From a Land Far, Far Away | Adventurers' Journal in Kazakhstan
- Henry Wat
- Sep 6, 2017
- 7 min read
“Hey, bro! I am going to Kazakhstan next month. Not Afghanistan lah…. Safe one…. Where got war..”
After this call with my friend, I started preparing for my trip to Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, for a 5-week Global Volunteer trip. You may not know where this country is. Maybe the only time you heard of this country was from newspaper when you were reading the news about the “One Belt One Road” idea proposed by the Chinese government. Without knowing much about this country, I embarked on my journey and spent over 17 hours on the flight journey to this ex-Soviet country.
About my volunteer work
So why did you go to Astana this summer vacation? I was there for 2 volunteer projects. The first one is called Hero Path. This project was co-organized by Local Committee of AIESEC in Astana (LC Astana) and a language school called Spasibeaucoup which aimed to help local teenager aged from 12-18 to find their future life goals.The other volunteer project was to volunteer in EXPO 2017, a 3-month International Exposition. It is the first time that a major international exhibition of this kind came to a country from the former Soviet Union and I was honoured to be involved in such a grand event.
Project: Hero Path
In this 4-week course, the major obstacle we faced was language barrier. Some of us do not speak Kazakh or Russian, which are the main languages of communication in Astana. Luckily, we had volunteers from Poland, Georgia and Czech who could speak Russian. When they were not here for the class, we had to rely on Google Translator (which was not very reliable). Sometimes our students did not understand us completely because of the wrong sentence structure formed by Google Translate.
You may wonder how my team could help the teenagers to find their future goals. This may be too complicated for them to understand, and was even more difficult for us to explain to them clearly with our broken languages. Instead, my team introduced to them some games and exercises for them to understand themselves better. We avoided explaining complicated concept but introduced simpler ideas to them through games.
One of the most interesting game was the "Great Egg Challenge"– dropping an egg without breaking it. Participants had to achieve the objective using materials like plastic bags and newspaper. Although we did not manage to save the egg in the end :( our participants gained a better understanding of themselves and became more bonded. That's the ultimate aim of the game.
I was pleased to bring some changes to the students. It matters little to me the number of lives I have touched. Rather, I derived my sense of accomplishment from the extent to which my help has influenced those I’ve met. My students were generally too shy to talk in front of others, especially when they were required to use foreign language to explain themselves. Some of them were afraid to dream big partly because of the relatively conservative family background. However, through our constant effort and patience, our students managed to open up to us and shared with us what they would like to do in the future. During the closing party, I was so touched by my time in Kazakhstan that I even cried in front of them. I could not imagine that one of them was going to leave the country to study overseas on a scholarship. I will always remind myself with this quote, “Dream big regardless of your background.”
EXPO 2017
Some background knowledge about my second volunteer project. EXPO 2017 is an international exhibition from June to Sept 2017. This year's theme is "Future Energy" and aims to create a global debate on a crucial question: "How do we ensure sustainable living while reducing CO2 emissions?"
The experience in EXPO was definitely rewarding. My role was to greet the visitors during the daily Parade for visitors to see a display of festivities. Every evening, I followed the parade team to greet visitors along the EXPO site. There were around 100 dancers and 30 volunteers in the parade team. Vehicles were decorated in the theme of “Future Energy” and dancers dressed to represent water, solar and other kinds of sustainable energy. It was so creative and amazingly fun to raise the awareness of the importance of sustainable energy this way.
When I worked in this team on the first day, the problem that I faced was I could not pronounce my supervisor’s name properly. Her name, Akzharkyn, is a Kazakh name. With my Singaporean Chinese accent, I spent one whole month to practise and pronounce her name correctly! You may think that it was too dull for me to work in the parade. Well, the international volunteer team, which consist of around 30 of us, decided to challenge ourselves to leave an impact here in Kazakhstan. We organized different activities for local volunteers which were aged around 18 years old. Most of the local volunteers worked for long hours everyday but their family were living in other cities. We want to provide them with a platform to relax and learn something from the EXPO. Some activities include a debate class, an English speaking club and several talks given by energy expert.
The events were warmly welcomed by local volunteers and even managed to break the barrier between the local and international volunteers. We were able to successfully create an English speaking environment for local volunteers to utilise their free time during the EXPO to learn something meaningful in addition to building friendships with the overseas volunteers.
