Being Black in Atyrau is interesting, to say the least. People here are not used to seeing Blacks and don't hesitate to show their interest whenever they see us. Before I came here the first time, I thought my husband was exaggerating whenever he mentioned people wanting to take pictures with him and not letting him leave events he attended quickly. I even told him that he probably fancied himself to be Denzel Washington or something! However, when I arrived with our kids for Christmas last year, I got to experience first hand what he meant right off the bat. The night we arrived, we had to go to a couple of supermarkets to shop. Along with the relief that many brands were familiar was the uncomfortable realization that we were being watched by almost every pair of eyes in each store. In the second store, a teenager was so entranced by my 6-year old's cornrows that she followed her around the store touching her head - I kid you not! This, as you can imagine, was not very welcome to a little girl who was already jet-lagged and cranky in a strange environment, and she decided to cling to me for every step, with a minor meltdown on our way home in addition.
It was also our first encounter with the ubiquitous camera-phones that tend to be whipped out whenever we go to a public venue. People come up to us waving their phones, obviously asking to take pictures with us - the language barrier results in a lot of hand-waving and sign language. My older daughter and I were more inclined initially to agree to the pictures, but even to our outgoing personalities it quickly grew old. My son hated it right from the first night and subsequently he bluntly refused to go shopping with us, unless he absolutely had to. He came up with the brain wave of writing a sign saying "Photo - 500 tenge" (the tenge is the local currency), which I had to strictly prohibit him from taking along whenever he went out. My husband and older daughter however adopted the principle of it, and whenever people come up to them now asking them to take pictures they say "Tenge, tenge", and make the international sign for money of rubbing their fingers together - that usually makes the requester stand down! Me, I just say "nyet" and shake my head.
People are openly very curious about everything about us, from our country of origin (usually guessed to be America) to our ages - the positive aspect is that people are often enthusiastically surprised to learn our ages, and generally indicate that my husband and I look younger than we are! Very few people speak any English, but even with the language barrier there are creative ways of getting the message across - writing or drawing familiar words, symbols or numbers, for example. The cultural differences are also evident in the pointing and / or open laughter, as well as calling friends or co-workers over to where we are to openly gawk. This tends to be disconcerting and was my son's main reason for refusing to go out, the fact that people were "laughing at him", as he put it. We tried to explain to him that it's not considered rude here the way it would be in Canada or Nigeria, and he should just ignore it, but that's hard for a teenager who is already at a pretty self-conscious age. It's a tough lesson in cultural adaptation that we're all having to learn.
Friday, September 21, 2012
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Half-empty nest
Hi again. Sorry I've been quiet for a while - after sorting out the flooding issues temporarily, it was thankfully time to go on vacation. While we were away, some major renovations were supposedly done to fix the problems permanently, but I have to admit that we've been too scared to test whether things are now working the way they should! Eventually we'll find out - for the meantime, my daughter's using the other bathroom until I'm brave enough to let her try out her own.
I now have one daughter in university - I took her to her new school a couple of weeks ago. We'd been on vacation in the US, and from there my husband took our son to his boarding school, and I took our daughter to her university, both in Canada. I didn't expect to feel any different from the usual back-to school blahs, since she spent the whole of junior and senior high school away from home. Somehow, though, it feels different. Maybe it's because I know there are no teachers looking over her shoulder to make sure she's doing the right thing, maybe its because she's semi-independent (still funded by Bank of Mom and Dad!) and she's going to have to learn how to stick to a budget, keep herself on track, and a million other things that we either used to do for her or knew were being done for her in boarding school. Thank God for modern-day technology though - we're thousands of miles away from each other, but between Skype, Twitter and e-mail, we keep in touch daily and talk at least every two days (usually initiated by her and I'm sure glad that she still likes to talk with her mother - hope that never changes!).
