kids in Koktube 2

A few people have wondered about what kids are like here. If anything, the youth of Kazakhstan are more steeped in TV and American pop stars than the youth of America. They are unburdened by understanding what Eminem, Nelly, and Britney are saying, but they memorize the words anyway. I was at a birthday party Wednesday night, and the girls asked me to translate the music they were dancing to. My Kazakh hasn’t reached so far – I don’t know the proper words to make people’s hair stand on end yet.
TV here is weird and certainly not as edgy as in America, but people sure watch a lot of it, maybe 5/6 hours a day. It’s not all innocence, though. There are some cable exports, such as “Sex and the City” and a number of South American soap operas. Film pirating is so efficient that my neighbor, Yerlan, was running around with a copy of “Troy” a month ago, and most people have seen “Shrek II” – not in theaters.
Kids here are well-loved, though not spoiled. I’ve not heard much praise or criticism. The situation for women is probably similar to the 1950’s in the US. Few work, and even those who do are fully responsible for feeding and cleaning for everyone. Children are courteous and affectionate with their parents, aunts, and uncles. I haven’t seen teenaged angst in anyone except a 21-year-old who goes to college in Houston.
All this doesn’t mean that the younger generations plan on staying in the villages. A few girls who just graduated from high school told us at tea about their plans for the future. They were all very ambitious, even if not likely: doctor, translator, etc. I have a couple host cousins who are in medical school. They’re 18. Here, you enter medical school out of high school and go for 6 years. Doctors here are younger, and many are women.
But back to the kids: they seem to have a lot of fun. There’s no school right now, so they’re running around in packs shouting three phrases in English. Some of the boys, headed by Narsultan, play bocce in the street. Lots of them also meet up for soccer in the field by the school. Some young girls were playing in a shallow ditch in the rain.
There are a million people named royally – Narsultan for boys and Sultanate for girls are especially popular. Which is interesting because they must have been named during the Soviet era, a brave new world with no end in sight and no love of kings.
Many 17-year-olds think I’m also about 17. It’s true, teenaged girls in KZ look much older than teenaged girls in America. 30-year-old women roughly correspond to American women in their 40’s. And my 70-year-old grandmas look like they could be the mothers of my American grandparents. It’s far more variable with the boys. Some are so thin! In fact, everyone except married women is thin. There’s quite a range for height. Most old men and women are quite short, but my 13-year-old host sister is taller than I am, and some of the boys in the local boxing club are absolutely huge.