An Apology to Kazakh.

My linguistics professor in college told us a story about a linguist studying languages in interior Africa. One reseracher was investigating a language that early explorers had described as simple and primitive, having only one tense apiece for future and past. The linguist uncovered a much more complex picture, and after discovering and documenting the sixth or seventh tense, he finally asked the Africans why the earlier explorers had claimed there were only two tense. "Oh, those people were very stupid," the Africans answered. "We only spoke to them very simply so they could understand."

Earlier in my training I accused Kazakh of being a rude language. I thought this because there's no word for please, no word for "to want", and people rarely say "thank you" or the phrase that is sometimes inappropriately translated as "you're welcome". (There is one phrase which means "you're welcome", but only for food. Literally, it is "may there be food", and people do use that all the time, as thank you is often said during toasts and at formal meals. I have never, not once, heard anyone besides Americans say the phrase given in our Peace Corps handbook as meaning "you're welcome" in generic situations ("eshtenge etpeidy"), and though some of my students use the other version ("okhasa zhok"), they once told me they only do it because they're imitating me.)

Consequently, if you try to translate this kind of conversation:

Person A: Do you want the book?
Person B: Yes, could I have it, please.
Person A: Here you go.
Person B: Thank you.
Person A: You're welcome.

You get:

Person A: Will you take the book?
Person B: I will take it.
Person A: Here.
Person B: ---
Person A: ---

And this was, in fact, how I communicated with my host family in training. Instead of expressing desires like "I want to go to the store," I said it like a fact: "I will go to the store." After a year and a half I'm still struggling to get out of the habit of saying thank you and you're welcome. To me, this felt very coarse, and I accused Kazakh of being coarse.

However, now that I'm getting into the language a little more, I'm finding many different ways of expressing intention with subtle differences in urgency, certainty, pleading, and other syntactic features that are associated with politeness. They simply have completely different gramatical forms than in English, and so don't lend themselves to being learnt right away - or used in speech with Kazakh-challenged foreigners. For example, you can say "I will go" like this:

Men baramin.

Which means "I go" was training-speak for "I want to go", "I would like to go", "May I go, please," etc. But now I know there is also:

Men baraiyn.
Men baraiynshy.
Mening bargym keledi.
Mening bargym kelip tur.
Men barsam eken.
Men barmakpyn.

Similarly, in training, "please go" was:

Baryngyzshy.

Which is just the command "go" with an ending that is supposed to mean please. But now I know there exists:

Barsangyzshy.
Barsangyz eken.
Barghaisyz.
Baryp beringiz(shy).
Baryp koingiz(shy).
Baryp turingiz(shy).
Baryp zhuringiz(shy).
Barganyngyzdy kalaimyn.

And all the above forms have both a formal and informal second-person ending that doubles the length of the list. Now, I admit that I don't understand the subtelties between them. But their existence shows that my early suggestion that Kazakh is a langauge that can't express shades of politeness was completely wrong, and based on my expectation of grammatical forms of politeness similar to my own language. (The grammar of some of these are really strange: barsangyz eken, taken literally, sounds something like if-you-go-it-seems, but it means "I would like you to go".)

This is not to say that knowledge of these grammar forms suddenly makes Kazakhstani society a courteous place to live. First of all, living in a Russophone environment, I'm not sure how often many of these forms are really used. And second of all, I think there really is a lack of courtesy and politeness in Kazakhstani general society. (If you doubt this, I have some stories for you.) However, there's no blaming the language.

Mac n' Cheese vs. Horse Sausage.

Now, don't think I'm dissing on my parents' care packages. I get the best care packages of all of Kazakhstan, and if you are a volunteer and don't think that's true, then step up. But I got some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese in the last one my parents sent me, and I found myself unable to eat it. It's been years now since I've eaten anything so freakishly orange. It doesn't even vaguely resemble cheese, at least not as I know it. I made a pot of it and had to throw half away, because the part I ate kind of turned my stomach.

On the other hand, I'm delighted when I go ghosting and see that horse sausage is on the evening menu. Go figure.

