Digest #1 - Some Odds and Ends of the Last Three Months in Astana

Sometimes something will happen and Yulia and I will look at each other and say: "We need to write a blog post about that."  But the thing isn't huge, and we don't have time right away, or life gets in the way.  So today I just wanted to put together a short digest of some of the things that maybe aren't full blog posts, or which won't be because their time has passed.

Fire Alarms

September and October were the months of fire alarms.  Apparently the fire system in our building is quite sensitive.  This is a problem when individual apartments are hooked into the central fire system.  This means that sometimes cooking mishaps turn into adventures for the entire building - or in our case complex of two buildings. We had a few very dramatic alarms that went off in the middle of the night.

The alarms are piercingly loud and are accompanied by loud instructions in Russian, Kazakh, and English to calmly exit the building.  We did so on a few occasions after the alarm had sounded for 15 minutes in the middle of the night.  That involved dressing the girls, ourselves, and getting the dog and making our way out of the apartment.  Because we had Yulia's mom here for all of September, she also came along!

These alarms turned out to be false alarms.  Some of them were due to a malfunction.  Although we did meet some of our neighbors at this community-building events, after the sixth or seventh alarm over the course of a few weeks we were all ready to be finished.  We haven't had an alarm go off for about two weeks, so we are hoping that the problem has been resolved.

Construction

We are living in the midst of a construction zone.  You can see from the model I am pointing at in the picture below, that the campus is going to be quite large.  As of now, however, we are a long way from complete.  From our building to the main campus (and also the main road with bus stops) we have to pass through an active construction site.  For a few weeks the route through the construction changed every day - sometimes with barriers around large holes, and sometimes not.  In general we understand the inconvenience and work through it, but sometimes it is a bit of a challenge.

Pointing out our apartment (the third building in the diagonal line of square buildings toward you the viewer in this picture). Our building and the middle one are built.  The first one (closest to the road on the left) is not yet built. This model is right outside the entrance to my building (in the background) and you can see my office at the left corner n the second floor - the one with the light on.

View of construction from our balcony window  The building on the right will be the new main administration building.  The two buildings straight out will be more faculty apartments

The "Berlin Wall"  This fence went up right outside our door in the course of a few hours one evening.  It is an improvement over the non-barriers that were there.  This sheet metal construction fencing is the national product of Kazakhstan right now - there is construction everywhere!

New Driver

In our school days posts we wrote about hiring a driver to take the kids to school.  She worked out really well for a few weeks and then began to flake out on us.  At the end of September we had to fire her.  We hired a new driver - and he is truly awesome.  We are paying him a salary between us and our friends the Petersons.  He is available all day from the beginning of school to the end of the day to take our kids back and forth to school. He is flexible and responsible and we love him!  He drives a nice Accura that he maintains very well.  In fact, his relationship with his car reminds me of my dad. He is the main reason that school is doable for us now.

School

All of the girls have had a breakdown by now.  Some of them multiple breakdowns, and some of them multiple times in a day.  School is very challenging for them.  The kids all have great teachers though, and the progress they are making in Russian (and math and even Kazakh) is awesome.  The unpredictability of day to day schedules is something we really have a hard time with, but the quality of the schooling they are getting is great.

Church

One of the great things about being a Mormon is that you always have a community wherever you go in the world.  The same has been doubly true for us here in Astana.  We moved in along with a big wave of church members who are working at the embassy.  My friend Jon and his family moved into our building at NU a few weeks after us after I encouraged him to look into a job here.  In fact, there were some other families from the embassy that we knew.  One was a missionary in Yulia's home city.  He and I had a Russian class together at USU about 10 years ago.  He works for USAID and has been here for about two years.  One of my friends from my national guard unit in Logan, Utah is also working for the embassy.  I hadn't seen him for about six years, but we are now both in Astana.

We have also made some other new friends and are having a great adventure.  Yulia and I were called to teach Institute, which is the church education system for young adults.  That means that we get to work closely with the Kazakh members of the church, most of whom are in their twenties.  They are a great group!

Astana as a Small Town

One of the things that has struck us about Astana is that it sometimes seems like a small town.  Part of that is the areas that expats hang out in are relatively constrained, but part of it is just the city.  There is a man who we flew in with (in August).  He also was missing luggage, so I saw him at the airport a few days later when we picked up our bags.  I have seen him in random places through town on two other occasions.

Just about every time we are out and about we run into someone from either church or the university.  Even though the city is about a million people, we feel like we are right at home in Iowa City or Logan on a lot of days.

