Bekzhan's corner

The power at home is on two hours in the morning and two in the evening. Our flat is +9. We sleep in coats, my grandmother says it is like 1992.

I am writing this from the university, where the computer centre is on the generator until 21:00. Many students come here only to be warm. They say on the news there was shooting on the dam road yesterday. I don't know what is true.

Everybody: check on your old neighbours. On the news they said an old teacher died alone in her flat.

At the university we hear things. The lecturer in hydrology says the water in the Toktogul reservoir is lower than it has been for many years and "we should expect rationing". She has made a graph, a good one, and showed it twice.

My mother is buying candles. My father brought home a second blanket. My grandmother says: "I know this, I remember this" and sits by the stove like a general.

Talgat has moved to Almaty for a job (he sells equipment for a firm that has an office on the 7th floor, he says "a real floor"). He called me yesterday. His news: it rains in Almaty. My news: it rains here too.

He also sent me a parcel. Inside, in a newspaper from Almaty, was the tüntolk cassette he owed me since 2005. Three years! It has a note: "Sorry. It was in my other jacket."

For July and August I work in a computer club behind the TSU stadium: 8 to 16, five days a week. My job is to take the money, fix the computers when they break, and to tell fourteen-year-old boys that no, they cannot play that game on the one that is only for Word.

An hour is 4 som. A game of "Counter" costs the boys nothing but their ears. There is a sign on the wall: "Please do not shout." There is another sign under it: "Please." It was added after the first week.

I bought a phone. Not a big thing, just an ordinary phone with a colour screen (65,000 colours, they say; I count only twelve). The camera is 0.3 megapixels and takes pictures like a person looking through a dirty window.

the new phone, on the Köch disk box. My first photo, of the box.

But the ring tones are polyphonic and my mother's contact is a picture of her teapot. I am a modern man.