I want to feel more connected to my community, and thus have decided to try to read the local newspaper, Сарыарқа, which literally means "yellow back" but would be best translated as "The Steppe." The faculty at my college are required to subscribe. They are not, however, required to read, so there are always extras lying around.

My first challenge was that there isn't a very good Kazakh-English dictionary. The Peace Corps gave us the best one they could find, but it is riddled with British English and other errors. We knew this coming out of PST because Amantai often laughed in our faces when we used it to produce Kazakh. The final straw came last week when I trusted it and bet a local that the word for zebra was алай. You may think it's arrogant to bet a Kazakh person about words in their own language, but the Kazakhs have a habit of using Russian words for things that their nomadic forebears hadn't encountered, like cars and zebras. Well, actually just cars. I lost 50 tenge in that transaction.

Fortunately we live in the digital age and my friend Kairat recommended that I check out sozdik.kz, a Kazakh-Russian dictionary that is reasonably comprehensive and has example sentences. Stop! I don't know Russian. Well fear not, Google has gone to the trouble of learning Russian and English and can get a fair approximation in translation.

Armed with a decent dictionary, I started reading the headlines to choose an article that could be interesting. As far is I can tell, the first headline was Assigned Mandate Confirmed. That sounded pretty bland. The second headline on the front page was I Also Subscribed to The Steppe. Is this really front page worthy news? But I found an article just for me titled Honored Residents of Zhezkazgan. After half an hour of wrestling with the article and dictionary, trying to figure out where the root word ended and the suffixes began, I was able to ascertain that I'm living in a city that has price controls on bread. Specifically, I shouldn't be paying more than 38 tenge for a 600 gram loaf of bread made from grade A flour. Fascinating!

I can't wait to find out what other nuggets of information await me in the pages of The Steppe!