New Rules

We got to the baby house yesterday to see Alex and Vera told us that we needed to make sure he stayed awake during our entire visit. Usually he falls asleep while we are with him because the end of our visit bumps up against the start of nap time. His falling asleep with us was causing problems back in 'the crib' since he would wake up when Vera would take him back to his nannies and he wouldn't fall back asleep. He was getting upset and wanting to be held all the time and that just didn't work with their program. So for our morning visit we kept him up and awake just fine. In the afternoon it was more of a problem since we visit from 3-5 and nap time starts at 4. He was getting really cranky toward the end of the afternoon visit and we asked Vera if in the future we could cut that visit short, to 4:30, for Alex's sake and ours. She said that the afternoons weren't as much of a problem and it would be OK for him to fall asleep with us during that visit. We'll put that into effect Tuesday since we won't have afternoon visits today or tomorrow.

Tomorrow we go to Guardianship Court, the first of two court appearances we'll make while we are here. It is a court of 5-12 people (I guess it depends who shows up that day) made up of community leaders who determine if they think we are worthy of moving on through the process. Honestly, we aren't sure what it is about but it will be good practice for the final court hearing when we will be officially named Alex's parents.

Forgot to write that the day before yesterday we went to the class on Kazakh culture and traditions at a language school here called Interligua. It was very interesting and we are going back Tuesday to learn some more. This is a new program and we were the first to participate. We learned about what life is like for the Kazakhs who lived in nomadic tribes prior to the Soviet takeover. Most interesting was hearing our teacher, Adilya, talk about her mother who remembered what it was like when the Soviets took over and forced the Kazakhs into collectivisation. Adilya's grandfather had been a fairly well-off fur trader, which didn't sit well with the Soviets. The came and took their furniture, other possessions, and finally their house simply because her grandfather 'had too much' and was therefore an 'evil' person. He packed up his family and fled their village rather than wait for the Soviets come back to kill them. They traveled for 3 days and were finally taken in by another village. They eventually came to Taraz and set up a good life. Adilya's mother married a man who became a judge so was fairly well taken care of during the Soviet times but she couldn't talk about her family having been in the fur trade and basically capitalists in the past for fear that it would ruin her husband's career. Adilya surprised us by saying that growing up in Soviet times wasn't all bad--they had good education, free healthcare, the kids were fed 3 times a day at school. She put it well when she said it was all free, but perhaps the price they paid was in their inability to say certain things for fear of imprisonment. All in all it was an eye-opener and we are looking forward to our next class.