This week has been a week of busy work - mostly shopping for supplies for the wheelchair project.
We started out the week by going to the Mayor's Office to meet with a man named Adalet who is the person from the Ministry of Religion who - well, I don't know what he actually does, but he is the one to whom we must go every twelve months to renew our Permission to Preach. So, Monday morning we went here.....
to get this document- This one is mine.
The Permission to Preach is a difficult concept for Americans because in the USA there is religious freedom, and you can be open about your beliefs.
In Kazakhstan, the Permission to Preach allows those of us who have visas which identify us as affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the city of Astana, to have permission to do the following:
-to pray in our church building
-to conduct meetings in our church building
-to teach classes in our church building
-to participate in religious discussions in our church building
-etc in the church building
Dad says, as far as he knows, in our church, in the US, the only registration that is required is when a new Bishop (prob also Stake Pres) is called; the Bishop has to be registered with the state so that he can conduct legal marriages. Of course, the same official registration can be obtained, online, by anyone who wants to marry a couple. So - it does seem uncomfortable that a government can give us permission to pray or teach or participate in religious activities and only in our church buildings. But we believe in obeying the law of the land, so all of the missionaries have this certificate.
We're told, that when we meet with the govt person, Adalet, that he may want to interview us....but that's not happened here in Astana. And Adalet even said that he would come to our church on Sunday just to visit - aka coming to see that we are following the rules. But that's only happened once since we been here, and he was merely friendly. He didn't come today. So all of this stuff is, in my humble opinion, only for show - to show who is in control, and so on.
The rest of the week we mostly went shopping to get the items we need for the wheelchair project. It required going to two office supply stores, three bike shops, and one 'outdoor' construction equipment market. It was really kinda exhausting because we had in the back of our minds a vision of Home Depot, Office Max, and Fred Meyer or Walmart.
Here's our shopping list for a stationery store: 18 clipboards, 8 small notebooks, 12 plastic folders to hold everything, 18 pencils, erasers and sharpeners, 12 ball point pens, 8 white board markers, 2 whiteboard erasers, 24 name tags with lanyards. We got everything at one store except the whiteboard erasers and the name tags, but we had to go three times because every time I re-read the instructions from SLC, I realized I hadn't counted properly. We announced at English Club that we needed help in finding the white board erasers and now we have four erasers. Don't know yet where to get the name tags......we'll know after English Club.
Here's Dad at the ABDI stationery store....he's talking to Warren while I am shopping....
Bike supplies: 8 tire gauges, 16 tire levers, 8 spoke wrenches, 8 patch kits . How hard could this be...well turned out it took a whole day. We found three bike shops on the internet and went to MegaSport first where we found movers taking everything out of the store and only a shadow of the words MegaSport on the outside of the building. Score: Grays 0 and Kaz 10.
The taxi driver then took us to a bike shop called Limpopo (a river in the north westernmost province of South Africa) - go figure) which was a fancy bike store like you'd find in Lake Oswego or on Manhatten Island. Prices were really HIGH, and the supply was terrible- we could have gotten maybe one or two of each item.
We decided to go to BikeMaster (which happens to be close to our favorite Doner lunch place) and we had success, but it did not come easily.
Being inside was like watching a Saturday Night Live sketch - you could barely walk through the jumble of bikes, there was only one, very busy, man, who spoke no English, helping several customers, and the parts we needed, behind the counter, were piled into various boxes with no sort of organization at all. Dad even went behind the counter and took parts off a pegboard to use as visuals....along with the photographs we'd brought along. Finally the guy helped us, and by rummaging through the boxes and going into the back room, we finally left the store with our treasures. I'm sure he was wondering what these two Americans we going to do with all the tire stuff.
(And yes we did eat lunch at the Doner restaurant).
We bought 'hardware' tools at an outdoor, Home Depot like, bazaar. It is an amazing place. Shops on either side of a paved path with hand tools, garden tools, electrical stuff, plumping stuff, paint, concrete, particle board - it kinda looks like a market scene you'd see in a Star Wars movie, but it's in Astana not on some extraterrestrial planet.
We had to assemble 8 tool bag kits: box wrenches, adjustable jaw wrenches, Phillips screwdrivers, utility knives, hacksaw blades, tape measures, rubber mallets, small (20 ml) bottles of machine oil. At a couple of places where we stopped, when we asked for something (by showing a photo), the salesperson simply said "nyet". We found one vendor who really was helpful..like he really wanted to help so he would sell tools (I think he is also a nice guy), and he took our phone number and in a couple of instances, found the items we wanted and then texted us saying he had them. We were really thankful to find such a helpful vendor. Tomorrow we go to his little tool shop and get eight 20 ml bottles of machine oil which, by ourselves, we were unable find.
We needed small bags for tool bags and decided the best (cheapest) place to go would the the humongous Central Market. The taxi dropped us off at an entrance that we weren't familiar with, but it turned to be in the perfect area to find luggage. We stopped at a couple of shops; no vendor was inside, so we went in to look around. While we were inside, some potential customers came inside and started asking us how much different items cost. We just told them that "we don't work here." Finally we found a luggage shop which had sport bags and bought eight of these.
We also needed to get 16 bottles of fingernail polish - 8 bottles of black and 8 bottles of teal blue - to repair tiny scratches or chips that may be on the wheelchairs. We chose to go to a vendor who has her little shop underneath the escalator in the shopping mall directly in front of our apartment building. We chose our two colors and then told her we wanted eight of each - that we wanted 16 bottles total, she was speechless - she had only one bottle of each color. She said, "next week", and we returned a week later, and our 16 bottles were ready for us.
We're almost finished with our purchases, but this is what we have so far.
Little bottles of 20 ml machine oil - really difficult to find
and name tags - after yet, another, trip to the office supply store.
Some interesting sights around town
This building on the corner looks like it would be an old produce market in Atlanta. It is a supermarket.
and the sign says, "World of Taste", but inside it was just an upscale mini market.
In the city there are, actually, a lot of green spaces, but they are seldom parks where you could sit on a bench (because no benches) and, maybe, read a book and relax. But we walked through one little park where there were these stone sculptures that were a bit difficult to identify.
Turtle
Fish
Maybe....a reclining human...because I think you can see an ear in the second photo. Dad thinks it is a whale.
Remember the Iron Man from last week? Here is the disassembled pavilion and the trucks which will take it to a storage area
And at the Triathlon Park, I showed you a photo of the pedestal telescope. Well..the telescope part is now gone. It didn't work anyway because the two eye pieces were too far apart to use.
We went to a big mall and discovered an under ground parking area......where they have a daily garden market. I thought Dad was going to die of disappointment because there is not enough time left on our mission for him to buy new plants and see them mature.
Interesting double decker storage containers. I'll bet someone lives in this - like a security guy.
June is rainy season, and when we have a short sudden deluge, the water rushes off the buildings
Kiev Chicken at one of our favorite cafeterias
A beautiful and flashy coat worn by this woman. In person, the yellow dots were sequins.
At church today there were only nine people - six missionaries, one American ex pat, and two Kazakhs, and, honestly, it was one of the best and most spiritual meetings we've had.
Dinner in the evening with the young volunteers.
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