School Days Part I

One of the attractive features of a job in Kazakhstan was the ability for us to immerse our children in the Russian language.  Our two oldest daughters got a pretty good foundation in Russian because their grandma (Babushka) spent extended time with us visiting when they were young and because Yulia was able to speak Russian at home with them.  Then our oldest went to school and started speaking to her mom in English.  That upset the carefully crafted dynamic that we had built.  The girls understand Russian, but need a lot of immersion and to be outside of their comfort zone in order to really start speaking it.

International schools in Kazakhstan are expensive - even with the generous education allowance that is part of our contract with NU.  This is especially true when you have four school-age children, and will have those children for the foreseeable future!  We had planned, since we took the job, on enrolling the girls in a local Russian-language school.  It would be a trial by fire, a sink or swim moment for them.  We talked to them a lot about this and they agreed that they would give it a try - they are young enough that they weren't too scared at the prospect of something new.

Then we arrived in Astana.  I had been in contact with the international scholars office about schools and they told me that there wouldn't be any problems with our children attending school.  They even contacted the school where the children should attend and told us that we could go and tour the school when we arrived.  Great!

A few days after arriving, I contacted the office about setting up a school visit and getting started on registration.  They set up an appointment for us to visit a school on Wednesday (August 6) and see about registration.  When we showed up at the school we were told that the first school that we had been told about was not accepting students from our area (schools attendance is based on geographic location here, too), but that our helper from the international office would take us to the correct school.  We got in the van and drove to the school.  It was a nice-looking school in a more established neighborhood on our side of the river/our side of town.  When we spoke to the ladies who were there taking care of registration we were told that NU was not part of the geographic region for their school and they would not accept us.

Our assigned school was a new school - No. 75 - that was still being built, but that would be ready for the school year to begin on 1 September.  We were also told that the school would be accepting students and that representatives from the school would come to do registration beginning later in the day.  They would also be there the next day.  We left, a bit disappointed, but not too discouraged.  We made a plan to go the next day with everyone in between some of my orientation meetings.

Hostility

When we arrived at the school the next day and walked into the reception room we were met with a great deal of hostility by the woman who was registering students. Here is the gist of the conversation we had with the woman.  (Her comments are red.  Ours are black.)

Where do you live?
At Nazarbayev University.
Where are you from?
America.
Your children can't study here. Go to the international schools. Our schools are only for Kazakhs.
We are legal residents of Kazakhstan and pay taxes.  Why can't our kids attend school?
Who told you that you could come here to register your kids (directed at our helper)?
That's not important (from our helper).  Why can't the children attend school?
The government pays a lot of money for each kid for their education.  This is an education for Kazakh kids.  I've been to America and you can't study there at public schools if you're not an American.
That's not right. Many non-US citizens study in US schools - especially if they are legal and pay taxes.
We've already turned away Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Russians who are here legally working.  Our schools are only for Kazakhs.  It's the law.
Tell us where to find that law.
Not until you tell me who said you could come here and register your children for school.

At this point we left - feeling quite upset and quite discouraged.  We decided to go and look at an international school that we had learned about online.  We went to the school and really liked it.  It was about half as much as the other international schools and the program was half in Russian and half in English, so it would have been a good fit.  We asked about getting spots, but were told that the registration was closed for the coming year because of the high demand.  We put our names on the waiting list for the next year and left.  Still discouraged.

Our helper from the international scholars office told us that he would call the Ministry of Education to find out about the law and that I should speak with my dean about the issue so that if pressure needed to be applied, we could start that process.  Yulia and I started talking about alternatives to schooling, including home-schooling for a year or just trying to find spots for the older girls in the other international school.  It was kind of a rough afternoon.

Hope
I got an email later in the day, towards evening.  Our helper had spoken with the director of the school and we could meet her the next day at the school - she may want to test your children's Russian ability.  That was good news, but we were still quite wary of what was going to happen.  We started drilling the children and warned them that they would have to be on their best behavior and best Russian.

We drove to the new school.  It was already Friday, and we were ending our first week in Kazakhstan.  We pulled up to the school - after having to pass through the construction of the apartment buildings that go around the entire block where the school is located - and saw that the school was still very much under construction. We got out and headed into the school where we asked a worker if anyone was in the school.  He pointed us down the hall and we went that way until we found the one room that looked like it was about ready.  In it was a long table, a couple of young women, and a number of chairs at the table and around the wall.

To be continued...