The Last Month: Shalom Almaty!

Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Aktobe

Aktobe Shock

The shock of returning to Aktobe after almost a month of traveling around Kazakhstan and volunteering in Almaty felt even stronger than when I first arrived in Aktobe.  The last two weeks I toured around the country with my family.  The week and a half prior to that, I spent in Almaty staffing a trip from Tufts University Hillel, working together with Almaty Jewish university students.  Boarding the bus on Monday back here at home was jolting.

While my family took the city bus to go to the big bazaar in the outskirts of Shymkent, the last month of no rush hour bus wrestling clearly impacted my capacity for aggressive boarding.  I stood with the crowd boarding Bus #1, then quickly stepped out of the way of the crushing wave of morning travelers getting on colliding with those trying to get off the bus.  It turned out to be a good move.  Waiting another three minutes cleared the bus and I got a peaceful back of the bus seat.

There’s a lot to cover from the past month, so I’ll start with the Jewish trip and work forward from there.

Where Volunteerism, Judaism, and Social Services Collide

I landed in Almaty July 21st to begin almost a month of adventuring around Kazakhstan.  About two months ago, a friend from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (Joint), called me to find out more information about Kazakhstan for a new Tufts Hillel trip to Kazakhstan in late July.  I had participated on a similar trip to Kharkov, Ukraine, the first university trip to the former Soviet Union with the Joint, a few years ago, so in addition to KZ, I had a little experience with the type of program.  The trip would bring 20 American university students to Almaty to do community service with Kazakhstani Jewish students while building global Jewish peoplehood.  The idea sounded wonderful and coincided with my work, a Peace Corps meeting, and my family’s trip to KZ, so I volunteered to come down and help out.

The first three days were pre-planning.  The trip coordinator, Naomi, and I met with the various KZ organizers who she had been working with for months, saw examples of homes of the elderly whom the students would be visiting, began our Almaty taste-fest, and started to get a feel for the Almaty Jewish community.  I ended up translating a lot from Russian to English and reverse.  I’d been speaking and working in Russian for almost a year, but hadn’t had to translate this intensely and over the course of three days.  My head hurt the end of each day, but it was wonderful. Needing to translate was really good for language.  Thank you Sherali.

Our hotel, Zhetysu, had a great location, right near one of the main pedestrian streets.  The hotel also tried to be convenient in other ways.  In classic Soviet style, you register every time you enter and leave on your floor and check your heavy metal key.  Additionally, ten minutes after checking in every evening, I would get a call asking if I spoke English.  “Yes”.  This was followed by “Do you want a girl?”  “No thank you.”  “Are you sure?” Hang-up.  Regardless of what time I arrived, the call was waiting.

Then the students arrived.  The plane ride had apparently been quite the experience, with a Jewish tour of Kiev before arriving in Almaty.  Then, the Ukraine-KZ flight experienced some power issues, sitting on the runway for a few hours as the lights flickered on and off.  It was good preparation for KZ.

After the students arrived, Naomi and I moved out of our classy hotel and up into a sanatorium, “Ak Kain”, in the brisk mountain air.  The air was considerably cooler and fresher than down in Almaty’s pollution valley.  It also rained the first two or three days.  This was a nice change of weather from stuffy city living, except that I only brought one long-sleeve shirt as I expected hot weather the entire time.  Fortunately, it’s a nice shirt as I’m wearing the shirt in a lot of pictures.

During Soviet times, “Ak Kain” was a sanatorium for sick people, then it was relatively recently renovated as a vacation area and campsite.  We stayed in cabins; the Americans and Kazakhstanis living together in each cabin.  Then, the staff had their own cabin on the top of the hill.  The parking lot just outside our cabin also hosted the nightly dance parties and Shashlich fest.  Prime real estate.

This was the Joint’s first university trip to Kazakhstan and the first time the Kazakhstani Jewish community has done anything of this nature.  A lot of planning went into it and a lot continued over the week.  There were three American staff: Naomi (Joint), Ethan (Tufts Hillel), and me.  A team also managed the trip from the KZ side: Galina (Joint), Inessa (JCC), and Vika (JCC).  We also worked with the Hesed Director to arrange the home care visits (the community service component), various other community leaders for different activities, and the head of the Jewish community and President of the Mitzvah Association (the umbrella Jewish community organization in KZ), Alexander Baron.

