True Colours

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.

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.