Spring is in the Air

March 3, 2008

It is official: Spring has come to Kyzylorda. How do I know this? The first clue was the sinus congestion that I always get this time of year. I thought that I would be safe living in a place with no green plants, much less pollen, but no such luck. I do have to admit though that my allergies were much less severe than they are normally so perhaps desert living agrees with me. The big sign of spring’s arrival however, is all of the couples that I see everywhere. The river is especially popular, and I regularly see fifteen to twenty couples hugging and making out on one of the park benches along the bank. At first, all of these public displays of affection struck me as strange, particularly in a culture that is usually demur about love and sex, but then I realized that the reason is that they have nowhere else to go. In Kazakhstan, most young people live with their parents who keep a close eye on their children’s friends and relationships, so a hook up in the basement when your parents were away would be difficult if not impossible. Some young people that do have cars and use them as rendezvous spots, but the vast majority do not and so turn to the only place that they can be together in private, public areas like parks, promenades or even the Korkit Ata Monument.

I know that parents and community leaders believe that by forcing their kids to romance in the public eye will keep them from engaging in risky behaviors, but from what I have seen in the last five months it has the unintended consequence of encouraging people to get married when they are very young. If people are told they can only have sex when they are married they are going to get married as soon as possible. For example, in one of my 4th year courses I have three nineteen year-old girls who are married, one has an eighth month old child and the other two are currently pregnant. That said, sex is not the only factor that promotes Kazaks to marry early. Most families vocally encourage their daughters to be married by the time they are twenty-one or twenty-two, but to deny the influence of sex, especially on those couples who get married before they turn twenty, would be ridiculous. Also, I am in not saying that marrying young is necessarily a bad thing, but getting married before you have graduated from high school/college or lived on your own is not usually the wisest decision, especially when you are marrying the first person you date. Still, there are few divorces in Kazakhstan, and most seem very happily married so maybe they know something I do not. In the meantime though, I will just enjoy the warm weather and sunshine, and maybe get a little jealous of all those couples as I run past.