Sometime around my 6th week here, something happened with my original host family that set them into bouts of excited squabbling. Because my Kazakh wasn't (and isn't) up to understanding arguments and half the time they were arguing in Russian, I didn't have any clue what was going on. But one morning, as I was eating breakfast, my host mom grabbed a cookie sheet and repeatedly attempted to strike my host dad as he clumsily parried with the balcony door. Before this incident I could've assumed that they were just having heated debates about the weather, or perhaps which events of the 2011 Asian Winter Games they wanted to attend, but it was now clear their passionate outburts were about something a bit more important.

Soon after that incident, they stopped talking to me except to say when dinner was ready. I tried asking my host brother what was wrong, and he said it wasn't me, but some sort of family issue. My language instructor came by the house and ascertained that I should go to bed a little earlier, wash my hands after waking up, and wash my dishes after finishing meals (something I'd been doing since they started letting me in the second week). I amended my behavior as suggested, and once again asked my brother what was wrong. I thought that perhaps that since my being there had forced the four family members to live together in the same room, it was stressing them out. However, my host brother, who had been making himself rather scarce lately, told me that it had something to do with a bank crisis.

Reasonably assured that I had taken whatever steps I could take to make the situation better, short of wiring a large sum of money into their bank accounts, I was content to spend my last few weeks sleeping in their house but spending my evenings with some neighborhood boys who were eagerly and patiently trying to teach me Kazakh. However, as fate would have it, another trainee from my language group decided that being here wasn't exactly what he wanted. My language instructor immediately recognized that I could benefit greatly from packing my bags and schlepping them and myself the mile or so to his host family's house. So that is exactly what we did.

Now to give you some idea of how deteriorated the situation was, when I went to get my things and tell my family I would be leaving, I went with my language teacher. Amantai is one of the most outgoing and friendly people I have ever met, and she had met the host family before. When we entered the house, I told my host mom that Amantai was there too. Amantai told her in kind terms that I would be leaving in the next 15 minutes, to which my host mom grunted a reply that was unintelligible to me, and then continued to clean the bathroom. During the 15 minutes or so that it took me to hurriedly throw my belongings together, my host mom completely ignored Amantai, refusing even to offer her a seat. I shook my host father's hand, said thank you and left. Amantai told me after we left that their only concern was that they wouldn't be getting the 30,000 tenge they had expeceted from me for staying with them. Instead, the money went to my new host family, who could not have been better.