Could you imagine being an athlete coming to Kazakhstan for the first time and being handed an 8th grader as your translator/guide? That would do more than Borat ever could to spoil the image of Kazakhstan.

So, dear parents, while it is good to be prepared early, you didn’t have to buy the uniforms or books yet. So far. Unless the akimat changes it’s mind.

After reading this book, I had a sense of confusion and psychological distress due to my attempts to understand this tutorial. Because the book is not written well, with a large number of mistakes and colloquial expressions, which themselves contain stylistic and grammatical errors, it is impossible to understand … This textbook, affecting my mind and causing confusion in my brain, directly distorts and disfigures the expression of my thoughts, which are transmitted to the understanding of society through the expression of my words. It forces me to be presented in front of society as an idiot who cannot express his thoughts beautifully, reasonably and culturedly.translation mine

While the lawsuit may seem frivolous and the sum of money obviously extreme, it does draw attention to some serious problems in Kazakhstan education. Zakon.kz lists many of the grammatical and spelling errors [RU] and there are quite a few. Obviously those don’t translate well so I won’t reprint them here.

But some of the material is clearly inappropriate for young students too. From page 25 of the textbook: “If the wound is visible then you should try to apply first aid yourself.” Shouldn’t first and second graders be taught to always get an adult if they are hurt, rather than try to evaluate the seriousness of an injury themselves? From page 24, “First, you must ascertain which vein or artery is bleeding.” Not that you should figure out where the blood is coming from, but you must memorize the names of all blood vessels and decide which one the blood is coming from? First? Before, say applying pressure to the wound? Or checking to see if you arm is broken? Another gem describes a traffic police officer’s baton and whistle as “weapons of his work”. That is preceded by the Zen riddle: “The traffic controller is the controller of traffic police”

I would say that this points to a larger problem: Why is traffic safety being taught to small children with a textbook at all? It seems to me that this is an area in which theory plays absolutely no role and children would learn better by seeing videos or having teachers demonstrate dangers on the board. Have kids memorize, “Look left and right before you cross” and monitor them when they come to school to make sure they follow these rules. Generally the emphasis on theoretical education and ‘objective’ measurements of knowledge in Kazakhstan fails to prepare students for real life. And traffic safety is a perfect example of an area where students need real life knowledge and no theory at all.

So hopefully this suit, which will surely be thrown out of court for lack of evidence, will shame the Ministry enough that they review their textbook writing procedures and look at what is actually being taught in schools.

Anyway, I took some photos of the inside and outside for your viewing pleasure:

• What to Pack
• Required Reading
• Take it easy and feel the love

1. In Kazakhstan, it’s not uncommon to have a ten minute phone call to set up a time for a meeting that lasts five minutes. Email and telephones are still not considered to be reliable or formal forms of communication. More and more in the West, people are using technology to avoid meetings. But here face-to-face meetings are still valued even if there are more efficient ways to transmit information. Interestingly, a number of expats I know prefer to communicate by email or at least text message because of the language barrier. If something is written down in Russian or Kazakh or bad English, they have time to analyse it and double check it, whereas in a phone conversation or face-to-face meeting you don’t always realize that you have misunderstood something.
2. It is not rude or pushy in Kazakhstan to call someone to tell them you are emailing something, then calling them a minute later to ask if they got the email, and calling a third time 5 minutes later to ask if they have replied. Some of this behavior has to do with the fact that the Internet is not as reliable here as it is in the West (and yes, in the US the Internet does go out sometimes too). Some of it I suspect is due to the mistrust of a new technology since it especially seems to be older people who do this. I also think it points to a difference in prioritizing tasks.
3. I did this thought experiment about priorities at work. What order would you do the following tasks in?
   1. email a client with a one sentence answer to a question
   2. edit a 2 page document for a peer that you have already been working on for 2 days
   3. Call a partner organization to let them know that the time and place of a meeting you have tomorrow with them have changed.
   4. Prepare for that meeting
   5. start a 10 page analysis that the head of the company has asked you to do.

   These are basically in the order that I would do these tasks. Get the quick (1 and 2) and urgent (3 and 4) tasks out of the way before dealing with a big task (5). However, many Kazakhstani at the meeting put task 5 first because the boss ordered it. They felt that preparing for a meeting tomorrow was not an urgent task at all. And a report for your peers had low priority. Many did say they would write the client first because it would take so little time. So one major area of miscommunication might be in agreeing on the priority of tasks. Your colleague who is bugging you to answer his email may feel that his task is important and should be finished immediately.

