I had only been living in Kazakhstan for a month when I made a trip from my home village of Kainazar to Esik, a larger town with a bustling Technicolor bazaar. While crossing a bridge linking the two halves of the bazaar, I suddenly stopped and looked up the narrow river valley to the peaks of the Tian Shan (“Celestial Mountains”), so high above the town that they were capped in snow even in July. I breathed in the fresh mountain air, the dust, the smell of roasting meat, and I felt the river rushing beneath me, the people pushing past me.  I felt an overpowering sense that I was exactly where I should be. This sense came to me often during the nearly four years I lived in the country, particularly in the first two years spent as a university English instructor through the U.S. Peace Corps. I’ve never lived so fully in the moment as I did while in Kazakhstan.

It was only after I returned to America, however, that I was fully able to appreciate my experience overseas. I can now see it in a broader context, which has helped me better understand my adopted culture, my own culture, the importance of community, and the connections between them. I’m aided greatly by my Kazakhstani wife, Valentina, Val for short, and by my memories.

For example, a few months ago, while standing in line at the post office, I met an immigrant woman who spoke Russian, which I had learned in Kazakhstan. As the clerk in front of us dealt with some business, we chatted about the same things two strangers anywhere might: our families, work, waiting in line.

“On tak medlenno rabotaet,” she said—“He’s working so slowly.” I had to laugh, for when I lived in Kazakhstan, that’s exactly how I felt about the postal workers there. It irked me when they took afternoon breaks together to drink tea, no matter the length of the lines at the windows. Why don’t they rotate breaks so that each worker goes one at a time? I used to wonder with my typical American penchant for efficiency. I eventually came to understand that this would disrupt the communal aspect of drinking tea, something extremely important to Kazakhstanis. In general, food in Kazakhstan isn’t simply for bodily sustenance; it’s a means to sustain social connections. No holiday or other special occasion passes without a great gathering of family and friends, tables arranged so fully there isn’t space for one more dish or glass. Kushai, kushai! is the refrain in Russian—Eat, eat!—along with long, repeated toasts to everyone’s health and prosperity running all through the evening and into the night.

And the food is fresh. I didn’t appreciate just how fresh until I returned to America and had difficulty finding fruits and vegetables with any vitality to them. They look good here—large, colorful, unblemished—but curiously possess little flavor and are often unripe, the result of being picked early in order to be shipped long distances. (Val actually cried after eating several purchases of deceptively beautiful red strawberries that tasted like raw potatoes.) Very few of our communities produce their own food anymore. In Kazakhstan, fruits and vegetables are sold in the bazaar only in season, and they are often grown by the very babushki (grandmothers) who sell them. I loved haggling over the prices, listening to the pride each woman took in telling how her produce was the best. Meat is often butchered right in front of the customer. To the uninitiated, as I was at first, the smell in that section of the bazaar can be overwhelming, but I came to appreciate how the meat came straight from the farmer to the butcher (sometimes the same person) to me. I knew what I was eating. I hadn’t thought as deeply about these issues before living in Kazakhstan. I’ve since become a strong advocate of organic, locally grown food.

I also find myself longing to take afternoon breaks for a fresh pot of green tea, preferably with my wife. I’m not often able to do so; American society simply isn’t set up to accommodate this. Rather, it emphasizes incessant multitasking. When Americans go on breaks, even for lunch, they often check email or run errands, gulping down food on the run, isolated from other humans. We could learn from the Kazakhstanis in this regard. 

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