Category Archives: Apple

Baby Steppes: Memories of Kazakhstan

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I’ve not yet seen Paris, but how many seasoned travelers can boast of spending time in cafes in Almaty, Astana and Karaganda? Clearly, I’ve got a leg up on veteran globetrotters.

Our three-week stay in Kazakhstan, for an eight-student photojournalism trip, was nerve-wracking at times. Reservations and credit cards were foreign ideas in some hotels and cold-water walkup flats in crumbling Soviet apartment blocks were the norm. Being unable to read street signs or tell taxi drivers where you want to go (my Kazakh is as good as my Russian) was also unsettling. And long, dusty bus rides and rickety train rides through the barren steppe gave us far too much time for reading.

But then there was the magic of the place. There were, for instance, Almaty’s “random taxis,” where you stick out your hand and, voila, some guy happening by in an old Lada or somesuch with an invariably cracked windshield stops to whisk you away (with the help of hand-signals and mumbled Russian). There was the city’s Green Market, an immense bazaar where you can buy just about anything. There was Panfilov Park, a gorgeous island of green that commemorates 28 Almaty soldiers who died fighting Nazis (immense memorials, including an eternal flame that brides and grooms pose near on weekends).

Almaty, the financial center and biggest city in the country, is a pedestrian-friendly place of tony shops, nice parks and rising new apartment towers. A leafy, cool place that stretches downward from the snow-covered Tian Shan mountains, the city was great for a morning run. It’s a busy town. It is home to the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange (KASE), the most visible sign of the nascent capitalism that could – if managed well – turn the country into a substantial regional force.

Almaty’s financiers could help enrich a population that, despite the rise of a middle class, is still relatively poor by western standards. At $1,322 yearly, Kazakhstan’s per capita income ranks it 94th globally, just below Tonga but well ahead of China, according to NationMaster.com. By contrast, each resident of No. 1-ranked Luxembourg boasts an income of $37,500. Some 1.26 million people live in Almaty and, income issues aside, it felt like most of them were shopping in the Green Market when we were.

Astana, for its part, is an enormous World’s Fair. The new capital city, which officially became the seat of Kazakhstan’s federal government in 1998, is much more of a car place (fancy cars predominate, too, for the status-minded Kazakhstanis). Giant buildings with stunning architecture are great to look at, but challenging to get to. It’s pretty, glitzy and new. In an odd way, it has a Washington-like feel, with monumental buildings and a feeling of power, but nowhere near as intimate as Almaty. If Almaty — population over 700,000 — were New York, Astana would be D.C.

Still, Astana has huge promise. From its spanking-new Eurasian National University, where we met with journalism instructors facing many of the same issues we do at UNL, to the wonderful new U.S. embassy, the place seems fresh and new. That freshness could help sweep away the old Soviet apartment blocks over time. Some of those five-story apartment blocks, with their steel doors, security locks, overgrown common areas and sewer smells, made South Bronx highrises seem palatial. One hopes most such places will disappear in Almaty and Karaganda, as well.

In some ways, Astana is a bold, optimistic statement. Just think about the religious nature of the place. A gleaming mosque, a stunning synagogue, Roman Catholic and Russian churches coexist, with representatives sometimes meeting in a huge glass pyramid built to celebrate the world’s religions. It all reflects the ebullient attitude of the country’s founding president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has kept power since Kazakhstan emerged from the Soviet Union in 1991. His long reign has been helped by the nation’s vast oil and mineral riches (despite sometimes questionable elections, he seems popular and the big question mark over Kazakhstan’s future is who will come next once the 70-year-old leader steps aside).

Then there’s Karaganda, the regional center where we spent our final week. There’s something tragic about the place, probably because it was shaped by the KarLag system, part of Russia’s Gulag internal-exile system. Many people in Karaganda, it seemed, had ancestors connected in some way to the KarlLag, as prisoners, exiles or guards. And folks there, even the Russians, still seem suspicious of Russian things – most notably, blaming rockets launched from the Baikonur space base for headaches, high blood pressure, joint pain and weather changes.

