I have recently started realising how important it is to diarise stories that matter in your life. I was rummaging through some old messages and came across a text from a friend where she had discovered a childhood photo of mine in her parents family album. Sarah Kuschner was my best friend in Kazakhstan. I moved to Almaty, much to my dismay in 1999 from Athens. Athens was my favourite experience. I had settled in so well in to my school and group of friends. I was popular in class and it seemed like a forever place. Until one day I exited a birthday party in 1998 and my parents waiting in our car to pick me up announced that we had been transferred. I immediately started crying but they made me hush down as they didn’t want the driver to hear how disappointed or unprepared we were for this inevitable change that most diplomats should really be ready to deal with all the time. 

Attachment is also unavoidable. Friends cried when I left Byron College in Athens. I was shell shocked and didn’t know how to react to the overwhelming sadness. I didn’t speak for two days in Almaty. Apparently it was some form of environmental change also known as depression, which the post communist doctors also announced could have been a case of a burst appendix. My father immediately debunked this prognosis; ‘She can’t have an appendix burst, she’d be dying in pain!’. By the way I got two appendix scares in Almaty, I feel like the doctors there were obsessed with it and the solution to every problem seemed to be the idea to get my appendix removed. 

I joined the International School. Ami promised me, these schools are different. ‘You will fall in love immediately, it’s the best school, you won’t want to come home. I am telling you – they’re good at making you settle down’. Other times my depression used to scare her and she would say things like, ‘Saira you need to cheer up, you’re scaring me. What will I do here if you stop talking?!’

Yes I did stop talking for two days straight which was a lot for someone like me and for my partial empty nesting parents to handle (My older siblings had already settled in London). 

She was right. It took a few days but AIS was immediately the best thing that happened to me. It was so different to Byron College and the popularity contests we all were used to. AIS encouraged us to be creative, talkative and studious. It was egalitarian. Yes we had the usual Girl Scouts that most American schools did but we also had a great connection with the opposite sex. Some of my best friends were the boys, not to mention the Israeli Ambassador’s son (which I also learnt later was a big ‘no – no’ for our political situation). I couldn’t care less. It was all an exciting change for me. I joined drama class – it was the best. I joined every club including Russian, hiking and music. Sports days were unlike any others I had seen. Senior boys from tenth grade came to mentor us and I already had my first crushes.

It still took time to settle in Almaty. The house we were in was bizarre. It had five floors – yes five. A basement with a sauna and small pool, but no lighting, not sure what the architect was thinking. The floors used to creek. After searching for months we moved to a house across the street, a stunning new build and it became our new home. Ironically, for every dinner party, my mother did send me back to the old home’s garden (‘Purana ghar‘, as if we had some everlasting right over it!) to pluck the roses. It didn’t matter, the house was abandoned, nobody rented it during our entire time in Almaty but the sheer audacity of my mother stuck to me. 

What really helped me fall in love with the life in Almaty is partially credited to Sarah. She may not know this, but one afternoon I was bored staring out the window of the old home when I saw someone familiar walk down the street. It was Sarah. She was with her housekeeper but it turned out that she was not only my classfellow but also my neighbour!  This was a game changer for me. I started hanging out with a cool kid in the neighborhood. We would show up at eachother’s homes and spend hours doing God knows what but we definitely enjoyed the freedom. I was very sheltered and wasn’t allowed to roam down the street alone but Sarah was and I enjoyed hanging out with her. We had a life outside school which just made us a little bit cooler than the others. 

Almaty was what we made of it. One mall, one ice skating rink, one Turkish restaurant and one British restaurant called Old England. But we made something of it and it was enough.

Almaty was our last posting before moving back to Pakistan. Leaving that school was another level of pain but I felt a little less overwhelmed and perhaps grateful for having embraced what life had offered me.