A good start in Kazakhstan

I arrived in Almaty, Kazakhstan over a week ago now. It is a large city, much larger than Dushanbe, with many more stores, restaurants, movie theaters and traffic. I am staying in a small apartment a very short bus ride away from the center of the city. There is only one other person in the apartment with me right now, Valera a middle-age Korean-Kazakh man. His wife was here for a few days before leaving for Moscow to visit their daughter. Unlike in Tajikistan, where I could speak English with my host family, here I speak only Russian with Valera. It is proving to be a great opportunity to improve my Russian.

I have a few contacts here, some students at the different universities as well as a university administrator and a USAID employee. The people here are all very helpful and I have been able to meet some university officials with their help. By myself I have already met with many of the foreign organizations that run scholarships here, including British Council, DAAD (German government’s exchange program) and ACCELS, an American organization which helps to administer the Bolashak program.

The Bolashak program is actually a very large reason I choose to come to Kazakhstan. It is an international scholarship funded by the oil-wealthy Kazakh government. Initially, in the 1990’s and until 2 years ago, the scholarship was given to no more than 100 students, and then only to the children of Ministry officials. In 2005 the Kazakh President, Nazerbayev, made a decree that the program should be expanded to 3000 scholarships for undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate Kazakh students. Since then the Kazakh government has been funding scholarships while foreign organizations here help administer and place Kazakh students in universities abroad. For example, ACCELS and the British Council each place 450 students in schools in the US and UK, respectively. I understand that the mission of this program is to promote the development of Kazakhstan through educating the best Kazakh young people in an international setting and where universities are stronger.

I hope to meet with some more Bolashak scholars here to learn more about their experience with the scholarship and their impression of the 5-year service requirement they must fulfill for the Kazakh government after they graduate. There is also an interesting incentive written into the scholarship contract related to this service requirement. The students must sign over a relative’s apartment or house to the Kazakh government. If the student, once he or she graduates, refuses to fulfill the 5-year requirement of working ‘for the benefit of Kazakhstan,’ the government can seize the property.

I plan on taking a long (some say 12 some say 22 hour) train ride through the steppes to Astana, the capital city, to meet with some government officials about the Bolashak and hopefully meet alumni of other international scholarships. I still have much to do in my remaining 2 and a half weeks here but I feel I have gotten a good start.