My Ghetto Bathroom.

A visitor to my apartment accused me of having a "ghetto bathroom". I reacted defensively, but I'm afraid she has a point. How is my bathroom ghetto? Let me count the ways:

1) The plastic tube connecting the sink to the outgoing water pipe long ago broke off. (I glued it, it broke again, and then I took it off completely.)

2) Consequently, the sink drains into a metal bucket, which I empty periodically.

3) I have two toilet brushes, whose colors don't match.

4) My shower curtain is a foot too long, and you step on it when you shower.

5) There is a green plunger attached to a long stick with wire and packaging tape. I use this to wash clothes.

6) There is a rice bag with my dirty laudry in a blue plastic barrel on a peeling wooden footstool.

7) I have never looked under the tub very seriously. There is stuff down there, but I don't know, and don't want to know, what.

8) There is a very, very old plastic bottle of "barf" brand tub-cleaner on the side of the tub, as well as a grizzled sponge and a pencil.

9) The various apartment floor-cleaning rags are kept in a pile under the peeling wooden footsool.

10) The hole where the broken plastic pipe use to empty into the waste-water pipe is covered with numerous plastic bags and rubber bands, which keeps my apartment from smelling like the septic system.

11) My showerhead mount is taped to my water heater with massive amounts of packaging tape.

12) My showerhead is too small for the mount, so I wrapped plastic bags around it until it fit snugly.

13) Dress socks of all stages of disintegration are drying on the heating pipes.

14) There is a makeshift wooden shelf above the bathtub, on which is what appears to be a fake christmas tree in a garbage bag.

Notice that despite all this, I still have a water heater, a showerhead, and a shower curtain. And let me mention that my bathroom may be a little ghetto, but it wasn't ghetto enough to keep this village volunteer from taking a shower. She may have complained, but she was clean as she did it.

Follow-up On the Computer Lab Incident.

The act of describing my response to the computer lab situation in my school shamed me into at least trying to do something about it. So I downloaded schematics of a couple American engineering universities' computer labs (Eastern Illinois and Purdue) to show that people who probably know what they're doing sometimes put computers together and not facing the wall. I gave them to the vice-principal, who ignored them because a journalist was present, and my stumbling Kazakh prompted a torrent of admiration that precluded all other subjects of discussion. A couple days later I asked if they were useful. "Oh yes," she said. "We're showing them to people." "So do you still have to change the computer lab layout?" "Of course!"

I tried, and in a sense that is what is important. But outside of existentialism, one can see from this how resistance to a bureaucracy's stupidity - and consequently it effectiveness - is dependent on the faith that resistance can achieve something. Fighting is expensive, and its cost must be weighted against both the individuals desire for the common good and the likelihood of success. In a system where most people have lost hope, people pursue anti-productive means of resolving wrongs, which makes the bureaucracy more impossible, which discourages more people.

Politeness, another social phenomenon that even locals agree is lacking, is the same way. I have come to realize that in America, I readily apologize for my mistakes because I have faith that the person I accidentally wronged isn't going to take advantage of me. The other day I was taking a printer away from a computer where someone was working, and I accidentally pulled out the computer's power cable, causing the secretary to lose her work. To my (retrospective) embarassment, I didn't even apologize until I established that she hadn't lost anything and didn't seem angry -- I was afraid of being chastised for what I thought was an honest mistake.

The flip side of this is that when someone in Kazakhstan does apologize to you, it's like a heavenly ray of light. I accidentally took the extra keys to a classroom home with me one day. Since the teacher I had borrowed them from didn't really use the room that they were for, I didn't worry about it, though I remember idly thinking that were she to need them, I would be responsible for going back to school, since it was my mistake. It happened, though, that another teacher had left her coat in the room the keys were for, planning on borrowing the keys from the teacher I had borrowed them from. She found out that I had them, and called me in my apartment to ask me to come back to school, because if I didn't, she couldn't really get home.

