#85: Kazakh or Mongol?

I am in Temirtau, Kazakhstan, on an election monitoring mission. Temirtau, Nursultan Nazarbaev's hometown, 30 km north of Karaganda, is a dilapidated mining town of 150 000 people. Half of its working-age population is employed by Mittal Steel, world's biggest steel company. As you approach the town, you can see black, white, orange, brown, and green smoke coming out a dozen of chimneys of Temirtau's steel plants and melting in the air above the Kazakh steppes.

Today we roamed around to locate polling stations in smoke-filled town, where we will observe the voting process tomorrow. As we were looking for one in Aktau, Temirtau's satellite, we stopped and asked an ethnic Russian lady where schools #32 was. She the pointed in the direction of the school and said: "The Mongol-language school is right around the corner down the road." An ethnic Kazakh woman was passing by and with frustration corrected her: "Not Mongol, Kazakh!" to which the first lady responded: "What is the difference!" I guess foreigners would confuse Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and Mongols, but you would not expect Russians born and living in Central Asia make such a slip up! Sad! Very sad! And it applies both to Russians and Kyrgyz. See my older post.