2 March 2008 - No Flight to Kostanai, Kazakhstan

Wednesday we sat in the airport for three hours and were very disappointed when we finally found out that our flight to Kostanai for the wheelchair presentation had been cancelled due to bad weather! Go figure; bad weather seems to follow us everywhere we go!! But this time it preceded us!! We called Sergei in Kostanai, our NGO representative, and he said that no flights had been in or out in two days. Kostanai is a city up north in the mountains and it takes 13 hours to get there by train!!!

We felt bad that we weren't able to be with him because this is the first time any Humanitarian work from the Church has been done in Kostanai. But since he had everything all set up with the government officials, he went ahead with the presentation without us because they need to get the 250 wheelchairs distributed to those who need them.

So for those of you who are wondering what it is like living in exotic Kazakhstan, we are going to show you a little more about every day life here!!!

Every two or three weeks, our translator calls the water company and we have water delivered to our apartment door. There is 19 liters (about 5 gallon) of water in each large container. The water is very bad here and everyone, even the locals, only drink bottled water. It costs us about $8 a month.


When the water comes, we pour it from the large 19 liter jugs into the smaller 5 liter jugs. This makes it easier for us to use. From the 5 liter jugs we pour it into the 1 liter bottles for brushing our teeth and drinking and cooking. We use the tap water for everything else.

Saturday is P-day and also laundry day. We start first thing in the morning washing clothes and it takes us all day long! They have no dryers over here that we know of, in fact many of the locals don't have washing machines and there are no laundromats. To wash one batch of clothes takes 2 1/2 hours!! If we have places to go on Saturday, we start washing at least one batch of clothes on Friday night.

Every city has their indoor and outdoor bazaar. We have not been to the outdoor bazaar in Astana yet because it is too cold. But we have been to the indoor bazaar a few times, once by ourselves!! It has four floors and on the bottom floor is nothing but fruits, vegetables, dried fruit and nuts. It is unheated and covers about a block in size. On the other floors, which are heated, are shops of evey kind. You can buy anything you could ever want, if you can afford it!!

We wanted to take a picture of the bazaar and so this young man volunteered to be in the picture!! They are so friendly! In this picture you can see all kinds of raisins, nuts, dried apricots, pumpkin seeds, etc. It is incredible the amount of stuff they have in one place!!

The fruits and vegetables are so much cheaper here than in the stores so we try to go every time we are in the neighborhood!! It is clear across town from us and we only buy what we can pack home!!

One Saturday, between laundry loads, we went for a walk on a wide walking bridge that crosses the river just to the south of us. On the frozen river, people were ice fishing.

This is taken from the walking bridge looking to the east. Notice the horse monument. Kazakhs love horses and because of their nomadic Kazakh heritage they have a lot of statues and monuments of horses.

On the way home from our walk we walked down on the river and crossed on the ice.

Notice the Radisson in the background. Our apartment is in the backyard of that giant hotel!! As thick as the ice is, we don't know if we will ever have spring!!

We'll continue to keep updating our work over here. We pretty much have our own schedule and we do a lot of paper work for the projects we are working on so we spend a good share of the time at the computer, something that we have never done before, but we are learning a lot.

We love and miss you all, but the Lord is blessing us and we are where we should be!

Love,

Elder and Sister Welling