Central Asians discover the real US

Mahkambaeva, the teacher, was surprised that Americans don't seem to think much about democracy. "I realized that it's like water," she says. "If you have enough of it, you don't talk about it."

Readjusting to life in Central Asia can be difficult.

"When I came home people told me I used too much 'thank you' and 'please,' " says Nargiza Abraeva, an Uzbek who spent two years at George Washington University. "My family and friends thought I was very changed," she said, admitting she had difficulty feeling at home again.

Many of the students, who faced stiff competition to win their US fellowships, were disappointed in the lack of rigor in American schools. Zarina Davlyatova, a high school teacher in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, who spent the summer of 2001 in a teacher-training course in Columbia, S.C., criticized the relaxed American approach to science and math. A student of hers who attended a US school for a year came home so rusty at science that he missed out on a gold medal for achievement that he easily should have won, she said.

The mobility of American life and the easy separation of extended families alarmed many students. Family remains by far the most important social structure in Central Asia.

The experience also taught many to see their own country differently. Yevgeni Onokhin, an ethnic Russian citizen of Uzbekistan who earned a master's degree in public administration in Massachusetts, says he heard American businessmen complain about the Uzbek government's economic policies. He also discovered that its human rights policies were controversial.

"I read and heard a lot of bad things about Uzbekistan," he says, "and this was shocking to me.... I thought I lived in a nice country, where everything was fine."

American patriotism surprised these Central Asians. "We don't have that in Kyrgyzstan," says Maksat Tynayev, who spent a year in a Medford, Ore., high school. He saw this comparison as a commentary on the state of Kyrgyzstan's evolution as a real country – not there yet, he concluded. "Here we don't know our national anthem very well."

During her year in Santa Fe, Irina Shames says, "I became a patriot" – of Uzbekistan. "I never thought it would happen. People here ask, 'Why didn't you stay [in the US]?' They don't realize how much you would miss home."

She is alluding to the fact that thousands of young Central Asians have given up on their homelands and moved abroad. Those who study in America are expected, by many of their friends and contemporaries, to use it as a means to escape their countries.

According to the American Council on Education, which tries to track former exchange students, 96 percent return from the US, but perhaps 12 percent of those go on to leave their countries later.

A Turkmen citizen who studied in the States says an important lesson was that even in Turkmenistan, a country ruled by a dictator, there is room to be independent and creative, provided you don't directly challenge the prevailing authority.

This young person takes every opportunity to share lessons learned in the US – most important, the fact that other countries have completely different systems based on different values. Like the other Turkmen youths interviewed, this person requested anonymity.

It can be in traditional societies to promote Western notions of pragmatism. In Turkmenistan, everyone still knows which of the nation's tribes he or she belongs to, and many people still think it's important not to marry outside one's tribe.

The same is true in Kazakhstan. In Tajikistan, membership in the right regionally based clan can be more important than one's education or experience.

"Before I went to the States I thought security was enough for a country," says Sukhrob Khoshumkhamedov of Tajikistan, a country wracked by civil war in its first five years of independence. But his US experience convinced him that "security is not enough. You need to change laws and the economy, [and] you need to change the minds of the people.... Many people [in Tajikistan] are thinking in a closed way."

Page: 1 | 2