It's still a big adjustment for me - she'll be 18 in less than 3 weeks and legally an adult - thankfully the drinking age in Ontario is 19! I use her as an example still for my patients with colicky babies, and its hard to imagine that now she's this beautiful and smart young woman who's more than half-way out of the nest. I remember when I first moved from Nigeria to Canada, and I was on the plane with two children under 6 - my husband was already in Canada waiting for us. I suddenly had the wrenching realization that I didn't know when, or if, I would see my parents again, and looking at my children, I also realized that they would likely grow up and do exactly the same thing to me! I seriously wondered, that day on the plane, why people bother to have children when they are just going to leave them one day, and now I'm on the brink of having that happen to me. Luckily, its a gradual process for most of us, so there's time to adapt and get used to that idea. If you're lucky, they come back home - not necessarily to live though! I know that even though I'm the eldest in my family and moved out the earliest, I can also claim to be the child who's moved back home the most, usually with children in tow, while transitioning in one form or the other! I've always been welcomed back with open arms, and we all know that its just a temporary stop in my itinerant journey. Hopefully my children will feel they can always come back home and be welcomed with open arms.
I now have one daughter in university - I took her to her new school a couple of weeks ago. We'd been on vacation in the US, and from there my husband took our son to his boarding school, and I took our daughter to her university, both in Canada. I didn't expect to feel any different from the usual back-to school blahs, since she spent the whole of junior and senior high school away from home. Somehow, though, it feels different. Maybe it's because I know there are no teachers looking over her shoulder to make sure she's doing the right thing, maybe its because she's semi-independent (still funded by Bank of Mom and Dad!) and she's going to have to learn how to stick to a budget, keep herself on track, and a million other things that we either used to do for her or knew were being done for her in boarding school. Thank God for modern-day technology though - we're thousands of miles away from each other, but between Skype, Twitter and e-mail, we keep in touch daily and talk at least every two days (usually initiated by her and I'm sure glad that she still likes to talk with her mother - hope that never changes!).
It's still a big adjustment for me - she'll be 18 in less than 3 weeks and legally an adult - thankfully the drinking age in Ontario is 19! I use her as an example still for my patients with colicky babies, and its hard to imagine that now she's this beautiful and smart young woman who's more than half-way out of the nest. I remember when I first moved from Nigeria to Canada, and I was on the plane with two children under 6 - my husband was already in Canada waiting for us. I suddenly had the wrenching realization that I didn't know when, or if, I would see my parents again, and looking at my children, I also realized that they would likely grow up and do exactly the same thing to me! I seriously wondered, that day on the plane, why people bother to have children when they are just going to leave them one day, and now I'm on the brink of having that happen to me. Luckily, its a gradual process for most of us, so there's time to adapt and get used to that idea. If you're lucky, they come back home - not necessarily to live though! I know that even though I'm the eldest in my family and moved out the earliest, I can also claim to be the child who's moved back home the most, usually with children in tow, while transitioning in one form or the other! I've always been welcomed back with open arms, and we all know that its just a temporary stop in my itinerant journey. Hopefully my children will feel they can always come back home and be welcomed with open arms.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
The floodgates open!
I took a break from writing over the past week because I've had to deal with recurrent flooding. The day I started the blog, I thought I'd seen the worst of it and would write about it in detail. Well, it turns out that the dyke was just beginning to leak at that point. My work week consisted of 5 days of water coming either out of the ground or down from the ceiling. In summary it looked like this:
Monday - my daughter had a shower and we went downstairs to find the laundry and kitchen flooded. My older daughter Lamide jumped in with the expertise learnt from being a veteran of multiple floods of her dormitory room in high school, and we cleaned up. The maintenance man found no source for the water. Later, water began to drip from overhead while my son was taking a shower in his bathroom. We mistakenly assumed this to be the source of the flooding and were told the problem would be fixed the next day. And while at it, one set of shelves in the pantry collapsed while trying to move things stored under the dripping water.
Tuesday - the workmen came in and fixed both the ceiling leak and the faulty shelf before I came downstairs. Things were looking good until Lamide took her shower and we noticed water on the floor again, and this time we caught it bubbling up in the laundry from the drain in the floor in front of the washing machine. As we were cleaning up the water in the kitchen we began to notice a nasty odour and then looked towards the drain...yep, you guessed it, everyone's worst nightmare - sewage coming up from the floor drain! I had already called for maintenance but the speed with which I jumped up to call again amazed even me. I screamed that it was an emergency and we needed the maintenance guys now. Within a few minutes a man came, and he opened the drain and cleaned it. He then announced "Nyet problem (no problem)" to which I vehemently disagreed. I had to call reception and have the receptionist act as a translator - have you ever tried to explain with faux sign language the severity of a problem to someone who believes there isn't one, when you can't understand each other? Not fun in the least! Eventually the maintenance and regional managers, who thankfully spoke English, came around and inspected the problem. Next thing I knew there was a team of 6 or 8 workmen trooping in and out of my house in dirty boots, opening the sewers outside (pheew!) and breaking down the walls to reach the pipes. Construction materials and multiple unmentionables were found in the drains. At the end of the day, I was told the problem was fixed.
