Gulnara

My adoption coordinator, with whom I spend much of the time that I am not at the baby house, is a Kazakh woman named Gulnara.  She is quite a character.  She is a lawyer and has a reputation for being a very tough, intense, highly competitive perfectionist.  She is capable of arguing with someone until they are so exhausted that they simply give in to her point of view.  She also has a heart of gold, and is like a mother hen who is constantly 'worried about me' for one reason or another (although for the most part, there is nothing to worry about!).

Gulnara spends so much time with me that I feel like I have a lawyer for a full time employee.  We have tea or dinner and go over adoption procedure and paperwork on pretty much a daily basis, and she also takes me shopping and takes care of most of my needs.  She calls me at least five times per day. Every conversation begins with either, "Hello, Jen, what are you doing?"  or "Hello, Jen, where are you?" and ends abruptly, often in what seems like the middle of a conversation, with "Ok, bye!"  I have both a cell phone and a landline in the apartment.  One day she called me on the landline and said, "Jen, where are you?!" (Note that this was the landline - where else could I have been other than in the apartment?)  "I'm in the apartment, Gulnara."  "Ok, bye!" On Christmas day, I was out at the bakery with a friend and she called me on my cell and said, "Jen!  I just want to say to you...CONGRATULATIONS ON CHRISTMAS!!!"  She congratulated me on Christmas four or five times before I finally managed to get off the phone.

Gulnara is only 12 years older than me, but she seems to think that I am a child who needs to be coddled.  When I told her I was going to start taking the bus to the baby house instead of paying for a rather expensive private driver every day, she said, "What will your adoption agency think if I let you take the bus!?  I'm responsible for you!"  Gulnara, it's a bus, it takes 15 minutes to get there, on a single bus line, the bus comes every two minutes, and it costs 30 cents.  I keep reminding her that I lived in a rural village in Thailand, and that I can probably handle taking a bus in Kazakhstan.  Gulnara is a germophobe, so she is somewhat impressed that I managed to live in rural Thailand.  She tells me that my nickname should be 'surprise', because I am always full of surprises.


One day, when it was a holiday and we didn't have a baby house visit, I decided to try to walk to the baby house and see if I could find it.  It's a 30 minute walk across a huge, beautiful city park called "Central Park."  A few other adopting parents have made a habit of walking across the park to the baby house.  So I took a leisurely Sunday afternoon and felt my way across the park - a bit of a challenge because of the lack of landmarks in a park, but it was a lovely walk and I found the baby house with no problem.  There is a skating pond in the centre of the park, and there were people out walking and cross-country skiing, despite temperatures of perhaps -25 degrees celsius.  So my walk was a success, and the next weekend I decided to walk to the baby house for my morning visit.

Unfortunately, I took a wrong turn and exited the park quite far from the baby house in a completely unfamiliar location.  It was too cold to try looking for it on my own at that point, so I went into a large public building that turned out to be the police station.  I called my translator, Alex, on my cell phone, explained that I needed directions, and handed the phone to a confused looking guard.  They figured out where I needed to go and directed me to a bus, which easily took me to the baby house - although I ended up being 45 minutes late.  We were laughing about this misadventure in the car the other day with Alex, and of course Gulnara said, "I forbid you to walk across that park again!!"  "Gulnara, stop worrying, there is always a solution to being lost. I called Alex for help.  If he wasn't there, I would have called you.  If you weren't there, I would have taken a taxi.  If there was no taxi, I would have asked someone how to take the bus to Tsum, the department store across from my apartment that everyone knows.  I know how to say 'Gdye Tsum?' (Where is Tsum) in Russian!" Alex clearly agreed, but Gulnara continues to 'worry about me' endlessly.  I don't know how she manages to simultaneously perceive me as a competent university professor and parent on the one hand, and as a helpless child on the other!