What just Happened?! что случилось?!

Navigating a new culture while not knowing the language

Back in March 2011 I had just begun my journey living outside the United States. That month I arrived in Kazakhstan as a new Peace Corps Trainee embarking on 3 months of language and cross cultural training before I would be sent to a remote town as an English teacher for the next 2 years. Top of mind for me was the question of language learning - I was not good at learning other languages.

When I was in high school I initially signed up to learn Russian as my second language, but had to reconsider when the school canceled their Russian program a month before I started my freshman year. I think that the Russian teacher just retired but I recall hearing that it was something about the cold war being over and there just not being a need anymore.¹ This whole “pick a more modern and relevant language” idea didn’t quite stick with me and I wound up in Latin class instead. It’s fair to say that my high school language journey was mostly a story about me trying my best not to fail classes. The highlight of the process was when I took a year of Spanish and my teacher gave a presentation on the Peace Corps - this stuck with me much more than Spanish. I decided that in college I needed to avoid this subject entirely and went into engineering.

So going into Peace Corps I was a bit nervous and I spent a fair amount of time trying to prepare myself. I learned the Cyrillic alphabet and spent a lot of time in the shower or car mumbling Здравствуйте (Zdravstvuyte / “Hello” in Russian) and trying to get the “r” sound right. This might have helped me a bit once language classes started, but it didn’t do much to prepare me to land with a host family that spoke no English in the first week.

When I arrived at my host family’s house I was greeted by a kindly Kazakh couple who were predominantly Russian speakers. At home, they had one son in high school, Tolegen, who spoke very limited English and they were also taking care of their young granddaughter part of the time since their daughter and her husband worked in nearby Almaty. We lived in a small Kazakh village called Belbulak which was probably destined to be a suburb one day but then had the infrastructure of a very rural town.

After shaking hands and a lot of smiles and words I didn’t understand Tolegen took me up to my assigned bedroom and said “be alone in your room,” closed the door and left. This seemed like an odd instruction to me but I set about unpacking and determined to use this “alone time” wisely. Later I found that the Peace Corps language teachers who were responsible for picking out host families had strongly impressed upon them that Americans are independent and like alone time more than Kazakhs. Apparently the family chose to respect my culture by shutting me away as soon as I arrived. It’s a good reminder that everyone was in a totally new situation here.

Once I got up the courage to venture out, I decided to focus on my immediate needs first - namely water. Peace Corps had made it very clear that we were not to drink the local water without filtering it first and had issued us really large water filters for this purpose. This was basically a gravity filter with 2 stacked buckets and ceramic filtration candles that the water would slowly pass through.² The operative word there is “slowly.” These filters could do a lot of work over a 24 hour period but you had to watch them and keep them fed. Since I showed up without any drinkable water I wanted to get this going so I wouldn’t have to live only on tea.³

So I asked if I could fill up the filter and where best to get water. This didn’t seem like a major request as there was a bathroom on the first floor and therefore I (foolishly) assumed that the house had running water. I was told no water now - wait for later and between everyone’s hand gestures and Tolegen’s few English phrases I realized that this was the final word.

Getting Water… More Complicated than Expected

When I was finally told to come downstairs for water I walked down and was met by odd looks. They conveyed something like “you’re going dressed like that?!” eying my sweater and jeans. I foolishly believed this was all some delay in showing me where I was “allowed” to get water from and not that we were beginning a quest of sorts. So off we went, me in my sweater, into the snowy night.

A Belbulk street in March. The Tien Shan foothills stretch away in the background.

My host dad gestured that I should help him gather up all the 6 liter water bottles that could be found which we then stacked in the back of his Mitsubishi 4x4. We piled into the car and set off on a short drive to another part of the village where we found lots and lots of people doing whatever it was we were doing.

Basically, there was one water tap, in the style of a pipe and garden hose style spigot. This emerged from the ground on the side of the road and surrounding it there were around 10 cars arranged in a semi-circle to shine their headlights at the water spigot. In the center of this were around 20 people filling water bottles. What made this whole process challenging was how cold out it was - not just this night but generally. Any drips from the spigot that didn’t make it into a bottle hit the ground and froze. Over time this resulted in a kind of mini ice mountain.

So picture this, you have a pipe and spigot that come out of the ground to a height of about 1 meter⁴. The ice mountain has covered this up to around 50 cm and spread out from the spigot to a radius of around 2 meters. This means that you have a fairly gentle slope of super slick packed ice around the prized goal of getting water. Stepping on this was completely out of the question. The tactic here was to have someone lie on the ice and then someone else kinda boost them up by their feet. This allowed you to get your arms close enough to the spigot to get water without sliding back down. Whoever was doing this job basically helped everyone in the crowd as bottle after bottle of water was passed up to them in a kind of bucket line.

As you might imagine this took a little while. My host dad thought it would be funny to volunteer me for the “dude who lies on the ice slope and is held up by his feet” job so I dutifully did that for a while. When all was said and done we had water and we headed home. I got to fill my filter and had discovered where the water is. Mission accomplished - but not at all as I anticipated.

