I Found God!

He was hiding in a 13-inch-wide crack between two giant slabs of mottled rock. The rock slabs were stuck into the hillside like tortilla chips in guacamole. Pass between those two rocks, right shoulder first, and you have proven yourself sinless (or, at least, free from the sin of eating too many Little Debbies). It was a little disconcerting to have my hips sandwiched by stone walls. The wobbly lady behind me, who held my hand on the way back down the hill, told me that she got stuck at one point but told Allah she was really sorry and he let her go.

Our group was guided by the austere Kazakh version of Mr. Miyagi, who kept us on our guards by springing strange demands on us. “Girl! Take off your earring and put it on that rock!” (the rock of energy, shaped like a table, which renews anything placed upon it). “Young man, take off your jacket and turn off your cell phone. Do you have anything broken in your pockets? What’s your father’s name?”

When we were instructed to touch our palms to the rocks and bow our heads, the oldest lady in the group started making wheezy grunts, akin to the one that starts “ohhhhh but mom, I washed the dishes yesterday”. I’ve never seen Kazakh people so emotionally involved in anything, religious or otherwise, which is ironic because the holy site was so patently not Muslim; it was a cluster of interesting rock formations on a hillside (imagine a group of devout American Christians caressing and praying to the sides of the Grand Canyon).

But given how indifferent Kazakhs are to most everything, including Islam, it made sense. Yesterday, I felt like I was experiencing something genuinely Kazakh — some part of the original Kazakh religion, maybe. In the distance, a shepherd was riding a horse across the spine of a hill. There were no buildings for miles. If I were a nomad on the steppe, I would definitely worship sandwich rocks. Allah has no place in this landscape. Mosques and mausoleums look like they’re photoshopped in.

But Muslim or not, some kind of deity definitely intervened when we drank out of the holy spring. Flash back to training, when Dr. Victor told us that drinking unfiltered water leads to pooping and more pooping (nothing is cuter than “poop” in a Russian accent). Flash forward to two Americans bending down to fill their cups with spring water, in accordance with Miyagi’s unbending will, and drinking it down like champs. “That was for your eye!” Miyagi says, poking his eye.

“Now somethingsomethingsomething!” (Damn you, Kazakh dentistry. With a few more teeth in him I might have understood a little). He points to another part of the spring.

We bend down to fill up our cups, but are stopped by urgent flailing and gasped instructions from the peanut gallery. Another man dips into the second part of the spring and fills our cups from his cup. We drank again. “This is for your ear!” he pulls his ear.

At this point, we were like crazy pagans taking Catholic communion, who misunderstand the priest and grab a handful of communion wafers.

But apparently, despite all the hilarious awkwardness, our good intentions were evident to the Kazakh Miyagi. As a reward, perhaps, he instructed us to drink from the third section of the spring, the part that’s good for your stomach, the part that was… stagnant and brown.

I’m not sure whether to be happy or disappointed that the holy spirit never manifested itself in divine diarrhea.