I keep probing. There had to be something,
and there was … a few vague scraps, the sum total of my knowledge of a country
I was about to spend two months living and working in. Scrap Number One: Kazakhstan is a small Central Asian
Republic
At that stage I hadn’t heard of Borat,* so
I was puzzled when a number of friends laughed and clapped me on the back with
a smirk, “You’re going to Borat land, ha ha!”
I lacked the courage to admit my ignorance, so I sneakily turned to my
Google contacts and asked, “What is Borat?” Failing to get a satisfactory
reply, it occurred to me to ask “Who is Borat?” From what I could make out,
whoever this Borat person was, he’d clearly done something to upset the
Kazakhs. Just as well I had no time then to pursue the matter because it could
have made me feel uneasy about my decision to accept a post in Kazakhstan
Even before I arrived at my destination,
I’d learned that “Scrap Number 1”
was completely wrong. Kazakhstan
is not some small republic, another puzzle piece in the map of Europe somewhere
beyond Poland China to the east and Russia Moscow , Istanbul
and Iran we travelled,
dwarfed all the while by the vast plains and mountains of Kazakhstan
In Astana, snow and ice blind me; the runway
is a glacial sheet, blurring at the horizon with a luminous white sky. Ground
control staff, dressed like astronauts, are buffeted by powerful gusts. One of
the marshallers is blown sideways, as if he had stepped on to an invisible
conveyer belt. He struggles on toward our aircraft, his yellow batons flailing in
the wind. The temperature, I'm told, can plummet to -45º C. The North Pole or the capital of Kazakhstan
A further flight south and westward takes
me to my final destination, to the oil-rich city of Atyrau ,
not far from the northern coast of the Caspian Sea . http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=es&tab=wl The climate is more benign here than in Astana and my Irish winter wardrobe
turns out to be adequate, particularly given that it is spring now and I only
have a ten minute walk from my new home to the college where I’ll be teaching. On
Monday morning I leave at 8.15, in the company of the other four teachers who
have been recruited for this project. We walk through, what seems to me, the
bleakest of landscapes, of grey-brown sand-dust stretching far beyond where the
eye can see, out to the steppes of Central Asia .
I’m staring at Nothing, at Nothingness. There are no mountains, no trees, no
paths to focus the line of vision. I’ve never been confronted by such emptiness
before and it’s disquieting.
When the wind blows it ushers in a storm
from the vastness. On that first week I see what I believe is mist approaching
from the distance, a dense mist. But it’s a wall of sand/dust advancing toward
us. With my sunglasses protecting my eyes and covering my nose and mouth with
my hands, I now understand why desert nomads swaddled their heads in metres of
cloth. My students tend to use Palestinian style Keffiyehs and they urge me to
buy one too.
The course I’m teaching on is an entirely
new project, financed jointly by the Kazakh government and a Kazakh oil
company. It is an endeavour to train more young people from the country to
become professionals in the burgeoning oil industry. Students recruited for the
course pay nothing for enrolment and live on site at no cost to themselves in specially built
residences. Many of them want to be engineers and many of them are young women.
It turns out that the students, with their
sense of humour, enthusiasm and kind heartedness, are the highlight of my time
in Kazakhstan
When I explain to my class that this is my
first experience of their country, they ask, “So what do you know about Kazakhstan
The young men in my class also know how to
dress to impress. Some of them arrive in suits, ties and waistcoats, and even a
briefcase dangling from their hands. Admittedly, they do look slightly
uncomfortable but it’s their way of honouring the importance of the occasion. The
honour, however, is mine. I feel privileged to be among these people. They are
endlessly courteous and grateful. On the Nauyrz feast day, the most important
in the Kazakh calendar, they invite me into a traditional banquet. The spread
is laid out across tables inside a yurt** and it is here that Scrap Number 4 is
confirmed. A variety of meat is neatly presented on large platters and some of
it is indeed horsemeat, a staple in the highly meat-oriented diet of Kazakhs. I’m
thinking it’s ironic that I should be here, where equine flesh is prized as
part of the local cuisine, while there is a national scandal raging back home
about how traces of horsemeat have been detected in products sold by major
supermarket chains. But I’m vegetarian, so I politely decline.
Toward the end of the course, some of
the students invite me to a meal, a pizza, “100 per cent vegetarian,” they
assure me. In the midst of the general banter at the table the dreaded “B” word
is mentioned. And yes, I quickly realise it was in a question directed at me. I
turn to Miras, Yesbol and the others; they’re staring at me expectantly. I take
a deep breath and search for the words that will lead me into an anodyne
response. “Borat? I’d never heard of him until I was about to leave home … and
now I don’t like him. Kazak people are not like him, not at all.”
“It’s okay, you know. Don’t feel bad. Some
of us laugh at him too, precisely because that buffoon does not resemble us.
Anyway, in the end, Borat has been good for us. Tourism in Kazakhstan
We all raise our Coca Cola glasses in a toast
that says so much about the tolerance and good nature of the Kazakhs I’ve
encountered during my stay in their homeland. Maybe they are the undiscovered
treasure, the most valuable asset the country possesses, more valuable than oil
even. For me they are priceless.
*
Borat is the main character in a comedy film entitled, Borat: Cultural Learnings
of America for Make Benefit
Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan Kazakhstan
**
A traditional tent-like dwelling used by the nomadic peoples of Central Asia
No comments:
Post a Comment