Kazakh Nomad Camp
Asy Plateau, Kazakhstan 2016
Kazakhstan is the third largest country on earth. Talk about wide open spaces. That is why this photo is so small. I wanted to get the herd and yurt in the photo, so I couldn’t zoom in to the max. I cropped out all the empty green space in my photo. It just didn’t add anything.
This family might own the sheep or they might be hired to watch them during the grazing season. Either way, I am sure they were happy living the life of their ancestors.
The Soviet Union tried to stamp out Kazakh culture. People are more malleable if they have no identity to defend. (Does this remind you of our present day when some in our society pretend that there is no difference between the male and female?) Nomadic life was looked down on in those days. Families were encouraged or forced to live in cities. Russian language was taught in the schools and was the lingua franca. The Kazakhs lost the ability to speak their language fluently. Our leader told me (he could understand Kazakh as it is similar to Turkish) that due to the Soviets, the Kazakhs today can not speak their own language well and neither can they speak Russian well.