KZBlog

One great source for information, often obscure information, about Kazakhstan comes from adoption blogs. Kazakhstan is now 5th in the world in terms of countries from which children are adopted, which means when you search for Kazakhstan on blog-searches, you find a lot of adoption blogs.

One of the best sources of information is the web directory at Kazakh Adoptive Families. The owner has found just about every link on the Internet to Kazakh language, culture and music. It’s immense!

Another blog for a couple that seem equally devoted to knowing everything about Kazakhstan is The Den Hartog Stork. There’s a great entry about the Museum of Archaeology in Almaty, which I have never gotten to, because it’s always closed for repairs so I was grateful for the photos.

And I just discovered The Hunts blog, whose saga appears to be over, but it’s interesting stuff and really gives an idea of day-to-day life here.

Redneck Peril has their whole adoption saga listed out, with some nice stories about his kids and their family. There’s less about life in KZ, but you get some nice personal stories and an idea of what kids face growing up here as orphans.

It’s one place to start, if you’re looking for ideas of what life is like here.

EDIT: Since this entry is starting to get hits from people clearly looking for help in adopting children from Kazakhstan, I wanted to give two useful links.

1. Kazakhstan Adoption Blogs part narrative and part useful advice/links to useful sites.
2. Information from the Kazakhstan Embassy on adoption, what documents you need, etc. As with all things government, check to make sure this list is updated before starting out
3. I can’t find anything on the test E-Gov site in English, but I’m sure once they get that up and running, it will be there.