Outside of Karaganda, we visited the village of Dolinka, where barracks and other buildings from the KarLag remain. The place seemed desperately poor to Western eyes, but residents don’t seem to feel that way (and there were plenty of satellite dishes on ramshackle houses). Indeed, I’ll never forget the young Russian college student who was appalled at my suggestion that it was a poor town. Her friend lived there, she said, and didn’t think it poor at all. Poverty, it seems, is relative (though running water, heat and the chance to get an education would seem to be handy universal barometers).

Karaganda is a place where Peace Corps folks and missionaries are reaching out in earnest to the local population. Saving souls or helping people think well of America is certainly not a bad thing. Already, the public seems enamored of things American, as reflected by the constant stream of music videos in cafes and restaurants, as well shop names (U.S. Polo Assn. has an outlet there). College students in an English club, which is helped along by U.S. aid, were fascinated to hear us talk about the U.S. Western cultural elements dominate: I’ll never forget the boy in Dolinka, about 10, who strummed his crude homemade guitar and talked about Pink Floyd.

Perhaps my favorite memory of Karaganda will be the city’s sprawling downtown park. There’s a delightful amusement park, where we challenged our nerve on a rickety old Ferris Wheel that looked like it hadn’t been oiled since the fall of the Soviet Union. And one of the students, Megan Plouzek, and I got to run an impromptu marathon around the park (14 circuits approximated 26.2 miles, and I managed five while Megan logged about eight, covering more than 15 miles). The marathon was the brainchild of a local American former college athlete now working for a missionary group, and drew about 15 competitors.

Kazakhstan seems very much a country still emerging. Its economic system, dependent on natural resources, needs to diversify. Its educational system, despite such dubious features as college students occasionally paying teachers for grades, offers a way up for the people. Its government-funded foreign-study programs, which pay full-freight for students who qualify in exchange for five years work back in the country, represent a smart bet on the government’s part.

But I believe the country will make a mark globally over time. Already a regional powerhouse in Central Asia, it could ride its oil wealth and strategic location between China and Russia to great things. I suspect Americans will hear much more about the place in coming years, and it makes me feel like we got a ground-floor view. Paris can wait.

Karaganda — A Mixed Soviet Legacy

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As we prepare to leave Karaganda, a 75-year-old city whose residents include a large number of survivors of Stalin’s KarLag internal-exile system, a few things stand out. There is a hardiness to the people here, bred perhaps by a history of fighting against everything from the weather to bureaucrats and worse. There is also a tendency to cut corners with few standards, whether in putting up or refurbishing buildings or in buying one’s grades in university. And there is a keen interest in other cultures, particularly the U.S.

On the survival front, we talked with remarkable people whose histories are both chilling and admirable. We met a woman whose parents survived the most absurd imprisonment in the KarLag here – her father simply because he was a German in the Ukraine during WWII and her mother because, at 18, she told someone that German sewing machines were better than Russian ones. The woman, now in her early 60s, went on to train as an accountant until she retired. Her husband, a Soviet Army veteran, at 67 works his small farm plot to raise the family’s food and boasts muscles far bigger than mine. Chillingly, his wife said her whole village, Dolinka, is a graveyard from indiscriminate killings in the KarLag days, to the point that her husband has turned up human bones as he has tilled his ground. (See Megan Nichols, with camera, and Megan Plouzek, below).

There is some nostalgia for the Soviet days here. College students told us that their parents yearn for the stability of that era. And one of our guides said there was real tumult for a couple years immediately after the collapse of the USSR, with both her parents losing their jobs and much unemployment hereabouts in the gap between the state-run society and the emergence of capitalism. Indeed, even the college students said they believed things were better in schools then, as they point out that salaries for professors are so low now that buying grades is commonplace – we’ve heard that cheating on exams is similarly universal. They believe the Soviets held students to a higher standard.

And yet, there’s also some resentment toward the Soviets. Russia still launches many rockets here from its Baikonur launch area. Intelligent people are convinced that the repeated launches give them headaches, as radioactivity or toxins fall to earth. They believe, too, that the rockets have upset the weather, making for spring days that start out sunny, turn wet quickly and then turn back to good weather. They argue that the Soviets once paid to compensate for health problems from the rockets, but don’t any longer. This distress over seeming Soviet exploitation of the area seems to echo the feelings of people in another part of the country, the Semey area, over nuclear testing that left a legacy of environmental disaster and cruel deformities among residents and their children.