4. A final issue that comes up frequently is the lack of negotiation on the part of local staff. Many expats feel that the Kazakhstan side never compromises or negotiates, but expects compromises. When Kazakhs are told, “We can’t do that,” or, “We don’t want to do that,” these are not taken as serious excuses. Foreign consultants and freelancers often cite a feeling that local businesses think they work directly for them and can be given any amount or range of work outside the original agreement. Local companies rarely try to negotiate or convince workers to take on extra work by offering more money, or easier working hours or any other benefits. Overall the idea of what constitutes a reasonable workload, a reasonable salary, and reasonable demands on workers seem to be very different.

So those are a few of the issues that came up frequently and that seemed to resonate well with the Kazakh managers. A lot of people told me they had never thought of this behavior as strange or unreasonable.

At the risk of ending up with lots of comments just complaining about Kazakhstan, what do you readers find hard about working here? And to be fair, what do local people think is weird, rude or unreasonable about foreign workers?

High-level OSCE conference in Astana to focus on tolerance and non-discrimination

Senior government officials, politicians and public figures from the 56 OSCE participating States will meet in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana on 29 and 30 June to discuss tolerance and non-discrimination in the OSCE region.

There is absolutely nothing here interesting for the reader and a complete absence of any useful details. In what way will it focus on tolerance? What proposals will be discussed? Who is coming? What problems are there with these issues? Why is this an important issue? Is this Astana’s idea or is this something that was scheduled before Kazakhstan took over the chair of the OSCE? What do experts have to say on this issue?

I bring this up because so much journalism in Kazakhstan is devoid of any kind of information, particularly official statements. We hear what happened but never why or what effect it will have or how people feel about it. Or why we should care about it. Complicated legal measures are not explained so that normal people can understand them. Complicated issues are rarely summarized and the history of events are never given. In fact, I can’t even call the above article journalism. It’s really just a press release.

The problem is that people absorb this kind of article and take it as a model of good journalism when in fact this is what journalists (and bloggers) should not do. The problem in Kazakhstan isn’t so much freedom of the press as having a press that thinks about its readers and digs into stories.

He also makes the point that some people don’t pay because they don’t live in the flat but 1) that means they aren’t using any utilities except heat (which usually can’t be shut off or isn’t billed by use) and 2) so what? You still have to pay even if you don’t live there. I’ll add number 3 which is that people who own more than one apartment are usually not poor. I think I can speak for both my apartment complex and Chris’ when I say that poor people do not live in either place. They have the disposable income to pay.

So please pay your bills so we can take hot showers again.

in the halls, they have the same tables, but without the revolutionary menu. However, they do have ashtrays. Somehow, they claim, that they smoking rooms.The walls are defiantly naked all the old stuff (rare phones and cameras, typewriters, portraits of leaders and the socialist advertising posters) have been removed.

RVS was a great place to meet, with old pictures of the Soviet Union, propaganda posters, and banners featuring clever satire on old Soviet slogans. My favorite was the banner outside that read: “Factories for the workers, Land for the farmers and Vodka for me!” It also featured old Soviet products and actually gave a good sense of what life used to be like. The menu was ironically English/American pub and bar food–some of the best chicken wings and potato skins in the country although over the years I noticed them adding more and more high class items. And the menu itself used to be in the form of a revolutionary handbill with nods to Cheburashka, Yuri Gagarin and other Soviet icons.

It’s one place I would have highly recommended to tourists, but now I guess it’s better to go to a pizza bar or something.

I don’t know what happened to cause them to change their style, but I present below a small tribute to RVS in the form of photos taken last summer.

This has led me to a question that has bothered me since I came to Kazakhstan. To the Western eye, people in Kazakhstan are remarkably unconcerned with safety. People don’t take what to me seem like very basic precautions.

For example, seat belts. Until the law on seat belts in the front seat was rigorously enforced, no one wore seat belts. Many drivers ripped the seat belts out of their cars and even the car dealer that sold us the car told us how to attach the seat belts and sit on them so that the alarm wouldn’t ring but we wouldn’t have to suffer wearing a seat belt.

We’ve had several electricians come to our house and work without shutting off the fuses. Sometimes they get shocked. They swear and go back to working. It would take them (or me) 1 second to switch off the power to the house. I even have the fuses marked. Workmen in general often work without gloves, or safety goggles. Every day I see someone holding down a pipe with a foot while it’s being cut or even two guys holding a piece of wood in the air in their hands while a third person uses an electric saw on it.

As for basic traffic safety, I am shocked when people stop their cars on busy highways and open the traffic side door without looking. Or stand in the middle of the road talking to someone. People jaywalk with their baby strollers pushed in front of them. I see people walking down busy streets in Astana, next to the sidewalk.

I could list a million examples where basic safety is ignored for as best I can tell, no reason except that either 1) they can’t be bothered or 2) they think only cowards worry about safety. Now I am looking at this through Western eyes which is why I pose this question in an open forum. Am I totally insane to see this as a trend? Is there some reason for this behavior?