Ethan

The boy's name is Ethan Azamat. His birthday is April 30, 2002. So he is 4.5 years old. He is approximately 41 inches tall, and adorable.

We visit with Ethan for two hours every day, and play with him in a big room at the orphanage. We bring toys, fruit (he loves bananas and apples), and yesterday we brought photos from home. He likes looking at pictures in books, and often repeats the English words after we've said them. He also loves music -- he can sing the Kazakh national anthem, and he's been learning bits of "old macdonald has a farm" since one of the toys plays this song -- he seems to have a good ear for tunes.

There are lots of things he likes doing. One day we played "house" ("orphanage"?) where he pretended to cook and feed us food, then put us to sleep on the floor. Then he'd wake us up a few seconds later. I pretended to be sleepy and not want to wake up, which threw him into a fit of laughter. As soon as we woke up, he'd feed us again, then put us back to sleep, so we had 30 second days. He even pretended to wash the dishes, making a "woosh, woosh" sound as he scrubbed them. He cooled the pretend tea down by blowing on it for Mark.

Other times he takes the cars and plays with them. He made a little garage out of some big lego-like blocks, and put the cars inside. One day he was pushing around Tania's little stroller (Tania is the 2 year old who is also in the room because she is being adopted too), and putting his cars and trucks inside of it. Sometimes he just likes to play for a while himself, or else put on my sun glasses and walk around the room. Yesterday we played "piggy-back" which also sent him into a fit of laughter. Ethan seems to be an extremely good-natured little guy -- he has the reputation of cheering up the other kids when they're down.

When we aren't visiting the kids, we walk around the city and shop for toys, go to dinner, or just relax in the hotel room.
KyzylOrda is a fairly small town, about 200,000 people. It is fairly near where the Russians launch their spacecraft and rockets (they rent the space from the Kazakhstan government). It's a bit dusty when the cars zoom past.

Things are very international here -- the music television has everything from US rap, to Japanese love songs, to Indian bollywood numbers. They have "The Simpsons" dubbed in Russian. The stores are filled with things from China and other parts of the world. In fact, it has been very hard to find anything to buy that was made in Kazakhstan. This morning I found some really delicious dark chocolate that has the Kazakhstan flag on the cover. Yum!

People have been very friendly with us, even as we completely fumble their language, and end up waving our arms, muttering "spaseeba" or "Rhakmet" (Russian and Kazakh for thank you) and pointing wildly at the things we're trying to buy. (Most people speak Russian and Kazakh, but they only speak Kazakh with the children at the orphanage. Since both languages are written in cyrillic, and sound very similar to us, we usually have no idea what language we're working in. Hence the wild flailing of arms).