Dozens of people formed a vegetable-chopping assembly line near a campfire, where a metal cauldron about as wide as a large tire heated several jugs of cooking oil. The cauldron is called a kazan, and it’s used for the traditional Kazakh preparation of a dish known as pulao in Kazakh, or plov, in Russian.
Preparing this meal is an annual tradition at Zhailau, a week-long summer camp that happens every year at Geneva Point Center’s facility in Moultonborough on Lake Winnipesaukee. It’s taken place every summer for the past 22 years.
Most of the camp’s attendees are families with white parents and Gen-Z children adopted from Kazakhstan, who travel to New Hampshire from all over the country to reunite every summer.
The Zhailau Heritage Camp is run by the nonprofit Kazakh Aul, which was created in 2004 to develop community and cultural knowledge for children with ties to Kazakhstan in America.
“Aul is the Kazakh term for a nomadic village,” explained Susan Saxon, one of Kazakh Aul’s cofounders. “Before the Soviets, these people were nomads and moved around. And when you lived with your aul, you depended on them for everything. You took care of the people you know in your village.”
Saxon is not ethnically Kazakh, but her daughter, Sara Remmler, is.
Saxon adopted Remmler from Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2001 when Remmler was eight months old.
As Remmler grew up in New England, Saxon wanted to make sure that she could have a community that understood her experience and meet children who looked like her. Saxon started organizing gatherings for parents in the region who had adopted children from Kazakhstan, of which there were quite a few.
Adoption from Kazakhstan to the United States was at its peak between 2001 and 2007, declining significantly by 2012, according to the state department.
Simultaneously, Saxon found that her local dance studio had ballet instructors who were from Almaty, just like Remmler.
“I marched right over there with her and I signed her up for ballet lessons!” Saxon said.
She met with instructors Zhanat Baidaralin and Vera Kurmasheva and asked them for help teaching Kazakh culture to Remmler and the other adopted children. They agreed, and soon after together they founded Kazakh Aul to create a summer camp to help children embrace their Kazakh culture.
Considering her mother’s involvement, Remmler has been attending Zhailau since the very beginning.
“I was the only person adopted from Kazakhstan in my school,” Remmler said. “Nobody knew where it was. Nobody! I have to explain to adults all the time where it is on a map.”
Kazakhstan is in Central Asia. It was part of the Soviet Union until 1991 and now shares its northern border with Russia and borders China and Mongolia to the east. As the ninth-largest country by land, its 20 million inhabitants live in an arid landscape of grassland steppes, deserts, and mountains.
“Here [at Zhailau], you don’t have to explain any of that,” said Remmler. “Everybody knows where Kazakhstan is. You don’t have to explain anything about who you are or where you come from or why you don’t look like your parents.”
Celebration of summer and heritage
When the camp launched in 2004, it looked a lot more like a traditional children’s summer camp. The adoptees and their parents attended classes on Kazakh language, learned how to play the dombra, Kazakhstan’s national two-string guitar-like instrument, and they even put on a traditional Kazakh dance performance in cultural dress, often taught by staff members flown in from Kazakhstan.
“In the beginning it was a way to learn about my own culture and heritage,” said Maddie Goldberg, who has been attending Zhailau since she was a child. “It’s something that I did not get from my adoptive family, obviously, and it’s not something that I grew up around. I didn’t see a lot of kids or families from Kazakhstan.”
Now, many of those adoptee-campers have become adults, and the camp has transformed from an instructional program to more of a family reunion.
“Over time, it’s just become like a really fun thing to return to,” Goldberg said. “It’s different than family friends, or classmates, or colleagues. These people are my family and it feels like coming home every single year.”
Zhailau has helped the Kazakh adoptees develop a personal and cultural connection with Kazakhstan.
“I would love to go back to where my orphanage is and kind of learn [about] that,” said Rosie Vaillancourt, who has been attending Zhailau since its inception. “I found my birth mother, so I would want to go meet her one day.”
The camp helped encourage her interest in connecting with her heritage and even shaped her education.
