Before America
In 2006, Kazakhstan announced it was expanding the Bolashak Presidential Scholarship, and the news was everywhere. Alua, freshly graduated from high school in Kokshetau, a northern city where both her parents taught at the university, had been dreaming about America since seventh grade. She had already spent a summer at 10 in a camp with American expats, and that taste of the outside world only made her apply harder for every program she could find.
She won. She was 18. The scholarship would send her to the United States to study, and it felt like the fulfillment of a dream she had been chasing for years, one most people around her only imagined for their children.
“One of my dreams was actually studying somewhere in a foreign country, and America was a big dream.”
Her mother cried on the phone the day the results came in. Alua was in Astana finishing a bachelor's degree at Eurasian National University while she waited on the scholarship decision, and her parents were back home in Kokshetau. When she visited them that weekend to talk through next steps, her mother, still emotional, floated an idea: could she maybe study somewhere closer, in Europe instead?
“I was like, why? What's the difference? I'm still going to be away. And my mom was like, well, I was thinking it's a little closer.”
Alua pushed back gently, and told her mother that if it would cause her real distress, she would consider staying in Kazakhstan for a master's degree instead. Her mother went quiet on the subject after that. She realized, Alua said, that she didn't want to be the reason her daughter didn't chase the dream she'd worked years toward. She stepped back and told Alua to go.
Arriving
Alua landed first in Chicago for an English-language program to prepare for university admission tests. She eventually enrolled at Kansas State University, where she earned her bachelor's degree in computer science. She arrived completely alone, no relatives, no built-in community, in an era before WhatsApp or reliable video calls.
“Back then you didn't have WhatsApp. The communication means were basically talking to your parents through those pay cards where you buy a card and have only 10 or 15 minutes.”
Her support system became the other Bolashak scholars scattered across American campuses, all similarly far from home, all leaning on each other. A cousin eventually came over on a work-and-travel program and landed in Cincinnati while Alua was in Kansas, but mostly it was just her and a small circle of fellow Kazakh students holding each other up long-distance.
Learning English fluently enough to disappear into American conversation became its own project. She watched movies with subtitles, pausing scenes to repeat lines the way actors said them, working through Disney animated films to retrain her ear. She had learned British English in school in Kazakhstan, and Americans could tell, so she deliberately reshaped her accent, motivated by something simple: she was tired of every conversation with a stranger starting and ending with questions about where she was from.
“I didn't want the whole conversation to revolve around my accent. I actually wanted to have meaningful conversations with Americans.”
The hard middle
Life as a military spouse meant almost constant movement. She married an American service member, and they never stayed anywhere longer than a year and a half or two years: South Korea for four years, where both of her children were born, then Michigan, Kentucky, Arizona, and finally Virginia. Each move meant learning a new local economy from scratch, figuring out what an area was actually built around before she could plant any career roots.
In Arizona, without a Kazakh community nearby, she didn't fully register what she was missing until she had it again. Building her career, meanwhile, meant climbing steadily inside IT, eventually reaching senior SAP consultant, working on large-scale transformation projects for major technology companies and traveling the world for work along the way.
Where she is now
Alua and her family settled in the Washington, DC area, where her husband, now retired from the military, is opening a franchise business making engineered stone products. The Kazakh community there is large enough to matter but small enough to stay unified, one shared Nowruz celebration, one group chat, rather than the fractured subgroups she'd heard about in bigger hubs like New York.
“Here in the DMV, because it's not as big a community as New York or Chicago, we just have one big event, and everybody's part of that chat, of that community.”
Her children, 13 and 11, don't speak Russian or Kazakh, so she's become the one carrying the culture forward in English, explaining what Kazakhstan is, what her family celebrates, what Nowruz means, piece by piece, at community picnics and gatherings.
What's next
After two decades of five-year plans, Alua is letting go of the mathematical certainty she used to build her life around. She has, by her own accounting, already gotten everything she originally wanted: a Big Tech career, senior SAP work, travel across the world. Now she's drawn toward something less charted, maybe a business of her own centered on giving back to the Kazakh community: a yoga studio, dombra lessons for kids, tea parties for the community's women, ideas she's still sorting through rather than a settled plan.
“I feel like I've already achieved everything I wanted. So now I want to actually start giving back more. That's my goal.”