Why Didn’t the House Have Running Water?

This is a harder question to answer than you would think. Most people kinda assume that houses in a rural setting either have running water or don’t. That’s a vision that makes a lot of sense to an American or Western European who is conditioned for a world where progress always moves forward. Our grandparents didn’t have running water, now we do! That’s progress. If you told that person that their grandchildren might not they probably wouldn’t believe you. Well, welcome to the former Soviet Union.

A lot of things took a step back in Kazakhstan when the Soviet empire collapsed. One really noticeable example was mail - most apartment buildings had the remnants of mail boxes but the mail stopped in the early 90s and never restarted. Now if you get a letter you have to go to the post office to pick it up. Similar things happened with town water systems.

In a state system where a bureau in Moscow decided menu items for a restaurant in Chisinau you don’t get a lot of flexibility and local accommodation. During the period where many of these towns were connected to water and sewage there was a multi-tiered standardized plan. For example if your town had 5001 people in it, you got the water system for the 5000 - 15,000 person town.⁵ After the fall of the Soviet union many towns with already oversized water systems contracted in population due to migration and urbanization - rendering the systems unaffordable and the water just stopped.

Is this what happened to my host family in Kazakhstan? I don’t know. When I was most curious I didn’t speak enough Russian to ask. When I spoke enough Russian I mostly accepted the situation as a fact of life.

The hardest part of this acceptance was getting over my fear of the massive guard dog that prowled at night and was between me and the outhouse.

To reiterate, the house had an indoor bathroom and elements of indoor plumbing. Lucky for me my host family anticipated both my confusion and their inability to explain things. They taped the toilet shut with a paper sign that said something in Russia - most likely “NO!” The tape spoke for itself and I used the outhouse.

Not all of my fellow volunteer were so lucky. A few of them arrived with host families and after being greeted with food, drink and celebration wandered off to do some business. One woman was horrified to discover that after doing some rather serious business she needed to put her best mime skills to work to get assistance with flushing. Flushing that was not possible. Then it was getting help with cleanup… and you get the picture.

Each day that we volunteers gathered at the local school for training we swapped horror stories about how we got something very very wrong the night before. I have to assume that our host families were doing something similar - laughing about how the crazy Americans did some confusing thing or another. Through this muddled process of trial, error and a lot of laughing we all started to figure each other out.

Except… wait, is there water?

Just when you think you have it figured out though you get a curve ball. A month or so later I got a fun chance to use a new Russian phrase I learned что случилось? (chto sluchilos'? / what happened?). I was coming downstairs in the morning for tea and breakfast and headed for the kitchen which was a half flight of stairs down from ground level.⁶ When I got to the top of the stairs I saw that the whole family was awake and wading through a sort of flood catastrophe. The whole kitchen, living room and wood fire stove auxiliary room was under around 10 cm of water. I deftly utilized my newly acquired language skills and blurted out “что случилось?!”

This caused everyone to look up from their efforts with buckets and mops to laugh hysterically. I think they realized how confused I must be (and still am to this day⁷) and also how little I would understand if they tried to explain. We all laughed and set to work remedying whatever disaster had befallen the house.

Stories like this make you realize that even if you did pretty well in high school language class you probably didn’t learn the vocabulary to describe the weird and wonderful contours of daily life. Years later my Russian skills are pretty strong and I have a sort of specialization in plumbing terminology after multiple floods and disasters in my restaurants. But that’s a story for another day.

1. That logic sure didn’t hold up.

2. Something like this on amazon

3. Kazakhs drink tea in around 5 seatings a day. In a lot of ways it is their main source of hydration and like most things in Kazakhstan it’s communal - meaning we all hydrate at the same time on our tea breaks. I personally like to drink a lot of water so this was not great for me. I got a very stern warning later when I was a teacher and I was told that the chemistry teacher believed that my water drinking was extremely dangerous to my health. This was conveyed with great gravity because as a chemistry teacher she was thought to be an expert by the other teachers. It’s important to note that this feeling about water and tea was pretty universal in Kazakhstan between ethnic Kazakhs and ethnic Russians and regardless of language. I haven’t found anything like it elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

4. In the future I’m going to have to do a post about my partial conversion to metric after so many years outside the US. I remain dedicated Fahrenheit but that’s a story for another day.

5. These numbers are just examples, I was told all the ranges by a water engineering project manager years ago but my memory isn’t that good.

6. I am certain that attempting to use western architecture software to create blueprints for Kazakh (or Moldovan) houses would result in the computer simply giving up and dying.

7. I’m still 99% certain that there wasn’t any running water in the house. There was still snow piled high outside so it wasn’t about external rain or something. My best guess now is that the wood fire stove probably heated water in a closed radiator system that had a failure. I distinctly remember the water being hot - like a hot water pipe burst - so this would fit. Then again, we had heat when I got back from class that day and no other consequences of this mystery flood ever made themselves known to me… so who knows.