalized economy in which a person's ability to find work and reach their potential is no longer handicapped by geography.
Ironically, the land of the steppe is not a particularly “flat” country. Cities such as Astana and Almaty are Westernized to a certain extent and connected to the global community. Outside of the big cities, however, everything immediately becomes more insular. In Zhezkazgan, I can read about financial crises, political happenings, and foreign affairs but everything feels very remote and slightly surreal. Nonetheless, even in this hidden corner of the world, we have telecommunications companies and DSL. It may take weeks of processing paperwork, but technology has a way of inexorably, if slowly, marching into even the most obscure and esoteric locales.
I didn't quite envision typing away on a DSL connection in the comfort of a sub-Siberian apartment when I applied to Peace Corps. It certainly does not fit the Peace Corps paradigm of a mud hut on the banks of the Volta or a hammock on a far-flung Pacific isle not seen since Captain Cook set sail. It is a different experience with a different set of challenges. Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteers can suffer from “close but no cigar syndrome”. Physically, Kazakhstan doesn't look incredibly different from America. Apartments, cars, groceries, Snickers bars, even barbershops are similar. The culture, however, is very different and this dissonance can be very frustrating and it inevitably wears on even the hardiest Westerner. I'm sure every single Peace Corps volunteer in Africa would roll their eyes at me. Of course, it's doubtful that more than a handful of them would ever be able to read this...
In any case, having a solid internet connection will allow me to post photos and videos of my trials and tribulations here, which will hopefully make Kazakhstan easier to visualize and less of a murky concept.
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4 comments:
Hey Jamie,
My name's Jack Aldrich; I was an AL at Dudley last summer and Tim was my JL my junior year. Just letting you know I happened upon your blog after you put up some pictures on facebook, and I find it really interesting. Haha, as a matter of fact, I think I had contacted you on facebook after you had pictures of you in Tim in the Balkans. I'm not stalking you, (I swear), but I find my interests and passions (seemingly) aligned with yours, and I really admire what you're doing. I have 4 years of college to look forward to (I just got into NYU), but I am tossing around the Peace Corps as a post-grad option. I've read several books on Central Asia, and I just wanted to let you know that I'll be following your adventures on your blog! Keep it up, and good luck with everything!
Pravda! I hope you had my beloved Kiribati in mind when you wrote about the Pacific isle. I think I am coming to visit your city at the end of February on busisness. I will let you know the details if I do. i want to see what you are missing by not living in Karaganda.
As an expat here, it's also strange. Friends contact me and say, "What's it like in Astana? It must be weird." And I always have to say, No we have a widescreen TV, wireless Internet, I go to work by bus and work on a computer. We live in an apartment and go to TGIF's or Il Patio or a Mexican restaurant on the weekend. This is not the exotic expat lifestyle I dreamed of!
Great blog. Look forward to reading more. Check out my blog KZBlog, if you like.
So there is a TGIF's in Astana? I've heard rumors. It's sad that the epitome of American culinary mediocrity has become a distant myth of growing proportions for us volunteers. The only "foreign" restaurant I've seen was Uighur which isn't so bad because I'm a sucker for lagman. Zhezkazgan doesn't have many restaurant options except for excellent shashlyk.
There's only so many times a man can eat beshbarmak.
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