The ability to survive all sorts of abuse marks these people, though. Economically, Karaganda is a dramatic case study in an overwhelmingly small-business oriented culture. Street vendors hawk toys, food and clothing. Underpasses beneath the city’s main roads are packed with little one-person shops, booths and tables. One walks into modern retail complexes that house collections of such one-person shops, often with tiny stores subdivided into sections. We saw, this, too in Astana in convenience stores. Here, one intriguing-looking building housed a bevy of small merchants selling hardware of all sorts. It’s a peddler culture.

We have seen this even in our latest hotel. We’re staying in the Hotel Karaganda, a classic-looking old hotel now undergoing rehab. We checked in and paid at the desk but then were sent upstairs to our room on the third floor where a woman sitting at a table entered us in her book and led us to our room. It appears as if the hotel is subdivided and this woman oversees her collection of rooms as a sub-letter. The second floor is filled with similarly sized rooms, each with a separate merchant. We’ve noted that most of these merchants are women, and our guide said this has been a longstanding way women earn a lot of the income for the family – in addition to doing all the traditional jobs of mothers and wives, such as cooking, cleaning, etc.

There’s a great need for travelers here to roll with the punches. Reservations can be difficult or even impossible at some hotels, sometimes requiring a payment. And terms can change quickly – we told the folks at the Edem, our first hotel here, that we would definitely stay through last Thursday and probably would stay through Sunday. On Wednesday, I learned they had given away our room and we had to move out on Friday. Then, when we moved to the Hotel Karaganda, our translator had booked two rooms with six beds in all. When we got here, we found just one room with five beds. Fortunately, there are only five of us and the two girls are tolerant of the inconveniences of sharing a small room with three guys – at least for two nights.

If the country is to develop a tourist industry – which it could do – a lot of infrastructure and cultural changes will have to be made. They could start by accepting credit cards and using computer reservations systems in the hotels. Paying in cash for everything – when ATMs limit you to 30,000 tenge (about $200) per day – is a real hassle. Plastic is much more commonly accepted in Astana and Almaty than in outlying regional spots like Karaganda. What’s more, the physical plant can often be challenging – with too few outlets, or outlets hanging out of walls. We’ve been told repeatedly that the construction of even the gleaming new buildings in Astana leaves much to be desired; already, at least one major new building collapsed because it was poorly built, we heard.

Finally, there is a real passion for things from other cultures here. The U.S. particularly is held in high esteem. Rock videos from the U.S., along with knockoffs done by the Russians or Kazakhs, blare from screens in restaurants everywhere. A club named Elvis seems to be a big draw, complete with its pictures of Dylan and the Beatles. Pizza is a big dish here, and we’ve been regulars at the pricey Assorti restaurant in the high-end City Mall and at a smaller cafeteria-type place where we get Margherita pizza. The other day, as we struggled to order, a high-school boy came up to help, using English he had improved by recently spending time in Michigan in an exchange program. People here do seem happy to help us, showing a spontaneous hospitality and graciousness toward strangers that one would be hard-put to find in America or elsewhere — though service in the restaurants can be pathetic, with dishes rarely arriving at the same time for all guests.

The U.S. is boosting its presence here. Peace Corps volunteers busy themselves in English-training classes and HIV-AIDS educational efforts, and the U.S. will be stepping up the number of them in the country substantially. There are now about 150 or so. There are also missionary groups active here, ranging from the Mormons we met in Almaty to a group of evangelicals in Karaganda who operate a feeding program for kids, many of whom are children of alcoholics, as well as an English-training program and a church.  A delightful lady from South Carolina who has taken in five young women who don’t have parents, works with the group. She and a friend helped put together an impromptu marathon this morning that drew about 15 people, including Megan Plouzek and me (I managed just 10 miles or so, while Megan did at least 15).