Opportunities in EXPO were everywhere. Future Energy Forum was organized for 2 days a week during the 3-month EXPO period and attracted delegates around the world who shared their insights on future energy. One of the topics was “Sustainable Energy and Entrepreneurship”. I was fortunate to have gotten the opportunity to talk to a manager of a Britain-based outdoor gym equipment company which were interested in developing their business in Singapore. I thought that the idea was viable as it coincided with our Government’s aims to develop our country as a “Garden City”. Infrastructure such as cycling tracks can therefore encourage residents to exercise outdoors. With the help of professional equipment, outdoor gym facilities can be used to generate energy for other uses, such as charging our mobile phones. As a business student, I found the idea to be a rather interesting one and I definitely hope it comes to fruition!
During my one-month journey in EXPO, I encountered a Singaporean couple that migrated to Kazakhstan. Mr Lee is a doctor and has been living in Central Asia for over 10 years. He came to Kazakhstan to continue his career in Medicine. He described his initial experience to be extremely daunting as he was not fluent in the Russian language prior to his arrival, nor was he accustomed to the different culture and lifestyle. His inspiring story motivates me to escape my comfort zone as I recognise that globalisation has made it almost impossible for one to remain permanently fixed in one country. We cannot limit ourselves within Singapore, instead, we should widen our perspectives by considering global opportunities.
Takeaways
Undoubtedly, Kazakh culture is quite different from Singaporean culture. Therefore, as a global citizen, I kept myself open-minded and explored whatever I could in Astana. First of all, I think most travellers may be concerned about local Kazakh fare, as it is known to be very meat-heavy and is quite different from our standard fare. During my journey, I found this to be extremely frustrating and sought to search for more variety. However, even the local Chinese food mainly consisted of meat. In the end I gave up and ate whatever was on hand, such as plov, one of the traditional food which is similar to rice. The difference in lifestyle was also quite jarring as the pace of life in Kazakhstan is relatively much slower, with each Hero Path class starting at least 10 minutes after the scheduled start time. To ensure that classes ended on time, I only needed to prepare about an hour and a half worth of lessons for every 2-hour debating class. I believe that this is part of the learning process when settling in a new country.
The one thing I definitely appreciated in Kazakhstan was the hospitality of the people. Despite never having met me and not being fluent in English, I was invited by several of my volunteer team mates to have dinner at their homes where we interacted in a more casual setting and played games. I will never forget the friends I made during the EXPO and Hero Path. My volunteer team was amazing and everyone was very kind and friendly. They shared their local culture and were very curious to know more about Singapore. I will miss this place with all the amazing buildings and the astonishing EXPO. I can even foresee that the pace of development may even exceed that of China’s! More importantly, I will miss the people I met here. Prior to leaving the EXPO, my parade team spent a night at a cafe before some of them headed back to their hometown. That night was especially cold. Nevertheless, I warmed by the love they showered me with during my time there. The moment we said our farewell will always linger on, even though the location was completely inappropriate (it was next to a rubbish dump).
My international volunteer team was brilliant! We did everything together, from exploring the city to organising and conducting activities. I still remember it took two days for us to plan the activity schedule, design the posters and promote it to local volunteers. The wonderful teamwork will stay in my mind forever. My time with the Hero Path team was equally memorable as we planned our trip from Almaty to Astana together. The day we travelled to Astana was a public holiday and we were unable to secure train and flight tickets in advance. In the end we endured a 20-hour bus ride together. Throughout the trip, whenever we encountered any challenges, we would tell each other that nothing could be worse than that 20-hour bus ride.
From being unable able to utter a single Russian word to having group of Kazakh friends, from not being able to point out Kazakhstan on the map to being able to navigate around Astana without the use of Google Maps. Farewell implies reunion. I love the culture, the people and everything else there. I am grateful that I had the chance to volunteer here and leave an impact.
As youths, we should all have aspirations and dreams to motivate ourselves to move forward. That is one of the reasons why I joined this project. Life is short. Although the cost of the trip was definitely a factor to be considered, I came to the conclusion that the experience of inspiring change is priceless. Thus, I would highly encourage interested individuals to join the program as it was a highly rewarding experience.
This is just the start of my volunteering journey. Stay tuned!
Henry embarked on his Global Volunteer trip this summer to Kazakhstan on the project Hero Path. To apply for more opportunities: https://www.aiesecinnus.org/global-volunteer
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