MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Every summer for more than 20 years, families of children adopted from Kazakhstan have gathered at a New Hampshire summer camp to celebrate Kazakh culture. Imaan Moin of New Hampshire Public Radio joined them for a traditional meal.
(CROSSTALK)
IMAAN MOIN, BYLINE: Dozens of people chat and chop vegetables next to a large metal cauldron, called a kazan, as it heats cooking oil over a campfire. They are preparing a traditional dish from Kazakhstan, known as pulao in Kazakh, or plov in Russian.
DAN GOLDBERG: So we've got, well, rice, carrots, onions, beef, garlic, salt, pepper and a lot of love.
MOIN: That's Dan Goldberg, whose daughter is adopted from Kazakhstan. He's overseeing meal prep for a feast fit for nearly 40 people. It's an annual tradition at Zhailau, a weeklong summer camp focused on Kazakh heritage that takes place every year in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. The campers are mostly American families with white parents and Gen Z children adopted from Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstan is in Central Asia. It was part of the Soviet Union until 1991 and now shares its northern border with Russia and its eastern border with China. It has a population of 20 million people and is about the size of Argentina. The camp is run by the nonprofit Kazakh Aul of the U.S. It helps children with ties to Kazakhstan learn more about their culture and build community.
SARA REMMLER: I was the only person adopted from Kazakhstan in my school. Nobody knew where it was. I have to explain to adults all the time where it is on a map.
MOIN: Sara Remmler came to the U.S. as an infant from Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2001.
REMMLER: And here, you don't have to explain any of that. You don't have to - 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.
MOIN: The camp began when Remmler and the other adoptees were children. It had classes on Kazakh language, music and dance. Adoption from Kazakhstan was at its peak in the 2000s. Around 6,000 Kazakh children came to the U.S. before adoptions dropped off in 2012, when international regulations made the process harder. Now, the adoptees from the early aughts have become adults. The camp feels like a family reunion. Rosie Vaillancourt, who is now 29, was adopted from Kazakhstan as a child. The camp inspired her to connect with her heritage, and now she's found her birth mother.
ROSIE VAILLANCOURT: I randomly in high school got a phone call, and it was from my birth mother's sister who only speaks Russian, and I couldn't understand her. I had to find this translator.
MOIN: Vaillancourt ended up double majoring in Russian and education in college.
VAILLANCOURT: Because I think that's the hardest part when you're adopted is, like, you sometimes feel lost when you're an American family. And so this is what I was able to do to kind of connect to my culture.
MOIN: While Russian is considered the lingua franca in Kazakhstan's urban centers, Kazakh, a Turkic language, is the official post-Soviet state language. I got to hear both.
Can you say, like, hi, my name is Rosie...
VAILLANCOURT: Yeah.
MOIN: ...In Russian?
VAILLANCOURT: (Speaking Russian) Rosie.
MOIN: Could you say hello, my name is Sara?
REMMLER: Yeah. (Speaking Kazakh) Sara.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Actually, we need the onions first.
MOIN: Back at the campfire, while the beef is cooking, people slice trays of dough for another classic Kazakh food - barsauk, or fried dough.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: To me, it's sort of like a beignet, if we have powdered sugar and sprinkled it all over it.
MOIN: Maddie Goldberg was also adopted from Kazakhstan as a young child. Now an adult, she wheels an improvised frying basket made of a colander taped to sticks.
MADDIE GOLDBERG: We are frying the barsauk. We have the oil, and it takes a while. There's a lot. And then we take the pizza dough, but we slide it down the side so that there's no splashing. We let it fry, and then we just flip it so that it's fried on both sides.
MOIN: Once the massive trays of pulao and barsauk are placed on picnic tables, Rosie Vaillancourt and the other campers begin their long-awaited feast.
VAILLANCOURT: For me, it's just - it's the once a year I have this food, and it tastes like home, right? So I was adopted at the age of four, so I do remember a little bit more of the food, and American food is so different.
MOIN: Now that the initial child campers are mostly in their 20s, they're stepping up and managing the camp's present and future. Vaillancourt is optimistic that there will be a new generation of child campers someday.
VAILLANCOURT: Eventually, I'm hoping, you know, in the years to come, like, we'll start having kids, and so that'll be the future of this camp.
MOIN: For NPR News, I'm Imaan Moin in New Hampshire.
(SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD HOUGHTEN'S "FADING INTO PURPLE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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