We ran around a park that demonstrates the curious state of the country. About half of the park is relatively well-maintained, with nice stone and dirt paths and a pleasant amusement park featuring a Ferris Wheel and other rides. People work out at spots around the park, using old playground equipment. Another half of the park, however, is overgrown and includes an abandoned-looking lake as well as rusting picnic spots. It appears that the place may have been well-kept in the old days, but has been largely ignored for at least a couple decades. Like much of the country, it seems to be both promising and in need, a place of great potential that has been both scarred and helped by its history.

Bright Shiny Thing

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Gary Kebbel, one of four candidates for the deanship at the J School at Nebraska, has a fetching idea. Since journalism is moving in the direction of the mobile device – with the iPad as the newest platform – why not turn our college into the national center for mobile media?

Kebbel’s vision is entrancing. He would bring together computer programming folks from other parts of the university with business-school folks and our faculty and student journalists to develop new apps so our budding reporters could serve readers on cell phones, iPhones, iPads and other yet-to-be-developed devices around the globe. Our student journalists would learn to write, film and photograph for such devices. And we could partner with newspapers, magazines, TV networks and other media outlets to commercialize the work we do (and hire our grads).

And Kebbel, who visited us yesterday, brings some street cred to the vision. He has reviewed and approved tens of millions of dollars in grants about such novel work in the journalism program at the grant-making Knight Foundation since January 2006 (program director since early 2008). He worked as news director at America Online, helped created USAToday.com and Newsweek.com and was a home page editor at washingtonpost.com. He got his start in small newspapers in upstate New York.

For us, he would bring a clear sense of what the cutting-edge folks in the field are doing to serve the journalism of the future – or, at least, what seems likely to be a big part of tomorrow’s media. He would also bring access to money through his foundation connections. And his outlook dovetails with that of the top administrators here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who are creating an entire campus, the Innovation Campus, on the longtime site of the state fair. Technology is key to the university’s future, our leaders rightly believe, and they would turn UNL into a beacon in the Silicon Prairie.

Kebbel, an energetic, likable and motivating sort, would turn the J School into the brightest bulb in that beacon. He would give our school national bragging rights to what could prove to be the key delivery systems for media in the future. And this, he believes, would attract bright students and faculty from around the country. It would put Nebraska on the map alongside schools such as Columbia and Missouri. (He’d like to beef up our master’s program, letting us compete better with such schools, with Berkeley, UNC, etc.)

For many of us who are steeped in the old media, however, the vision is as much as a challenge as an opportunity. We do a good job teaching students how to write, report, photograph and film for print and broadcast. We are used to magazines, newspapers, TV and radio. We each bring backgrounds in one or more of those arenas and a few of us have multi-media experience that brought those different platforms together. Still, we do tend to teach for those media as we know them (focusing on their traditional approaches even as we nod to the dabbles they make in the online world).

So how do we now get our heads around journalism for the mobile media? What skills will we need to add to our repertoires to push students into those areas? And what can we learn since we don’t know yet exactly what the mobile media will need? Some things seem obvious, such as teaching kids to write shorter and produce video that works well on the small screen. But we don’t even know yet what we don’t know.

To be sure, we’re all earning our multi-media spurs. I’m a lifetime print hound and was lucky enough to develop a touch of online sakel through BUSINESSWEEK.com. I’m now honing my skills in doing slide shows, using still and video cameras, and putting material on the Net. (I must, since I team-teach two multi-media courses with broadcast veterans. In one, students create stories for our website, NewsNetNebraska.org.) We all are laboring to integrate our schooling of the basics of journalism – clear writing, thorough reporting, fairness and accuracy – with technology in our classes.

Frankly, it’s a lot for us and for students to learn. Already, we grouse that students don’t get enough time and practice on the basics of reporting and writing. Those basics must be covered, whatever delivery system they use. We need to add more reporting and writing courses to the loads they carry, even if that conflicts with the rules that limit their journalism course-loads so they can study such areas as English, History, Science, etc., to get a well-rounded education.

If Kebbel does move into the corner office, he will surely bring an appealing focus to the school. His vision is almost certainly right about the delivery systems of the future (though I believe print and broadcast won’t disappear for a while yet, and skills such as compact writing, eye-catching layout and organization matter even more in the online world). But he must make room for the basics. If our students don’t master the essentials today, they won’t get the chance to serve up news on the beeping bright shiny things we’ll all be carrying around tomorrow.