happy new year, again

Yesterday, we celebrated Nauryz at my school. Several kids sang traditional songs with a disco beat and accordion music on the synthesizer. (If there is a synthesizer available, it will be used to its utmost; fortunately, sometimes there is not a synthesizer.) The 7th grade girls were great. Akbota did an Uzbek (I think) dance, and five of the girls did a chicken dance, then a dance where they dressed up as Kazakh grandmas, then “the dance of the swallow.” My host sister and another 10th grade girl did a Kazakh dance, and the four 10th grade boys, who are rock stars (figuratively), sang their hit song which translates to “Hey, girls!”

The concert was in the gym, which is not ideal, but Nauryz is a spring New Year, and there is, after all, slush absolutely everywhere. Some of the teachers were seated at the low tables on the oriental rugs (not traditional Kazakh, but close) snacking on horse and wheat products. I was among them, and wondered again at how people who live here their whole lives can walk after a lifetime of sitting at these tables. The shortest celebratory chai at a low table (our everyday meals are at a higher table, with stools) is 2 hours, and we crawled away after three hours like wounded animals, on all fours, and used friends or the walls to help us stand again. The food was great, and the kids all told me about it proudly.

Most of them had rented Kazakh costumes. The 11th grade girls’ outfits featured the traditional oy-yoo, the designs that are on everything here, but were a bit more dramatic than was likely to be normal on the steppes. There was a baby blue dress with a bustier and a hoop skirt, a red gown where the hat with the feather in it was higher than Nazgul’s arm could reach, as well as a red, off-the-shoulder gown. “I don’t think that’s traditional,” said one of the teachers to me. But it’s slightly Kazakh, the only condition under which the girls could wear such a thing in the school.