KZBlog

Today as I walked through the old square of Astana, I saw something going on at the Ministry of Education. Cars and trucks parked everywhere, hundreds of kids running around carrying boxes and Chinese bags, men and women standing over them barking orders. I asked one of the kids what was going on.

“The Ministry of Education is moving to the Left Bank,” he answered.
“Wow! They hired a lot of workers for that. When we moved offices, we did all the moving ourselves,” I said.
“What workers? We’re students. The rector of the university called off classes today and told us to come here and help them move,” he replied.

I’m not really sure that the government should be sending the message that students are slave labor. Or that students should be entrusted with government property–some of the kids had brought their own cars, meaning they were going to get in those cars and drive to the Left Bank with papers, supplies, maybe computers. What’s to stop them from just going home? Loyalty to the kind Ministry who gave them a day of hard labor?

Also, it seems odd that the Ministry can afford to move to a new building, but didn’t think to spend money on professional movers. Leaving aside that it looks very bad–could Borat have thought of anything more shameful–it also would have been a more organized move. As I watched, office workers were running around shouting, “Where’s my computer? Who has it? The black one? That goes to office 315.” People were writing their names on boxes, no doubt hoping there would be only one Aigul or Nurlan in the entire Ministry. The chaos was unimaginable as the whole courtyard in front of the Ministry was full of people running this way and that, boxes and bags stacked here and there, cars being driven in and out, around the mess.

Perhaps I should view it as a bit of a cultural experience. When I worked as a volunteer in a small African country, I remember attending a conference of teachers. Everyone was dressed in their suits for the conference and spoke very formal English. As soon as the conference ended, everyone took off their shirts in the heat, started up small fires in the school playground and started drinking beer and talking local slang. The simple villagers came out once work hours ended, and it was sort of delightful how these serious men started telling dirty jokes, and all the worries of the modern world fell away. It made me think that the Western world will never capture, colonize, destroy the spirit of these people.

Perhaps we should view these sorts of disorganization similairly. Reclaim the term “по Казакский”, doing things in the Kazakh way, which often means doing things incorrectly, not by the rules, but getting the job done anyway, often avoiding expense or unnecessary complications. Perhaps Kazakhs should be proud that even their Ministry does things по Казакский.