Matt, meet host family – adventures in Қазақша and монша culture

The third day in Kazakhstan is here (though I should be spelling it Qazaqstan now to be consistent in my romanisations), and I have just spent an enjoyable afternoon with my host family after a morning agonising over meeting them with my single-digit vocabulary in Qazaq language and a boatload of host-family related PST, concerning etiquette rules and the various do's and don'ts. I am located in С— village about 45 minutes outside Almaty, though I spent most of the bus ride over here sleeping from exhaustion. My host sister, Бота Bota, a young woman with a ready smile and a beauty mark beneath her right eye, was there to pick me up, along with her husband Қуаныш Quanysh and Courtney Ho (a fellow Qazaq-language student and education Trainee), who is living catercorner from me with the relatives of my host family, making us host cousins.

I was again struck with the duelling impressions of a culture influenced by northern Europe and a culture influenced by China. The low, colourful street-side architecture reminded me strongly of the villages I visited in Sichuan (I even saw a SinoOil station out here), while other aspects seemed like they came straight out of Oulu, Finland (like the copious fruit-trees painted white from the base to about four feet up) – but the house my host family lives in looks like it came straight out of Vermont (minus the Green Mountains in the background). It is clean and quiet, and the air outside is sweet and crisp (not at all like China, I promise you), and the buildings in the complex are spaced apart, separated by dirt roads and small bridges over artificial brooks, with apple-trees forming hedges between properties. They keep a few dogs (ит 'eet' in Qazaq), a couple of cows for milk (one of which looks like a small Jersey), and a few fowl which look like chickens, only far leaner and capable of short-distance flight.

My host mother, a tall, sweet and attentive middle-aged woman with a nice smile (and one gold tooth) named Гүлбаржан Gülbarzhan showed me around the place, including the монша (monsha, a bit like a Finnish sauna), the туалет (tualet, latrine) and the short path over to Courtney Ho's host family's place. After some чай (chai tea, Qazaq-style, with milk and sugar, served with нан bread with butter and jam), over which I gave them my host family gifts and started showing them my album, I started jotting down any and all Qazaq vocabulary they could teach me – which wasn't much, but it was a start. Thankfully, they were pretty laid-back about everything, and had a good sense of humour about the situation and my lack of Qazaq language ability. That alone made me feel much more at ease.

My host family has a number of generations living under the same roof. My host mother is of the first and eldest generation I've met here (she is one of ten brothers and sisters!), and she has a husband, Болат Bolat, one daughter living here (Адима Adima), three sons (Айдар Aidar, Куаныш Kuanysh and little Диас Dias) and a couple of grandchildren by Quanysh and Bota (Дауыр Dauyr and Дана Dana). My host brothers and sisters are each a handful of years older than I am (with the exception of Dias), and my host nephews and nieces are much younger (six and seven years old). Peace Corps has never been in С— village before, so I was probably one of the first Americans they've met, but aside from my host brother Dias staring and occasionally laughing at me, my host family was pretty relaxed with me, not just tolerant but welcoming and hospitable. Definitely good people.

I helped Bota some with dinner (cutting up meat, onions and potatoes for stew) and relaxed a bit before night began to fall – we visited Courtney's host family and had dinner, after which we went into the монша 'monsha', the bathhouse / sauna (баня in Russian) – my host brother Aidar showed me the ropes. You go in, fill your washing pan with two scoops of boiling water and two scoops of cold water, soap and shampoo up, rinse yourself off and go into the sauna, pouring the boiling water on the heat. It can get really hot and steamy in there, and you feel like you might stifle but you don't – you get really clean. Deep clean. When you've sweated and relaxed for a bit, you come out, scrub yourself down once more and then douse yourself with a couple bins full of cold water. It definitely isn't the kind of showering I'm used to, but it feels really good.