Of course I went -- but I grumbled uncharitably to myself the whole way about how the teacher shouldn't have left her coat in a room that she didn't have the keys for in the first place. In fact, though it was actually my fault, I felt prepared to give her a lecture when I got to school. But when I saw her, the first thing she said was, "Oh, I'm so sorry you had to come back for me!" and I suddenly felt enormous relief. "No, no," I was able to say completely sincerely and without effort, "it really was my fault. You don't need to apologize." She got her coat and I went home much happier than I left, thinking about the good that can come from taking chances against cynicism.

I Surprise Myself With My Answer and What I Put On My Bread.

Here's how it's supposed to work in America, and as far as I'm concerned, in good organizations all over the world. If an order to do something unambiguously senseless comes from on high, you tell your boss. The following things might happen:

1) Your boss understands and either countermands the order or takes over investigating the source of the command upwards in the chain of command.
2) Your boss explains that there are reasons previously unknown to you that necessitate the order. You do it.
3) Your boss is sympathetic but powerless. Escalate your complaint to the next level up and repeat.

One of these variants always happened to me in the States. Living here I have had to add two more:

4) Your boss understands, but for corrupt or political reasons tells you to do it anyway.
5) You can't find your boss.

What do you do in these situations? I've run across both. In the case of (4), I swallowed it and did what I was told. In the case of (5), I ignored the order, because if I can't find them, then I figure they can't find me to make sure I'm doing what I'm told.

But I surprised even myself with the way I responded to a problem in my school the other day. We have a beautiful brand new computer lab consisting of a projection monitor with pull-down screen, color printer and scanner, and six networked computers. (My and my counterpart's classroom got taken to host it.) To be honest, no one uses it. It's kept locked all the time and no one is sure who knows the password to the computers. The director, for a while, was putting tape across the door at night to see if people were going in and out, and I got in caused a real uproar, featuring real yelling and panic, because I went in there to use the copy machine, which hadn't been moved yet. (They have since taken my key.)

I went to ask a vice-principal for money to take my English-language debate team to Petropavlosk. (A summary of our conversation: "Anything you ask!" she said. "I need $60." "Oh, that's a lot," she said.) After we finished our business, she sighed. "Our school is in a lot of trouble," she said. What's the matter, I asked. "It's the computer lab in room 17," she said. "Do you want to see?" Of course I did. I imagined that something was broken or a kid had put a pirogi in a cd drive or something. But as we entered the classroom, everything looked normal. The vice-principal opened a book. "This is the plan we got," she said, and showed me a map of the room as it was, with the desks facing the projection screen. "And this is the Singaporean system," (this is actually what she said) and showed me a map with the desks facing the wall.

So evidently, they were supposed to have set up the classroom according to the "Singaporean system", even though the documents they were sent were different. The school will have to do this at its own expense, and since they cut every computer wire to the exact centimeter and secure it along its entire length for some reason (which is, by the way, the exact opposite of how they approach plumbing), moving things around will actually be quite a lot of work. "Why is it so important that you move it?" I asked. "Because this layout is dangerous for your health!" she said.

Perhaps they just need more cactuses. (A shout out to the Uralsk volunteers who first noticed the cactus-computer correlation.) But jokes aside, this order is patently ridiculous. In America I would have followed the above rubric, believing that somewhere along the line there must be a micommunication, that an educated, accomplished human being couldn't actually issue a statment like that. But my actual reaction surprised me. After making it clear that I thought whoever had issued this order wasn't worth listening to, I advised, "Look, just sit on it. Don't do anything. If you have to, make up some guy in some department that was supposed to give you some receipt and force them to try to track him down. Make them make a big deal out of it, and it'll all pass."

It wasn't until an hour after I said this that I realized what had happened to me. This kind of reaction to an incompetent bureaucracy doesn't help anything; it just perpetuates the fundamental problem. To recommend this course of action indicates a lack of faith in the fact that human reason can overcome poor organization. I recommended this sincerely. I have lost my faith. I have become a cynic. Or at least I have regarding the Kazakhstan education system.

In what I believe to be a fundamentally not completely unrelated development, I now love to eat bread spread with sour cream instead of butter. I crave it.

I am becoming part of Kazakhstan, and I leave in only four months.