In any case, here’s hoping that it does something to reduce the traffic in Almaty!

Interesting report on healthcare reform in Kazakhstan. Specifically, a grad student from Kazakhstan did a survey of doctors on the decision of working in public or private sector.

The result seems to be that doctors move from public to private when they fear the public sector is unstable or risky. Interestingly reforms meant to better the sector are seen as increasing instability. So fear of change and pessimism that any change could be bad appear to be big motivations.

The most interesting point made, I feel, was that doctors reported discontent that they were not consulted about changes or reforms to the public healthcare sector:

According to Chukmaitova, Kazakhstan’s health care workers also complained “that there are too many reforms that are being implemented, [and that] they are being implemented in a top-down approach, physicians are not being consulted or asked for their opinion in terms of whether there is need for another reform.”

“There is no ownership or engagement coming from the physicians so they have no idea what is happening and they are not feeling comfortable with all these reforms the ministry is implementing,” Chukmaitova added.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has lived in Kazakhstan and worked with the government.

I did have one complaint, that the research appears to assume working in the private sector is better so that the guiding question was, “How can we get doctors to leave public hospitals and start private practices?” That may or may not be a good thing for Kazakhstan. Because of the way government dominates the social sector, in fact reforming the public sector (with doctor and nurse and patient input) might be the best possible solution for getting good healthcare to everyone.

the most concentrated and popular form of marijuana is so-called “plastilin” (plasticine), and the way it is harvested and produced has not changed for centuries.

It begins with a freshly showered person riding naked for hours on a clean, washed horse inside a two-meter-high “forest” of marijuana.

Afterwards, the human body and that of the horse are covered with a thick layer of resin mixed with sweat.

It only takes a few tiny pieces of “plastilin” to get high.
This produces a substance that is usually dark brown in color, which is then thoroughly scraped off the human and horse’s bodies.

The mixture is subsequently pressed, molded into bars, and dried.

The “plastilin” that results from this process effectively comprises very concentrated marijuana bars.

A couple of small, pinhead-sized pieces from one of these bars added to a regular cigarette is enough to make the smoker happy.

from RFE/RL

Once again, for some reason, the program to bring US and Canadian beef cattle, as well as expertise, to Kazakhstan is hitting the press. The Moscow Times via Reuters has a nice article up about Michael Slattery, a cowboy from Nebraska, currently working at a cattle farm north of Astana.

Two things caught my eye. One, the director of the farm where Slattery is stations, said that “Kazakhstan already supplies all of the meat required for its own domestic consumption…’Now we are starting work on exports to cover the needs of our neighbors,’ he said. ‘And who is our neighbor? Russia. This giant bear is always hungry.’

I’ve heard several times from several sources (none of whom will go on record) that in fact Kazakhstan has been importing meat for years. The expansion efforts now are designed to try to cover domestic consumption. Why this is such a big secret, I don’t know, except that Kazakhs are crazy about meat so perhaps it would be a blow to national pride if they knew they were eating US beef. In any case, this program to import cattle and Western expertise is a good one and I hope it works out well. Maybe I’ll be able to afford meat soon if the prices drop.

The other point of interest here is the difference between human resources management, I suppose you might call it:

“I prefer dealing with young people,” Bisekenov[director of the Mamai farm] said. “A Soviet-trained tractor driver often doesn’t want to understand that, apart from bringing hay to the cattle, he should also feed the cows. Here we try to mould a new, responsible personality.”

Slattery agrees. He has just injected vaccines into scores of furiously resisting calves. “The mind-sets are a lot different. People are kind of one-track minded here,” he said. “They only want to drive a tractor. They don’t want to multi-task, I guess. In the United States, we have to do every job.”

While the Mamai ranch has two veterinarians, he said a typical U.S. ranch might have only one for an entire county. “The cowboys are usually all doctors in themselves,” he said.

Who knows what it will do to unemployment, but certainly productivity and efficiency will go up if people are trained to do more than one job. If you’ve ever gone to a supermarket deli counter in Kazakhstan, you’ll know the frustration of watching the cheese-selling lady, the sausage-selling lady, the salad-selling lady, as well as the cheese packing lady, and the salad-packing lady, sit idle and stare at you blankly as you wait ten minutes for the meat-selling lady. That’s a trivial example, but one wonders how much money could be saved at businesses if they were able to hire fewer employees, not to mention how many fewer hours people could work. And how much more mobile the workforce would be if they had more skills.

As students are studying their exam tables and practice books, they got some bad news:
The tests will be harder [RU]. More questions will added to the humanitarian subject tests But the minimum score necessary to be admissible to university, 50 out of 120 points will not change. Nor will the format, multiple choice, despite calls from parents, teachers and students to change to a less structured format that better tests knowledge.

Furthermore, security will be enhanced [RU] including on-duty police at test sites, metal detectors, and cell-phone jammers.

Sounds like even more fun for high school graduates this year.

No idea if that’s actually workable in Kazakhstan or not. But we definitely can’t afford an SUV (or as they call it in Russian, a jeep).

Among other things, apparently strokes account for 3% of disabilities in the group of countries in the study. I would assume injuries and accidents would be much more significant causes, but it does make you wonder if you should take out disability insurance, even if you don’t have a dangerous job.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Kasymov claims that tens of thousands of citizens go to live in the UK and Arab states. He wishes that the government would acknowledge this problem and develop a policy to counteract it. To his credit, he says it is not a simple problem with a simple answer. However he gives his own theory:

[Young people] do not believe that they can have normal career development itself, they do not believe in our medicine or education system; The biggest problem is ire over the fact that they cannot protect themselves against corruption – that’s what prompts the migration

I think this is a very important point that he is raising and platitudes that there is no place like your homeland are not enough. While the standard of living in Kazakhstan has risen, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is still disturbingly wide. Corruption is a real problem, not only in terms of bribery, but also in terms of nepotism and cronyism. And perception of corruption is also quite high; in some cases people don’t try to do certain things because they believe it will be impossible without a bribe or connections even though they have no reason for their pessimism. So the nation has a lot of work to do to level the playing field AND make sure people know the playing field is level.

The Caspionet article cites the problem that a lot of Kazakhstan-made ads copy the same basic format and lack creativity. There are exceptions of course. I was rather fond of a bank commercial that showed giant stacks of money learning the alphabet and doing exercises, rather like a nursery school. The tagline was something like, “We help your money grow.”

I would also note that a lot of magazine and newspaper ads lack quality. I suspect a lot of the time, the agencies take images off of the Internet and don’t think about image format so small images are blown up too big. And some photographers don’t seem to have found the zoom on their cameras. Or use low quality equipment. I wish some agencies would invest in professional digital slr cameras.

That being said, a lot of ads are good quality-though it’s hard to tell which brands use local ads and which are using their international ads.

It got crazy when Armand Masimzhanov, an alternate for Kairat, ran onto the field and did a flying kick at the back of Lokomotiv player Radmir Ruskova. Video footage below of the tackle, then the ninja kick and then the kick again in slow motion. I love how the guards don’t get involved until the flying ninja kick, but they move in pretty quickly.

Masimzhanov has been banned for life. But he did get his very own wikipedia entry. So that’s something.

The match was stopped, and a score of 0:3 Kairat was recorded, since Kairat was in the lead before the fight. The Astana club was fined 300,000 tenge (about US$2,000) and the Almaty club will have to pay 400,000 tenge (around US $2,700) as it was their player who ninja kicked an unaware player.