After I came out, towel draped over my shoulders, the Courtney's host family invited me into the building just next door for some fresh watermelon (for which it is apparently peak season; we saw a few truckloads of them on the bus ride in). Courtney seemed pleased with her host family, too – hopefully, I'll be able to understand more of the Qazaq going on around me given time.

In the meantime, my vocabulary list is (hopefully) going to get longer.



UPDATE for 24 August:

Today was basically our 'relax-and-get-to-meet-your-host-family' day before hardcore language and technical training start tomorrow. I hung out with Bota, Dauyr and Dana for the morning, watching Spider-Man (Урмекші-Адам Urmekshi-Adam in Qazaq), shared my photos with Bota and went over to Нургуль Тәте Aunt Nurgül's place to see Courtney. Nurgül, I learned, was the wife of Сатай Аға Uncle Satai, who is the younger brother of my host father Bolat. They have four children, three of whom I've met: Лаура Laura (the eldest daughter, whose ағылшынша English is excellent), Дария Dariya (the rather more soft-spoken – at least to us – second daughter, who also speaks some English) and Назар Nazar (the eleven-year-old son who enjoys listening to Eminem and playing CS and GTA: San Andreas on his laptop).

Our host families are really laid-back, easy-going types, not easily offended at all, which is good because it makes our lives as trainees much easier. But there are certain things they just don't do halfway. Every time you enter someone else's house, they will insist serving you чай tea, which is cool for those of us (like me) who enjoy tea – even if we get it six or seven times as I did today. They also don't screw around with нан nan: a couple of loaves are always on the table, always in a central spot, always cut and presented neatly (in the same fashion, once down the middle and then into slices), and it is always served with май (butter) and raspberry and blackberry варенье (varen'e, jam) – and with tea you are expected to eat at least one slice. So suffice it to say that I was overfed today, if only because I kept coming back to Aunt Nurgül's house – once in the morning to get Courtney's number, once to share pictures and once more to visit with Emiko Güthe (our PCVTA) and our technical facilitator (whose name is escaping me at the moment).

I took my pad of paper and pen with me wherever I went inside our family complex, jotting down whatever new vocab words of Qazaq I could (though Emiko told me later that a few of them were Russian words rather than Qazaq – the Qazaq they speak here is pretty heavily influenced by Russian from the Almaty area). Whenever our hosts speak around me I am constantly reminded of the Finnish I heard in Oulu and Jyväskylä – a lot of it sounds the same, with a lot of the same stops, rolled r's, umlauted vowels and schwas, and it makes the Ural-Altaic theory sound a lot more plausible (lumping together the Finnic languages – Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian and Karelian – with the Turkic languages, Mongolian, Korean and Japanese).

When I went to Aunt Nurgül's house, Laura showed me her family albums (hers, her parents' and Dariya's) – this made me feel slightly inadequate, since I only had my one with me that seemed like a slipshod affair, since it wasn't filled or decorated the way their family's were. It was enjoyable to spend time with them that way, though I felt somewhat guilty about neglecting my own host family today.

Today was an adventure in a couple of respects. Firstly, I went to a дүкен (düken market) with Laura and Courtney, but in the end I only bought a bottle of шие сок (shie sok – cherry juice) and hanging out with them outside a hotel waiting for Laura's boyfriend to pick us up. We had great seats – the view of the Tian Shan mountains was amazing in the evening, just before an equally amazing sunset. I finally got around to using my phone (and blowing away half my SIM-card minutes on a call to the United States to tell my parents my phone number). Secondly, it was my first time using the даретхана (bathroom) in earnest, in the dark, using my headlamp. It's basically just a squat toilet, and you have to empty your pockets of anything you don't want to fall in before you go.

For dinner, Bota made пылау (pylau), a fried rice pilaf with meat and carrots: very tasty, but a bit greasy. She gave me a heaping plateful which I finished, but just barely – пылау seriously fills you up fast, and gets you pretty sleepy.

On that note, I'm going to sign off for the night – big day tomorrow; I'm off to bed. Қайырлы түн, everybody.