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 bazaar. While crossing a bridge linking the bazaar’s two halves, I suddenly stopped and looked up the narrow river valley to the peaks of the Tian Shan, so high above the town they were capped in snow even in July. I breathed in the myriad country smells of fresh mountain air, dust, roasting meat, the river rushing beneath me, the people pushing past me, and I felt an overpowering sense that I was exactly where I should have been. This sense came to me often during my time in the country, particularly those first two years as a Peace Corps English instructor. It was odd but exhilarating to feel nostalgic for a moment while it was happening, not after it had passed. In many ways, I 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, and by my memories.
For example, once while standing in line at the post office, I met an immigrant woman who spoke Russian. 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! comes 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. Valentina cried after eating several purchases of deceptively beautiful red strawberries.
“They taste like raw potatoes,” she said.
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’ve also found myself longing to take afternoon breaks for a fresh pot of green tea, preferably with my wife. I’m usually not able to do so; American society isn’t set up to accommodate this. Rather, it emphasizes multitasking to an unhealthy degree. When Americans go on break, even for lunch, we often check emails or run errands, gulping down food on the run, isolated from other humans. We could learn from the Kazakhstanis in this regard. I don’t wish to oversimplify the situation. America offers a tremendous range of opportunities and choices, while Kazakhstan is still a developing country with many attendant problems: widespread poverty, crumbling infrastructure, corruption. Living there can be hard, as I personally experienced. But Kazakhstan has managed to keep some healthy traditions alive. People work better when they are refreshed and made to feel human, part of a human community. Afternoon tea almost magically restores such feelings.
When Valentina and I lived in Kentucky, we visited a quiet monastic community in a rural part of the state, Gethsemani Abbey, where the writer Thomas Merton lived and produced most of his voluminous and exquisitely beautiful work. Walking the trails of the abbey grounds that led along hayfields and into the woods, I sensed something hauntingly familiar.
“Do you smell that?” I asked. We both stopped and sniffed the air. A farmer was running a baling machine in a neighboring field, and the scent of fresh-cut hay mingled with that of the dusty path under our feet, horse dung, and blooming wildflowers. I felt as if I were again with my host family—Itam, Farida, and their children Malik, Adik, and Takmina—in the village where I had trained, or sitting behind the house where I learned Russian, in the shade by a cold mountain brook. “This smells just like Kainazar.”
“Yes, it does,” Valentina agreed, gesturing around her. “We have this same grass and these same flowers in Kazakhstan.”
Instead of the snow-peaked Tian Shan, we were surrounded by the green knobs of Kentucky, the colorful bazaar replaced by the Gethsemani Welcome Center and Gift Shop down the road. Two different periods of my life in two different cultures on opposite sides of the earth merged in that moment and became one. Just as I used to feel an odd but exhilarating nostalgia for moments as they were happening in Kazakhstan, so do I now often feel that curious but satisfying dislocation of time and place.
To say that I’ve bridged two cultures isn’t the perfect metaphor. True, my experiences have helped me cross from my past to my present. But experiences don’t stand alone. As with bridges, other people help build them. They become important parts of the landscape, both physical and spiritual. I can trace my path in the lines on my face and hands, in the lines of my memory. Four years of mountain wind helped carve them, along with steppe sun, laughter, and sometimes tears. More than fifteen years have now passed since I left Kazakhstan, yet in my emails and social media posts to friends and former colleagues there, I engineer spans that drop me off at their doorsteps and welcome them into my new home here in America. That bridge in Esik isn’t the metaphor for my life in Kazakhstan as much as the people who continue to cross it back and forth every day, the surrounding bazaar, the entire town, the country itself. The cultural represents the personal, just as I, in my own small, individual way, once represented American culture as a Peace Corps volunteer.
I initially thought that in crossing from one culture to another and back I would arrive somewhere—full circle, if nothing else. I never did. I’m still somewhere in the middle, enjoying the view, something much different and far more enchanting than I could have seen or even imagined had I remained on the shore, drawn by the rushing waters but afraid to step out over them.