Wednesday - no water seemed to be rising from the ground, and a female artisan came to plaster the wall after the panel was replaced. However, we noticed a stain forming on the ceiling in the living room soon after my son took his shower, on the other side of the house from the laundry / pantry which had previously leaked from the ceiling. One of the managers came to take a look and we were told someone would deal with it the next day.
Thursday - a relatively chatty plumber who appeared to have only 2 teeth left in his mouth came to fix the leak in the ceiling, telling us it was "Italiana problem" - apparently Italian contractors had worked on the house. Before he left, the washing machine began to leak too! He tightened whatever was loose in the hoses behind and declared that to also be "Italiana problem"! He asked if we were from Cameroon, then "Niheriya (Nigeria)", the first regular Kazakh I'd met who didn't think we were Americans. Apparently for most of them the only blacks they see are black Americans in movies, so by default we're American, especially when they hear our accents. We often correct them and let them know we're from Canada, which most of them have heard of.
That evening, just as we were beginning to heave a sigh of relief, Lamide went to take a shower - and up came the water from the floor drain again! Talk about feeling frustrated - was it never going to end?
Monday - my daughter had a shower and we went downstairs to find the laundry and kitchen flooded. My older daughter Lamide jumped in with the expertise learnt from being a veteran of multiple floods of her dormitory room in high school, and we cleaned up. The maintenance man found no source for the water. Later, water began to drip from overhead while my son was taking a shower in his bathroom. We mistakenly assumed this to be the source of the flooding and were told the problem would be fixed the next day. And while at it, one set of shelves in the pantry collapsed while trying to move things stored under the dripping water.
Tuesday - the workmen came in and fixed both the ceiling leak and the faulty shelf before I came downstairs. Things were looking good until Lamide took her shower and we noticed water on the floor again, and this time we caught it bubbling up in the laundry from the drain in the floor in front of the washing machine. As we were cleaning up the water in the kitchen we began to notice a nasty odour and then looked towards the drain...yep, you guessed it, everyone's worst nightmare - sewage coming up from the floor drain! I had already called for maintenance but the speed with which I jumped up to call again amazed even me. I screamed that it was an emergency and we needed the maintenance guys now. Within a few minutes a man came, and he opened the drain and cleaned it. He then announced "Nyet problem (no problem)" to which I vehemently disagreed. I had to call reception and have the receptionist act as a translator - have you ever tried to explain with faux sign language the severity of a problem to someone who believes there isn't one, when you can't understand each other? Not fun in the least! Eventually the maintenance and regional managers, who thankfully spoke English, came around and inspected the problem. Next thing I knew there was a team of 6 or 8 workmen trooping in and out of my house in dirty boots, opening the sewers outside (pheew!) and breaking down the walls to reach the pipes. Construction materials and multiple unmentionables were found in the drains. At the end of the day, I was told the problem was fixed.
Wednesday - no water seemed to be rising from the ground, and a female artisan came to plaster the wall after the panel was replaced. However, we noticed a stain forming on the ceiling in the living room soon after my son took his shower, on the other side of the house from the laundry / pantry which had previously leaked from the ceiling. One of the managers came to take a look and we were told someone would deal with it the next day.
Thursday - a relatively chatty plumber who appeared to have only 2 teeth left in his mouth came to fix the leak in the ceiling, telling us it was "Italiana problem" - apparently Italian contractors had worked on the house. Before he left, the washing machine began to leak too! He tightened whatever was loose in the hoses behind and declared that to also be "Italiana problem"! He asked if we were from Cameroon, then "Niheriya (Nigeria)", the first regular Kazakh I'd met who didn't think we were Americans. Apparently for most of them the only blacks they see are black Americans in movies, so by default we're American, especially when they hear our accents. We often correct them and let them know we're from Canada, which most of them have heard of.
