Recently I did an online survey using Web Survey Master and 27 of my expat friends responded. I must have sent out to 50 people so I got over a 50% return rate. 12% have lived in KZ for less than half a year, 23% for one year, 23% for 2-3 years, 8% for 4-5 years, 12% for over 5 years and 8% over 10 years and another 14% had various answers. These were comments at the end of survey most of the 27 were American friends of mine but also some from Canada, U.K., Australia, Netherlands and other places. See what they wrote in answer to my asking for additional advice or feedback:
1) In general the Kazakh people are great. I really find it bothersome that some Kazakh ethnics and non-Kazakh ethnics do not always get along only because of their heritage. I believe much could be done to improve the relations between these two groups. I would also like to say that once a foreigner develops a friendship with someone from Kazakhstan, it is a great thing. Kazakhs can be very welcoming and hospitable, BUT I think the Soviet attitude of not trusting people and being too skeptical of someone’s motives gets in the way too often.
2) Kazakhstan has wonderful people and a great deal of potential. Still the process of establishing a nation is a great task. Most Kazakhstanis are unaware of all the challenges that the U.S. has overcome to be where it is today. It did not happen in fifty, one hundred, or even one hundred-fifty years.
3) The orientation of the questionnaire suggests a sensitivity or underlying inferiority complex regarding this country. But only in a small way.
4) A question such as the following would be good: How have you benefited from living in Kazakhstan?
5) I think Kazakh people are very resilient and will survive whatever life throws them. I don’t think they are easily offended, but they have been mistreated by others in their past.
Of the questions I asked my expat friends, this was Question #6. Kazakhstan can be a challenging place to live, even for the locals, what bothers you as a foreigner the most? Several expats commented on RUDENESS where we are used to “service with a smile” in the western world. I’m used to poor service in communist or former communist countries so my answer would instead be different but it still amounts to what I perceive as rudeness. If I had I taken my own survey my pet peeve would be Kazakh drivers using their cars to drive TOO close to pedestrians. We Americans like our personal space a bit bigger.
“Customer service could improve in some businesses, Rude salespeople, Poor service ethics and rudeness of shop assistants, the “rudeness” of the men…..spitting and general unattentiveness to “polite manners”
Some others wrote: “General difficulty of living conditions” “I actually worry more about the disparity of income within Astana itself. You see some very rich people here, but there are many more who are not so lucky.
Other comments: Nothing to do for English speakers (e.g. movies)
Litter
Corruption,
Nepotism,
unfulfilled promises and focus on presentation without substance to back it up
Lack of care for poor and homeless Justice/human rights/corruption: it is indeed very important to have ratified conventions and written laws, however, it takes much more time to implement them.
Lack of interest in offering excellent medical care
To be continued tomorrow with more answers to the questions posed to expats about living in Kazakhstan.
waiting in lines
Expats’ Impressions of Living in Kazakhstan (Part II) « Kazakhnomad’s Blog: A Westerner’s View of Kazakhstan said,
December 19, 2010 @ 11:02 pm
[...] yesterday’s blog I put the extra comments for Question #6. I asked in a matrix format the following eight questions [...]
Expats Impressions Living in Kazakhstan (Part III) « Kazakhnomad’s Blog: A Westerner’s View of Kazakhstan said,
December 20, 2010 @ 10:57 pm
[...] read the other day’s blog entry with an explanation of what survey I did and who were my respondents were about expat impressions [...]
futureabroadkz said,
December 22, 2010 @ 9:51 am
I am glad to know what the guests from other countries think about our country. Interesting to know. I am glad you did the survey, because sometimes we do not see what other person, I mean foreigner, can notice about the people and country itself.
Survey of Expats About Life in Kazakhstan | KZBlog said,
December 29, 2010 @ 2:59 am
[...] has yet another interesting series of posts up on a survey she did of expats living in Kazakhstan. If you start from that post and go forward in time, you’ll be able to see all the questions [...]
Батырхан said,
July 14, 2011 @ 10:18 pm
Nice work! Thank you. Very interesting read.
With al due respect, I only disagree with your statement “all the challenges that the U.S. has overcome to be where it is today”. I wouldn’t like at all for Kazakhstan to be where the U.S. is today. The economy is very close to total collapse. Moral degradation. Crime rate has gone through the roof. Censorships of all media. Military aggresion for natural resources and political dominance. And the list goes on and on.
kazaknomad said,
July 14, 2011 @ 10:34 pm
I would agree with you half a year later looking at the mess that the U.S. is currently in Stateside. When I wrote this piece I was thinking of our Constitution and what it stands for and the principles of freedom and independence that we, as Americans, hold dear. Perhaps our nation’s democracy has run its course of 200 years and now it is perhaps Kazakhstan’s turn to take the lead. However, it must be done honestly, with integrity in government with compassionate leadership, ethics in business, etc. Our nation took the bravest and best from all the nations of the world who wanted to come to the U.S., now we have a sense of entitlement with those several generations later who don’t expect to work. I’m not sure what you mean by “censorship of ALL media” but I would agree with you that there is moral degradation where people are pagan in their thoughts and lifestyles. We live in a fallen world…
Батырхан said,
July 14, 2011 @ 11:00 pm
All main-stream media, belonging to a few elite, that feed the carefully filtered information to 99% of the US population. You rarely, and mean extremely rarely, hear the truth in the US media. But thank God for the Internet, a US invention.
Good principles in the US constitution and bill of rights. Yes. But not in practice anymore, alas.
I have been studying the pre-Columbian history of the Americas, and am greatly saddened and utterly shocked by the genocide of 50 million idigeneous people, the worst in the human history after Europeans’ arrival to the continents… Sometimes some sad thoughts visit me about the present being a sort of the Old Spirits’ punishment upon the poor desendants of the infamous murderers. Well, all peoples on the face of the earth are children of conflict, that’s part of human nature. Including us the Kazakhs. So I am not judging I am just trying to understand today’s events and where this world is going. I wish all the best to the USA and all other nations of the world, we are all brothers and sisters sharing one increasingly small planet.
Simon said,
May 24, 2012 @ 1:54 pm
Actually a British person invented the internet, the Americans would only wish they could provide the world with something as useful as this…
kazaknomad said,
July 15, 2011 @ 2:47 pm
Yes, thank God for Internet so we can have this conversation about “truth” versus “carefully filtered information.” Not only the media but history is promulgated to the masses to persuade people of certain crimes in the past. I’m wondering what research and data is out there done by true scholars to back up your claim of “genocide of 50 million indigenous people” in the Americas. Seems you have been taken in by the elites who would have you believe that all Europeans are bad and promoted only evil. If we go far enough back we would need to visit how Ghengis Khan also had a lot of blood on his hands. As I wrote before, we live in a fallen world. We could despair over past statistics of deaths due to genocide, we could lament about present atrocities. All this to make us depressed about the hope of a future. Bottomline, we have Someone who has predicted all these events will happen before HE returns to earth to save this precious planet HE created.
Батырхан said,
July 15, 2011 @ 7:22 pm
You’re right, 50M is one of the most “generous” estimations of the vanished native population, but I tend to believe that at least the magnitude was such. I’m far from generalizing, just contemplating historic facts. Even if it was, say, 5M, still, what was done is really hard to read about. Today I was reading about a Holocost survivor and was crying in my heart, too.
So, are you a Christian, I take it?