С днем рождения

Last Friday happened to be the birthday of both my host mother and my host brother. Exciting stuff – they get to enjoy a birthday feast, right? Not exactly. As Kazakh tradition dictates, it was my host mother’s responsibility to throw a huge dinner party for the whole extended family. My host brother chatted with the family for a little bit before slinking off to carouse with his friends, like he does seven nights a week. He’s even worse than Tim, for christ’s sake.

I arrived home from training on Friday to a madhouse. My host mother, my host sister and the eldest daughter (now married and living in the next village) were crammed in the kitchen preparing all manner of food. The living room/storage room/three person bedroom took on yet another persona and had been transformed into a large dining room. The entire apartment was sweltering with the heat from the kitchen, primarily from that titan of Kazakh cuisine, beshbarmak (literally: five fingers). And yes, everything in the picture to the right was consumed -- even the fat, which was diced and tossed into the bowl.

Before long, the guests began to arrive in an unending stream. Everybody was speaking Kazakh, which immediately rendered me the functional equivalent of a two year old, but I was at least able to squeak through with a “Hello” and “How are you?”. We’ve only had about four hours of Kazakh, much of which was spent on numbers. That will be useful in the long run and in bazaars, but I don’t think listening to someone count to one hundred in Kazakh would really get their blood flowing. However, there was one spry old babushka sitting across from me who merrily chirped at me in Russian, trying to discuss something about languages and teaching but it was a little too much for me to understand.

I’m still on the fence with beshbarmak. The meat and noodles are ok, but the Kazakhstani obsession with eating animal fat is a little too much to bear. Other than shashlyk (basically all-meat shish kebabs), they don’t use anything to spice up the meat here so it’s really bland. As far as the alcohol here, most of the trainees in Issyk have yet to throw back their first vodka shot. I think the Peace Corps staff put the fear of God into these host families and led them to believe that we were the quintessential lightweights. However, I don’t think my family drinks that much, which is more typical of Kazakh families. One of the trainees, Mike, is even doing Ramadan with his family. Observance of Ramadan is unusual even among the Kazakhs of the town though. Kazakhstan’s relationship to Islam is encapsulated by the huge post-Ramadan feast that Kazakhs celebrate even though most of them don’t actually fast. On the whole, Kazakhstan is probably more secular than the United States.