Unlike my trip experiences with the Uruguayan and Ukrainian Jewish communities (though possibly because I was on the staff side here), the entire Jewish community, from the top leadership to volunteers was on hand for a large portion of the trip and it was easy to see the importance of this trip to the community.  This must have been one of the largest (if not the largest) groups of American Jews coming to KZ in its history, and the only group of students that has come for this type of program.

I saw the trip as having two main goals: (1) building global Jewish peoplehood, and (2) community service.  The friendships and connections made between the students and that I made are incredibly important.  Additionally, the increased understanding of the Jewish communities and of different countries is vital as a window to understand the world.  Unlike a few years ago, now all of the participants have Internet access.  Internet means Facebook and translation programs.  While Facebook isn’t as popular in KZ as in the States (they tend to use vkontakte, Moi Mir, and Odeenclassniki here), it’s easy to sign-up and can provide easier, faster, and more colorful interactions across the world.  Within a day of returning home, it seems that all of the Tufts students had already friended each other and the Kazakhstanis and within two days, all of the Kazakhstanis not previously on Facebook signed-up.

The community service consisted of visiting and working at the homes of elderly Jews in Almaty.  We cleaned, organized, ate, and provided company.  Americans and KZs working together.  Hesed sends home care workers to each of the clients we visited (along with many more) multiple times a week, and these home care workers were with the client when we were there.  We worked for three days, about four hours each, eight groups of four to six people each day.

I visited three women.  In the first apartment, small and well maintained, we cleaned everywhere.  The amount of dust, grime, and dirt took hours to get through.  Then, we spent some time talking with her.  But, she was hard of hearing and the conversation was very difficult.

The second woman’s place was an old house near the bus station.  No running water (it had to be fetched from a pump 30 seconds away), and an outdoor toilet.  There was the house proper, a covered outdoor area, then a back area that included a toilet, overgrown garden, and a good deal of shed space (with the roof looking like it would collapse soon over part of it).  We reorganized the back shed space so it looked cleaner, clipped down the prickly trees, installed new dividers between sections of the property (new big blue heavy tarps), cleaned the house, organized the covered outdoor area, and installed a new, clean toilet seat (and tarp cover).  The woman was wonderful, so friendly, fed us watermelon, and it was incredibly sad how bad of a condition her house was in.

The third woman I worked with had a beautiful apartment.  She used to be an internal medicine doctor and volunteered at Hesed following retirement, but then got cancer.  Since then, she has had so much difficulty even moving around the apartment.  Despite her health, however, she had chai with us and we talked for a while.

This aspect of the trip clarified a few issues of the Jewish community in Almaty.  The community does a lot to help the elderly, both those halachically Jewish and those connected with Judaism through a spouse or family history.  There are a lot of poor Jews and poor people in general, in Almaty.  Especially in Almaty, it’s easy to not see poverty.  New Porsches, Mercedes, Hummers, Bentleys, and BMWs provide a nice mask over the lack of running water, minimal heating, poor medical treatment, and lonely elderly.  One block you have the tastiest hot chocolate I have ever had and the block over is an 80-year-old man living alone, with no family to care for him, and difficulty paying for necessary medicine and food.

The week included lots of time for everyone to get to know each other, learn about the country and the community, eat shashlich, and build ladders over language barriers.  Fortunately, a good number of the Kazakhstani students spoke very good English, making my translation work much easier, especially as there were lots of new words last week, particularly those related to religious discussions and astronomy.

Then the students left and I had some Peace Corps meetings.  This was the first time since PST last August to November that I had been with so many Americans and in such a close environment where I needed to say goodbye.  They were all great, the USers and KZies – it was a tough goodbye and I still miss them.  At least I have had the chance to hang out with and get to know better some of the Kazakhstanis while I had more time in Almaty.

After a day of Peace Corps meetings, my family arrived on Sunday, August 3.  Two days in one week I had to be at the airport at 5 AM.  I love the Almaty airport and the road to the airport is beautiful.  There are as many car dealerships along from the city to the airport as on Orchard Lake Road and more SUVs in Almaty then in Detroit.