The Block
The open concrete area under the block in which Yuri lives, is filled with large wailing women. They sit on plastic chairs between pillars in a large square clapping their folded hands over their chests in grief, lamenting the tragic and sudden loss of the father of my friend Yuri. In the cultural code of the Kazakhstan, they are all dressed alike for the occasion, wearing finely decorated black and dark blue summer dresses and patterned scarves to cover their heads. I am noticeably out of place in my jeans and my genes, dwarfed by their heavy bodies and swollen legs which show out beneath mid calf hemlines. They are, each and every one, magnificent, with eastern european faces that express a lifetime of experience; expulsion, war, famine, migration, poverty, loss, grief and suffering. These are not women who care about carbs, these are women who work two jobs a day to pay for their children's fake designer jeans and tobacco and Hash habbits. I have noticed these heavy set women w