day 14, part 2: "the blood will tell" - thus spaketh Darzhan

sunday was a cold but beautiful day, and Aya, our translator, was free so we headed downtown.

 here we are in front of "Father Frost" down on the main square in front of the mosque. behind this were twelve animal statues. apparently, Toby was probably born in the year of that "Jaguar", though our translator wasn't 100% sure. no big deal to us, but we thought we'd take a photo of it.

 we learned that the building across the street from the square is actually the head government building for the Ust Kamenogorsk region; that's probably where all our paperwork went through! 

(i thought the bus going by was a nice touch.)

 

 from here we headed right by the "green market" or bazaar, where i elegantly wiped out on the ice (it has to happen to somebody) and over to the Pushkin Library where we attended an English discussion group, which proved to be really interesting!

we found out about the group from the american volunteer we met at through the discussion group we'd joined on thursday night. the group was mostly college-aged young people, primarily kazakh, but some Russian too, and led by another peace corp volunteer named Samantha. (i had seen this gal walk in to the library only moments after we had, and right away i had thought, she's gotta be american or european. so even we are starting to be able to pick out the stuff that makes us stick out. :-])

Sam is from eastern US, but the crazy thing is, her brother lives in Elkhart, and he pastors a Lutheran church in GOSHEN. go figure! ya hafta come all the way to Ust Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan to meet people from your own hometown. we'll be sure to look him up when we get home.

so the discussion was on the topic of human rights, and it was quite interesting to hear what these educated kazakh citizens had to say. for the most part, they are grateful that they have the freedoms/rights that they do, particularly when compared with other muslim nations around them. many of them feel education is the most important human right and everyone should have access to free education.

we would have liked to engage the discussion more, but there is that hesitancy to do so b/c we felt the discussion really is for those learning and exercising their english. melissa and matt did a fair bit of talking, rob and i did a little--but there were about 6 or 7 kazakhs/russians who engaged the topic a lot. we thought it was pretty amusing when one of them, a pretty young lady who had been fairly vocal, piped up and said, "it is an important issue, but not very interesting!" this got a chuckle from many of the rest of us, who clearly disagreed with her. ;-p

afterward, a guy named Darzhan (sp?)  who had piped up a number of times comes up to Rob and me and introduces himself. he asks why we're here in k-stan. by now, we should probably just be giving a generic answer like "oh, we're tourists," but really, in Ust? in December? so we responded honestly, "adoption". he asks what age child, we say 2. then he says, "well, you will see when he grows up, the blood will tell, the blood will tell."

haaah? rob says, "the blood will tell...what?"

then he goes on with this rather esoteric and philosophical diatribe that we really couldn't decipher; either he was really out there, or his english wasn't quite developed enough to be able to handle the subject matter. (Aya knew him from school and suggested it was the former.)

he said, "you should not adopt from a great nation," and went on to elaborate. we didn't really get what he was after, but we thing it's one of two things: 1) that K-stan is a great nation and you shouldn't adopt from it, or 2) you shouldn't adopt from a great nation like a European nation, into another great nation, b/c the child will have a conflict within himself about who he is or something.

i don't know, i didn't really get it, and i escaped with aya and left poor rob to deal with it! Aya knows this guy from school and htinks he's quite odd; after a bit she said "oh we have to go rescue Rob!" ;-p and we did.

i don't think he was trying to be rude, he was actually very warm and wished us God's blessings on our adoption before he said goodbye - but i think there was a lot more there in terms of underlying opinions about it. later when we were walking, Aya brought up the thing about some people  still associating adoption with buying kids for parts. this is so tragic. i don't think this is what Darzhan thought (that would perhaps be too concrete a concern for his philosophical mind) but i think from now on when asked, we'll just respond, "tourism" and be done with it. you never know. at any rate, it was a pretty interesting exchange.

afterwards sam, matt and melissa invited us to come have supper with them at their apartment after the next thursday discussion group at the Nazarbaev school, so i guess we have a date! suddenly our social calendar is filling up, with a hockey game Monday night, bowling party for max's b-day Tuesday, Independence Day celebration downtown Thursday, and discussion group and supper in the evening... wow!

on the way home we visited the Yurt museum we'd heard about. there was no tour guide working, since it was Sunday, but Aya translated some of the information, and we enjoyed walking around and seeing many Kazakh artifacts. we also found a neat shop we'll return to later in the week to pick up some kazakh stuff for Toby.

the traditional bowl and cups for drinking kmer - fermented mare's milk. mmmmm.....

what a great day. it was a very cold, but beautiful walk back to the shiny river. we spent the evening in, eating one of our new favorites: mixing the curry noodle packet with the mashed potato packet. delicious. i spent most of the evening trying to catch up on blogging. but with the length of my blogs, that's not likely to happen any time soon. :-]