That evening, just as we were beginning to heave a sigh of relief, Lamide went to take a shower - and up came the water from the floor drain again! Talk about feeling frustrated - was it never going to end?
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Welcome to Atyrau
I've just spent the day cleaning up backed-up sewage in my laundry, threatening to spill into my kitchen....so the adventure begins in Atyrau, Kazakhstan.
Having played with the idea of writing a blog for a couple of years now, I never expected the above sentence to be my opening line. I had initially planned to write when I moved back to Nigeria from Canada, but I never got round to it. I promised myself I would do it this time since I was moving again, to a country that would probably never have come up on my "Top 100 Countries To Move To" list. The experiences leading up to our departure, and during our trip over, could themselves fill a book. But back to our little plumbing mishap for now.
We (my three children and myself) arrived in Atyrau two days ago. My husband moved here last fall, and we came to visit for a few days over Christmas. As soon as the school year ended for everyone, we headed here. From the air it was a very different sight from what we'd seen in December - an expanse of brown prairie-like land, with not a land elevation in site. My son Biodun commented that it reminded him of flying into Calgary (Canada), where we'd previously lived for several years, but without the patchwork of farmlands that are characteristic there. The pilot announced as we were about to land that the temperature was 34 degrees C on ground - apparently it'd been 37 degrees earlier that day! As soon as you stepped through the door of the plane it hit you like a brick wall - dry heat like being in a huge oven. Air conditioning has never felt so good!
My husband had moved to a new townhouse complex a couple of months ago, and proudly informed us that he'd used the showers in all the bathrooms except one (there are four altogether). So we naively didn't expect any unpleasant surprises when we started using the showers the next day. My youngest daughter, Sayo, who's six, as usual was the first of us new arrivals to wake up after their dad had gone to work. She came to ask me to help her with the shower. Because the shower bases were flat and not fully enclosed, she'd been forbidden from using her previously assigned shower after making a watery mess the night before. After taking her shower in her brother's bathroom, which had a bathtub, she wanted breakfast so I went downstairs with her...and walked into a flooded mess! The floor of the walk-through pantry / laundry was covered with water on the laundry side, and had spilled over into the kitchen. This did not look good.
Having played with the idea of writing a blog for a couple of years now, I never expected the above sentence to be my opening line. I had initially planned to write when I moved back to Nigeria from Canada, but I never got round to it. I promised myself I would do it this time since I was moving again, to a country that would probably never have come up on my "Top 100 Countries To Move To" list. The experiences leading up to our departure, and during our trip over, could themselves fill a book. But back to our little plumbing mishap for now.
We (my three children and myself) arrived in Atyrau two days ago. My husband moved here last fall, and we came to visit for a few days over Christmas. As soon as the school year ended for everyone, we headed here. From the air it was a very different sight from what we'd seen in December - an expanse of brown prairie-like land, with not a land elevation in site. My son Biodun commented that it reminded him of flying into Calgary (Canada), where we'd previously lived for several years, but without the patchwork of farmlands that are characteristic there. The pilot announced as we were about to land that the temperature was 34 degrees C on ground - apparently it'd been 37 degrees earlier that day! As soon as you stepped through the door of the plane it hit you like a brick wall - dry heat like being in a huge oven. Air conditioning has never felt so good!
My husband had moved to a new townhouse complex a couple of months ago, and proudly informed us that he'd used the showers in all the bathrooms except one (there are four altogether). So we naively didn't expect any unpleasant surprises when we started using the showers the next day. My youngest daughter, Sayo, who's six, as usual was the first of us new arrivals to wake up after their dad had gone to work. She came to ask me to help her with the shower. Because the shower bases were flat and not fully enclosed, she'd been forbidden from using her previously assigned shower after making a watery mess the night before. After taking her shower in her brother's bathroom, which had a bathtub, she wanted breakfast so I went downstairs with her...and walked into a flooded mess! The floor of the walk-through pantry / laundry was covered with water on the laundry side, and had spilled over into the kitchen. This did not look good.
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