The official state language of Kazakhstan is Kazakh, a Turkic language, which is what campers learned in prior years at Zhailau. But many people also speak Russian due to the country’s history and involvement with the USSR.
“I randomly in high school got a phone call, and it was from my mother’s birth sister, who only speaks Russian. And, I couldn’t understand her,” said Vaillancourt. “I had to find this translator. And so when I got to college and I had to take a language [class], I was like, I’m going to take Russian so I can speak to her.”
Vaillancourt ultimately double-majored in education and Russian.
“I think that the hardest part when you’re adopted is you sometimes feel lost when you’re in an American family. So this is what I was able to do to kind of connect to my culture,” she said.
And Russian pops up in Vaillancourt’s life in America more than one might expect.
“One time this lady stopped me and she goes, ‘are you from Kazakhstan?’ And I was like, ‘yeah.’ And she goes, ‘you look so Kazakh.’ And so we started talking and we conversed in Russian,” said Vaillancourt. “So it’s like those weird connections that you can make.”
Camp dinner, family-style
One of the highlight events of this summer’s Zhailau was the communal traditional preparation of a Kazakh feast.
The recipe for this summer’s 40-person serving of pulao included rice, carrots, onions, beef, garlic, salt, pepper, “and a lot of love,” according to camper and unofficial head chef Dan Goldberg. The specifics of the recipe aren’t written down (no matter how many times his daughter Maddie asks him to do so). Instead, the knowledge on how to make this dish is taught by hands-on practice and collective memory, originally learned many summers ago from the Kazakh staff members.
As the mothers chopped cucumbers and carrots for the side salad, Goldberg and the other dads stood around the campfire, waiting for the oil to heat before adding about ten pounds of beef and stirring it with a 5-foot-long wooden paddle.
Once the vegetables were chopped and the beef was cooking, campers shifted to slicing trays of dough in the bright sunlight to prepare another class Kazakh dish – barsauk, or fried dough. Some campers compared it to a beignet without powdered sugar.
After the dough had risen in the sunlight for a few hours, it was time to fry it in a kazan.
Remmler pulled on a pair of sweatpants despite the beating sun to protect herself from splattering oil, and Maddie Goldberg wielded a colander taped to long sticks as an improvised frying basket. These precautions were made due to prior hazardous incidents of hot oil splattering and singeing off leg hairs.
Through a group effort, the dough carefully slid down the side of the kazan into the hot oil and fried perfectly. (No leg hairs were lost in the process.)
Once the pulao, baursak, and an accompanying summer salad are prepared, the campers sit around several picnic tables covered in the bright turquoise tablecloths reminiscent of the Kazakh flag. Massive trays of rice are placed at each table, and everyone scoops a heaping onto their plates. Once the trays run empty, some of the sneakier younger campers pinch extra servings from their parents’ tables.
The food is aromatic and warm, with garlic, carrots, and raisins adding subtle flavor to the pulao. The beef is extremely tender, and as Dan Goldberg said, the dish is clearly made with a lot of love — and oil. The barsauk is delightfully warm and doughnut-like.
“For me, it’s just the once a year I have this food and it tastes like home,” said Vaillancourt. “I was adopted at the age of four, so I do remember a little bit more from my orphanage days and I remember a little bit more of the food. And American food is so different.”
Birdsong and a gentle breeze accompany the chatter and laughter as everyone finishes their plates. Campers laugh fondly about the time they nearly rode their bikes into the lake. Conversations wander from the World Cup to polls on who wants to drive and get ice cream before heading to the beach. People discuss new jobs and revisit old baby stories. They’re a family with ties stronger than blood.
“This is the time we’re all just together eating and having a shared meal,” Vaillancourt said. “It’s special.”
The first children to attend the camp are now adults, and they plan to keep the annual tradition going, even as the summer programs evolve with the needs of the community.
Remmler, Goldberg, and Vaillancourt now volunteer to shoulder the responsibilities of running both Kazakh Aul and Zhailau as managing directors. It’s important to them that they keep the organization going for future generations of campers.
“I’m hoping in the years to come we’ll start having kids,” said Vaillancourt. “And so that’ll be the future of this camp.”
