Steph swings down from the top bunk over my head. “Come on. It’s warmer in the kitchen.”
I pull on jeans and a sweater, the warmest clothes I have, and hurry to the kitchen. I expect to be greeted with the typical scrambled eggs, bread, and milk. Instead, there’s a small gray-brown square patty on my plate.
“This is oatmeal cake,” Yana tells me.
“Cake” seems like too glorified a word for the dense slab on my plate, but I gamely take a bite.
“Sometimes it is dense as a brick,” she whispers. “And if the cook wakes up late, it’s half-baked and gooey. When Abigail cooks, it’s light and fluffy.”
Obviously, Abigail didn’t cook today, as I’m spitting out soapy balls of baking soda.
“This is our breakfast every day except on the weekends,” Yana continues. “On Sunday, we get two eggs each! They are too expensive to eat every day on the Home’s budget. I like to make pancakes with mine, but some use their two eggs to make French toast or bake a cake.”
Our lunch is tvarok, a dry version of cottage cheese, best made into a salad with grated carrots and some raisins. Dinner is some form of meat or organs with potatoes and beets, cabbage or carrots. I hate beets and cabbage, so I discreetly avoid them the first night. And then the next night. After five nights, I realize I’ll probably get scurvy if I eat vegetables only when we have carrots. Time to grow up and stop being so spoiled, I tell myself, as I scoop some of the slimy boiled beets onto my plate.
I’m starting to see just how basic life is here in Kazakhstan. Normally, Family Homes can raise money by asking locals for donations and by selling our music CDs, but Kazakhstan is so poor that these aren’t options. I come to learn that Abigail and Philip have a supporter in Europe who sends them $1,000 a month. That sum is mostly what supports our Home, so money is very tight.
On my first weekend in Almaty, I go with Yana to the big market to shop. What we cannot get donated, we must buy. This is not like any shopping I’ve experienced before. The market is hundreds of people selling their wares under a flat gray sky. Their blankets spread on the cold, hard-packed dirt, piled with large striped bags filled with more wares. Some of the fancier places have a small stall instead of just a blanket.
It hasn’t snowed yet, but it’s in the air. Yana and I walk together, looking for warm boots. I need her to translate and negotiate for me. I’ve been studying my little Russian phrase book every day, but I still can’t say enough to communicate.
Yana has dismissed many pairs of shoes so far. They need to be sturdy and lined with fur, she insists. I already know why. My feet feel like I’m stepping on needles they are so cold, and it’s only November.
Finally, we find a pair of black leather boots with a thick, rubber sole and fur inside. They’re two sizes too big, so I can wear multiple pairs of thick wool socks. Yana negotiates hard, walking away a few times in disgust. I keep quiet so I won’t reveal myself as a foreigner and risk losing a good price. I know this bargain dance in Chinese, but not in Russian.
When Yana finally settles, I immediately pull the boots on my frozen feet.
“Now we will have to get you gloves,” she says, eyeing my bare hands.
The boots cost more than we expected, so I don’t have money left for gloves.
“Here.” She thrusts a pair of gloves into my icy hands. “You can have these. I have another pair.”
I am full of gratitude. Yana is different from any of the girls I’ve known in the Family. At twenty-five, she is older than I am, but since she’s a new disciple and I’ve been in the Family my whole life, I’m considered older than she is. She is stocky and boisterous and wears brown corduroy pants and drab sweaters, brown work boots, and not a lick of makeup; her hair is an ambiguous shade of brown that’s always pulled back into a quick ponytail. She’s so different from the Family teen girls in Japan, who are laser-focused on their makeup and sexy outfits; after all, getting noticed by the teen boys is the difference between being cool and being invisible. Yana seems oblivious to her appearance.
She squints up at the setting sun. It’s getting late. Yana leads me back to the huge parking lot and starts waving at a car.
Does she know him? I wonder.
She argues with the driver for a few minutes, then instructs me to jump in.
“Everyone is a taxi here. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, many people don’t get paid for six months, or they are paid in bottles of vodka,” she explains.
I scoot inside and take off my gloves to blow on my hands. Looking out the window, I see an old lady standing by the side of the road, shivering. She is holding up a pair of brown wool socks in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other.
“She is just trying to get some money for food,” Yana says, following my gaze.
I ask Yana if we have anything we can give her, and Yana shakes her head. “If we give to every person we drive by, we will end up on the streets before we get home.”
On my second week in Kazakhstan, Benji and Yana take me to the baby orphanage, our arms filled with donations we’ve managed to scrape together from local businesses and donors in Europe, friends of Philip and Abigail, who occasionally ship us supplies. We are bringing ten baby walkers and strollers and a refrigerator for formula.
The baby orphanage is where children from newborn to three years old are housed. The dilapidated public facility doesn’t have any way for the babies to leave their cribs, and there aren’t enough workers to help them regularly exercise their little limbs, so they aren’t able to develop normally. Though the wife of the Kazakh president is allegedly involved in the Children’s Foundation, no one is supporting the institutions. The staff hasn’t been paid in six months, but the women who work there love the children and come to work anyway.
The matron cries when she sees our gifts and blesses us. We learn that just today three more babies arrived, discovered on the workers’ daily trip to the cemetery and the nearby garbage dump.
The next week we visit an orphanage for older kids. No amount of preparation readies me for what I see. The little kids have distended stomachs and faces crusted with dirt. The workers here are less diligent. The kids are barely dressed, even in the middle of winter.
When we distribute the boxes of donated clothing we’ve brought with us, we don’t have enough to go around, so the girls and boys have to choose tops or bottoms; they can pick only one. The half-dressed children run to me and hug me. I hug them back and braid the little girls’ hair. My heart squeezes in my chest, and tears burn the backs of my eyes. I steel myself and pry their little hands from my shirt and legs when it’s time for us to leave.